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

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 much news surprise bestie pods but dropping a bestie it's not a code 313 we're not dropping 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 by the way um and his chief of staff called me he felt like he only got 62 of the minutes in the last two podcasts versus the rest of us and so i'm dealing with his agent a little bit 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

quantity absolutely okay uh well this week's going to be i mean what a complete disaster of a week 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 emails have been leaked again potentially but last time we had an investigation by the fbi and then that might have infected impacted the election this time we have a whole different brouhaha apparently hunter biden who loves to smoke crack and has a serious drug problem this this is you know he's a seriously obviously troubled individual um but he brought three

laptops to get them fixed and never picked them up according to this story in the new york post so the new york post runs a story with an author who is kind of unknown um and this these laptops were somehow the hard drives me he never picked them up that's a little suspicious the hard drives wind up with rudy giuliani and the fbi uh and anyway what they say is that hunter biden which we kind of know is a grifter who traded on his last name to get big consulting deals i don't know what board anybody here has been on that pays 50 000 a month but it's obviously gnarly stuff but the the fallout from it was the big story i went to

tweet the story and it wouldn't let me tweet the story uh so the literal new york post was banned by twitter at the same time facebook put a warning on it so let's just put it out there um you know sax your guys losing pretty badly in this election and so we'll go to our token geo peer what do you think is this let's let's take this in two parts one what do you do what do they think the chances that this is fake news or real news or something in between and then let's get into twitter's insane decision to block the url yeah i mean so so first of all so i i think this whole thing

is a tragedy of errors on the part of sort of everyone involved i think the new york post story 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 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 of disasters that

have led to this this dumpster fire but starting with the story it is it is um very suspicious first of all these disclosures about hunter biden's personal life they didn't have to go there was completely gratuitous to the article it was sleazy and then of course the story about how the hard drive ends up with the reporters makes no sense even today uh giuliani was was making up new explanations for how it got there um it's now being widely speculated that this was the the content came from the results 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 um i mean so that that's now you know i think that would have been the story today if it weren't for um facebook and twitter making censorship the story and then the final thing

is you know this story wasn't a smoking gun to begin with i mean the worst thing it showed was that there was a single email between a barisma exec and joe biden and um the buying campaign is denied that that joe biden never met with this guy and so it wasn't ever this smoking gun and um and and that makes it all the more um apparent why facebook and twitter sort of overreacted it was almost like they were trying to overprotect their candidate that's the thing that obviously looks crazy like they now have given the gop the right the extreme right the belief that the

the technology companies are now on the side of the left whereas last time they were on the side of the right i think right facebook was supposed to be on the side of the right last time so chabot you worked at facebook famously for many years what are your thoughts well jack came out last night and basically said that the reason that they that they shut down distribution was that it came from hacking and doxxing or some i think that was basically the combination yes a combination um and then facebook today came out and said you know before we could take it down it had been

distributed or read 300 000 times um i mean look if we just take a step back and think about what's happening here there are more and more and more examples that are telling i think all of us what 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

road map of how to repeal it and if you assume that amy coney barrett gets you know put into the high court in a matter of days or whatever um it's only a matter of time until the right case is thoughtfully prepared along those guard rails 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 uh 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 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 now 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 and increased the volume on those things so what you have now is really no

different than if you know you created a show um on netflix or hbo or cbs and put it out there if that stuff contained you know something that was really offensive those companies are on the hook did they make it no did they distribute it yes and it's the in here but here's the difference but it's the active act of distributing it you cannot look at these companies and say they are basically holding their hands back they have written active code and there is technical procedures that they are in control of that are both the amplifier and the kill switch but isn't

this a bad analogy netflix shouldn't it the analogy be the person who makes film stock or the person who makes the camera or the person who develops the film not the person who distributes it no because that a limited amount of shows on netflix you can police all of you can't police everything written netflix is making editorial decisions about which shows to publish just like you know a magazine makes editorial decisions about which articles to publish they are clearly publishers um but the the communications dcx section 230 the original

distinction i mean if you want to think about like in 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 newsstand on which it appears is a distributor it shouldn't be liable if there's if there's a a a a libelous article contained in that magazine you shouldn't be able to sue every single newsstand in the country that made that magazine available for sale that was that was the original offline law that was then kind of ported over into section 230.

it made a lot of sense without this i mean i think it was a really visionary provision it was passed in 1996 without that every time that somebody sends an email that you know potentially created a legal issue you know gmail could have been liable freedberg is it what's the right analogy when people post to the internet is that the is the analogy or film stock is it the newsstand or is it the publisher so remember like what saks is pointing out is this was passed in 1996 so think back to 1996 when you would um create some content right in the term around that time with user

generated content right you guys remember this like the early days it was like the big switch ugc and it was like the big sweeping trend was like oh my god all this content is being created by the users we don't have to go find content creators uh to create you know a reason for other consumers to want to come to our websites so users could create content you know blogger was an early kind of user generated content service you could create a blog post you could post it and people would show up the problem with blogger or the challenge was distribution or syndication right

how do i now i've posted my content how do i as that content creator get people to read my content and you'd have to send people like a link to a website a link to a web page and you click on that link and then you could read it what chamath is pointing out is that today twitter and facebook make a choice about and and youtube make a choice about what content to show and so you know i think the analogy in the offline sense via the algorithm is what you're saying to be via the algorithm and uh you know youtube realized that if they showed you videos that

they think that you'll click on they'll keep you on youtube longer and make more money from ads so it keeps the cycle going and so they optimize con and it turns out that the content that you need to optimize for to get people to keep clicking is content that is somewhat activating to the amygdala in your brain it's like stuff that makes you angry or makes you super pleasured and not just boring ordinary stuff and so this sort of content which the new york post sells a lot of um is the sort of stuff that rises to the top of those algorithms naturally because of the way they

operate now if a magazine stand were to put those newspapers using the offline analogy on the front of their magazine stand and told people walking down the street hey you guys should check these out you know top of the news is hunter biden spoken crack with a hooker people would you know probably stop but i think the question is should they be liable now in in i think 2000 uh the digital millennium copyright act was passed and um that act basically created a process by which folks who felt like and it was related to copyright but i think the analogy is similar

if you thought that your content was copyrighted and was being put up falsely or put up without your permission you could make a claim to one of those platforms to get your content pulled down and i think the question is is there some sort of analogy around uh libel content or false or misleading content um that maybe this evolves into law where there's a process by which platforms can kind of be challenged on what they're showing um much like they are with the dmca take down notices so the problem the problem comes back to the code if you explicitly

write code that fundamentally makes it murky whether you are the publisher or the distributor i think that you have to basically take the approach that you are both and then you should be subject to the laws of both if for example twitter did not have any algorithmic redistribution amplification there were the only way you could get content was in a real-time feed that was everything that your friends posted and they stayed silent you could make a very credible claim that they are a publisher and not a distributor which by the way is the way it originally worked

and it was why they were falling behind facebook as you well know because you worked on the you can algorithm actually you cannot click but you're 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 but you can debate which signals they decide to use but it is their choice well but but if the signals are the user's own clicks then i would argue that's still just user generated content no no it is a it is a signal david but that's not the only signal for example

i can tell you very clearly that we would choose a 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 click less clicked but my point is there are people inside the bowels of these companies that are deciding what you and your children see and to the extent that that's okay that's okay maybe we've actually solved this problem saks in that if we said if you deploy an algorithm that is not disclosing how this is going then you

are ergo a publisher and if you uh are just showing it reverse chronological archron as we used to call back in the day with the newest thing up top that would be uh just so maybe we should be not getting rid of 230 we should be talking to these politicians about algorithms equal publisher so the publisher at the new york post is the same as the algorithm i like this as a better framework well yeah so 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 going to act like publishers we're going to treat

you like publishers so that that's not modifying section 230 that's just saying you're not going to qualify for section 230 protection anymore if you're going to make all these editorial decisions i would argue that these decisions they're making about censoring specific articles and by the way it's a total double standard because you know when when trump's tax returns came out a week or two ago uh where was the censorship of that that was wasn't that hacked material i mean that was material that found its way to the new york times without trump's consent by the way so

were the pentagon papers i mean you cannot apply this standard this this idea that we're gonna prohibit links to articles yeah but you're proving the point these people are no no i know i know well well hold on i'm saying i'm saying if they make editorial decisions they're publishers i think there's a way for them to employ speech neutral rules and remain distributors so i would be i would i'd have a little bit of of an issue with you i would say the reason why they're going to fall into this trap becoming publishers is because of their own

desire to censor their own biases they can't i don't think that's what it is i think it's purely market cap driven if you go from an algorithmic feed to a reverse chronological feed only i can tell you what will happen in my opinion which is that the revenue monetization on a per page per impression basis will go off by ninety percent ninety percent for sure people wouldn't people that is the only reason why these guys won't switch because they know that for every billion dollars they make today it would go to a hundred million in a reverse chronological feed because you would not be able to place ads in any coherent valuable way

there would 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 and by all the libertarians in the middle the reason they don't do it is because of money let's just be honest that's the only reason they don't do it but it's all market cap driven

maybe they should go back to this kind of the straight reverse crown feed and maybe you're right that the algo i mean i think you probably are right that the algorithms um 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 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 but just to think

about like the publisher aspect of it going back to the newsstand example let's say that the guy who works at the newsstand knows his customers and pulls aside every month the magazines that he knows that his clientele wants and in fact sometimes he even makes recommendations knowing that oh okay you know chamath likes you know these three magazines here's a new one maybe he'll like this and he pulls it aside for you that would not subject him to publish reliability even though he's doing some curation he's not involved in the content curation uh i i

would argue that if the 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 it was but if you if you do if you do put your finger if these engineers are putting their thumb on the scale and and pushing the algorithm towards certain specific kinds of content that may cross over no no no you're being you're being too specific and it's it's not that extreme and

it's not as simple as you're saying the reality is there are incredibly intricate models on a per person basis that these companies use to figure out what you're likely going to click on not what you should not what is exposed to you not what you shouldn't but what you likely will and that's part of a much broader maximization function that includes revenue as a huge driver yeah so the reality is that these guys are making publishing decisions and right you are right david you know the law back in the day it didn't scale to the newspaper owner but you know what in 1796 you know

colored people were three-fifths of a human and we figured out a way to change the law so i'm pretty sure we can change the law here too and i think what's going to happen is you should be allowed to be algorithmic but then you should live and die by the same rules as everybody else otherwise that is what's really anti-competitive is to essentially lie your way to a market advantage that isn't true just because people don't understand what an algorithm is that's not sufficient to me but they're not actually in the content creation business right and so what's the uh what's the the

definition of a term publisher in that context because in all other cases publishers pay for and guide and direct the editorial creation the content versus being a kind of discriminatory function of that context here's the problem let's take for example uh instagram reels can you manipulate content through reels yes now as the person that provides that tool to create content that theoretically could be violating other people's copyright or you know offensive or wrong or whatever and then you yourself distribute it to other people knowingly

the reality is that the laws need to address in a mature way the reality of what is happening today versus trying to hearken back to the 1860s and the 1930s because things are just different and we're smart enough as humans to figure out these nuances and that sometimes we start with good intentions and the laws just need to change well ironically chamath you're making a point that clarence thomas made justice thomas made in his uh filing recent filing where he said that that if you are acting as both a publisher and a distributor you need to be subject

to publish reliability which means peeling back section 230 and moreover you may not even be the primary creator of the content if you're merely a secondary creator if you're someone who has a hand in the content um then you are you're 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 well the other thing is you know what you have because david but you also have monetization guys right there's monetization involved in the youtube example

they are helping you we're having a serious conversation jason let's not let's not go off in that no i'm just good no but but it's jamal i mean this goes back to the politics may make strange bedfellows point um 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 [ __ ] because i don't trust them to be neutral over long periods of time so do you trust their decision to pull down q anon groups and zero just like just like it took

it took years for us to figure out that holocaust denial was wrong anti-vaxx was marginal q anon was crazy like wearing masks was a good idea right i mean i 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 chamel your ideal non-profit social media service would be a chronological feed of any content anyone wants to publish that anyone can browse that's right that's not what i'm saying david what i'm saying is that you have to be able to live with the risk that comes

with you know playing in the big league and wanting to be a 500 plus billion dollar company there is 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 up voting that decides what content rises to the top suspect i suspect that so reddit has a just a different problem which is this sort of like uh you know a decency problem and a different class of law who are we to judge decency right

i mean like in in the vein of like editorialism like they're taking no hand in what content rises to the topic they did ban certain topics so they did recently but like like assume they didn't right and it was just purely like upvoted consumer and not algorithmic it's very hard to pin 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 and so if youtube reverted to just hey what people are watching right now rises to the top and that was the only thing that drove the algorithm you would feel more comfortable with youtube not being

it's not comfortable this is what i'm saying it's 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 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 this 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 would go to facebook and twitter and it was boring as hell it's like just [ __ ] random [ __ ] that people like here's a picture like show me the best stuff you know like like and now i go to facebook and i'm like [ __ ] addicted because it's showing me this and there's like [ __ ] that i've been buying online and the ads keep popping up and i'm like oh this is awesome and i keep buying more stuff i think all of that is good but i it's

all it all should be done eyes wide open where in these corner cases the people that feel like some sort of right or privilege or has been violated or some overstepping has occurred they should have some legal recourse and they should be they should be on the record a mechanism to disambiguate all that wait hold on let me just ask just one question david would this be uh alleviated if the algorithm was less of a black box if we could just say hey no we need these algorithms to be so that's not a solution and then what is this and then and i want to hear david's about that and

then also labeling because facebook labeled stuff and if labeling stuff hey this is disputed from a third party that feels to me like that would have been a better solution in the twitter's case all right let me get in here so i half agree with tremoff okay so the half i agree with is i don't want any of these people meaning the social media sites making editorial decisions about what i see censoring what i can look at i don't trust them i don't want that kind of power residing in really two people's hands mark zuckerberg and jack dorsey i don't i don't trust them and i don't want them

to have that kind of power but that where i disagree is if you repeal section 230 you're going to make the situation infinitely worse because section 2 what is the response of these companies going to be corporate risk aversion is going to cause them to want to hire hundreds of low-level employees basically millennials to sit there making judgments about what content might be defamatory might cause a lawsuit they're going to be taking down content all over the place and you know what will happen that's gonna be a worse world no you know what'll happen

those companies will lose users lose engagement and new things will spring up in its place around these laws that work how will they how do they lose audience i mean i think what will happen is you have a torrent of lawsuits any time somebody has a a potential lawsuit based on you know 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 cap so what if that's what i think that's what i don't think that's what we're doing so for me i i'm trying to work back from how do we preserve the open internet but i think this

is exactly what it's saying which is here's a clear delineation in 2020 knowing what we know you know person entrepreneur who goes to y combinator or to launch to build the next great company here are these rules pick your poison and some will choose to be just the publisher some will probably create forms of distribution we can't even think of some will choose to straddle the line they'll have different risk spectrums that they live on and that's exactly how the free markets work today there's nothing wrong with that maybe the only like disagreement here is that i think that code can be written and algorithms

can be written in a speech neutral way so that the distributors don't cross over the lines becoming publishers i fully agree with you that these sites should not be publishers the reason why the new york post should be really taken off they should be platforms and they cross the line i would say that this this newer post story is the reason why people are up in arms about it is because what twitter and facebook have done is basically said they're going to sit in judgment of the media industry and if a publisher like the the new york post puts out a story that doesn't meet the

standards of twitter and facebook they're going to censor them that is a sweeping assertion of power they're picking and choosing who they don't want to give distribution to yeah we all we all agree on that piece they should not be the arbiter that is what is triggering but that is what is triggering the conservatives in particular but everybody but especially conservatives to say they want to repeal section 230. nobody my point is nobody is safe and it's less about um 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 you know some degree of equivalency false which shouldn't be on the platform absolutely and it is the simple choice that they chose an article to exclude um regardless of the reason in the background because there are many articles like it that aren't being excluded um and that alone speaks to the hole in the system as kind of

well it's because it's because they they have too much power and they're unaware of their own biases they can't see this action for what it so clearly was it was a knee-jerk reaction on the part of employees at twitter and facebook to to protect the biden campaign from a story that they didn't like i mean because if they were to apply the these standards evenly they would have 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 i i would say i've been red-filled actually the last 24 hours have been repelling for me

i i i gotta say david i agree with you because like i thought i thought that both things were uh crossing the line like meaning either you publish them both or you censor them both and there are very legitimate reasons where you could be on either side but to choose one and not do the other it just again it creates for me uncertainty and i don't like uncertainty and i really don't like the idea that some nameless faceless person in one of these organizations is all of a sudden going to decide for me knowledge yeah and information that to me is just unacceptable the journalistic

standard becomes a slippery slope to nowhere right like at that point like what what is true what is not true what is opinion what is not opinion what is what you know how do i validate whether this [ __ ] laptop came from this guy or this guy or this guy it's a slippery how are you ever going to resolve that across billions of articles a day standards would be the answer yeah and your look has 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 uh a statement explaining why facebook was gonna

censor a holocaust denial why he really went on a limb huh david well it's i think wow no no no no no not brave no no no but my point is my point my point is he actually put out a multi-paragraph well-reasoned statement multi-paragraph your three paragraphs about the holocaust is bad wow congrats you're you're not listening to my point my point is that he took it seriously that he was gonna censor something and i think you know people can come down you could be like a skokie aclu liberal and oppose it or you know you could say look common sense dictates that you would you

would censor this but he felt the need to justify it with you know like a long post how and then one week later we're already down the slippery slope to the point where you know facebook's justification for censoring this article was a tweet by andy stone you know like that was it it was a tweet that was the only explanation they gave by the way one of the reporters pointed out that if you were going to announce a new policy you probably wouldn't want it done by a guy who's been a lifelong democratic operative you know this was just so and so it just shows that once you start down the slope

of censoring things it becomes so easy to keep doing it more and more and and this is why i think these guys are are really in hot water whatever whatever um you know whatever controversy there was about section 230 before and there was already a lot of rumblings in dc about modifying this they have made things 10 times worse i mean as as someone who's actually a defender of section 230 i wish dorsey and zuckerberg weren't making these blunders because i think they're going to ruin the open internet for everyone super blundered i'll tell you it was an even bigger blunder 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 biden hunter biden story was and i went to rachel maddow and the last word and anderson cooper and there was a media blackout last night i couldn't find one left leaning or cnn if that is even in the center i don't think they're the center any more than the left i couldn't find one person talking about buy and i was like all right let me just see if i tune in to fox news and fox news was only discussing the binding story and

so this now felt like wow not only if you were one of these you know folks on the left who's in their filter bubble on twitter and facebook they're not going to see that story and then if they tuned in to rachel maddow uh 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 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 you know uh 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 burned we have to um 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 um but to friedberg your point you kind of like the algorithm telling you what to watch so a potential solution here i think i like it rationally by the way i'm just saying like as a human humans like it i like it like i like to be stimulated with titillating information and uh you know interesting things that for whatever reason i'm gonna you know click on again you like that

experience of jumping down the road my point is all humans are activated and the algorithms the way they're written they're designed to activate you and keep you engaged and activation naturally leads to these uh dynamic feedback loops where i'm going to get the same sort of stuff over and over again that that it identifies activates me because i clicked on it and therefore i'm gonna you know continue to firm up my my opinions and my beliefs in that area but i think doing these 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 [ __ ] that i consider [ __ ] i'm not going to read it anymore so if i'm reading just random blurtings by random people in reverse chronological order it is a completely uncompelling platform to me and i will stop using it and that leads back to kind of the you know tomos point which is that the ultimate incentive the mechanism by which these platforms stay alive is the capitalist incentive which is you know how do you drive uh revenue and therefore how do you drive engagement and and that's to give consumers what they want and that's

what consumers want all right let's let's give sax his victory lap he predicted last time that uh 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 uh putting the secret service at risk i guess um and then did a mussolini-like salute from everybody from the top of the white house 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

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 he must be much sicker than he's letting on if he says he's not that sick it must be really bad um and so for days and days they were talking about how trump was you know potentially had this fatal condition and by the way he deserved it you know it was a moral failing he was negligent and so it he it's not unlike really what the right was doing constantly accusing biden of senility you know and then biden went into that debate and then blew away expectations um

and so the same thing here you know the the media set up trump to kind of exceed expectations but but but i do think you know it is um noteworthy that trump was cured so quickly with the use of these you know clonal antibodies that we talked about last time and we talked about it on the show two weeks ago and it was a combination i guess of regeneron and rem deserve and the guy was out of there in like a couple of days so um you know it's like the 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 kovid they may not be completely distributed uh yet uh trump obviously had access to them that the rest of us don't have but it feels to me like we are really winding down on the whole the whole covet thing and i asked a question is it has have they published the blow by blow tick talk of exactly what he got when um no they haven't right i would love i would love to have that because i think all americans deserve probably yeah they know they know what his dosage was and they said what day he got it on the rem death severe he got several doses

it said what days he got the antibody treatment i i just want to print that out and keep it as a folded in my pocket just in case we know what to take now we know what to take if we get sick right yeah well the question is can we get it but even independent of that right like um i think people love um anecdote it's very hard for people to find a motion and find belief in statistics and you know if you look at the statistics on covid you know you go into the hospital 80 chance you're coming out and you know the average stay for someone that goes in a lot of people 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 covet dies the statistics show that that's not true and you know whether or not trump got exceptional treatment he certainly did um it's very hard to sax's point for the storytelling that has kind of been used to keep people at home and and manage kind of and create this this expectation of severity of this crisis etc um it's very hard for people to kind of then say hey like you know he's got a 97 percent chance of making it through this and he'll be

90 chance he'll be out of the hospital in three days when it happened it was a shocking moment um 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 covet um yeah it's about half a percent 0.4 and that's across you know the whole spectrum but like in anyone under 75 years old you've got the numbers right facts right but it's here let me pull it up it's on uh we we tweet i think bill gurley first tweeted it and then i retweeted it

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 were above 75. it's way way less than point one wait yeah it's it's it's it was um i thought the ifr was a lot less than that that ifr is also distorted you you know based on the zero prevalence study that was just published you can take that number that's published and divided by about three uh three to five uh to get the true ifr because not everyone that's had covet is registering as a positive infection because they had cobin got over it

so there was a paper published in in jama a few weeks ago where they took dialysis patients and they measured and they get blood from these dialysis patients and they measured covet antibodies in these patients and they showed that in the northeast 30 percent of people 27 point something percent of people have already had covet uh it's an incredible fact wow and in the west uh the number is close in western states they've kind of got it all written up in this paper and they did a great job with paper it's about three percent um but in aggregate across the united

states it's a this was a few weeks ago so nowadays it's it was a 10.5 percent i think so it's probably closer to 12 now if people have already had covet and so then if you assume that number right i mean that's 30 million people and now you look at how many people have died we haven't gotten the deaths wrong right because everyone that's died from covet we've recorded that death we know that numbers right it could be a little inflated right people who died with covetous exactly conservative and assume that it's right right i mean if i look in the united states it's

217 thousand 270 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 0.1 yeah like very very 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 took the tick tock decree and he just crossed that tick tock and put twitter and he just shut twitter down what what what is the tick tock thing done yeah who knows that was like three weeks ago it doesn't matter anymore was there a second debate there's tonight there's going to be two town halls

um trump refused to do a zoom with or you know a zoom debate talk about the power of zoom a virtual debate he wouldn't do ostensibly because he's not good when he's not interrupting somebody would be my take on it so then he went to nbc which he made 400 million dollars i guess from the apprentice and nbc let him take a time slot directly opposite biden tonight to do his own town hall so they didn't even stagger it which nbc which is responsible for saving trump is getting absolutely demolished by their own actors and show runners 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 drive versus watching like you know some maniac running down market street with a samurai sword on meth i'll be uh i won't be watching either um i cannot wait for this election to be over how many days until november 3rd we are like 18 in a wake up 18 days my gosh 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

i mean it's the polls are now showing that biden is up by as much as 17 i mean things have really uh continued to break his way i think to your point jason um about trump being more watchable i think that's sort of trump's problem is he just can't help making himself the center of the news cycle every single day and to the extent the election is a referendum on trump i think he's going to get repudiated if the election were more of a contest and people would weigh biden's you know positions as well i think trump would have a better shot because i think he does have some

blind does have some weaknesses but um the whole reason why biden's basement strategy's been working so far is because trump just eats up all the oxygen and he's making a referendum on him which i think he'll lose if he keeps doing it that way yeah you know what they say saks what got you here will not get you there what got him into his office was the ability to take up the entire media channel during the republican runoff and just be able to demolish everybody was entertaining 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

or 15 yeah yeah yeah so um 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 of of prop 13 and it would then tax it almost called fair market value as opposed to the the cost basis of the property it would have a lot of unfair consequences for property owners who've owned their their commercial property for a long time you know

if you're a small business and you've owned your your store or whatever for 20 30 years all of a sudden you're going to get your taxes are going to get reassessed at the new fair market value um but you know i just think there's the the the larger prize though is that the the you the california unions uh the the government workers unions want to chip away at prop 13 this is the first salvo first they're going to strip out commercial property eventually they want to 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 profit 13 is really the shield of the middle class in california and it's kind of no wonder that frankly like tech belt wealth is so just increasingly despised in this country because tech millionaires are funding such stupid causes to explain this to people who don't know in california if you bought your house in 1970 for fifty thousand dollars the one percent tax you pay on it is five hundred dollars that house might be worth five million today if it was in atherton and so you're still paying what would

have been a fifty thousand dollar tax bill is a five hundred dollar tax bill so they're starting with commercial spaces and jason i'm sorry backwards and you can pass it off to your kids at that cost basis yeah so this is why you have two old people living in a five bedroom right it caps the rate increase of the the tax increase every year there there's there if you didn't have if you no hold on if you didn't have proper please explain to people if you didn't have prop 13 anybody who owned who's 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 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 sacs to access capital that they're using and investing in different things whether it's that'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 uh to buy stuff uh they can take a mortgage out and they

can go spend that money versus having that money eaten up by property taxes which just goes well yeah so so so i 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 wonk 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 taxed state and and there's never enough you know the beast always wants more and so what i would say is look if you want to reform prop 13

do it as part of a grand bargain that creates real structural reform in the state of california what i mean by structural reform we got to look at who controls the system and it's really the government employee unions who block all structural reform and who keep eating up a bigger and bigger portion of the state budget so we've talked about this on previous pods that the police unions block any kind of police reform um you know the the prison unions block prison reform you've got the teachers unions blocking education reform and school choice if you want to talk about systemic

problems in california look at who runs the system it's these these gigantic unions and a bigger and bigger portion of the budget keeps going to them every year they're breaking the bank and by the way it doesn't get us more cops on the beat it doesn't get us more teachers in the classroom what it's buying is lots and lots more of administration along with a bunch of pension fraud and so what i would do is i would say look we need some structural reforms here we need some caps on the rate of growth in spending we need some pension reforms in exchange for that

as part of a grand bargain you might get some reforms to prop 13 but just to give away one of the only cards we have in negotiating with these powerful special interests for no reason i just think it's dumb you know do you think that zuck was tricked or what do you think i think he's probably got look i don't really know but i don't know how anything can suck and i've defended him on this podcast a lot basically on on the speech issue but i think what it is he's got some foundation and he's got some pointy headed policy wonk sitting there trying to analyze what

the perfect tax policy is and it probably looks more like fair market value than like cost basis and they're not thinking about the larger political sort of ramifications which is we the private sector is being squeezed more and more by these public employee unions and we do need structural reform and we can't just give up one of the only cards we have which would be you know trading reform on prop 13. and zuck doesn't already commercial real estate yeah well even 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

me i i do but let me explain that this doesn't affect me because my cost basis is fresh yeah all the all the commercial real estate that i've bought in california has been the last few years it's probably underwater i mean it's certainly not above my cost basis um so ice 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 couldn't come with a better tax system but what i'm saying is the bigger more pressing need is structural reform totally no i mean look 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 on twitter average to average salary in san francisco 170 thousand dollars not a tech worker city employees yeah of city employees i saw that like 170 000 was the average salary i was like oh wow tech people are doing good they're like no no that's the city employees 19 000 administrative employees in the city of san francisco city of 800 000 people 800 people with a 14 billion budget

the state of california is converting the entire middle class into government workers because if you're a small business owner you're getting squeezed by more and more taxes you're getting driven out of the state people leaving the state now exceeds people immigrating into the state so the the private sector middle class is leaving and this public sector sort of public sector middle class of government workers is being created and like i mentioned it's not getting us more cops on the beat it's not going to get more teachers in the classroom what it's getting is a giant

number of overpaid administrators and bureaucrats that is a big structural problem the you know private sector unions are very different you see when a private sector union goes to negotiate they go negotiate against ownership or management there's someone to oppose their unreasonable demands not all their demands are reasonable just the most unreasonable demands but it with a 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 teachers police officers exactly the unions feed the politicians the politicians feed the unions that is a structural 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 in the state like it's it's just an inevitable outcome i um i had no idea about any of this until 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 the amy coney barrett confirmation hearings whether you guys have watched them and what

you guys think um and i don't know whether these are just um cherry-picked clips or whether she's playing dumb or i i really don't want to judge because i want to know more but i just want to know what you guys think of uh going into this um you know the i'll say something about climate change because look i'm i i i spend a lot of time looking at data and research on climate change and certainly feel strongly that there's a human caused function of global warming that 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 the key points of science is you have to recognize your ignorance and you have to recognize that science is um you know kind of an evolving process of discovery and understanding i don't and she's getting a lot of heat for what she said about i'm not a scientist i don't know how to opine on climate change and i heard that and actually gave me a bit of pause that like this this is exactly you know what i would expect someone who's thoughtful to say not someone that's trying to act ignorant and play to the right um she didn't say i don't think climate change is

being caused by humans and i think like everyone kind of wants to jump on her and every it's like become religion i just want to point out that climate change has become as politicized and as dogmatic as all these other topics we 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 um and i i think like it's very easy to kind of just go into hear those hearings and assume that but i wouldn't say that her answer necessarily made me think that she is ignoring facts and ignoring the truth i think you

know she's kind of pointing out that this is a process of science and there's a lot of discovery underway so i i don't know i mean that was one point the controversial point that i thought i should make um because i am a believer and i do think that climate change is real i do think the data and science supports it but i do appreciate that someone recognizes that they may not have the skills yeah the few rather than just assume what the media tells them to believe yeah the few the few clips that i saw of the confirmation hearing my takeaway was basically you know any candidate

on the left or the right comes in extremely well coached and they're taught basically how to evade meaning there's a go-to answer amy coney barrett's go-to answer was um 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 um and uh you know the questions on the right were um more soft polish um 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 to the court um it was supposed to be 5-4 conservative with john roberts and basically what we learned was now john robertson you know some critical decisions he is willing to basically you know uh make sure that things don't change that much um including obamacare yeah exactly you you don't you don't know exactly how they're gonna vote on these issues you really don't roberts was the deciding vote in upholding obamacare gorsuch uh extended gay rights well beyond anything anthony kennedy ever did that was a big surprise and so we don't

really know exactly how she's going to vote the reason why amy coney barrett rockets to the top of trump's list quite frankly is because of how dianne feinstein treated her three years ago in the last confirmation hearings which is she 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 rocketed her to the top of this list but but we don't know how she's going to vote based on her catholicism you know which is the future 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 they should be like a term well i i think it's a little crazy that decisions as important as you know the the the right to to choice or something like that um hangs on whether an 89 year old uh cancer victim can hold on for three more months you know it seems very arbitrary to me and therefore these supreme court battles become very um heated and and and toxic and there's been a recent proposal by democrats that that i would

support which basically says listen we should have an 18-year term for supreme court justices 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 um 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 that'd be a much better that's a great idea that's a great idea yeah that's a great idea i think it's a i think it's a fabulous idea i i took solace in the fact that when they asked her the uh for what's protected in the first amendment she couldn't name all five things that i could i was like what about protests did you miss that one and i thought that was like a i mean it's a gotcha moment obviously uh and it's not easy to be under that kind of scrutiny and obviously she justif jacob well i just thought that was like it's also like pretty

interesting i think they invented the word unconfirmable for jkl you got a right to have your own pistola but you shouldn't have a shotgun boys free burgers has a hard stop at three uh the the uh the fact that she left out protest is interesting i do think let's let's just end on the election uh and our little handicapping of what's gonna happen and getting out of this mess i do think one of the stories coming out of this is going to be female voters i have the sense and i know it's anecdotal that trump has just alienated and pissed off so many women and that the threat of the supreme court thing and with uh rgb dying uh

this has made women feel so under appreciated and attacked especially with trump um uh you know in terms of how he treats women and things he says about women and then you had the constant interruption by pence of the moderator and kamala like i think all of this is going to add up and when we do the postmortem on this losing all these women as voters is going to be and as well as uh 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 yeah oh way he's disrespected women listen i i don't know uh i think biden is uh is is on the path to an enormous victory right now well that's what the polls that's what the polls say certainly is that it looks like a buying landslide i um and i guess that makes sense i think trump's running out of time to change the polls um every day that goes by he's basically got like 19 ounces or 18 days he's got 18 outs every day that goes by where he isn't able to move the poll number he loses an out right and so we're

going to get closer to election day he's only going gonna have like a three outer or something um so yeah i i mean look obviously i understand the polls i still somehow think i know it sounds kind of weird but i'm just not sure americans are ready for this reality show to end i mean we know it's jumped the shark okay but the kardashians the kardashians lasted for 19 seasons i just don't know if america is ready for the trump reality show i think part of the appeal of trump last time around was the the message of change and he's not delivering a message of change anymore

and i think that's where he's kind of lost the narrative um 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 uh people don't love that he's also um he also i think is coming across as not being he's looking weak by not being willing to be challenged and that came across clearly in that debate 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 just um

he looks like he just doesn't want to have a shot at it and it just comes across as bad so i don't know these are all contributing factors i think to what's going on chances of a pardon by pence he resigns he pardons himself pence player it's him zero zero you go two you won't resign um well uh we wouldn't see that unless he lost the election if he loses during the last duck during the lame duck period if he lost maybe 20 20 yeah 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 pardon uh all right all right love you guys i gotta go all right guys uh love you guys and uh hopefully we'll have a bestie poker soon yay soon talk to you guys later bye