You were bloated last night. What else is new? I said not bloated. My God, you really are, though. You look bloated. Listen, that's coming from you. You started to look like Bert, and now you're back to Ernie. Your face is getting round again. All I have to say is, hold on a second, guys.

I gotta get a drink. Is it OK? You guys got a minute for me to get a drink? Yeah, yeah, I definitely do. I definitely do. Go ahead. Hold on a second. You gonna get a beer? No, no. I'm actually, you know, I've been working on my weight, so I'm just gonna pick here.

I think I have the mocha latte from Supergut, and I also have the chocolate shake. Do you have a recommendation here for me, Friedberg? Because I'm going to put it in my coffee. Is mocha on a mocha? You can't go wrong. You can't go wrong. Thank you. Double mocha's a win.

Just on a completely unrelated topic, did you happen to invest in Supergut, J.Cao? No, no, no. I haven't invested yet, but use the promo code. Oh, OK. It's been a big part of my weight loss journey. It's also been a big part of me and Friedberg becoming besties and creating a unified block for All In Summit 2023.

So I've got two solid votes. I'll be very honest with you. You guys give me a credible plan where we can maintain the integrity. I was joking. Hold on, hold on, keep going. I was joking. Hold on. Maintain credibility. Continue. Listen to me. Listen to me. Listen to me.

I'm listening. If you two idiots. I'm not involved. Yes, you are. You clearly are involved with this fucking grift. You're an important vote. Hold on. No. Continue, Chamath. I'm writing this in. I'm writing it down. If you two idiots, the two of you have to do this together because otherwise I'm with David and there's absolutely got it.

You two idiots need to come up with a plan where we can each make. Make four million bucks each net, then I'll do it. Four million net. OK, great. Look at Jekyll writing that down as as if he respects a contract. OK, got this. Got this. I signed the fucking car.

I signed the contract for Jekyll. The negotiation begins at the point where there's a signed contract. Yeah, exactly. So, OK, now negotiate with you. All right, everybody, the show has started. The four of us are still here by some miracle. We're still going after 107 episodes and it's better than ever.

Last week we were number 12. So mainstream media. We'll see you in the top 10. Mainstream media. Here we go. Twitter files, part one and part two. We're not on strike. Despite your oppressive conditions. Yes, Jekyll. We're not on strike. What oppressive conditions of making you show up on time.

Yeah. If I was getting paid five bucks for this, I'd be on strike right now. Guys, not only are you getting five bucks, you're getting a bill for the production. OK, here we go. By the way, how beautiful is it that the same reporters who couldn't stop writing about the oppressive working conditions that Elon Musk was supposedly creating because he simply wanted the employees to go back to the office and work hard.

And if they did it, he'd give them a generous three months severance package. Yeah, those same reporters are now on strike because the souls burgers are running a clickbait farm over there with oppressive working conditions. The intellectual dishonesty has never been higher in the world. Yeah, I would like to ask.

Honesty. Yes. Will the publisher of The New York Times agree that anybody who isn't happy there can have a voluntary three month severance package? Yeah. Click this link. And do you want to work hard or do you want three months severance? If The New York Times publisher did that, you know what would happen?

800 of 1200 people would take the severance. Of course. All right, here we go. Twitter files have dropped. Part one dropped with the legendary award winning, highly respected journalist Matt Taibbi. If you don't know who he is, he is a left leaning journalist who worked at Rolling Stone and did the best coverage, hands down, of the financial crisis and the shenanigans.

And he held truth to power to that group. This is important to note. The second drop was given to Bari Weiss, who is a right leaning independent journalist. These are both independent journalists. She previously worked at The New York Times itself. Now, I think we should work backwards. From two to one.

Do you agree? Yes, for sure. Let's start with the drop that just happened last night. Yes, so last night a drop happened. So here's what happens in Twitter files part two. I'm going to give a basic summary and then I'm going to give it to Sax because he's chomping at the bit.

We now have confirmation that what the right thought was happening all along, which is a secret silencing system built into the software of blacklists was tagging right wing conservative voices in the system. And these included people like Dan Bungino, is that how you pronounce it? Yes. He was tagged with being on a search blacklist.

What that means is you're a fan of Dan's who is a former Secret Service agent who is now a right wing conservative. I could just say conservative instead of wing. A conservative radio host, podcast host. He was not allowed to be found in search engines for some reason. Charlie Kirk, who is a conservative commentator, he was tagged with do not amplify.

I guess that means you can't trend into people's feeds, even if they follow you. And then there were people who were banned from the trends blacklist, including a Stanford professor, Jay Bhattacharya. Did I get it right? Yes, Jay Bhattacharya. OK, I got it right. Doctor of Stanford School of Medicine.

And he was not allowed on the trends blacklist because he had a dissenting opinion. A Stanford professor had a dissenting opinion. A dissenting opinion on COVID that's turned out to be true. And this is where the danger comes in, because all of these actions were taken without any transparency.

And they were taken on one side of the aisle by people inside of Twitter, essentially covertly. No ownership of who did it. And they never told the people. They gaslit them. They could see their own tweets. They could use the service, but they couldn't be seen even by their own fans in many cases here.

Sax, when you look at that, let's just start with that first piece, the shadow banning, as it's called in our industry, where you can participate in a community, but you can't be seen. Is there any circumstance under which this tool would make sense for you to deploy? And then what's your general take on what has been discovered last night?

Okay, look, what was-- Two-part question. Yes, let me start with what's been discovered here. Let me boil it down for you. This is an FTX-level fraud, except that what was stolen here was not customer funds. It was their free speech rights, not just the rights of people like Jay Bonacoria and Dan Bongino to speak, but the right of the public to hear them in the way that they expected, okay?

And you had statement after statement by Twitter executives like Jack Dorsey, like Vijay Gowdy, like, you know, Yoel, and others saying, "We do not shadow ban." And then they also said, "We certainly," this is their emphasis, "do not shadow ban on the basis of political viewpoint." And what the Twitter files show is that is exactly what they were doing.

They, in the same way that SBF was using FTX and customer funds as a personal piggy bank, they were using Twitter as their personal ideological piggy bank. They were going in to the tools and using the content moderation system, these big brother-like tools that were designed to basically put their thumb on the scale of American democracy and suppress viewpoints that they did not agree with and they did not like, even when, even when, they could not justify removing content based on their own rules.

So there are conversations in the Slack that Barry Weiss exposed, where, for example, Libs of TikTok, they admit in the Slack that we can't suppress Libs of TikTok based on our hate policy. Libs of TikTok hasn't violated it. We're going to suppress that account anyway. Now, it's important to note what Libs of TikTok does.

This is a great talking point. Libs of TikTok finds people who are trans, people who are, you know, maybe not LGBTQ, and they feature their TikToks and they mock them on Twitter. Now, this certainly is free speech. And the argument from the safety team was by putting all of these together, you're inciting violence towards those people.

And they said they haven't broken a rule, but collectively, they could be, in some way, targeting those people. Is there anything fair, Friedberg, to that statement? That they targeted them? By collecting their, let's say, views that are, I'm asking this question for discussion purposes. I'm not giving my opinion.

Jake, help. Hold on. I want Friedberg to answer one. Why can't I finish? I'm going to go back to you. You spoke for two minutes. That's why. Friedberg. You turned down moderating today, Sax. You could have had the opportunity to decide who speaks. Everybody else gets to speak as long as they want and I get interrupted.

You got two minutes. Let Friedberg talk. Let me just finish the SBF analogy, okay? Oh, my God. The filibuster continues. Go ahead. Then you can both sides this issue. Don't worry, Sax. While you're speaking, I'm going to ask you to take a minute to think about what you said and then I'll come back to you.

I'm going to ask you to think about what you said and then I'll come back to you. I'm going to ask you to think about what you said and then I'll come back to you. I'm going to ask you to think about what you said and then I'll come back to you.

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I think, I think, I think Saks has articulated a vision for the product he wanted Twitter to be but I don't think that's necessarily the product that they wanted to create. It's not that Twitter set out at the time or stated clearly that they were going to be the harbinger of truth and the free speech platform for all.

I think they were really clear and they have been in their behavior and as you know demonstrated through this stuff that came out which to me feels a lot like a we already knew all this stuff. This is a bit of a nothing burger that they were curating and they were editing and they were editorializing other people's content and the ranking of content in the same way that many other internet platforms do to create what they believe to be their best user experience for the users that they want to appeal to.

And I'll say like there's been this long debate and it goes back 20 years at this point on how Google does ranking. You guys may remember Jeremy Stoppelman went to DC and he complained about how Google was using his content and he wasn't being ranked high enough as Google's own content that was being shoved in the wrong place.

And there's a guy who ran, he was a spokesperson for the SEO, the search engine optimization rules at Google. And it was always the secret at Google how did the search results get ranked. And I can tell you it's not just a pure algorithm that there was a lot of manual intervention, a lot of manual work.

In fact, the manual work gets to the point that they said there's so much stuff that we know is the best content and the best form of content for the user experience that they ranked it all the way at the top and they called it the one box. It's the stuff that sits above the primary search results.

And that editorialization ultimately led to a product that they intended to make because they believed it was a better user experience for the users that they wanted to service. And I don't think that this is any different than what's happened at Twitter. Twitter is not a government agency. They're not a free speech, they're not the internet.

They're a product. And the product managers and the people that run that product team ultimately made some editorial decisions that said, this is the content we do want to show and this is the content we don't want to show. And they certainly did wrap up a bunch of rules that had a lot of leeway for what they could or couldn't do.

Or they gave themselves a lot of different excuses on how to do it. I don't agree with it. It's not the product I want. It's not the product I think should exist. I think Elon also saw that. And clearly he stepped in and said, I want to make a product that is a different product than what is being created today.

So none of this feels to me like these guys were the guardians of the internet and they came along and they were distrustful. They did exactly what a lot of other companies have done and exactly what they set out to do. And they editorialized the product for a certain user group.

And by the way, they never blocked, they never edited people's tweets. They changed how people's results were showing up in rankings. They showed how viral they would get in the trend box. Those were in-app features and in-app services. This was not about taking someone's tweet and changing it. And people may feel shamed and they may feel upset about the fact that they were deranked or they were kind of quote, shadow banned.

But ultimately, that's the product they chose to make and people have the choice and the option of going elsewhere. And I don't agree with it. And it's not the product I want and it's not a product I want to use. And I certainly don't feel happy seeing it. So you want to see products in, FreeMark to summarize it, you want to see the free market do its job.

Chamath, you worked at Facebook. Facebook seems to have done, I would say, an excellent job with content moderation. I think in large part, correct me if I'm wrong, because of the real names policy. But tell us what you think, when you look at this and the 15 year history of social media and moderation.

I think moderation is incredibly difficult. And typically what happens is, early on in a company's life cycle, and I'm going to guess that Twitter and YouTube were very similar to what we did at Facebook. And it's very similar to probably what TikTok had to do in the early days, which is, you have this massive tidal wave of usage.

And so you're always on a little bit of a hamster wheel. And so you build these very basic tools, and you uncover problems along the way. And so I think it's important to humanize the people that are at Twitter, because I'm not sure that they're these super nefarious actors per se.

I do think that they were conflicted. I do think that they made some very corrupting decisions, but I don't think that they were these evil actors. I think that they were folks who, against the tidal wave of usage, built some brittle tools, built on top of them, built on top of it some more, and tried to find a way of coping.

And as scale increased, they didn't have an opportunity to take a step back and reset. And I think that that's true for all of these companies. And so you're just seeing it out in the light, what's happening at Twitter. But don't for a second think that any other company behaved any differently.

Google, Facebook, Twitter, ByteDance and TikTok, they're all the same. They're all dealing with this problem, and they're all probably trying to do a decent job of it, as best as they know how. So what do we do from here is the question. The reason somebody needs to do something about this is summarized really elegantly in this Jay Bhattacharya tweet.

So please, Nick, just throw it up here so that we can just talk about this. This is why I think that this issue is important. Critically. This is a perfect tweet. Still trying to process my emotions on learning that Twitter blacklisted me. Okay, who cares about that? Here's what matters.

The thought that will keep me up tonight. Censorship of scientific discussion permitted policies like school closures and a generation of children were hurt. Now, just think about that in a nutshell. What was Jay Bhattacharya to do? Maybe he was supposed to go on TikTok and try to sound the alarm bells through a TikTok.

Maybe he was supposed to go on YouTube and create a video. Maybe he was supposed to go on Facebook and post into a Facebook group or do a newsfeed post. The problem is that, and the odds are reasonably likely, that a lot of these companies had very similar policies.

In this example, around COVID misinformation, because it was the CDC and governmental organizations directing information and rules, reaching out to all of these companies. We're just seeing an insight into Twitter, but the point is it happened everywhere. The implication of suppressing information like this is that a credible individual like that can't spark a public debate.

In not being able to spark the debate, you have this building up of errors in the system. Then who gets hurt? In this example, which is true, you couldn't even talk about school closures and masking up front and early in the system. If you had scientists actually debate it, maybe what would have happened is we would have kept the schools open and you would have had less learning loss and you'd have less depression and less overprescription of Ritalin and Adderall, because those are all factual things we can measure today.

I think the important thing to take away from all of this is we've got confirmatory evidence that these folks under a tidal wave of pressure made some really bad decisions. The implications are pretty broad-reaching. Now I do think governments have to step in and create better guardrails so this kind of stuff doesn't happen.

I don't buy the whole, "It's a private company. They can do what they want." I think that that is too naive of an expectation for how important these three companies literally are to how Americans consume and process information to make decisions. Incredibly well said, Sachs. Your reaction to your besties?

I largely agree with what Jamal said, but let's go back to what Freeberg said. I think what Freeberg's point of view is is really what you're hearing now from the mainstream media today, which is, "Oh, nothing to see here. You know, that they told us all along what was happening.

This was just content moderation. They had the right to do this. You're making a big deal over nothing." No, that's not true. Go back and look at the media coverage starting in 2018. Article after article said that this idea of shadow banning was a right-wing conspiracy theory. That's what they said.

Furthermore, Jack Dorsey denied that shadow banning was happening, including at a congressional hearing, I believe, under oath. So either he lied, or he was lied to by his subordinates. I actually believe that the latter is possible. I don't think it's true with SBF. It might be true with Jack because he was so checked out.

Furthermore, you had people, again, like Vijay Aghati, again, tweeting and repeatedly stating, "We do not shadow ban and we certainly don't shadow ban on the basis of political viewpoint." So, these people were denying exactly what their critics were saying. They were accusing their critics of being conspiracy theorists. Now that the thing is proven, the mountain of evidence has dropped, they're saying, "Oh, well, this is old news.

This was known a long time ago." No, it was not known a long time ago. It was disputed by you. And now, finally, it's proven. And you're trying to say it's not a big deal. It is a big deal. It's a violation of the public trust. And if you are so proud of your content moderation policies, why didn't you admit what you were doing in the first place?

That's what I said. Don't you feel good that Elon's running this business now? I mean, like, the things that you're concerned about as a user, as someone who cares about the public's access to knowledge, to opinions, to free speech, this has got to be a good change, right? Like, this has come to light.

It's clearly going to get resolved. Everyone's going to move forward. I mean, do you think that there's penalties needed for the people that work there? Or, like, what's the anger? No. Because you won. Look, I think we got, I think we basically got extremely lucky that Elon Musk happened to care about free speech and decided to do something about it and actually had the means to do something about it.

He's just about the only billionaire who has that level of means who actually cared enough to take on this battle. But are you saying that this is a hard measure for other platforms? I think he deserves praise for that. But, I mean, unless Elon can buy every single tech company, which he clearly can't, I think you guys are right.

This is happening to a lot of other tech companies. We're about to rewrite the government, the United States government is going to make an attempt to rewrite Section 230. I think that what this does is put a very fine point on a comment that Elon actually tweeted out. And, Nick, if you could find that, please.

That's a very good tweet, where he said, "Going forward, you will be able to see if you were shadow banned, you were able to see if you were de-boosted. Why? And be able to appeal." And I think that that concept, to be very honest with you, should be enshrined in law.

And I think that should be part of the Section 230 rewrite. And all of these media companies and all of these social media companies should be subject to it. And the reason is because it ties a lot of these concepts together and says, "Look, you can build a service, you're a private company, make as much money as you want, but we're going to have some connective tissue back to the fundamental underpinnings of the Constitution, which is the framework under which we all live, and we're going to transparently allow you to understand it." And I think that's really reasonable.

Make that a legal expectation of all these organizations. And by the way, the companies will love it because I think it's super hard for you to be in these companies, and they probably are like, "Take this responsibility off my plate." It's very simple. This is a... There's really four problems that occurred here.

Number one, there was no transparency. The people who were shadow banned, taken out of search, etc., they did not know. If they were told, and it was clear to users, we could have a discussion about was that a fair judgment or not. In the cases we've seen so far from Bari Weiss's reporting in the Twitter files part, it's very clear that these were not justifiable.

Number two, these were not evenly enforced. It's very clear that one side... 'Cause we don't have one example of a person on the left being censored. If we do, then we could put balls and strikes together, and we could say how many people on one side versus how many people on the other.

It's pretty clear what happened here. Because these all occurred with a group of people working at Twitter, which is 96% or 97% left-leaning. The statistics are clear. Number three, the shadow banning and the search banning, and I think this is something we talked about previously, Chamath, it feels very underhanded.

This was your point. If we're gonna block people, they should be blocked, and they should know why. The fourth piece of this, which is absolutely infuriating, and this is a discussion that myself, Sax, and Elon have had many times about this moderation, and I'm not speaking out of school now because he's now very public with his position, and his position he came to on his own.

It's not like this is Sax and I coming up with these positions. This is why Elon bought the business. If you really want to intellectually test your thinking on this, and I am a moderate who's left-leaning, I can tell you there's a simple way for anybody who is debating the validity of the concerns here.

Imagine Rachel Maddow or Ezra Klein, or whoever your favorite left-leaning pundit is, was shadow-banned by a group of right-wing moderators who were acting covertly and without any transparency. How would you feel if Maddow reporting on, you know, all the Russian coordination with Trump's campaign did this, or Ezra Klein with whatever topics he covers, and you will very quickly find yourself infuriated, and you should then intellectually, as we say on this program, steelmanning, if you argue the other side, it's infuriating for either side to experience this, and that is what the 230 change needs to be, Chamath.

You're exactly correct. If you make an action, it should be listed on the person's profile page and on the tweet, and if you click on the question mark, you should see when the action was taken, by who, you know, which department, maybe not the person, so they get personally attacked, and then what the resolution to it is.

This has been banned because it's targeted harassment. This can be resolved in this way, then everybody's behavior would steer towards whatever the stated purpose of that social network is. You can get better behavior by making the rules clear, by making the rules unclear, and making it unfair, you create this insane situation.

Go ahead, Chamath, and that's why I'm infuriated about it. I think you have to take it one step further to really do justice to why this should be important to everybody, and I do think this school example, it really matters to me. Like, we have, like, I don't know now, we know what the counterfactual is, which is that we have, I mean, we've relegated our children to a bunch of years of really complicated relearning and learning that they never had to go through because of all the learning loss they gave them, but what if Jay Bhattacharya, who's, I mean, like, you can't be, you know, have a higher sort of role in society in terms of, you know, population.

- Pretty good credentials. - I mean, imagine if, you know, there was a platform where he could have actually said this and then, you know, people would have clamored and said, "You know what? "You and Fauci need to get to the bottom of this," or where legislators could have seen it and said, "You know what?

"Before we make a decision like this, "maybe, hey, Fauci, go talk to Jay "because he's a Stanford prof. "He's probably not an idiot. "Why does he think that?" Or maybe let's convene, you know, an actual group of 20 or 30 scientists and the fact that this one version of thinking about things was deemed so heterodoxical, it is just such a good example because you-- - They shut down an important conversation.

- You know that the decision was so wrong and the damage was so severe. - Yes. - So we know what happened by suppressing that speech. - And that's one example. - Well, it's, in my estimation, it is the silver bullet example that cleans through all of this other stuff because, you know, I don't really care if Rachel Maddow has reclined.

Who the hell cares? This is important stuff because it affects everybody irrespective of your political persuasion and what editorial you want to read. - Chamath, what if the investigation into the Catholic Church and the abuses that occurred there, somebody said, "Oh, this person, "it needs to be shut down," and then children are molested for another decade?

By the way, we have an example of that. Sinead O'Connor came out on SNL. You can look it up for if you're under 40 years old and said, "Fight the real enemy." She ripped up a picture of the Pope because of the scandals there. She was excommunicated. She was canceled at that time, one of the first people to be canceled because she spoke truth to power.

What if somebody, an investigative journalist at the New York Times, the Boston Globes are in the movie spotlight. Those are the people who broke the story of the Catholic Church. If somebody came in and the Catholic Church put pressure on a social network and said, "Hey, you can't put this stuff up here.

"You can't have this discussion of abuse." - Here's another example. - It's infuriating. Why are we shutting down discussions in America? - Remember the Vietnam Papers? - Well, because, J. Cal, the media does not value transparency anymore. If you go back and look at the way the media portrays itself, like in the movie, "The Post," which is about the revelations about the Catholic Church, where you go back to all the president's men, what the media prized and what they congratulated themselves on was, first of all, transparency and exposing the lies of powerful people.

Well, that is exactly what has happened here. The lies of the powerful group of people who were running Twitter policy and suppressing one side of the debate has been exposed, and the media is treating it with a yawn, like there's nothing to see here. Why? Because they were complicit in this.

They were complicit in suppressing the views of people like Jay Bhattacharya. They were complicit in choosing the views of Fauci and the elite on COVID. And so they have no interest now in bringing and making what's happened here at Twitter fully transparent. - They have to own it. I think, by the way, just a quick correction there.

I think, Sax, when you said "The Post," Washington Post, Watergate, Spotlight, exactly. - Oh, I'm not even thinking about Spotlight, sorry. It may have been Spotlight. - Yeah, that's what I was going to say. - Okay. - But "The Post" is another example. That movie was about another event like this, which could have been easily suppressed in today's world, much harder there, which was the Pentagon Papers.

And in that world, you know, there was an immense amount of pressure that the government put on "The Washington Post," but then they said, "You know what? We're going with it," and they still published it. And it created a groundswell of support to really reexamine the Vietnam War, and it had a huge impact.

But could you imagine this time around, which is like, "Hey, guys, there's going to be some kind of misinformation. You know, these Pentagon Papers are not real. It's coming from the Russians. Suppress it." And nobody could-- It's so much easier now to run this play. - Right. - What journalists need to realize is that today's conspiracy theories are tomorrow's Pulitzer Prizes.

On to you, Sax. - Not in the current media environment. They work for these corporations, and they don't get rewarded for telling the truth. - Oh, no, they're going for Pulitzers. Trust me, they are. And what they need to do is stop thinking short-term and think long-term. Anytime there's a conspiracy theory, you must give it some validity and say, "Is there any truth here?" Because it could, in fact, be a scandal that's being covered up.

And if you take the approach of shutting down everyone-- - They're involved in the cover-up right now. They're involved in the cover-up right now. - This is a cover-up. I agree. I'm in agreement with you. - Let's bring the first batch of Twitter files into the conversation, the one that Matt Taibbi exposed.

What he did was confirm that a completely true story by the New York Post about Hunter Biden that came out a month before the election was suppressed by Twitter executives, including at the behest of, you know, of FBI agents and former security state officials. So this has now been exposed.

There was no legitimate basis for suppressing that story. It was true. It was a respected publication. They did it anyway. This is election interference. You know, the same people who pride themselves on strengthening democracy are engaged in this wide-scale censorship of one side of the political debate, including of true stories before an election, and then they puff out their chest and say, "We're protecting democracy." They're not protecting democracy.

They're interfering with democracy. They're interfering with the public's right to know. And then we look at a country like China, and we say, "Well, we're so much better than them," because they've got this problem over there where the state and big tech are colluding to create a Big Brother-like system.

Well, what is this? What are these tools that have been exposed? This is a Big Brother-like system. Okay, yeah, but just you have to-- I know you want to make it like an equivalency. It's less than a 1% equivalency because in our society, we can have moments like this, and we can have investigations.

So just to put it in perspective-- Yeah, look, Jake, I don't think we're equivalent, but what I'm saying is that this is very much like a Big Brother social credit system that was being perpetrated-- Yes, alarm bells should be going off. There should be an alarm bell going off.

And if Elon didn't decide-- Just we had this one idiosyncratic billionaire who believes in free speech. If he didn't decide to take this on, we would never have known this stuff. Okay, tell me what happened in between these two things. There is an attorney at Twitter, and I don't know the details of this.

Right, okay, so this is interesting. I do not work for the Twitter Corporation. I do not speak for the Twitter Corporation. Saks does not work for the Twitter Corporation and does not speak for it. But there was, in between these two drops, something that happened. Yes, so basically, what was discovered-- and this is all just publicly reported-- is that a former FBI lawyer named Jim Baker had now become Deputy General Counsel at Twitter.

And this guy, Jim Baker, is like the zealot of the whole Russian collusion hoax. He was involved in the FISA warrants that the FBI applied to the FISA courts that had all the errors and omissions. He was involved in the Alphabank hoax. He was the guy that that Perkins Coie lawyer, Sussman, was feeding this phony scam to.

And I don't think he was officially sanctioned, but basically he was asked to leave the FBI. And then, lo and behold, where does he land? At Twitter. And he is involved in their content moderation policies. I think what it shows is how deeply intertwined our big tech companies have become with the security state.

Now, how did this get exposed? Well, Barry Weiss was basically putting forward document requests for the latest batch of Twitter files, and she wasn't getting anything back. And she's like, "What's going on here?" And the guy who's giving her the files, his name is Jim. And she's like, "Well, wait, wait, Jim who?" And she finds out, "Wait, Jim Baker?

Wait, that Jim Baker?" The New York Post had a long story about this guy. And so it was discovered that the guy who was curating the Twitter files was this former operative of the FBI who was involved in the Russian collusion hoax and then was involved in their blacklist decisions.

So in any event, once this came out, Twitter fired him. And then, you know, Barry apparently received all these files that are now the second batch of the Twitter files. And just to be clear, that's not James Baker if you're, you know, thinking it's the former Reagan cabinet member, not James Baker.

This is Jim Baker, who's a different person. Right, but a lot of people are wondering, "Well, how could this have been missed?" He's an ex-FBI agent. These guys don't want to be found. I mean, this is, some people call it, you know, the permanent Washington establishment. Some people call it the deep state.

The administrations come and go. The people who work in Washington stay there forever. And they can simply effectuate policy by outlasting everybody else and clandestinely implementing what they believe. And they've become a constituency of their own that exercises power like a Praetorian Guard in Washington. So in any event, this guy is an expert at bull-weaveling himself into the bureaucracy.

Great. Praetorian Guard bull-wea- You're on fire right now. Hold on a second. So, hold on. Say the two words again. Hold on a second. When they finally rooted, when they finally rooted this mole out of the FBI, he bull-weavels himself into another powerful bureaucracy. What is that word? Bull-weavel?

Bull-weavel. Bull-weavel? Like Burrows. Like Burrows. Like Burrows. Like that. So, he digs his way into the Twitter bureaucracy to the point where he isn't even found. And then somehow, he has put himself in the position to be intermediating the Twitter files. Can you believe this? Praetorian Guard. So once it was discovered, a unit of the Imperial Roman Army that served as personal bodyguards and intelligence agents.

The Praetorian Guard. Okay. Got it. Well, you understand what happened is that the Praetorian Guard originated because they were to defend the life of the Emperor. And then what happened... That's PQR. Then they became so powerful that whoever bribed the Praetorians would become Emperor. And then finally, the last step is that the Praetorians themselves would pick the Emperor.

And whoever basically led the Praetorian Guard would be the next Emperor. In any event, I mean, we're not at that point yet. But the point is that these security state officials have power that they should not have. Okay. That's the bottom line. They should not be involved in our elections in this way.

They should be completely nonpartisan and nonpolitical. They should just do their jobs as law enforcement officials. But we know from the Hunter Biden story that a very important piece of this was the pre-bunking that the FBI went to Facebook and Twitter and social networks and said, "Be on the lookout for a story about Hunter Biden.

It is Russian disinformation." And they primed these social networks to suppress that story when it came out. That was something they never should have done. And they knew. They knew the story was not fake. They knew it was not Russian disinformation because they had the laptop in their possession since 2019.

Well, okay. That has not... The providence of the laptop is still being reviewed in fairness. No, sir. You're wrong. Hold on. And there is an investigation going on of Hunter Biden. You also have to put the context in here. And please let me finish. There is a context here of there was massive election interference going on.

Both sides of the aisle, Republicans, Democrats, all wanted to see the Russian interference and the Ukrainian interference and Trump's encouraging the Ukraine and the Russians to interfere in elections. Everybody was on high alert. And that happened to drop, like it was announced 30 days before, and it dropped 10 days before the election.

So everybody was on high alert. And I agree it was not done properly. That's why it was the perfect excuse. It should have been done properly. They should have said, they should have come out public and say, "We don't know the providence of this. It could be hacked. It might not be hacked." Jason, they knew.

Let's wait and see. We have to reserve judgment. No, listen. Let me tell you what happened. Let me just tell you what happened, okay? And make sure you source this. I will. So, look, it's all in the New York Post, okay? They've done a great... Oh, great. No, nobody has refuted it.

Nobody has refuted it. It's a superfluous paper. Let me just tell you what happened. Let me just get this on the record here. From the Post. The FBI was given the laptop in 2019 by the lab store owner. Those guys have forensics. They have cyber experts. They knew the laptop was real.

We know it's real now. Nobody questions that. In fact, the FBI has admitted that the laptop was real and that the Hunter Biden files are real. Nobody disputes that, okay? But what they did before the election is they used this excuse of Russian disinformation to discredit the story before it even came out.

But they had no business getting involved in the story that way. They simply didn't. They should have stayed out of it completely. I don't understand how you can possibly justify that. Yeah, I mean, I think we do have to look at the context of that time period when Hillary's emails were hacked and we had a president...

That's why it's a perfect excuse. Well, I didn't finish the sentence. And we had a president, which you will agree, our presidents and presidential candidates should not be encouraging foreign powers to hack their adversaries. Do you agree with that? This is the election. Do you agree with that? Answer my question.

Do you agree that presidential... You're still wrapped up in... Answer the question. Why do you have to divert? No, Jake, I know what you're doing. You're going to personally attack me. No, I'm not. Don't personally attack me. Just answer the question. Should presidential candidates... This is your election denial for 2016.

You're still wrapped up on this. You can't let it go. Again, you personally attack me, you don't answer the question. That's fine. We'll move on. You can't be intellectually honest? That's fine. The audience knows you're not being intellectually honest. Let's move on. You don't even know what you're talking about.

If you could answer the simple question, should presidents encourage foreign powers to hack their adversaries, then you would be being intellectually dishonest. I am absolutely disappointed that you will not answer that simple question. It's an obvious yes. It's an obvious yes. We don't want people doing it. Of course, but I don't really believe that happened.

Then say it. You won't say it because you know Trump's going to win the primary. Let's keep going. China has... Honestly, I don't... Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Listen, I've said so many times on this show that he's not my candidate. I don't know what you're talking about.

You're going all the way back. He'll wind up being your candidate when he wins. What you're doing right now is delusional. You're going back to some throwaway comment he made at a rally in 2016. It's got nothing, absolutely nothing to do with the story. And the fact you're even bringing it up is pure TDS.

And I don't want to waste any time talking about it. Here you go, name calling instead of answering a question. That's your technique. Your technique is to call me names instead of answering the question. I want to un-muddy the waters. I want to make one more point about this.

Un-muddy the waters. Another technique that I'm muddying the waters. I'm not muddying the waters. You are. I don't know what this has to do. Let's move on. Let's move on. I want to make one final point. Okay, I'll make a final point. There was a letter. Listen, there was a letter with this Hunter Biden thing.

This is 2020 election Jason. We're not going back two elections ago. I want to talk about the most recent one. Okay, fine. You had Clapper, you had Comey, you had 50 of these security state officials. They write a letter saying that the Hunter Biden story has all the hallmarks of Russian disinformation.

They claim that it was Russian disinformation. When it wasn't, they knew it wasn't. And it was the same story that the FBI was telling Twitter. And it was the same story that these Twitter executives were indulging in. Even though they all knew or had reason to know, it wasn't true.

And they suppressed the New York Post story anyway. I don't know why you're bringing up this Trump stuff. It has nothing to do with the real issue here. Hold on a second. The real issue is this. Does social media have the right to suppress true stories put out by our media the month before an election?

Yes or no? How do you defend that? I will answer your question yes or no, and you will not answer mine because you're being intellectually dishonest. Yes, we should. No, we should not suppress news stories. If it was, and I will argue both sides, if it was Snowden, if it was the Pentagon Papers, if it's Hunter Biden's laptop taking out the sex stuff, which we both agree on, or if it is Russia and Ukraine, where your presidential candidate at the time, Trump, asked Zelensky to find dirt on Biden before the election, and he asked the Russians to hack Hillary's email, and they did that, and they released it 10 days before the election.

That is facts that happened, and that is the context. No, wait a second. That's not what this was. That's not what this was. You said you would let me speak, and you will let me speak. You're muddying the waters. No, stop interrupting me, and stop insulting me. I will say my part, you said yours, and then we will move on.

The fact is, Trump encouraged hacking of other candidates, and he did it twice in a four-year period, back-to-back elections. We need to be on high alert when you have a Republican candidate, Trump, doing something so absolutely treasonous. Period. I'm done. This is why it was the perfect cover story.

This is why it was the perfect cover story, is because people like you are on-- But you would address the treasonous behavior. Let's move on. Listen, I don't think it was a perfect phone call. I think it was-- Treasonous. There were lots of shenanigans. There were lots of shenanigans.

It's called treason. Hold on. I'm not defending anything Trump did, okay? I don't feel the need, okay? I never defended it. But the deal is that you're letting your TDS justify-- I don't have TDS. He's treasonous. You're allowing this Russian disinformation to be a cover story for what they all did.

No, I said I don't think posts should have been blocked. You're misconstruing what I'm saying. Then why are you even bringing this up? It was not Russian disinformation. Because the context under which-- The reason I'm bringing-- I agree that the posts should have been blocked. The context made it a great cover story.

That's your interpretation. The context also is everybody was on high alert waiting for a hack to drop, and in fact, a hack dropped 10 days before. You have to-- That was not a hack. Okay, we found out subsequently it was a hack. That's why there needed to be time.

They knew at the time is my point. They knew at the point. Twitter and Facebook did not know. Twitter and Facebook didn't know. That's the point. They don't know they're not in the FBI. Hold on a second. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Taibbi, go back to the Twitter files.

The first drop. Jim Baker, hold on a second. Jim Baker and Vijaya Gaudi said, okay, that there were a lot of internal questions about whether that Hunter Biden story could be justified under the hacked policy. Yes. Okay? And there were many legitimate questions raised internally about whether they could maintain that party line.

And the emerging view was that they could no longer maintain that line and still Gaudi and Jim Baker said, no, we will maintain the idea that this was hacked information until proven otherwise. Even though it was not hacked, it was a New York Post story. Okay, let's move on.

We'll agree to disagree. Let's move on. Why are you bringing up all this like irrelevant stuff? I think the audience and the other besties want us to move on. So let's move on. China ends most zero COVID rules and Iran might be abolishing its morality. Police news broke in the past week.

On Wednesday, China's health authorities overhauled its zero COVID policy and announced a 10 point national plan that scrapped most health code tracking. And also they're rolling back their mass testing. And this allowed many positive cases to just simply quarantine at home like we were doing, I guess a year ago now.

And they're limiting some of these lockdowns. This all comes from a Foxconn letter, which we don't know the cause causation here. Does it? Well, we don't know. That's why I just said, we don't know cause and correlation here. Give us some perspective here, Chama. Well, I just think it's kind of ridiculous to assume that the second largest economy in the world pivots based on one letter from one CEO.

So I know that that's how the Western media- Describe the letter, please. Well, apparently what happened was Terry Guo, who's colloquially known as Uncle Terry, who's the CEO of Foxconn, wrote a letter that essentially said, if we don't figure out a way to get out of this lockdown process, we're going to lose our leadership in the global supply chain.

And apparently that jolted the Central Planning Commission to realize that they needed to get out of these lockdowns. I think it's something different, which is I think this has been part and parcel of a very focused and dedicated plan by Xi. Phase one was to consolidate power. Phase two was to get through November and to basically get reappointed for life and dispel any other, you know, rivals that he actually had.

And now phase three is just to reopen the economy again so this guy can basically sit on top of the second largest economy in the world. So I think this is sort of a natural flow of things. The other part of it, which I think is being underreported, is I think that the way in which they did it was less responsive in my opinion to a letter from Uncle Terry, but was more responsive to the fact that there are people on the ground.

And I think that these guys are getting very sophisticated in understanding how to give the Chinese people some part of what they want so that they're roughly happy enough to keep moving forward. And I'm not going to morally judge whether it's right or wrong, but it's just a comment on what the gameplay and the game theory seems to be coming from the leadership of China.

So I think this is, it's good for the Chinese people and the real question is what will it mean for the US economy if these guys get their economy going again. We talked about this previously, but this is a good example of the autocrat not necessarily being absolute in their authority.

And the sense that I think we get at this point coming out of China is that there was enough dissent from the populace on the lockdown and the experience of the lockdowns and we can all go online and see the videos of steel bars being put on doors to keep people in their apartment buildings and people screaming and buildings being on fire, people can't escape the buildings.

How much of that was true or not and riots in the street and people fighting with the COVID testers. How much of it is true or not we don't really know. But it certainly seems to indicate that there was enough dissent and enough unrest that in order to stay in power the CCP had to take action and they had to shift their position and shift their tone.

And I think it's a really important moment to observe that sometimes the CCP and perhaps even we can extend this into other autocratic regimes that we think are absolute in their authority and their power perhaps are necessarily influenced by the people that they are there to govern and that they are you know, ruling over.

And that while we don't think about these places as democracies perhaps they're not entirely the traditionally defined autocracy. That there is an influence that the people can have. And maybe we see the same change happening in Iran with young people and a population that's more modern that's growing and swelling in size that doesn't want to accept some of the traditional norms and the traditional laws.

And maybe that will start to resonate around the world that the internet is starting to do what everyone hoped and wanted it to do which is the democratization of information the democratization of seeing other people's conditions and seeing what the rest of the world is and is like gives the populace the ability to rise up and to say this is what we want.

We hope that there are better things out there. And these autocratic regimes have to start to shift slightly. And over time maybe that has a real impact. Here's a specific statistic and chart for everybody. The demographics of Iran are incredibly notable. If you look at this chart for those of you listening it just shows people by age and how many, what percentage of the population they are or actually the raw numbers of the population.

As you can see, it's basically like a pair. You have very few old people and you have a lot of people in their 20s and younger. And so young people... No, no, no, Jason. It's really 40s and 30s. It's really... Yeah, okay. So 40s, 30s. You don't have the geriatric population that you see in other countries like Japan.

And so the demographics of Iran are extremely weighted towards younger people. Millennials, Gen Xers and younger. And they have VPNs, virtual private networks. They can see everything happening in the free world versus, let's say closed societies. And so I think that's what gives me a lot of hope is that these countries are going to have to evolve because young people are seeing how the rest of the world lives.

And I think that's a big part of the change. Tamath, what are your thoughts? About Iran specifically? I think demographic change and then China and demographic change slash the protests. I've said this before and I've been tweeting about this for years, but people so poorly understand demographics. Everybody thinks that we have a surplus of people and we don't.

And we need to have a positive birth rate in order to kind of continue to support the expansion of the world and GDP. And we need that. And right now, we're not in that situation. If you look at a country by country basis, a lot of these countries are facing that in a pretty cataclysmic way.

The most sensitive country to this is China. I mean, their population, at current course and speed, I think the last number is, it's going to halve by 2100. There'll be about 600 million people in China, which is unbelievably disruptive in a very negative way for them. Because you will have a lot of people who are entering the workforce having to support an entire cohort of people above them in terms of age, who are retired, etc.

So the state's going to have to get much, much more actively involved over the next 50 years in China. And then you look at other countries like Nigeria or India, who are in, you know, at the beginning of what could be a multi-decade boom. Because you have 20-year-olds that will be entering the workforce, you know, they'll effectively work for less than their older counterparts, right?

So then there'll be an incentive then to bring work on shore into those countries. And so it's going to have huge impacts because then you have rising GDP, you'll have rising expectations of living quality, you'll have rising expectations of how governments treat those people. So it's all kind of positive in general, but the world needs more people.

Let's just be clear. Especially in Western countries, we are going to be, we're not as badly off as China, but we're not far behind. Yeah, here's a quick view of China and Japan. Yeah, these same kind of, I don't know what they exactly call these charts, they're kind of like vertical histograms, and again, you know, data's hard to come by in some countries, but you know, China's starting to get top-heavy when compared to Iran, and then if you look at Japan, quite stunning.

There's just no young people left, and they live very, too much older ages than Japan. It's this longevity is one of their great strengths as a population, as a country, and so these demographics can't be fought. You're going to have a constricting economy in Japan, and their place in the world is going to be very, very different.

Okay, where do we want to go to next? You never asked my opinion on these protests in China. Oh, I was going to, usually you just talk, so go ahead. I didn't want to, I didn't know if I could throw it to you. No, I just talk. No, I usually have to fight to give my opinion.

Oh, here we go. Listen, have your agent call my agent, we'll talk about it. Okay. We'll talk about it on the All In, Nearly Did It. I have a slightly different view of what's happening in China, Jason, which is, you know, I think that the people there need to stop harassing the CCP.

You see, the Chinese Communist Party, they're the elites, they've set things up for the benefit of the people. They're not engaged in shadow banning, they're just, you know, they have a system there to, you know, to engage in censorship, to prevent abuse and harm. Yeah. Right? That's the system.

Continue. They've set up, right? And the people just need to understand that, that when they say things like, you know, when they oppose things like COVID lockdowns, like Abe Auditoria did, they need to understand that that is engaging in abuse and harm. You see? Exactly. Yes. And you know what?

They've provided re-education camps for citizens who need, you know, to maybe rethink their positions on freedom and their wages, the hours they work, and their social conditions. You're absolutely correct. China really has built a perfect model for our society. Well said, Sax. Great. Now we can move forward. Let's go.

Now we can move forward. We are finally, we're in agreement. By the way, you know that's going to get clipped out and go viral. You understand, right? No, no, no. It's a good thing. According to our elites, according to our elites, like Yoel Roth or Taylor Lorenz, to criticize them is a form of harassment.

You understand that, right? So, therefore, what the people in China are doing, specifically by opposing lockdowns, you know, they're taking the J-Pod Autoria point of view, they're engaging in harm and abuse and harassment of their betters, of their elites. I mean, the disagreement Why won't they just submit to the social credit system that has been set up for them for their benefit?

It's for their benefit. Why question it? Yeah, just accept. Accept your fate and work hard for the good of the people. Great, great points. Let's move forward. Should we talk about sales? No, I think it's actually a pretty, it's a pretty good satire. I agree. I think we have to talk about FTX.

I don't know if you saw and I, the people covering for SBF, it continues to be an absolute joke. The number of interviews that SBF is doing is absurd. But the people carrying water for him is even more offensive. I mean, if you're a criminal trying to cover up your crime, okay, we get it.

You're trying to cover up and stay out of jail. But Kevin O'Leary, who calls himself Mr. Wonderful, was on CNBC trying to defend the fact that he was given, this is stunning by the way, $15 fucking million to be a spokesperson for FTX. So the grift not only went to the press, politicians, but now commentators on CNBC, $15 million.

To put that in context, I mean, you're talking what an elite NBA player gets from Nike. This does not exist in the world. Kevin O'Leary might get $50 to $200K for speaking gigs. But nobody gets $15 million to show. Here's a 75 second clip that I don't know if you all have seen, but is unbelievably stunning.

See you on the other side of 75 seconds. If you're a defense attorney that represents someone that you know is guilty, you gotta say, yeah, well, they're innocent. But you may know they're guilty. You may know they're guilty. If you find someone, if you watch someone kill someone, yeah, they're innocent.

Don't prove them guilty. There's only the murder of my money in this case, okay? It's murder of FTX's money, in my view. Look, Joe, if you made the decision. I don't think you should be singing the blues right now at all. Oh, yes, I'm singing the blues. Why? Because your $15 million didn't pan out?

That's a lot of money to be a paid spokesperson. It's a lot of money. You didn't have to do much for that. That's found money, Kevin. That's a different decision. That's a different discussion. You can make that decision on your own, but I'm going to this point that if you want to say he's guilty before he's tried, I just don't understand it.

But it may end up costing you $15 for reputation on everything else. That's the problem. That's why I stay on this pursuit. I'm very transparent about it. I've disclosed everything I know about it. I will find out more information. If I make the credit committee, I will act as a fiduciary for everybody involved.

I will testify. I am an advocate for this industry, and this changes nothing. Just look at the numbers that came out of Circle today. I'm an investor there, too. You've got the "I lost it all" on FTX, and we have a fantastic print on Circle. The promise of crypto remains.

This will not change it. Pretty crazy. $15 million. Any thoughts on the continuing SBF saga, Sax? Well, I don't know why we should care so much about him. I mean, Kevin Leary. It's indicative, right? It's indicative of all these guys that got money from this guy. Who is he?

He's on Shark Tank. He's on Shark Tank, and he's a contributor to CNBC who's on multiple times a week. The point is, you've got the grift. I'm just trying to point out, $15 million to a CNBC commentator is just an extraordinary payoff. I've never heard of anything like that.

I don't think it's fair to pick on Kevin O'Leary per se, because there's a bunch of those guys that took money from him. A bunch of athletes did. Probably a bunch of movie stars. Pats. Republicans. Democrats. Everybody got paid by this guy. Democrats. Just like in the Twitter example, I think it's important in this case to generalize because the generalized thing is the real problem.

Look, if you want to focus on the crux of this, you have a concept in law that Saks knows better than the rest of us called fraudulent conveyance. We have example after example where it does not matter whether it was in the Bernie Madoff example, or, for example, Jason, we talked about it, the guy in LA that lost all the money, client funds playing poker.

You have to give the money back, especially if it was fraudulently conveyed to you. Can you explain this in detail for a second so the audience understands? Well, my understanding, which is very basic, and I think David can probably do a much better job, is the following, which is if you get money some way, but it comes from somebody who fraudulently acquired that money, you have to give the money back.

So in this example, what it would mean is if that they can show that that $15 million that this guy got came from SBF basically raiding the piggy bank of user accounts, he's going to have to pay the money back. Just like, for example, in the Madoff fraud, the folks that went to find the money were able to go back to folks that actually redeemed, even the beginning early ones, and said, "I understand that you didn't know any better, but this was fraudulently conveyed to you, so we need the money back." And they got the money back.

In that case, if they had put a million in, and it grew to $3 million, they got their million principal back, but the $2 million in gains, which were ill gotten, had to be returned. So as I understand it, based on just what I've read, that there's a 90-day rule around contributions, meaning that if, I think this has to do with the bankruptcy, that if he donated money within 90 days, then that can be unwound.

So, yeah, but I do think it creates potentially a powerful incentive here by politicians and various political groups for him not to be convicted of fraud, for him to be able to plead this out into some sort of negligence, because they don't have to give the money back. They keep the bag!

What an incredible insight. Well, this is what I think is so interesting about the Kevin O'Leary thing. It's not about Kevin O'Leary, but it's about the fact that the money was spread around so widely, and into such deep trenches of the regulatory world, society, influencers, and basically, I think the guy cemented this, he thought that which I think, by the way, is a really interesting product of the crypto ecosystem and the model that so many kind of crypto businesses have engaged in over the years, which is if you can fester the belief, then there is a business.

If you cannot fester the belief, there is no business. That there isn't a fundamental productivity driver. It's about building a belief system. And you can buy a belief system if you can take money that people have given you, you can embed it in influencers and celebrities and politicians and regulators, and if you give it to enough of these people, and you give enough of it to them, maybe that belief system solidifies and your thing becomes real.

Which is a classic grift technique, by the way, in the grifters. Oh, tell us all about it, Jacob. Yeah, what you do is you have this No, no, it's the patina, it's this, you know, you look like you're incredibly rich, you're going to fancy restaurants, you're wearing an expensive suit, you're getting in a sports car, and then you own some palazzo, whatever, and then some other rich person comes and you get them to invest in something and then you abscond with the money.

But they see all the accoutrements, you check all the boxes, your parents were Stanford, you went to MIT, and you are donating large sums of money, and you got this big table at the club, and you got a penthouse, everybody starts to feel, well, might is right, you got the wealth, there might be some agony.

How would you guys feel? Like, how would you guys feel about, honestly, honestly, no, backing a CEO of a growth stage company that you put your firm's money into who lives in a $130 million house and has not yet exited the business? Yeah, absolute alarm bells everywhere. Never done it.

And this is why I'm not a fan of secondary sales. Let me ask you guys a question. Or huge secondary sales. Yeah, let me ask you guys a question. Do you think that a billion dollars of dark money could stop a red wave? Just asking for a friend. A billion dollars in dark money.

Do you think it was over-weighted to Democrats? No, honestly, do you think it's over-weighted? Yes, his mother was a huge Democratic bundler. Yeah. And moreover, the specific politicians he needed to influence, yes, there were some Republicans, but by and large, it was the SEC. So you're the first person to make this claim.

I want to say, did you hear it here first on the OlliPod, David Sachs making the declaration that the red wave was stopped because of... Well, let me ask you a follow-up question. What do you think would have more impact on our election? Enormous amounts of dark money going to Democrats or extensive shadow banning of conservative influencers?

Which one do you think would have a bigger impact? And hold on a second, in a 50-50 country where, I mean, the scales are like balanced, where these elections are just a few thousand votes. What do you think the result is going to be if we actually have a level playing field to get rid of this swindler's dark money?

Yeah, that's an interesting question. Let me add a thing to that. What would have a bigger impact? This subversion of covert voices... I think this is great, except for when you guys in your fight, like... Or taking away a woman's right to choose after 50 years of giving it to them.

Which would have a bigger impact on the red wave? That did have a big impact, but I think we're going to move past that. I think we're going to move past that. Yeah, all right. Great, yeah. Great, great strategic move. Sachs, what do you think about this cinema, Kyrsten Cinema flipping to independent?

Do you think that's a big deal? I think it's really interesting. I think it's actually a very shrewd move on her part. Purple. She's gone purple. So first of all, I think she's great. You know... Yeah, just tell us about her, Sachs. No, he... Well, she's great. She's... She is the senator from Arizona, formerly Democrat, now independent, who is in the mold of, you know, John McCain, who was a former senator from Arizona.

Sort of this maverick independent, and she does not kowtow to her party orthodoxy. And when Biden wanted to pass three and a half trillion of Build Back Better spending, she, along with Manchin, opposed it. And I think, save the administration from this gigantic boondoggle that would have made inflation much, much worse.

Now, Manchin got all the credit, but she was equally responsible for putting a hold on that, and then as a result, they only did the 750 billion inflation reduction act. So, she's willing to buck her own party. Now, as a result of that, I think they were planning on...

She was going to get primaried. That the progressive wing of the party was planning on primarying her. And by moving to an independent, in a sense, she preempts that. Because what she's now saying is... She's now sort of like, you know, Bernie Sanders is an independent, or this guy Angus King from Maine.

They still caucus with the Democrats, but they're independents, and the Democrats don't run candidates against them. Because they know that if they do, you'll have a Republican, a Democrat, an independent, and the Democrats and the independents will split the vote, and the Republican will win. So, basically, she's now daring the Democrats, "Hey, if you want to run a candidate against me, I'm not going to sit around and get primaried by them.

You go ahead and run somebody, but then we're both going to lose to the Republican." That's what's smart about it, is I think she's daring Schumer to run somebody against her. It's also interesting, she's the only member of Congress I've read that's non-theist, which is kind of like atheist.

She doesn't talk about God or doesn't believe in God, and I think she's the first openly bisexual member of Congress. She's a maverick. Certainly. Saks, do you think she held up on making this decision until after that Georgia Senate runoff election finished, and do you think that it influenced the decision?

I don't know, but I think that the key consideration here for her is... Well, imagine if she doesn't make this move now, okay? And then in two years, well, I guess really next year, she gets primaried, okay? And then what if she loses the primary? It's going to be very hard for her to run as an independent.

At that point, it'll look like sour grapes or loser, right? But if she goes independent now, she's saying, "Listen, I'm running as an independent no matter what. The question you have to make, the Democratic Party, is whether to support me or basically tank this election and throw it to the Republicans." Will we see more of this purple approach?

Well, I was just going to ask you, what does this mean for Joe Manchin? Well, I don't think Joe Manchin has this problem, and I'll tell you why. Because West Virginia, unlike Arizona, is like a plus 22 red state. Joe Manchin is the only politician in that state who could win that seat for the Democrats.

When Joe Manchin retires, that seat is going Republican. And Schumer knows this, the Democrats know this, they think they're lucky stars every day that they got Joe Manchin, because otherwise that would be a Republican seat. And so, look, all this stuff about how the progressives were upset with Manchin and all that papapalooza he got, that may be the sort of progressive wing is going to say that publicly, but the smart Democrats know that they're very lucky to have a politician like Joe Manchin on their side of the aisle.

I've got to ask a question to you, Chamath. Why do Democrats, why are they, it seems to be so anti-moderate Democrats, why are they so resistant to the concept of a moderate Democrat when obviously moderate Democrats seem to have an advantage in these elections? Well, no, I think David described it well, which is that in many of the seats, this is both true for Republicans and for Democrats, you're not really competing in a general election, you're competing in a primary, and if you win a primary, you're probably going to win.

So, like, you know, if you're in Mississippi, for example, you just have to win the Republican primary. Nothing else matters. And then you're just going to skate to victory. And so the real question is who votes in those are different oftentimes than who votes in the general. And this is why you get this dispersion that's happening where folks seem to be getting more and more extreme.

It's reflecting the soundbites that those primary voters want to hear. And this is the big problem that we have. And that's why, like, if you have a bunch of this, you know, rank choice voting, or, you know, these other kinds of methods, it starts to clean that up so that you move people more into the moderate middle.

But that's why that's why you have this crazy stuff happening. All right, everybody, this has been another amazing episode of the all in podcast for the dictator, the Sultan of science and David Sachs. I am Jay cow. We'll see you next time. Bye bye. Let your winners ride. Rain Man David Sachs And it said we open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it.

Love you. Queen of King. Besties are gone. My dog taking a notice in your driveway. Oh, my natural media. Just get a room and just have one big huge or because they're all just like this like sexual tension that they just need to release somehow. You're a B. We need to get Merck.

I'm going. (Hairdryer sound)