All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg - E10: Twitter & Facebook botch censorship (again), the publisher vs. distributor debate & more

Episode Date: October 16, 2020

Follow the crew: https://twitter.com/chamath https://linktr.ee/calacanis https://twitter.com/DavidSacks https://twitter.com/friedberg Follow the pod: https://twitter.com/theallinpod https://linktr.ee/allinpodcast Sacks' blog post on Section 230: https://medium.com/craft-ventures/rip-section-230-1112dfad3fac Referenced in the show: NY Post Hunter Biden Story https://nypost.com/2020/10/14/email-reveals-how-hunter-biden-introduced-ukrainian-biz-man-to-dad/ Twitter's explanation for censoring it https://twitter.com/TwitterSafety/status/1316525303930458115 Facebook's explanation for censoring it https://twitter.com/andymstone/status/1316395902479872000 Updated CDC survival rates https://twitter.com/adam_creighton/status/1308652790823051264?s=21 Show Notes: 0:00 The besties catch up on the news 1:29 NY Post Hunter Biden story & censorship by Twitter/Facebook 7:27 What is section 230 & how does it play into the publisher vs. distributor debate 13:23 Distinguishing between publishers & distributors 28:30 Why Twitter & Facebook's actions with the NY Post were a huge blunder & crossed a line, should the laws be rewritten? 37:21 Trump beats COVID, what that means for better treatment options, dueling town halls 46:14 Sacks explains his stance on Prop 13 & Zuckerberg's pro-Prop 15 lobbying 54:34 Thoughts on Amy Coney Barrett & Biden's large lead in the polls

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 too much. Bestie pods. We're dropping a bestie. It's not a code. They're 13. We're not dropping any Snickers bars today. Just dropping the bestie. Oh, no, he's got a mega phone. He's got talent. Special censorship addition. We hit a new law in terms of people needing to be heard. Oh my god. And by the way, Tramot sacks his agent and his chief of staff called me.

He felt like he only got 62% of the minutes and the last of the last person. 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 and internally. Who Daniel is Daniel grinding you for more minutes. Daniel's grinding. 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 it the other way to explain what is that?

Every day is a dumpster fire. It's a huge dumpster fire flagger. So here we are. We're three weeks out from the election. And somebody's emails, 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 brew, apparently Hunter Biden who loves to smoke crack and

has a serious trouble. This is, you know, he's a seriously obviously troubled individual, 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, he never picked them up. That's a little suspicious. The hard drives wind up with Rudy Giuliani and the FBI. 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, but it's obviously gnarly stuff. But the fallout from it was the big story. I went to tweet the story and it wouldn't let me tweet the story. 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. You know, Saks, your guys losing pretty badly in this election, and so we'll go to our token GOP here. What do you think is this? Let's take this in two parts. One, 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 first,

I'm sorry, I think this whole thing is a tragedy of errors on the part of sort of everyone involved. I think the New York Post story stinks. I don't think it, it needs sort of standards of journalistic integrity. We can talk about that. 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 230. We should talk about that. And so each one, there's been a cascade of disasters that have led to this, this dumpster fire. But starting with the story, it is very suspicious. First of all, these disclosures about 100 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, this story about how the hard drive ends up with the reporters makes no sense. Even today, Giuliani was making up new explanations for how it got there. It's now being widely speculated that this was the that the content came from the result of a hack. 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. I mean, so that's now, you know, I think that would have been the story today if it weren't

for 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 barisma exec and Joe Biden. And the buying campaign is denied that Joe Biden never met with the sky. And so it wasn't ever this smoking gun. And that makes it all the more apparent why Facebook and Twitter sort of overreacted. It was almost like they were trying to overprotect their candidate.

That's the thing that obviously looks crazy. They now have given the GOP the right, the extreme right, the belief that 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 on the side of the right last time. So Chimalt, 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 shut down distribution

was that it came from hacking and doxing or some I think that was basically the combination Yeah, a combination 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 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 230. 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, 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 230 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 freedberg, I'm just going to read what section 230 is. This is part of a law basically designed to protect common carriers, web-hosters of legal

claims that come from hosting third party information. Here's what it reads, no provider, a user, of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider. 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.

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. If you look at the internet's 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 increased the volume on those things. So what you have now is really no different than if you know, you created a show on Netflix or HBO or CBS and put it out there. If that stuff contained, you know contained something that was really offensive, those companies are on the hook. Did they make it? No, did they distribute it?

Yes. But here's the difference. You know, the active, but it's the active, active, 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 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 be 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 the art? No, because that a limited amount of shows on Netflix, you can police all of them.

We can't police everything written. Netflix is making editorial decisions about which shows to publish, just like a magazine makes editorial decisions about which articles to publish. They are clearly publishers. But the communication to DCX6 and 230, the original distinction, I mean, if you want to think about like an offline terms for a second, you've got, you've got this idea

of publishers and distributors, right? That's a fundamental dichotomy. A magazine would be a publisher, the new stand on which it appears is a distributor. It shouldn't be liable. If there's, if there's a, a, a, a, a liableist article contained in that magazine, you shouldn't be liable if there's a libelist article contained in that magazine. You shouldn't be able to sue every single new stand in the country that made that magazine available for sale. 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.

It was passed in 1996. Without that, every time that somebody sends an email that potentially created a legal issue, Gmail could have been liable. Freeberg, is it what's the right analogy? When people post to the internet, is that the analogy paper or film stock? Is it the newsstand or is it the publisher? So remember like what sex 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 and 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 a reason for other consumers to want to come to our websites. So users could create content. Blogger was an early 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 a link to a webpage, and you click on that link, and then you could read it. What Chimoff is pointing out is that today, Twitter and Facebook make a choice about, and YouTube, make a choice about and YouTube make a choice

about what content to show. And so, I think the analogy in the offline sense that the value of the algorithm is what you're saying. To be clear. And the algorithm and YouTube realize 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 for ads.

So it keeps the cycle going. And so they optimize, 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 pleasure 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 behind the street, hey, you guys should check these out. You know, top of the news is Hunter Biden spoke in crack with a hooker. People would 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 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 libel 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 DNCA. Take down notices. So, Jim, 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, you can't out-trade the mattress. You cannot claim, 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 debate, 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 signal, David, but that's not the only signal. For example, I can tell you very clearly that we would choose a priority 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. 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. But maybe we've actually solved this problem, Sachs, in that if we said, if you deploy an algorithm, that is not disclosing how this is going, then you are, or go, a publisher. And if you are just showing it reverse chronological,

our chronons, we used to call it back in the day, with the newest thing up top, that would be, just, I mean, 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, so Senator Tom Cotton, you know, who's a Republican, he tweeted in response to the

New York Post censorship. Look, if you guys are gonna act like publishers, we're gonna treat you like publishers. So that's not modifying Section 230. That's the saying you're not gonna qualify for Section 230 protection anymore if you're gonna 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 when Trump's tax returns came out, the week or two ago, where was the censorship of that? That wasn't that hack material. And by the way, it's a total double standard because when Trump's tax returns came out the weaker two ago, where was the censorship of that? That 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 we're the Pentagon papers. I mean, you cannot apply this standard, this idea that we're gonna prohibit links to articles. You're about you're proving the point. These people are punishments. No, I don't. 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 traffic-coming 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 would 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 would 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. 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 cat driven. Maybe they should go back to this kind of a straight reverse confeed and maybe you're right that the algorithm, 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 keeping 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 new stand example, let's say that the guy who works with the new stand 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, Tremoth likes 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. And I think 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, no, you're being too specific. And 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 you are right, David, that the law back in the day, it didn't scale to the newspaper

owner, but you know what, in 1796, 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.

It's 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 me. But they're not actually in the content creation business, right? And so 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

in the content versus being a kind of discriminatory function of that context. 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'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, Tomoth, you're making a point that Clarence Thomas made, Justice Thomas made in his recent filing where he said that if you are acting as both a publisher and a distributor, you need to be subject to publisher liability, 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 a 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 because David I have monetization Guys, there's monetization involved in the YouTube exactly But you also have monetization, guys. There's monetization involved in the YouTube, exactly. They are helping you make a-

Well, we're having a serious conversation, Jason. Let's not go off in that. No, but, but, Jamal, I mean, this goes back to the politics and makes 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 QAnon groups and just like a group? Just like it took years for us to figure out that Holocaust denial was wrong. Antivax was marginal.

QAnon was crazy. We're wearing masks. It was a good idea. 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, Chimap, your ideal nonprofit, social media service, would be a chronological feed of any content anyone wants to publish than 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 company. There is a 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 so Reddit has just a different problem, which is a sort of like a decency problem and a different class of war.

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 of the day. Well, they did ban certain topics. So they did recently, but like assume they didn't, right? And it was just purely like upvoted consumer and not algorithmic.

That's the, it's very hard to pin. I think it's very hard to pin. I think it's very hard to pin. 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 comfortable.

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, and you have no solution. Maybe I just want to be stimulated. Like I remember the day when I went 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 life. Show me the best stuff. Yeah, you know, like I, like I, 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. Well, 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 all that. Wait, hold on a second. Let me just ask this one question, David. Would this be alleviated if the

algorithm was less of a black box, if we could just say, Hey, no, need these algorithms to be so that's not a solution. And then what is this? And I want to hear David's about you know, 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 wouldn't have a better solution in the squares case. All right, let me get in here. So I have to agree with Jamoth. Okay, so the half I agree with is I don't want any

of these people meeting 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 where I disagree is if you were a PLS 2.30 you're going to make this situation infinitely

worse because 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. My cause of lawsuit, they're going to be taking down content all over the place. And you know what will happen daily?

That's going 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 lose audience? I mean, I think what'll happen is you'll have a torrent of lawsuits.

Anytime somebody has a potential lawsuit based on... But, you know, this is all I think of, like trying to police speech at a dinner party. Like, this is what we've thought existed at the 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 I don't think that's what I don't think that's what we're doing. I said 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 clearer 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 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 is really taken off.

They should be platforms and they cross the line. I would say that this New York Post story is the reason why people operate an arms about it is because what Twitter and Facebook have done is basically said they're gonna 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 gonna censor them. That is a sweeping assertion of power. They're picking and choosing who they don't wanna give distribution to. Yeah, 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 appeal section 230. Nobody is safe. My point is nobody is safe. And it's less about, I actually think that there's, a nuance 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, which should be on the platform. Absolutely. And it is the simple choice that they chose an article to exclude, regardless of the reason and the background, because there are many articles

like it that aren't being excluded. And that alone speaks to the whole in the system as kind of a sacks of money. Well, it's because it's because 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 the these standards evenly They would have blocked the Trump tax returns for these actually reason by the way Just take out the belt to block you so he can keep the Biden campaign strong and not have your

I would say I've been red-pelled actually the last 24 hours have been red-pilling for me. I I gotta 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 to 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's what it is. That's the journalistic standard becomes a slippery slope to nowhere, right? Like at that point, you're

just like what is true? What is not true? What is opinion? What is not opinion? What is, 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? I've lost billions of articles today. Standards would be the answer. Yeah, but look at 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 Hall of Coste Nile. Why, he really went out on a limb, huh, David?

Well, it's, I think, wow. No, no, no, my point is, my point is, no, no, no, no, no, my point is, no, but you're missing my point. My point is, you actually put it out, a multi- out a multi paragraph well-reasoned statement Three He took it seriously that he was gonna sense or something and I think you know people can come down You could be like a scopie ACLU liberal and oppose it or you know you could say look common sense dictates that you would you'd censor this

But he felt the need to justify it with you know like a long post How and then one week later we're already done the slippery slope to the point where you know face looks 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 this slope of censoring things, it becomes so easy

to keep doing it more and more. This is why I think these guys are really in hot water. Whenever 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, but I think they're gonna ruin the open internet for everyone.

Super blunder, I'll tell you what was it even bigger or 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 Hunter Biden story was, and I went to Rachel Maddo 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 folks on the left

who's in their filter bubble on Twitter and Facebook, they're not gonna see that story. And then if they tuned into Rachel Maddo 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 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. 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 think I like it rationally by the way. I'm just saying like as a human, humans like it. I like it. I like to be stimulated with titillating information and interesting things that for whatever reason I'm going to want- Click on again. You like that experience of checking down the resume.

All of my point is all human-directivated 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 gonna get the same sort of stuff over and over again that it identifies, activates me because I clicked on it. And therefore, I'm gonna 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-science, 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 blurdings 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 the schmoss point, which is a completely uncompelling platform to me and I will stop using it. And that leads back to the Chimau's point, which is the ultimate incentive, the mechanism

by which these platforms stay alive, is the capitalist incentive, which is how do you drive revenue and therefore how do you drive engagement and that's to give consumers what they want. That's what consumers want. All right, let's give Saks 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 hide house. I mean, you nailed it, Saks. It'll do shit out. It was very old Ducay. He did. He did. It was very old Ducay. It was very predictable. The media was making it sound like Trump was on his deathbed. 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 potentially at this fatal condition. And by the way, he deserved it. It was a moral failing. It was negligent. And so it's not unlike really what the right was doing,

constantly accusing Biden of sinility, 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 think it is noteworthy that Trump was cured so quickly with the use of these colonial antibodies that we talked about last time. I mean, 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 a couple of days. So 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 COVID thing.

And I ask a question, is it, have they published the blow by blow tick talk of exactly what he got when, um, no, they haven't, right? I would love to have that because they know what his dose age was. They said what day he got it on the rendesaver. 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 Now we know what to take if we get sick right? Yeah, well the question is could we get it? But you get it right like I think people love anecdotes. It's very hard for people to find emotion

and find belief in statistics. And if you look at the statistics on COVID, you go into the hospital 80% chance you're coming out and the average stay for someone that goes in, a lot of people are going to 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 whether or not Trump got exceptional treatment, he certainly did. It's very hard to sex his point for the storytelling that has kind of been used to keep people at home and manage kind of, and create this expectation of severity of this crisis, et cetera. 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 a 90% chance of 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's a tweet recently providing the statistics on what the real infection fatality rate was for COVID? Yeah, I thought it was like, it's about half a percent point four, and that's across the whole spectrum, but like in anyone under 75 years old,

you've got the number of sites, that's it. Right, but it's here, let me pull it up. We tweet the we we tweet. I think Bill Gurley first tweeted it and then I re-treated it. Yeah, I thought the 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's it was I thought the IFR was a lot less. And by the way, that that That IFR is also distorted, 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? To get the true IFR, because not everyone that's had COVID is registering as a positive in section, because they had COVID and got over it. So there was a paper published in JAMA a few weeks ago where they took dialysis patients

and they measured, and they got blood from these dialysis patients, and they measured COVID antibodies in these patients. And they showed that in the Northeast, 30% of people, 27.0% of people, have already had COVID. It's an incredible fact. Wow.

And in the West, the number is close and Western states. They've kind of got it all written up in this paper. And they did a great job with the paper. It's about 3%. But in aggregate across the United States, this was a few weeks ago. So nowadays, it was a 10.5% I think. So it's probably closer to 12% now

if 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 has died from COVID. We've recorded that death. We know that numbers right.

It could be a little inflated, right? People who died with COVID as a solution. Exactly, but from COVID. Be conservative and assume that it's right, right? I mean, if I look in the United States. Yeah, it's 217,000. 217 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 point one. Yeah, like very, very point 1%, point 07% or point 7% sorry. By the way, my my tweets aren't loading right now. So I think Trump just odd took the TikTok decree and he just crossed that TikTok and put Twitter and he just shut Twitter down. What? What? Is the TikTok thing done? Yeah, who knows. That was like three weeks ago. It doesn't matter anymore. It's from off. Was there a second debate? There's tonight, there's going to be two town halls. Trump refused to do a Zoom with or a Zoom debate. I'm talking about the power of Zoom. A virtual debate he wouldn't do. Obstantibly 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, 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. Yeah. I know we're all over with. Yeah. Yeah. I know we're all sick of it. I do feel like, I mean, the polls are now showing that Biden is up by as much as 17. I mean, things have really continued to break his way. I think to your point, Jason, about Trump being more watchable, I think that sort of Trump's problem is he just can't help making himself the center of the new 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 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 baseless strategy has been working so far is because Trump just eats up all the oxygen and he's making it a rough run 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 with entertaining. I want to

ask this exhausting. It's now exhausting. I want to change topics. I would like to ask David to explain his tweet related to prop 13, yeah, yeah, yeah, so So I saw that that Mark Zuckerberg had contributed 11 million dollars 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 almost 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. If you're a small business, and you've owned your store or whatever for 20, 30 years, all of a sudden you're gonna get, your taxes are gonna get reassessed at the new fair market value. But, you know, 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 wealth is so 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 in Atherton. 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, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no 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's a lot of pop 13. If you didn't have prop 13, anybody who owned 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 sacks 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 to government. Yeah, 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 And maybe prop 15 in a vacuum if you're just like a policy won't trying to design the ideal tax policy It might look more like that

But the real problem in California. We're not an under tax state. It's a massively tax state. 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, where you 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'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 union's block prisoner 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 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. 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 I think and Zuck and I've defended him on this podcast a lot, basically, on the speech issue, but I think what it is, he's got some foundation and he's got some pointy headed policy wonks 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 the private sector is being squeezed more and more by these public employee unions. And we do need structure reform. And we can't just give up one of the only cards we have, which would be trading reform on Prop 13. And Zuck doesn't already commercial real estate. Yeah. Well, even so I would venture to guess that maybe SACS does. I don't know.

I mean, I do, but let me explain that. This doesn't affect me because my cost basis is fresh. Yeah, all the commercial real estate that I've bought in California has been the last few years is probably under water. 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 structure of form. 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 tax. Average salary, I don't know if you saw this, go viral in the last couple weeks and Twitter. As average salary in San

Francisco $170,000 for a dollar tech city out of tech workers city employees. Yeah, of city employees. I found that like 170,000 with the average salary. I was like, Oh, wow, tech people are doing good. 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 for the $14 billion budget, a city of 800,000 people. 800,000 people. What are the $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 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 knocking us more cops on the beat. It's knocking us more teachers in the classroom. What is 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. And they're so into opposed, they're unreasonable demands, not all they're demands unreasonable, but most unreasonable demands. But with the public sector unions, they're 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 to the 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, well, the unions will never be a piece. You can never buy them off.

It's white democracy always ends in, in, in the state. Like it's just an inevitable outcome. I, 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. watch 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, the- 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 cause 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 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 apply an on climate change. And I heard that and actually gave me a bit of pause. It like this is exactly what I would expect someone who's thoughtful to say, not someone that trying to act ignorant and play to the right. If she didn't say, I don't think climate change

is being caused by humans. And I think everyone kind of wants to jump on her. And it's become religion. I just want to point out that climate change has become as politicized and as dogmatic as all these other topics we talk about. And we all kind of assume that if you do or don't believe in climate change, you as politicized and as dogmatic as all these other topics we talk 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 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 in science supports it. But I do appreciate that someone recognizes that they may not have the skill to wrap and just see what the media tells them to believe. Yeah, the few clips that I saw of the confirmation hearing might take away

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 softballish So I couldn't really get a sense of it now the the thing that I take kind of a lot of comfort in is that you know when we saw

John Roberts get confirmed with the court it was supposed to be five four conservative with john robberts and basically what we learned was now john robberts and you know some critical decisions he is willing to basically you know uh... make sure that things don't change that much uh... including obama can get 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 in 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 rocked to the top of Trump's list quite frankly is because of how Diane finds and treated her three years ago in the last confirmation hearings, where she is, where Feinstein attacked her Catholicism. It was, and it was so

ham-handed, it was so poorly done that it made Barrett a hero instantly on the right, and it rocked her to the top of this list. But we don't know how she's going to vote based on her catholicism you know which is the feature isn't it David because the lifetime appointment means they like tenure they can go with what they think is right so that that is kind of a good feature of the Supreme Court. Do you think there should be like a term?, I think it's a little crazy that decisions as important as, the right to choice or something like that, hangs on whether an 89 year old cancer victim can hold on for three more months.

It seems very arbitrary to me, and therefore these Zoom Court battles become very heated and toxic. 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 adds up to 18 years. That proposal makes a ton of sense to me. And so, you know, you know that when you vote for a president, they're going to get two Supreme Court picks. That feels less chaotic than this. That would be a much better system. That's a greater system. That's a greater. Yeah, that's a much better system. 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 word? And I thought that was like a,

I mean, it's a gotcha moment, obviously. And it's not easy to be under that kind of scrutiny and obviously she just just J.K.L. Well, I just thought that was like, it's also like pretty interesting, I just, I think they invented the word uncontformable for J.K.L. You got a right to have your own Pistola, but you shouldn't have a shotgun.

Boy, Friedburgers has a hard stop at three. The fact that you left out prototypes is interesting. I do think let's just end on the election and our little handicap of what's gonna happen and getting out of this mess. I do think one of the stories coming out of this is gonna 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 theated and attacked, especially with Trump, you know, in terms of how he treats women and thinks he says about women. And then you had the constant interruption by a pence of the moderator and Kamala. I think all of this is going to add up. And we do the post mortem 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. He's disrespected women. I don't know. Listen, I don't know. I think Biden is on the path to an enormous victory right now. Well, that's what the polls say. Certainly, it looks like a buy-in landslide. 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. Where we're 18 days, he's got 18 outs. Every day that goes by where he isn't able to move the bull number, he loses him out, right? And so we're going to get closer election days, only going to have like a three out or something. So yeah, I mean, look, obviously, I understand the polls. I still somehow think it, I know it sounds kind obviously, I understand the polls. I still somehow think it, 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. Okay. But the Kardashians, the

Kardashians lasted for 19 seasons. I just don't know if America is ready for the Trump reality show to be over. I think part of the appeal of Trump last time around was 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 just people don't love that. He's also, I think it's coming across as not being,

he's looking weak by not being willing to be challenged. And that came across clearly in that debate. He 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 like he just doesn't wanna have a shot at it and it just comes across as bad. So I don't know. These are all contributing factors, I think. So what's going on?

Chances of a pardon by Pence. He resigns. He pardoned himself. Pence, Pants, Pants, Pants, zero. Zero. Ego, tax. He won't resign. Well, we wouldn't see that unless he lost the election. If he loses. Well, we wouldn't see that unless he lost the election. If he loses. During the lame duck period, if he lost, maybe 20%. 20%. Because at that point, he's got nothing to lose, right?

Right. That I think it's, I think it's like a, I think it's 50, 50. He just goes for the full family part in. All right. All right. Love you guys. Love you guys. Love you guys. And hopefully we go. All right guys. Love you guys and hopefully we'll have a bestie poker soon.

Yeah, see you soon. Talk to you guys later. Bye.