Hey everybody. Hey everybody. Welcome. Besties are back. Besties are back. It's another all-in podcast. Dropping it to you unexpectedly because there's just so much news. Surprise Bestie Pod. We're dropping a bestie. It's not a code 13. We're not dropping any Snickers bars today. Just dropping a bestie. Oh no, he's got a megaphone.

Oh no, he's got a megaphone. He's got two. This is a special censorship edition. Warning, warning. We hit a new low in terms of people needing to be heard. By the way, Tramath Sachs, his agent 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 debates where they count the number of minutes. Who, Daniel? Is Daniel grinding you for more minutes? Daniel's grinding me for more minutes on the back channel. No, I go for quality over quantity. Absolutely. Okay. Well, this week's going to be, I mean, what a complete disaster of a week.

Is there no other way to explain what is happening right now? Every day is a dumpster fire. It's a huge dumpster fire. So here we are, we're three weeks out from the election and somebody's emails have, Democrats' emails have been leaked again, potentially. But last time we had an investigation by the FBI and then that might have impacted the election.

This time we have a whole different brouhaha. Apparently Hunter Biden, who, loves to smoke crack and has a serious drug problem. This is, you know, he's a seriously, obviously troubled individual. But he brought three laptops to get them fixed and never picked them up. According to this story in the New York Post.

So the New York Post runs a story with an author who is kind of unknown. And this, these laptops were somehow the hard drives, he never picked them up. That's the hard drive. That's the hard drive. That's the hard drive. That's a little suspicious. The hard drives wind up with Rudy Giuliani and the FBI.

And anyway, what they say is that Hunter Biden, which we kind of know is a grifter who traded on his last name to get big consulting deals. I don't know what board anybody here has been on that pays 50,000 a month, but it's obviously gnarly stuff. But the, the fallout from it was the big story.

I went to tweet the story and it wouldn't let me tweet the story. So the literal New York Post was banned by Twitter at the same time Facebook put a warning on it. So let's just put it out there. You know, Saks, your guys losing pretty badly in this election.

And so we'll go to our token GOP here. What do you think is this? Let's let's take this in two parts. One, what do you 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 first of all, I think this is a whole different story. I think this whole thing is a tragedy of errors on the part of sort of everyone involved. I think the New York Post story stinks. I don't think it it 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 disasters that have led to this this dumpster fire. But starting with the story, it is it is 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, this story. About how the hard drive ends up with the reporters makes no sense. Even today, Giuliani was was making up new explanations for how it got there. It's now being widely speculated that this was the that the content came from the result of a hack, maybe involving foreign actors, that this whole idea that it came from this sort of hard drive that he left at a repair shop and forgot to pick up.

I mean, so that that's now, you know, I think that would have been the story today if it weren't for. Facebook and Twitter making censorship the story. And then the final thing is, you know, this story wasn't a smoking gun to begin with. I mean, the worst thing it showed was that there was a single email between a Burisma executive and Joe Biden.

And the Biden campaign is denied that that Joe Biden never met with this guy. And so it wasn't ever the smoking gun. And and that makes it all the more apparent why Facebook and Twitter. Sort of overreacted. It was almost like they were trying to overprotect their candidate. That's the thing that obviously looks crazy.

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 Facebook was supposed to be on the side of the right last time.

So, Shabbat, you worked at Facebook famously for many years. What are your thoughts? Well, Jack came out last night and basically said that the reason that they that they shut down distribution was that it came from hacking and doxing or some. I think that was basically the combination. Yes, a combination.

And then Facebook today came out and said, you know, before we could take it down, it had been distributed or read 300000 times. I mean, look, if we just take a step back and think about what's happening here, there are more and more and more examples that are. Telling, I think all of us, 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 roadmap of how to repeal it.

And if you assume that. Amy Coney Barrett gets put into the high court in a matter of days or whatever, it's only a matter of time until the right case is thoughtfully prepared along those guardrails that that Clarence Thomas defined and it'll get 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. David Morgan Okay, so before we go to your Friedberg, I'm just going to read what Section 230 is.

This is part of a law basically designed to protect common carriers, web hosters of legal claims that come from hosting third party information. Here's what it reads. No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information 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's it makes complete logical sense. The entire internet was based off of this, that platforms are not responsible for what people contribute to those platforms.

That's how publishing works. Now look at the internet as paper. But again, let's build on this one. That's the only way to do it. That's the only way to do it. And that's the only way to do it. Right. Right. Right. When that law was originally written, we had no conception of social distribution and algorithmic feeds that basically pumped content and increased the volume on those things.

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

But here's the difference. It's the Netflix, 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 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 them.

You can't police everything written. Netflix is making editorial decisions about which shows to publish, just like a magazine makes editorial decisions about which articles to publish. They are clearly publishers. But the Communications Decency Act Section 230, the original distinction, if you want to think about it in offline terms for a second, you've got this idea of publishers and distributors.

Right? That's a fundamental dichotomy. A magazine would be a publisher. The newsstand on which it appears is a distributor. It shouldn't be liable. If there's a libelous article contained in that magazine, you shouldn't be able to sue every single newsstand in the country that made that magazine available for sale.

That was 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. It was passed in 1996. Without that, every time that somebody sends an email that potentially created a legal issue, Gmail could have been liable.

Freedberg, is it? What's the right analogy? When people post to the internet, is the analogy paper or film stock? Is it the newsstand or is it the publisher? So remember, what Sachs is pointing out is this was passed in 1996. So think back to 1996. When you would create some content, and the term around that time was user generated content.

You guys remember this, like the early days. It was like the big sweeping trend. UGC. UGC. And it was like the big sweeping trend was like, "Oh my God, all this content is being created by the users. We don't have to go find content creators to create a reason for other consumers to want to come to our websites." So users could create content.

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. 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 YouTube make a choice about what content to show.

And so I think the analogy in the offline sense, Via the algorithm is what you're saying to be clear. Via the algorithm. And YouTube realized that if they showed you videos that they think that you'll click on, they'll keep you on YouTube longer and make more money from ads.

So it keeps the cycle going. And so they optimize content. And it turns out that the content that you need to optimize for to get people to keep clicking is content that is somewhat activating to the amygdala in your brain. It's like stuff that makes you angry or makes you super pleasured, not just boring, ordinary stuff.

And so this sort of content, which the New York Post sells a lot of, is a content that's a lot of is the sort of stuff that rises to the top of those algorithms naturally because of the way they operate. Now, if a magazine stand were to put those newspapers using the offline analogy on the front of their magazine stand and told people walking down the street, hey, you guys should check these out.

You know, top of the news is Hunter Biden smoking crack with a hooker. People would probably stop. But I think the question is, should they be liable? Now, in, I think, 2000, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act was passed and that act, basically created a process by which folks who felt like it was related to copyright.

But I think the analogy is similar. If you thought that your content was copyrighted and was being put up falsely or put up without your permission, you could make a claim to one of those platforms to get your content pulled down. And I think the question is, is there some sort of analogy around liable content or false or misleading content that maybe this evolves into law where there's a process by which platforms can kind of be challenged?

And what they're showing, much like they are with the DMCA takedown notices. So the problem comes back to the code. If you explicitly write code that fundamentally makes it murky, whether you are the publisher or the distributor, I think that you have to basically take the approach that you are both and then you should be subject to the laws of both.

If, for example, Twitter did not have any algorithmic redistribution, amplification, there were the only way you could get content was in a real time feed. That was everything that your friends posted and they stayed silent. You could make a very credible claim that they are a publisher and not a distributor, which, by the way, is the way it originally worked.

And it was why they were falling behind Facebook, as you well know, because you worked on the you can't, I cannot claim that you're not a distributor when you literally have a bunch of people that sit beside you writing codes. You can't claim that you're not a distributor when you literally have a bunch of people that sit beside you writing code that decides what is important and what is not.

You can debate which signals they decide to use, but it is their choice. Well, but if the signals are the user's own clicks, then I would argue that's still just user generated content. No, no, it is a signal, David, but that's not the only signal. For example, I can tell you very clearly that we would choose a priori stuff that we knew you would click on.

It wasn't necessarily the most heavily clicked. We could make things that were lightly clicked, more clicked. We could make things that were more clicked, less clicked. But my point is there are people inside the bowels of these companies that are deciding what you and your children see. And to the extent that that's okay, that's okay.

Wait, wait, maybe we've actually solved this problem, Sax, in that if we said, if you deploy an algorithm that is not disclosing how this is going, then you are ergo a publisher. And if you are just showing it reverse chronological, are you saying that you're not a publisher? Our chron, as we used to call it back in the day, with the newest thing up top, that would be just a, so maybe we should be not getting rid of 230.

We should be talking to these politicians about algorithms equal publisher. So the publisher at the New York Post is the same as the algorithm. I like this as a better framework. Well, yeah. So Senator Tom Cotton, who's a Republican, he tweeted in response to the New York Post censorship, look, if you guys are going to act like publishers, we're going to treat you like publishers.

So that's not modifying section 230. That's just saying you're not going to qualify for section 230 protection anymore. If you're going to make all these editorial decisions, I would argue that these decisions are making about censoring specific articles. And by the way, it's a total double standard because, you know, when Trump's tax returns came out a week or two ago, 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. The standard, this idea that we're going to prohibit links to articles. But you're proving the point.

These people are publishers. No, I don't. Well, hold on. I'm saying if they make editorial decisions, they're publishers. I think there's a way for them to employ speech neutral rules and remain distributors. So I would be, I would have a little bit of an issue with you. I would say the reason why they're going to fall into this trap of becoming publishers is because of their own desires.

They're not going to be able to censor their own biases. They can't. I don't think that's what it is. I think it's purely market cap driven. If you go from an algorithmic feed to a reverse chronological feed only, I can tell you what will happen in my opinion, which is that the revenue monetization on a per page per impression basis will go off by 90%.

90% for sure. People wouldn't. Right. People wouldn't. That is the only reason why these guys won't switch because they know that for every billion dollars they make today, it would go to a hundred million. In a reverse chronological feed, because you would not be able to place ads in any coherent, valuable way.

There'll 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. Well, let me, and by all the, 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.

They're all market cap driven. Maybe they should go back to this kind of the straight reverse confeed and maybe you're right that the algorithm, I mean, I think you probably are right that the algorithms are make the situation worse because they kind of trap people in these bubbles of like reinforcement and they just keep being 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, Tamath likes, you know, these three magazines, here's a new one. Maybe he'll like this and he pulls it aside for you. That would not subject him to publisher liability, even though he's doing some curation, he's not involved in the content curation.

I would argue that if the algorithms proceed in a speech neutral way, which is just to say, they're going to look at your clicks and then based on your own revealed preferences, suggest other things for you to look at. I don't think that makes you a publisher necessarily. 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, and pushing the algorithm towards certain specific kinds of content that may cross over.

No, no, 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, The reality is that these guys are making publishing decisions. And you are right, David, that, you know, the law back in the day, it didn't scale to the newspaper owner, but you know what, in 1796, you know, colored people were three fifths of a human and we figured out a way to change the law.

So I'm pretty sure we can change the law here too. And I think what's going to happen is you should be allowed to be algorithmic, but then you should live and die by the same rules as everybody else. Otherwise that is what's really anti-competitive. So what's the point of that?

I think the point of that 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 definition of a term publisher in that context?

Because in all other cases, publishers pay for and guide and direct the editorial creation of the content versus being a kind of discriminatory function of that content. So I think that's the point. So let's take for example, Instagram Reels. Can you manipulate content through Reels? Yes. Now as the person that provides that tool to create content that theoretically could be violating other people's copyright or, you know, offensive or wrong or whatever and then you yourself distribute it to other people knowingly, the reality is that the laws need to address in a mature way.

The reality of what is happening today versus trying to harken back to the 1860s and the 1930s because things are just different. And we're smart enough as humans to figure out these nuances and that sometimes we start with good intentions and the laws just need to change. Well, ironically, Chamath, you're making a point that Clarence Thomas made, Justice Thomas made in his filing, recent filing where he said that, that if you are acting as both a publisher and a publisher, you're going to be a publisher.

And that's the point. And that's the point. And that's the point. And that's the point. And that's the point. And that's the point. And that's the point. And that's the point. And that's the point. And that's the point. You need to be subject to published reliability, which means peeling back Section 230.

And moreover, you may not even be the primary creator of the content. If you're merely a secondary creator, if you're someone who has a hand in the content, then you are your creator, you're a publisher, and therefore you should lose Section 230 protection. That is basically what he said.

If your argument is that the algorithms make you a content creator effectively, Add the tools. Algorithms and the tools. And tools. And tools. The other thing is, you know, what you have the algorithm. Because David's You have the tools, but you also have monetization, guys. Right. There's monetization involved in the YouTube example.

They are helping you make We're having a serious conversation, Jason. Let's not let's not go off on that. No, I'm just kidding. No, but Jamath, I mean, this goes back to the politics makes strange bedfellows point. I mean, I think a lot of the conservatives are actually making the point you're making, which is that these social media sites are involved in publishing.

I don't know. I don't want these guys involved in any of this shit, because I don't trust them to be neutral over long periods of time. So do you trust their decision to pull down QAnon groups and Zero. What they call hate groups? Just like it took it took years for us to figure out that Holocaust denial was wrong.

Anti-vax was marginal. QAnon was crazy. Like wearing masks was a good idea, right? 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, Jamath, your ideal nonprofit social media service would be a chronological feed of any content anyone wants to publish that anyone can browse.

That's not what I'm saying, David. What I'm saying is that you have to be able to live with the risk that comes with, you know, playing in the big league and wanting to be a 500 plus billion dollar company. There is a liability that comes with that. And you need to own it and live up to the responsibility of what it means.

Otherwise, you don't get the free option. What if they didn't take a hand in it and they follow the dig, the Reddit model, and it's just upvoting that decides what content rises to the top? I suspect that Reddit has just a different problem, which is a sort of like, you know, a decency problem and a different class of law.

Who are we to judge decency, right? I mean, like in the vein of like editorialism, like they're taking no hand in what content rises to the top. Well, they did ban certain topics. So they did recently, but like, like assume they didn't. Right. And it was just purely like upvoted consumer and not algorithmic.

That's the end. It's very hard to pay. I think it's very hard to me. I think it's very hard to pin a section 230 claim on Reddit as easy as it is YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. And so if YouTube reverted to just, hey, what people are watching right now rises to the top, and that was the only thing that drove the algorithm, you would feel more comfortable with YouTube not being.

It's not comfortable. This is what I'm saying. It's what I know. All I want to know is what am I getting when I go here? And if what I'm getting is a subjective function where they are maximizing revenue, which means that I can't necessarily trust the content I get, as long as I know that and as long as there's recourse for me, I'm I'm very fine to use YouTube and Twitter and Facebook.

What I think is unfair is to not know that there's a subjective function. Confuse it with an objective function. Go on with your life. End up in the state that we're in now where nobody is happy and everybody is throwing barbs. And you have no solution. Maybe I just want to be stimulated.

Like, I remember the day when I would go to Facebook and Twitter and it was boring as hell. It's like just fucking random shit that people like here's a picture of my show me the best stuff. You know, like, like, now I go to Facebook and I'm like fucking addicted because it's showing me this and there's like shit that I've been buying online and the ads keep popping up and I'm like, Oh, this is awesome.

And I keep buying more stuff. Well, I think all of that is good, but I it's all it. All of that is good, but I it's all it all should be done eyes wide open where in these corner cases, the people that feel like some sort of right or privilege or has been violated or some overstepping has occurred.

They should have some legal recourse and they should be there should be on the record a mechanism to disambiguate all that. Wait, hold on. Let me just ask this one question, David. Would this be alleviated if the algorithm was less of a black box? If we could just say, Hey, no, we need these algorithms to be so that's not a solution.

And then what is this? And I want to hear Dan's about 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 Chamath. Okay, so the half I agree with is I don't want any of these people meaning the social media sites, making editorial decisions about what I see censoring what I can look at. I 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 230, what is the response to these companies going to be corporate risk aversion is going to cause them to want to hire hundreds of low level employees, basically millennials, to sit there making judgments about what content might be defamatory might cause a lawsuit, they're going to be taking down content all over the place.

And you know what will happen? That's gonna be a worse world. No, you know what will happen? Those companies will lose users lose engagement and new things will spring up in its place around these laws that work. How will they how they lose audience? I mean, I think what will happen is you have a torrent of lawsuits.

Anytime somebody has a potential lawsuit based on what you know, I don't think I don't like trying to police speech at a dinner party like our job never existed. And scale that never existed at the scale. I don't think the goal is to work backwards from how do we preserve a trillion dollars of market cap?

So what if that's what happens? That's what we're doing. So for me, I'm trying to work back from how do we preserve the open internet. But I think this is exactly what it's saying, which is, here's a clear delineation in 2020. Knowing what we know, you know, person entrepreneur who goes to Y Combinator or to launch to build the next great company.

Here are these rules, pick your poison. And some will choose to be just a publisher, some will probably create forms of distribution, we can't even think of some will choose to straddle the line, they'll have different risk spectrums that they live on. And that's exactly how the free markets work today.

There's nothing wrong with that. Maybe the only like disagreement here is that I think that code can be written and algorithms can be written in a speech neutral way, so that the distributors don't cross over the line to becoming publishers. I fully agree with you that these sites should not be publishers.

The reason why the New York Post should be taken off, they should be platforms and they cross the line. I would say that this New York Post story is the reason why people are up in arms about it is because what Twitter and Facebook have done is basically said they're going to sit in judgment of the media industry.

And if a publisher like the New York Post puts out a story that doesn't meet the standards of Twitter and Facebook, they're going to censor them. That is a sweeping assertion of power. They're picking and choosing who they don't want to give distribution to. Yeah, we all we all agree on that piece.

They should not be the arbiter of that. That is what is triggering. But that is what is triggering the conservatives in particular, but everybody, but especially conservatives to say they want to repeal Section 230. Nobody, my point is nobody is safe. And it's less about I actually think that there's a nuanced point to this, which is it's less about what they think is legit.

Or not as much as what they think is important or not. They chose to make this an important article. They chose to kind of intervene in this particular case, when every day there are going to be hundreds of other articles that are going to be actively shared on these platforms that are by those same standards, false with some degree of equivalency, false or shouldn't be on the platform.

Absolutely. And it is the simple choice that they chose an article to exclude, regardless of the reason in the background, because there are many articles like it that aren't being excluded. And that alone speaks to the whole. In the system as kind of sacks. Well, it's because it's because they they have too much power and they're unaware of their own biases.

They can't see this action for what it so clearly was. It was a knee jerk reaction on the part of employees at Twitter and Facebook to to protect the Biden campaign from a story that they didn't like. I mean, because if they were to apply these standards evenly, they would have blocked the Trump tax returns for the exact same reason.

By the way, just so you know, Cal's about to block you so he can keep the Biden campaign strong. And not have your. I would say I've been red pilled. Actually, the last 24 hours have been red pilling for me. I got to say, David, I agree with you because like I thought I thought that both things were crossing the line, like meaning either you publish them both or you censor them both.

And there are very legitimate reasons where you could be on either side. But to choose one and not do the other, it just again, it creates for me uncertainty. And I don't like uncertainty. And I really don't like the idea that. Right. 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 is true, what is not true? What is opinion? What is not opinion? What is what? You know, how do I validate whether this fucking laptop came from this guy or this guy or this guy?

It's a slippery. How are you ever going to resolve that across billions of articles a day? Standards would be the answer. New York 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 a statement explaining why Facebook was going to censor, censor Holocaust denial.

Why he really went out on a limb, huh, David? Well, it's I think. Wow. My point is, 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, Zach. No, no, no. What I'm trying to you're not listening to my point.

My point is that he took it seriously that he was going to censor something. And I think 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 the you would you would censor this, but he felt the need to justify it with, you know, like a long post.

And then one week later, we're already down the slippery slope to the point where, you know, Facebook's justification for censoring this article was a tweet by Andy Stone. You know, like that was it. It was a tweet. That was the only explanation they gave. By the way, one of the reporters pointed out that if you were going to announce a new policy, you probably wouldn't want it done by a guy who's been a lifelong Democratic operative.

You know, this was just so and so it just shows that once you start down the slope of censoring things, it becomes so easy to keep doing it more and more. And, and this is why I think these guys are really in hot water, whatever, whatever, you know, whatever controversy there was about Section 230 before, and there was already a lot of rumblings in DC, about modifying this, they have made things 10 times worse.

I mean, as someone who's actually a defender of Section 230, I wish Dorsey and Zuckerberg weren't making these blunder is because I think they're going to ruin the open internet for everyone. Super blunder. And I'll tell you what was an even bigger blunder for an equal blunder for me last night.

I don't know if you guys had this experience. But I was trying to figure out what the consensus view on the Biden Hunter Biden story was. And I went to Rachel Maddow, and the last word and Anderson Cooper, and there was a media blackout last night. I couldn't find one left leaning or CNN if that is even in the center.

I don't think they're the center anymore. Any more than the left. I couldn't find one person talking about Biden. I was like, all right, let me just see if I tune into Fox News. And Fox News was only discussing the Biden story. And so this now felt like, wow, not only if you were one of these, you know, folks on the left, who's in their filter bubble on Twitter and Facebook, they're not going to see that story.

And then if they tuned into Rachel Maddow, or to Anderson Cooper, or you go to the New York Times, it's not there either. And then Drudge didn't have it for a day. You're bringing up something so important. So think about what you're really talking about, Jason, there was a first order reaction that was misplaced, and not rooted in anything that was really scalable or justifiable.

Then everybody has to deal with the second and third order reactions. The left leaning media outlets circle the wagons, the right leaning media outlets are up in arms, nobody is happy, both look like they're misleading. And then now if you're a person in the middle, for example, what was what was frustrating for me yesterday was, it took me five or six clicks and hunting and pecking to find out what the hell is actually going on here.

Why is everybody going crazy? But that bothered me. You know? And so I just think like, again, it used to be very simple to define what a publisher was and what a distributor was in a world without code, without machine learning, without AI, without all of these things. I think those lines are burned.

We have to rewrite the laws. I think you should be able to choose. And then I think if you're trying to do both, by the way, the businesses that successfully do both will have the best market caps. But if you're trying to do both, you have to live and die by the sword.

Yeah. It would be interesting also, if I don't know if you guys have done this, but I switched my Twitter to being reverse chronological, which you can do in the top right hand corner of the app or on your desktop, because I just like to see the most recent stuff first.

But then sometimes I do miss something that's trending, whatever. But I just prefer that because I have a smaller follower list now. But to Friedberg, your point, you kind of like the algorithm telling you what to watch. So a potential solution here might be... I'm not saying I like it rationally, by the way.

I'm just saying like as a human, humans like it. I like it. I like to be stimulated with titillating information and interesting things that for whatever reason I'm going to... Click on again. You like that experience of jumping down the rabbit hole. My point is all humans are activated and the algorithms, the way they're written, they're designed to activate you and keep you engaged.

And activation naturally leads to these dynamic feedback loops where I'm going to get the same sort of stuff over and over again that it identifies, activates me because I clicked on it. And therefore, I'm going to continue to firm up my opinions and my beliefs in that area. But I think showing me stuff that I don't believe, showing me stuff that's anti-science, because I'm a science guy, showing me stuff that's anti-science, showing me stuff that's bullshit that I consider bullshit, I'm not going to read it anymore.

So if I'm reading just random blurtings by random people in reverse chronological order, it is a completely uncompelling platform to me and I will stop using it. And that leads back to kind of the, you know, Chamath's point, which is that the ultimate incentive, the mechanism by which these platforms stay alive is the capitalist incentive, which is, you know, how do you drive revenue and therefore how do you drive engagement?

And that's to give consumers what they want. That's what consumers want. All right. Let's give Sachs his victory lap. He predicted last time that there was a possibility that Trump would come out of this like Superman. And would do a huge victory lap. And sure enough, he considered putting a Superman outfit on under his suit.

And he did a victory lap literally around the hospital, putting the Secret Service at risk, I guess. And then did a Mussolini-like salute from everybody from the top of the White House. I mean, you nailed it, Sachs. He came out. It was very Il Duce. Il Duce. He did Il Duce.

It was very Il Duce. Il Duce? No, but he was very Il Duce. It was very predictable. The media was making it sound like Trump was on his deathbed, you know, because the presumption is always that the administration's hiding something. He must be much sicker than he's letting on.

If he says he's not that sick, it must be really bad. And so for days and days, they were talking about how Trump was, you know, potentially had this fatal condition. And by the way, he deserved it. You know, it was a moral failing. He was negligent. And so it's not unlike really what the right was doing, constantly accusing Biden of senility, you know, and then Biden went into that debate and then blew away expectations.

And so the same thing here, you know, the media set up Trump to kind of exceed expectations. But I do think, you know, it is noteworthy that Trump was cured so quickly with the use of these, you know, clonal antibodies that we talked about last time. I think we talked about it on the show two weeks ago.

And it was a combination, I guess, of Regeneron and Remedios, and then 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 Remdesivir. And the guy was out of there in like a couple of days.

So, you know, it's like the media doesn't want to admit anything that is potentially helpful to Trump. But you have to say that at this point, we have very effective treatments for COVID. They may not be completely distributed yet. Trump obviously had access to them that the rest of us don't have.

But it feels to me like we are really winding down on the whole COVID thing. Can I ask a question? Have they published the blow-by-blow TikTok of exactly what he got when... No, they haven't, right? I would love to have that because I think all Americans deserve to have that.

They did roughly, yeah. They know what his dosage was. I mean, they said what day he got it on the Remdesivir. He got several doses. It said what days he got the antibody treatment. I just want to print that out and keep it as a folder in my pocket just in case.

We know what to take now. We know what to take if we get sick, right? Yeah. Well, the question is, can we get it? But even independent of that, right? Like, I think people love anecdotes. It's very hard for people to find emotion and find belief in statistics. And, you know, if you look at the statistics on COVID, you know, you go into the hospital, 80% chance you're coming out.

And, you know, the average stay for someone that goes in, a lot of people are going to the ER and they're getting pushed back out because they're not severe enough. And I think the anecdote is everyone that gets COVID dies. The statistics show that that's not true. And, you know, whether or not Trump got exceptional treatment, he certainly did.

It's very hard to Sachs' point for the storytelling that has kind of been used to keep people at home and manage kind of and create this expectation of severity of this crisis, etc. It's very hard for people to kind of then say, hey, like, you know, he's got a 97% chance of making it through this, and he'll be at 97% chance of making it through this.

I mean, you know, he's got a 97% chance of making it through this. He's got a 99% chance of being out of the hospital in three days, when it happened. It was a shocking moment. And it really hit that narrative upside down. Right? Like, it was just like, well, can we show that there was a tweet recently providing the statistics on what the real infection fatality rate was for COVID?

Yeah, I saw it. It's about half a percent point four. And that's across, you know, the whole spectrum. But like in anyone under 75 years old, you've got the number of strikes facts. Right, but it's here. Let me pull it up. It's on. We tweet, I think Bill Gurley first tweeted it.

And then I read it. Yeah, I thought the IFR was like point one, if you're young, and it goes all the way up to like point four, if you're above 75. It's way less than point one. Yeah, it's it was, um, I thought the IFR was a lot less severe than that.

That IFR is also distorted, you know, based on the zero prevalence study that was just published, you can take that number that's published and divided by about three, three to five. Why? To get the true audience. Yeah, because not everyone that's had COVID has is registering as a positive infection, because they had COVID and got over it.

So there was a paper published in in JAMA a few weeks ago, where they took dialysis patients, and they measured that they get blood from these dialysis patients. And they measured COVID antibodies in these patients. And they showed that in the Northeast, 30% of people, it's 27 point something percent of people have already had COVID.

It's an incredible fact. Wow. And in the West, the number is close in Western states, they've kind of got it all written up in this paper. And they did a great job with the paper, it's about 3%. But in aggregate across the United States, it's a this was a few weeks ago.

So nowadays, it was 10.5%, I think, so it's probably closer to 12%. Now people have already had COVID. And so then if you assume that number, right, I mean, that's 30 million people. And now you look at how many people have died, we haven't gotten the deaths wrong, right?

Because everyone that's died from COVID, we've recorded that death. We know that numbers could be a little inflated, right? People who died with COVID. Right. So it's a lot of people who died with COVID. Exactly. But be conservative and assume that it's right. Right. I mean, if I look in the United States, 217,000 cases, but the real cases is 30 million, 30 million.

And that's where you that's where you end up with this, like, you know, adjusted IFR true IFR of one. Yeah, like very, very point 1% point. Oh, 7% or point 7%. Sorry. By the way, my my tweets aren't loading, right? Right now. So I think Trump just took the tick tock decree, and he just crossed out tick tock and put Twitter and he just shut Twitter down.

What was what is the tick tock thing done? Yeah, who knows? That was like three weeks ago. It doesn't matter. Or tomorrow. Was there a second debate? There's tonight, there's going to be two town halls. Trump refused to do a zoom with or you know, debate. I'm talking about the power of zoom.

A virtual debate he wouldn't do, ostensibly because he's not good when he's not interrupting somebody would be my take on it. So then he went to NBC, which he made $400 million, I guess from The Apprentice, and NBC let him take a time slot directly opposite Biden tonight to do his own town hall.

So they didn't even stagger it. Which NBC, which is responsible for saving Trump is getting absolutely demolished by their own actors and showrunners on Twitter. So I think NBC is going to come out swinging tonight in this town hall to try to, you know, take down Trump as maybe their penance.

That's my prediction for it. But how do you watch Biden if Biden is up against Trump? Like, that's like watching paint dry versus watching like, you know, some maniac running down Market Street with a samurai sword on meth. I'll be I won't be watching either. I cannot wait for this election to be over.

How many days until November 3, we are like, 18 and a wake up. 18 days, my God, maybe 18. Yeah, let us just get this over with. Yeah, 18. I know, we're all sick of it. I do feel like I mean, it's the polls are now showing that Biden is up by as much as 17.

I mean, things are really continue to break his way. I think to your point, Jason, about Trump being more watchable. I think that's sort of Trump's problem is he just can't help making himself the center of the news cycle every single day. And to the extent the election is a referendum on Trump, I think he's going to get repudiated if the election were more of a contest.

And people would weigh Biden's, you know, positions as well. I think Trump would have a better shot because I think he does have some Biden does have some weaknesses. But the whole reason why Biden's basement strategy has been working so far is because Trump just eats up all the oxygen and he's making a referendum on him, which I think is a good thing.

I think he's going to get repudiated. And I think he's going to lose if he keeps doing it that way. You know what they say, Sacks, what got you here will not get you there. What got him into his office was the ability to take up the entire media channel during the Republican runoff and just be able to demolish everybody was entertaining.

I wanted that exhausting. It's now exhausting. I want to change topics. I would like to ask David to explain his tweet related to prop 13. Or 15. Yeah, yeah. So, so I saw that that Mark Zuckerberg had contributed $11 million to try and convince the people of California to vote for this prop 15, which is the largest property tax increase in California history.

What it does is it chips away at prop 13 by moving commercial property out of prop 13. And it would then tax it on what's called fair market value as opposed to the 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, whatever for 2030 years, all of a sudden, you're going to get your taxes are going to get reassessed at the new fair market value. But, you know, I just think there's the larger prize, though, is that the California unions, the government workers unions, want to chip away at prop 13.

This is the first salvo first, we're going to strip out commercial property, eventually, they want to, they want to basically repeal all of prop 13. And I just think it's like, so misguided for billionaires to be using their wealth in this way. Because prop 13 is really the shield of the middle class in California.

And it's kind of no wonder that, frankly, like tech belt wealth is so increasingly despised in this country. Because tech billionaires are funding such stupid causes. to explain this to people who don't know in California if you bought your house in 1970 for 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 sorry we'll go 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 prop 13 no hold on if you didn't have prop me just 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 sacks to access capital that they're using and investing in different things whether it's you know 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 undertaxed state it's a massively taxed state and and there's never enough you know the beast always wants more and so what I would say is look if you want to reform prop 13 do it as part of a grand bargain that creates real structural reform in the state of California um what I mean by structural reform where you got to look at well who controls the system and it's really the government employee unions who block all structural reform and who keep eating up a bigger and bigger portion of the state budget um 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 reforms on the rate of growth in spending we need some pension reforms in exchange for that as part of a grand bargain you might get some reforms to prop 13 but just to give away one of the only cards we have in negotiating with these powerful special interests for no reason I just think it's dumb you know do you think that Zuck was tricked or what do you think I think he's probably got look I don't really know but I don't know how many things and I've defended him on this podcast a lot basically on on the story I think he's probably got look I don't really know but I think he's probably got look I don't really know but I don't really know but I think what it is he's got some foundation and he's got some pointy-headed policy walks sitting there trying to analyze what the perfect tax policy is and it probably looks more like fair market value than like cost basis and they're not thinking about the larger political sort of ramifications which is we the private sector is being squeezed more and more by these public employee unions and we do need structural reform and we can't just give up one of the other things that we're doing and we're not 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 would venture to guess that maybe Saks does I don't know I mean 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 is probably underwater I mean it's certainly not above my cost basis um so it doesn't affect me it affects the little guy it affects the small business who's owned their property for 10 or 20 years and again I'm not arguing that we couldn't come up with a better tax system but what I'm saying is the bigger more pressing need is structural reform totally no I mean I totally agree the bloated monster of socialism is coming for us and it starts with the unions and it evolves and it's just average salary I don't know if you saw this go viral in the last couple weeks on Twitter average to average salary in San Francisco 170 thousand dollars a lot of tech workers city employees yeah I'm saying employees I saw that like 170 000 was the average salary I was like oh wow tech people are doing good it's like no no no that's the city employees 19 000 administrative employees in the city of San Francisco city of 800 000 people 800 000 people with a 14 billion dollar 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 sec this 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 getting us more teachers in the classroom what it's getting is a giant number of overpaid administrators and bureaucrats that is the big structural problem the you know private sector unions are very different you see when when a private sector union goes to negotiate they go negotiate against ownership or management and there's someone to oppose their unreasonable demands not all their demands are reasonable just the most unreasonable demands but it with the public sector unions they're negotiating against the politicians and they are the largest contributors to those politicians and so there's no one and the politicians need them for their votes right they're like they're going to deliver whatever number of 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 these unions will the unions will never be appeased you can never buy them you can never buy them you can never buy them 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 up uh going into this um you know the I'll say something about climate change because look I'm I I I spent a lot of time looking at data and research on climate change and certainly feel strongly that there's a a human uh caused function of of global warming that that we're actively kind of experiencing um 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 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 talked about and we all kind of assume that if you do or don't believe in climate change you're left or right you're evil you're good um and I I think like it's very easy to kind of just go into here 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 that controversial point that I thought I should make um because I am a believer I 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 have the skills rather than just assume what the media tells them to us to believe yeah the few um 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 softballish 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 Roberts and 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 yeah exactly yeah exactly you you don't you don't know exactly how they're going to vote on these issues you really don't Roberts was the deciding vote in upholding Obamacare Gorsuch uh extended uh 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 Diane Feinstein treated her three years ago in the last confirmation hearings which she 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 a feature isn't it David because the lifetime appointment means they like tenure they can go with what they think is right so that is kind of a good feature of the Supreme Court do you think there should be like a term well I 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 um 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 Justice that's long enough and each president should get two nominees like one in the first year and then one in the third year and so you basically have one Justice rolling off every two years and one coming on and so you have nine Justices and so every two years adds up to 18 years that proposal makes a ton of sense to me and um and so you know you know that when you vote for a president they're going to get two Supreme Court picks um that feels less chaotic than this that would be that'd be a much better that's a great idea that's a great idea yeah that's a great idea I think it's a fabulous idea I I took solace in the fact that when they asked her the uh what's protected in the First Amendment she couldn't name all five things that I could I was like what about protest did you miss that 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 Justice J.

Cal wow I just thought that was like it's also like pretty interesting I think they I think they invented the word I think they invented the word unconfirmable for J. Cal you got a right to have your own pistola but you shouldn't have a shotgun boys Friedberg Friedbergers has a hard stop at three uh the the uh the fact that you left that protest I do think let's let's just end on the election uh and our little handicapping of what's going to happen and getting out of this mess I do think one of the stories coming out of this is going to be uh 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 we do the post-mortem 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 oh my God respected women I don't know 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 I guess that makes sense I think Trump's running out of time to change the polls um and I'm not sure if you're going to be able to see that but I'm not sure if you're going to be able to see that but I'm not sure if you're going to be able to see that but I'm not sure if you're going to be able to see that but I'm not sure if you're going to be able to see that but I'm not sure if you're going to be able to see polls.

Every day that goes by, he's basically got like 19 outs, where 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 gonna have like a three out or something.

So yeah, I mean, look, obviously, I understand the polls, I still somehow think, I know, it sounds kind of weird, but I'm just not sure Americans are ready for this reality show to end. I mean, we know it's jumped the shark. 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. And the excitement of building a wall and changing everything and draining the swamp, like he's just like, keep draining the swamp or keep building the wall.

And people don't love that. He's also he also, I think it's coming across as not being he's looking weak by not being willing to be challenged. And that came across clearly in that debate. He last time around, he got on stage, and he just knocked everyone down. But by not letting Biden talk by not kind of engaging on any of the topics, he looks just he looks like he just doesn't want to have a shot at it.

And it just comes across as bad. So I don't know, these are all contributing factors, I think, to what's going on. Chances of a pardon by Pence, he resigns, he pardons himself. Pence, zero, zero, zero, ego. Well, we wouldn't see that unless he lost the election if he loses during the lame duck during the lame duck period.

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 5050. He just goes for the full family pardon. All right. Love you guys. I gotta go. Love you guys. And hopefully we'll have a bestie poker soon.

Yay. Talk to you guys later. Bye.