Search Captions & Ask AI

E10: Twitter & Facebook botch censorship (again), the publisher vs. distributor debate & more

October 16, 2020 / 01:04:12

This episode discusses the recent controversies surrounding Hunter Biden's leaked emails, social media censorship, and the implications for Section 230. The hosts, including Chamath Palihapitiya and David Sacks, analyze the fallout from the New York Post's article and the reactions from Twitter and Facebook.

The conversation begins with a focus on Hunter Biden's laptops and the allegations of his drug problems. The hosts express skepticism about the journalistic integrity of the New York Post's reporting, while also critiquing the social media platforms for their censorship actions.

Chamath and David debate the consequences of these actions, particularly regarding Section 230, which protects online platforms from liability for user-generated content. They discuss the potential for legal reforms and the challenges of balancing free speech with content moderation.

The hosts also touch on the upcoming election and the impact of these controversies on voter sentiment, particularly among women and minority groups. They speculate on how Trump's handling of these issues might affect his chances in the election.

The episode concludes with a discussion about the future of social media regulation and the necessity for platforms to adapt to changing legal standards.

TLDR

The episode covers Hunter Biden's email leaks, social media censorship, and implications for Section 230 ahead of the election.

Episode

1:04:12
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hey everybody hey everybody welcome  besties are back besties are back it's another all-in podcast dropping it to  you uh unexpectedly because there's just so
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much news surprise bestie pods but dropping a  bestie it's not a code 313 we're not dropping
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any snickers bars today just dropping  the bestie oh no he's got a megaphone because we hit a new law in terms of  people needing to be heard oh my god
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by the way um and his chief of staff called  me he felt like he only got 62 of the minutes
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in the last two podcasts versus the rest of us  and so i'm dealing with his agent a little bit
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it's like the uh the debates where  they count the number of minutes into daniel is daniel grinding you for more than  just grinding no i go for i go for quality over
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quantity absolutely okay uh well this week's going  to be i mean what a complete disaster of a week
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um it's the other way to explain what  is it every day is a dumpster fire it's so here we are we're three weeks out from the  election and somebody's emails have a democrats
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emails have been leaked again potentially but  last time we had an investigation by the fbi
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and then that might have infected impacted the  election this time we have a whole different
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brouhaha apparently hunter biden who loves  to smoke crack and has a serious drug problem
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this this is you know he's a seriously obviously  troubled individual um but he brought three
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laptops to get them fixed and never picked them  up according to this story in the new york post
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so the new york post runs a  story with an author who is kind of unknown um and this these laptops were  somehow the hard drives me he never picked them
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up that's a little suspicious the hard drives wind  up with rudy giuliani and the fbi uh and anyway
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what they say is that hunter biden which we kind  of know is a grifter who traded on his last name
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to get big consulting deals i don't know what  board anybody here has been on that pays 50 000
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a month but it's obviously gnarly stuff but the  the fallout from it was the big story i went to
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tweet the story and it wouldn't let me tweet the  story uh so the literal new york post was banned
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by twitter at the same time facebook put a warning  on it so let's just put it out there um you know
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sax your guys losing pretty badly in this election  and so we'll go to our token geo peer what do you
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think is this let's let's take this in two parts  one what do you do what do they think the chances
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that this is fake news or real news or something  in between and then let's get into twitter's
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insane decision to block the url yeah i mean so  so first of all so i i think this whole thing
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is a tragedy of errors on the part of sort of  everyone involved i think the new york post story
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stinks i don't think it uh it it meets  sort of standards of journalistic integrity we can talk about that but then i  think you know twitter and facebook overreacted
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and i think that the story was well in the process  of being debunked by the internet and it was like
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twitter and facebook didn't trust that process  to happen and so they intervened and now i think
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there's going to be a third mistake which is that  conservatives are looking to repeal section 230
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we should talk about that and so each one  there's been a cascade of of disasters that
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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
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didn't have to go there 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
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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 the content came from the results of a hack
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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
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um i mean so that that's now you know i  think that would have been the story today
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if it weren't for um facebook and twitter making  censorship the story and then the final thing
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is you know this story wasn't a smoking gun to  begin with i mean the worst thing it showed was
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that there was a single email between a barisma  exec and joe biden and um the buying campaign is
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denied that that joe biden never met with this  guy and so it wasn't ever this smoking gun and
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um and and that makes it all the more um apparent  why facebook and twitter sort of overreacted
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it was almost like they were trying to overprotect  their candidate that's the thing that obviously
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looks crazy like they now have given the gop  the right the extreme right the belief that the
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the technology companies are now on the side of  the left whereas last time they were on the side
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of the right i think right facebook was supposed  to be on the side of the right last time so chabot
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you worked at facebook famously for many years  what are your thoughts well jack came out last
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night and basically said that the reason that they  that they shut down distribution was that it came
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from hacking and doxxing or some i think that was  basically the combination yes a combination um
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and then facebook today came out and said you  know before we could take it down it had been
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distributed or read 300 000 times um i mean  look if we just take a step back and think about
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what's happening here there are more and more and  more examples that are telling i think all of us
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what we kind of already knew which is that this  fig leaf that the online internet companies have
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used to shield themselves from any responsibility  those days are probably numbered because now
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exactly as david said what you have is the left  and the right looking to repeal section 230 and
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so and by the way two days ago i think it was  clarence thomas basically put out the entire
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road map of how to repeal it and if you assume  that amy coney barrett gets you know put into
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the high court in a matter of days or whatever  um it's only a matter of time until the right
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case is thoughtfully prepared along those  guard rails that that clarence thomas defined
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and it'll get you know fast-tracked through  to the supreme court but if i was a betting
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man which i am i think that section 230 is  their days are numbered and facebook twitter
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google all these companies are going to have to  look more like newspapers and television stations
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okay so before we go to your freedberg i'm just  going to read what section 230 is this is part of
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a law basically designed to protect common  carriers web hosters of legal claims
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that come from hosting third party information  uh here's what it reads no provider a user of
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an interactive computer service shall be  treated as the publisher or speaker of any
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information provided by another information  content provider so what this basically means
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is if you put a blog post up and people comment  on it you're not responsible for their comments
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or if you're medium and you host the blog you're  not responsible for the comments of that person
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is that person it makes complete logical sense  the entire internet was based off of this that
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platforms are not responsible for what people  contribute to those platforms that's how
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publishing works now look at the internet's paper  but again let's build on this when that law was
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originally written we had no conception of social  distribution and algorithmic feeds that basically
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pumped content and and increased the volume on  those things so what you have now is really no
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different than if you know you created a show  um on netflix or hbo or cbs and put it out there
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if that stuff contained you know something that  was really offensive those companies are on the
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hook did they make it no did they distribute it  yes and it's the in here but here's the difference
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but it's the active act of distributing it  you cannot look at these companies and say
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they are basically holding their hands back they  have written active code and there is technical
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procedures that they are in control of that are  both the amplifier and the kill switch but isn't
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this a bad analogy netflix shouldn't it the  analogy be the person who makes film stock
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or the person who makes the camera or the  person who develops the film not the person who
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distributes it no because that a limited amount of  shows on netflix you can police all of you can't
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police everything written netflix is making  editorial decisions about which shows to publish
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just like you know a magazine makes editorial  decisions about which articles to publish
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they are clearly publishers um but the the  communications dcx section 230 the original
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distinction i mean if you want to think about like  in offline terms for a second you've got you've
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got this idea of publishers and distributors right  that's a fundamental dichotomy a magazine would be
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a publisher the newsstand on which it appears is  a distributor it shouldn't be liable if there's
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if there's a a a a libelous article contained  in that magazine you shouldn't be able to sue
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every single newsstand in the country  that made that magazine available for sale
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that was that was the original offline law that  was then kind of ported over into section 230.
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it made a lot of sense without this i mean i think  it was a really visionary provision it was passed
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in 1996 without that every time that somebody  sends an email that you know potentially created
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a legal issue you know gmail could have been  liable freedberg is it what's the right analogy
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when people post to the internet is that the is  the analogy or film stock is it the newsstand or
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is it the publisher so remember like what saks is  pointing out is this was passed in 1996 so think
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back to 1996 when you would um create some content  right in the term around that time with user
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generated content right you guys remember this  like the early days it was like the big switch
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ugc and it was like the big sweeping trend was  like oh my god all this content is being created
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by the users we don't have to go find content  creators uh to create you know a reason for other
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consumers to want to come to our websites so users  could create content you know blogger was an early
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kind of user generated content service you could  create a blog post you could post it and people
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would show up the problem with blogger or the  challenge was distribution or syndication right
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how do i now i've posted my content how do i as  that content creator get people to read my content
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and you'd have to send people like a link to  a website a link to a web page and you click
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on that link and then you could read it what  chamath is pointing out is that today twitter
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and facebook make a choice about and and  youtube make a choice about what content to show
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and so you know i think the analogy in the offline  sense via the algorithm is what you're saying to
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be via the algorithm and uh you know youtube  realized that if they showed you videos that
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they think that you'll click on they'll keep you  on youtube longer and make more money from ads
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so it keeps the cycle going and so they optimize  con and it turns out that the content that
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you need to optimize for to get people to keep  clicking is content that is somewhat activating
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to the amygdala in your brain it's like stuff that  makes you angry or makes you super pleasured and
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not just boring ordinary stuff and so this sort  of content which the new york post sells a lot of
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um is the sort of stuff that rises to the top of  those algorithms naturally because of the way they
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operate now if a magazine stand were to put those  newspapers using the offline analogy on the front
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of their magazine stand and told people walking  down the street hey you guys should check these
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out you know top of the news is hunter biden  spoken crack with a hooker people would you
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know probably stop but i think the question is  should they be liable now in in i think 2000 uh
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the digital millennium copyright act was passed  and um that act basically created a process by
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which folks who felt like and it was related  to copyright but i think the analogy is similar
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if you thought that your content was copyrighted  and was being put up falsely or put up without
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your permission you could make a claim to  one of those platforms to get your content
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pulled down and i think the question is is there  some sort of analogy around uh libel content
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or false or misleading content um that maybe  this evolves into law where there's a process
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by which platforms can kind of be challenged on  what they're showing um much like they are with
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the dmca take down notices so the problem the  problem comes back to the code if you explicitly
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write code that fundamentally makes it murky  whether you are the publisher or the distributor
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i think that you have to basically take the  approach that you are both and then you should be
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subject to the laws of both if for example twitter  did not have any algorithmic redistribution
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amplification there were the only way you  could get content was in a real-time feed that
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was everything that your friends posted and they  stayed silent you could make a very credible claim
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that they are a publisher and not a distributor  which by the way is the way it originally worked
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and it was why they were falling behind facebook  as you well know because you worked on the
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you can algorithm actually you cannot click but  you're you're not a distributor when you literally
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have a bunch of people that sit beside you writing  code that decides what is important and what
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is not you can debate but you can debate which  signals they decide to use but it is their choice
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well but but if the signals are the user's own  clicks then i would argue that's still just user
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generated content no no it is a it is a signal  david but that's not the only signal for example
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i can tell you very clearly that we would choose  a priority stuff that we knew you would click on
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it wasn't necessarily the most heavily clicked  we could make things that were lightly clicked
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more clicked we could make things that were  more click less clicked but my point is there
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are people inside the bowels of these companies  that are deciding what you and your children
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see and to the extent that that's okay that's  okay maybe we've actually solved this problem
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saks in that if we said if you deploy an algorithm  that is not disclosing how this is going then you
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are ergo a publisher and if you uh are just  showing it reverse chronological archron as we
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used to call back in the day with the newest thing  up top that would be uh just so maybe we should be
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not getting rid of 230 we should be talking  to these politicians about algorithms equal
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publisher so the publisher at the new york post is  the same as the algorithm i like this as a better
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framework well yeah so so senator tom cotton you  know who's a republican he tweeted in response to
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the new york post censorship look if you guys are  going to act like publishers we're going to treat
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you like publishers so that that's not modifying  section 230 that's just saying you're not going
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to qualify for section 230 protection anymore if  you're going to make all these editorial decisions
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i would argue that these decisions they're  making about censoring specific articles and
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by the way it's a total double standard because  you know when when trump's tax returns came out
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a week or two ago uh where was the censorship of  that that was wasn't that hacked material i mean
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that was material that found its way to the new  york times without trump's consent by the way so
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were the pentagon papers i mean you cannot apply  this standard this this idea that we're gonna
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prohibit links to articles yeah but you're  proving the point these people are no no i know
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i know well well hold on i'm saying i'm saying if  they make editorial decisions they're publishers
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i think there's a way for them to employ  speech neutral rules and remain distributors
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so i would be i would i'd have a little  bit of of an issue with you i would say
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the reason why they're going to fall into this  trap becoming publishers is because of their own
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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
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a reverse chronological feed only i can tell you  what will happen in my opinion which is that the
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revenue monetization on a per page per impression  basis will go off by ninety percent ninety percent
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for sure people wouldn't people that is the only  reason why these guys won't switch because they
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know that for every billion dollars they make  today it would go to a hundred million in a
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reverse chronological feed because you would not  be able to place ads in any coherent valuable way
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there would be zero click-throughs and the ads  would be just worthless otherwise they should
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do it now if you could keep all the revenue  and you could be reverse chronological right
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and have the same market cap just do it and be  under safe harbor so that you're not attacked
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every day how fun is it to be sitting there and  being attacked every single day by both sides
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and by all the libertarians in the middle the  reason they don't do it is because of money
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let's just be honest that's the only reason  they don't do it but it's all market cap driven
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maybe they should go back to this kind of  the straight reverse crown feed and maybe
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you're right that the algo i mean i think  you probably are right that the algorithms
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um are make the situation worse because  they kind of trap people in these bubbles
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of like reinforcement and they just keeping  fed more ideological purity and it and it
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definitely is fueling the polarization of our  society so i'm not trying to defend i mean
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i think maybe you have a point that we should  get rid of these algorithms but but just to think
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about like the publisher aspect of it going back  to the newsstand example let's say that the guy
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who works at the newsstand knows his customers  and pulls aside every month the magazines
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that he knows that his clientele wants and in  fact sometimes he even makes recommendations
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knowing that oh okay you know chamath likes  you know these three magazines here's a new
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one maybe he'll like this and he pulls it aside  for you that would not subject him to publish
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reliability even though he's doing some curation  he's not involved in the content curation uh i i
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would argue that if the the algorithms proceed in  a speech-neutral way which is just to say they're
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going to look at your clicks and then based  on your own revealed preferences suggest other
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things for you to look at i don't think that makes  you a publisher necessarily and i think if it was
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but if you if you do if you do put your finger  if these engineers are putting their thumb
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on the scale and and pushing the algorithm towards  certain specific kinds of content that may cross
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over no no no you're being you're being too  specific and it's it's not that extreme and
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it's not as simple as you're saying the reality  is there are incredibly intricate models on a per
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person basis that these companies use to figure  out what you're likely going to click on not what
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you should not what is exposed to you not what you  shouldn't but what you likely will and that's part
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of a much broader maximization function that  includes revenue as a huge driver yeah so the
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reality is that these guys are making publishing  decisions and right you are right david you know
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the law back in the day it didn't scale to the  newspaper owner but you know what in 1796 you know
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colored people were three-fifths of a human and we  figured out a way to change the law so i'm pretty
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sure we can change the law here too and i think  what's going to happen is you should be allowed to
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be algorithmic but then you should live and die by  the same rules as everybody else otherwise that is
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what's really anti-competitive is to essentially  lie your way to a market advantage that isn't true
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just because people don't understand what  an algorithm is that's not sufficient to me
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but they're not actually in the content creation  business right and so what's the uh what's the the
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definition of a term publisher in that context  because in all other cases publishers pay for
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and guide and direct the editorial creation the  content versus being a kind of discriminatory
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function of that context here's the problem  let's take for example uh instagram reels
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can you manipulate content through reels yes  now as the person that provides that tool
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to create content that theoretically could  be violating other people's copyright or you
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know offensive or wrong or whatever and then you  yourself distribute it to other people knowingly
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the reality is that the laws need to address in  a mature way the reality of what is happening
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today versus trying to hearken back to the 1860s  and the 1930s because things are just different
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and we're smart enough as humans to figure out  these nuances and that sometimes we start with
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good intentions and the laws just need to change  well ironically chamath you're making a point that
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clarence thomas made justice thomas made in  his uh filing recent filing where he said that
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that if you are acting as both a publisher  and a distributor you need to be subject
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to publish reliability which means peeling back  section 230 and moreover you may not even be the
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primary creator of the content if you're merely a  secondary creator if you're someone who has a hand
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in the content um then you are you're a  creator you're a publisher and therefore
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you should lose section 230 protection that is  basically what he said if you if your argument
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is that the algorithms make you  a content creator effectively and the tools algorithms and tools well the other  thing is you know what you have because david
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but you also have monetization guys right there's  monetization involved in the youtube example
00:22:26
they are helping you we're having a serious  conversation jason let's not let's not go off in
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that no i'm just good no but but it's jamal i mean  this goes back to the politics may make strange
00:22:35
bedfellows point um i mean i think a lot of the  conservatives are actually making the point you're
00:22:39
making which is that these social media sites are  involved in publishing i don't want these guys
00:22:46
involved in any of this [ __ ] because i don't  trust them to be neutral over long periods of
00:22:53
time so do you trust their decision to pull down  q anon groups and zero just like just like it took
00:23:00
it took years for us to figure out that holocaust  denial was wrong anti-vaxx was marginal q anon was
00:23:07
crazy like wearing masks was a good idea right  i mean i i don't want these people in charge of
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any of this stuff and to the extent that they are  i want them to be liable and culpable to defend
00:23:18
their decisions so chamel your ideal non-profit  social media service would be a chronological feed
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of any content anyone wants to publish that  anyone can browse that's right that's not
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what i'm saying david what i'm saying is that you  have to be able to live with the risk that comes
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with you know playing in the big league and  wanting to be a 500 plus billion dollar company
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there is a liability that comes with that and you  need to own it and live up to the responsibility
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of what it means otherwise you don't get the free  option what if they didn't take a hand in it and
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they follow the dig the reddit model and it's just  up voting that decides what content rises to the
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top suspect i suspect that so reddit has a just  a different problem which is this sort of like
00:24:02
uh you know a decency problem and a different  class of law who are we to judge decency right
00:24:07
i mean like in in the vein of like editorialism  like they're taking no hand in what content rises
00:24:12
to the topic they did ban certain topics so  they did recently but like like assume they
00:24:17
didn't right and it was just purely like upvoted  consumer and not algorithmic it's very hard to pin
00:24:23
i think it feels 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
00:24:33
and so if youtube reverted to just hey what people  are watching right now rises to the top and that
00:24:37
was the only thing that drove the algorithm you  would feel more comfortable with youtube not being
00:24:41
it's not comfortable this is what i'm saying  it's it's what i know all i want to know is
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what am i getting when i go here and if what  i'm getting is a subjective function where
00:24:53
they are maximizing revenue which means that  i can't necessarily trust the content i get
00:24:59
as long as i know that and as long as there's  recourse for me i'm very fine to use youtube and
00:25:05
twitter and facebook what i think is unfair is  to not know that there's a subjective function
00:25:11
confuse it with an objective function go on with  your life end up in this state that we're in now
00:25:17
where nobody is happy and everybody is throwing  barbs and you have no solution maybe i just want
00:25:22
to be stimulated like i remember the day when  i would go to facebook and twitter and it was
00:25:26
boring as hell it's like just [ __ ] random [ __  ] that people like here's a picture like show me
00:25:29
the best stuff you know like like and now i go to  facebook and i'm like [ __ ] addicted because it's
00:25:34
showing me this and there's like [ __ ] that i've  been buying online and the ads keep popping up
00:25:38
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
00:25:44
all it all should be done eyes wide open where in  these corner cases the people that feel like some
00:25:50
sort of right or privilege or has been violated  or some overstepping has occurred they should have
00:25:57
some legal recourse and they should be they should  be on the record a mechanism to disambiguate all
00:26:02
that wait hold on let me just ask just one  question david would this be uh alleviated if
00:26:08
the algorithm was less of a black box if we could  just say hey no we need these algorithms to be so
00:26:15
that's not a solution and then what is this and  then and i want to hear david's about that and
00:26:20
then also labeling because facebook labeled stuff  and if labeling stuff hey this is disputed from
00:26:25
a third party that feels to me like that would  have been a better solution in the twitter's case
00:26:29
all right let me get in here so i half agree with  tremoff okay so the half i agree with is i don't
00:26:34
want any of these people meaning the social media  sites making editorial decisions about what i see
00:26:41
censoring what i can look at i don't trust them i  don't want that kind of power residing in really
00:26:47
two people's hands mark zuckerberg and jack dorsey  i don't i don't trust them and i don't want them
00:26:52
to have that kind of power but that where i  disagree is if you repeal section 230 you're
00:26:57
going to make the situation infinitely worse  because section 2 what is the response of these
00:27:03
companies going to be corporate risk aversion is  going to cause them to want to hire hundreds of
00:27:08
low-level employees basically millennials to sit  there making judgments about what content might
00:27:13
be defamatory might cause a lawsuit they're going  to be taking down content all over the place and
00:27:19
you know what will happen that's gonna be  a worse world no you know what'll happen
00:27:23
those companies will lose users lose engagement  and new things will spring up in its place around
00:27:28
these laws that work how will they how do they  lose audience i mean i think what will happen is
00:27:33
you have a torrent of lawsuits any time somebody  has a a potential lawsuit based on you know
00:27:41
like trying to police speech at a  dinner party like this never existed at i don't think the goal is to work backwards from  how do we preserve a trillion dollars of market
00:27:53
cap so what if that's what i think that's what  i don't think that's what we're doing so for
00:27:58
me i i'm trying to work back from how do we  preserve the open internet but i think this
00:28:02
is exactly what it's saying which is here's a  clear delineation in 2020 knowing what we know
00:28:07
you know person entrepreneur who goes to y  combinator or to launch to build the next great
00:28:12
company here are these rules pick your poison  and some will choose to be just the publisher
00:28:17
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
00:28:26
and that's exactly how the free markets  work today there's nothing wrong with that
00:28:31
maybe the only like disagreement here is that  i think that code can be written and algorithms
00:28:37
can be written in a speech neutral way so that the  distributors don't cross over the lines becoming
00:28:42
publishers i fully agree with you that these sites  should not be publishers the reason why the new
00:28:47
york post should be really taken off they should  be platforms and they cross the line i would say
00:28:52
that this this newer post story is the reason  why people are up in arms about it is because
00:28:58
what twitter and facebook have done is basically  said they're going to sit in judgment of the
00:29:03
media industry and if a publisher like the the new  york post puts out a story that doesn't meet the
00:29:09
standards of twitter and facebook they're going to  censor them that is a sweeping assertion of power
00:29:15
they're picking and choosing who they don't want  to give distribution to yeah we all we all agree
00:29:19
on that piece they should not be the arbiter  that is what is triggering but that is what
00:29:24
is triggering the conservatives in particular  but everybody but especially conservatives to
00:29:29
say they want to repeal section 230. nobody my  point is nobody is safe and it's less about um
00:29:35
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
00:29:47
this an important article they chose to kind of  intervene in this particular case when every day
00:29:52
there are going to be hundreds of other articles  that are going to be actively shared on these
00:29:55
platforms that are by those same standards false  with you know some degree of equivalency false
00:30:00
which shouldn't be on the platform absolutely  and it is the simple choice that they chose an
00:30:04
article to exclude um regardless of the reason  in the background because there are many articles
00:30:09
like it that aren't being excluded um and that  alone speaks to the hole in the system as kind of
00:30:14
well it's because it's because they they have too  much power and they're unaware of their own biases
00:30:20
they can't see this action for what it so  clearly was it was a knee-jerk reaction on
00:30:25
the part of employees at twitter and facebook to  to protect the biden campaign from a story that
00:30:31
they didn't like i mean because if they were to  apply the these standards evenly they would have
00:30:36
blocked the trump tax returns for  the exact same reason by the way is about to block you so he can keep the  biden campaign strong and not have your
00:30:44
i i would say i've been red-filled actually  the last 24 hours have been repelling for me
00:30:49
i i i gotta say david i agree with you because  like i thought i thought that both things were uh
00:30:54
crossing the line like meaning either you publish  them both or you censor them both and there are
00:31:01
very legitimate reasons where you could be on  either side but to choose one and not do the other
00:31:07
it just again it creates for me uncertainty and i  don't like uncertainty and i really don't like the
00:31:12
idea that some nameless faceless person in one  of these organizations is all of a sudden going
00:31:16
to decide for me knowledge yeah and information  that to me is just unacceptable the journalistic
00:31:22
standard becomes a slippery slope to nowhere right  like at that point like what what is true what is
00:31:27
not true what is opinion what is not opinion what  is what you know how do i validate whether this
00:31:32
[ __ ] laptop came from this guy or this guy or  this guy it's a slippery how are you ever going
00:31:36
to resolve that across billions of articles a day  standards would be the answer yeah and your look
00:31:43
has lower standards right and so let's look at how  slippery the slope has become just a week ago i
00:31:48
mean literally a week ago mark zuckerberg put out  uh a statement explaining why facebook was gonna
00:31:55
censor a holocaust denial why he really went on  a limb huh david well it's i think wow no no no
00:32:01
no no not brave no no no but my point is my point  my point is he actually put out a multi-paragraph
00:32:08
well-reasoned statement multi-paragraph your three  paragraphs about the holocaust is bad wow congrats
00:32:16
you're you're not listening to my point my  point is that he took it seriously that he
00:32:22
was gonna censor something and i think you know  people can come down you could be like a skokie
00:32:26
aclu liberal and oppose it or you know you could  say look common sense dictates that you would you
00:32:31
would censor this but he felt the need to  justify it with you know like a long post
00:32:36
how and then one week later we're already  down the slippery slope to the point where
00:32:40
you know facebook's justification for censoring  this article was a tweet by andy stone
00:32:45
you know like that was it it was a tweet  that was the only explanation they gave
00:32:49
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
00:32:58
you know this was just so and so it just  shows that once you start down the slope
00:33:03
of censoring things it becomes so easy to keep  doing it more and more and and this is why i think
00:33:10
these guys are are really in hot water whatever  whatever um you know whatever controversy there
00:33:15
was about section 230 before and there was already  a lot of rumblings in dc about modifying this
00:33:22
they have made things 10 times worse i mean as as  someone who's actually a defender of section 230 i
00:33:28
wish dorsey and zuckerberg weren't making these  blunders because i think they're going to ruin
00:33:31
the open internet for everyone super blundered  i'll tell you it was an even bigger blunder or
00:33:36
an equal blunder for me last night i don't know if  you guys had this experience but i was trying to
00:33:40
figure out what the consensus view on the  biden hunter biden story was and i went
00:33:46
to rachel maddow and the last word and anderson  cooper and there was a media blackout last night
00:33:54
i couldn't find one left leaning or cnn if that  is even in the center i don't think they're the
00:34:00
center any more than the left i couldn't find one  person talking about buy and i was like all right
00:34:04
let me just see if i tune in to fox news and fox  news was only discussing the binding story and
00:34:09
so this now felt like wow not only if you were one  of these you know folks on the left who's in their
00:34:16
filter bubble on twitter and facebook they're not  going to see that story and then if they tuned in
00:34:21
to rachel maddow uh or to anderson cooper or you  go to the new york times it's not there either
00:34:27
and then drudge didn't have it for a day you're  bringing up something so important so think about
00:34:33
what you're really talking about jason there  was a first order reaction that was misplaced
00:34:38
and not rooted in anything that was really  scalable or justifiable then everybody has
00:34:44
to deal with the second and third order reactions  the left leaning media outlets circle the wagons
00:34:50
the right leaning media outlets are are up in arms  nobody is happy both look like they're misleading
00:34:57
and then now if you're a person in the middle for  example what was frustrating for me yesterday was
00:35:02
it took me five or six clicks and hunting and  pecking to find out what the hell is actually
00:35:06
going on here why is everybody going crazy but  that bothered me you know uh and so i just think
00:35:14
like again it used to be very simple to define  what a publisher was and what a distributor was
00:35:20
in a world without code without machine learning  without ai without all of these things i think
00:35:26
those lines are burned we have to um rewrite the  laws i think you should be able to choose and then
00:35:32
i think if you're trying to do both by the way  the businesses that successfully do both will
00:35:36
have the best market caps but if you're trying  to do both you have to live and die by the sword
00:35:41
yeah it would be interesting also if i don't  know if you guys have done this but i switched
00:35:46
my twitter to being reverse chronological which  you can do in the top right hand corner of the
00:35:51
app or on your desktop because i just like to see  the most recent stuff first but then sometimes i
00:35:55
do miss something that's trending whatever but  i just prefer that because i have a smaller
00:35:58
follower list now um but to friedberg your point  you kind of like the algorithm telling you what to
00:36:06
watch so a potential solution here i think i like  it rationally by the way i'm just saying like as
00:36:11
a human humans like it i like it like i like to be  stimulated with titillating information and uh you
00:36:19
know interesting things that for whatever reason  i'm gonna you know click on again you like that
00:36:24
experience of jumping down the road my point is  all humans are activated and the algorithms the
00:36:29
way they're written they're designed to activate  you and keep you engaged and activation naturally
00:36:34
leads to these uh dynamic feedback loops where i'm  going to get the same sort of stuff over and over
00:36:38
again that that it identifies activates me because  i clicked on it and therefore i'm gonna you know
00:36:43
continue to firm up my my opinions and my beliefs  in that area but i think doing these stuff that i
00:36:48
don't believe showing me stuff that's anti-science  because i'm a science guy showing me stuff that's
00:36:52
anti-science showing me stuff that's [ __ ]  that i consider [ __ ] i'm not going to read it
00:36:56
anymore so if i'm reading just random blurtings  by random people in reverse chronological order
00:37:01
it is a completely uncompelling platform to me and  i will stop using it and that leads back to kind
00:37:06
of the you know tomos point which is that the  ultimate incentive the mechanism by which these
00:37:10
platforms stay alive is the capitalist incentive  which is you know how do you drive uh revenue
00:37:15
and therefore how do you drive engagement and and  that's to give consumers what they want and that's
00:37:19
what consumers want all right let's let's give  sax his victory lap he predicted last time that
00:37:25
uh there was a possibility that trump would  come out of this like superman and would do a
00:37:31
huge victory lap and sure enough he considered  putting a superman outfit on under his suit
00:37:37
and he did a victory lap literally around the  hospital uh putting the secret service at risk
00:37:43
i guess um and then did a mussolini-like salute  from everybody from the top of the white house
00:37:52
i mean you nailed it sacked you  came out it was very ill duchy no but it was it was it was  it was very predictable it was
00:38:02
you 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
00:38:10
he must be much sicker than he's letting on if  he says he's not that sick it must be really bad
00:38:15
um and so for days and days they were talking  about how trump was you know potentially
00:38:20
had this fatal condition and by the way he  deserved it you know it was a moral failing he
00:38:24
was negligent and so it he it's not unlike really  what the right was doing constantly accusing biden
00:38:30
of senility you know and then biden went into  that debate and then blew away expectations um
00:38:36
and so the same thing here you know the the media  set up trump to kind of exceed expectations but
00:38:42
but but i do think you know it is um noteworthy  that trump was cured so quickly with the use of
00:38:50
these you know clonal antibodies that we talked  about last time and we talked about it on the show
00:38:55
two weeks ago and it was a combination i guess of  regeneron and rem deserve and the guy was out of
00:39:01
there in like a couple of days so um you know it's  like the the media doesn't want to admit anything
00:39:08
that is potentially helpful to trump but you have  to say that at this point we have very effective
00:39:14
treatments for kovid they may not be completely  distributed uh yet uh trump obviously had access
00:39:20
to them that the rest of us don't have but  it feels to me like we are really winding
00:39:25
down on the whole the whole covet thing and i  asked a question is it has have they published
00:39:30
the blow by blow tick talk of exactly what he got  when um no they haven't right i would love i would
00:39:38
love to have that because i think all americans  deserve probably yeah they know they know what
00:39:42
his dosage was and they said what day he got  it on the rem death severe he got several doses
00:39:47
it said what days he got the antibody treatment  i i just want to print that out and keep it as
00:39:52
a folded in my pocket just in case we know what  to take now we know what to take if we get sick
00:39:58
right yeah well the question is can we get it but  even independent of that right like um i think
00:40:04
people love um anecdote it's very hard for people  to find a motion and find belief in statistics and
00:40:12
you know if you look at the statistics on  covid you know you go into the hospital 80
00:40:17
chance you're coming out and you know the average  stay for someone that goes in a lot of people are
00:40:22
going to the er and they're getting pushed back  out because they're not severe enough and i think
00:40:26
the anecdote is everyone that gets covet dies the  statistics show that that's not true and you know
00:40:32
whether or not trump got exceptional treatment  he certainly did um it's very hard to sax's point
00:40:39
for the storytelling that has kind of been used  to keep people at home and and manage kind of and
00:40:44
create this this expectation of severity of this  crisis etc um it's very hard for people to kind of
00:40:49
then say hey like you know he's got a 97 percent  chance of making it through this and he'll be
00:40:55
90 chance he'll be out of the hospital in three  days when it happened it was a shocking moment
00:41:00
um and it really hit that narrative upside down  right like it was just like well can we show that
00:41:05
there's a tweet recently providing the statistics  on what the real infection fatality rate was for
00:41:11
covet um yeah it's about half a percent 0.4 and  that's across you know the whole spectrum but
00:41:18
like in anyone under 75 years old you've got the  numbers right facts right but it's here let me
00:41:24
pull it up it's on uh we we tweet i think bill  gurley first tweeted it and then i retweeted it
00:41:28
i thought the ifr was like point one if you're  young and it goes all the way up to like point
00:41:34
four if you were above 75. it's way way less  than point one wait yeah it's it's it's it was
00:41:39
um i thought the ifr was a lot less than that  that ifr is also distorted you you know based
00:41:46
on the zero prevalence study that was just  published you can take that number that's
00:41:50
published and divided by about three uh three to  five uh to get the true ifr because not everyone
00:41:56
that's had covet is registering as a positive  infection because they had cobin got over it
00:42:01
so there was a paper published in in jama a  few weeks ago where they took dialysis patients
00:42:08
and they measured and they get blood from  these dialysis patients and they measured covet
00:42:12
antibodies in these patients and they showed that  in the northeast 30 percent of people 27 point
00:42:18
something percent of people have already had covet  uh it's an incredible fact wow and in the west
00:42:24
uh the number is close in western states they've  kind of got it all written up in this paper and
00:42:28
they did a great job with paper it's about three  percent um but in aggregate across the united
00:42:33
states it's a this was a few weeks ago so nowadays  it's it was a 10.5 percent i think so it's
00:42:37
probably closer to 12 now if people have already  had covet and so then if you assume that number
00:42:43
right i mean that's 30 million people and now  you look at how many people have died we haven't
00:42:47
gotten the deaths wrong right because everyone  that's died from covet we've recorded that death
00:42:51
we know that numbers right it could be a little  inflated right people who died with covetous
00:42:55
exactly conservative and assume that it's right  right i mean if i look in the united states it's
00:43:01
217 thousand 270 cases but the real cases is  30 million 30 million and that's where you
00:43:07
that's where you end up with this like you know  adjusted ifr true ifr of 0.1 yeah like very very
00:43:16
0.1 0.07 or 0.7 sorry um by the way my my tweets  aren't loading right now so i think trump just odd
00:43:28
took the tick tock decree and he just crossed that  tick tock and put twitter and he just shut twitter
00:43:32
down what what what is the tick tock thing done  yeah who knows that was like three weeks ago it
00:43:39
doesn't matter anymore was there a second debate  there's tonight there's going to be two town halls
00:43:49
um trump refused to do a zoom with or you know  a zoom debate talk about the power of zoom
00:43:57
a virtual debate he wouldn't do ostensibly because  he's not good when he's not interrupting somebody
00:44:04
would be my take on it so then he went to nbc  which he made 400 million dollars i guess from
00:44:10
the apprentice and nbc let him take a time slot  directly opposite biden tonight to do his own
00:44:16
town hall so they didn't even stagger it which nbc  which is responsible for saving trump is getting
00:44:23
absolutely demolished by their own actors and  show runners on twitter so i think nbc is going
00:44:28
to come out swinging tonight in this town hall  to try to you know take down trump as maybe their
00:44:34
penance that's my prediction for it but how do  you watch biden if biden is up against trump like
00:44:41
that's like watching paint drive versus watching  like you know some maniac running down market
00:44:47
street with a samurai sword on meth i'll be uh i  won't be watching either um i cannot wait for this
00:44:53
election to be over how many days until november  3rd we are like 18 in a wake up 18 days my gosh
00:44:59
maybe 18 yeah let us just get this over with yeah  yeah i know we're all sick of it i i do feel like
00:45:07
i mean it's the polls are now showing that biden  is up by as much as 17 i mean things have really
00:45:13
uh continued to break his way i think to your  point jason um about trump being more watchable
00:45:20
i think that's sort of trump's problem is he just  can't help making himself the center of the news
00:45:26
cycle every single day and to the extent the  election is a referendum on trump i think he's
00:45:32
going to get repudiated if the election were more  of a contest and people would weigh biden's you
00:45:39
know positions as well i think trump would have  a better shot because i think he does have some
00:45:44
blind does have some weaknesses but um the  whole reason why biden's basement strategy's
00:45:48
been working so far is because trump just eats up  all the oxygen and he's making a referendum on him
00:45:54
which i think he'll lose if he keeps doing it that  way yeah you know what they say saks what got you
00:45:58
here will not get you there what got him into his  office was the ability to take up the entire media
00:46:03
channel during the republican runoff and just  be able to demolish everybody was entertaining
00:46:09
that is exhausting it's now  exhausting i want to change topics i would like to ask david to explain  his um tweet related to prop 13
00:46:22
or 15 yeah yeah yeah so um so i saw that that mark  zuckerberg had contributed 11 million dollars to
00:46:30
try and convince the people of california to  vote for this prop 15 which is the largest
00:46:35
property tax increase in california history what  it does is it chips away at prop 13 by moving
00:46:42
commercial property out of of of prop 13 and it  would then tax it almost called fair market value
00:46:50
as opposed to the the cost basis of the property  it would have a lot of unfair consequences
00:46:57
for property owners who've owned their their  commercial property for a long time you know
00:47:02
if you're a small business and you've owned your  your store or whatever for 20 30 years all of a
00:47:08
sudden you're going to get your taxes are going  to get reassessed at the new fair market value
00:47:13
um but you know i just think there's the the  the larger prize though is that the the you the
00:47:21
california unions uh the the government workers  unions want to chip away at prop 13 this is the
00:47:26
first salvo first they're going to strip out  commercial property eventually they want to
00:47:30
they want to basically repeal all of prop  13 and i just think it's like so misguided
00:47:36
for billionaires to be using their wealth in this  way because profit 13 is really the shield of the
00:47:41
middle class in california and it's kind of no  wonder that frankly like tech belt wealth is so
00:47:48
just increasingly despised in this country because  tech millionaires are funding such stupid causes
00:47:54
to explain this to people who don't know in  california if you bought your house in 1970
00:48:00
for fifty thousand dollars the one percent tax  you pay on it is five hundred dollars that house
00:48:04
might be worth five million today if it was in  atherton and so you're still paying what would
00:48:09
have been a fifty thousand dollar tax bill is a  five hundred dollar tax bill so they're starting
00:48:14
with commercial spaces and jason i'm sorry  backwards and you can pass it off to your kids at
00:48:20
that cost basis yeah so this is why you have two  old people living in a five bedroom right it caps
00:48:26
the rate increase of the the tax increase every  year there there's there if you didn't have if you
00:48:34
no hold on if you didn't have proper please  explain to people if you didn't have prop 13
00:48:39
anybody who owned who's owned their house for  say 20 years would have a massive tax bill
00:48:44
all of a sudden and probably would have to sell  their house just about anybody who's middle class
00:48:49
who's been in california for for more than a  decade or two probably could no longer afford to
00:48:54
live in their house but the reality is people are  mortgaging that asset sacs to access capital that
00:49:00
they're using and investing in different things  whether it's that's fueling the economy right so
00:49:05
i mean the libertarian point of view might be less  taxes is good because in this particular case that
00:49:10
building can still be used by that resident uh to  buy stuff uh they can take a mortgage out and they
00:49:16
can go spend that money versus having that money  eaten up by property taxes which just goes well
00:49:21
yeah so so so i i understand that if you were to  design the like perfect tax policy it wouldn't
00:49:27
look like prop 13 or you know or you know and  maybe prop 15 in a vacuum if you're just like a
00:49:34
policy wonk trying to design the ideal tax policy  it might look more like that but the real problem
00:49:40
in california we're not an under tax state it's a  massively taxed state and and there's never enough
00:49:46
you know the beast always wants more and so what  i would say is look if you want to reform prop 13
00:49:52
do it as part of a grand bargain that creates real  structural reform in the state of california what
00:49:58
i mean by structural reform we got to look at who  controls the system and it's really the government
00:50:02
employee unions who block all structural reform  and who keep eating up a bigger and bigger portion
00:50:08
of the state budget so we've talked about this  on previous pods that the police unions block
00:50:13
any kind of police reform um you know the the  prison unions block prison reform you've got
00:50:18
the teachers unions blocking education reform and  school choice if you want to talk about systemic
00:50:23
problems in california look at who runs the system  it's these these gigantic unions and a bigger and
00:50:29
bigger portion of the budget keeps going to them  every year they're breaking the bank and by the
00:50:34
way it doesn't get us more cops on the beat it  doesn't get us more teachers in the classroom
00:50:38
what it's buying is lots and lots more of  administration along with a bunch of pension fraud
00:50:43
and so what i would do is i would say look we need  some structural reforms here we need some caps
00:50:48
on the rate of growth in spending we need  some pension reforms in exchange for that
00:50:54
as part of a grand bargain you might get some  reforms to prop 13 but just to give away one
00:51:00
of the only cards we have in negotiating with  these powerful special interests for no reason
00:51:05
i just think it's dumb you know do you think  that zuck was tricked or what do you think
00:51:10
i think he's probably got look i don't really know  but i don't know how anything can suck and i've
00:51:15
defended him on this podcast a lot basically on on  the speech issue but i think what it is he's got
00:51:21
some foundation and he's got some pointy headed  policy wonk sitting there trying to analyze what
00:51:26
the perfect tax policy is and it probably looks  more like fair market value than like cost basis
00:51:32
and they're not thinking about the larger  political sort of ramifications which is we
00:51:39
the private sector is being squeezed more and  more by these public employee unions and we do
00:51:45
need structural reform and we can't just give up  one of the only cards we have which would be you
00:51:50
know trading reform on prop 13. and zuck doesn't  already commercial real estate yeah well even
00:51:57
if so i i i i i would venture to guess that maybe  sax does i don't know i mean no no no hold on let
00:52:02
me i i do but let me explain that this doesn't  affect me because my cost basis is fresh yeah
00:52:08
all the all the commercial real estate that i've  bought in california has been the last few years
00:52:12
it's probably underwater i mean it's certainly  not above my cost basis um so ice doesn't affect
00:52:17
me it affects the little guy it affects the small  business who's owned their property for 10 or 20
00:52:23
years and again i'm not arguing that we couldn't  come with a better tax system but what i'm saying
00:52:28
is the bigger more pressing need is structural  reform totally no i mean look i totally agree the
00:52:33
bloated monster of socialism is coming for us and  it starts with the unions and it evolves and it's
00:52:37
just tax average salary i don't know if you saw  this go viral in the last couple weeks on twitter
00:52:43
average to average salary in san francisco  170 thousand dollars not a tech worker city
00:52:49
employees yeah of city employees i saw that like  170 000 was the average salary i was like oh wow
00:52:54
tech people are doing good they're like no no  that's the city employees 19 000 administrative
00:52:59
employees in the city of san francisco city of  800 000 people 800 people with a 14 billion budget
00:53:08
the state of california is converting the entire  middle class into government workers because if
00:53:12
you're a small business owner you're getting  squeezed by more and more taxes you're getting
00:53:16
driven out of the state people leaving the state  now exceeds people immigrating into the state so
00:53:20
the the private sector middle class is leaving and  this public sector sort of public sector middle
00:53:26
class of government workers is being created and  like i mentioned it's not getting us more cops
00:53:31
on the beat it's not going to get more teachers  in the classroom what it's getting is a giant
00:53:34
number of overpaid administrators and bureaucrats  that is a big structural problem the you know
00:53:41
private sector unions are very different you see  when a private sector union goes to negotiate
00:53:45
they go negotiate against ownership or  management there's someone to oppose their
00:53:49
unreasonable demands not all their demands are  reasonable just the most unreasonable demands but
00:53:54
it with a public sector unions they're negotiating  against the politicians and they are the largest
00:53:58
contributors to those politicians and so there's  no one and the politicians need them for their
00:54:02
votes right they're like they're going to deliver  whatever number of teachers police officers
00:54:07
exactly the unions feed the politicians the  politicians feed the unions that is a structural
00:54:11
um that is a structural  problem and and these unions the unions will never be at peace you can never  buy them off it's why democracy always ends in
00:54:21
in the state like it's it's just an inevitable  outcome i um i had no idea about any of this until
00:54:27
um i'm glad i asked you about that  tweet that's really i i actually learned a lot just in that last little bit uh i have one  other thing i want to ask you guys about which is
00:54:36
the amy coney barrett confirmation hearings  whether you guys have watched them and what
00:54:41
you guys think um and i don't know whether these  are just um cherry-picked clips or whether she's
00:54:50
playing dumb or i i really don't want to judge  because i want to know more but i just want to
00:54:54
know what you guys think of uh going into this  um you know the i'll say something about climate
00:55:00
change because look i'm i i i spend a lot of time  looking at data and research on climate change and
00:55:07
certainly feel strongly that there's a human  caused function of global warming that that we're
00:55:14
actively kind of experiencing but i think everyone  kind of assumes you have to take that as truth
00:55:21
i think one of the the key points of science is  you have to recognize your ignorance and you have
00:55:26
to recognize that science is um you know kind of  an evolving process of discovery and understanding
00:55:32
i don't and she's getting a lot of heat for  what she said about i'm not a scientist i don't
00:55:37
know how to opine on climate change and i heard  that and actually gave me a bit of pause that like
00:55:43
this this is exactly you know what i would expect  someone who's thoughtful to say not someone that's
00:55:49
trying to act ignorant and play to the right um  she didn't say i don't think climate change is
00:55:54
being caused by humans and i think like everyone  kind of wants to jump on her and every it's like
00:55:58
become religion i just want to point out that  climate change has become as politicized and as
00:56:03
dogmatic as all these other topics we talk about  and we all kind of assume that if you do or don't
00:56:07
believe in climate change you're left or right  you're evil you're good um and i i think like
00:56:12
it's very easy to kind of just go into hear those  hearings and assume that but i wouldn't say that
00:56:17
her answer necessarily made me think that she is  ignoring facts and ignoring the truth i think you
00:56:22
know she's kind of pointing out that this is a  process of science and there's a lot of discovery
00:56:26
underway so i i don't know i mean that was one  point the controversial point that i thought i
00:56:30
should make um because i am a believer and i do  think that climate change is real i do think the
00:56:35
data and science supports it but i do appreciate  that someone recognizes that they may not have the
00:56:39
skills yeah the few rather than just assume what  the media tells them to believe yeah the few the
00:56:44
few clips that i saw of the confirmation hearing  my takeaway was basically you know any candidate
00:56:50
on the left or the right comes in extremely well  coached and they're taught basically how to evade
00:56:56
meaning there's a go-to answer amy coney barrett's  go-to answer was um listen as a judge i'd have
00:57:01
to you know hear that case on the record i can't  opine on something hypothetically you know she had
00:57:06
this very well-rehearsed answer and a lot of the  answers to the questions from the left were that
00:57:12
um and uh you know the questions on the right were  um more soft polish um so i couldn't really get a
00:57:19
sense of it now the the thing that i take kind of  a lot of comfort in is that you know when we saw
00:57:25
john roberts get confirmed to the court  um it was supposed to be 5-4 conservative
00:57:30
with john roberts and basically what we learned  was now john robertson you know some critical
00:57:36
decisions he is willing to basically you know uh  make sure that things don't change that much um
00:57:43
including obamacare yeah exactly you you don't you  don't know exactly how they're gonna vote on these
00:57:47
issues you really don't roberts was the deciding  vote in upholding obamacare gorsuch uh extended
00:57:54
gay rights well beyond anything anthony kennedy  ever did that was a big surprise and so we don't
00:57:59
really know exactly how she's going to vote  the reason why amy coney barrett rockets to
00:58:05
the top of trump's list quite frankly is because  of how dianne feinstein treated her three years
00:58:10
ago in the last confirmation hearings which is  she where feinstein attacked her catholicism
00:58:16
it was and it was so ham handed it was so poorly  done that it made barrett a hero instantly on the
00:58:22
right and it rocketed her to the top of this  list but but we don't know how she's going to
00:58:26
vote based on her catholicism you know which is  the future isn't it david because the lifetime
00:58:32
appointment means they like tenure they can go  with what they think is right so that that is
00:58:38
kind of a good feature of the supreme court do you  think they should be like a term well i i think
00:58:43
it's a little crazy that decisions as important  as you know the the the right to to choice or
00:58:50
something like that um hangs on whether an 89  year old uh cancer victim can hold on for three
00:58:58
more months you know it seems very arbitrary to me  and therefore these supreme court battles become
00:59:04
very um heated and and and toxic and there's been  a recent proposal by democrats that that i would
00:59:12
support which basically says listen we should  have an 18-year term for supreme court justices
00:59:16
that's long enough and each president should get  two nominees like one in the first year and then
00:59:22
one in the third year and so you basically  have one justice rolling off every two years
00:59:26
and one coming on and so you have nine justices  and so every two years adds up to 18 years
00:59:31
that proposal makes a ton of sense to me and um  and so you know you know that when you vote for
00:59:37
a president they're going to get two supreme court  picks that feels less chaotic than this that would
00:59:42
be that'd be a much better that's a great idea  that's a great idea yeah that's a great idea i
00:59:46
think it's a i think it's a fabulous idea i i took  solace in the fact that when they asked her the
00:59:51
uh for what's protected in the first amendment  she couldn't name all five things that i could
00:59:57
i was like what about protests did you  miss that one and i thought that was like a
01:00:00
i mean it's a gotcha moment obviously uh and  it's not easy to be under that kind of scrutiny
01:00:04
and obviously she justif jacob well i just  thought that was like it's also like pretty
01:00:10
interesting i think they invented the word unconfirmable  for jkl you got a right to have your own pistola
01:00:22
but you shouldn't have a shotgun boys free  burgers has a hard stop at three uh the the uh
01:00:31
the fact that she left out protest is interesting  i do think let's let's just end on the election
01:00:35
uh and our little handicapping of what's gonna  happen and getting out of this mess i do think
01:00:41
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
01:00:51
off so many women and that the threat of the  supreme court thing and with uh rgb dying uh
01:01:01
this has made women feel so under appreciated  and attacked especially with trump um
01:01:11
uh you know in terms of how he treats women and  things he says about women and then you had the
01:01:17
constant interruption by pence of the moderator  and kamala like i think all of this is going
01:01:24
to add up and when we do the postmortem on this  losing all these women as voters is going to be
01:01:29
and as well as uh the black vote and people of  color this is going to be a big part of it so
01:01:36
i think that trump's going to lose and it's  going to be a landslide what a roundabout
01:01:42
way to say the same thing you've been saying for  four months yeah oh way he's disrespected women
01:01:49
listen i i don't know uh i think biden is uh is  is on the path to an enormous victory right now
01:01:56
well that's what the polls that's what the polls  say certainly is that it looks like a buying
01:02:00
landslide i um and i guess that makes sense  i think trump's running out of time to change
01:02:06
the polls um every day that goes by he's basically  got like 19 ounces or 18 days he's got 18 outs
01:02:12
every day that goes by where he isn't able to move  the poll number he loses an out right and so we're
01:02:17
going to get closer to election day he's only  going gonna have like a three outer or something
01:02:21
um so yeah i i mean look obviously i understand  the polls i still somehow think i know it sounds
01:02:27
kind of weird but i'm just not sure americans are  ready for this reality show to end i mean we know
01:02:32
it's jumped the shark okay but the kardashians  the kardashians lasted for 19 seasons i just
01:02:38
don't know if america is ready for the trump  reality show i think part of the appeal of trump
01:02:43
last time around was the the message of change and  he's not delivering a message of change anymore
01:02:50
and i think that's where he's kind of lost the  narrative um and the excitement of building a wall
01:02:55
and changing everything and draining the swamp  like he's just like keep draining the swamp or
01:03:00
keep building the wall and uh people don't love  that he's also um he also i think is coming across
01:03:07
as not being he's looking weak by not being  willing to be challenged and that came across
01:03:11
clearly in that debate he last time around he  got on stage and he just knocked everyone down
01:03:16
but by not letting biden talk by not kind of  engaging on any of the topics he looks just um
01:03:22
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
01:03:27
know these are all contributing factors i think  to what's going on chances of a pardon by pence he
01:03:33
resigns he pardons himself pence player it's him  zero zero you go two you won't resign um well uh
01:03:42
we wouldn't see that unless he lost the election  if he loses during the last duck during the lame
01:03:48
duck period if he lost maybe 20 20 yeah because  at that point he's got nothing to lose right
01:03:54
right that i think it's i think it's like a  i think it's 50 50 he just goes for the full
01:03:59
family pardon uh all right all right love  you guys i gotta go all right guys uh love
01:04:05
you guys and uh hopefully we'll have a bestie  poker soon yay soon talk to you guys later bye

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This episode stands out for the following:

  • 60
    Most shocking
  • 60
    Most talked-about
  • 60
    Most controversial

Episode Highlights

  • Hunter Biden's Laptop Controversy
    Emails linked to Hunter Biden raise questions about their impact on the election.
    “Hunter Biden loves to smoke crack and has a serious drug problem.”
    @ 01m 53s
    October 16, 2020
  • Social Media Censorship
    Twitter and Facebook's decision to block the New York Post sparks debate.
    “The literal New York Post was banned by Twitter.”
    @ 02m 50s
    October 16, 2020
  • The Future of Section 230
    Experts discuss the potential repeal of Section 230 and its implications for tech companies.
    “Section 230's days are numbered.”
    @ 07m 22s
    October 16, 2020
  • The Power of Algorithms
    The discussion revolves around the influence of algorithms on social media content and user trust.
    “I want them to be liable and culpable to defend their decisions.”
    @ 23m 13s
    October 16, 2020
  • Censorship Concerns
    Debate on whether social media platforms should make editorial decisions about content.
    “It creates for me uncertainty and I don't like uncertainty.”
    @ 31m 07s
    October 16, 2020
  • The Slippery Slope of Censorship
    Exploration of how initial censorship decisions lead to more censorship over time.
    “It becomes so easy to keep doing it more and more.”
    @ 33m 03s
    October 16, 2020
  • Election Fatigue
    The speakers express their exhaustion with the ongoing election cycle and desire for it to end.
    “I cannot wait for this election to be over.”
    @ 44m 53s
    October 16, 2020
  • Trump's Media Strategy
    Discussion on how Trump's media approach is becoming exhausting and may lead to his downfall.
    “What got you here will not get you there.”
    @ 45m 58s
    October 16, 2020
  • California's Middle Class Shift
    A commentary on how California's policies are affecting the middle class and creating a government worker majority.
    “The state of California is converting the entire middle class into government workers.”
    @ 53m 12s
    October 16, 2020
  • Predictions for the Election
    The speakers predict a significant loss for Trump in the upcoming election.
    “I think Trump is going to lose and it's going to be a landslide.”
    @ 01h 01m 36s
    October 16, 2020

Episode Quotes

  • This story wasn't a smoking gun to begin with.
    E10: Twitter & Facebook botch censorship (again), the publisher vs. distributor debate & more
  • I want them to be liable and culpable to defend their decisions.
    E10: Twitter & Facebook botch censorship (again), the publisher vs. distributor debate & more
  • I just want to know what I'm getting when I go here.
    E10: Twitter & Facebook botch censorship (again), the publisher vs. distributor debate & more
  • It becomes so easy to keep doing it more and more.
    E10: Twitter & Facebook botch censorship (again), the publisher vs. distributor debate & more
  • What got you here will not get you there.
    E10: Twitter & Facebook botch censorship (again), the publisher vs. distributor debate & more
  • I think Trump is going to lose and it's going to be a landslide.
    E10: Twitter & Facebook botch censorship (again), the publisher vs. distributor debate & more

Key Moments

  • Dumpster Fire Week01:16
  • Censorship Debate02:50
  • Trust Issues22:46
  • Accountability23:13
  • Election Anxiety44:53
  • Media Strategy Critique45:58
  • California Tax Debate47:21
  • Supreme Court Confirmation54:36

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