Speaker 1: Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics,
Speaker 1: where we discussed the top political headlines with some of
Speaker 1: today's best minds, and Democrats will continue to control the Senate.
Speaker 1: Tom Vannier is the CEO of Target Smart and he
Speaker 1: will talk to us about how he correctly predicted the midterms.
Speaker 1: Then platformers Casey Newton will talk to us about Elon
Speaker 1: Musk and f t k is bankruptcy. But first we
Speaker 1: have the host of MSNBC is the Lawrence O'Donnell show.
Speaker 1: Help me. Welcome, Laurence O'Donnell. Welcome back to Fast Politics. Lawrence.
Speaker 1: Great to be here. I'm so excited to have you back.
Speaker 1: I wanted to have you back because we talked pretty recently,
Speaker 1: and I want you to talk about like how you
Speaker 1: dealt with these mid terms, because I feel like ultimately
Speaker 1: there were very few people who were right, and you
Speaker 1: were one of them. Well, you know, I was right
Speaker 1: in the in my open declaration, but I didn't know anything.
Speaker 1: And perhaps the other thing I was right about was
Speaker 1: my belief that it is unknowable and that one will
Speaker 1: waste more of a life than anyone ever should by
Speaker 1: trying to figure out what's going to happen in congressional elections.
Speaker 1: I refused, by the way, to use the term mid
Speaker 1: term elections. I think it's one of the great tragedies
Speaker 1: of political coverage in this country and political terminology, because
Speaker 1: it says to people out there, if they ever hear it.
Speaker 1: First of all, what it says to them is, what's that,
Speaker 1: you know, because the kind of non religious voter who's
Speaker 1: not really hit to these election schedules outside of the presidency,
Speaker 1: here's that, and they think it's something weird, unrelated to them.
Speaker 1: It might be city council or school committee or I
Speaker 1: don't know what it is, you know, And so we
Speaker 1: should just call them elections. And if we just keep
Speaker 1: calling them elections, and that we had this country to
Speaker 1: have elections literally every year, you know, not necessarily where
Speaker 1: you live, but you know, we have elections wherever you
Speaker 1: live every two years, every two years. And there are
Speaker 1: some places where they have elections in the odd numbered
Speaker 1: years from mayor and different things like that. And I
Speaker 1: never think about these congressional elections because the chess board
Speaker 1: is way too big and it has become way too complex.
Speaker 1: It did not used to be complex for the you know,
Speaker 1: first forty years of my life, the Democrats won the
Speaker 1: House of Representatives every single time, to the point where
Speaker 1: none of us were aware that it was a contest.
Speaker 1: There wasn't an American who knew that it was optional
Speaker 1: for the Republicans to actually run the House of Representatives.
Speaker 1: We had never seen a Republican speaker. And believe me,
Speaker 1: when they did win in they were shocked. The Republicans
Speaker 1: were shocked. Uh. And none of them knew how to
Speaker 1: handle it. And none of them knew how to be chairman.
Speaker 1: None of them knew how to you know, they obviously
Speaker 1: don't know how to be speaker for you know, and
Speaker 1: so it's just become way too complex to to figure out.
Speaker 1: And so I ignore it and I don't attempt to
Speaker 1: figure it out. And I live with this with a
Speaker 1: condition that apparently, uh, the the American kind of the
Speaker 1: anatomy of the American body politic uh simply cannot bear.
Speaker 1: And that is the condition called suspense. And you know,
Speaker 1: people pay good money to go into dark rooms and
Speaker 1: have the curtain go up and or the screen illuminate,
Speaker 1: and spend two hours in suspense in a theater. They
Speaker 1: pay for that sensation because it is, among other things
Speaker 1: so rare in the rest of our lives. You know,
Speaker 1: we have a neo synthesis, now we have following, we
Speaker 1: have all of these things that have you know, attempted
Speaker 1: to remove suspense as if it's an illness, as if
Speaker 1: it's something we simply physically can't bear. And and so
Speaker 1: my only point of clarity on this, or or being
Speaker 1: in any sense right was in knowing that I couldn't know.
Speaker 1: Therefore I also couldn't be surprised. So all these people
Speaker 1: who are going, I'm really surprised that it's not a
Speaker 1: red wave, Well, they're surprised because they misspent their time
Speaker 1: for the previous year. And the most absurd way you
Speaker 1: can possibly use any ounce of mental capacity is to
Speaker 1: ever look at or refer to what they call the
Speaker 1: generic congressional ballot poll, in which you get this thing
Speaker 1: that says, you know, the voters forty seven percent of
Speaker 1: voters want a Democratic Congress and forty six on a
Speaker 1: Republican Congress or something like that. It's the most idiotic
Speaker 1: thing in the world, especially if you the same time,
Speaker 1: the people, you know, the people who could play with
Speaker 1: this all year, these pundits you know, have in their
Speaker 1: you know ten commandments list. Commandment one issued by House
Speaker 1: Speaker Tip O'Neill, who was from Boston, All politics as local.
Speaker 1: You know, they believe that, right because Tip O'Neal said it,
Speaker 1: and he's he was a political god and a wise
Speaker 1: man and all that, and it absolutely appeared to be
Speaker 1: completely right. And oh, by the way, you know, that
Speaker 1: was the political commandment of life that enabled Tip O'Neal
Speaker 1: as speaker to have a Democratic majority that was so
Speaker 1: big there was never ever ever a risk of any
Speaker 1: bill not passing the House of Representatives because you could
Speaker 1: have dozens of Democrats not vote for it, you know,
Speaker 1: because they're from Texas or Oklahoma and they're uncomfortable with it,
Speaker 1: and you'd still be able to pass it. And Tip
Speaker 1: understood that all politics is local. When the guys from
Speaker 1: Oklahoma can't vote for this, we understand that. And so
Speaker 1: if all Paul tix or local, what the hell are
Speaker 1: you doing with a pole that's supporting seven you know
Speaker 1: what a Republican Congress exactly well. And it's funny because
Speaker 1: with Gretchen Whitmer, who won handily in a swing state
Speaker 1: and who is not being celebrated nearly as much as
Speaker 1: Ron De Santis, who won in a state where there's
Speaker 1: almost no Democratic party structure anymore. Right, But I just
Speaker 1: I'm thinking about that. People said the thing they loved
Speaker 1: about Big Gretch was that she was doing what they
Speaker 1: wanted in their state, you know, fixing roads and doing
Speaker 1: things that they wanted in Michigan. Yeah. And by the way,
Speaker 1: the same thing for De Santis with the voters who
Speaker 1: voted for him. You know, he's you know, putting sending
Speaker 1: airplanes to Texas to fly people in markets Vinyard they
Speaker 1: want that, you know, who lives there, you know, at
Speaker 1: least in that number, right, I mean, there's a good
Speaker 1: of Floridians who were horrified by it, you know. But uh,
Speaker 1: I think you know, with De Santa's proved in the
Speaker 1: current climate and this I suspect it's going to hold
Speaker 1: for a while. There is that Florida is no longer
Speaker 1: a swing state. You can't really think about it that way.
Speaker 1: It's really a Republican state, and Michigan remains within the
Speaker 1: definition of a swing state, which makes it more impressive
Speaker 1: to win that way. You know. There are so many
Speaker 1: stories from Tuesday Night of candidates who really like I mean,
Speaker 1: Mandela Barnes like he lost by one point. I mean
Speaker 1: the Republicans were pumping millions of dollars into keeping a
Speaker 1: seat for Ron and on. I mean, like I do
Speaker 1: think there are a lot of stories of like Democrats
Speaker 1: overperforming by large margins. Yeah, And what I have to
Speaker 1: say to Mandela Barnes and this is something I'm actually
Speaker 1: hoping to do on the show and hoping he comes on,
Speaker 1: and hoping that Rourke comes on, and others who came
Speaker 1: in second, what I want to say to them as
Speaker 1: thank you. Imagine a Wisconsin in which a strong Democratic
Speaker 1: candidate side did not emerge to challenge what was you know,
Speaker 1: a strong enough incumbent Republican running for election. That would
Speaker 1: have been just a disservice to democracy to not have
Speaker 1: that contest there. I've seen it, you know when when
Speaker 1: I worked in the Senate. You saw it all the time.
Speaker 1: You saw states where you know, this candidate, this senator
Speaker 1: is so strong that you know that it's going to
Speaker 1: be very hard to find an opponent. And we actually
Speaker 1: had that experience. And I was working for Senator Daniel
Speaker 1: Patrick moynahan, New York who and the suspense with Amoyahn
Speaker 1: Senate campaign was always was he gonna win by sixty
Speaker 1: seven or sixty and the Republicans knew that. And so
Speaker 1: my first year doing this being involved at all was
Speaker 1: his re election campaign of nineteen eighty and the challenge
Speaker 1: was finding an opponent. And there was this big list
Speaker 1: of big Republican stars who lived in New York, Henry Kissinger,
Speaker 1: Jack Kemp, people like this massive speculation in the press,
Speaker 1: someone named Rudolph Giuliani, who was then the U. S.
Speaker 1: Attorney And each one of them, one by one dropped
Speaker 1: out because each one of them stared at it, they
Speaker 1: thought about it, they kind of wanted to do it,
Speaker 1: and they saw, oh no, Wynihan will crush me, and
Speaker 1: so they dropped out, and we finally, you know, at
Speaker 1: the end of you know, twenty names ended up with someone,
Speaker 1: and I remember feeling grateful that that someone stepped forward
Speaker 1: so that there would be this actual democratic process with
Speaker 1: by the way, no suspense. But he was going to
Speaker 1: get out there and argue, you know, the tax argument
Speaker 1: against you know, the liberal Democrat and New Yorkers were
Speaker 1: going to have that uh discussion, and they were going
Speaker 1: to be able to cast those votes and um and
Speaker 1: and so um you know, imagine, imagine a Texas this
Speaker 1: year without Better Rourke. Imagine a year without even hope,
Speaker 1: without even hope, you know. And there are so many
Speaker 1: ways of living in that we go through in the
Speaker 1: course of our lives. The rarest way of living is
Speaker 1: as a winner. The most common way of winning is
Speaker 1: as someone who's not quite getting where you need to be.
Speaker 1: And for Better or Rourke to get up there a
Speaker 1: third time as statewide, knowing that you know, if he
Speaker 1: loses this time, they're gonna say, they're gonna call him
Speaker 1: a loser. The national media is gonna try to humiliate him,
Speaker 1: in effect, because the national media despises losers unless their
Speaker 1: name Trump. I mean, you think about John Kerry, you
Speaker 1: go back to you know, uh yeah, do Caucus. But
Speaker 1: John Carey, you know, you go back to two thousand four,
Speaker 1: if you flip, you know, sixty votes in Ohio, John
Speaker 1: Terry's president. But he was treated by the media as
Speaker 1: if he came in ninety points behind, you know, George W. Bush,
Speaker 1: as if he was this horrible loser to be banished
Speaker 1: from our site. And by the way Democratic voters felt
Speaker 1: that way, people I knew I could feel it like
Speaker 1: they voted for him, and two weeks later they never
Speaker 1: wanted to hear his name again. And so you know,
Speaker 1: the losers to me have a certain kind of nobility
Speaker 1: that I just feel so warmly about and admiringly about.
Speaker 1: And I know I would never do it myself. I
Speaker 1: would never subject myself to that and subject myself to
Speaker 1: that possibility of being the loser. Uh. And these people
Speaker 1: do it, and they do it for us, and they
Speaker 1: do it for at minimum hope, to give people a
Speaker 1: year of feeling hope instead of horror. Well, and also
Speaker 1: there is polling that shows that you do better in
Speaker 1: a state if you run a candidate even if they
Speaker 1: don't win, like it helps down ballot. Yes, and it's
Speaker 1: projectable certainly within our imaginations. You know that there will
Speaker 1: be again, because there were until the nineties, right into
Speaker 1: the nineties, Democratic senators from Texas and Democratic governors of Texas. Again,
Speaker 1: we can see how that can happen as that as
Speaker 1: the demographics are moving there. But these betto campaigns are
Speaker 1: helping lead to whoever the Democratic winner is statewide. Whoever
Speaker 1: that first Democratic winner is statewide in Texas will have
Speaker 1: built that victory on what betto Rourke has been doing
Speaker 1: for years. There. Yeah, that's a really good point and
Speaker 1: I think really important talk to me about where we
Speaker 1: see things go from here. Now, Oh you're asking for
Speaker 1: so alright, alright, Never I dropped out of that business.
Speaker 1: I'll tell you know. Here's another thing about about watching politics.
Speaker 1: There's kind of an optimal level of attention, and it's
Speaker 1: it's lower than most people realize. So I, as I said,
Speaker 1: I first got into this in because there was a
Speaker 1: writer's build strike in Hollywood and my screenwriting career at
Speaker 1: that point was about a year and a half underway.
Speaker 1: And suddenly I was the you know, lowest ranking member
Speaker 1: in a striking Hollywood union and I was pathetically available
Speaker 1: to join a campaign, which was not my idea. I
Speaker 1: knew Senator moynihan and his wife. His wife was a
Speaker 1: campaign manager, and she just kind of asked me to
Speaker 1: come into the campaign and and be the other guy.
Speaker 1: And I did it mostly as a like a tourist,
Speaker 1: like I'll just this would be fun to watch, Like
Speaker 1: I have no idea what this is, right, but here's
Speaker 1: what I knew with an absolute certainty. Every single day
Speaker 1: of nine and nineteen eight. Michael Ducacus is never going
Speaker 1: to be president. There wasn't a single moment when I
Speaker 1: thought that, okay, even when Michael Ducacus had an eighteen
Speaker 1: point lead in the polls. I'm from Boston, he was
Speaker 1: my governor. I had what I thought were I just had.
Speaker 1: I couldn't even explain it to you. I just had
Speaker 1: this feeling, right, And so what I had was the
Speaker 1: advantage of being an amateur. What I had was the
Speaker 1: advantage of never having been down there on the field
Speaker 1: and only watched this thing from way up high in
Speaker 1: the stands, you know, at the fifty yard line, where
Speaker 1: you could just kind of see the whole thing. And
Speaker 1: I I remember saying, after that first year of my life,
Speaker 1: you know in professional politics that you have about six months.
Speaker 1: It's your first six months in politics when you know anything,
Speaker 1: and after that gonna know nothing. Because in your first
Speaker 1: six months in professional politics, you are them. You are
Speaker 1: one of the people who you're trying to convince you
Speaker 1: are the voter out there. But once you've been professionalized,
Speaker 1: which takes about months, then you have no idea how
Speaker 1: those people think. You spend the rest of your life
Speaker 1: kissing about how those people think, because you're not one
Speaker 1: of them anymore. And so your your optimal moment in
Speaker 1: this is taking it seriously enough to consume the basic
Speaker 1: news about it. But that first six months of really
Speaker 1: kind of watching it is your best. And after that
Speaker 1: you're just kind of, you know, a kind of calloused
Speaker 1: old hack who's just kind of you know, filing one
Speaker 1: hack assumption on top of another hack assumption and some
Speaker 1: other hack. You know, at the bar in the New
Speaker 1: Hampshire primary is telling you something. You buy that, and
Speaker 1: then you go and talk out on TV. Why did
Speaker 1: you think that du Caucus would never win? I just
Speaker 1: knew he wasn't a president. This is great because there's
Speaker 1: no analysis to it. There's nothing that the experts say.
Speaker 1: It's what the voters say, right, and so I would
Speaker 1: have sounded at the time and I would just insist,
Speaker 1: you know, to Senator Moynehan. You know, he was very
Speaker 1: disappointed that he didn't endorse Ducacus early, especially when Ducacus
Speaker 1: was way up in the polls, because it looked like
Speaker 1: there was going to be a Democratic president elected without
Speaker 1: his health. And so he was very jealous that Bill
Speaker 1: Bradley Center from New Jersey had endorsed, you know, like
Speaker 1: Duconcus early so he was going to get to be
Speaker 1: secretary of state or something, and uh, and I was
Speaker 1: sitting there the whole time, go nowhere, he's not gonna
Speaker 1: be president. And it's like they go, why he's not
Speaker 1: gonna be president, you know, because it's like, you know,
Speaker 1: it was all that stuff that a voter sees. The
Speaker 1: cosmetics of him aren't right, you know, the the other
Speaker 1: guy is taller. It's just it's just raw, you know,
Speaker 1: voter imagery. And I liked Ducocus and I liked him
Speaker 1: as a governor. I thought, you know, if you said
Speaker 1: to me he's going to be governor, I go, yeah,
Speaker 1: he's gonna be a governor. You know. Michael lucoccus Is
Speaker 1: stated in writing high school ambition in his Brookline High
Speaker 1: School yearbook was to be governor of Massachusetts. That was achievable.
Speaker 1: But he couldn't get me on that. Now, if you
Speaker 1: run that campaign again, I won't know what to think
Speaker 1: because I'm too close to all the professional analysis. You know.
Speaker 1: It's not like the stock market, where you might maybe
Speaker 1: get rewarded by studying the company is even closer. It's
Speaker 1: much more of a gut thing, you know, the way
Speaker 1: politics works. And you lose your gut after a few
Speaker 1: months of professional studio. So interesting, Lawrence. I'm really glad
Speaker 1: you came back, and I'm really glad like this is
Speaker 1: just sort of a very interesting way to think of
Speaker 1: all of this, and I really appreciate having you. Thank you.
Speaker 1: Tom Bonnier is the CEO of Target Smart. Welcome Too
Speaker 1: Fast Politics, Tom, thanks for having me here. We won
Speaker 1: the mid terms, you and I. We did because we
Speaker 1: were right. And since we're never wrong, certainly never, let's
Speaker 1: talk about that explained to us. How you got it?
Speaker 1: All right? I love this premise, by the way, even
Speaker 1: though I'm slightly uncomfortable with it. But but let's go.
Speaker 1: Let me say I shouldn't say this, I should don't
Speaker 1: lean into it. But I'm not a magician. You know,
Speaker 1: there wasn't any magic here. I'm not a super genius.
Speaker 1: I just followed the data and listened to the data.
Speaker 1: But I also questioned the data. And so yeah, there's
Speaker 1: a lot of information out there. There's the voter registration data,
Speaker 1: there's the polling data, and I think everyone just kind
Speaker 1: of focuses on the polls primarily without a lot of context.
Speaker 1: And yeah, I mean, the short answer is I followed
Speaker 1: the data, I question it, especially when it came to
Speaker 1: the polls, and the data was generally pointing in one direction,
Speaker 1: and it's exactly where we ended up. In fact, the
Speaker 1: only thing that wasn't was this flood of garbage Republican
Speaker 1: polls that we all looked at at the time and
Speaker 1: sort of acknowledged, like, hey, these are garbage Republican polls.
Speaker 1: Then they got used in the averages. Yeah, they got
Speaker 1: thrown into five thirty eight, real clear politics. You know,
Speaker 1: I think a lot of people were frankly nervous because
Speaker 1: they're humans. They lived through man. That was right where
Speaker 1: the needle went from seventy percent everything's gonna be okay
Speaker 1: to your fucked you know, yeah, not great. That was
Speaker 1: not great. And so like we all remember that, or
Speaker 1: maybe we don't remember, maybe we've blacked out from our memory,
Speaker 1: but it's there. It was in there somewhere, and it
Speaker 1: was clear and how people were reacting to these things
Speaker 1: because now everybody's saying the polls were right, the polls
Speaker 1: were right. Well, if the polls were right and the
Speaker 1: outcome is a Democratic victory, why was everybody expecting a
Speaker 1: Republican victory, which is you know, we'd have to bring
Speaker 1: us chologist in for that. But yeah, follow the data. Okay,
Speaker 1: who are the people who did the very partisan GOP
Speaker 1: polling in in late October? Trafalgar and who else? Trafalgar
Speaker 1: was the big one. There's inside er inside advantage. There
Speaker 1: was a whole flood of polls from polsters who I
Speaker 1: had never heard of. I've got to be honest, and
Speaker 1: I maga one to three poles. Yeah, yes, it would
Speaker 1: be like I don't want to pick on kids. There
Speaker 1: were two polling firms that are run by high school
Speaker 1: kids that were all over the averages. One of them,
Speaker 1: I know, I know, I know, I do. I do worry.
Speaker 1: They'll get better next election. They'll be in college exactly
Speaker 1: hopefully yeah or maybe not, maybe not. One of them
Speaker 1: was from my hometown school I didn't go to, but
Speaker 1: Phillips and Over. Oh yeah, I don't feel so bad
Speaker 1: for those kids. Go ahead, no reason to feel bad
Speaker 1: for them. They got a lot going for it. They
Speaker 1: had some of the most Republican in outlier polls. And
Speaker 1: then there was another one from a couple of kids
Speaker 1: who were in high school. It wasn't like a high
Speaker 1: school project. They had some really bad polls. There were
Speaker 1: poles from a Canadian company that were very Republican. There
Speaker 1: were poles from a Brazilian company that were very republican.
Speaker 1: Um Wick was another one that sort of popped up
Speaker 1: in this election and had a lot of outlier results.
Speaker 1: Never heard of them before. But if you go through
Speaker 1: going five thirty eight and like look at the worst states,
Speaker 1: the biggest misses, which are like, you know, the Washington
Speaker 1: Senate race, New Hampshire Senate race, New York governor, New
Speaker 1: York AG, New York AG. She won by like seventy
Speaker 1: three percent. I mean she percent of the vote, didn't
Speaker 1: you Yeah, And and I think it was Travalgart was
Speaker 1: one of those who had a poll that showed that
Speaker 1: being like a margin of vera race. So those polls
Speaker 1: were not great, I think is the kindest way to
Speaker 1: put it. What I think is interesting is like clearly
Speaker 1: we're in an inflection point with ulsters. And the thing
Speaker 1: that I had thought about was like I had wondered
Speaker 1: when we were coming up into this election. I just
Speaker 1: want to actually point something out that's important about these
Speaker 1: polls in this race that is still being counted, but
Speaker 1: probably Lauren beau Bert is going to win. There was
Speaker 1: a really good Democratic candidate who we actually had on
Speaker 1: this podcast, and he had a lot of trouble raising
Speaker 1: money because he was shown to be a like a huge,
Speaker 1: you know, a kind of a candidate who couldn't win,
Speaker 1: and in fact, he really could have won. And you know,
Speaker 1: he's maybe bau Bert will win by a couple of
Speaker 1: thousand votes, maybe last maybe she won't even win, maybe
Speaker 1: because they're still not done counting. But I'm using this
Speaker 1: to illustrate that these polls actually have real world implications
Speaker 1: and I want to talk about that. Yeah, they do,
Speaker 1: and I've seen that. Look, you know, outside of Twitter,
Speaker 1: my day job is actually working with campaigns. We have
Speaker 1: a polling theme ourselves and analytics team, and we provide
Speaker 1: data to Democratic candidates progressive organs around the country, and
Speaker 1: so we see that impact. It's maybe why I feel
Speaker 1: these things even more deeply as we saw that happening
Speaker 1: in races where there were bad poles out there, and
Speaker 1: we knew they were bad poles because you can look
Speaker 1: at the sample and you see, like, well, gosh, this
Speaker 1: likely voter sample in this state is based on a
Speaker 1: notion that young people are just going to flee from
Speaker 1: the state. They won't vote because there won't be any
Speaker 1: Like literally, there's a poll in Pennsylvania that came out
Speaker 1: a few days after the debate that was one night,
Speaker 1: two hour window poll that had Doctors up by a
Speaker 1: couple of points, right, that was the kind of thing
Speaker 1: we're dealing with, And we should have been able to
Speaker 1: look at those and say this is nonsense. Forget about it,
Speaker 1: doesn't get into averages. We're not going to talk about it.
Speaker 1: We're not as reporters going to go out and pretend
Speaker 1: like suddenly this race changed and start writing stories about
Speaker 1: why John Fetterman is losing. We won't do it, but
Speaker 1: we did do it. And the Bobert race is a
Speaker 1: great example of one that wasn't on the radar at all,
Speaker 1: though he was on this podcast. Yeah, and kudos to you,
Speaker 1: because that's incredible because when you look at like that
Speaker 1: was a district that wasn't even in like the Cook
Speaker 1: ratings for like even like the likely Republican whatever the
Speaker 1: thing is right behind Safe, it just wasn't there. But
Speaker 1: I think like some of these higher profile races too,
Speaker 1: like Mandela Barnes, the fact is that's a one point race.
Speaker 1: Right now. It's we're talking about what like a swing
Speaker 1: of thirteen thousand votes, and and he'd be winning that race.
Speaker 1: And you look at the polls, and we saw how
Speaker 1: the polls changed the narrative in that race so dramatically,
Speaker 1: where he was winning right after the primary, and then
Speaker 1: a few of these garbage poles come in and suddenly
Speaker 1: all the narratives are about, well, why is Mandela Barnes losing?
Speaker 1: Its crime, it's obviously the concern of crime and inflation.
Speaker 1: Let's write stories about crime and inflation. And so if
Speaker 1: you're a voter in Wisconsin, you're waking up every morning
Speaker 1: the stories about crime and inflation to fit the narrative
Speaker 1: to explain why Mandela bar Barns is losing. When you
Speaker 1: look at the pole averages there, it wasn't a huge miss,
Speaker 1: but it was a big enough mess where I think
Speaker 1: they had him losing by you know, four points on average,
Speaker 1: the difference between someone losing or perceiving that they're losing
Speaker 1: by four or five points. If you're down four or
Speaker 1: five points, you're probably not going to win if you
Speaker 1: believe the polls. But in reality, those polls were wrong.
Speaker 1: He was down one and I think there would have
Speaker 1: been a lot of more resources directed to that campaign.
Speaker 1: The news stories would have been much less negative. Uh,
Speaker 1: they would have been looking at why is Ron Johnson
Speaker 1: the incumbent barely hanging right? And and well they're spending
Speaker 1: I mean remember Ron and On got a humongous cash
Speaker 1: infusion because of his sketchy taxation of pass fruit through companies.
Speaker 1: And you know, there were a couple of donors who
Speaker 1: just literally put the money they saved in taxes into
Speaker 1: his campaign. And and by the way, Ron and his
Speaker 1: kids trust fund saved a lot of money on taxes too.
Speaker 1: I mean just completely as sketchy. And I say this
Speaker 1: as someone who you know myself has been a beneficiary
Speaker 1: of like familiar all large asse as we say, and
Speaker 1: I am just like furious. I mean it is so corrupt.
Speaker 1: I mean, you can't just change the taxes so they
Speaker 1: benefit you know, but he but he could, he could,
Speaker 1: and he did, and now he has six more years
Speaker 1: to try. Yeah, well the lesson we learned there. If
Speaker 1: you can create the sort of perception of inevitability driven
Speaker 1: by bad polls, um then you're going to be in
Speaker 1: better shape. And I think that's really unfortunate. And I
Speaker 1: think the people are saying that the polls are right. Generally,
Speaker 1: what they're doing is like, well, yeah, if you look
Speaker 1: at it from about a hundred miles away or forty
Speaker 1: feet in the air, yeah, big picture. They say, well,
Speaker 1: the poll said, yeah, the Senate was going to be close. Though,
Speaker 1: to be fair, the models did not predict the seat,
Speaker 1: you know, a Democratic pick up, an actual gain, and
Speaker 1: that's maybe where we'll end up. That's a possible outcome. So,
Speaker 1: but the reality is campaigns don't engage at the forty
Speaker 1: foot level, and donors don't either. I think that's the
Speaker 1: most important point. And can we have confidence in the
Speaker 1: polls at the micro level, at the state by state level? Now, no,
Speaker 1: we can't. Look at the Senate races, and a third
Speaker 1: of the competitive Senate races had polls that where the
Speaker 1: error was greater than four and a half points. And
Speaker 1: so the problem is that error is not predictable. So sure,
Speaker 1: the average error was four points, and people say that's
Speaker 1: not bad, but you don't know which. Yes, sorry, you
Speaker 1: don't know which. I've get I often called it all
Speaker 1: runs together at this point. But the problem is you
Speaker 1: don't know which are the third of states that are
Speaker 1: going to be these massive outliers, and so if you
Speaker 1: don't know which, how can you have confidence? Should Democrats
Speaker 1: have followed the polls and put tons of money into
Speaker 1: Washington State for Patty Murray. Thank god that didn't happen,
Speaker 1: but some amount of money went in there because of
Speaker 1: bad polls, because they're only bad polls. Again, New Hampshire
Speaker 1: is a great example of that too. Yeah, New Hampshire
Speaker 1: is a great example. I mean that is you know,
Speaker 1: I was watching on Tuesday morning when I woke up
Speaker 1: ready for a blood bath, you know, filled with dread.
Speaker 1: I thought to myself, if Democrats can hold New Hampshire,
Speaker 1: it won't be a blood bath. And you know, not
Speaker 1: only did Democrats hold New Hampshire, but she was not
Speaker 1: going to lose. And it just is so shocking to
Speaker 1: me how awful out of these polls were. Yeah, but again,
Speaker 1: if you had actually followed the data, and by the data,
Speaker 1: I mean not just the polls, and in fact very
Speaker 1: little the polls, but but if you look at what
Speaker 1: happened in Kansas, and then you looked at the gender
Speaker 1: gaps and voter registration around the country after Kansas, after Dobbs,
Speaker 1: as we were seeing, and we were reporting on and
Speaker 1: you were lifting this up consistently over that time period.
Speaker 1: And then you look at the early vote. You look
Speaker 1: at New York nineteen, you look at Alaska. Every indicator
Speaker 1: was pointing in this exact same direction. And if you
Speaker 1: were someone who I think like the narrative generally, maybe
Speaker 1: around late August was fairly consistent. If you went to
Speaker 1: sleep in late August and woke up today, you look
Speaker 1: at the result and be like, okay, but not surprising.
Speaker 1: But we all suddenly jumped in bought the narrative of
Speaker 1: these garbage polls. Row happened too early, right as a
Speaker 1: feminist and as a person for whom Row was just
Speaker 1: so even though I saw it coming with s B
Speaker 1: eight in Texas a year before. When it happened, it
Speaker 1: was such a profound moment in my life because I
Speaker 1: thought this could never be taken away from us, and
Speaker 1: all of a sudden it was I you know, immediately
Speaker 1: the next day they were like ten essays, this won't
Speaker 1: this is not you know, we had all the sort
Speaker 1: of bad faith Republicans out there being like, this is
Speaker 1: not going to move the needle, voters don't care. And
Speaker 1: then that after that narrative, we saw this polling, We
Speaker 1: saw these specials where Democrats overperformed, and then in September
Speaker 1: we started with these stories again row happened too early,
Speaker 1: voters don't remember. I want to ask you about this idea.
Speaker 1: It does seem like punden think voters are morons. Yes,
Speaker 1: I mean, I'll tell you to your point. I was
Speaker 1: on CNN at some point in September and I was
Speaker 1: talking about what we were seeing in the voter registration data,
Speaker 1: and I was asked by a male host, well, but yeah,
Speaker 1: that was a long time ago, Dobbs, was a long
Speaker 1: time ago. Don't you think that's faded by now? Isn't
Speaker 1: that what we're seeing? And I genuinely didn't know how
Speaker 1: to answer that question. It's such a bizarre notion, but
Speaker 1: that became the commonly held perception, a lot of it
Speaker 1: again driven by polls. But like we're talking about the
Speaker 1: polls as if there's some sort of like abstract you know, android,
Speaker 1: that it's not actual humans making decisions in these polls,
Speaker 1: that there aren't actual humans pushing this narrative, And then
Speaker 1: as if there aren't actual humans, the pundits, the media
Speaker 1: and frankly, the political professionals whose job it is to
Speaker 1: take these things and learn from them but also filter
Speaker 1: through them, as if they shouldn't have been able to
Speaker 1: look at that and see, like, hey, this whole false
Speaker 1: dichotomy about the economy or inflation versus abortion is a problem,
Speaker 1: and no one was saying that. Well not no one
Speaker 1: was saying that. You were saying that, Many others were
Speaker 1: saying that, but many more people were saying that it
Speaker 1: looks like voters have shifted back. They're just concerned about
Speaker 1: the economy. Now, well, yeah, so many reasons that that
Speaker 1: framework is problematic, but that became the dominant framework, and
Speaker 1: I think contributed more than anything else to this notion
Speaker 1: that the red wave was back on. Yeah, I also think,
Speaker 1: you know, I was on this Twitter spaces last night
Speaker 1: with John Stewart, who I don't know at all, and
Speaker 1: he was saying this thing, which I actually thought was
Speaker 1: quite smart. I don't want to beat up the mainstream
Speaker 1: media a because I'm lucky and that I'm on the
Speaker 1: opinion side, so I don't have to pretend not to
Speaker 1: believe in things. But also I do think that it's
Speaker 1: been a bad time for the media and people have
Speaker 1: just been so horrendous. But I do think that they
Speaker 1: there is you know, the horse race narrative is where
Speaker 1: a lot of this election coverage is stock. I share
Speaker 1: your hesitation in terms of being critical of the media,
Speaker 1: largely because it is their responsibility to explain what is
Speaker 1: happening and maybe add some context as to why and when.
Speaker 1: All they are being fed from these polls and frankly
Speaker 1: from political If they were only hearing it from Republican
Speaker 1: campaign operatives, then that's one thing. They have to be
Speaker 1: more skeptical. But they were hearing this from democratic campaign
Speaker 1: operatives to let's be real, not all of them, but
Speaker 1: enough of them where there is credibility, and you look
Speaker 1: at these bad polls that are showing them something. So
Speaker 1: to them, the narrative now is the red wave is
Speaker 1: back on. Voters have forgotten about jobs, or at least
Speaker 1: it's not as important as maybe we thought it was
Speaker 1: to them and their decision making, and therefore I've got
Speaker 1: to go out and write stories about why that is
Speaker 1: and what's happening. And that's generally what happened, and so like.
Speaker 1: Would have been nice if they were digging in a
Speaker 1: little deeper on the pulse. But to expect every political
Speaker 1: reporter to also be a polling expert is not exactly fair,
Speaker 1: and it is I mean, I just want to point
Speaker 1: out there were a lot of people on the right
Speaker 1: pushing the narrative that like, because I remember I did
Speaker 1: a TV hit I don't know, a couple of weeks
Speaker 1: ago with Maddie and we were talking about how, like
Speaker 1: I actually thought voters would vote for democracy. I thought
Speaker 1: that that would really that they want calm, and uh,
Speaker 1: you know, I was being made fun of by people
Speaker 1: on the right, Like no, people if they keep you know,
Speaker 1: all they care about or gas prices and you know, look,
Speaker 1: gas prices are a serious thing, especially if you drive
Speaker 1: for a living or you have you know, if you
Speaker 1: live very far from where you work. But and they
Speaker 1: really are. But but ultimately, like the American voter can
Speaker 1: walk and chew gon yes, yeah, they always do. They
Speaker 1: always do, and and they they pay uh less attention
Speaker 1: to a lot of these issues than we think. But
Speaker 1: in other ways they pay much more attention, or they
Speaker 1: pay attention in different ways because it's what's real to them,
Speaker 1: it's what's actually breaking through. These polls distill it down
Speaker 1: into such a simplistic framework, and the fact the matter is,
Speaker 1: when you ask someone to predict their own behavior or psychology,
Speaker 1: there are a lot of problems with that. They're going
Speaker 1: to tell you what they think is the right answer,
Speaker 1: or what they should say, or what they would like
Speaker 1: to think. You know, the person who they would like
Speaker 1: to be versus the person who they are. In the end,
Speaker 1: we're poor predictors of our own psychology and behavior. But
Speaker 1: if you ask someone if money is important to you,
Speaker 1: or if it's disturbing to you that things cost more
Speaker 1: than they used to, which is basically the framework of saying,
Speaker 1: is the economy important? Are you concerned about inflation? Everyone's
Speaker 1: going to say yes. And that's the other issue is
Speaker 1: that the the issues that elevate to the top are
Speaker 1: those that have sort of bipartisan symmetry and response, meaning
Speaker 1: Democrats and Republicans both say the economy is important to them,
Speaker 1: so it elevates to the top of the issue list.
Speaker 1: Do democrats and Republicans think the same thing about the
Speaker 1: economy interms? Not at all, not one bit. And so
Speaker 1: you're seeing choice. What I was seeing in the data
Speaker 1: when you go under the hood with these polls was well, sure, overall,
Speaker 1: choice wasn't as big of an issue and self report
Speaker 1: as other issues because almost no Republicans were elevating it
Speaker 1: because that was the quote right answer for them. But
Speaker 1: when you looked at the voters who Democrats needed to
Speaker 1: exceed expectations and to win in this election, meaning mobilization
Speaker 1: targets Democrats who maybe wouldn't vote unless we persuaded them to,
Speaker 1: or persuasion targets voters who could vote Democrat or Republican,
Speaker 1: choice was a very salient issue. Yeah, so interesting. Thank you,
Speaker 1: thank you, thank you, Tom. Yeah, thank you so much
Speaker 1: to thrill to be here. Casey Newton is a tech
Speaker 1: reporter or a platform er and the host of the
Speaker 1: podcast hard Fork Welcome Too Fast Politics. Casey, Hey, thanks
Speaker 1: for having me, Molly. Today's Friday. This will air Monday.
Speaker 1: We will have it. Is two weeks, fourteen days, right
Speaker 1: or maybe fifteen days fourteen days really of Elon Musk
Speaker 1: owning Twitter? Whoa go? Yeah, I think that's exactly like
Speaker 1: the only sort of a rational response to the two
Speaker 1: weeks of Elon owning Twitter is just a series of
Speaker 1: confused noises, Right, exactly did this go the way you
Speaker 1: thought it would? And if so, Wow, Well, I think
Speaker 1: everything is moving much faster. You know, I think it's
Speaker 1: important to remember that while Twitter had its challenges, it
Speaker 1: was still an okay business when Elon Musk took it over.
Speaker 1: You know, it makes billions of dollars a year, it
Speaker 1: has hundreds of millions of users. And yet somehow, within
Speaker 1: two weeks you have Elon Musk appearing before the company
Speaker 1: saying that bankruptcy isn't out of the question. So that
Speaker 1: feels very fast to me. Let's talk about what happened here.
Speaker 1: So he he didn't really want to buy the company,
Speaker 1: and I think he didn't think he was going to
Speaker 1: have to until he did. One of the strangest turns
Speaker 1: in this story is that after he bought it, he
Speaker 1: seemed to immediately change his mind. He spent most of
Speaker 1: the year trying to get out of it, and then
Speaker 1: some sort of rulings started to go against him in
Speaker 1: the Delaware Court of Chancery, and he changes to and
Speaker 1: he said, Okay, I want it, and I'm going to
Speaker 1: close the deal now. And I still don't really think
Speaker 1: we've got an adequate explanation for how or why that happened.
Speaker 1: But yeah, then he showed up two weeks ago and
Speaker 1: started making changes, and he really overpaid for it, right,
Speaker 1: Like he has thirteen billion dollars of personal exposure on
Speaker 1: this too. Oh yeah, I mean there's not one person
Speaker 1: who thought Twitter was worth forty four billion dollars when
Speaker 1: he actually acquired it, right because the tech stalks had
Speaker 1: all declined so much since then. So Elon Musk really
Speaker 1: bought it at the peak. Um in a way that
Speaker 1: is amusing to something I would say. So, now we
Speaker 1: have this situation where he fired half the staff. Basically
Speaker 1: this entire time, people have been telling you what's happening
Speaker 1: as it's going, tell us what's happened. It really has
Speaker 1: been chaos, you know. So a week ago today, from
Speaker 1: the day that we're recording this, Elon Musk laid off
Speaker 1: half of the staff, over thirty people, and then less
Speaker 1: than twenty four hours later started to reach out to
Speaker 1: some of those same people that had just been laid
Speaker 1: off and said, actually, um, we might need you back
Speaker 1: in just a sort of ready fire aim approach to
Speaker 1: right sizing the company. And of course you can imagine
Speaker 1: all the turmoil that that cause for you know, employees.
Speaker 1: Did some people come back? I have not spoken to
Speaker 1: anyone who is in that position, and in fact, a
Speaker 1: lot of the folks I know, after they got that
Speaker 1: initial notice, we're looking forward to ninety days of essentially
Speaker 1: paid vacation. There's this sixty day warm Act notice that
Speaker 1: they get paid out for, and then there is thirty
Speaker 1: days of severance that are being offered. So most people
Speaker 1: would rather take that than work at the new Twitter,
Speaker 1: and so people are hoping that they're not forced to
Speaker 1: go take their old jobs back. Ellen is also going
Speaker 1: to have to pay millions of dollars in fees, right,
Speaker 1: fees for what for laying off half the company, and
Speaker 1: because California has laws that are labor laws right well,
Speaker 1: so my understanding of that is usually usually the penalty
Speaker 1: for violating the warnack is paying back pay. So that's
Speaker 1: why all these workers are being given their sixty day notice.
Speaker 1: Now there are a couple of class action lawsuits. The
Speaker 1: lawyers we've talked to. You You don't seem to think they
Speaker 1: have all that great of a chance of making any
Speaker 1: real money for anyone but the lawyers. But yeah, the
Speaker 1: real payment, at least at first, is just going to
Speaker 1: be sixty days of this warnack notice. Pay let's talk
Speaker 1: about what Twitter looks like right now. Last night there
Speaker 1: was more Twitter carnage. Well, there was certainly a lot
Speaker 1: of confusion around the ongoing disaster of the verification badge.
Speaker 1: Explained to those of us who are not like extremely online,
Speaker 1: what the verification badges, what Ellen wanted to do with it,
Speaker 1: and the chaos that ensued. Yeah, so the verification badge
Speaker 1: was created in two thousand and nine and it has
Speaker 1: only ever had one point, which is to say that
Speaker 1: whoever is tweeting, whether it's a person a government agency,
Speaker 1: is who they say they are, Right, so when I tweet,
Speaker 1: you know that it's me Casey Newton who's tweeting. Ellen
Speaker 1: thought that that was a little too elitist because not
Speaker 1: everyone could have access to verification, and he wanted to
Speaker 1: expand that. And by the way, I think that's a
Speaker 1: good idea. I think Twitter could be better if people
Speaker 1: could optionally verify their identity. Right. But he goes about
Speaker 1: it in the strangest way imaginable, which is that he
Speaker 1: takes that same blue checkmark that has been synonymous with
Speaker 1: you are who you say you are for over a
Speaker 1: decade and he starts giving it away to anyone who
Speaker 1: will pay him eight dollars, and he finds himself surprised
Speaker 1: when people do exactly what you and I would have
Speaker 1: guessed that they would have done if they were given
Speaker 1: this feature. So you have people creating uh, you know,
Speaker 1: fake Tesla accounts, getting verified and then tweeting jokes about
Speaker 1: running over pedestrians. You have people creating an Eli Lily account,
Speaker 1: getting it verified and said tweeting that insulin is free. Right, So,
Speaker 1: and all of this stuff is like kind of funny,
Speaker 1: and I think most of the things that we've seen
Speaker 1: so far are kind of in that zone of like hijinks.
Speaker 1: But you can imagine much darker and scarier uses of
Speaker 1: this kind of mischief. Yes, absolutely, completely and utterly true. Now,
Speaker 1: were there trust in safety people who left last night
Speaker 1: or was that not true? That is true. So the
Speaker 1: head of trust and safety on the site, you know,
Speaker 1: l Roth, resigned from the company. A number of other
Speaker 1: people who I think I'm as sort of the watchdogs
Speaker 1: of Twitter left too. So the chief information security officer,
Speaker 1: the chief privacy officer, members of various like security and
Speaker 1: risk teams have all been resigning as well. So some
Speaker 1: really important rules that the company are now empty. I
Speaker 1: feel like that is just like two on the nose, right,
Speaker 1: like if you're writing that book, it's weekend of burnings.
Speaker 1: I'm a little bit. I mean, you know, Ellen is
Speaker 1: very actively involved. You know, he is in the office.
Speaker 1: He does have workers who are there working almost around
Speaker 1: the clock to sort of respond to his whims and
Speaker 1: get features into development. So you know, there are still
Speaker 1: more than three thousand people who work at this company
Speaker 1: and and they're doing things right. The whole thing is
Speaker 1: just so strange what happens now. Ellen is like very
Speaker 1: worried about losing money. He's got these eight dollars. The
Speaker 1: verification is gone, but you can't do Twitter Blue now,
Speaker 1: and there's a badge that's as Official. Yeah. So on
Speaker 1: Thursday night, in response to all of the criticisms that
Speaker 1: exactly what people said was gonna happened happened. They paused
Speaker 1: new sign ups for Blue, so you cannot go get
Speaker 1: another one of these check marks, and they're going to
Speaker 1: try to figure it out. They also have started to
Speaker 1: give out this secondary badge called official, which they're giving
Speaker 1: two accounts that had been verified under the old you
Speaker 1: are who you say you are policy. Then, of course
Speaker 1: the really funny thing about that is that Musk is
Speaker 1: recreating the exact sort of elitist like system that he
Speaker 1: used to have there. They just have a different color
Speaker 1: check mark now. So the other thing I want to
Speaker 1: ask you about is Musk is all this debt he
Speaker 1: needs to service, right, he has his personal exposure, and
Speaker 1: then he has all this debt. He has banks, he
Speaker 1: has Tesla stock, The Tesla stock is going down. Explain
Speaker 1: to me what is his sort of idea here about
Speaker 1: how he's going to make this all work. So what
Speaker 1: he's telling employees is that he wants to get fifty
Speaker 1: percent of revenues coming from subscriptions, so something like that
Speaker 1: Twitter blue eight dollars a month thing. You know. I
Speaker 1: reported earlier this week that he has also talked to
Speaker 1: his advisors about putting the entire site behind a paywall.
Speaker 1: So like, maybe you browse Twitter for an hour a month,
Speaker 1: but if you go over that hour, he asked you
Speaker 1: to pay him. That's what they want to do. But
Speaker 1: that's a challenge, as you know, for reasons that we've
Speaker 1: just seen. It's it's it's hard to build that and
Speaker 1: it's hard to get people to pay eight dollars a month, right,
Speaker 1: So that's kind of challenge number one. He wants us
Speaker 1: to pay for the free content we're making. Exactly if
Speaker 1: you want to be a part of Twitter, he wants
Speaker 1: you to essentially subscribe to see it. So it's you know,
Speaker 1: like Netflix for for texts or something like that. But
Speaker 1: you know, he has this more immediate problem, Molly, which
Speaker 1: is that he owns a company that makes eight nine
Speaker 1: percent of its revenue from advertising, and several big advertisers
Speaker 1: have paused all spending on the platform. You know, they've
Speaker 1: been looking to him for reassurance, and it is not
Speaker 1: reassuring when the head of trust and safety quits, when
Speaker 1: a bunch of your privacy and security people quit, right.
Speaker 1: The two top ad people in New York quit too,
Speaker 1: write that is true, although one of them was lured
Speaker 1: back after she quit yesterday, So it'll be interesting to see,
Speaker 1: you know, sort of what effect that has. But you know, Ellen,
Speaker 1: instead of really courting those advertisers, he's just been tweeting
Speaker 1: about how you know they're they're pulling out because you know,
Speaker 1: like the woke leftist mob you know, wants to kill
Speaker 1: free speech in America or something. And that's also not
Speaker 1: something that generally makes advertisers want to open up their wallets.
Speaker 1: So you know, what happens to ads on Twitter is
Speaker 1: a big open question here in the next few weeks.
Speaker 1: So he's basically doing everything to mess himself up, like
Speaker 1: he's self destructing. I would say, there's a lot of
Speaker 1: unforced errors. And you know, something that the Musk team
Speaker 1: believed when they came into Twitter, according to the people
Speaker 1: that I've spoken to, there was that most of these
Speaker 1: Twitter employees were not that smart right there. There was
Speaker 1: this view of them that they were these sort of
Speaker 1: you know, coddled leftists who had just been you know,
Speaker 1: paralyzed for years and had never shipped a useful feature
Speaker 1: and had no idea what they were doing. And Ellen
Speaker 1: was going to come in and sort of jump start
Speaker 1: this company. And I think the darkly funny thing about
Speaker 1: all of this is that Twitter, and the same Twitter
Speaker 1: employees that he's so disdained and you know and and
Speaker 1: gutted the staff, it was those employees who told him
Speaker 1: every single thing that was about to happen to him,
Speaker 1: and he ignored them and went ahead anyway, and guess
Speaker 1: what it all happened. It's amazing. I actually love Twitter.
Speaker 1: Oh me too. Yeah, So as much as like, I
Speaker 1: don't mind seeing this happen to Ellen and it seems
Speaker 1: like he's you know, he's sort of like Chorus, right,
Speaker 1: But I just wonder, like, is there a world in
Speaker 1: which things work out here? We are still in the
Speaker 1: early days of whatever this is. It's possible that Twitter
Speaker 1: will have a next act, right, maybe Musk will sort
Speaker 1: of gradually be willing to seed more control to people
Speaker 1: who actually know how to run a social network and
Speaker 1: he'll kind of go from there. But you know, if
Speaker 1: you talk to people who have worked with him at
Speaker 1: Tesla as I have, that's not how he runs that company.
Speaker 1: You know. He has a sort of very intense, you know, micromanage,
Speaker 1: whim based style of management there as well. So it's
Speaker 1: hard for me to be optimistic, but you know, I
Speaker 1: would love to be proven wrong because, like you, I
Speaker 1: love Twitter. Yeah. I know, I'm not supposed to ask
Speaker 1: people to predict the future, but predict the future, I
Speaker 1: mean a few things that I can predict. A lot
Speaker 1: of the engineers I've talked to you some are still there,
Speaker 1: some have left. They think that Twitter is going to
Speaker 1: have a significant outage, Like they think they've gotten rid
Speaker 1: of so many technical people who are necessary to operate
Speaker 1: this right, that something is going to go down and
Speaker 1: it's just gonna take a long time to fix. So
Speaker 1: that's something that I'm sort of looking at. I think
Speaker 1: Ellen is going to continue to tweet about new products
Speaker 1: and services that are coming. You know, he's we're gonna
Speaker 1: do this, and we're going to do that, right the
Speaker 1: sort of, you know, much of the same way that
Speaker 1: Donald Trump used to tweet about new policies, and then
Speaker 1: just as what Trump, we're gonna have to see, well,
Speaker 1: like does it actually happen? Is this something that he
Speaker 1: forgets about in two hours or is this something that
Speaker 1: actually gets built? That's gonna have a lot of consequences
Speaker 1: for employees who are going to be learning on Twitter
Speaker 1: what their jobs are supposed to be, right, which was
Speaker 1: another thing that you know, you'll you'll remember from the
Speaker 1: Trump administration. So lots of chaos and lots more to
Speaker 1: write about and podcast about Twitter in the the coming
Speaker 1: weeks and months. I think, do you think there's like
Speaker 1: another Twitter that's going to come along? There's never been
Speaker 1: a better time to start when you know there's this
Speaker 1: service mastered on that's existed since that. Some people are
Speaker 1: kind of I have them mastered on. I actually looked
Speaker 1: you up on masted on. Yeah I am there, but
Speaker 1: you haven't tweeted since two thousands. You haven't massed don Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's been well. I I logged on the other day
Speaker 1: and was just sort of like, hey, what's up, But
Speaker 1: like I haven't been there. You know, since some people
Speaker 1: are getting into it, we'll have to see. I sort
Speaker 1: of think it will have a relatively short shelf life.
Speaker 1: I mean, I like, to me, this is just right,
Speaker 1: Like this is what silicon value is supposed to be
Speaker 1: good at, is just seeing the market opportunity, seating some
Speaker 1: you know, smart team of people, and just letting them
Speaker 1: go do their things. So I think we need a
Speaker 1: new text based social alternative, and you know, the time's
Speaker 1: right to build it. I think, Yeah, does it end
Speaker 1: up that the bank owns Twitter in a year? Let's see,
Speaker 1: a year is a long time, really hard to say.
Speaker 1: I will say that some employees do think that that
Speaker 1: the company is on a path to bankruptcy if for
Speaker 1: know the reason that it will let Elon restructure his
Speaker 1: debt obligations in a way that's outdvantageous to him, So,
Speaker 1: you know, I do think that there's a significant likelihood
Speaker 1: that that's something like that might be a foot. Can
Speaker 1: you talk to us about f t X, explain it
Speaker 1: to us like we're stupid, And by we I mean me,
Speaker 1: sure well, and so you know, we're we're we're sort
Speaker 1: of at the very edge of my knowledge here. This
Speaker 1: isn't my main beat, but we did talk about it
Speaker 1: this week on my new podcast, hard Work, which I
Speaker 1: do with The New York Times, and my co host
Speaker 1: Kevin Ruce really sort of helped me understand this. And
Speaker 1: basically f t X is a place where you could
Speaker 1: go and buy cryptocurrencies. So maybe you want some bitcoin,
Speaker 1: that's a place where you could go. And if I
Speaker 1: say that to you, you know, you like me, probably think, well,
Speaker 1: that doesn't seem like that risk. You have a business,
Speaker 1: you know. But what seems to have happened is that
Speaker 1: f t X, which is owned or created by this guy,
Speaker 1: Sam Bateman Freed, is become you know, this major democratic
Speaker 1: and progressive donor. He also had this other business, Allometer Research,
Speaker 1: which was a hedge fund, and somehow it seems like
Speaker 1: customer funds got commingled, so funds that people had put
Speaker 1: into f t X. You never want that. It's the
Speaker 1: classic mistake. Molly is the daughter of a divorced lawyer.
Speaker 1: You never wanted to touch this stuff, you know that's
Speaker 1: in the Escaroa camp. Yeah. So that's basically what seems
Speaker 1: like happened. You know, it's truly astonishing because f t
Speaker 1: X was seen as this sort of rock solid crypto business.
Speaker 1: In fact, it's spent most of this year buying up
Speaker 1: just rest crypto companies that had gotten into trouble themselves,
Speaker 1: and so everyone saw them as sort of the savior
Speaker 1: of the crypto world. And then overnight the entire thing
Speaker 1: imploded and Sam bankman Fried lost of his wealth. Wow, unbelievable.
Speaker 1: So interesting. I hope you will come back. I would
Speaker 1: love to come back. Thank you. Jesse Cannon, Molly John Fasts.
Speaker 1: So we're tapping this on Sunday night, and it seems
Speaker 1: like one side is going to have a very very
Speaker 1: narrow lead over the other in Congress. It's going to
Speaker 1: be very very tight. Our moment of fuccory is that,
Speaker 1: believe it or not, this house is going to be
Speaker 1: so tight. The idea here is that in this hundred
Speaker 1: and seventeen Congress. Last the last congress Um, there were
Speaker 1: fifteen special elections for congressional seats, and so if Republicans
Speaker 1: have a one seat majority or even a two seat jority,
Speaker 1: every congressional special election is going to be like Georgia
Speaker 1: was two years ago. And if Democrats win special congressional elections,
Speaker 1: then the power in Congress could switch back and forth,
Speaker 1: and so that will be a lot of funckory. And
Speaker 1: so it is our moment of gery. That's it for
Speaker 1: this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in every Monday, Wednesday,
Speaker 1: and Friday to her the best minds in politics, makes
Speaker 1: sense of all this chaos. If you enjoyed what you've heard,
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Speaker 1: And again, thanks for listening.