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

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

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Jason Calacanis?

  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.

• 0:11Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Surprise bestie pod.

• 0:14Jason Calacanis?

  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.

• 0:27Jason Calacanis?

  He's got two.

• 0:35David Sacks?

  Special censorship edition. Warning, warning.

• 0:43Jason Calacanis?

  We hit a new low in terms of people needing to be heard.

• 0:46Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Oh my god.

• 0:47Jason Calacanis?

  By the way, Tremont Sacks's 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 that interrupt.

• 1:04Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Who, Daniel? Is Daniel grinding you for more minutes?

• 1:06Jason Calacanis?

  Daniel's grinding you for more minutes.

• 1:08David Sacks?

  I go for quality over quantity.

• 1:10Jason Calacanis?

  Absolutely. Okay. Well, this week's gonna be, I mean, what a complete disaster of a week.

• 1:19Jason Calacanis?

  Is there no other way to explain what is happening right now?

• 1:22Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Every day is a dumpster fire.

• 1:24Jason Calacanis?

  It's a huge dumpster fire.

• 1:29Jason Calacanis?

  So here we are. We're three weeks out from the election and somebody's emails have, a Democrat's emails have been leaked again, potentially. But last time, we had an investigation by the FBI, and then that might have infected, impacted the election. This time, we have a whole different brouhaha. Apparently Hunter Biden, who Loves to smoke crack and has a serious drug problem. This 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.

• 2:13Jason Calacanis?

  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 made, he never picked them up. That's a little suspicious. The hard drives wind up with Rudy Giuliani and the FBI. And anyway, what they say is that Hunter Biden, which we kind of know is a grifter who traded on his last name to get big consulting deals. I don't know what board anybody here has been on that pays 50,000 a month, but it's obviously gnarly stuff. But the fallout from it was the big story. I went to tweet the story and it wouldn't let me tweet the story. So the literal New York Post was banned by Twitter.

• 2:57Jason Calacanis?

  At the same time, Facebook put a warning on it. So let's just put it out there. You know, Sax, your guys are losing pretty badly in this election and so we'll go to our token GOP'er. What do you think? Is this? Let's, let's take this in two parts. One, what do you, what did they think the chances that this is fake news or real news or something in between? And then let's get into Twitter's insane decision to block the URL.

• 3:22David Sacks?

  Yeah, I mean, so, so first of all, so I, I think this whole thing is a tragedy of errors on the part of sort of everyone involved. I think the New York Post story stinks. I don't think it, 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

• 4:05David Sacks?

  a cascade of disasters that have led to 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, the story about how the hard drive ends up with the reporters makes no sense. Even today, Giuliani was making up new explanations for how it got there. It's now being widely speculated that this was the, that the content came from the results of a hack, maybe involving foreign actors, that this whole idea that it came from this sort of hard drive that he left at a repair

• 4:47David Sacks?

  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 exec and Joe Biden. And the Biden campaign has denied 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.

• 5:31Jason Calacanis?

  That's the thing that obviously looks crazy. They now have given the GOP, the right, the extreme right, the belief that the, the technology companies are now on the side of the left, whereas last time they were on the side of the right, I think, right? Facebook was supposed to be on the side of the right last time. So, Shabbat, you worked at Facebook famously for many years. What are your thoughts?

• 5:55Chamath Palihapitiya?

  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

• 6:05Jason Calacanis?

  A combination, yes.

• 6:06Chamath Palihapitiya?

  A combination. And then Facebook today came out and said, you know, before we could take it down, it had been distributed or read 300,000 times.

• 6:17Chamath Palihapitiya?

  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, you know, put into the high court in

• 6:58Chamath Palihapitiya?

  a matter of days or whatever, it's only a matter of time until the right case is thoughtfully prepared along those guardrails that Clarence Thomas defined. And it'll get, you know, fast-tracked through to the Supreme Court. But if I was a betting man, which I am, I think that Section 230 is, their days are numbered, and Facebook, Twitter, Google, all these companies are going to have to look more like newspapers and television stations.

• 7:26Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so before we go to your Friedberg, I'm just gonna 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 content provider." So what this basically means is, if you put a blog post up and people comment on it, you're not responsible for their comments. Or if you're a medium and you host a blog, you're not responsible for the comments of that person. It is that person's. It makes complete logical sense.

• 8:11Jason Calacanis?

  The entire internet was based off of this, that platforms are not responsible for what people contribute to those platforms. That's how publishing works. If you look at the internet's paper...

• 8:22Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But again, let's build on this. When that law was originally written, we had no... Conception of social distribution and algorithmic feeds that basically pumped content and increased the volume on those things. So what you have now is really no different than if, you know, you created a show on Netflix or HBO or CBS and put it out there. If that stuff contained, you know, something that was really offensive, those companies are on the hook. Did they make it? No. Did they distribute it? Yes. And it's the

• 8:53Jason Calacanis?

  But here's the difference.

• 8:54Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It's the active 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.

• 9:11Jason Calacanis?

  But isn't this a bad analogy Netflix? Shouldn't it the analogy be the person who makes film stock? Or the person who makes the camera, or the person who develops the film, not the person who distributes it.

• 9:22Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, because that

• 9:23Jason Calacanis?

  A limited amount of shows on Netflix, you can police all of them. You can't police everything written.

• 9:28David Sacks?

  Netflix is making editorial decisions about which shows to publish, just like, you know, a magazine makes editorial decisions about which articles to publish. They are clearly publishers. But the the communications DCX section 230, the original distinction, I mean, if you want to think about like in offline terms for a second. You've got you've got this idea of publishers and distributors, right? That's a fundamental dichotomy. A magazine would be a publisher. The newsstand on which it appears is a distributor. It shouldn't be liable. If there's if there's a 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.

• 10:11David Sacks?

  That was that was the original offline law that was then kind of ported over into section 230. It made a lot of sense without this. I mean, I think it was a really visionary provision. It was passed in 1996. Without that, every time that somebody

• 10:27David Sacks?

  Sends an email that, you know, potentially created a legal issue. You know, Gmail could have been liable.

• 10:35Jason Calacanis?

  Friedberg, is it, what's the right analogy? When people post to the internet, is that the, is the analogy paper or film stock? Is it the newsstand or is it the publisher?

• 10:45David Friedberg?

  So remember, like what Sax is pointing out is this was passed in 1996. So think back to 1996 when you would create some content, right? And the term around that time was user generated content, right? You guys remember this, like the early days. It was like the big 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, you know, a reason for other consumers to want to come to our websites. So users could create content, you know, Blogger was an early kind of user generated content service. You could create a blog post, you could post it and people would show up. The problem with Blogger or the challenge was distribution or syndication, right?

• 11:27David Friedberg?

  How do I, now I've posted my content, how do I as that content creator get people to read my content? And you'd have to send people like a link to a website, a link to a webpage 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, you know, I think the analogy in the offline sense.

• 11:50Jason Calacanis?

  Via the algorithm is what you're saying, to be clear.

• 11:53David Friedberg?

  Via the algorithm and, you know, YouTube realized that if they showed you videos that they think that you'll click on, they'll keep you on YouTube longer and make more money from ads. So it keeps the cycle going and so they optimize 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 and not just boring, ordinary stuff. And so this sort of content, which the New York Post sells a lot of, is the sort of stuff that rises to the top of those algorithms naturally because of the way they operate. Now, if a magazine stand were to put those newspapers, using the offline analogy, on the front of their magazine stand and told people walking down the street, hey, you guys should check these out, you know, top of the news is Hunter Biden smoking crack

• 12:38David Friedberg?

  with a hooker, people would, you know, probably stop. But I think the question is, should they be liable? Now, in, I think 2000, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act was passed. And that act basically created a process by which folks who felt like, and it was related to copyright, but I think the analogy is similar. If you thought that your content was copyrighted and was being put up falsely or put up without your permission, you could make a claim to one of those platforms to get your content pulled down. And I think the question is, is there some sort of analogy around libel content or false or misleading content that maybe this evolves into law where there's a process by which platforms can kind of be challenged on what they're showing, much like they are with the DMCA takedown notices.

• 13:23Jason Calacanis?

  So, Jamal.

• 13:24Chamath Palihapitiya?

  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.

• 14:03Jason Calacanis?

  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 algorithm at Facebook.

• 14:11Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You cannot 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, you can debate which signals they decide to use, but it is their choice.

• 14:25David Sacks?

  Well, but if the signals are the user's own clicks, then I would argue that's still just user-generated content.

• 14:33Chamath Palihapitiya?

  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.

• 15:00Jason Calacanis?

  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...

• 15:17Chamath Palihapitiya?

  ARCRON, as we used to call it back in the day, with the newest thing up top, that would be, uh, just a, I mean, so maybe we should be not getting rid of 230. We should be talking to these politicians about algorithms equal publisher. So the publisher at the New York Post is the same as the algorithm. I like this as a, as a better framework.

• 15:36David Sacks?

  Well, yeah, so, so Senator Tom Cotton, you know, who's a Republican, he tweeted in response to the, the New York Post censorship, "Look, if you guys are going to act like publishers, we're going to treat you like publishers." So that, that's not modifying Section 230. That's just saying you're not going to qualify for Section 230 protection anymore if you're going to make all these editorial decisions. I would argue that these decisions they're making about censoring specific articles, and by the way, it's a total double standard because, you know, when, when Trump's tax returns came out a week or two ago, uh, where was the censorship of that? That was, wasn't that hack material? I mean, that was material that found its way to the New York Times without Trump's consent. By the way, so were the Pentagon Papers. I mean, you cannot apply this standard, this, this idea that we're going to prohibit links to articles.

• 16:21Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But you're proving the point. These people are publishers.

• 16:23David Sacks?

  No, I know, I know, well, well, hold on. I'm, I'm saying, I'm saying if they make editorial decisions, they're publishers. I think there's a way for them to employ speech neutral rules and remain distributors. So I would be, I would, I would have a little bit of, of, of an issue with you. I would say the reason why they're going to fall into this trap of calling publishers is because of their own desire to censor, their own biases. They can't.

• 16:49Chamath Palihapitiya?

  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%.

• 17:06David Friedberg?

  90% for sure. People wouldn't.

• 17:08Chamath Palihapitiya?

  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 100 million in a reverse chronological feed, because you would not be able to place ads in any coherent valuable way. There would be zero click-throughs and the ads would be just worthless. Otherwise, they should do it now. If you could keep all the revenue and you could be reverse chronological, right, and have the same market cap, just do it and be under safe harbor so that you're not attacked every day. How fun is it to be sitting there and being attacked every single day?

• 17:42Jason Calacanis?

  By both sides.

• 17:43Chamath Palihapitiya?

  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. It's all market cap driven.

• 17:54David Sacks?

  Maybe they should go back to the straight reverse con feed and maybe you're right that the, 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 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

• 18:36David Sacks?

  knowing that, oh, okay, you know, Chamath likes, you know, these three magazines. Here's a new one. Maybe he'll like this and he pulls it aside for you. That would not subject him to publisher liability, even though he's doing some curation. He's not involved in the content curation. I would argue that if the, the algorithms proceed in a speech neutral way, which is just to say they're going to look at your clicks and then based on your own revealed preferences, suggest other things for you to look at. I don't think that makes you a publisher necessarily.

• 19:05Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And I think if it was that.

• 19:06David Sacks?

  But if you, if you do, if you do put your finger, if these engineers are putting their thumb on the scale and, and pushing the algorithm towards certain specific kinds of content, that may cross over.

• 19:18Chamath Palihapitiya?

  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.

• 19:44David Sacks?

  Yeah.

• 19:45Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So the reality is that these guys are making publishing decisions.

• 19:50Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And you are right, David, that the law back in the day, it didn't scale to the newspaper owner. But you know what? In 1796, colored people were three fifths of a human, and we figured out a way to change the law. So I'm pretty sure we can change the law here, too. And I think what's going to happen is you should be allowed to be algorithmic, but then you should live and die by the same rules as everybody else. Otherwise, that is what's really anti-competitive, 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.

• 20:25David Friedberg?

  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 discriminatory function of that content.

• 20:44Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Here's the problem. Let's take, for example, Instagram reels. Can you manipulate content through reels? Yes. Now, as the person that provides that tool to create content that theoretically could be violating other people's copyright, or 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,

• 21:28Chamath Palihapitiya?

  and that sometimes we start with good intentions, and the laws just need to change.

• 21:33David Sacks?

  Well, ironically, Chamath, you're making a point that Clarence Thomas made, Justice Thomas, made in his recent filing, where he said that if you are acting as both a publisher and a distributor, you need to be subject to publisher liability, which means peeling back Section 230. And moreover, you may not even be the primary creator. of the content if you're merely a secondary creator if you're someone who has a hand in the content um then you are you're a creator you're a publisher and therefore you should lose section 230 protection that is basically what he said if you if your argument is that the algorithms make you a content creator effectively

• 22:12Jason Calacanis?

  and the tools algorithms and tools well the other thing is you know what you have the algorithm

• 22:18Chamath Palihapitiya?

  because David

• 22:19Jason Calacanis?

  you have the tools but you also have monetization guys there's monetization involved in the YouTube example they are helping you

• 22:26David Sacks?

  we're having a serious conversation Jason let's not let's not go off on that no I'm just kidding no but but Chamath I mean this goes back to the politics makes makes strange bedfellows point um I mean I think a lot of the conservatives are actually making the point you're making which is that these social media sites are involved in publishing

• 22:44Chamath Palihapitiya?

  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

• 22:53David Friedberg?

  so do you trust their decision to pull down QAnon groups and what they call hate groups

• 22:59Chamath Palihapitiya?

  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

• 23:08David Friedberg?

  wearing masks was a good idea right I mean

• 23:10Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I I don't want these people in charge of any of this stuff and to the extent that they are I want them to be liable and culpable to defend their decisions

• 23:19David Friedberg?

  so Chamath your ideal nonprofit social media service would be a chronological feed of any content anyone wants to publish that anyone can browse and read

• 23:29Chamath Palihapitiya?

  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

• 23:50David Friedberg?

  What if they didn't take a hand in it and they follow the Reddit model and it's just upvoting that decides what content rises to the top?

• 23:57Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I suspect that so Reddit has just a different problem, which is a sort of like, you know, a decency problem and a different class of law.

• 24:06David Friedberg?

  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.

• 24:13Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Well, they did ban certain topics, so...

• 24:15David Friedberg?

  They did recently, but like, assume they didn't, right? And it was just purely like upvoted consumer and not algorithmic.

• 24:20Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think it's very hard to pin... It feels like a platform to me. I think it's very hard to pin a Section 230 claim on Reddit, as easy as it is YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter.

• 24:32David Friedberg?

  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...

• 24:41Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It's not comfortable, this is what I'm saying. What I know, all I want to know is, what am I getting when I go here? And if what I'm getting is a subjective function, where they are maximizing revenue, which means that I can't necessarily trust the content I get, as long as I know that and as long as there's recourse for me, I'm very fine to use YouTube and Twitter and Facebook. What I think is unfair is to not know that there's a subjective function, confuse it with an objective function, go on with your life, end up in the state that we're in now, where nobody is happy and everybody is throwing barbs, and you have no solution.

• 25:21David Friedberg?

  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 dog picking up shit. You know, 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.

• 25:40Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think all of that is good, but I, it's all, it all should be done eyes wide open, where in these corner cases, the people that feel like some sort of right or privilege or has been violated or some overstepping has occurred, they should have some legal recourse and they should be, they should be on the record. mechanism to disambiguate all that.

• 26:02Jason Calacanis?

  Wait, hold on a second. Let me just ask this one question, David. Would this be alleviated if the algorithm was less of a black box? If we could just say, hey, we need these algorithms to be, so that's not a solution. And then what is this? And I want to hear David's opinion about that algorithm. 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 Twitter's case.

• 26:29David Sacks?

  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 don't trust them. I don't want that kind of power residing in really two people's hands. Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey. I don't, I don't trust them and I don't want them to have that kind of power. But that where I disagree is if you repeal section 230, you're going to make the situation infinitely worse. Because section two, what is the response of these companies going to be? Corporate risk aversion is going to cause them to want to hire hundreds of low level employees, basically millennials, to sit there making judgments about what content might be defamatory,

• 27:14David Sacks?

  might cause a lawsuit. They're going to be taking down content all over the place.

• 27:19Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And you know what will happen?

• 27:20David Sacks?

  That's going to be a worse world.

• 27:21Chamath Palihapitiya?

  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.

• 27:30David Sacks?

  How will they, how will they lose audience? I mean, I think what will happen is you'll have a torrent of lawsuits. Anytime somebody has a potential lawsuit based on.

• 27:40Jason Calacanis?

  You know, this reminds me of like trying to police speech at a dinner party. Like, this is, we've never existed at a scale. This has never existed at the scale.

• 27:49Chamath Palihapitiya?

  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?

• 27:55David Sacks?

  I don't think that's what we're doing. So for me, I'm trying to work back from how do we preserve the open internet?

• 28:01Chamath Palihapitiya?

  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.

• 28:29Jason Calacanis?

  There's nothing wrong with that.

• 28:30David Sacks?

  Maybe the only disagreement here is that I think that code can be written and algorithms can be written in a speech-neutral way so that the distributors don't cross over the lines becoming publishers. I fully agree with you that these sites should not be publishers. The reason why the New York Post story has really taken off.

• 28:48Jason Calacanis?

  They should be platforms.

• 28:49David Sacks?

  They should be platforms, and they crossed 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.

• 29:15David Friedberg?

  They're picking and choosing who they don't want to give distribution to.

• 29:18Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, we all agree on that piece. They should not be the arbiter of what...

• 29:22David Sacks?

  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.

• 29:31Jason Calacanis?

  Nobody is safe.

• 29:32David Sacks?

  My point is...

• 29:33David Friedberg?

  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 and shouldn't be on the platform.

• 30:01Jason Calacanis?

  Absolutely.

• 30:02David Friedberg?

  And it is the simple choice that they chose an article to exclude regardless of the reason and the background, because there are many articles like it that aren't being excluded. And that alone speaks to the hole in the system as kind of Sax is pointing.

• 30:14David Sacks?

  Well, it's because they have too much power and they're unaware of their own biases. They can't see this action for what it so clearly was. It was a knee-jerk reaction on the part of employees at Twitter and Facebook to 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.

• 30:39David Friedberg?

  J Cal is about to block you so he can keep the Biden campaign strong and not have your

• 30:44Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I would say I've been red pilled actually, the last 24 hours have been red pilling for me. I gotta say David, I agree with you because like I thought I thought that both things were crossing the line. Like, meaning either you publish them both, or you censor them both. And there are very legitimate reasons where you could be on either side, but to choose one and not do the other. It just, again, it creates for me uncertainty and I don't like uncertainty and I really don't like the idea that some nameless, faceless person in one of these organizations is all of a sudden going to decide for me. Knowledge and information.

• 31:21David Friedberg?

  The journalistic standard becomes a slippery slope to nowhere, right? Like at that point, you're just like, what is true, what is not true? What is opinion, what is not opinion, what is, you know, how do I validate whether this fucking laptop came from this guy or this guy or this guy? It's a slippery, how are you ever going to resolve that across billions of articles a day?

• 31:39Jason Calacanis?

  Standards would be the answer. And New York Post has lower standards.

• 31:44David Sacks?

  Right, and so let's look at how slippery the slope has become. Just a week ago, I mean, literally a week ago, Mark Zuckerberg put out a statement explaining why Facebook was gonna censor a Holocaust denial.

• 31:56Jason Calacanis?

  Wow, he really went on a limb, huh David?

• 31:58David Sacks?

  Well, it's, I think, no, no, no, my point is, no, but you're missing my point. My point is, he actually put out a multi-paragraph, well-reasoned statement.

• 32:09Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Multi-paragraph, you have three paragraphs about the Holocaust is bad? Wow, congrats, Zuckerberg.

• 32:14David Sacks?

  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 gonna censor something. And I think, you know, people can come down, you could be like a Skokie ACLU liberal and oppose it. Or, you know, you could say, look, common sense dictates that you would 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.

• 32:58David Sacks?

  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, um, and this is why I think these guys are really in hot water. Whatever, whatever, um, you know, whatever controversy there was about Section 230 before, and there was already a lot of rumblings in DC about modifying this, they have made things 10 times worse. I mean, as, as someone who's actually a defender of Section 230, I wish Dorsey and Zuckerberg weren't making these blunders, because I think they're going to ruin the open internet for everyone.

• 33:33Jason Calacanis?

  Super blundered. I'll tell you what was an even bigger blunder for, or an equal blunder for me last night. I don't know if you guys had this experience, but I was trying to figure out what the consensus view on the Biden, Hunter Biden story was. And I went to Rachel Maddow and The Last Word and Anderson Cooper. And there was a media blackout last night. I couldn't find one left-leaning, or CNN, if that is even in the center. I don't think they're the center anymore 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

• 34:15Jason Calacanis?

  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, uh, or to Anderson Cooper, or you go to the New York Times, it's not there either. And then Drudge didn't have it for a day.

• 34:29Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You're, you're bringing up something so important. So think about what you're really talking about, Jason. There was a first order reaction that was misplaced and not rooted in anything that was really scalable or justifiable. Then, everybody has to deal with the second and third order reactions. The left-leaning media outlets circle the wagons. The right-leaning media outlets are, are up in arms. Nobody is happy. Both look like they're misleading. And then now, if you're a person in the middle, for example, what was, 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,

• 35:15Chamath Palihapitiya?

  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.

• 35:41Jason Calacanis?

  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-

• 36:09David Friedberg?

  Yeah, 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. Like, I like to be stimulated with titillating information and, you know, interesting things that, for whatever reason, I'm gonna, you know, want-

• 36:23Jason Calacanis?

  Click on again. You like that experience of jumping down the rabbit hole.

• 36:25David Friedberg?

  Well, 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 identifies activates me because I clicked on it. And therefore, I'm going to, you know, 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, I mean, 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, Tomás' point, which is the ultimate incentive,

• 37:08David Friedberg?

  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. And that's what consumers want.

• 37:20Jason Calacanis?

  All right, let's, let's give Sacks 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, Sacks. Il Duce.

• 37:54David Sacks?

  It was very Il Duce.

• 37:55Jason Calacanis?

  Il Duce.

• 37:56David Sacks?

  It was very Il Duce.

• 37:58Jason Calacanis?

  Il Duce?

• 37:59David Sacks?

  No, but it was, it was, it was, it was very predictable. It was, 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, was a moral failing, he was negligent. And so it, he, and 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, the media set up Trump to kind of exceed

• 38:40David Sacks?

  expectations. But I, but, but I do think, you know, it is noteworthy that Trump was cured so quickly with the use of these, you know, coronal 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, it's, it's like the, the media doesn't want to admit anything that is potentially helpful to Trump. But you have to say that at this point, we have very effective treatments for COVID. They may not be completely distributed yet.

• 39:19David Sacks?

  Uh, Trump obviously had access to them that the rest of us don't have. But it feels to me like we are really winding down on the whole, the whole COVID thing.

• 39:27Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Can I ask a question? Is it, has, have they published the blow by blow Tik Tok of exactly what he got when? Um, no, they haven't, right? I would love, I would love to have that because I think all Americans deserve to have that.

• 39:41David Friedberg?

  They know, they know what his dosage was and they said what day he got it on the remdesivir. He got several doses. It said what days he got the antibody treatment.

• 39:49Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I just, I just want to print that out and keep it as a folded in my pocket just in case.

• 39:55David Sacks?

  Oh, we know what to take now. We know what to take if we get sick, right?

• 39:58Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah. Well, the question is, could we get it?

• 40:00David Friedberg?

  But even independent of that, right? Like, um, I think people love anecdote. 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, 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, 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.

• 40:37David Friedberg?

  It's very hard to Sacks's point for the storytelling that has kind of been used to keep people at home and, and manage kind of, and create this, this expectation of severity of this crisis, et cetera. Um, 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 90, 90% chance he'll be out of the hospital in three days. When it happened, it was a shocking moment. Um, and it really hit that narrative upside down, right? Like it was just like.

• 41:03David Sacks?

  Well, can we, can we show that there was a tweet recently providing the statistics on what the real infection fatality rate was for COVID?

• 41:12Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah, I saw it.

• 41:13David Friedberg?

  It's, it's about half a percent, point four, and that's across, you know, the whole spectrum. But like in, in anyone under 75 years old, you've got the number, right, Sacks?

• 41:22David Sacks?

  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 retweeted it.

• 41:28Jason Calacanis?

  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 seventy-five.

• 41:35David Friedberg?

  Way less than point one.

• 41:36Jason Calacanis?

  Way, yeah, it's, it's, it was, um, I thought the IFR was a lot less severe than.

• 41:42David Friedberg?

  That, that IFR is also distorted, you know, based on the seroprevalence study that was just published. You can take that number that's published and divide it by about three, uh, three to five.

• 41:53Jason Calacanis?

  Why?

• 41:54David Friedberg?

  To get the true IFR, 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, um, uh, in JAMA a few weeks ago where they took dialysis patients. And they measured, and they get blood from these dialysis patients and they measured COVID antibodies, uh, in these patients. And they showed that in the Northeast, thirty percent of people, twenty-seven point something percent of people have already had COVID. Uh, it's an incredible fact.

• 42:21Jason Calacanis?

  Wow.

• 42:22David Friedberg?

  And, and in the West, uh, the number is close in Western states, they've kind of got it all written up in this paper and they did a great job with the paper, it's about three percent. Um, but, uh, in aggregate across the United States, it's a, this was a few weeks ago, so nowadays it's, it was a ten point five percent, I think, so it's probably closer to twelve percent now of people have already had COVID. And so then if you assume that number, right, I mean, that's thirty 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 number is right.

• 42:52Jason Calacanis?

  It could be a little inflated, right, people who died with COVID as opposed to from COVID.

• 42:57David Friedberg?

  Be conservative and assume that it's right, right, I mean, if I look in the United States.

• 43:00Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, it's two hundred seventeen thousand, eight million cases, but the real case is, is thirty million.

• 43:05David Friedberg?

  Thirty million, and that's where you, that's where you end up with this like, you know, adjusted IFR, true IFR of, um,

• 43:12Jason Calacanis?

  Point one.

• 43:13David Friedberg?

  Yeah, like very, very, point one percent, point oh seven percent, or point seven percent, sorry. Um.

• 43:23David Sacks?

  By the way, my, my tweets aren't loading right now, so.

• 43:26Jason Calacanis?

  I think Trump just, uh, took the TikTok decree and he just crossed that TikTok and put Twitter and he just shut Twitter down. What, what, what, is the TikTok thing done? Yeah, who knows, that was like three weeks ago, it doesn't matter anymore, Trump.

• 43:42Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Was there a second debate?

• 43:45Jason Calacanis?

  There's tonight, there's going to be two town halls. Trump refused to do a Zoom with, or you know, a Zoom 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 halls. 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.

• 44:26Jason Calacanis?

  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.

• 44:49Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I'll be, I won't be watching either. I cannot wait for this election to be over. How many days until November 3rd? We are like 15 days.

• 44:57Jason Calacanis?

  18 and a wake up?

• 44:58Chamath Palihapitiya?

  18 days, my gosh.

• 44:59Jason Calacanis?

  Maybe 18.

• 45:00David Sacks?

  Yeah.

• 45:01Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Let us just get this over with.

• 45:03Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 45:04David Sacks?

  I know, we're all sick of it. I, I do feel like, I mean, it's, the polls are now showing that Biden is up by as much as 17. I mean, things have really continued 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

• 45:48David Sacks?

  has been working so far is because Trump just eats up all the oxygen and he's making it a referendum on him, which I think he'll lose if he keeps doing it that way.

• 45:56Jason Calacanis?

  You know what they say, Sax, 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. But that is exhausting. It's now exhausting. I want to change topics.

• 46:13Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I would like to ask David to explain his tweet related to Prop 13.

• 46:21David Sacks?

  Or 15, yeah, 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 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 who've owned their their commercial property for a long time. You know, if you're a small business and you've

• 47:05David Sacks?

  owned your your store or whatever for 20, 30 years, all of a sudden you're going to get your taxes are going to get reassessed at the new fair market value. But, you know, I just think there's the 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 wealth is so increasingly

• 47:48David Sacks?

  despised in this country, because tech billionaires are funding such stupid causes.

• 47:54Jason Calacanis?

  To explain this to people who don't know, in California, if you bought your house in 1970 for $50,000, the 1% tax you pay on it is $500. That house might be worth 5 million today if it was in Atherton. And so you're still paying what would have been a $50,000 tax bill is a $500 tax bill. So they're starting with commercial spaces.

• 48:15Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And Jason, sorry, no, Jason. And you can pass it off to your kids.

• 48:19Jason Calacanis?

  At that cost basis.

• 48:20Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 48:21Jason Calacanis?

  So this is why you have two old people living in a five bedroom.

• 48:24David Sacks?

  Right.

• 48:25David Friedberg?

  It caps the rate increase of the tax increase every year.

• 48:29David Sacks?

  There's, there's, there.

• 48:31David Friedberg?

  I guess that's the counter argument.

• 48:33David Sacks?

  If you didn't have Prop 13, no, hold on. If you didn't have, let me just explain it 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 more than a decade or two, probably could no longer afford to live in their house.

• 48:55David Friedberg?

  But the reality is people are mortgaging that asset tax to access capital that they're using and investing in different things. Whether it's, that's fueling the economy, right? So, I mean, the libertarian point of view might be less taxes is good because in this particular case, that building can still be used by that resident to buy stuff. They can take a mortgage out and they can go spend that money versus having that money eaten up by property taxes, which just goes to government.

• 49:21David Sacks?

  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. What I mean by structural reform, well, you got to look at, well, who controls the system? And it's really the government employee unions

• 50:04David Sacks?

  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. Um, 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,

• 50:44David Sacks?

  look, we need some structural reforms here. We need some caps on the rate of growth in spending. We need some pension reforms. In exchange for that, as part of a grand bargain, you might get some reforms to Prop 13. But just to give away one of the only cards we have in negotiating with these powerful special interests for no reason, I just think it's dumb, you know?

• 51:06Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Do you think that Zuck was tricked? Or what do you think?

• 51:09David Sacks?

  I think he's probably got, I, look, I don't really know, but I don't know how anything can suck. And I've defended him on this podcast a lot, basically on, on the speech issue. But I think what it is, he's got some foundation and he's got some pointy headed policy wonks sitting there trying to analyze what the perfect tax policy is. And it probably looks more like fair market value than like cost basis. And they're not thinking about the larger political, um, sort of ramifications, which is we, the private sector is being squeezed more and more by these public employee unions. And we do need structural reform and we can't just give up one of the only cards we have, which would be, you know, trading reform on Prop 13.

• 51:53David Friedberg?

  And Zuck doesn't own any commercial real estate?

• 51:55David Sacks?

  Yeah. Well, even if, so I, I, I don't.

• 51:58David Friedberg?

  And I, I would, I would venture to guess that maybe Sacks does. I don't know. I mean.

• 52:01David Sacks?

  No, no, no, no, no. Hold on. Let me, I, 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. 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.

• 52:30David Friedberg?

  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 taxes.

• 52:37Jason Calacanis?

  Average salary, I don't know if you saw this go viral in the last couple of weeks on Twitter.

• 52:41David Friedberg?

  SF.

• 52:42Jason Calacanis?

  Average, average salary in San Francisco, $170,000.

• 52:46David Friedberg?

  For a government, city employees.

• 52:49Jason Calacanis?

  City employees, yeah. Of city employees. I saw that like 170,000 was the average salary. I was like, oh wow, tech people are doing good. It was like, no, no, no, that's the city employees.

• 52:58David Friedberg?

  19,000 administrative employees in the city of San Francisco, city of 800,000 people.

• 53:03Jason Calacanis?

  800,000 people.

• 53:04David Friedberg?

  With a $14 billion budget.

• 53:07David Sacks?

  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, the private sector middle class is leaving and this public sector, 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 a 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

• 53:50David Sacks?

  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 to ever.

• 54:00Jason Calacanis?

  And the politicians need them for their votes, right? They're like, they're going to deliver whatever number of teachers, police officers.

• 54:06David Sacks?

  Exactly. The unions feed the politicians, the politicians feed the unions. That is a structural. That is a structural problem. And these unions will... The unions will never be appeased. You can never buy them off.

• 54:18David Friedberg?

  It's why democracy always ends in the state. Like, it's just an inevitable outcome.

• 54:24Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I had no idea about any of this until... I'm glad I asked you about that tweet. That's really... I actually learned a lot just in that last little bit. I have one other thing I want to ask you guys about, which is the Amy Coney Barrett confirmation hearings. Whether you guys have watched them and what you guys think. And I don't know whether these are just cherry-picked clips or whether she's playing dumb. Or I really don't want to judge because I want to know more, but I just want to know what you guys think going into this. You know, the...

• 54:59David Friedberg?

  I'll say something about climate change. Because, look, I spend a lot of time looking at data and research on climate change and certainly feel strongly that there's a human-caused function of global warming that we're actively experiencing. But I think everyone kind of assumes you have to take that as truth. I think one of the key points of science is you have to recognize your ignorance and you have to recognize that science is, 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,

• 55:42David Friedberg?

  this is exactly, you know, what I would expect someone who's thoughtful to say, not someone that's trying to act ignorant and play to the right. 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 it's like become religion. I just want to point out that climate change has become as politicized and as dogmatic as all these other topics we talk about. And we all kind of assume that if you do or don't believe in climate change, you're left or right, you're evil, you're good. And I think like it's very easy to kind of just go into hear those hearings and assume that, but I wouldn't say that her answer necessarily made me think that she is ignoring facts and ignoring the truth. I think, you know, she's kind of pointing out that this is a process of science and there's a lot of discovery underway. So I don't know. I

• 56:27David Friedberg?

  mean, that was one point that controversial point that I thought I should make because I am a believer. I do think that climate change is real. I do think the data and science supports it. But I do appreciate that someone recognizes that they may not have the skill

• 56:39Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah, the few

• 56:40David Friedberg?

  Rather than just assume what the media tells them to believe.

• 56:43Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah, the few the few clips that I saw of the confirmation hearing, my takeaway was basically, you know, any candidate on the left or the right comes in extremely well coached. And they're taught basically how to evade, meaning there's a go to answer. Amy Coney Barrett's go to answer was, listen, as a judge, I'd have to, you know, hear that case on the record. I can't opine on something hypothetically. You know, she had this very well rehearsed answer. And a lot of the answers to the questions from the left were that. And, you know, the questions on the right were more softballish. So I couldn't really get a sense of it. Now, the thing that I take kind of a lot of comfort in is that,

• 57:24Chamath Palihapitiya?

  you know, when we saw John Roberts get confirmed to the court, it was supposed to be 54 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, make sure that things don't change that much, including Obamacare.

• 57:43David Sacks?

  Yeah, exactly. You don't know exactly how they're going to vote on these issues. You really don't. Roberts was the deciding vote in upholding Obamacare. Gorsuch extended gay rights well beyond anything Anthony Kennedy ever did. That was a big surprise. And so we don't really know exactly how she's going to vote. The reason why Amy Coney Barrett rockets to the top of Trump's list, quite frankly, is because of how Dianne Feinstein treated her three years ago in the last confirmation hearings, which 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 we don't know how she's going to vote based on her Catholicism, you know.

• 58:28Chamath Palihapitiya?

  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.

• 58:37Jason Calacanis?

  So that that is kind of a good feature of the Supreme Court? Do you think there should be like a term?

• 58:42David Sacks?

  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 hangs on whether an 89 year old 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 heated and and and toxic. And there's been a recent proposal by Democrats that I would support, which basically says, listen, we should have an 18 year term for Supreme Court justices. That's long enough. And each president should get two nominees, like one in the first year and then one in the third year. And so you basically have one justice rolling off every two years and one coming

• 59:27David Sacks?

  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 and so, you know, you know that when you vote for a president, they're going to get two Supreme Court picks.

• 59:40Jason Calacanis?

  That feels less chaotic than this.

• 59:42David Sacks?

  That would be that'd be a much better system.

• 59:43Chamath Palihapitiya?

  That's a great idea. That's a great idea. That's a great idea.

• 59:46David Sacks?

  I think it's a fabulous idea.

• 59:48Jason Calacanis?

  I took solace in the fact that when they asked her the what's protected in the First Amendment, she couldn't name all five things that I could. I was like, what about protests? Did you miss that one? And I thought that was like a, I mean, it's a gotcha moment, obviously. And it's not easy to be under that kind of scrutiny. And obviously she-

• 1:00:05David Friedberg?

  Justice J. Cal.

• 1:00:06Jason Calacanis?

  Wow, I just thought that was like, it's also like, pretty interesting.

• 1:00:14David Sacks?

  I think they I think they invented the word unconfirmable. I think they invented the word unconfirmable for J. Cal.

• 1:00:20Jason Calacanis?

  You got a right to have your own pistola, but you shouldn't have a shotgun.

• 1:00:24Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Boys, Friedburgers has a hard stop at three.

• 1:00:29Jason Calacanis?

  The the the fact that she left out protests is interesting. I do think, let's let's just end on the election 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 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 R G B dying, this has made women feel so underappreciated and attacked, especially with Trump,

• 1:01:12Jason Calacanis?

  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. I think all of this is going to add up, and we do the postmortem on this. Losing all these women as voters is going to be, and as well as the black vote and people of color, this is going to be a big part of it. So I think that Trump's going to lose, and it's going to be a landslide.

• 1:01:40Chamath Palihapitiya?

  What a roundabout way to say the same thing you've been saying for four months.

• 1:01:45Jason Calacanis?

  The way he's disrespected women is going. Listen, I don't know. I think Biden is on the path to an enormous victory right now.

• 1:01:56David Sacks?

  Well, that's what the polls, that's what the polls say certainly, is that it looks like a buy-in landslide. I, and I guess that makes sense. I think Trump's running out of time to change the polls. Every day that goes by, he's basically got like 19 outs, or 18 days, he's got 18 outs. Every day that goes by where he isn't able to move the poll number, he loses an out, right? And so we're going to get closer to election day, he's only going to have like a three outer 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's ready for the Trump reality show to be over.

• 1:02:41David Friedberg?

  I think part of the appeal of Trump last time around was the message of change, and he's not delivering a message of change anymore. And I think that's where he's kind of lost the narrative. And the excitement of building a wall and changing everything and draining the swamp, like, he's just like, keep draining the swamp, or keep building the wall, and people don't love that. He's also...

• 1:03:05David Friedberg?

  He also, I think, is coming across as not being, he's looking weak by not being willing to be challenged, and that came across clearly in that debate. He, last time around, he got on stage and he just knocked everyone down. But by not letting Biden talk, by not kind of engaging on any of the topics, he looks just, um, he looks like he just doesn't want to have a shot at it, and it just comes across as bad. So, I don't know, these are all contributing factors, I think, to what's going on.

• 1:03:29Jason Calacanis?

  Chances of a pardon by Pence. He resigns, he pardons himself. Pence pardons him.

• 1:03:36David Friedberg?

  Zero.

• 1:03:37Jason Calacanis?

  Zero?

• 1:03:37David Friedberg?

  Ego too, he won't resign.

• 1:03:41David Sacks?

  Well, we wouldn't see that unless he lost the election.

• 1:03:44Jason Calacanis?

  If he loses.

• 1:03:46David Sacks?

  During the lame duck, during the lame duck period, if he lost, maybe 20%.

• 1:03:51Jason Calacanis?

  20%, yeah.

• 1:03:52David Sacks?

  Because at that point, he's got nothing to lose, right?

• 1:03:54David Friedberg?

  Right.

• 1:03:55Jason Calacanis?

  That, I think it's, I think it's like a, I think it's 50/50, he just goes for the full family pardon.

• 1:04:01David Friedberg?

  All right, all right, love you guys, I gotta go.

• 1:04:03Jason Calacanis?

  All right, guys, uh, love you guys, and, uh, hopefully we'll have a bestie poker soon. Yay. Talk to you guys later. Cheers, bye.