SPEAKER_07: Hello, everybody. Welcome. We are live at the All In headquarters and the All In podcast is now live. We have 63 people watching already. And bear with us while we get the besties on the line. I'll be doing my introductions in just a moment after I tweet this. But it is an eventful night and we had to start early because it's looking like this could be another shocker. And I am not being facetious here. I am not happy about this, obviously. But Trump looks like he's been underestimated again. This is not a blowout. We are going live early. This could be a shocker, folks. OK, so with me early on the pod is regular David Friedberg. David, you're watching this early action. And what's your early reaction to what we're seeing? You know, Trump's moved.
SPEAKER_06: There's nothing definitive yet, but he's moved in the results and he's moving markets. We're seeing Forex markets show a sharp indication that Trump has a real shot at winning here. Treasury markets and as Phil Hellmuth will share with us, betting markets as well. All right, well, it is more of a nail biter than game seven of the Warriors, Cavs. So here we go.
SPEAKER_06: There's a hell of a nail biter, guys. And I'm just going to say this. The UK market set it first.
SPEAKER_08: He was five to two. You could get Trump at five to two, two and a half to one. Then it hit five to four. And I thought that was quite crazy. You're watching CNN, you're watching these networks and they're saying, oh, my God, Biden's winning this. No, they're not even in the right neighborhood. I'll never watch a network again on election night. And now the market from five minutes ago, three hundred and sixty eight million pounds wagered, three hundred and sixty eight million pounds. Trump is now a three to ten favorite. OK, so for people, Phil, who are not gamblers, if you bet three dollars, you bet three dollars.
SPEAKER_07: No, no, Jason, you have to understand if you bet thirteen dollars, OK, you don't get thirteen back,
SPEAKER_08: you only get ten back. OK, now if you want to bet Biden, it's seven to four. So if I bet seventy dollars, if I bet forty dollars, I can get seventy dollars back on Biden. Now, the shocker is right around six twenty eight p.m. The betting odds, the markets have been in Biden's favor for three straight months. I've been live posting them on my Twitter all day. The worst I saw was was Trump was was Biden was minus a dollar twenty five. Still a big favor to win. And then boom. And, you know, there are people in my house that are actually crying. You know, I'm very much more in the middle of this thing. But all of a sudden, Trump, all of a sudden it was five to four. Then it was even. And then all of a sudden Trump was nearly a two to one favorite. I'm getting live information from my friends right now. I'm seeing that that it's a it's a little bit lower on some of these sites. I saw two sixty seven. That's for a two hundred dollar bet. So he's a pretty big favorite. I saw the lowest I've seen is two seventeen. But Jason, if you're watching the a lot of odds and I put some stuff on my Twitter, it's amazing how it went from, you know, minus a dollar seventy, you know, all the way down minus a thirty. Then it came all the way up to minus a dollar seventy. This is crazy. And I've seen this movie before in 2016, actually. OK, so we all know that you need two hundred seventy electoral votes to win and that there were a couple of states that were critical for Trump to win.
SPEAKER_07: And it seems like those states that Trump was critical to win, he has now won. So let's bring in David Sacks. David, we just turned on the live stream. And boy, is this a turn of events that I don't think any of us except for maybe you. But you were very pessimistic on the last maybe three or four all in podcast. You're watching these results come in. The betting markets have totally flipped to Trump. What are you seeing and what can we expect tonight? What are you looking for?
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I mean, it's looking just like 2016. I mean, you're right that I was looking at the polls in the last few pods that we've done and there was no way to say anything other than, you know, Trump was the was the underdog. But at the same time, I still thought that Trump had a really good shot because I was watching both candidates on YouTube all the time. They both were doing live events. I wasn't watching it with the commentary. I wasn't watching the clips. I was watching Trump do these rallies. I was watching Biden do these parking lot events. And I would see Trump do four or five events a day, flying from tarmac to tarmac on Air Force One, having these huge crowds. I saw him do this event in Butler, Pennsylvania, over the weekend. It looked to me like there was tens of thousands of people there. And I remember Trump saying a line like, you know, this doesn't seem like a second place crowd. And, you know, it's one of those Trump lines. But, you know, it did put in my mind this idea, you know, he's got a point. Whatever the polls say, we're seeing tens of thousands of people show up at these events who are fanatical. I mean, just fanatical for Trump. And so you always had to think that he had a chance of pulling off an upset, just like 2016. I will say what I said on our text earlier. Donald Trump ate the COVID virus and killed it with his body.
SPEAKER_06: And then he stood in front of the White House and ripped his shirt off and let us all know that he is our leader. He did not get elected. He claimed victory beginning in 2016. And he has not and will not let go since then. And I think it is that cult of personality that... Cult of personality.
SPEAKER_08: ... draws so many people in that are just, you know, feeling like they need change and they need leadership and they don't need something from the old school.
SPEAKER_06: And he stood up and he showed us that this whole thing is a fake. COVID is a fake. Government is fake. People are fake. The media is fake. I'm getting some late numbers. I'm getting some late numbers here, you guys.
SPEAKER_08: He's now minus a dollar fifty nine to win Pennsylvania. And they took every other number off the board. However, if you're a Biden person, Jason, the number is only two point one seven right now. So, oh, wow. The polls are pollsters were miles off on this. And this is just amazing.
SPEAKER_07: And it seems like from what we're hearing from the reporting is that the pollsters did not understand the Latin or I guess Latin X is a way to describe a group of people who actually don't think exactly the same. I've always had a weird understanding of this terminal at next, which seems to come from the woke left. Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, these are different countries. They're not all the same as Waylands, Venezuelans. This is not a monoculture just because they all speak the same language. And we're seeing something very different happen in Florida right now. We're male Cubans maybe are voting very differently than what pollsters expected. Bestie Chamath is now fresh off a tight haircut. And he's here on the pod. We've got bestie fellas, our first bestie guestie of the night. Bestie P. How are you bestie P?
SPEAKER_08: She must you and I, we shouldn't talk about this. This is about politics. But you and I were just filming high stakes poker in Las Vegas on Friday night. It was great to see you bestie.
SPEAKER_07: Is there any indication you can give us besides I mean, of course, there's a presidential election that is going to determine the future of humanity. But more importantly, how did you each do in the high stakes poker game? The biggest the biggest the biggest part of the night was around 400 K, maybe 500 K played between me and Der.
SPEAKER_05: Der, der, der, der.
SPEAKER_07: Yeah, and he won. He did not win that.
SPEAKER_07: Oh, my Lord. She must win that one. Go.
SPEAKER_05: And it was I think it was beautifully beautifully played. I think Doug Polk will definitely do a short video clip on it. I did a I did a very, very sneaky three bet preflop turn check river over bluff and got him to call.
SPEAKER_07: Oh, my Lord. A little set bomb, I'm guessing. But here we go. Jason, I can't wait since I'm here to promote, promote, promote everything I promote.
SPEAKER_08: You can only watch these episodes of high stakes poker. A lot of players favorite show. You can only watch them on the poker go app. They're coming out December 16th. Meet you, Matt. Phil Ivey, Tom Dwan, Ben Lam. A lot of your a lot of your heroes take it. Oh, well, can't wait. Can't wait to and I have a subscription to that all in.
SPEAKER_07: I'm sorry. The poker go app. It's well worth it. David Sacks, you have one of your recording. Friends on the pod. Why don't you introduce one of your consulting friends and we'll have him tee up what we think the possible scenarios are and where we're at right now at this very moment. Yeah. So seven in California. Yeah. So Michael Newman works for me as a researcher and he's a is a political scientist, I guess you could say.
SPEAKER_02: And I've known him since college and he's very steeped in these a lot of these races. I don't know if he's. Yeah, I have been obsessively following politics since the Reagan election of 1980.
SPEAKER_09: So I wasn't alive then. So I know I'm afraid I'm I was only 10, but I was already a political obsessive.
SPEAKER_09: And as you can imagine, a real hit with the ladies as well. So tell us what what are the key states we need to focus in on here and which one of them have enough reporting for us to sort of put them in a column and then move on and understand the path to victory for Trump or Biden?
SPEAKER_07: Yes. Well, I mean, depending upon which network or news organization you're following, they're either calling calling a lot of states or they're being very conservative about their calls.
SPEAKER_09: I mean, NBC has still not called Florida for Trump, but there's really no path for Biden to win that state. So you can put that safely in the Trump column. He has just taken the lead in North Carolina after trailing all night. We've got about 88 percent of the vote in now. And I suspect he's home free, as is the Republican incumbent senator there. Can I can I can I just can I just ask a question? I mean, isn't it typically the case that the counts from the most populous urban areas come last and those tend to skew more Democrat than Republican?
SPEAKER_05: That sometimes happens. It depends on the state.
SPEAKER_09: Some states have their rural areas come in last. One of the things that has changed the vote in North Carolina is as the early vote came in, as the in-person early vote and mail in ballots came in, the last counties that reported that early vote were the rural counties. That's why early on it looked very good for Biden. And now it looks like it's trending away from him. Wait a second. North Carolina, according to The New York Times and according to CNN right now, is favoring slightly Biden, 49.7 percent to 49.1 percent for Trump with 84 percent.
SPEAKER_07: I don't think that's I don't think that's quite current. I think they're up to about 88 percent. But again, yeah, it's very close.
SPEAKER_09: What's interesting is Biden had five potential states where he could have knocked Trump out. Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Ohio and Texas. We don't know. We don't. Yeah. Florida's off the table. The others are still on the table, but none of them are trending Biden's direction at the present time. So he so far, Trump is is staying in the hand, as as you poker players would would say he's he's he's getting the cards he needs to stay in the to stay in the game.
SPEAKER_09: But we still have the river to play in the river would be, in this case, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania.
SPEAKER_07: Texas had an early lead for Biden, which was crazy to see right now it's got Donald Trump at fifty point three percent Biden at forty eight point three percent. Guys, again, that's going to normalize.
SPEAKER_05: I go back to this one very critical thing. The reason why Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania right now are Trump is because you count the vote when the county is counted. You can pass the votes and you can report. And if you have twenty five thousand people in a county versus Allegheny County, which has like, I don't know, hundreds of thousands or a million plus people, it just takes longer. Yes. No, I listen. I don't characterize Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania at all.
SPEAKER_09: I think one of the reasons why Michigan right now looks so red is because they're counting today's vote first. A lot of these other states that like Florida that had the option because their legislature allows them to do this. They counted all that early vote in advance and they dumped it in one big pile as soon as the polls closed in the in the various counties. So that's why you saw early on a blue mirage there. What you're seeing in a place like Michigan right now is probably a red mirage because it's it's today's vote, which was going to skew Trump because of the because of the way he presented it to his people. Florida was the one state, thank goodness for his sake, that he encouraged people to vote early and by mail. In the other states, he encourages people to vote today. Here's a here's a stat in Pennsylvania. I'm on the secretary of state's reporting dashboard.
SPEAKER_06: They've counted only 12 percent of the mail in ballots, which is and the total mail in ballots is two point five million. Yeah. Which is huge. Right. And they've only should be a majority of the vote, I would imagine.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah. Yeah. And they've and they've only counted 24 percent. Actually, sorry. They've only yeah, they've only counted a handful of precincts at this point.
SPEAKER_06: A quarter of the precincts. Right. Here's something I don't understand. So Nick Carlson from was it like Business Insider?
SPEAKER_02: He just tweeted minutes ago that North Carolina Biden is ahead with ninety nine percent of the vote counted. And Biden has a less than point two percent lead. But it's nine thousand votes.
SPEAKER_09: But I mean, that's. That would be a huge problem for Trump.
SPEAKER_02: North Carolina. Listen, I think a loss in any of those five states, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Ohio or Texas is probably.
SPEAKER_09: By the way, guys, I just want to give a shout out to nothing. Who's listening here all the way from Sri Lanka.
SPEAKER_05: He's listening. He just texted me. OK. By the way, guys, right now the odds are three to one in the betting market.
SPEAKER_08: So, I mean, obviously the networks I realized are completely useless. I stopped watching him a long time ago when they had Biden way ahead in Florida and the odds were 10 to one against. Right now, if you want to bet, Trump is a three to one favorite. And there's been billions of dollars bet in England, Australia, all over the world. He's a three to one. Well, it looks like it's real to me. And just to and just to just to build your side of the case, Nasdaq futures ripping, S&P futures falling and the 10 and 30 year falling, RMB ripping.
SPEAKER_05: These are all pro Trump trades and the euro, the euro collapse, the euro dollar falling, falling sharply once the markets turn towards Trump.
SPEAKER_06: Well, here's what they're reacting to is Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. Trump is all up big time now.
SPEAKER_02: But again, this that lacks a very basic understanding of how county reporting is happening in these highly populous, you know, or these sort of these bimodally distributed states where they have a bunch of suburban and rural vote that's fast to count.
SPEAKER_05: And the big places, for example, like, you know, you're not going to see Milwaukee and Green Bay report until probably close to midnight. So the question is, why are the betting markets so pro Trump then? What do they know that we don't know?
SPEAKER_02: I will say this. Let me say this, Jason. I mean, if you're like you're talking about billions of dollars.
SPEAKER_08: Right. And so all you had to do was design a system to figure out how to calculate votes earlier and make a couple hundred million dollars. OK. These are the smartest people in the world. There's hundreds of millions of dollars, billions of dollars at stake. They obviously do it 10 times better than any other site than in the other network. So this information, I mean, I give a friend of mine posted, hey, I'm laying two to one on on Twitter. Guys, I'm buying my other friend bet four hundred thousand dollars to eight hundred thousand dollars. Trump and now he looks like a genius. Somebody knows something that we don't know. Well, Trump just on Bovada, Trump just moved to minus six hundred.
SPEAKER_05: Just Michigan on unbelievable. It looks like he's it looks like he's ahead in Michigan.
SPEAKER_05: But again, we are all and there's there's a bunch of places in Michigan. Let's let's let's look at the North. So here's the North Carolina secretary of state dashboard.
SPEAKER_06: And they're showing two thirds of the county. Then you can actually see by county when you go on to their dashboard, the you know, the larger counties are partially reported. Most of the smaller counties are fully reported. Sixty three percent total with Biden ahead by literally a thousand votes right now across two point five to two million to two point five to one million. Wow. But what percent reported is that? I mean, it's 63 percent of the counties have completely reported.
SPEAKER_06: And so the remaining counties, if you look at the reporting status, the remaining counties that are partially reported, there's a mix of rural and some of the urban counties. You know, Durham's in there partially reported. So there is a mix. It's not Durham should be a Biden county.
SPEAKER_09: The research triangle is upscale, well-educated professionals that I think are the backbone of the Democrats coalition in a state like North Carolina.
SPEAKER_06: Now, they have absentee votes that are counted and they have so far counted three point three million. Absentee one stop votes and a million votes by mail. But that's how many came in. It actually shows that only five. I see. Yeah. OK, that makes Trump. Trump is now ahead in Ohio by two thirds of the votes were out. Post the link into the Zoom chat so Nick can pull it up on the screen, please.
SPEAKER_07: I need to get an understanding of something very basic here for the audience who's not degenerate. Gamblers are. Is there a chance here, Phil and Chamath, gambling experts, both that people had put early money on Biden and are now covering or hedging some of those bets? Is that a possibility here? Yes. OK, Jason, Jason, the line is minus a dollar, minus four, 10 on Pinnacle right now.
SPEAKER_08: Let me just double check that source. So what Phil is saying, Jason, is like, yes, there's going to be a bunch of essentially covering.
SPEAKER_05: Now, that covering will swing the line. But I think what Phil is also saying is when a line moves this violently, literally what we've seen in the last 35 minutes is both the equity markets, the currency markets and the betting markets flip one hundred and eighty degrees from where they have been. Not just all day, but frankly, where they had been probably for the last few months. That's what I was saying, Chamath, for three months straight right now, Biden has been a favorite anywhere between three to one favorite at one point all the way to maybe 50 percent favorite.
SPEAKER_08: And all of a sudden today, the lowest I saw was a dollar thirty five. And I was kind of shocked. And the next thing you know, boom, Trump's a three to four to one favorite. So and I'm looking at CNN and I'm looking at these networks and they're still they still have Biden ahead. And I'm like, wow, what is going on? That's the next thing we need to take care of, Chamath. There's a business for you is somehow we can deliver the right data on elections quickly. There you go, Saxon. Yeah, well, I think the betting markets know something we don't know, because Trump is just you know, if you look at like the livestream on Twitter or The New York Times or something, Trump just slightly took the lead in Ohio.
SPEAKER_02: But that's the state he's supposed to win in North Carolina. It looks like with over 99 percent reporting, it looks like he lost by 9000 votes. A 9000 vote margin would probably trigger an automatic recount of North Carolina.
SPEAKER_09: And there's like one hundred thousand absentee ballots there. I don't know if those have been counted yet.
SPEAKER_02: OK, so let's let's pause for one second on this. Everybody, North Carolina is one of the four or five states Trump has to win in order to have a victory.
SPEAKER_07: Right, Michael? I absolutely agree with that. He had to have those five Florida, North Carolina, Georgia, Ohio and Texas.
SPEAKER_09: OK, so we have Florida. He's got now there's four left.
SPEAKER_07: There's four left. Georgia is a very slow counting state. We really don't know. All of Atlanta could be out for all we know.
SPEAKER_09: But we leave Georgia on the side. So now we got four states we can work with.
SPEAKER_07: North Carolina is in Biden's pocket by just a hair. Yeah, that could change. And it would trigger a recount, which would take days to weeks. Yes. Another three states. Let's go through them systematically, one by one, Michael. OK. Ohio was the biggest surprise of the night when Biden built an early lead there, although again, a bit of a blue mirage based upon the fact that the mail in vote and the early vote came in so strong for the Democrats this year because they emphasized it.
SPEAKER_09: And the Republicans kind of fought against it. But Michael, Michael, with forty nine percent of the vote in Ohio. OK, he had right now Biden had a massive lead and he had about a four hundred thousand vote lead with half the vote.
SPEAKER_09: Correct. And when you look at the betting odds, he was five to one underdog to win the state. So something doesn't add up there.
SPEAKER_08: And you can you can say, all right, some of that is all the early voting went for Biden. We know that to be a fact. But there's something else there.
SPEAKER_07: OK, I'm just looking at the results for Ohio. We'll stay on Ohio for one more moment. And then we have another guest who just jumped on. Ohio is currently showing Donald Trump with two point rounding it up, two point four million votes to two point two million, slightly rounding up for Joe Biden. Fifty two percent to forty seven percent with seventy eight percent reporting. Does that mean we feel comfortable with Trump winning Ohio unless all of Cleveland is outstanding?
SPEAKER_09: I would say that's a Trump state. OK, we now have John Cohen on the line.
SPEAKER_07: John is a member of the Survey Monkey team. John, welcome to the all in pod. Can you hear us? Thank you so much.
SPEAKER_04: I'm sorry I didn't hear what was going on. I don't know how much you've been disparaging pollsters so far. So we know we were waiting for you. We're waiting to get here.
SPEAKER_07: Tell us as we start what your prediction was earlier today.
SPEAKER_04: Well, we're very clear to say that we're doing measurements, not predictions. That said, the measurements that we are doing clearly pointed to Biden advantages across the board. But we didn't have we so far we have no surprises. We had Florida had been Trump plus two basically all week going to dead even coming into Election Day itself. We don't know where the final votes will be. Most analysts think that it's in Trump's camp. It may end up there, but it's super close. We had Georgia close. We had North Carolina close, although North Carolina had been closing. It had been a big Biden lead. It was down to under two points with the Senate, you know, kind of even closer than that in some of our data. So, you know, so far there's no obvious surprise here. Like, damn, the polls were really wrong. Certainly ours. You know, it's it's early, though. We're not declaring victory on those. Obviously, there's a lot to watch, but nothing really to surprise us, given the numbers so far. What about Ohio and Georgia? So we had Ohio pretty consistently in Trump's camp.
SPEAKER_04: We had him up four. So it's trending that way now. We had it as close as two points for Trump. I mean, again, I haven't mentioned the word margin of error. That's in my professional obligation and duty to mention it. It's around three points, I believe, two and a half in Ohio. So close. But we always had it in Trump's camp again. Biden, that wasn't part of Biden's any of the past victory that the campaign was counting on. So, you know, no big deal. But we went from having an early night to now we're sure for sure. And for a really late night here. John, let me ask you one of the most basic questions that I've had, which is what did we learn from 2016?
SPEAKER_05: And tell me, what exactly did people try to fix? Like, what was the thing that everybody got wrong? And what changed?
SPEAKER_04: Well, the biggest thing that polls fixed was how they adjust their polls by education. What we see in polling, no matter how they're conducted, whether online as we do at SurveyMonkey or still on the telephone, which most media pollsters do, is you get people with more formal education to answer those surveys in far greater proportions than you do people with lower education. So the biggest thing you've got to do and look, we always did it. So we weren't in the among the state pollsters who kind of failed, I think, you know, kind of negligently to just like education at all. We always had to register for education. But we what we failed to notice in 2016 was there was an increasing gap between those with postgraduate degrees and those of B.A.s. They've always been both to pro-democratic group. But the gap in 2016 was abnormally large. A fix to our polls, which I just point out, weren't kind of we're actually standouts in the in the upper Midwest in terms of showing it as a close race, not clear of Clinton victories. We broke apart postgrads and grads into two distinct categories, and that released kind of about a point and a half of unforced error in our polling for 2016. So that's fixed. We've used it to good effect. Again, this time around, we weren't showing what all the other national polls were showing. We've had this between a four and six point national leap. Again, we'll get quickly into why national results don't matter. But you all know that all too well. Everyone knows that all too well. But we've had it kind of more narrow. And that plays out in the states that I mentioned. We had Florida tied, not a four point five point five advantage elsewhere. But we'll see how it plays out in the Midwest. We also had Wisconsin. What was our final margin there? I think it was kind of nine and nine and a half points, not the 17 points that you saw from my former colleagues at the Washington Post ABC News. So we've always had it a little bit tighter. But again, it plays how it's going to play out in the states. And so far, no surprises. But the night is early and I have a healthy dose of Pulsar's paranoia. Jamaf, I don't know if that answered your question well enough, but that was the main thing people did.
SPEAKER_05: It's really helpful. But now take off your pollster measure, chief research officer hat for a second and put on just the American hat. What does it mean when we had effectively a repudiation of the establishment in 2016? And despite everything that's happened over the last four years, we may be on the brink of another repudiation again. If you know where you're there to measure the pulse of what's going on, but less in sort of measurement speak and just more in just plain American English speak. John, what like what's going on if this happens again?
SPEAKER_04: So you're absolutely right. There's something major. I would also like to caveat it. We are looking once again at if Trump wins, it's because of the Electoral College. Like he is going to lose the popular vote. There are still far more Americans and American voters who voted today and kind of over the past several weeks who would prefer Joe Biden to be president. So, again, we can't characterize with a broad brush the American voting population when this is about effectively, I hate to call it a quirk, but this is about our system of vote tallying. And the president, you know, but to pull back your point about kind of there is something major here, the fact that many people, you know, some of us might be friends with can't understand why this is a hundred to zero race, fail to understand that the president's base isn't small. It is, you know, we've had it 44 to 46 percent approving of his job performance for many years now. Like he has a completely durable, solid floor. He also has a high ceiling. So he was never going to win the popular vote this time around, but he had a chance at that electoral, you know, squeaking out another Electoral College win because he's been so stable. This is a president who, you know, kind of up Trump now head an NC. Thank you for the chat window. So I think you're right that we need to understand more about what is the componentry of that 45 percent that they would support Trump when the other 55 percent are so dead set against him and see it as something really wrong with the country. So we still have two thirds of the country.
SPEAKER_05: No. What have you guys done to, though, understand the people that are voting for Trump better? Because I think that they are protesting and they're protesting a lot. And I think that, you know, if we didn't listen to them in 16, I think it's almost criminal to not listen to them in 2020. So what are they what are they saying? What are they rejecting or what is it that they want? Because at the end of the day, you know, I think his incompetence can't really be debated. Competence versus incompetence. I think what we can debate is he's a vessel. And in that, I think that it's incredibly important what's happening, irrespective of what happens today, because we were supposed to walk into a landslide. We're not, as you said, we're going to be in a nail biter. What what are what are they using him as a vessel to communicate to everybody else? That's a really good question. Some of that will depend on a closer analysis of the surveys, ours where we talk to more than a million voters and the exit polls that are being conducted by two separate organizations.
SPEAKER_04: What's the what are the storylines that come out of the election? You know, one of the things that's being reported early is there's a much tighter Hispanic vote in Florida than many early polls predicted. How will that play out as we start to get votes coming out in Texas? How is it being Arizona? Is Arizona looking positively for Biden and Mark Kelly in the Senate in Arizona? Is it is it really Hispanic votes that are driving some Trump strength in these states or is it the obsession that the news media has had for the past four years around the kind of Trump middle aged white male voter with less than college education who has been displaced by technological and industrial trends over the past 20 years? I think it's going to depend on what that voting coalition looks like for Trump. And it's more diverse than I think we've been focusing on for four years. I think you're saying an incredibly important thing. I think that that was a ruse. And I've always thought that that was bullshit. It's not some undereducated rube that's running around voting for this guy.
SPEAKER_05: I think that there are there are people up and down the age spectrum, the socio economic spectrum. And this is what I mean by he has become a vessel for so many different messages. And I think we really have to start figuring out what the hell these messages actually mean. Because if Biden loses, to your point, maybe in Florida, it's a repudiation of socialism. Okay. But in Pennsylvania, it's going to be something else. In Michigan, it's going to be something else. In Ohio, it's going to be something else for him to keep winning. Right. And I just don't think that there's a consistent idea. And it's very dismissive to say that, I'm not saying you are, but I'm saying, you know, that idea that it was an out of work ex factory worker, you know, in rural Ohio that was protesting. This is going to be much bigger than that. Because even if Biden wins the popular vote, until we figure out how to rebalance balance the Electoral College in a completely, you know, new way or just get rid of it altogether. We're going to have to live with understanding how some folks in these extremely pivotal states are pushing back. Are they pushing back on political correctness? You know, that's one thing that I've always thought. I think that there's a huge vote here against cancel culture, cancel culture, all of that stuff. Absolutely. Absolutely.
SPEAKER_02: And lockdowns. I think those are the underreported.
SPEAKER_09: Lockdowns are the, I think the biggest one of the biggest drivers.
SPEAKER_06: No, go ahead, John. Go ahead.
SPEAKER_04: I was going to say one of the components here that we have to pay a lot of attention to is gender. Right? Kind of, you know, the storyline for a long time. And when you think about, you know, kind of Republican Democratic politics is that, you know, we talk about black voters and Hispanic voters, talking about them as if they're monoliths. What we have seen consistently over the course of the year is that Trump does much better among black men and Hispanic men than he does among black women and Latinas. And that is just kind of like, you know, whereas black women are 95, five years, 20% among black men, it blends into that what we've been 90, 10, 40, see, look, but these are measurements, these are measurements, I don't think they're telling you the whys of anything.
SPEAKER_02: And I think for the wise, you have to go a lot deeper. I mean, first of all, let's talk about the lockdown issue. Can we just pull up that tweet, Nick? I mean, so this is what I said back in May, this was like months ago before the election even hit, you know, which is if the woke left insists on permanent lockdowns, Trump will have an issue that supersedes the incompetence of COVID response. Because I think, you know, we all we all agree on that, which is whether our lives and livelihoods belong to politicians to meter out in dribs and drabs as they see fit. And this was back when Elon was being shut out of his factory in Fremont. And then there was this hairdresser named Shelley Luther in Texas, who was basically put on trial for opening up her hair salon. And the judge wanted her to grovel and beg for forgiveness. And this was the beginning of the rebellion over lockdowns. And it was so obvious back then, that lockdowns weren't going to fly, they weren't sustainable, they were too politically unpopular. They weren't going to work. And by the way, if it was something, a cause that the left agreed with, like, you know, a BLM rally or something like that, then you were allowed to do it, you know, it was that whole standard around, you know, doing things that were essential. And so, you know, this insistence on lockdowns, even after the public had really repudiated them, I think was a major issue for Trump. And it was crazy to me that Biden was still insisting on lockdowns, you know, still, I mean, that is his official position. I don't think it's the only reason why he's in trouble right now. But I think it's a big one. I think if he if Trump reaches the blue wall again of Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, lockdowns is the biggest reason why because those are three states that had extensive and still have extensive lockdown hurts, it hurts people.
SPEAKER_06: I'll read you a tweet. I won't name who it's from. It's from a farmer in the Corn Belt who's well followed on Twitter, believe it or not, there's a whole Ag Twitter community. And he says, Well, it's the day does this country turn down the road to be like Venezuela? Or do we continue on the road of capitalism? And he's had this acute feeling that he's kind of vocalized on Twitter for months now on how painful the lockdowns have been on him and his family and his business and on the community. And it just feels like overreach to a lot of people that the recognition that you know the left might be using to justify the decision is just not there that the the impact the near term impact that folks are feeling is what's there. And that's driving a lot of behavior right now.
SPEAKER_05: Boys, all markets are now up. Everything is green Dow futures, S&P 500 futures, NASDAQ futures. Oil is up gold is down and there were some guys that made some heavy bets against the dollar going into this thinking we were going to have massive inflation with Biden policy coming up and some big fund managers that went really big on on shorting the dollar this last week. And the dollar is up right now.
SPEAKER_06: Yeah, by the way, we should we should make sure at some point tonight to talk about these very important Senate races because it's not just Trump versus Biden. There's also a bunch of
SPEAKER_02: taken luber one in Colorado and luber one in Colorado, but there have been some, you know, some of the Republicans who look to be in big trouble like Lindsey Graham have have pulled it out and have one. And so it's looking like the Senate is still very much in play, I would say as big a favorite as Biden was the Senate shifting from Republican to Democrat, well, I'd say that was considered as equally big a favorite. And that that may not happen now.
SPEAKER_02: So we should make sure to talk about that at some point. North Carolina right now is forty nine point eight percent to forty nine percent for Biden. Two point six million versus two point five eight. Ohio is at two point four to two point two fifty one fifty two percent to forty seven percent. Trump is beating Biden.
SPEAKER_07: I have a question for John Cohen. John, let's go back to sort of your understanding as you've been measuring different trends. Have you measured people's sympathy towards lockdowns on a state by state level?
SPEAKER_05: And then second question is, have you measured people's sympathy to cancel culture at a state by state level? And by the way, you're on mute. So if you want to just take yourself off. Yeah, thank you. We have not done anything on cancel culture. We've done a lot on the coronavirus. We've been tracking that actually in three countries since mid-February.
SPEAKER_04: And we have a state by state look. And what's interesting is we ask the question like this is primarily an economic issue or a primary health issue. And those two have been running neck and neck. But health, you kind of more people on average say it's a health issue than an economic one. Trump with Trump supporters overwhelmingly say that a crisis is one that's financial, not health related. So there's always been that. But it's been like a forty five fifty five gap there. So we've been measuring it state by state. But there's a solid core of people. It gets to David's point about why. What are they focused on? What is the what is affecting them and their pocketbooks? It is the lockdowns and the kind of clamping down. And what is this economic crisis? Not a health care one, even though that's what we all say that they should follow. There was a fantastic line that the Democrats coined, which essentially said something to the tune, Saxipoo, you'll tell me if I get this wrong.
SPEAKER_05: But it was socialism for the rich and rugged individualism for the for the rest of us is essentially sort of their grab bag phrase for for this election cycle and sort of to frame a lot of policies. But when you have in these states, again, if we say this cuts along socioeconomic lines, but then maybe bleeds into college and even graduate level educated folks. Is there a vote here for rugged individualism and just leave me the fuck alone?
SPEAKER_04: There certainly could be. I want to go back to what David said about measuring versus the why, because I mentioned gender to point out a big difference that we're seeing across racial groups, across the levels of education. But I'm you know, we're we're polling every day. So you guys have the right why question. You know, send it to me. Yeah. Sent to Xander. We'll we'll we'll ask it. You know, we pulled 9000 people today on their willingness to accept the results. And so we'll be putting that out tomorrow. We have a we'll have an exit poll running every day from here on to certainly till we get a result. So you have the question you want to ask? Send along. We'll we'll get you the data at the state level.
SPEAKER_07: All right, John, we very much appreciate you coming on the pod and we will be checking Survey Monkey's amazing data as we go. I'm going to switch now and just John. John. John, thank you. And Xander, thanks for for hooking that up. Thanks, John. Thanks, guys.
SPEAKER_04: And we'll have some more bestie guesties coming up, some fan favorites from the Twitter and the poker group.
SPEAKER_07: I just want to point out right now that it's very interesting to see that Fox has Biden at one hundred twenty nine electoral votes and Trump at one hundred nine. And some of the other networks have it much lower. How do the networks make these decisions of when to call a state? Because it's too early, according to many, to call Florida. But we're sitting here with a pretty clear understanding of where Florida is at. Does anybody have any thoughts on that? Well, I think they're erring on the side of extreme caution because of the strange year that it is and the fact that there is all this.
SPEAKER_09: We had one hundred over one hundred million votes banked early through the mail or through early in-person voting and nobody's sure how many more mail ballots. According to one side, I looked at there were still twenty seven million ballots outstanding. Now, some of those are redundant ballots like David's father in law who got three ballots in the mail in Pennsylvania. And a lot of those are probably going in the trash. But there could be another five to 10 million of those to come in that are postmarked by today. Many states will accept them after the election, as long as they're postmarked by Election Day. So they're probably being very, very careful that they don't make a premature call. Of course, they all have PTSD about what happened in 2000 when they first prematurely called Florida for Al Gore, then prematurely called it for George W. Bush. And we spent the next thirty seven days trying to figure out what the hell happened in Florida. So I think they're going to err on the side of extreme caution across the board. Although I feel like the margin in Florida at this point is insurmountable.
SPEAKER_07: It feels insurmountable now, right? Florida is over. Florida is over. It's about now. It's about Ohio.
SPEAKER_02: By the way, the betting markets have just moved again big time. So Donald Trump was at minus 600. Now he's minus 250 on Bovado. Phil, what do you think about that?
SPEAKER_08: Yeah, snapping back, I will say, let me let me address what Jake, Jason was talking about a few seconds ago. And that's it. You know, basically Florida, even the New York Times, had them at 6 p.m. at 95 percent to go to Trump at 95 percent. That was a New York Times site. My wife and I looked it up and the betting odds had him at over 10 to one. This was at five thirty. This was two hours ago. So, I mean, I just think there's a huge inefficiency with with the way that I think it was over as soon as the Miami-Dade dump showed that Biden only won the early vote by nine points.
SPEAKER_09: I mean, Hillary won it by twenty nine in 2016 and she lost the state. So how much of this do we think has to do with tax policy?
SPEAKER_07: People in Florida are retiring. We have the AOC gang. We have Elizabeth Warren. It's his beloved state. He has a place.
SPEAKER_08: OK, so so hometown favorite, Mar-a-Lago, I get that. But you have so many retirees and we have this bifurcation of how taxes should work in the United States.
SPEAKER_07: So I just want to open that up for the entire group to discuss of art. Are we seeing old people? Are we seeing people who are concerned about taxes? Because we have had a flight in the last couple of years of people from high tax states to low tax states. Is this about taxes? Do you think? Let's start with you, Friedberg. No one wants to pay taxes. The fuck? No one's going to raise their hand.
SPEAKER_07: But I mean, there's a moment where taxes don't matter. Well, but Romney, Romney, Romney was in favor of taxes and he you know, he didn't win any any of these elections like the way that Trump looks like he's going to.
SPEAKER_02: I think that the traditional Republican messages message of taxes is sort of necessary, but not sufficient. Trump obviously brought a whole set of issues that previous Republicans hadn't hadn't brought. And I think that I think you have to look at 2016 separately from 2020. And so starting with 2016, I think the big issue that Trump that no Republican really had ever figured out, except maybe Pat Buchanan 20 years ago, was the trade issue with China. You know, we forget that in the 19th century, when the great Chinese economic reformer Deng Xiaoping decided to open up the Chinese economy, the average Chinese was making two dollars a day. And today their economy is roughly the size of the US. Now, you know, what was the reason for that? Well, we had a bipartisan consensus in this country for 30 or 40 years on the part of both Clintons and both Bushes that we should open them. We should welcome them with open arms. And we opened up our market to Chinese products. We brought it to the World Trade Organization. But but but that was the start. That was the start of that was the the killer app or the killer issue that Trump figured out. And that's what shattered the blue firewall in those Rust Belt states. I mean, if you're going to try and figure out going back to 2016, why Trump won, you have to explain why he won Michigan. So you're saying our jobs, they took our jobs. But what I'm saying is the manufacturing jobs went out and the fentanyl came in.
SPEAKER_02: I mean, that's his argument. And that was a killer argument. I mean, and the proof is in the pudding. And so the proof is that he won these states that Hillary thought were so in the bag that she didn't even bother to campaign there. That was the big surprise at 2020 and the issue of taxes.
SPEAKER_07: Well, no, no, no, no, no, no. Let me explain what's going on in 2020, in my opinion.
SPEAKER_02: Okay, this is not a partisan explanation. But I think that after the loss in 2016, look in business, we know that when you lose it, when you make a mistake, you make a bad investment or the company does something wrong. You analyze what you did wrong, right? And then you figure out what changes to make. The Democrat Party did not do that. What do they do? They blame Facebook, they blamed it on Russian interference. They never really analyze why they lost these Roosevelt states and made changes. Instead, what they began was this hysterical denunciation of Trump. You had this sort of, you know, you sort of had this sort of, you know, media, culture, tech, industrial complex, who decided that Trump was an illegitimate president. And, you know, and so what they did is they went all in on impeachment, they went all in on this Russia stuff. And in the process, they created this enormous backlash. And I think that 2020, if 2016 was an economic repudiation of the elites, 2020 is a cultural repudiation of the elites. That is the big issue in 2020. Yeah, I tend to, I tend to, I'm sympathetic to David's view. I don't completely agree with all of it. But just to build on something you said, I don't think, Jason, this has anything to do with taxes.
SPEAKER_05: I think that in Florida, if we end up really getting to the bottom of what happened, I think there's a lot of people, older people that probably lived through some version of McCarthyism, and immigrants who actually fled really shitty totalitarian countries who were like, you want to do what? Here? And I think that there was a lot of people that basically are giving a very clear signal, which is, I'm a Democrat, but if you push me to the brink and talk about a socialized nanny state, I'm going to vote Republican. So to David's point, to David's point, if there was an economic repudiation of sort of traditional globalism in 2016, and Donald Trump ends up carrying the day in today, then it's a repudiation of sort of these cultural manifestos and norms that we're swinging to. Now, the answer to that may be to say, change the Electoral College, because it doesn't represent the majority or the plurality of Americans. I hear that. But in the same way that, you know, we've said for years now that the Republicans will have to change to win the Electoral College or to change to win what's evolving in terms of people's perceptions on social policy. Now, it may actually be the Democrats that also have to change if this doesn't swing hard back in Biden's favor. So and Chamath, when you when you made that statement, I think what's particularly prescient is the Democrats believed that because of the demographic shift from white Americans to people of color, Latinos, black Americans, that they were just going to win all of this is this is that if you were, this is the problem with the stupidity of the establishment.
SPEAKER_05: Like, if you take 1000 brown people and put us in a room, what I will tell you is just in case, here's a fucking memo for all you white people out there. We're not all the goddamn same. Okay. And if you put 1000 black people, here's the memo. Now for the Democrats and the Republicans, they're not all the same. You can take 1000 Hispanics and it turns out they're not all the same. So maybe, you know, you can take 1000 straight people 1000 black people, and they're all the same. Straight people, 1000 gay people, they're, we're not all the fucking same. So maybe what this means is that we've moved past color. And now ideology and social policy and economic and monetary and fiscal all of these things that the totality of how a rational, well developed person makes a decision, maybe that's at hand. And before, if we historically only thought, you know, older white men and white women could do it, maybe now it actually applies independent of color and gender. Yeah, I absolutely agree with that. And I would add to that, that if Trump's victory in 2016, laid waste to the Republican establishment, if he wins again tonight, it will lay waste to the Democratic establishment. And the theory of the case that they've had for 20 years, the sort of share emerging Democratic majority case that they just had to sit back and let demography become destiny, and they could just graft an identity politics onto the same,
SPEAKER_09: neoliberal economic agenda they've been pushing since the late 1980s. And it would all just somehow magically produce majority results in the country, they are going to have to go back to the drawing board, and, and I think get more populist themselves, and come up with some kind of version of politics that is isn't it more in the Bernie mold, it needs to be left, but not woke, isn't it going to be socialism? It's it probably is going to be socialism, but it's not like if you lay waste to the center, you know, you're like, I mean, that's basically what happened.
SPEAKER_06: And now if you're saying the same is going to happen with the Democrats, this time around, you're going to have AOC running for president in four years. And she won't be the right brand, though, because she's woke. You need a Sherrod Brown, you don't need AOC.
SPEAKER_09: We need a charismatic Democratic candidate. Somehow Sherrod Brown keeps getting elected in increasingly red Ohio as an old school, gravelly voiced Irish Labor Democrat. And somehow Bernie ignited a movement as a very old school, gravelly voiced Jewish Democrat, neither of whom gave a damn about identity politics, really, they were principally concerned with inequality and income redistribution.
SPEAKER_09: I want to I want to see that happen. But I think that's the only path forward for the demo.
SPEAKER_09: Let's let me go to Phil because Phil had somebody wants to add there. And then we'll go to you, Chima.
SPEAKER_07: Yeah, I want to say that we needed for the Democrats and they just needed I think they needed a very they needed a charismatic, powerful leader with a lot of charisma. I mean, I know that, you know, the I was hanging out with one of the Trump guys that was with him on the plane in the 2016 election. He said that, you know, he outworked Hillary. There's no doubt that he outworked Biden. I mean, this guy's going to seven rallies a day, showing up with a ton of energy. And he has, you know, like him or not, he has a lot of charisma.
SPEAKER_08: Also, I can't help but think that you're talking about repeat, repeat, repudiating. Sorry, I'm getting that word wrong. To me, this is all about I think a lot of people are really scared of socialism. OK. And I think it's just like even the young people that, you know, even the young people, you know, who say that they love it, they're looking at their path to the future. And with and, you know, they can they can still do great things. There's no doubt you can still be a 20 year old and make a billion dollars by the time you're 30 or 40. And I think with socialism that goes away. I think that, look, I think if Trump does win, I don't think what it means is that you need a person that's at the extreme left to win.
SPEAKER_05: I actually counterintuitively would say the the opposite, which is that you need just a more credible centered person. Now, that may only be possible if the Democratic Party cleaves in two. And the reality is the Republicans may actually quasi-cleave in two independent of whether Trump wins or not anyways. And we'll see, as David said, how some of these Senate seats break, because if that goes in a different direction, you know, for example, if Trump wins, but we have a Democratic tie. In the Senate, maybe that's not possible. But I think that would say a lot around the need for pragmatic but more youthful leadership. I want to go around the horn right now. What is your gut telling me who is going to win, given what we know right now?
SPEAKER_07: Everybody give it a thought when you're ready. Look into the camera and I will call on you, Michael. You're looking into the camera. OK, when if you had to pick one right now, Michael, give us your best guess. You just brought me the winner of the recount in North Carolina, because that would tell me a lot.
SPEAKER_09: But I have increasingly think Trump is going to win. OK, Phil, you're looking in the camera.
SPEAKER_07: Who do you think is going to win? We've seen this movie before, except that Hillary was actually five to one favorite last time.
SPEAKER_08: And I watched these numbers go straight up and now I'm watching the same thing. It seems like although I will say this, you know, Saks has been posting some stuff within our channel about the numbers popping up and down. I'm getting texts and they are popping up and up. It's still the lowest I've seen is two point five to one. I think Trump wins. Trump wins. Who do you got, Saks?
SPEAKER_02: I'm going to assume the betting markets know something. I'm still a little bit unclear on North Carolina because I saw some tweets that Biden had wanted by a few thousand votes. But the North Carolina Web site is showing that actually Trump's ahead by like 70,000 votes. So I'm not sure who to believe. And one. Well, yeah, I mean, look, I'm going to I'm going to go I'm going to I'm going to go with what the markets are saying, which is Trump. And, you know, I thought that he I thought he had a much better shot than the polls were reflecting.
SPEAKER_02: And that's what it's looking like. What do you got for you, Berg?
SPEAKER_06: Donald Trump took on coronavirus for us. He killed it. He is our true leader and he will prevail here in the United States of America tonight. At least the betting markets are telling me and the Treasury markets and the S&P futures are telling me that Donald Trump's going. But I do think that the fact that this guy has never conceded defeat to anything in his life gives him a huge leg up. And he wore you know, he is he is like Steve Jobs. He warps reality and he tells everyone, I am going to win. I have killed coronavirus. And it happens like a Jedi Knight.
SPEAKER_08: It's like a Jedi. All right. I will for a four so far.
SPEAKER_07: Picking at exactly seven forty five p.m. California time. Chumath, who do you have at this point if you had to shove your chips all in?
SPEAKER_05: I still think the path is. I, I think it's Biden. And I have the advantage of some information, which is that they just announced breaking news. They aren't counting mail in votes in Philadelphia tonight. And I am going with so.
SPEAKER_07: So we don't know Pennsylvania tonight. So if it's down to a few thousand votes, Philly, I think is going to break.
SPEAKER_05: I think you can count that as three or four hundred thousand votes.
SPEAKER_09: And it should be it should be five hundred thousand. It should be five hundred thousand. Well, then five hundred thousand would carry the state for Joe Biden.
SPEAKER_05: So one hundred thousand. So they've got so I'm going to I'm going to stick with Biden here because I think that that Philadelphia vote count is crucial.
SPEAKER_05: It turns out that it may it may come down to Philly, which, by the way, what an incredibly poignant place for the election to be won and lost.
SPEAKER_09: The city of underdogs, the city of Rocky. I think we can safely say that Biden is going to win the popular vote and it might be by four points, five points, which means that there is a discrepancy between the popular vote and Electoral College. We're going to hear a lot about that because I am going to go with Bison because.
SPEAKER_07: My heart is going to be so broken if this country picks this sociopath to run it for another four years after his absolute failure to contend to do even the most modest things to battle coronavirus and the strife he has caused between Americans and his personal style is so heartbreaking to me that I don't know that I can believe in America. If they put this absolutely sociopathic person who has the least amount of character of any other human being, anybody on this call has ever met in their lives, it would be a complete, absolute utter disgrace if he makes it into office for a second term. Jason, what do you really exist? So you're going to respond to the entire look? I mean, the American people. Hold on. It's an existential threat to the entire planet and humanity and democracy across the world. If this country puts that maniac into office again for four goddamn fucking more years, I'll make up for that. My personal feeling, I can't I don't care what the statistics say right now. In my heart, I cannot give that man even a benefit of the doubt. If he wins garbage, if he wins is Fauci the first guy fired? Oh, I think you can count on it. And Fauci and Christopher Ray, the FBI director and on right and increasingly maybe bill Barr to
SPEAKER_09: shred of credibility or honor is gone. I want to I want to just say to J. Cal I, I really empathize with how you're feeling because I have never as a person that has been a citizen of three countries.
SPEAKER_05: When I moved to America in 2000, I have never really I mean, you know, edge cases. Yeah, I felt some racism here, obviously, you know, I've but I've never felt so unwanted. And I remember 2016 for the first time in my life feeling a level of insecurity. I had never felt before because I was so afraid I didn't know what it meant for Donald Trump to be elected. Four years later, you know, in so many ways, it's like two realms of a coin, you know, I leave my house and you can just see that there's just so much pain and divisiveness, I come back into my little world and things seem to be really great. And that's a really, really terrible feeling to have Jason. So I know exactly what you're talking about. I wanted to tell you guys. You know, I there was like a I've always been sort of like, okay, Biden's gonna win Biden's gonna win Biden's gonna win. And then there's a weird thing that I did. And you guys can see it in the FEC filings, but I gave a million bucks this year in the elections, but I gave 750 to the Senate and I gave 250 to Biden. And I didn't understand why I did it. And I explained it to Nat as she's like, why did you do it that way? And the best way that I could explain it is I think that there are so much I don't know about what is driving the vote for president, that I wanted to make sure that, you know, there are checks and balances and the best check and balance was to, you know, make sure that there was actually some Senate check and balance on Biden, I mean, on on Trump. So, you know, I'm, I'm gonna Jason, I'm going to accept the result. I'm going to try to figure out what the fuck I don't know, because this is yet another layer of clearly don't know what the hell is going on. But I can tell you pretty assuredly, guys, any result that's called tonight, I think is going to be incomplete, because they're not going to call Pennsylvania because they're not going to call Philly. And so if there are in fact, three, no, I think that the exact math is about 350,000 votes that show up in Philadelphia, a gap of 350,000 votes that show up in Philly. Biden will do what he needs to do. By the way, how many people live in Philly? Does anybody know how many registered voters? Friedberg's? Is that is that on the billion? It's supposed to be like half a million votes coming in there. And I think they've counted 100,000. And so I think it'd be more than half a million, usually the Dems margin is about half a million.
SPEAKER_09: The margin? Yeah, really is, I want to say our fifth or sixth largest market. It's a pretty significant population that that link I sent you there, Nick. And then if you click on click to view precincts reporting, you can see the data right now. Sorry, it's tough to read.
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, I mean, we care about Allegheny. And then what else do we care about?
SPEAKER_09: You care about Philly and you care about those immediate suburbs outside of Philly, like Box County and Chester County. And there's four or five ringed suburbs of Philly that used to be the centerpiece of Country Club republicanism. They're the counties that elected Arlen Specter to the Senate. But over time, as the Republicans moved right, they moved more toward the Democrats. Michael, do you know why they're going to stop reporting mail in ballots tonight? Why would they do that? They just probably just to go home and sleep for a while before they pick it up tomorrow. Pennsylvania, unfortunately, and Michigan as well, are states that aren't allowed to start tabulating until all the polls are closed. That's why those states in the Sunbelt, we were all looking for to be early bellwether because
SPEAKER_09: Look at that guys. 4.81. This is unbelievable. Unbelievable.
SPEAKER_07: But what are we seeing here? What's unbelievable? What that means, Jason, is that in Philadelphia, there are 1706 precincts, okay? Of those, only 82 have reported the their ballot tallies. So you have 95% of the precincts in Philly, not reporting. If you take Michael's framework and say there's a swing of 500,000 votes, if it goes historically Democrat, as it has been,
SPEAKER_05: you attack on 500,000 net new votes to Biden and, you know, and he ekes out a win. Yeah, it goes blue probably in that scenario. Yeah. So then it becomes about remember, though, if Trump is holding, if he manages to hold Michigan, he could lose Pennsylvania, it wouldn't matter.
SPEAKER_09: He had a little bit of a margin, he had what he had 306 electoral votes last time. So if he holds everything he had minus Pennsylvania, actually could lose Michigan to as long as he carried Wisconsin, he has to have one of those two. But I think Wisconsin's difficult. So for all of our listeners and watchers in New Jersey, they legalize recreational pots. So go out and get yourself. Yeah, I'm gonna I just took four gummies after my little tirade there because the two Xanax weren't working.
SPEAKER_07: So it's gonna get really strange for me in about an hour. Just to go back the reason I mean, are we gonna crack a bottle of wine or what somebody already got one?
SPEAKER_07: Yeah, this is mostly coffee. But trust me, there's some Irish whiskey in here.
SPEAKER_09: Speaking to you, but it looks like I'm seeing reports of the sound of Arizona, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. Unfortunately, all four of those states are going to probably take at least a day Arizona, three days, I think to count. Maybe not this year, because so much of the vote was early, maybe it'll move faster, but they are notoriously slow counters. So settle in, it could be the weekend before we have a result.
SPEAKER_09: Well, okay, so let me just drop this. If we don't know tonight, what is going to happen over the next week?
SPEAKER_07: Well, we're gonna be we're gonna be gonna need a lot of gummies, Jason.
SPEAKER_07: No, I mean, joking aside, there, I think everybody's gonna be tense. Jay, I think I don't I don't think you're gonna see a lot of action one way or the other. I think that people. I think people in America are incredibly good people. I think that folks are just going to sit tight, and hope that the folks whose job it is to do their job do their job.
SPEAKER_05: I hope you're right, Shemagh. But when I see a group of trucks surrounding people's cars, when I see people bringing guns on both sides, horrible people on both sides, bringing guns, malicious style, to specifically taunt each other when you see people getting shot in the street chasing each other down over politics.
SPEAKER_07: This is something that has not happened in our lifetime. I mean, Phil's very old, so he kind of remembers the 60s. But for the rest of us under 68, we we have not witnessed Americans shooting each other in the street over politics. We have not witnessed people taking people out of their lives because of politics. And this is got Trump's fingerprints on it from top to bottom. You mean since this summer? I mean, what about all the looting and rioting and protests? My point is, when Trump got in office, his character, and his ability to trigger people, his ability to abuse people, his rhetoric, put everybody on tilt. I'm not saying people looting stores are correct. What I'm saying is George Bush, and Ronald Reagan, your heroes, Bill Clinton, Obama, other people,
SPEAKER_07: other people's heroes on this call. There was a there was a kindness in our differences. And when people conceded, they conceded with grace. And this individual, this horrible human being, Bush wasn't a hero of mine, but putting it aside, yeah, I think maybe Bush senior was Yeah. Look, I respect classiness, and we had a mutual respect for each other that this deranged individual has removed from America. So Jason, I'm not gonna defend what's gonna happen in the next week. Because I'm not I'm not defending each other leading up to this. I think the next week should be incredibly violent.
SPEAKER_07: You are fake news. Thank you for that. You are fake news.
SPEAKER_02:
SPEAKER_02: Now look, Jason, I'm not gonna like disagree with you about any of that. The only thing I would add, though, is I do think that the media has been a co equal partner in sowing this chaos and divisiveness. Because, you know, we used to have a media that thought its job was objectivity and neutrality. Yes. And they rip the umpire jersey off their back to go after this guy, Trump and, and why do you think they did? Money? Well, it's very profitable. Trump Trump has made big money. Picking aside, picking aside is definitely more profitable to get more subscribers. It might also be that they were absolutely suffering from Trump derangement syndrome from the fact that the person lies, and that he wants to separate children from their parents at the border.
SPEAKER_07: Listen, yes, but they're supposed to they have a job to do. They're supposed to be neutral. They're supposed to be a rational opposition to Trump. Yeah, but exactly. But the reason why Trump is doing well, or better is because the opposition to him is increasingly irrational. And, and people have voted for Trump to basically give the middle finger to the to the media, who, you know, again, who are taking sides to these big tech censors, you know, who don't want us to read things that are not going to be a good
SPEAKER_02: or critical of Trump. You know, and so on down the line. I mean, I tweeted earlier, I mean, Rich Lowry had a great post explaining why if Trump was going to win, why, you know, why that would happen. And it's because he's the only middle finger available to these people. And, you know, I don't disagree with you. He's not being no one's voting for Trump because of his integrity, perceived integrity, or integrity.
SPEAKER_02: It's the first time I've heard integrity in the same sentence as Trump.
SPEAKER_07: I thought you're, I'm agreeing with that point. I'm saying they're not voting for him because of that. They're not voting for him because of even a second term. They're voting for him in order to stop cultural forces they don't like.
SPEAKER_07: Two things to say, decidedly, by the way,
SPEAKER_05: two things to say, according to the national political writer for the Philly Inquirer, Jonathan Tamari, his tweet of 7.35pm said actually, it was even greater than we thought there are still 2.2 million mail-in ballots to be counted in PA, about 87% of the total. So if that's true, then we have that and Philly, number one. The second thing I wanted to say is that if you actually look at the sum counts right now in Pennsylvania, it's 371,591 votes that separate Trump and Biden. So it's, you know, not that much guys, if 2.2 million votes are outstanding. Yeah, but if it's, if it's two, if it's, let's see, 60% or two-third kind of to one-third slash 40%.
SPEAKER_06: And it's not, let's say it comes in under that, right, they probably counted a couple hundred thousand already. I mean, it is still pretty close. Yeah.
SPEAKER_06: Really close. Let me, let me ask Chamath, do you think that part of the reason we're seeing futures markets jump and the dollar jump and, and all the kind of obviously correlated assets moving the way they are is not necessarily because of a Trump win, but because the risk of a hung election seems to be coming out of the system right now. That it seems like we're going to have a much more clear outcome here than we thought we would. Florida is going to be much more clear. That's always a worry state. Georgia is going to be clear. Obviously, we've still got Pennsylvania to kind of figure out here. But it seems like this is going to break one way or another, whereas a lot of folks were concerned we'd end up in the court fighting over hanging chads for months. And there was concern in the markets for months about that. Do we think that's breaking up? No, I think that people were basically, look, there's a reason to be long Biden in the markets, which is essentially that there are certain sectors of the economy that would have done very well.
SPEAKER_05: Those sectors of the economy were probably slightly different than Trump's. Under a Trump regime, the reality is that corporate taxes, broadly speaking, are not going to go up. And so you can forecast higher earnings power for every stock. And so everything goes up. I think what's happening right now is more of that relief trade of maybe Trump was winning so you could be kind of long everything blindly. But the real canary in the coal mine was like, if you looked at tech futures, tech futures was just going bonkers when they thought he was going to win because they will probably disproportionately benefit of just having to pay no taxes because they pay no taxes today. So that's kind of like what I think is happening on that side. I mean, Trump is very pro-business. That's why the markets are ripping, right?
SPEAKER_06: I don't know. I mean, I feel like there was a real concern, like there was a non-zero case here, call it a 30% case, that we were going to get stuck for a few months with uncertainty and litigation about where this election was going to go. I think it's fair to say that we could still have that, David, because if this goes to tomorrow, I think it's fair to say that the game theory would tell you that tomorrow, whoever loses Pennsylvania should ask for an immediate recount.
SPEAKER_05: Right. And I don't know what the process for that is. If whoever loses Arizona should ask for an immediate recount. You know, whatever is possible under the law, I think both Biden and Trump will exercise because, let's face it, this is the highest stakes possible. And so you would hate to not if it's a margin of a few thousands of votes or tens of thousands of votes or even 100,000 votes and you're allowed to do a recount. So if that's the case tomorrow morning, if we go to bed in another hour and a half or if we finish this thing in another hour and there is no winner, clear winner, I think markets will be back to sort of modestly risk off tomorrow. So David, your thesis is that your thesis is clear winner, the markets rip either way?
SPEAKER_08: I think, yeah, clear winner. It's just like there was a lot of grinding expected here that was going to cause a lot of trepidation and bouncing for a while that folks were concerned about.
SPEAKER_06: And if you feel like you're going to have a clear election outcome or whether or not it gets litigated, if you feel clear about where it's going to go, because it's 55, 45, you know, sure, they're going to ask for a recount. It's good news for everybody. It makes sense.
SPEAKER_08: Look, I think the market does not want those Trump tax cuts repealed. Stocks just ripped after Trump passed those corporate tax cuts.
SPEAKER_02: So if either Trump wins or the Republicans hold on to the Senate, then that would be a reason for the market to rip. It doesn't mean Trump has to win. But if we have divided government gridlock. So between the two of you, the best possible scenario for the market is if Trump clearly wins.
SPEAKER_08: OK, I think I think we have another bestie on the line.
SPEAKER_06: Is it the case if we look at the Senate races? I don't know if anyone I don't know if there's an easy way for us to pull this up, but we have to pull that up, David.
SPEAKER_07: And I just want to introduce our next bestie guestie, Brad Gerson is here. He runs a multi-billion dollar. I believe you would call it a hedge fund or a fund. Yeah. And he invests large swaths of money in the American economy. Has he the best travel investor of all time? Jason Calganis?
SPEAKER_08: He's up there, but he certainly I would I would guess, Brad, with covid and airlines being grounded.
SPEAKER_07: This has not been the easiest year for you. So apologies.
SPEAKER_05: No, Brad. Brad just made ten billion dollars on Snowflake. He's fine. Snowflake. Brad, what's going on? Tell us what's going on. What do you know? Well, hi all.
SPEAKER_03: You know, it's a it's a fascinating night. I mean, all markets are ripping.
SPEAKER_03: We've had a massive reversal in the Nasdaq, a massive reversal in the bond market. And it it appears that, you know, everybody's now who is worried about a Trump victory is now celebrating a Trump victory. You know, one of the things people didn't understand about a clear Biden victory is the underlying concern in the bond market. Right. If there's one thing to explain, the expansion of multiples in the market this year is the fact that rates have collapsed. So the 30 and 10 year went from, you know, a couple hundred basis points 20 months ago to basically 50 basis points in August of this year. We've seen them back up about 40 percent over the course of the last couple of months. We see him backing up again tonight. The fact is the market is seriously concerned about higher rates, which are the result of both a turbocharged economy, too much stimulus on top of, you know, vaccines and prophylactics for covid. And so, you know, if you ask me, you know, we get all excited about the election, we get all excited about stimulus and tax policy. But the biggest elephant in the room is the Fed and rates. That's the 80 to 90 percent factor in the market this year in Q4 of 18. And so what I'm what we're looking at, you know, we see the Nasdaq now up three hundred and fifty bips. The futures up three hundred fifty bips. So that says Trump's winning. We're not going to break up the tech companies. We see the S&P starting to rise again and we see the bond market falling, saying that we're going to have lower stimulus. Right in the market. So, you know, I've heard I've heard you all talk about, you know, a clear victory certainly is better than not a clear victory. But, you know, notwithstanding our own fucking anxiety that we have to live with for the next four years in the short run, the market is clearly voting on, you know, is is voting that Trump is a palatable alternative. And I would tell you to keep your eyes on rates. Brad, what's your on the market? Brad, more than a great manager of money. You're actually a great human being. But you're also very wired into the Dems.
SPEAKER_05: What are the Dems getting wrong if they lose today? Well, you know, first, this is an upset already tonight. Let's call it. This is a massive upset relative to expectations.
SPEAKER_03: Win or lose? The reversal in the betting markets, the reversal in the stock market. You know, I was just earlier tonight at, you know, a well-known organizer's house on the Democratic side. There is despondency. This is a massive upset by Trump.
SPEAKER_03: And once again, a massive misread by the progressives and organizers in the Democratic Party. You know, I had my 84 year old mother out here from Michigan over the weekend. And I'll tell you that ordinary people. Are made to be to feel bad about themselves. By people living in these parts. The sanctimony that exists in urban areas. You know, and coastal elites is just it's it. You know, this is what we're seeing people vote against. Right. The idea that you're going to close down the state of Michigan, not allow people to take their boats out on lakes. This is just, you know, not something that people are willing to tolerate. And I think more than anything else tonight, you see a protest vote against sanctimony. And this is just ordinary people saying that, you know, let us live our lives. Don't act so much smarter than us. You know, and, you know, I asked my 84 year old mother, you know, who she voted for. She goes, don't ask me who I voted for. That's none of your business. Right. Like that's her way of telling me. Right. That, you know, that she's frustrated by how people in San Francisco make her feel living in Michigan. I think that's I think that's right. That's so smart. But David Sachs, before you talk, he's talking about you.
SPEAKER_02: Well, no, look, I mean, I'm on Twitter and I echo the technology. Extremely. I mean, it's usually VCs. Basically, they can't comprehend how somebody could have a political opinion that's different than them without that person literally being evil. I mean, I see this on Twitter over and over and over again. I'm like, really? Yeah. But but but but this is like most of Silicon Valley. And I'm just like, look, I mean, political opinions are like assholes.
SPEAKER_02: I mean, everyone's got one. And to think that yours is a lot prettier than everybody else's. It's a bit ridiculous. Welcome everybody to the podcast if you're just tuning in.
SPEAKER_07: Well, the family hour just ended. There we go.
SPEAKER_05: Brad, Brad, can I ask a question? What? Like, what what do we do?
SPEAKER_03: Yeah. You know, for me, listen, a Trump victory. The reality is we've learned to tolerate the anxiety over the last four years. And I think the market's fully prepared to to manage its way through another four years of Trump. So I think that's the reason we're seeing the futures react the way they are, is it's a whole lot of nothing. I mean, the fact that the matter is asking, how do we get off of our horses if we're on horses, the social elites?
SPEAKER_08: Well, I mean, this is going to take a complete rewiring, right? Like an abandonment of, you know, the I mean, listen, you and I all know the exodus of people out of the Bay Area right now.
SPEAKER_03: Right. The fact of the matter is like pragmatic politics in the Democratic Party in the state of California vacated long ago. And, you know, that is not a recipe for victory. It's not a recipe for victory at a national level. It's not a recipe for victory or tolerable victory at a state level. I think we're going to have the single largest migration of economic, the single largest economic migration in the history of this country. The convergence of COVID, which allows people to work from anywhere, and the risk of changing tax policies in states like California is going to cause mass economic migration. And I think that people are voting with their feet and they're voting with their wallets and they're voting, you know, tonight in loud numbers, no matter where this comes down. This is an upset and a defeat for what Democrats expected to occur tonight. Do you buy the framing, Brad, that this is about political correctness versus cancel culture?
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I think that's a big part of it. I mean, you know, I think it comes out, it's amplified this year because of COVID, but it comes down to something very simple, which I talked about. You know, sometimes my sister likes to call me fancy pants. Right. She's like, oh, you fancy people live in San Francisco. You have all the answers. Right. This is just the way that people in Indiana and Michigan and Ohio, they're made to feel every day. They don't sit around watching Fox News. These are not people who are racist. Right. Chamath, I heard you say earlier tonight the idea that Trump could pull what he's pulling. And yet if you talk to all of our friends, they would have you believe that it was just a small band of racist pickup drivers carrying Trump flags.
SPEAKER_03: I mean, they are their head is in the sand. Yeah, this is this is CEOs. You know, these are business owners. These are small business owners. These are farmers. These are old people. These are young people. I mean, the millennials, you can't find a millennial in the state of Indiana or Michigan who supports Biden. Right. And I mean, just add to that point about what they think about people in San Francisco.
SPEAKER_02: Why shouldn't they think that when tech giants and the people who work at these big tech companies like Twitter and Facebook are asserting a right to censor articles that they don't like and trying to assert a power over what the American people get to see and read? I mean, what a campaign issue that was for Trump in the last two weeks. I mean, whatever Twitter and Facebook thought they were doing to protect or help the Biden campaign. I mean, what a blunder. I mean, to give Trump the issue of censorship in the last two weeks. And then the extraordinary thing, you know, we had that that congressional hearing in the Senate Commerce Committee that I wrote a blog about. And the amazing thing is right on the heels of that. After that hearing, when we heard Jack Dorsey got that, you know, he just got grilled. He got ripped apart by the senators. Twitter doubled down on censorship. After that, there's an article by Jonathan Turley talking about they censored a whole new batch of accounts. And so, if anything, you know, it'll be really interesting to see. I think, you know, if you think back four years ago, Facebook was really, for whatever reason, became the scapegoat for the election. I think this time around, it's going to be Twitter because they have been so arrogant and their assertion of their right to censor viewpoints they don't like. And if the Republicans hold on to the Senate and or the presidency, I think you're going to see Jack Dorsey become the poster child for this new censorship that they're going to target. And the paradox, Friedberg, is that had they just let that New York Post story be tweeted because it's the New York Post.
SPEAKER_07: This is I mean, you may not like the New York Post. It may have a sordid past or reputation. But if that had been a New York Times story, a Washington Post story or an MSNBC story or a CNN story, it would not have been banned because it's a Rupert Murdoch New York Post story. And because it was salacious, somebody mid-level inside of Twitter decided to ban it. How much of that do you think plays into what we're seeing here tonight, Friedberg, which is that this is not a small event. This is a large group of people saying, I don't want anything to do with the Democratic Party anymore.
SPEAKER_06: I just think back to 2016 and, you know, everyone has their own priorities, their own individual things that matter to them. And I remember in 2016 or leading up to it, I spent a lot of time in what we call kind of the Rust Belt and the Farm Belt. And if you'll remember, this was around the time of kind of the transgender bathroom movement. Yeah. And this was felt very much like a coastal elite topic of interest. If you're in the Rust Belt and the Farm Belt, you're like, what the fuck? How is this possibly something people are spending time on and arguing about and thinking about? And the disconnect between the priorities of the individuals that live in the vast part of the United States versus what they read about and hear about, others treat as their priority, I think is what partially helped support Trump getting elected in the first place, because the things that mattered to them that they felt were highly consequential were completely unrelated and not being paid attention to. While other folks that had the money and the power in the big cities were focused on social matters and social issues and liberal decisions that they thought were inconsequential or shouldn't be a priority. And I think that fast forward to 2020, and it hasn't moved in the right direction, it's moved in the wrong direction, where the disconnect is no longer a passive difference of priority. It's actually become an active interest moving against you. And so if you live in the Corn Belt or the Rust Belt or vast parts of rural America, to your point, you're now not only feeling that there's this disconnect, but you're also feeling like this point of view is becoming overwhelming and stopping you from having a point of view. And I think whether your point of view is rooted in fact or not, you can base that however you want. It just feels like it's becoming a silencing effect and not just kind of an ignoring the effect. And I think let me let me just jump in here.
SPEAKER_05: I want to come back to this, but I want to just jump to something that Bogut just tweeted. Andrew Bogut, thank you for this. Detroit, Philadelphia and Milwaukee are all planning to post vote counts tomorrow as they work through absentee backlog. So if we look at the counts, that really could mean that, you know, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan are either too close to call or not even yet ready to be called until tomorrow morning. I think let's take a pause here and let's go through what the swing states are and where they stand at this very moment.
SPEAKER_07: Arizona is an important toss up state. Correct. Let's pull up Arizona, Nick. Let's all just take a moment to look at Arizona. We're going to go through about six or seven of these states and just get our bearing right now, because when we did the quick survey about 45 minutes ago, four of us believed Trump was going to win. Two of us believe one of us emotionally and of us somewhat emotionally believed. That's where we were at. Guys, you get my guys before you start this. Hold on. Before you start this, I just want to read a tweet with two two tweets.
SPEAKER_05: Number one from Nick Bilton. When do we get to vote on when we fire Nate Silver? And the second one. Wait, the second one, which is even funnier. He's named Nate Silver because all his picks come in second place. Oh, ouch. Wow. I mean, I was tweeting you guys for the election.
SPEAKER_02: I mean, the Nate Silver thing was a joke. First of all, he was saying that Biden was 90 percent favorite. And at the same time, he said that if Trump won Pennsylvania, then he would become the favorite. But you knew that Trump was a few points of the margin of error in Pennsylvania. So how can you be 90 percent favorite? But some but but but Pennsylvania is sort of neck and neck. I mean, even his own internal projections weren't consistent with each other. I mean, here's Nate Silver, one of the best sports predictors in history. He's been an absolute genius.
SPEAKER_08: He stepped into politics and now you guys are lashing. Yeah, but this this is the worst case of analytics since Tampa Bay pulled their picture in the sixth inning of the World Series.
SPEAKER_07: I mean, if we look at what's happening, it's very clear that there are people who are either lying to the pollsters because they're embarrassed about their choice or they may actively be trolling the pollsters. So when a pollster calls them, they lie to them to have this exact moment happen, just like the ticktockers all registered for a Trump event. So now we have a level of trolling going on at a national level. Hashtag poll. I think there's a simpler explanation. And that's that we're not all trolls.
SPEAKER_09: I think the simpler explanation is that pollsters are empiricists and they're experts. And like a lot of experts, you can kind of you can kind of interpret the Trump phenomenon of overperforming. Now, two elections in a row is a kind of revolt against the experts and they don't see their biases the way they should. They're blind to certain things. There's really no excuse for how bad they miss this one because they may have been experts. Yesterday, but they're not experts.
SPEAKER_08: Well, this is I mean, this is what Trump does. This is why people support him in spite of the fact that I don't think anyone disagrees with Jason's opinion of his of his character is that they love sticking it to the to the eggheads.
SPEAKER_09: You know, right. Yeah. Right. What happens to media?
SPEAKER_05: Like what happens to how we conduct ourselves? Like, do you do you read The New York Times tomorrow and think, wow, I'm going to trust the Times? I'm not saying you did before, but I'm just using it as a generality to sort of ask the question, like, what happens to media? No, I think I think I believe in, you know, all of these polls and all of these mainstream press.
SPEAKER_03: I mean, this validates the arguments effectively that Trump has been making. Right. That you've been told lies, that these polls were lies, that everybody was trying to manipulate you. I mean, it's this is a validation of those who are flipping the middle finger at Washington and at the coast and are saying we're not going to be told how to believe, how to think, how to vote, how to wear masks, how to wear masks. And, you know, there's a dangerous side to this. One hundred percent. It's the end of expertise. I mean, who can we ever trust?
SPEAKER_07: I mean, and this is put, ironically, it's the experts who got mass wrong.
SPEAKER_02: Remember that at the time that I was saying that we should wear masks, the WHO was saying we shouldn't. So they were lying. They were deliberately lying to keep PPE from being overrun by the experts have done a horrible job on Covid to Jason.
SPEAKER_02: I mean, look, I think that's now the cynicism of Trump and his approach to absolutely undermine Foushee and say to and admonish people wearing masks while on stage is a level of danger.
SPEAKER_07: And as in as a what? What? What? That's insane. So we know that mass work. You actually were a proponent of it. Yes, of course. Mass mass should never become a political issue. Trump last week said don't wear a mask. No, he never said he was. He literally made fun of a person wearing a mask. Let's just run through each of the states right now. Can I can I just respond to that, Jason?
SPEAKER_02:
SPEAKER_02: Real quick. Yes. Look, look, I you know, I wrote a blog post, but going back to April 1st, saying that we should that mass should be the policy and it should never have become a political issue. OK, right. It should have been a bipartisan response. And it's unfortunate it became a political issue. But and I'm not not forgiving that. And it took Trump way too long to get on board with mass. I think right around the time my blog was published a few days afterwards, first, he said it was optional. You can do it if you want. It took him about another three months to actually say that mass were a good idea. I agree that had he just gone all in on a mass policy, I think this would not even be a close election. I mean, that was probably the single biggest blunder that he made politically this year. One hundred percent agree. OK, so we agree on that.
SPEAKER_02: But but but look, but you're missing the other half of it, which is what is our covid policy going to be today? And the reality is that Joe Biden and all these blue state governors are still on the record as being in favor of lockdowns. And in fact, they are doing lockdowns. The only reason why Michigan and Wisconsin, but I say especially Michigan, would ever be in play tonight was because of lockdowns.
SPEAKER_00: Absolutely agree. Yes. This is a resounding rebuke of lockdowns.
SPEAKER_07: Let's just zip through these real quick. Arizona. Pull it up, Nick. Arizona. Here we are. Biden. Fifty four percent. If we round out forty five for Donald Trump. Seventy five percent. Looks like Arizona is going to Biden. Next up, let's take a quick look at Iowa. Iowa, 64 percent in and we're in essentially a dead heat with. Yeah, I was going to Trump, Jason. I was going to Trump.
SPEAKER_09: You can see how that numbers come down as the election day vote starts to trickle in. That's going to try it. So they were one of the states that did the drop off ballots, mail in ballots first.
SPEAKER_07: Yes, I think I think that's fair to say. Yeah. OK, Ohio, critically important.
SPEAKER_07: Let's take a look at Ohio while we're here. Ohio. Wow, that's really flipped hard with a commanding lead. Yeah, you can kiss that one. Goodbye.
SPEAKER_09: Ohio. Ohio. Just to be North Carolina. We are now within one.
SPEAKER_07: And we just all agree if we were I mean. All right. If we're momentum investors.
SPEAKER_03: I mean, this thing is this is a disaster for Biden right now. This is a disaster for Biden. And on top of this, all our talk is about the presidency. They're not going to get the Senate either. No, no, no. Tillis is running ahead of Trump in North Carolina.
SPEAKER_09: So I think he's home free. And while the vote in Maine is not fully in yet, there's only about 41 percent. Collins has a forty thousand vote lead, which is in college, keeps her seat.
SPEAKER_02: That is the biggest that that is like the mega upset. The Democrats were already. They were targeting her two years ago after she voted for Kavanaugh. Yeah.
SPEAKER_05: OK. The best that we as we think through this, by the way, just get this in mind. CNN right now shows I mean, CNN said must be up there after we don't know what we're doing, but they show one ninety two to one fourteen Biden. Well, yeah, because they call California. That's right. They call California when the polls close.
SPEAKER_09: So that's 55. Yeah. OK.
SPEAKER_07: North Carolina. Here we go. We or we did North Carolina, I believe. Yeah. We're at 95 percent reporting. And Trump has a lead that looks like he's. Yeah. Unless there's a lot of Charlotte out. I think that North Carolina is over.
SPEAKER_09: And that, by the way, that percentage is outside the recount window. I think you have to be within one percent. OK, let's take a look at Georgia for a quick second.
SPEAKER_07: We said that was the way you know, if we've counted North Carolina's mailings.
SPEAKER_09: I think that I think they were all dumped at the outset. Right. In North Carolina, one of the reasons why we were watching them tonight is that, like Florida, they can count in advance. And so they dumped, they dumped a bunch right at the outset here. By the way, I just got it. By the way, I just checked the betting lines.
SPEAKER_08: Trump is over a three to one favorite to win the election right now. Later, the later it goes, the more significant that is. Why did it come down to 200 on Bovado? That's the lowest it's been.
SPEAKER_08: I just got three to one on one of the sides. This has two to one. Yeah, that's the lowest.
SPEAKER_05: Brad, you better start arming these sides. If you assume that Biden takes Arizona, Trump takes North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia. Let's go to Georgia. Let's give him pencil. If Biden wins Arizona, if Biden wins Arizona, he could lose Michigan.
SPEAKER_09: So Georgia is currently 54 percent.
SPEAKER_07: Fox just declared that Biden won Arizona.
SPEAKER_06: Oh, well, OK, that's a quick call. Biden has to take Pennsylvania, though.
SPEAKER_03: OK, so now this is what I'm saying. This is why this is in place.
SPEAKER_05: So if you assume Biden takes Arizona, so that's now on the table. Now, if you say that Trump takes North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Florida, Texas, Ohio, etc., he still needs to pull out a victory in Michigan, Wisconsin or Minnesota. Otherwise, get this or Nevada.
SPEAKER_09: Well, actually, Nevada would be enough. Nevada would be enough. Otherwise, let's go to Minnesota. Guys, hold on. Just let me finish, please.
SPEAKER_05: It's going to be if Trump. So if that happens, Trump needs to win one of Michigan, Wisconsin or Minnesota. Otherwise, it's 270 to 68 Biden.
SPEAKER_07: OK, so here's Minnesota. Let's just pause for a second. Biden with Biden's got a 56 percent to 42 with 54 percent. And so there's a lot more to come in. But I think, Michael, you would agree that's a bridge too far.
SPEAKER_09: I never thought Minnesota was in play. The Republicans, the Republicans put a brave face on there and they are making some gains in the rural areas. But Minnesota was never in play. Time to go to Wisconsin. Time to go to Wisconsin.
SPEAKER_07: Let's take a pause here. We got to do this step by step. Everybody, Wisconsin, 51 percent to 47 percent. Donald Trump with 54 percent. That, too, I think, feels like a bridge too far. Or do we not know if they did? We don't know. You know, I think Wisconsin is another one who's probably counted their election day vote first.
SPEAKER_09: So now, so Biden is still very much alive in Wisconsin. Yeah, exactly. Milwaukee doesn't come in until tomorrow morning.
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, Michigan. We need to take a quick look at Michigan and then we're almost done.
SPEAKER_07: OK, here's Michigan. Donald Trump at trending to 55 percent to 44 percent for Biden. Only 44 percent are in. And let's be clear, is this Detroit doesn't come in until tomorrow? OK, that Michigan Detroit does. Yeah, that Wayne, that Wayne County vote is very low.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah. Look at that. Twenty eight percent. A lot of more. A lot more votes there.
SPEAKER_07: OK, so we don't know about Michigan. Michigan is very much up in the air.
SPEAKER_09: That's a pretty good margin for Trump there. But I would say it's very much up in the air. But by the way, if you put Arizona in Biden's column, he can lose Michigan.
SPEAKER_07: Let's take a look at Pennsylvania one more time. Actually, and Trump is right.
SPEAKER_09: He could lose. He could lose either Michigan or Pennsylvania and still he could out. Trump needs to win Michigan, Wisconsin, one of Michigan, Wisconsin or Minnesota.
SPEAKER_05: So basically forget Minnesota. If destroyed. So so then if Detroit doesn't show up and Milwaukee and Green Bay don't show up, Trump wins.
SPEAKER_07: Pennsylvania. But Chammock, does that assume that he wins Pennsylvania?
SPEAKER_05: Yes. If I give you if we give him Pennsylvania. So again, this is why I think, guys, it feels like Biden. As I said, I'm a little shaky on my prediction right now.
SPEAKER_09: I think the betting markets are showing it's tightened almost to even. And let me ask Brad a question.
SPEAKER_06: Brad, if the betting markets are saying it's almost even in the analysis we just did isn't missing any information. Yeah. Why are the futures markets still trading up one and a half points? And why are things still, you know, I think that, listen, the the the stock markets ripped the last two days, assuming that Biden's going to win.
SPEAKER_03: And I think what the markets are starting to price in is that this is not going to be a blue wave. There's no mandate here for massive tax reform. There's going to be a divided Senate. It's going to be hard to pass legislation that's going to be overly onerous, that the stimulus package is going to be smaller, not larger, which is why the rates are backing up. So I think from a I think from a public markets perspective, the idea that we're going to have some checks and balances in place, it can live with either the the devil we know or it can live with Biden. But it doesn't want Biden with Elizabeth Warren as Treasury secretary. So democracy survives.
SPEAKER_06: I think Scenario three is starting to look very possible.
SPEAKER_09: Biden and a Republican Senate. And I can sleep soundly with that. OK, so we're going to have to meet you guys. I don't know what you're looking at, but but I mean, one point nine is I mean, that's like that's a huge significant right there.
SPEAKER_08: It's still good. I give you that. But I don't know those those numbers.
SPEAKER_02: And so it's moving fast.
SPEAKER_05: I want to I want to take it down to 180. Yeah. I want to go back to this topic that that brought up. OK, guys, look, we'll have a winner and it's going to be close. But think of how many people like isn't there any empathy for all these people that are that just feel so completely shut out of the system? Like what do we do tomorrow? Like irrespective, actually, of whether Trump wins or Biden wins.
SPEAKER_05: I think Brad's right. We're going to basically get nothing much is going to happen at that level. But what do we do with the like on Main Street? Like what are we doing to close the gap between folks so that, you know, this entire cohort, like literally, I don't care whether Biden wins by the popular vote by five million or seven million. You're talking about tens of millions of people.
SPEAKER_07: Bill Gurley is now on the line. Another one of our best guests is Bill. Thanks for joining us. You heard the question being teed up here. This is neck and neck. This is not something anybody, at least pollsters, came anywhere close to predicting. And Chamaat's question, I think, is a really valid one. Who is got a greater chance of bringing the country back together and maybe leading from the middle and maybe healing this wound? Because this has been the worst four years, I believe, in any of our lifetimes in terms of the anxiety and the anger between people who used to be able to get a load of questions. Well, I want to know Bill's opinion because... By the way, Bill Gurley is the best VC... Jason, Jason, Bill Gurley is the best venture capitalist in the world.
SPEAKER_08: Give him a proper introduction. Stop hijacking our fucking broadcast. Go ahead, Gurley.
SPEAKER_05: So thanks for having me on. I think you guys have done a really good job of breaking down why people have mis-estimated this thing.
SPEAKER_00: There was a, you know, there's such a rural-urban split. There was a really good New York Times daily podcast about two weeks ago where they interviewed rural Democrats in Pennsylvania that had switched to Trump. And all the voices they echoed were very similar to what Brad walked through with his mother. And so I do think there's a true lack of empathy for the center states in the rural areas from the coastal elites. And I'd say part of breaking any of it down would be somehow trying to separate that. I think a bigger issue that has really been on my mind lately is just how tribal everyone's gotten. And I've come to believe that the way you can probably just ruin your mind the most is to just join a tribe and quit thinking about things. And the number of people I know on both sides that have run off to their tribe is shocking to me. And it's just not a way to go about being smart because, you know, and if you, anyone that makes fun of a, you know, a religion that's extreme or something, it's all the same shit. Like you're just believing dogma for the sake of it. So I, one of the things that I worry about about a Trump victory is just very tactically in my life, and maybe it's part of living in California, but a whole bunch of people and things that I want to get solved become more manic if he wins. Like my kids' school and the companies that I work with and COVID, quite frankly, I think that we can't get past COVID with Trump because the TDSers are so convinced that it has to be problematic. And it's just, you know, so I don't, I actually, I don't know the exact path to solve it, but I do worry about just being in a world where everyone hates each other. And it just doesn't seem solvable that way.
SPEAKER_02: Well, this is why I think, you know, this scenario which we've called the soft landing where, let's say you had a Biden victory by two electoral votes, the Republicans hold on to the Senate. I think the radical left gets a big, I'd say rebuke or shock. We have basically divided government in Washington, but it takes the whole temperature down because, you know, Trump gets replaced by Biden, but you've kind of got, you know, basically, Joe and his old pal Mitch are in a power sharing arrangement in Washington. It could be a really good situation for the country for the next four years, you know, temperature will go down, there'd be kind of this, you know, healing process, if you will. But, you know, there wouldn't be a whole lot of new sort of legislation that we have to worry about. I think we would get what we want, which is the ability to ignore Washington for four years.
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, but we wouldn't get a solution to really what ails us, which is the fact that there's all these people that just feel completely shut out. And that really bothers me at some very basic level, which is like, I just think like, you know, I fought my family, my parents, just escaped some third world fucking shithole to go to Canada. And, you know, Canada gave us a lot, but it still wasn't enough for me. I crawled and scratched to get into the United States. Things work out, but I don't feel like I have a right to all of a sudden, I don't know, just like look down on other people or make people feel like shit or not allow people to... Do you actually think, Shamath, that Biden is going to do that? Or do you think Biden's going to be the middle ground who collaborates with the Republicans in the Senate and the Congress?
SPEAKER_07: No, no, no. What I'm saying is independent of what happens, we're going to have basically, we're going to have a photo finish. And what I think what Brad said is right.
SPEAKER_05: The fact that we are in a photo finish means that there are a lot of people in pain. And I think we have a responsibility to get our heads out of our asses and stop this sanctimonious, holier than thou bullshit. I agree with Brad when he says that it really hits a nerve with me because I feel like there are a lot of people we work with them all. It's rife within the tech culture and all these fuck bags think they know what they're talking about all the time. And we're doing a disservice to so many Americans and we need to wake up. And that's what bothers me. The idea that there are so many people who feel like they're just getting so fucked. Really bothers me. That bothers me. So I can ignore Trump. I'll ignore his bullshit because honestly, he's done nothing. He will do nothing. He is a complete fucking void. But whether it's Trump or Biden in a 270, 268 election, the fact that so many people still use this guy as a vessel. I don't know. That makes me more upset. I think some people, I think everyone thinks has some degree of empathy to the problem.
SPEAKER_06: I think there are different points of view on the solution, which is where this stuff gets realized. The one point of view is we should have less government involved in our lives and our businesses. And the other point of view is we should have more support and help from the government. And that's where things diverged very quickly. It doesn't feel to me like anyone in politics is necessarily ignoring what you're highlighting. And I don't think anyone in America does from the rich to the poor to the left to the right. I think the solutions are miscast because, for example, like what are we supposed to do?
SPEAKER_05: Like with our higher educational institutions, the people that are churning out all these folks that are meant to go and collaborate and find middle ground. I mean, I clearly like all of this says our educational facilities are completely failing from grade school all the way through to high school, community college, college, grad school. It's all just a contrived piece of shit. Right. We are completely putting out one in two people for failure. OK, so that much is clear. So I don't see politicians fixing that. On either side of the aisle. What I mean, honestly, what are we supposed to do? Well, I mean, I just might I just suggest that two things.
SPEAKER_03: Number one, I think in these results that you see, there's a you know, there is extraordinary frustration, right? With this with the state of affairs, the fact that Trump in the middle of covid.
SPEAKER_03: After four years of torturous, anxiety inducing tweets. Could even be in a neck to neck race to win this election tells you, right, how devastatingly bad people feel about how they're how they're being treated. I think that I said recently, we have to redraft the social contract. This idea we've been living under social contract drafted post World War Two that is pre technology revolution. We have a concentration of wealth today in the world and in this country like we've never seen. And we have Republicans that are set in their ways who say, you know, no, no universal health care, you know, no reform of the education system. You have Democrats who are demanding that you have universal basic income. I think you have to have pragmatic, smart, younger politics. I mean, the fact that we have two old white men. I mean, neither of these folks is on top of their game. I mean, neither of these like this is I mean, you compare Biden to Pete Buttigieg. I mean, Buttigieg is Buttigieg walks into the lion's den of Fox TV and tames the lion every night. Every night. Right. Let's get Pete Buttigieg solving some of these problems. Let's get some younger ideas on the Republican side, solving these problems. But we're going to have to re architect architect that social contract. No doubt about it. You know, and I think the second thing is that, you know, to me, this is going to be a wake up call to the nominating processes in both parties. But but let's be clear. Mike Pence. Right. Has his roadmap, you know, for, you know, how to win the election. Indiana governor. Right. He's going to tap into the same fears that Trump tapped into. I mean, these fears aren't going away. Right. The exact the exacerbation of the wealth disparity is going to increase, not decrease. We see it every day out here. And so I think you're going to have to have, you know, the Democratic Party who nominates people, puts people forward, who can, you know, who can tap into this. Right. Who do you like? If it wasn't Biden, who would you like? Buttigieg.
SPEAKER_03: Buttigieg. He's a south. This was, you know, an openly gay mayor of my hometown in Indiana.
SPEAKER_06: You think he can sell? Right. Who fought who fought in Afghanistan and who goes on Fox News every damn night.
SPEAKER_03: Right. And has a conversation that leaves Republicans saying, oh, that guy's pretty smart.
SPEAKER_02: Right. Yeah, I agree that he is a tremendous political talent. Do you think that he's pragmatic enough, Brad?
SPEAKER_05: Or he would he would end up veering more towards, you know, sort of like politically correct leftist socialist agenda and then have the same result?
SPEAKER_03: I think that there is a there's been a doctrine in the in the Democratic Party that to win the primary, you got to veer to the left. Right. You got to contend with Bernie. You got to contend with Elizabeth Warren. But ultimately, that's a losing strategy in the election. And so I think you're going to have the emergence of a middle of the country governor, middle of the country mayor, somebody like Pete who's going to run on a smart, younger, pragmatic Democratic ticket. I think that's a winning formula. I mean, I think that's the Clinton formula. You know, Obama was a bit of an anomaly, but the Clinton formula was a conservative, pragmatic form of of Democratic Party leadership.
SPEAKER_05: I mean, I suspect that in the next three or four days, I'm going to get a call from the Democratic leadership figuring out how much they can count on me. And my message to them is you guys can go fuck yourselves until you figure this out. Because to your point, Brad, it is absolutely shameful that we're in. No, no, I'm serious that we are in. I know you are. That's what I love.
SPEAKER_02: Well, but that's a moth. I mean, what you should tell them to do is go form a DLC. Remember the Democrat Democratic Leadership Committee that Bill Clinton forms. So remember what Bill Clinton did, you know, when he won in 92, we had three straight Republican presidential terms, Ronald Reagan, incredibly successful president, then his successor, basically, Reagan won. Bush won a third term for Reagan, but he was a weak candidate. And Clinton came in there. What did he do? He triangulated. He tacked toward the center. And, you know, he he actually passed a lot of bipartisan legislation. David, David, David, let me make this even more blunt. OK, my million bucks will grow to 10 million dollars per election to 50 million dollars per election as I get older.
SPEAKER_05: OK, so these motherfuckers want a single goddamn dollar from me. What I want first is a root cause analysis to understand what is actually going on. So to your point, before you fix it, you need to be honest and identify the problem.
SPEAKER_02: Well, I mean, I think that I think it's because the issue that Trump ran against was that Joe Biden was a Trojan horse for radical for a radical left that really owns the Democratic Party right now. That's what he ran against. Bill Gurley, what do you think the issues are that if we were going to try to have a great reconciliation between these two parties,
SPEAKER_07: between middle America and the coastal elites, where you have spent, you know, large swaths of your life, I think perhaps you're the only person here who has lived in both places. Middle of America. Right, you said he's from Indiana.
SPEAKER_07: OK, but you don't trust your judgment on these issues. Well, what does the what does the what are the coasts need to understand about the people who believe when we live between the coasts and what they're trying to express to us and how can we as coastal occupants and citizens do to kind of bridge this gap other than just moving to Austin and getting the hell out of California, which is devolving, which is what I feel like doing at this point. Well, I have two comments on this one, you know, having having listened to, you know, as much as I can on all of the voter conversations, including this call on.
SPEAKER_00: I'm not 100% sure that these people feel unrepresented. I think a lot of them want to be left alone. And so part, part of what's being engineered, or what they fear is being engineered is someone sitting in a city with views that are very different than the telling them that this is the world they have to live by. And I think the lockdown fit in with that, but a lot of other things to that put the daily podcast I mentioned, you know, there was this guy just saying what is what is Nancy Pelosi know about what I want my day to day life, you know, and so there is a notion of being left alone Brad story about his mom was like, hey, we're fine here, like don't don't bother me. And so there's a, there's a difference between trying to solve a problem for them and being empathetic to their point of view, and and I would say, having spent a lot of time in these areas and being a slow talker and sometimes made fun of for that. There's a there's unquestionably a, a type of social bias against rural Americans in in urban cities, there's just no doubt. It's the only joke you're allowed to tell without getting rebuked.
SPEAKER_07: In other words, we can make fun of the rednecks and we can Oh, absolutely. All day long, all day long, we can we can do a Bill Gurley impersonation or I mean, if we and this is the thing that I don't understand when I grew up, and I'm curious other people's opinions here and I'll let anybody who wants to jump in on this. It feels like the lessons I was taught in the 70s and 80s, which were America is strong because we're a melting pot, we take the best of all the cultures, and we try to make our own out of it, and that you get to make choices for your life, and in your city, town and state that don't have to be the same as the ones that you're talking about. They have to be the same as the ones we make in New York. So if you want to have a handgun, and you want to put it on your waistband in Texas, or wherever, and in New York City, we don't want to have handguns in the city because it's a little bit more crowded. We can we can have that difference. And we can coexist. And I don't know when we lost this script, that what makes America great is the differences, and that people living in different parts of a very large, diverse country can have different opinions. About, you know, abortion and what month abortion is allowed to occur at or the owning of a gun, or, you know, how tall a building can be built. When did that get taken off the table and who took it off the table? You know, who took it off table was these hysterical libs. And I think the hysterical as much as this far right Trump, you know, you know, flags on pickup trucks surrounding other cars, you know, cars is absolutely horrible to watch. I have equal disdain for hysterical libs trying to tell somebody who lives on a ranch that they can't have a gun when they've never even been to a goddamn ranch. And they've never had to use a gun to protect their family, because the a cop coming to your ranch is going to take 45 minutes.
SPEAKER_07: And that's what America needs to get back to is respecting each other's different lifestyles, whether you're an atheist, or you're devoutly Catholic, Viva la difference. Let people live their goddamn lives. I think it's an astute point bill. J Cal, can we run down California next? Yeah, I'm very curious how prop 22 is doing and is ahead. Oh, girlie. Oh, Jesus, the goddamn people are allowed to build can you tell everyone what prop 22 is and why? Please? Why?
SPEAKER_06: Yeah, but and it would transition to a whole bunch of conversations about politics that I feel more passionate about than who gets elected, which is, if, you know, in order to solve the problems that everyone's upset about with an inequality and whatnot.
SPEAKER_00: I think you have to have massive innovation, and you have to have job growth. And I don't know of any waves in history where you get a whole bunch of improvement in in standard living for broad swaths of a population without being positively aligned with job growth. And what the where I'm going with this is my biggest concern about Washington I used to say, the main reasons, Silicon Valley works is because it's so fucking far away from DC. And it's because regulation is the friend of the incumbent, and it's the it's the opposite of innovation it locks in things, and it's very resistant to change and Matt Ridley's new book how innovation works goes through this over a very very long period of time it's fantastic. And he talks about why Europe's gotten stuck and like the top 50 market cap companies in Europe. There's no new entrant in 30 years or something like that. Because of this anyway, prop 22 is a California proposition reaction to a law that was put on the California books called AB five.
SPEAKER_00: To the best of my knowledge and this is consistent with the editorial groups at the LA Times, San Francisco Chronicle and the San Diego Tribune, is that it was written entirely by a union that's the IU, who has no representation over, over drivers or gig workers whatsoever. They represent service industry workers. And they would like to represent who were drivers but they don't today. And I think, I think about this like a bunch of people living in Nevada, trying to pass a law for the citizens of California. Unfortunately because the regulatory capture, which, which I think is unfortunate on both sides of the aisle. The unions able through a woman named Lorraine Gonzalez is able to get the state to pass a law that that basically targeted gig workers, which was this new job type that has all these fantastic benefits. Anyway, immediately thereafter there were several industries are like, oh, we don't want this for us. So them and their unions and constituents started calling on Sacramento with Lorraine Gonzalez, and, and carving them out, one by one. So, by the, by the time, AB five was set to be put in action there over 100 industries that have been carved out because it was a stupid law written just to target and a single industry, and it was written with political donor dollars. In a moment that I would say is completely outside of my realm of what I expected. I saw that this was crony capitalism written with donor dollars, and they all got behind Prop 22, which is because we have this ballot initiative in California is a way for the voters to tell Sacramento that they're full of shit. And that looks like what's happening right now. Sorry for the long answer. No, no, it's a great answer. And what what's particularly infuriating about this.
SPEAKER_07: And listen, you and I are both, you know, investors in companies impacted by this is that it's there's a group of people who've been exempted from this. And the list of people exempted all seem to be just slightly more powerful and slightly better paid salespeople, fishermen, psychologists, surgeons, dentists, engineers, architects, lawyers, etc. And if this had passed, or if it still does pass, because we're only at 15 or 20 percent of people have been counted so far, but it's looking like Prop 22 will pass. Well, in one of the businesses I run inside dot com, we had to tell all of the freelancers we were hiring who are writers that they would lose their gig work with us because they could only write five stories a year or 10 stories a year. And Vox, one of the big publishing companies, which is incredibly left leaning as left as it gets. They stopped hiring people in California and they fired and laid off all their California freelance writers. Nick, and what this does to people who are doing gig economy, 70 percent of them are working part time. Nick, can you go back to, I need to switch topics, Nick, can you go to Georgia, please, for a second? A little late breaking data.
SPEAKER_05: Over 400,000 votes outstanding in Atlanta and the suburbs. How close is Georgia?
SPEAKER_09: Let's see how... Oh my God, it's a statistical dead heat if you add back in 400,000 for all Biden. Now I'm just saying that's not where it's going to be.
SPEAKER_05: They want all of Biden, yeah. I mean, Atlanta should go 70 percent by... Oh sure, it will. Maybe 75, 80, but I guess he'd have to be 100 to 0 to catch up if I'm reading that right.
SPEAKER_09:
SPEAKER_00: Anyone here cynical enough to think that there's some operative in these states holding these on purpose so that they can be the center of importance tomorrow?
SPEAKER_09: No, I just think it's almost midnight on the East Coast and people are tired and they're going to go home and have a shit shower and a shave and start again tomorrow. The reason Gurley is so successful, Gurley always knows how to diagnose the individual motivation of the lives of everyone on a macro level.
SPEAKER_06: And he can diagnose the shit out of it by just thinking about what one guy's motive is and then he's figured the whole thing out and he makes a billion dollars. Master of self-interest, Bill Gurley.
SPEAKER_08: That's true.
SPEAKER_02: Here's what it comes down to. So Trump needs to win two out of four of these states, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, or Michigan. And he's got to win two of those four. So it's got to be probably Pennsylvania and Michigan or Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. But he's got to win, if he loses Nevada, he needs to win two out of those three Rust Belt states. Or he wins Nevada plus like a Pennsylvania. Yeah, this is going to be really close. Michigan's going to go to Trump. This is going to come down to Pennsylvania and really to the Philly suburbs.
SPEAKER_03: I was reading on Twitter, election official in Michigan says don't expect results before Friday.
SPEAKER_02: That's crazy. And by the way, I mean, so let's just think for a second how extraordinary it is that Trump looks like he might win Michigan. I mean, just to go back to the theory of the case that we were laying out earlier about how Trump picked up this China trade issue four years ago. And this time he combined it with the lockdown issue. I mean, it's really amazing that that state is leaning Trump right now. Michigan. Michigan was two issues. It was, you know, working class Democrats feeling like Trump's standing up for them with respect to China.
SPEAKER_03: And it was locked down and locked down. It was an overwhelming issue, you know, for my for my friends and my folks in Michigan, for sure. Can we go back to Prop 22 for a second, Jason? Because I think that this is you know, this is a an issue of extreme importance. You know, one of the things that Bill didn't say is, you know, we were talking earlier, Chamath brought up, you know, what's the third way? You know, we we we've we've built a social contract on the back of kind of W2 tied employment for the better part of the last 70 years. We now have a massive part of the economy that's gig. And it's not just this is all freelancers. This is all part time workers and post-Covid. This is just a massive portion of the economy. The idea that we're going to tie all benefits to W2 is just totally asinine. It's got to be re-architected. And what Prop 22 does is say it's IC plus.
SPEAKER_03: It's independent contractor plus benefits. Right. It's this idea that we don't have to tie benefits to W2 employment. Right. So the nonsensical no argument against Prop 22, this was an abandonment of the employee is just that. It combines flexibility with benefits. And, you know, from my perspective, you're going to see if Prop 22 passes, which I think it will tonight, it's going to be the architecture that New York and many other states follow. They're certainly not going to follow the disastrous AB five example. But we also know that it's not sufficient just to have a bunch of workers with zero health care. And, you know, and so I think this is a, you know, hats off to DoorDash, Instacart, you know, Uber and Lyft trying to trying to design something that is a middle way. And, you know, Chamath, if we don't have politicians designing a middle way. Right. Then we need leadership out of the business community designing a middle way. Well, that, so you just said something so, so profound. And I was going to, I would like to build on that. I think what California shows is that if you have a completely democratic up and down ticket, and it veers too far to this coastal, naval gazing socialist nanny state, then it requires money and companies to basically level the playing field because the Republicans can't do it.
SPEAKER_05: And it's possible to fight back. And what's interesting to me is nobody ever talks about, or maybe they do, and I just don't hear it, about how the equivalent happens on the right. It'd be interesting to know if you guys know of any states where there's just Republican up and down the ticket and they just veer into such a detached laissez faire where the whole state needs to get corrected by for profit organizations. But it seems like we're setting up for Democrats versus companies and people moving to Republican states to have low taxes and to be left alone.
SPEAKER_06: Well, you know, it's a sensible set of outcomes in California, right? I mean, do you guys not agree that the the yes on Prop 22 and SACS, it looks like your commercial property tax proposition that Zuck helped fund may not pass. It's a, oh, thank God. It's a, yes, we don't know. It's a point 1% differential. Yes. Which I agree. It's look, the California ballot initiatives are looking really good right now. It gives me a lot of hope. It gives me a lot of hope about the state because the most anti economic, the most let's put a business on friendly ballot initiatives looks like they're going down, starting, you know, with the win on Prop 22.
SPEAKER_02: That's huge. But then Prop 15, you know, we talked about that on a former episode of the all in pod. This was chipping away at Prop 13, which is the great shield of the middle class in terms of property taxes. I'm not saying you couldn't get a better tax regime that would tax commercial property at fair market value, but you sure wouldn't want to give that card away without demanding some structural reform in exchange for it, which is why I thought it was just so stupid for, you know, tech billionaires to be funding, you know, these, these ballot initiatives for higher taxes, you know. This is definitely looking like a, like a sensible kind of middle ground outcome where a lot of folks who were concerned about California swinging all the way left and chasing business and enterprise out of the state, you know, maybe kind of getting reeled in.
SPEAKER_06: I think it gives some hope and give some pause to a lot of folks who are trying to build businesses in California to recognize that, you know, hey, there is a thoughtful populace here. Totally agree. And this is this is a great outcome tonight. I feel I personally feel really good about I agree if this sticks it's, it is because the big the big issue with California right now is that we've got, you know, people, we've got net migration out of the state because it's just so hard for the middle class to live here and to build businesses here.
SPEAKER_02: I hope what we hear, you know, if we're fortunate enough for Prop 22 to pass, I hear we, I hope we see a coalition among these companies come together and really promote this as a national architecture for a third way for independent contractors, free agents across the country to have a living wage and benefits.
SPEAKER_03: It's totally detached from W2 employment. I really do believe a bunch of people on this call were helpful to an effort I launched around the board challenge. You know, it's high time for the social consciousness of corporate America to take the leadership position. And because it's not coming out of Washington and there's so many issues that the solution lies among us. And we've got to stop spending our election nights wondering when somebody is going to deliver us from ourselves. We got to start delivering ourselves.
SPEAKER_06: I think it's a very good thing you resolve that unions. I mean, like, you know, girlies girlies still with us. Yes. How do you resolve things with the unions after this? I mean, if Prop 22 passes. Is there a coming to the middle ground with unions and or unions always just kind of directional vector, you know, they're always like a force on the system. They're not an absolute or objective. Right. They're they're just always pushing in one direction. I mean, what ends up happening with the resolution with unions or is it just a constant back and forth to try and manage the impact they'll have on policy, politics, tax, free market, et cetera?
SPEAKER_00: So from from my point of view, the if you if you think about Citizens United, which a lot of people were upset about, I think rightfully so. Because D.C. is so money oriented, like it's coin operated. And a lot of people have vivid awareness of it being coin operated on the right through corporations. This is why the most heavily regulated industries are the hardest to break into, hardest to innovate against. What I think they miss is how much of its right is is is regulatory capture on the left. And the difference that a union has versus a company is it's a natural monopoly. And so it actually has more power to write regulation than a company does. And it's going to be around every single election cycle. So if you listen to them, you know, you get what you want. And the people have pointed out that the the gentleman or not a gentleman, the individual that did that killed George Floyd probably wouldn't have been on the force if it weren't for the union protecting him because of the stuff he had done before. But and this goes back to the red and blue and blindness of just being dogmatic to your party. Most of the people I know that are heavily prescribed to the to the Democratic tribe refuse to acknowledge that one of the big problems in police reform comes from the unions. And you can't see those things unless you take yourself out of that single place. I would tell you the California situation I think is deeper than than maybe what Brad talked about the rule, the law that's causing more companies to leave, from my perspective than 85 is something called Paga, which was passed about 25 years ago but has finally reached momentum, where it's causing problems for companies. And this was a law passed by litigators with donor dollars in Sacramento, that lets any lawyer bring a case on behalf of the state against a company. And so they, they're basically like local sheriff's just running around, bringing claims and of course they'll settle every time the, the, the supposed victims are getting about 10% on average on Paga claims, and it wants your company's been shook down on three or four Paga claims by a lawyer who's only going to give 10 cents on the dollar to these people that used to work for you, you finally just throw up your hands and say, you know, I don't need to hire someone here, or someone somewhere else cost twice as much to hire someone here. And so I do worry that if any state or country wants to move forward in our new economy. They can't just be completely anti business anti tech that I have a strong point of view on that. It won't work, you're going to grind to a halt. Hey Jay, Jason, can we go back to the Senate. Is anybody prepared to, I'm getting a read from my analysts who are live blogging to me that the Senate is almost certain to go Republican at this point
SPEAKER_03: with Iowa Maine and North Carolina, going Republican. That would do it, and Michigan and Montana both in real danger for Democrats but even if they lost both of those, you're going to have 51 49 to Republicans on the Senate.
SPEAKER_06: Hey Brad wire markets trading down a bit right now, from where they were.
SPEAKER_03: And both and both Vada, I guess which is the Vada just came back up they stopped taking action now they've got Trump, minus 150 Is that how you say it and Joe Biden plus 115 so to.
SPEAKER_07: If you put $100 on Joe Biden you win 15 Is that right.
SPEAKER_07: And if you want to have you win 115 115 $115 is very close, Jason, and Donald Trump if you were to put $100 in you make 150. Is that right, Phil Hellmuth, you'd have to know you 150 to 100.
SPEAKER_08:
SPEAKER_07: Exactly. Got it. Okay.
SPEAKER_03: I think the more surprising thing at this point is it's almost, you know, I'm certainly going to live to write this but it appears at this point that the markets going to be up tomorrow. Almost either way. And if you look at what the market was saying last week. You know just yet another surprise. The market is celebrating the fact that this is a close election. But, you know, if it's a, if it's a contested transfer of power and we have, you know, there's, there's certainly a lot of room for uncertainty, uncertainty to still be injected into this, but it likes the fact that we, whether it's Biden or Trump, who pulls out the presidency is certainly liking the fact that it's going to be a close election.
SPEAKER_07: Right now, just to give people an indication, Fox News has Joe Biden at 227 electoral votes and Trump at 204. The New York Times is at 213 and 136 for Trump. The Senate on the New York Times is 44 Dems, 45 Republicans. And I don't know how we're supposed to, who we're supposed to trust here. There's a Senate, the Senate on Fox News is 45 Democrat, 44 Republican. So this is a dead heat, which I think could lean us towards the great reconciliation, which is if Trump comes out of office. Biden becomes the elder statesman Biden reaches across the aisle. We have a massive balance of power in the Senate. Everybody's forced to work together in order to get anything done. Am I correct in my reading of this as a nonpolitical expert? Well, what you're describing is the great gerontocracy. We'll have 78 year old Biden negotiating 79 year old McConnell and Schumer is what, 74, 75. Pelosi is over 80.
SPEAKER_09: Steny Hoyer, her deputy is over 80. So who do we have in the death pool? Because two or three of those are dying in the next four years.
SPEAKER_07: I don't mean to make it dark, but just looking at McConnell and his bruised hands and lips and everything, something's eating him alive. I'm not exactly sure what it is, but that's a bad, bad scene.
SPEAKER_00: Is that on the betting markets, Phil? That's not on the betting markets. And by the way, the other direction you're talking about Trump, who's 74 negotiating.
SPEAKER_08: I mean, you know, it's it's everybody. We've got to get younger in our political leadership across the board. It's it's there.
SPEAKER_09: It's ridiculous. Who who had a better chance of beating Trump? Would Bernie, Elizabeth Warren or Buttigieg would one of those three if you had to pick one of those three and I think it's one of those rates or you could pick your other.
SPEAKER_07: Which one would have performed better? Brad, you with Brad? I was Brad on me or Pete for sure. I'm with Brad on that one here.
SPEAKER_08: OK, so, Bill, you believe Mayor Pete would have had a better performance. He would have been more inspiring. He would have been more energy.
SPEAKER_00: I think that there is a lot of people that want what Brad talked about, which is someone who's who's rational and calm and and centered. And I also think that if you look at the history of of presidential campaigns, most Americans favor an outsider. And I I attribute that to personally to them feeling like Washington's on the hook and been bought. And, you know, Biden would be an outlier for a lifetime senator. There was a lot there was a lot of excitement around Obama. There was a lot of excitement about Reagan who came from Hollywood.
SPEAKER_08: There was a lot of excitement about Clinton. So, you know, a lot of governors, a lot of a lot of first time senators is what you tend to see.
SPEAKER_00: And so Pete fit that mold. Why? Some youth and some charisma would be nice.
SPEAKER_07: And David, the two Davids and Michael, who do you think would have put up the best fight? Because tonight, if Biden does win and it's feeling maybe like that is going to happen. So it's clearly a jump ball here. It's any it's coming down to the last 30 seconds. Last minute of the game. If Biden does lose, who would have been the candidate that would have beaten Trump? If there was another one who would have had the next best chance? David's. Well, well, Biden's still looking pretty good right now.
SPEAKER_02: So I don't know that I don't know that there was somebody better, but I do agree that I always was most impressed with Buttigieg out of the candidates in the sense that I thought he was the most articulate. I thought he was the best debater. I thought he was the best on TV. And he knew how to reach for the center. And he had the kind of Obama thing of having identity politics, politics working for him, but without making a big deal out of it. And and so, yeah, I mean, he was what you mean by that, Mr. Sachs? Well, he's he's gay.
SPEAKER_02: He'd be the first gay president, but he's not making that an explicit part of the reason to vote for him. And but it would have been a first and his voters would know that. But he doesn't want to you know, he doesn't want to run on the idea of identity politics. And so he's not leading with that. He's not leading with it. I think that's a smart way to play it. It's, you know, Obama was obviously an incredibly important first, but he didn't lead with that as the reason why you should vote for him. So to a certain extent, Hillary did lead with that. Hillary was going to be the time with her, you know, and her was the slogan.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah. And I think a lot of people did want to make that first. But I think you have those votes. You need to make the case to everybody else. So, yeah, I think he's a great political athlete and someone who's got probably a bright future in the Democrat Party. I'm seeing some people on Twitter say that Biden's now become the favorite, but I just checked Betfair. It's basically one point one.
SPEAKER_08: It's very close now. Kind of crazy. This is going to come down to one. This is going to come down to Pennsylvania, Michigan, and it's going to take days to do those counts and we're probably going to end up in the courts.
SPEAKER_07: We're not going to bet fair. Friedberg, who would have done a better job here? Look, I mean, the market already voted, right? It voted for Biden. He is the leading candidate.
SPEAKER_06: I don't know if anyone else would have outperformed Biden at this point. I think, you know, the next in line was a very different ideology. And that's Bernie. And, you know, Bernie really is the contrast to, you know, the points that we were making earlier. You either think that the way forward is to have the government leave me alone or to wrap me up in a blanket and give me a hot cocoa and rub my feet. And Bernie Sanders is the you know, the guy in middle school who runs for class president and tells you the vending machines are all going to be free if you elect me. And that's a broadly, you know, like everyone votes for that guy. And let me let me ask you a question, Brad, that I build off of David.
SPEAKER_07: I just think the mayor of P.P., by the way, let me just say I think Mayor Pete is a great, articulate, thoughtful guy.
SPEAKER_06: And he's certainly appealing to those of us who want to have a thoughtful, well articulated response to the problems we're facing. But I think that there is a guttural kind of, you know, innate drive that folks want. They either want free shit or they want to be left alone. And, you know, you're going to need to appeal to one of those two motives. Brad, how would you have voted had your choice been? And I'm going to go around the horn on this so everybody gets a chance to think about it, except really, Brad.
SPEAKER_07: Brad, if you had the choice. Yep. Elizabeth Warren slash Bernie, hardcore socialist. Let's go with Bernie, since I think he's even more on the socialist side or Trump. Could you have conceived of voting for Trump over Bernie or would you have voted actually voted for Bernie Sanders?
SPEAKER_07: Take your time and you can think out loud when you answer. I mean, I have to say that, you know, I have a nine and 12 year old boy, boys, and the conversation we had is it's not just about what you stand for. It's about how you stand for it.
SPEAKER_07: Character.
SPEAKER_03: And I just couldn't tolerate Trump's character, either in my own life, my own level of anxiety or standing for that, you know, and telling my boys that that's a okay way to lead. And so for me, I was willing to vote against my own interests and taking comfort in the fact that four years under any president is not enough to really change the arc of the country. But to send a signal that, you know, how you lead matters in this country and a rejection of this form of leadership. Yeah, but Brad, if you didn't think that Bernie Sanders policies would actually I mean, if you thought they would actually pass everything he wanted to do, you couldn't conceive them of voting for Trump.
SPEAKER_03: I mean, you know, again, like I would just say that I would have bet that the system that we have would have been slow enough in moving that that Bernie would not have been, you know, that when weighing those two evils. Right. That, you know, again, for me, socialism versus Trump are your two.
SPEAKER_03: I can I can tolerate the mean spiritedness, perhaps myself. But, you know, like I'm trying to you know, I think it is important that we we say that like this is not what we stand for. This is not a an honorable way to lead. And certainly when it comes to sitting around the dinner table every night and talking to them about the way I expect them to behave in their form of leadership, you know, that that mean spiritedness just didn't work for me.
SPEAKER_07: Would anybody else like to answer that question or is it? Well, I'm not I'm not going to disagree with any of that, but I would just like to point out, I'd like to ask a question actually, which is, if this president was so bad that he had to be impeached, why wasn't that a campaign issue?
SPEAKER_02: I don't remember it being mentioned once by Biden, that Trump was impeached, you would think that impeaching the president would be something you'd want to make a major campaign issue. I just think this idea that Trump is the only one who's dishonest and unethical. You know, that whole Russian, the insane hoax that they put us through for years, they put this whole country through before the guy even took office, they were trying to delegitimize his election. I mean, come on, you can't just look at Trump's behavior, which I agree is outrageous, and not look at the other side and say they're doing the same thing. And this is like a they're they're they're sort of like co equal partners in this chaos that's been created. David, let's be there. They're co founders in chaos.
SPEAKER_07: Let's be candid. All these politicians that we've had to live with in our lifetime are grifters. We know that and their kids are grifters. Putting that aside, do you think there is any chance that the Russians have not bought an inordinate amount of apartments from Donald Trump at extraordinary prices?
SPEAKER_02: Are you just making that up? Or I mean, I'm just going with my gut.
SPEAKER_02: Right. Exactly. Yeah, QED case in point, because you feel it, you can now make an accusation that the President has received bribes from the Russians. I mean, come on. Well, we know and actually, I want to I want to bring up something election. We all know Putin interfere with the election. And we all know he interfered on behalf of one candidate. Okay.
SPEAKER_07: I honestly, like,
SPEAKER_02: unless you don't trust the CIA, unless you don't trust the FBI, unless you don't trust our age.
SPEAKER_07: Really? I mean, you believe in the deep. You're still holding the Russians.
SPEAKER_08: We've had Jason.
SPEAKER_02: We had we had Bob, we had Bob Mueller with a team of like 18.
SPEAKER_02: Like pit bull democratic prosecutors and 50 FBI agents. Let me finish. Who investigated for two years and they couldn't find any collusion. I mean, you're still hanging on to this this insane fallacy. And you're wondering why the American people are turning against why they're willing to vote for Trump again. Come on. Can't you see the insanity of the other side? Well, I mean, I did see Manafort go to jail and pay a twenty five thirty million dollar fine. And I did see that Trump's kids took the meeting with the Russians to try to set up a secret back channel.
SPEAKER_07:
SPEAKER_07: So while they might not have been smart enough or effective enough to actually collude, there certainly was a lot of graph going on. This is this is this is on the level, if not worse than the whole Hunter Biden hard drive story, which I thought Hunter Biden's a grifter, too, which I thought was a ridiculous story, an attempt to smear up Biden.
SPEAKER_02: Come on. But I for you to lay this integrity issue on Trump alone, which I agree there's some truth there and not lay it on his Democratic inquisitors in the Senate who put in the House who put us through this impeachment hoax for two years. Come on. We're starting to sound a little like a radio. Let's get we did go there. No, sex is a free thinker. I like this. He's a free thinker for.
SPEAKER_08: But it's not. But this word is this entire campaign. All sex is saying is own both sides of this.
SPEAKER_08: I guess I'm sure by you initially say, well, Jason, can you say the word I'm agreeing with you? Can you say it? Biden, can you say the word impeachment?
SPEAKER_07: Impeachment. I just said, OK, there we go. I was wondering what happened to that word.
SPEAKER_02: You know, normally, no, I normally when you impeach a president, if you normally when you impeach a president, it becomes a really big campaign issue. It's a really big campaign issue. Nick, can you please throw Georgia back on the map, please? Are you guys seeing this, that that now they're tipping Georgia back to Biden?
SPEAKER_06: Who is? This is insane. Where?
SPEAKER_02: Well, they're also saying that Arizona may have been prematurely called for Biden. So Arizona may be back in play for Trump.
SPEAKER_08: It was really weird that they called Arizona so early, wasn't it? And only Fox, only Fox has done it, I think.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah, Nick, where do you have how do you have Georgia reporting right now? How much is in right now?
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, if you call on Georgia just for a second, we have 81 percent. Yeah, the Times had it flip on at 9.13 p.m. I have a screenshot which shows Biden plus four. And then North Carolina is now just Trump plus one point one.
SPEAKER_06: Michael, in Arizona, when they show that it's reporting, it's precincts reporting, right? It doesn't show mail-ins or by precinct or mail-ins are at the state level. Well, a precinct will have both mail-ins and Election Day votes.
SPEAKER_09: And when they say 81 percent of precincts reporting, that doesn't mean that 81 percent of precincts are finished reporting. It's a very misleading number because what it means that 81 percent of precincts have reported. What they have, but it doesn't mean they're finished counting necessarily. Right. So, you know, Atlanta is probably the precincts in Atlanta had probably reported some vote.
SPEAKER_09: In fact, we we see that when we click on it. But there's obviously a lot of outstanding vote in Georgia. There could be outstanding vote in some precincts in North Carolina as well. And they at this point, once you get into the 95 percent and above range, they do tend to be urban centers that are that obviously have a lot more vote to count. It gets late at night. They go home. They finish in the morning or three days later.
SPEAKER_00: If you go zoom in on Arizona, please. Seventy six percent of voting reporting.
SPEAKER_07: I mean, how is this possible? Fifty four percent, basically. I don't know. But in all those states, you're going to have the intensity you had around hanging chat and they tell you, you're going to have like massive tension and drama around counting each of these last.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, we're going to have five Florida's. You knew 2020 would do this on the way out the door.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah. So so Arizona, they counted all the absentee ballots for the mail in ballots first.
SPEAKER_02: But the in-person voting hasn't been counted yet. So you can't call that state if they haven't counted all the in-person because Trump's going to do better with election day ballots. I agree. It's premature. Well, it depends on whether they're considering Phoenix as part of that. Right.
SPEAKER_07: OK, why is Nevada only reporting one percent?
SPEAKER_06: In local news, there are now groups of people gathering at Oakland City Hall. So they go there when, like, what night aren't they rioting in Oakland?
SPEAKER_07: I mean, come on. In Berkeley, they smashed a pizzeria window. They do it every other week.
SPEAKER_02: Hey, guys, I want to I want to discuss an idea I have that might be a little bit cheeky, but since Jake and I were getting into it before, I kind of want to I want to talk about a little bit. OK, let's do it, which is I've called the Trump derangement score, which is if you go to Twitter, that Trump derangement score, which is if you go to Twitter and search Trump from your username, it'll show you how many tweets you've you've published that you've posted that mentioned the word Trump. And so I did this before the show to see which bestie had tweeted the most and see what the score was. And my sense is, like, if your your score is like zero to 10, you haven't really paid a lot of attention to Trump. It's probably like very healthy. And then if you're in like the 10 to 30 range, you're paying a little more attention. It could be normal. And here it comes. Here it comes. I'm going to say three for my friend Alex. Hold on. If you're in like the 30 to 50 range, I think you pretty much are infected. There's two strains. There's kind of the maga strain and then there's the resistance strain. But clearly you've tested positive for Trump derangement syndrome. And then I would say there's kind of like an advanced level where you can't even count how many tweets there are. You've got to like scroll and like you keep scrolling and you can't even get to the bottom. And that's that's like a level of infection where you need to immediately quarantine yourself. And so anyway, I did this. And anyway, the winner actually was Freeburg. Freeburg only had he had a score of one. He literally only had one tweet mentioning Trump in the last four years. I only had eight, but in fairness, five of them were posted yesterday to advertise this this pod. So I my boss at 20. My one was during this podcast, by the way.
SPEAKER_06: Yeah. I'm off at 20. I had a 12. You had about 20. About 20.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah. And then Jake, how you were in scrolling territory. I couldn't even I couldn't even count. I gave up. I feel for you.
SPEAKER_02: I really feel for you that you're hurting over this election. I you know, I don't like I'm not trying to make fun of you or see you. Hey, guys, guys, another just another quick update here that the Cobb County, Fulton County and Cobb County in Georgia are pro Democrat.
SPEAKER_05: They're huge. And there are 31 percent, 58 percent and 70 percent. And if you play these out, there's somewhere between 400 and 500 thousand potential incremental votes for Biden, which would eke out Georgia for Biden, potentially, according to just this last.
SPEAKER_07: Just looking at Fox News, I think that they're trolling the libs because they have Trump at 210 and have Joe Biden at 237. The The New York Times has let me just make sure I'm refreshing here and have the latest data. 213 to 145. So Fox is aggressively calling electoral votes at a level that. The New York Times is far behind, like behind by 50, at least 100. What is the explanation of this? Wow.
SPEAKER_05: I this is I mean, this is nuts. MSNBC, 205 electoral votes for Joe Biden, which NBC has been the most conservative overall.
SPEAKER_06: And what happens if it's tied? It can tie right. We still have that scenario on the table. Two sixty nine, two sixty nine. Yeah, there's probably a way to to get there.
SPEAKER_09: Let's see. Well, interestingly, Biden did not get that one district in Omaha, Nebraska that he had targeted that Obama won his first time that would give you one electoral vote in Nebraska. Nebraska and Maine both. You get you get two for winning the state and you get one for each of the congressional districts. So, well, well, Biden was not going to play an overall in Nebraska. He had a shot at Omaha and that 270, two sixty eight scenario we talked about earlier could have potentially been two sixty nine, two sixty nine if that Omaha district was in play. But the polling really missed.
SPEAKER_05: Michael, just to jump in, B.G. Gurley. Gurley's got a hop off, boys. Say bye to Gurley. I appreciate it. Girl, I miss you best to be speaking of Bill Gurley.
SPEAKER_08: How about Texas? I mean, I think I think Texas is definitely going to be Republican. Right, Michael? Yeah, that one's trending far away from Biden. He looks like he's down about five hundred thousand.
SPEAKER_09: How many points is that? No one's called that yet. Right. It's bizarre that Florida and Texas are still listed as employed.
SPEAKER_09: So that could explain what J.K. is looking at between the disparity and. Yeah.
SPEAKER_08: What I don't blame. If Fox called Texas, I don't blame them. But I think Arizona.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah, that might that might be that would explain your difference. Jacob, Texas and Florida.
SPEAKER_07: Yeah, Fox. Yeah, that's 60, 67 votes right there. Yeah, that explains it.
SPEAKER_07: So The New York Times has not called Florida or Texas, which The New York Times had Florida at 98 percent.
SPEAKER_08: I think it's like ninety nine point nine or something. If you add thirty eight for Texas,
SPEAKER_07: twenty nine for Florida, you're sixty seven, sixty seven until the one forty five, which you had two hundred twelve. Wow. And Joe Biden at 213, which was one point difference. Ralph Warnock and Kelly Loeffler and a runoff for the Senate seat in Georgia. That's just incredible.
SPEAKER_05: I mean, hey guys, a comment and then a question. Looks like The Washington Post is projecting that California approved Prop 22.
SPEAKER_03: So there is a that's the first one that I'm speaking right now. I think. Right. Do we have to is not speaking yet, but he's getting applied to speak the implied volatility on Uber stock at the close.
SPEAKER_03: Today was 14 percent. By the way, every ballot initiative in San Francisco, the city level ballot initiatives passed one of them.
SPEAKER_02: The Prop H was good. All the rest were disaster. So. So the state level ballot initiatives were pretty good news for California, but San Francisco. OK. Not much of that. So, you know, in terms of what we were talking about earlier about creating a more business friendly environment,
SPEAKER_02: unfortunately, what happened in San Francisco, I think California as a whole is positive with Prop 22, Prop 15 failing. But every single crazy ballot initiative in San Francisco passed. So it's just getting crazier in San Francisco. I don't know if you did this in your household, but with my 10 year old, Brad, I went through my wife and I, Jade, we went through each of the ballot initiatives as many as we could.
SPEAKER_07: We listened to little encapsulations of what they were. And we talked about the stem cell one. And I just thought, why is California? Which is losing. All of these businesses adding to the tax burden. Stem cell research and why isn't that being done by the private sector? If there is a huge prize to be had with stem cell, why would we have California send billions of dollars on this when we're losing all this government? I'm wondering how people thought about something like that, like the stem cell. Did you vote for that, David, to continue to have California flip the bill for? I, by the way, just before you answered it,
SPEAKER_05: I took the pages of the ballot initiative and I used them to keep my white truffles from developing humidity.
SPEAKER_07: I mean, basically, the truth of the matter, Jason, is that when when I don't understand about initiative, I just vote against it.
SPEAKER_02: And I didn't really understand that the stem cell ballot initiative or why even why if that was a spending priority, why couldn't just be handled by the state legislature? I didn't understand why that needed to be a ballot initiative. So, you know, I feel like ballot initiatives, like I'll support them when the state legislature does something wrong. Like it was a perfect example where Lorraine or whatever the had this tremendous amount of power and passed this crazy AB5 and the people had to overrule that. So I feel like that's where like these ballot initiatives make sense is when you want to overrule the legislature. But, you know, it's kind of crazy for to be passing these laws directly when we don't know that much about them.
SPEAKER_07: Concur. I mean, the founders had this vision of representative democracy, not direct democracy. And that's generally a good idea.
SPEAKER_02: So, Jason, I don't know, you have to kind of like what director the results that direct democracy has produced tonight.
SPEAKER_09: The initiatives may be saving us from ourselves since we don't have in this state, unfortunately, a viable Republican Party to represent us. This may be our last line of defense. Well, I think I think you're right in terms of overruling things but like in San Francisco, you know, every single ballot initiative path, and I think most of them are doing well there's no saving San Francisco we all knew that.
SPEAKER_02: Well, I don't like hearing that.
SPEAKER_09: Come to LA baby. We got a few more years at least.
SPEAKER_03: What is the consensus view seems to be the markets are still up NASDAQ futures up to 80 still. What, what causes us to wake up tomorrow or the next day and have the futures down three four or 500 bears, there's one thing.
SPEAKER_05: And so far it hasn't happened and if we avoid it. We're going to fade a really big out here, which is Trump declares victory right now. I think that is the disaster scenario because I think Biden's going to get up there. He's not going to say much of anything he'll be very kind of down the middle, you know, kind of let's take a wait and see approach we're waiting until tomorrow there's a lot to go. Grind it out, blah blah blah, but if Trump comes out and says we won. We're done. Let's move on. It's going to be panic because look, I mean, he's, you can't certify Georgia, apparently, right.
SPEAKER_05: So, you know, there's a there's a path where there's seven or eight states that have to go through a lot of meticulous recount.
SPEAKER_02: I think this thing is back to a coin flip. I mean, Trump now has to win, Georgia, Michigan and Pennsylvania, in order to win the presidency. If Biden wins any one of those three states he wins. He has to be a three for three in Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. Three or three and not. Well, but we're saying that may that may become ungod. So if he loses Georgia, he loses if he loses Pennsylvania lose if he loses Michigan loses, assuming he's ready.
SPEAKER_02: Lost Wisconsin and in Arizona. So, hey guys Biden's coming out but my analyst just run this analysis. If Biden wins Ann Arbor and Detroit by the same percentage as 2016. That's 420,000 Biden incremental votes versus the 300,000 current Trump lead.
SPEAKER_03: Just apply the math and he wins Michigan. We feel good about where we are.
SPEAKER_01: We really do. I'm here tonight. We believe we're on track to win this election. We knew because of the unprecedented early vote in the mail and vote. It's going to take a while. We're going to have to be patient until we the hard work of tallying votes is finished. And it ain't over till every vote is counted, every ballot is counted. But we're feeling good. We're feeling good about where we are. We believe one of the nets is suggested we've already won Arizona but we're confident about Arizona. That's a turnaround. We also just called it from Minnesota. And we're still in the game in Georgia, although that's not what we expected. We're feeling real good about Wisconsin and Michigan. And by the way, it's going to take time to count the votes. We're going to win Pennsylvania.
SPEAKER_05: There it is. Folks in Philly, Allegheny County, Scranton, and they're really encouraged by the turnout and what they see.
SPEAKER_01: Look, you know, we could know the results as early as tomorrow morning, but it may take a little longer. As I've said all along, it's not my place or Donald Trump's place to declare who's won this election. That's the decision of the American people. But I'm optimistic about this outcome. I want to thank every one of you who came out and voted in this election. And by the way, Chris Coons and the Democrats, congratulations here in Delaware. Hey, John, the gov. Yeah, the whole team, man. You've done a great job. I'm grateful to the poll workers, to our volunteers, our canvassers, everyone who participated in this democratic process. I'm grateful to all my supporters here in Delaware and all across the nation. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And folks, you heard me say it before. Every time I walk out of my grandpa's house up in Scranton, he'd yell, Joey, keep the faith. And my grandma, when she was laughing, I'll know, Joey, spread it. Keep the faith, guys. We're going to win this. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Oh, my God. Well, they guys before before before we just I just want to give a big shout out and thank you to Brad Gerstner.
SPEAKER_05: Thanks for having a credible investor and person and thinker. Thank you, BG, for being on the call. Thanks for having me. Guys, I appreciate it. Incredible. Thanks to Bill Gurley, who stepped in and Phil Hellmuth.
SPEAKER_07: This has been a great first time effort. We had a big about four thousand of you at the peak here and certainly five or six thousand over the night. This was an experiment, I think a successful one. And of course, I'm speaking about this country, America. What a successful experiment it has been to Jason. Jason, you can unclench your your nether regions, because I think we're going to be OK.
SPEAKER_05: You think we're going to be OK? Yeah, it's very tight. Anyways, you guys. Good night. Thank you. Thank you.
SPEAKER_08: I'm changing my prediction to scenario three. Biden president. Oh, yeah. Let's do that as we wrap these best.
SPEAKER_07: I think it went Biden. I'm still sticking with Biden. OK.
SPEAKER_05: Trump just tweeted that I will be making a statement tonight, a big win. So we're either in scenarios.
SPEAKER_02: Well, I mean, it's two, three and four, two, three and four, all three or four. Just for I don't know if the viewers remember.
SPEAKER_02: Scenario one was a Biden landslide. That's clearly not off the table. Two was was basically what was was Trump pulling a big upset that's still on the table? I'd say probably. Forty nine percent chance right now, 40, 45 percent chance. Then you've kind of got the scenario three was the soft landing where Biden wins the presidency, but the Republicans take the Senate. And I think it's probably like the 51 percent. And then scenario four was the shit show. That was a totally inconclusive outcome. Here we are. So, I mean, the reality is, I think this thing I mean, I think it's probably at the end of the day, 51, 49 in favor of Biden right now, but we probably have at least three more days and maybe a bunch of court cases. Yes. This could be really bad. I mean, we may not know who the winner is till December. And this may require another Supreme Court case. I think we'll know within a week who won.
SPEAKER_09: But it's going to be it's going to be a white knuckle kind of week. We did you know.
SPEAKER_05: I think we're going to know tomorrow. I think we're going to tomorrow.
SPEAKER_07: I guess, you know, I guess based on the electoral map, I'd say it's 51, 49 in favor of Biden at this moment.
SPEAKER_02: OK, so Saks wants Biden to win.
SPEAKER_07: Friedberg, where are you at the end of this shit show?
SPEAKER_07: I was doing as 2020. I was looking at which island in Hawaii I want to go to.
SPEAKER_07: I'm looking at Austin and then just to look at our final.
SPEAKER_09: The dots are getting a little better for Trump. I wonder who the hell knows.
SPEAKER_07: This has been an incredible evening. I feel better about the market reaction.
SPEAKER_06: I feel like, you know, those of us who operate businesses and try and build businesses and, you know, have employees and all this stuff. I mean, I'm disappointed in San Francisco. It's a fucking shit show of the city. But I feel good about the fact that markets are taking this well. And it means businesses will continue to operate and find funding and shout out Billy in Hawaii.
SPEAKER_07: Muthi, what's your pick? And then Jake, how? And then we're going to bounce.
SPEAKER_08: I have to go with the math. I think Trump dollar 60 is pretty significant. So I have to pick that direction. And I'm going by. All right, everybody.
SPEAKER_07: This has been a special edition of the besties. Michael. Thank you. Thanks for having me. I enjoyed it. Thank you. Later, guys.
SPEAKER_09: The poker table soon. Yeah. Soon. Yes. Bye bye.
