 loved it, it was great. And then as soon as the game ended, Twitter drama exploded, just exploded. It's like, Elon, I think, was in Qatar to watch the game, because he was showing videos of the Game Plus, there's pictures of him there. But as soon as the game ended, it was like, I don't know, if I say what I really think, I'm going to lose a bunch of subscribers. But it was like, I want the attention back on me. It was unbelievable what happened last night and the pace at which things developed last night. So let's talk about that, because that is, I think the number one news story coming out of this weekend is Twitter. Twitter. So, you know, let's talk about it. So I also think I was tweeting about it a lot yesterday and last night, and the response of people is pretty amazing. So again, I've talked about this, that Elon Musk can do no wrong. The Elon Musk is playing 4D chess and you're an idiot, that translate right from Trump, right? All the people who said that about Trump now are saying it about Elon Musk. It is this personality worship that is very, very, very dangerous. And I think it's that mentality that so many people in the US have. And it's not just Trump and Elon Musk, it's also people on the left, I think have it towards figures on the left, certainly they have it towards Obama. And very authoritarian or very in line with authoritarianism and therefore very, very susceptible to authoritarianism. I'll excuse everything that they do. All right. So let's start. You know, I'd be critical of Elon for using polls on Twitter to make decisions. I'd be critical about that for weeks now. I don't think it's an appropriate way to make decisions even for a social network. I think it's not serious. It's not strategic. It doesn't convey a clear policy, a clear agenda. It doesn't convey a clear mission that he has. He's leaving it up to the masses to make crucial decisions. And this happened at the end of last week. It happened, this is December 17th. This is on Saturday. Elon Musk tweeted, the people have spoken. Accounts to dox my location will have their suspension lifted now. Now, it wasn't accounts to dox this location. It was accounts of reporters who reported on the fact that he had banned the people, the guy who doxed his location. Their accounts were restored, at least most of them, not all of them. But that was like, why are you making that decision based on a poll? Why do people's views on this matter? Why don't you have a policy, stick to the policy, and convey that policy and run with the policy? This is my whole argument about needing objectivity on Twitter, on the management of Twitter, on the guidelines of Twitter, on the policy of Twitter. Anyway, instead of that, Elon Musk ran a poll and that poll said he should return the journalists. So he did, for the most part, and he attributed the returning to the poll. So he's elevating now the polls as the way in which decisions are going to be made at Twitter. Then, I think sometime on Sunday, not clear when exactly on Sunday because he didn't tweet about this, sometime on Sunday, another policy change at Twitter, and again discovered because people were canceled suddenly on Twitter. Their accounts were suspended suddenly on Twitter. And then a policy came out explaining the suspension. And this new policy on Twitter was that you cannot use Twitter to advertise or to link, not clear exactly, the terminology wasn't clear. And it's not clear who gets suspended, who doesn't. You cannot link it to, if you're linking to your other social media accounts. So if you say, hey guys, you can also follow me on Facebook, MasterDone, YouTube, I don't know, other accounts like that, you are going to get delisted from Twitter if you do that. Now nobody knew this beforehand. And some of the people got suspended, and then the policy got introduced. The policy came after the suspension, which is bizarre. Anyway, a number of people got suspended, or their tweets got suspended as a consequence of this, because they let people know about the fact that their MasterDone accounts, or they had these other accounts or not. Now maybe this is a justifiable policy. I don't think so, and it scares me a little bit because I use Twitter to advertise my YouTube show is the fact that I use Twitter extensively to advertise my YouTube shows, and therefore drive traffic towards YouTube, going to create an issue for Twitter and ban me from Twitter. I mean, it's possible. Again, they can do whatever they want. I'm not saying they can't do it. I'm saying it's fine for them to do it. I'm just saying, I won't like it. And I don't think this is a good way to run a business where you start having these policies without warning people in advance, and then delete them. I mean, let us know objectively what we can and cannot do, and we, if we want to stay on Twitter, we'll try to follow that. I mean, a good example of this was Paul Graham. I don't know how many of you know Paul Graham, but I've been following Paul Graham for, I don't know, a few years now. Paul Graham was one of the most thoughtful, and it turns out respected, venture capitalists in Silicon Valley. He's also a huge supporter of Elon Musk, huge supporter of Elon Musk, and Paul Graham writes these blog posts, again, very thoughtful, very interesting. Don't always agree with them, but always interesting. Anyway, he tweeted yesterday that he was kind of, not yesterday, yesterday or Saturday. Why did, why is this, I had this account, right, I'll get it, I'll get the, I'll get the exact stuff in a minute. Here we go. Why is this all blanked out? Oh, because Fortune, it's a Fortune article and I don't have a subscription, so they, they blanked out the text. All right, luckily, no, I read it earlier, so I know what's written there. I just can't access it again. Huh, interesting. All right, basically, basically what's happening is Paul Graham got suspended from Twitter for saying, look, I'm tired of all the drama on Twitter. I think he was upset at what happened with the doxing and all of that and the suspensions of the journalists. And he, and he basically says, look, I'm a little tired of Twitter right now. I'm taking a break from Twitter. I'm over at Master Dome. Here's my link. And he got canceled. He got suspended. Now, when people let Twitter know that it was Paul Graham and Paul Graham's a big supporter of Elon Musk and after all, it's Paul Graham. He's a big shot. You don't want to do this. I guess his account was reinstated, but that's only because he's connected. My account wouldn't be suspended if I had anything like that. Anyway, so that happened like on, on, on Saturday, maybe Sunday morning, maybe during the game on Sunday, not sure exactly when, but sometime on Sunday. And that's a big policy change. And people were upset, including Paul Graham and including I think a lot of friends of Elon, Elon Musk. And we still don't know exactly what the policy is. So we're still trying to figure out what the policy is. And for example, can I advertise my shows that have been broadcast on YouTube on Twitter? Okay. And then at seven PM Puerto Rican time at least, who knows what time, Qatar time, probably sometime in the morning or maybe from his private jet. I have no idea because I'm not tracking his private jets. I don't know where Elon Musk was at seven o'clock PM Puerto Rican time yesterday. Elon Musk tweets, going forward, there will be a vote for major policy changes. My apologies won't happen again. Now I'm not sure my apologies refers to the doxing, my apologies, policy change, my apologies refers to the advertising of the social media policy change. No idea what he's apologizing for exactly, but I'll repeat going forward, there will be a vote for major policy changes. So now Twitter is a democracy. It's CEO is going to make policy changes based on the votes of the masses. The reality is it seems that most people on Twitter are still maybe, we'll see in a minute, maybe not philosophically aligned with Elon Musk as you really want to hand them the reins. Is it possible that maybe if you hand the majority of the reins, they would return Twitter to its old ways? Isn't the whole point here that Elon Musk is coming on to imprint his vision of quote, free speech onto Twitter? And that's what everybody is all excited about. Even I was excited about Elon Musk taking over Twitter. And now he's handing it over to the mob. Going forward, there will be a vote for major policy changes. That's Elon Musk, not me. And it's not just about one issue about policy changes. Then that was at 717 p.m. Then at 720 p.m., three minutes later, he posts a poll. Should I step down as head of Twitter? I will abide by the results of this poll. Well, I assume he'll abide by the results of any poll he keeps saying he'll abide by the results and he has so far, at least to a large extent. He might have known the result in advance and he wanted to, you know, Twitter's a headache and Tesla stock is going down and a lot of investors are complaining about he's not paying enough attention to Tesla. And maybe this is a way for his graciously to leave by popular consent. It's still stupid. It's still unprofessional. Is this how you make again, make crucial important decisions in Twitter, including whether you as CEO will remain or not? Is this fair to his investors? Is this fair to the bankers who gave him a lot of money? Is it fair to all of his supporters on Twitter who are being excited and thrilled and anticipating the massive changes he is going to bring to Twitter? I mean, again, he has a right, a political right to do whatever the hell he wants. But is this moral? Is this rational? Is this making any sense from business perspective or even from personal perspective? Is this how you manage your life? Now, it turns out that 57.5% of the people who voted want him gone, want him to resign, to leave as head of Twitter. 57.5%. That's a pretty strong, I mean, presidents don't win by that margin. Even popular ones don't win by that margin. That's a big margin. That's a big margin. Twitter is overwhelmingly wants Elon to leave. Now, not everybody on Twitter voted. Only 17.5 million people voted. That's a lot. 17. Now, it could be bots. Some of the speculation is it's bots. But again, why is Elon Musk putting his fate in bots? Now, he was going to leave anyway. Maybe? I don't know. Nobody knows. I know his adoring fan crowd who think this is 4D chess, think he was going to leave anyway. And he's just having fun. No. I mean, again, three minutes earlier, he said, going forward, there will be a vote for major policy changes. This is the way he believes Twitter should be run. Thank God, or thank Elon, that this is not the way he ran SpaceX. I'm so glad 99.9% of companies in the world don't function this way. And I'm so glad the great innovators in history do not function by vote in determining their fate. Imagine if Henry Ford has asked people if they wanted an automobile. Most of them would have said, no, we just want to bet, you know, if you could improve the breeding of horses and get us a better buggy, that would be great. And I'm so glad Steve Jobs didn't ask the masses whether they wanted an iPhone or not. I don't know. I mean, this is sad. He then, by the way, at 743 tweets, again, this is all in sequence, right? As the saying goes, be careful what you wish as you might get it. Then more revelations about, you know, the Twitter files at 823 from Matt Tibi. And then as people are tweeting, oh, I'll be CEO, I'll be CEO, please have me as CEO. He writes, those who want power are the ones who least deserve it. Does that apply to Elon himself when he bought Twitter? It's just the inconsistency here, the flippancy is flippancy a word. I don't think flippancy is a word. The lack of seriousness, given the importance that Elon Musk has said Twitter represents in the public square, in the square of idea debate, in the position where we discuss and debate. And it's just disappointing. Flippancy, flippant nature. Anyway, flippant nature is probably better. It's just unserious. It's flippant. It's Twitter. It's Twitter. This is why you don't, I don't think you should run a business on Twitter. I don't think you should make decisions about Twitter on Twitter. Twitter might be a good place to announce and then link to the document where you explain what you are actually doing. Twitter is a good marketing place. It's a good trolling place. It's a good poking people in the eye place. It's not a good place for intellectual debate, intellectual argument. It's not a pretty, it's not a good place for decision, for robust decision making. There has to be a backup. There has to be documents and documentation. There has to be thinking. Twitter does not encourage thinking. Twitter encourages responding. I know from my own experience, somebody will post something on Twitter that I find offensive or stupid or rude or whatever. Somebody did that today to me. And my immediate response is, I got to attack, I got to put them down. I got to make them feel as small as possible. Now mostly I resist that. And maybe part of that resistance is, I'm not very good at necessarily putting people down like that. But that's the instinct. Some people can refrain from it and some people cannot. I was told today on Twitter that I have an incredibly narrow-minded and simplistic view of economic demand. All right. And then somebody wrote, well anyway, I won't even read that. Let's see. All right. So that's the story of Twitter. I hope if he leaves, that he has a succession plan in place, that he has an idea of who he would like to be the CEO of Twitter. I hope he brings in somebody serious, somebody strong, somebody who has a real vision for how to creating a platform and how to change Twitter in a way that encourages real debate and discussion and conversation. And who understands the role of Twitter as a platform for marketing, including marketing your, what do you call it, social media elsewhere? One other comment I want to make is the other story that came out just this morning, just as I was starting the show, was another episode in the Twitter papers, in the Twitter files about the Hunter Biden, Hunter Biden files, which I think give another spin to the story. The more I read the Twitter papers, the more I read the Twitter papers, the less I blame Twitter for what happened, and the more I blame the government for what happened. What the government has been doing and what the government is doing and what the government is involved in doing. I think this started with the Patriot Act. It probably started way before that. My guess is that the FBI and the Hoover got involved constantly in the media and in putting pressure and stories and tracking us and violating our privacy in a whole lots of ways. But what happened post Patriot Act is in the U.S., is I believe the government got involved significantly starting with the issue of terrorism in monitoring media, in monitoring social media, and then in telling, and then with the 2016 idea that, you know, the whole idea of fake news, but the whole idea of a foreign power manipulating our election is I believe a bogus idea. If a foreign country creates bots that fill our news feeds with fake news, I mean, the only entity that should be in a position to stop them is you, as a consumer of that news, the social media company, but the government has no business. There's no violation of rights here. Lying is not a violation of a right. Creating fake news is not a violation of anybody's rights. It's not thought because it's not clear what the value you're getting in return is. So I think Facebook and Twitter needed to do a much better job in screening out Russian, Chinese, Venezuela, and Iranian bots, but the government has no job here. And as soon as they took that responsibility on responsibility that both political parties embraced and both political parties thought was their responsibility, on both sides to screen out what news we get from where, once that happens, once that happens, it's a disaster because then they start, you know, so what happened was a Twitter. The first thing that Twitter gets is the FBI, or not the FBI even, the intelligence community, the amorphous intelligence community, telling them that Hunter Biden's laptop might be fake and might be a Russian thing, a Russian plant. So of course they hesitate. Of course they try to bury the story. Of course they're going to act in that way. They get fake information from the intelligence community. They're going to act on it. They don't know it's fake. And as the days evolve and they discover that maybe this is wrong, they are torn and they struggle to make a decision and they struggle to decide what to do. It's not easy. You've got the government breeding down your throat. And again, I go back to what I said the other day on my show. This is not Twitter's fault. This is the government's fault. This is not Twitter censoring by proxy. This is government censorship. It's the government censoring. It's the government censoring through threats. It's the government censoring through, you know, fake information. It's the government censoring through basically, you know, implicit threats. And that needs to be stopped. That needs to be canceled across the board. And that goes for the president of the United States, not telling a businessman that he will go after his business if he doesn't get his newspaper to change his tune about him. Again, both parties are guilty here. Even if it's true, the FBI is dominated by people on the left, and therefore the FBI is much more likely to be in favor of the Democrats and Republicans and use this power in favor of them versus the other party. That's a reality. But it's the government that needs to stop. Separation of government from media needs to happen. You think of free speech. It's not the company's responsibility to have a gun placed at its head and say, okay, but we're sticking to, no, I mean, why don't you have a gun placed at your head? You're not the one to blame. Somebody says the poll was for show. There's no such thing as polls for show when you say explicitly from now on, all decisions are going to be made by poll. And 24 hours earlier, you use a poll to decide who to bring back onto Twitter. That concedes the whole idea of using a democratic means that ruled by masses for decision making. And it is wrong, wrong for business to function this way. It's wrong for politics to function this way. Absolute democracy is wrong all the time. And it is a sanction and a legitimization of that, whether you know what the outcome is going to be or not. It's wrong of him to do that. It doesn't even matter whether big media wants the separation from government or not. I think they do. I think they all do. I think Facebook would jump at the opportunity for the government to stop bringing them in front of Congress and harassing them. I think every big tech would love to get the antitrust threat off their back, every single one of them. So this is not, that's not the issue. The issue is who is to blame and who is to blame here is government, not business. Any one of those channels, also if you'd like to see the Iran book show grow, please consider sharing our content and of course subscribe. Press that little bell button right down there on YouTube so that you get an announcement when we go live. And for those of you who are already subscribers and those of you who are already supporters of the show, thank you. I very much appreciate it.