Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics, where we discuss the top political headlines with some of today's best minds. And a federal judge has blocked Florida's ban on gender firm and care for trans youth. We have such an interesting show today. Nprs Miles Parks stop spy to talk to us about Republicans' latest fuckery with the voter rolls. Then we'll talk to the New York Times Ryan Mack about the bleak future in store for
Elon Musk's Twitter. But first we have the host of the Think Like an Economist podcast, University of Michigan Professor Justin Wolfers. Welcome to Fast Politics.
Welcome back Justin Fast Politics and Fast Economics.
Molly, Fast Economics. We need your help, man, I'm here to help.
Let us talk first about the blockbuster jobs numbers.
The jobs we're blockbuster again, right, yeah, So let me just give some context for your listeners. Yes, we economists pay enormous attention to a monthly set of numbers called the Jobs Report. Partly it's because we love it when people find work. But it's not just that. This is also the first big data release that tells us what
the economy was doing in May. So it's not just that it's important, it's also that it's reliable and it's early, and so it tells us when we get all the rest of the indicators to May, it's also going to say this economy just kept rocketing along.
There's a lot of anxiety here that we and this has been going on for a while, that we were going to go into a recession or something, you know, that we were going to have a hard landing. These jobs numbers explain why they're so relevant.
Right, So I will tell you, molly, Like every month for the last maybe year and a half or two years, literally every month a journalist has called me and said, boy, do you think this means we're in a recession?
Right?
Every time, and in every single one of those months, the economy has created more jobs than it normally does. So it's not just that the economy is not a lot of nuts. In that sentence, let me.
Go back, Yeah, tell us without the quadruple negatives.
Please, you're saying I should aure not the knots. Boom, yes, boom, that's right. We got some real academic humor here. Continue. Yes, no, I'm just kidding, hilarious.
Continue, So, if people thought we're in a recession, we should be creating fewer jobs than we normally are, in fact, we should be losing jobs. False and false. The opposite of a recession is when we're creating jobs, and the extreme opposite of a recession is when we're creating jobs faster than usual.
Right, all of which is true right now.
All of which is true this month, last month, the one before that, the one before that, and how long do you want me to go on for molly okay?
On the internet, which we're trying to do less of, but on Twitter, the tech bro crew, which includes Elon Musk and his minions were mad about these job numbers and felt that they weren't legit.
Can you explain a little bit about this incredibly dumb story.
Yeah, So, if you and you alone have a galaxy brain that understands all of capitalism, which I do, Yes, and some numbers come out that happen not to reflect the reality that you see as you're walking down Sandhill Road in Silicon Valley to buy an eighteen dollar latte.
We are really at peak naughtiness here. Justin continue, Yes, there's.
Only one conclusion you can draw, which is the numbers must be fake. Reality could not possibly be anything else you perceive it to be. I will tell you, Molly, the fun thing about this is I teach freshman economics. I have brilliant, wonderful eighteen year olds, and I teach this stuff about how these numbers are calculated and so on, and they fall a little bit of sleep because statistics
aren't for everyone. But any one of my freshmen could fly out to Silicon Valley and I'm sure I could get one of them out there for a mere two thousand dollars an hour to give a quick little lecture on how the numbers are collected. And let me tell you, the moment someone tells you there's corruption involved, they're telling you they don't know what they're saying. They could explain the very simple mathematics of how it involves both addition
and subtraction and sometimes long division. And it turns out the rest of the economy is just not necessarily what your little bubble looks like.
Right.
Sometimes these numbers are adjusted after they're announced. Can you explain a little bit about what where those factor into I mean, have you seen big adjustments down and what does that look like.
So here's how they collect the most important of those numbers, which is called the Non farm Payrolls Report. Basically, every big company in the country and a pretty good sampling of smaller companies are asked every month to send in a form or to electronically zap across a headcom to the government, and then the government uses statistical voodoo otherwise known as you know, just standard extrapolation to come up
with the numbers that you read about in the newspaper. Now, sometimes it happens that the folks in the personnel department are a little bit busy and they don't zap their numbers across in time, and so every month they publish the number before all the responses come back, and in order to be responsible the next month, the statistical authorities so, well, let's count all the forms that were returned, and so
they publish what's called the revised number. It is true that the first number you read is an initial early best guess. It is true that they're subsequently revised. One of my favorite tech bro stories I've heard is that they're always published is if the economy is strong, and then later quietly Biden and his minions revise it down when literally the exact opposite has been true over the
past few years. So it turns out these numbers ten over a couple of months have been revised up more often than down, But over a long run of history, they're revised up and down roughly as often as each other, and roughly as much under Republicans as Democrats. And this is just an incredibly serious and boring statistical exercise, and there's nothing more to it than meets the eye.
So I want to ask you, just I want to get into this for another minute, even though it's so stupid. Do you think it's a bad tension that we have a certain And again, these are not all tech bros. These are just very loudest ones, and they tend to be the very libertarian ones. But do you think it's bad that this crew is so convinced that the economy is bad and wants to make it so or do you think that's just a normal tension that we see.
Let me answer by broadening the lens and not just picking on the tech bros. Right, So, the our word recession is one we have just heard an absolutely relentless drum beat of over the past two years, just month after month, and each of your listeners has tuned into a major TV station, or listen to a radio broadcast, or read a headline from a major newspaper saying are we in recession? Are we in recession? Are we in recession?
People are worried about a recession. And the amazing thing was, if you're one of the statistical nerds that I am, there never has been even a hint that we're in recession. And so that raises this very deep question what the hell's going on? And a bright young economists who came up with this idea lovely expression. She called it a vibe session. It's the vibe, man. The vibe is recessionary. The reality, though, which is reflected in statistics, is not.
And I think it's kind of important because when I say the reality is not, I am not saying your industry, your job, your street, your part of the country is doing okay. I don't know. What I do know is when we add up the statistics across hundreds of millions of people that on average, the economy today is doing a lot better and has continued to improve for the
last couple of years. And so there's a deeper I don't like saying this because normally I think the economics media does a pretty good job, particularly from top outlets, But this has been a case where the disjunction between popular opinion and media reporting versus reality has been larger than I've ever seen in my life. I don't have a deep theory as to why, but I do know that's true.
You don't have a deep theory into why. You want to just make a gas.
I'll take a guess. So one, Molly, you might notice that I'm on your show right now during the middle of a booming economy. What are we talking about right now?
The economy?
Did you use the word recession when asking me some questions? Yes, okay, so I'm talking about a recession because you asked me about a recession, right, Molly, Why did you ask me about a recession?
We're not in one, because there's been a lot of anxiety about a recession.
So you have to talk about a recession because everyone else is talking about a recession. Yes, and despite the fact I know we're not in a recession, I'm talking about a recession as well. It's a little bit of a self reinforcing loop there. But let me give your listeners to other explanations. One, there actually is something bad going on at the moment. Inflation is high. Inflation sucks, right, I hate it, it's awful.
I wanted to ask you about.
Yeah, so good. You've now got my bold opinion. I'm again.
Hey, so it's high, but it's actually better than we thought.
Right, talk to us about inflation. The numbers are going down.
Right, So, first of all, inflation is not the same thing as recession. A recession means we're making less, we're buying less, fewer of us have jobs. Yes, it's about the stuff that's getting done. Inflation is about the price tags associated with that stuff. And so those price tags have been a source of angst. But the amount of stuff we do has actually been going up. Now inflation is fortunately on its way down. There are gradations. We could talk about numbers, but let me just use normal
terms instead. There was a point about a year ago where it was at the let's call it the holy shit level where.
There was a lot of anxiety.
You couldn't help but notice it. You'd go to the grocery store and stuff was more expensive, right, So that's what inflation's like eight, nine, ten percent. Then it's now fallen to the four or five percent, which is the you know, it's kind of a minor annoyance, but you're not seeing your paycheck getting robbed at at a really crazy rate. And then once we get to two or three two percent. No one will believe me when I say this, but once inflation gets down to two percent,
you can barely notice it. And the reason you can barely notice it is once it's two percent, some things are getting a lot cheaper and some things are getting a lot more expensive, and it actually requires a really big spreadsheet to figure out which side of the ledger is bigger. So we're down from holy shit levels towards annoying but noticeable, and inflation is going to continue to fade down. And the question is will it get all the way to unnoticeable or will it stick it mildly annoying.
So I want to ask you, as we're talking about this, the dead ceiling, big news drama, a lot of you know, it could have really crashed the American economy and really hurt the Biden presidency. I think a lot of us had that anxiety that did not happen, and Biden.
World really did best.
The GOP time to me about a how they basted them and be what it looks like now.
Great, So let me tell you a story in three acts. First two acts are good news, and then we learned the whole thing was a tragedy. The first act is there were threats to not raise the debt ceiling, which would have forced the US to default on its debt, which could have caused a financial crisis, not unlike that of two thousand and eight two thousand and nine, forcing millions out of work. That could have happened. Good news
in this first act is that didn't happen. Eventually, Congress decided to do what it ought to do, and what it's done seventy times in the past is raise the debt limit. Second act is who won and who lost? And my reading is that Biden. And it's not everyone's reading, by the way, but my reading is that Biden ate McCarthy's lunch. Now you have to kind of go deep in the weeds to see it and know a little
bit about how the government does accounting. So really, Biden I wanted a clean debt ceiling bill, which was a way of saying Biden wanted to give nothing up. Of course that's my opening can. But in fact my opening gambit is I give nothing up and you send over a pint of ice cream. Love ice cream, but we don't want to compare things to that. What he ended up giving up was nominal spending caps, so caps on government spending for the next two years. That sounds like
a lot. Now. Let's realize, though, that Republicans refused to do anything on taxes, so it was all on the revenue side, within sorry, all in spending side. Within government spending. Two thirds of it's what's called mandatory spending, which is like Social Security, and they said, well, we're not going to touch any of that. The remaining one third is what's called discretionary spending. This is the stuff where we have to have annual bills appropriating money. And they said, yeah,
well look at that. Well half of that one third is military spending, so we like the military, we don't want to do anything there. So what you're left with is caps on one half of one third, that is one sixth of the federal budget. Those caps, there's actual cap for the next two years. And then the bill says and here's our goals for the future. Thing about goals is they're just that, they're just words. So Biden
gave up two years of caps. Here's a funny thing. Now, Biden, can't you know, he's kind of one at this point, but he's got to give McCarthy something to go back to his folks and claim a big win. Here's a really weird thing. There's a part of the government called the CBO Congressional Budget Office whose job is to say how much money any new bill will cost or save.
And what they do is they say, well, it's obviously these caps will cut government spending for the next two years, and they say, we don't know what's going to happen in the third fourth. And they say they accumulate the total savings over ten years, but they don't know what's going to happen in years three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine and ten. So they say, well, let's just assume government spending sticks at its level at the end of
two years, except will allow for inflation adjustments. So it's like they assume that the two year deal lasts for ten years, and so carfee can go back, and so imagine that we cut spending one hundred million dollars for the next two years. You and I would say that's two hundred million dollars worth of savings. The Congressional Budget Office would say, yeah, but spending's going to remain lower than that. Otherwise would be for one hundred million for
each of the next ten years. So therefore that's a trillion dollars in savings. So McCarthy goes back to his folks and shows these graphs, saying I saved us a trillion dollars, and Biden quietly says, hey, you know what, I didn't really give them very much at all, which is the truth.
Right, So then what's the third act?
So can I give you one more thing on the second act because it's kind of interesting? Yeah, yeah, of course, the Republicans really wanted work requirements in order to get government assistance. They're like, you know, too many people who are poor are just sitting around enjoying being poor. What we want them to do is have to work in order to.
Be poor, right, right, They're so cruel.
I mean, I shouldn't be laughing, but the work, I mean, the idea here is like you now, it's just let's just pick on the people who need us anyway.
Gone.
Yeah, So they said, if your age fifty to fifty four and want various forms of assistance, you have to show that you're working or trying to work. And the Democrats actually said, okay, but in return, let's agree that work requirements, which actually already exist for a lot of the population, right right, are inhumane for certain groups like veterans,
homeless people, and foster kids. And so they said, let's just get rid of the work requirements for them, but we'll boost them for these other guys you want to punch.
Amazing because the reality is homeless people, veterans, and faster kids.
Are on benefits at higher rates than the rest of the population.
Right, I mean, it was laughed.
So guess what the number of people subject to work requirements actually falls.
It's amazing, It's amazing.
Which is quite the negotiating outcome from McCarthy.
So is it fair to say that McCarthy is in fact a golden retriever of a man?
McCarthy's new doesn't really know how it's done, And Biden's seen this play before, and I don't know. I find it hard to answer your question, Molly, because I really like golden retrievers. But oh my goodness, if we see Biden v. McCarthy, if we see that again, I'm going to feel pretty good going into it. And so I spent all my energy not gloating because I didn't want to wake anyone up to how badly McCarthy got beat. Let's get to the third act. So far, it's a
good news story. No, we didn't crash the economy and Biden didn't give up most anything to get it. One view is the system worked. Here's the problem. What we'd spent the entire period of that debate doing is basically standing up and saying, hey, I'm thinking about not repaying my debts, and then the Republicans will say, I think it even more right?
Right?
Right?
The brinkmanship is bad.
Yeah, have you ever met a bank manager, like, do you have a mortgage or anything? Molly a car loan?
Sure?
Okay, So let me just give you some advice. Next time you want to loan, don't walk into the bank and say, you know, if things are going okay, I'll make my payments. But if I feel kind of pissy with this other guy, I'm not going to make a payment, right, And that's effectively, what Congress did and what that's going to do is cost us all because we know that our commitment to repaying our debts is not that great.
And the world's bank managers, which is global financial markets, are going to say, if I'm going to lend you, I'm going to do it at a higher interest rate. And then we also had all these people in Treasury, their full time job normally is helping run the American economy. They spent three months basically looking down the back of our metaphorical couch for extra quarters in order to keep the government open. And this is all just completely wasted work.
So my better half, Betsy Stevenson, had an op ed in The New York Times yesterday in which he says, this may be cost us twenty billion dollars. It's like Congress just like just picture this, the number of school buses full to the brim of dollar bills lined up in front of Congress, and they've got McCarthy out there. He probably sent Matt Gertz out to do it instead with a cigarette lighter, just burning dollar bills hour by hour by hour by hour. And so yes, the system worked,
but this was political point scoring. But it was political point scoring with yours and my tax dollars, and you should be pissed. Whoever won this shouldn't have burned a competition. This is the most expensive campaign advertisement that either side has ever written. They would never pay this much for this sort of political advertising, and the reason they did it is because it wasn't the RNC paying for the advertising, it was your million instead.
Justin thank you so much a pleasure. Mine.
Miles Parks is a correspondent on NPR's Washington Desk. To hear more of his reporting, head to NPR dot org.
Welcome Too Fast Politics, Miles Park.
Thank you so much for having me.
I'm so excited to have you, so gonna set the stage here a little bit. You and the NPR team, which is probably a lot of people on of you, did an incredible investigation into one of the sort of best ways to fight voter fraud and how that.
Mechanism is being disabled by the right. Can you explain what Eric does?
So what Eric does is it takes all of this government data. It takes data from state DMVs, it takes data from the Social Security Administration, in the US Postal Service, and then each state's voter records, It takes all of that data, throws it in a bowl securely. All the
sensitive data is encrypted before Eric analyzes it. And then a guy named Jeff Jonas, who is a kind of world renowned cybersecurity guide, developed this technology that allowed for this system to match up all of these different records from different government systems and then spit out reports that can be sent directly to local election officials so they can update their roles. So it will say, hey, John Smith, we are very confident that your voter, John Smith has
now moved to Rhode Island. You should reach out to John Smith with a mailer to ask if they've moved and see if it comes back to you. Then they produce another report that says, hey, we have information that John Smith seems to have voted twice in Rhode Island and in South Carolina. And then they have another report that says, you know, we have information that seems to indicate John Smith has died in Georgia or something like that. So it uses all this data to actually spit out
reports election officials can use. Because these are I think we also forget that these offices are under resource. They don't have some person in the back, who's able to go through millions of pieces of data and try to figure out whether their voters have moved. What we'll figure out all of this stuff. So Eric did a lot of that work with technology, right.
I mean, that is the thing that I'm struck by is that these secretaries of state can't handle this. That's why this database was created. And the original anxiety about it was really that it was registering voters.
Right.
Well, the original original anxiety was that it was connected to George Soros in some way, which was quickly proved false. And I think once that got proved false, then it started focusing on the One aspect of Eric is that one of the reports it produces says, hey, John Smith moved, got a driver's license but hasn't registered to vote. You should send them a postcard. That's one of the things that kind of gets muddled when the far right talks
about this. They imply that Eric is registering voters or is actually doing anything. Eric is producing reports and then the local election officials and all these states act on them. So it's not like people are getting registered by Eric. Eric is just telling the election official, hey, we think you should reach out to this person and give them some information on how to register.
Can you explain to us what is happening.
Yeah, absolutely, it's a very complicated story that's actually kind of simple. Basically, states without this tool, which is called the Electronic Registration Information Center, have no way to share election data. So if you are let's say South Carolina, and you want to know if one of your voters moves to Connecticut gets a driver's license there, I think people kind of assume that the government is talking to
itself in all these different ways. It is not. And so this organization called the Electronic Registration Information Center, better known as ERIC, was started about ten years ago to help election officials know when their voters move, get notified when their voters die, and then also critically for especially for these Republican states, for the small amount of people every federal election who do vote in more than one state, which is illegal, and ERIC is the only way that
states have to catch that sort of voter fraud. And so for the first nine years or so of its existence, it was growing and beloved. I mean, I've been covering voting for about half a decade now, and every time I would talk to an election official, and I'm talking about the most conservative election officials in the country from
West Virginia and Missouri and Texas. These people love this thing as well as Democrats, who I think people some Republicans think that Democrats don't want clean voter roles, but the Democratic election officials say no, it's much more efficient to have mail going to the right places, to have our precincts set up where you know addresses are accurate.
So Eric was beloved for close to ten years until last year when the far right started targeting it with a smear campaign campaign that really effectively started kind of blowing this thing up.
I want to talk about this because this all started with an article in The Atlantic.
Well it started with an article. There's a couple different starting points, so really it actually goes back to an article in the Gateway Pundit.
I thought the Atlantic article came before for the Gateway Pundit, and the Gateway Pundin article is based on the Atlantic article.
No, so the guy who wrote that article, he made a joke in the piece that it wasn't an article in the Atlantic, and that's why the far right loved it. So I think it may have got misunderstood there basically
he wrote a blog post. This guy, Jay Christian Adams wrote a blog post in twenty sixteen that loosely alleged that George Soros was somehow behind Eric, and then the Gayway Pundit found that article, found some interviews with the same guy, turned that into what they called kind of investigation into Eric, and then published their article in twenty twenty two.
Okay, so let's talk about the Gateway Pundit. Gateway Pundit for those of you who are not extremely online, and I assume there.
Are a few people who listens podcast.
Who lucky them, lucky you guys right, who don't.
Know about the dumbest man on the Internet, Jim Hoff. But the Gayway Pundit is this incredibly stupid site run by a guy with two short bangs and his twin brother that basically pumps out crazy cannspiracy theories but has become really a sort of central educator on the right.
Yeah, and I will not be commenting on the has appearance, right, Well, yes, but I I but our investigation did find that the Gayway Pundit has become a real influential player, especially in these states where these election officials are going to be running in Republican primaries, and they're going to need to be winning Republican primary voters in off election years. That could be a very small percentage of diehard Republicans, and a lot of those people are reading the Gayway pundit.
Because we're all going to die, so Gayway Pundit Cleta Mitchell. So explain to us who Cleida Mitchell is and where and sort of where she comes up with this idea.
Yeah, So, Clelida Mitchell is this very influential Republican election attorney who kind of came to prominence after twenty twenty for helping former President Trump try to overturn that election. She was on the phone call with Georgia election officials where Trump was asking them to find votes. And so since twenty twenty, Kleida Mitchell has kind of found a niche as a key election denier. She has started a podcast called Who's Counting, which does a good job of
spreading a lot of election misinformation. She's also started this thing called the Election Integrity Network, which is a coalition of sort of grassroots groups all over the country that are interconnected in this web that they're kind of aimed at quote unquote election integrity, but in reality, our investigation found that they're pushing to dismantle a lot of tools
and helpful things that actually help election integrity. So what happens is the Gateway Pundit publishes this article in January of twenty twenty two, and we found we did a really cool social media analysis that looked at hundreds of thousands of posts in far right channels and found that
they really latched on to this Gateway Pundit article. And then Louisiana pulls out a week later, the Secretary of State there announces it we found to a conservative activist group, which is key because a lot of election officials I talk to, Republican and Democrat, point to that actually even more importantly than the Gateway punted article, because gatewayed publishes
stuff every day that the government doesn't respond to. But the moment that an election official actually responded to it and gave it credibility, that is what kind of started this entire pressure campaign on the other Republican states. And so what we found is that Cleta Mitchell saw Louisiana pulled out and decided, Wow, this is a thing that really seems to ignite our base. Started focusing her podcast on it, these election integrity groups started focusing on it.
She started telling these groups, reach out to state legislatures in your states, reach out to your election officials, and that happened, which kind of, over the course of a year, led to a number of these state election officials feeling the pressure and actually pulling out.
So you talked through this on your NPR podcast and also on the station I assume about exactly how this went down, and you actually interviewed a secretary of state talk to me about sort of how this went down.
So what it really boils down to is that for a lot of last year, a lot of these Republican election officials were on the record as saying they loved this tool. Like this secretary of state who you mentioned that I interviewed and I've talked at linked with the number of times. His name's Frank Lrose in Ohio. He's a Republican, but he's also pushed back at times against election denihalism, and so he in February called this tool one of the best tools we have for fighting election fraud.
And he talked me through basically said, you know, if you want to win a Republican primary, you kind of need these voters. So he almost had empathy for people like Kyle Ardwin in Louisiana and West Allen in Alabama, who were the first secretaries to pull out of this thing. They were trying to win elections, and he was basically saying, that's how politics works. They looked at this thing, said well,
my voters want this, I'm going to do it. But hopefully over time it starts to kind of cool off, states start to get into it, the pressure kind of dies down. A month after that interview, LaRose pulled Ohio out of eric and so we kind of saw in real time as this investigation unfolded, the pressure building on these election officials who just weeks before were defending it on the record.
Oh wow, but they did it because they were scared of pushback from the far right or I mean, they won't.
Say that, but well, the the well exactly exactly, they will never say that. But what we found is this common through line where especially the first few election officials that pulled out, they're all going to be running in Republican primaries in the next you know, year to year and a half. Larrose, for instance, is expected to run for Senate in Ohio. Florida pulled out. You know, obviously DeSantis is in the presidential race Missouri and West Virginia.
Both those secretaries of state have now announced runs for governor, and so there is kind of a through line of politics actually kind of inner fearing an election administration here.
It's so interesting because it really is you're really seeing how much the craziness of Republican primary politics has reverberations that we can't even quantify.
Yeah, I mean that was to me why this story was worth doing. Was it was not this feels like a twenty twenty four story. Yeah, you know in terms of this is not only because of how the election is going to be run in twenty twenty four, but I think there are a lot of Republicans who are still members of ERIC who are pushing through this pressure. This is not something where you can paint the Republican
Party with like one big broad brush. You know. What we're seeing is people like Brad Raffisberger and Georgia who has been one of the most vocal defenders of ERIC and is still a member. It's an individual decision for each one of these Republicans to say, will I stand up to this pressure and defend this thing that I've been on the record for defending.
The thing I would say about Brad Rathitsberger is that he has shown that he has the monetary support to be able to win a primary challenge.
We just saw that for him, So obviously, I mean.
It's easier for somebody who refeels confident in their political position, right, But I mean, to be fair, Leroe's just won re election last year in Ohio and defeated a primary challenger, not a super serious primary challenger necessarily, but he had just won a Republican primary last year, and so it was interesting to see. But obviously he sees it seems like I should say that he sees this Senate run as this is something he needed to do.
Yeah, I mean, it's just such an interesting situation because you really see the Gateway pundon has so much power.
Yes, absolutely, And what I think this story also showed to me was that there's an infrastructure in a way there wasn't four or five years ago to get this election denial moving into policy. It's like it's not just like throwing spaghetti at the wall in social media anymore. Like these groups that I mentioned, these election integrity groups,
they didn't exist five years years ago. And so you have these groups of people in all of these states who have a way, like we found call outs in all of these states where these groups were telling their members, here's the emails for all of your all of the state lawmakers and the election officials, here are the talking points on ERIC. Reach out to them. Phone calls are
best in person, it's best. Email works too, And so there is an infrastructure now that actually works to get these ideas into the mainstream in a way that didn't there what there wasn't five years ago.
Right exactly.
It's such a strange situation. So you can get a state back into ERIC. It's not like there's some mandatory leaving period.
Right exactly. So a lot of the election official I talk to said, basically, we just got a weather, this storm, and hopefully in maybe it's two years, maybe it's five years, but some of these states that have left will look to join again. Some of the Republican states have started, including Lrose has kind of been leading this effort to start almost like an ERIC competitor, where they will be able to share data amongst at least probably Republican states, but maybe they will be able to get a few
other states. It's unclear whether that will work as well as Eric did and whether they will be to be able to get as many states, but there is definitely a world where Eric kind of pushes through this weird time. I think it's fair to say that in twenty twenty four these states will probably not have access to that data, and it's really unclear how they'll be able to prosecute voter fraud.
So interesting and so weird and also depressing. Thank you so much for joining us. I hope you'll come back.
Yeah, thank you so much for having Mollie. It's been a pleasure.
Hi. It's Mollie and I am.
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How's it going?
You know, live in the.
Dream completely ironically, of course. So I want to talk to you about your I mean, I guess, do you get sick of the Elon Musk beat?
No?
I don't know.
I've covered him for a couple of years now, and you know, I go in and out of covering certain companies and focusing on different things, but it's always interesting in Elon world.
So it's it's entertaining.
Did you at one time?
Because I went on a tour of the SpaceX factory in twenty seventeen SpaceX No, of the Tesla factory in twenty seventeen with a like a university board that I was not on. I was just a guest, and and I thought, this guy is incredible, this company is amazing.
Did you Did you.
Originally have that kind of feeling about Musk or did you always just were you always just a serious, straight reporter who didn't have expectations about your subject.
I'll give the reporter answer, which is as any straight serious reporter.
I don't know.
I don't let my kind of personal feelings get in the way of what's what I report on. I will say, you know, I focus on accountability in my work and that's been kind of the guiding light. And so you know, I think you can you can analyze and view Elon in a couple buckets. He is, of course very successful. I don't need to tell people that. You look at his at worth, you look at what he's done with you know, normalizing electric vehicles and privatizing the space industry
like that is all no one's ever done that. You know, he is very singular in having done all those achievements, and you know you can read about that and you know,
read Ashley Vats's book and see that success. At the same time, you know, I think I started really reporting on him and his companies at my previous job at BuzzFeed, and you know, we were doing you know, investigations into what was happening at those Tesla factories, and my colleague at the time, Carolyn and Donovan, was really looking at kind of the human costs of these factory workers who were building these electric cars at the kind of this
breakneck pace, you know, and they were getting hurt and crushed and you know, not getting the support from the company because they were fighting for the union. The company was fighting against the union movement, and you know, you can see these people getting hurt in this process. And that's this lens that I've I've taken into, you know, reporting on him and his companies.
Not to say that the other side of things, you.
Know, I do acknowledge, you know, he's very successful, but in my work, that's that's how I've seen him.
One of the things that Elon wanted to try to do was to get Twitter to make money. That has sort of run counter. Can you explain to us what's happening with Twitter's advertising and just sort of where we are with that.
Well, I think the whole thing about making money, it really depends on what week you get him answering that question, because some weeks, you know, I don't care about money. It's not about money, it's about free speech. I'm making a principal decision, you know, supposedly as he says, defending the digital town square or whatever. You know, in other weeks, he is a businessman, you know, he has to run this company he paid forty four billion dollars for it.
He loaded it with I think thirteen billion dollars worth of debt to close this deal. You know, he has to get the economics to work. And part of this economics, you know, the main chunk of that is the advertising portion. And historically, like any large social media company, advertising has been the lifeblood of Twitter, and you know it, in the past, advertising has accounted for about ninety percent of
revenue at the company. And in coming into the company and buying it back in October, Elon Musk has essentially cratered that business. He's talked about it somewhat openly, and we you know, recently got some internal documents and spoke to some employees current informer that kind of paid a kind of bleaker picture of where the company is at since the takeover.
It's interesting to me because one of the things that I was sort of surprised by, and again this is perhaps my own naivy day, but like he does just blatantly lie about things, which you know, again I don't know why that shocks me so much, but like there's certain things, like you said, if there's an ad on your tweet, you'll.
Get paid for it. Remember that that was just not real at all.
Right, I think he's working towards that. I would say, you know, there is you know, undoubtedly obfuscation.
You know.
I think the thing about lying is there has to be intent to deceive.
Right.
I think he makes these very big predictions and large projections that often don't hit the mark.
Right.
You know, we started our story this week about problems with advertising by looking at some of the comments he made back in April, and he gave this interview with his BBC reporter This kind of it's been made fun of quite a bit, but you know, he went on this live interview with the BBC and talked about, you know, advertisers are almost all back on the platform. You know,
we're gonna break even. He painted this picture of the company really having turned a corner and doing well, and actually these documents show otherwise.
And then you have the head of trust and safety and the head of brand safety and ad quality, and you have I mean, you have all of these people resigning.
Yeah, and actually actually probably contextualize what those documents showed before going into that. But with the documents showed, you know, US AD sales were down fifty nine percent for the first weeks of quarter two. You know, the for that would mean, you know, April into May, the company has been down tens of millions of dollars compared to last year.
They're also undershooting.
They're already kind of adjusted projections for revenue this quarter, and it kind of paints this bleak, bleak picture.
For the company moving forward.
You know, if they can't bring in this money, you know, Twitter is going to have to keep operating at a loss, and Elon Musk's going to have to keep sinking money into this business. You know, That's what we kind of showed in these documents. And with regards to the questions you asked with the kind of folks that left recently, this all happened last week when this kind of Daily Wire incident popped up.
Will you tell our listeners what this did? It's so stupid, but it worked, right. They were able to get you along to do what they wanted.
Yeah, and I think of like still reporting it out. But basically what happened is The Daily Wire, a right wing podcast network and content network and by Ben Shapiro, had a movie they wanted to promote called What Is a Woman? Obviously playing into the culture war around trans issues, and they wanted to promote this movie. If you have been anywhere near Elon's Twitter feed, you obviously know this is a culture war topic that is very near and dear to his heart. He has himself, you know, exhibited.
Trans people, right, and I.
Don't think it's very secret what his politics are on the topic. The Daily Wires says claims that they had, you know, a deal to promote this movie essentially, I think hour and a half long movie, by pushing it into some kind of special area on Twitter that it could be promoted. There was supposed to be some money exchange, and they claim that it was then prevented because of
the content of the video itself. Twitter had these rules around misgendering folks and policies intended to protect people who were trance, and those have been kind of whittled away under Elon Musk. Yeah, I guess some of the remaining folks at the company decided to uphold those policies.
Or maybe not. I mean they could also be lying, right, It's.
A little unclear. Yeah, it's a little unclear. So this kind of dust up happens. Elon comes in and says, well, you know, actually before that, you know, the video was actually labeled on Twitter as I guess, under the company's
popolicies around hate speech. And Elon comes in and says, this is the wrong decision, you know, decisions made that weren't and I wasn't involved with, and he blames his underlings, and he then gives full promotion to this video, which then gets pushed everywhere on Twitter, and then those people get fired or resigned. Essentially, the head of trust and safety and the head of brand safety all left last week in this kind of kerfuffle.
And that was because of this, yeah part.
And you know other kind of I guess dust ups in the past, but yeah, this was kind of I guess the nail in the coffin.
I think about Linda Jakarino, who went over there. It's hard to imagine taking a job there after the way he's treated his other employees. It seems like a real gamble in my mind.
Yeah, her first day was yesterday.
I think there is no shortage of people that want to work with this very successful entrepreneur, you know, people that maybe view him in that other bucket as this successful man they can hitch their start of his you know, they can build a name for themselves. You know, there's all types of motivations for why someone would want to work with Elon Musk. You know, everyone has confidence in themselves.
They're maybe like, you know, maybe they see what's happened in the past and they think they can they can buck that trend. And you know, and there are and there are examples of people that I've worked successively with him in the past when shot while at SpaceX for example, being the you know, pre eminent example of that, the kind of president at SpaceX who's been there for decades.
So one of the things I want to ask you is, Uh, there was this RFK junior Twitter spaces yesterday. It didn't break, but it did spread a lot of anti VAXX conspiracy theories. I mean, we've gone from like, you know, actively trying not to spread these things to actively trying to spread them. I mean, what am I missing here?
And that happened on Lindy Acarina's first day, so I'm sure that excited advertisers that she yeah.
Once to court.
I mean it just evidence is the shift in let's call it Twitter one point zero. Everything before Elon and Twitter two point zero everything that has come with Elon's ownership. You know, Twitter used to have policies around COVID misinformation. That was something they enforced through the pandemic. They developed it because of concerns around misinformation on the virus and
the vaccines. Obviously, we can debate, you know, how effective those were or whether those were completely correct to implement at the time. Now, obviously Elon has given a platform to the leading one of the leading anti VACS activists in the US. You know, he's obviously now a presidential candidate. So that's the guys by which Elon has welcomed him into this platform to do a Twitter space like he did with Ron DeSantis a couple of weeks ago, or
I don't know what last week or something. I don't even know the weeks anymore, But that illustrates the difference here in the approaches of Twitter past and present.
We're seeing less accountability for this kind of thing. I mean, do you think that there's any chance that this wolf spur government oversight. I mean, we've seen like the spread of misinformation via Facebook, like causing things like genocide or helping organize genocide. I mean, you know, we've really seen some technology that is unregulated. I mean the road to
this is paved with the bodies. And I mean do you see any impetus for anything happening or do you think this will just continue as it does?
I don't think, you know, not in the US. I mean, there's really no laws around, you know, how platforms should handle misinformation in the US, and I frankly don't know the answer to that or don't know if that would be the best way to adjust it. I mean, Twitter, at its core essentially is still a private company. It's making decisions that its owner thinks his best with regards to how it operates. You know, it's protected by Section two thirty and which is much longer debate to be had.
But there isn't necessarily any law breaking in the US with regards to hosting RFK Junior on a Twitter space. There could be a counter argument to be made that people hearing him and his belief systems and his viewpoints will actually go against it. You know they won't, right, right, I might can be the business in fact in et cetera, et cetera.
Right, you could go either way.
But there are you know, rules around social platforms and misinformation and disinformation in the EU, and they have to show compliance with these laws, and that could be a potential avenue for regulation with regards to how you know, speech is I guess regulated in these places.
So, you know, I don't think it's going to happen in the US.
You know, the EU has these laws around compliance for social media companies with miss info and disinfo.
But we'll see. I guess what happens with Twitter.
Is Elon's goal to host all the presidential candidates in spaces.
I think you would tell you that, And yeah, he said he's he'd welcome other candidates as well.
But he has sort of made overtures that he's going to support to Santa's right.
Yeah, I mean it's he's made no secret that he's going to support Disantas. I mean, he's tweeted it multiple times at this point. Maybe he sees himself as like the you know, Twitter is Howard Stern in a way where he hosts these people and he talks about talks with them, and he just wants to be a podcast host and like, you know, content creator. No, I don't know, it could be an ego thing here, but yeah, he said as much. He's wanted to bring any candidate on
to talk in his Twitter space. Whether that's the most effective use of his time, I don't know. I'm not a Tessa shareholder or a SpaceX shareholder, but you know he was in a Twitter space yesterday for two hours with RFK Junior talking about everything from vaccines to bio weapons to nuclear power.
So better him than me. So I think the top line here is that there.
Is a chance that everyone, no matter even if you're the richest man in the world, all he wants to be is a podcaster.
I mean, I feel like there's.
Yeah, I think for him, and maybe he wakes up next week and he doesn't want to do this anymore.
Who knows, I'll just take.
His money and he can have Mike podcast. Thank you so much, Ryan, this is great, of course, thanks for having me. No moment, Jesse Cannon.
My Jung Fast. This RFK junior guy, he really likes to spread the disinformation.
Elon Musk held a Twitter spaces with RFK where he said a lot of really stupid crap. I'm talking about RFK, though I'm sure that Elon said.
It was a little evenly distributed.
It was two hours of stupid crap from both of those guys. Again, I don't know where they caught the brain worms that they have, but it's pretty depressing to watch them spreading disinformation and misinformation, especially when we know that RFK Junior is really just acting as a spoiler to elect Donald Trump, and for that he is our moment Offucker. That's it for this episode of Fast Politics.
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