Transcript

Rich Ziade Which is often how we start our workday at Postlight: I just read you the text of a statute. 

Paul Ford This is key to our romantic relationship. This is how—[chuckles] Go ahead! Read me a statute! [Music plays alone for 18 seconds, ramps down]

RZ Hi, Paul. How are you doin’?

PF I dunno. My index fund just sent me a message of solidarity. 

RZ Of solidarity as in like, “We’re gonna need more municipal bonds”? 

PF [Crosstalking] No, it’s—I don’t think anyone listening will be surprised [music fades out]. Right? Like, it’s just—The world is extremely topsy turvy. We’re all addressing it in our own ways. Postlight is addressing it in its own way. It’s real. There’s really bad stuff out there. It’s stuff that’s been goin’ on for a long time and boy, did the pot boil over. 

RZ It sure did. It’s just layered on top of a pandemic. You know, Nate and Margherita? 

PF Carlotta! Carlotta. 

RZ Nate and Carlotta in 2025 are looking back and saying, “God, that’s before they passed 56 USC 481, that new law that finally [laughs] addressed a lot of things.” 

PF Finally put everything better, or—

RZ “Those poor people!” 

PF Or they’re like, “Wow, I’m so jealous, they had electricity.” 

RZ Yeah [laughs]. 

PF The only thing—

RZ [Laughing] Um, yeah! It’s a tricky, tricky time. Right? Talk about cakin’ it on but on top of it all is the tools we have in our hands. We just didn’t know how they’d be used and what they’d be used for and . . . how to really manage them and deal with them. 

PF I think we knew. Like, I—I knew. In 2014, I tweeted that Facebook could be a terrible tool for misinformation during a pandemic. Like, I mean, people knew things but [yeah] I don’t think we ever—you know, there was a point I was writing about Twitter, also in 2014. I was writing about it for The New Yorker’s website. You know, and it was when Erdoğan in Turkey had shut down Twitter. And kinda shut down the internet. 

RZ Yup. 

[2:11]

PF And had blocked Twitter and I was like, “You know, dictators are blocking this but imagine what it would be like if they could have a direct line to all of their constituents without anything in the middle.” That is just like [mm hmm] a Minister of Propaganda’s dream. And I wrote those words thinking about—not thinking about America [mm hmm] cuz we’re fine. Typical kinda blinders, right? So it’s in the air. Like, the knowledge was there but it just—I don’t think anyone expected three or four worst case scenarios to layer on top of each other. 

RZ Yeah! I think that’s—that’s right. And I think on top of that I think the power that surfaced as a result of these tools, and also as a result of how . . . the press and media shifted in terms of being businesses. I remember like 12—I think it’s gotta 15 years now—there was a day when breaking news was actually breaking news. But the moment CNN went to 24 hours a day, it’s like what—there’s not enough news for 24 hours. 

PF It’s even further back. You know what I remember is after September 11th I was out of the country; I was trying to get back home . . . [yeah] to New York City. And a friend of mine was like, “I gotta tell ya: it’s been really weird because you turn on the TV and you actually kinda need to know what’s on the TV. It’s not just this wall. It’s actually news about the world. And you wanna know it.” 

RZ Yeah! 

PF And that was what struck him as just bizarre because we’re just so used to being layered with . . . signals and images and things that we’re being told to freak out about and PR and so on that when it actually went to high velocity, high bandwidth, real news, it felt bizarre. 

RZ Yeah, it felt bizarre and also the—the tabloid formula. The formula of like, “How do I get your attention while you’re on the supermarket line?” Bled over into cable news. And so everything was loud, all of a sudden. Everything was highly polarized all of a sudden and it’s like, “Ok, you know what? There’s gonna be an audience for that.” I don’t pick up The Inquirer when I’m at the supermarket. Some people do. So, that’s the world, right? I read The New York Times, and, “Look at me: how smart I am,” right? So, [mm hmm] you figured it would all work itself out and then these wickedly powerful amplification tools showed up and it’s like, “Wait a minute, if I apply the tabloid model, I’ve got your attention for about six minutes while you’re holding those four grapefruits and a jar of pickles, on the supermarket line [mm hmm], if I apply that—” 

PF Very healthy. 

RZ “ —to these tools [chuckles],” thank you, “If I apply that to these tools, I can do more than just get people’s attention. I think I can actually control narratives and I can do all kinds of things.” So, you know, like, you know, you and I work for a for profit company, for profit platforms showed up, like Twitter and Facebook. And that kind of ampli—any kind of amplification was attractive—and then we started walkin’ it back, right? And so, it’s like, “Ok, wait, you know what? Obscenity: clear line. Terrorism: clear line.” But then you get to a point where it’s like, “Wait, ok so, how far do I go with this?” Right? 

[5:24]

PF Well, here’s what’s tricky with those platforms, too: they were designed and built for small conversations between groups of people. 

RZ Correct. Correct.

PF And as they got more and more audience, those clusters of attention . . . started getting pointed to fewer and fewer people and brands and things like that. And that connected beautifully to an extremely profitable advertising product. Perfect storm! “We can make celebrities, and we can bring brands on and get them to give us money . . . And it is a showstopper of a business model!” It is an absolute payday. 

RZ Absolutely! And—and so it’s a very, very scary thing. And what I wanna do at this point, Paul, is read you a statute. It’s Section 230 of The Communications Decency Act and it’s really only one sentence that’s relevant. There’s many parts to it. Everybody associates it with this sentence . . . but it’s this: “No provider or user of an interactive computer service” —which is just a killer term—

PF Mm hmm. 

RZ “ —shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” This collection of words is—

PF Ok, lemme tell you what I think it means. 

RZ Yeah, yeah, translate it. 

PF If you have a message board . . . the posters can’t get you in trouble. 

RZ And the analogy here is to provide protection for what is being pegged as a distribution system. You can’t sue the truck driver who drops off the newspapers for what was said on the newspapers. They’re just distribution. They are not publishers, right? Twitter and Facebook are saying, “We are nothing more than transit systems. We sit in the middle and words get said. Now, if you’re gonna come after me cuz someone said something about Paul Ford and then Paul Ford’s gonna sue not only that person . . . who slandered him but also Facebook?!? Then [mm hmm] that’s the end of Facebook.” 

[7:25]

PF Somebody—somebody calls the journalist on the phone and says that, you know, somebody did something bad and the journalist prints it in the paper. It’s not the phone company that did it, right? Like that—it’s the—it’s the journalist and that person talking. So these are—The idea being that these are means of transmission of information and when—when you sat down—You know, if you put it in print. If you say, “Hey, no we’re a newspaper and we’re gonna publish this,” then you are partially responsible but here we’re saying that Facebook, Twitter, internet message boards and so on are like the phone company: they enable communication but they don’t—they aren’t actually responsible for it. 

RZ On its face, this is a hugely important handful of words. It, in fact, is the bedrock by which these platforms were able to thrive because they were able to thrive without worrying about getting sued and about all the risk—

PF Well, and this is a litigious culture, right? So if you don’t have [oh yeah] that protection, it doesn’t matter what, you are sued into oblivion before you could hit any kinda scale. So if you didn’t have this, you’re basically going to—Because if you have any money at all, and someone doesn’t like something someone’s saying on their platform and they can sue you, they’re gonna list in a lawsuit and that means that at any scale you’re gonna get thousands of lawsuits simultaneously. Just the cost of which managing is gonna destroy your company. So this enables the internet. You don’t have the internet—including the things we like, unless you have something like that. 

RZ That’s right. The argument that’s surfaced is that if you’re gonna be pure distribution, you better act like it. Because the minute you become editorial, you are no longer solely distribution, you are now a publisher. So if you block my tweet, right? You have become editor. And the moment you become editor, you are susceptible—you are no longer protected by 230. Now—

PF Right, well, no and—and look: I mean—

RZ That’s one of the arguments, by the way. Not—

PF There’s another thing going on here which is that . . . VC funded platforms never want to be evaluated and understood as media in the first place. They always fight back against that label. 

RZ Sure!

PF Not just for the risk but because the valuation is so low. Media companies [Rich laughs] don’t’ have—No, I’m—

RZ Yeah. Yeah, yeah! 

[9:43]

PF Because they’re not peer to peer, you don’t get that hockey stick from The New York Times. You get it from, you know, your uncle talking to your aunt and talking to the nieces and nephews and—So there’s always been a bias against saying, “We’re media.” Even when they work with media, publish their own, you know, create their own publications, hire hundreds of—I mean, probably more editors work at Apple than at any publication in the world right now [Rich laughs]. Seriously, like, it’s huge. 

RZ Right. 

PF It’s hired so many people. But they are never gonna wanna call themselves a media company, even though now they’re making media top and bottom. 

RZ And so, you know, and this is widely known now is that, you know, Facebook has taken what many view as a very extreme position which is 230’s right! We are distribution. We believe in freedom of speech and freedom of expression, and we let the masses figure it out. And it’s extremely important that they go sort it out. And why are you putting us in the conversation, man? These aren’t our words! 

PF And they’re drawing some lines. They’re drawing some lines usually after the fact, you know, they don’t want to enable violence, they’ve said that, and, you know, they have a set of policy rules. And the same was true of Twitter. Like, Twitter has—you know, you create rules because if you don’t have some, you just meltdown right? And everybody kind of was like, “Ok, ok,” like—and every now and then someone would be like, “I have the right to say everything terrible I ever wanted,” but for the most part, that gets shutdown. And [mm hmm] frankly, we talked about this on this very program about three and a half years ago. Maybe four. 

RZ Mm hmm. 

PF When we ah—You have this one test case, that is at the wicked problem level of the test case which is President Donald Trump. 

RZ Yup. So I wanna—I wanna actually shift gears: we’re gonna make this a law podcast for five more minutes. 

PF Go! 

RZ There are what are called the free speech exceptions and they’ve materialized over essentially through case precedent, not through laws most often. Where, “Yeah, free speech in the constitution but there are exceptions to it.” And they’re actually pretty well enumerated. Like, I remember in law school it was like, “Here we go. Here are the eight or nine—or I forget how many it was—free speech exceptions.” And there’s one that’s hairy and the others aren’t. I’ll go through the ones that aren’t, right? And what you’ll see is—and I don’t know why it took Facebook and Twitter so long to just fold these in but they have since. But it took forever. And I think they—it took forever because they were afraid of losing the 230 protection, right? Because they felt like they were now policing but people wanted it. So, incitement is one. You can’t incite violence, right? So, recently Trump put, you know, “No looters, shooters, something—shooters—” Looting—

[12:23]

PF “You loot, we shoot.” Something like that. 

RZ Yeah, something like some nonsense. That’s incitement, right? And there is case precedent that backs that up, right? There’s obscenity. There’s child pornography. There’s what’s called fighting words. There’s a specific one that’s narrow which is threatening the President of the United States . . . is an exception to free speech. The one that is very messy, and very difficult to pin down, is called false statements or fact. Right? And that’s actually a legal precedent that is very thorny and very, very messy because the Supreme Court over the years has struggled with, “But we gotta let the expression make it out!” But at the same time [right], you can cause a lot of damage with false statements, right? And there are actually cases out there that almost bud into each other. That make arguments for both sides here, right? And that’s, I think, squarely where Twitter and Facebook find themselves . . . is what kind—what is unprecedented—and you called this before—unprecedented is that the false statements of fact are coming out of the president. Nobody ran that scenario. 

PF No, cuz you’re expecting—I mean, there are newsworthy, they are coming from an official vehicle of policy, I mean it is—it’s genuinely unprecedented. I mean, here’s the thing, too: we’re now years into this. We saw this. This was happening. And everyone went, “Well, you know, it’s the President.” And it just kept elevating and elevating cuz he can’t leave it alone. He has to push the button. 

RZ Yeah . . . It’s terrible but isn’t it—can’t you make that case like, “Look, let this play out, this is exactly how it’s supposed to go cuz it’s all melting down on ‘em’”. 

PF You can’t except—it’s just so tricky, right? Because then you set up your—Like, really, what you need is the double—the double standard exception . . . that you just continually invoke. Like, just, “Yes, there is a double standard. The ethics here—here is why we think it should be a double standard is the President of the United States, and instead, Twitter—and so Twitter basically had a double standard. For the President. 

RZ And I think other leaders though. I think other leaders as well [oh yeah]. 

[14:29]

PF Oh yeah. Yeah, in the US and outside. And someone has an account that just retweets Trump and it keeps getting—it got blocked, right? Because [yup, yup] —because it [laughing] kept threatening. 

RZ You are now Jack Dorsey. Which means you mediate a lot and you’re the Golden Gate Bridge. And you eat a lot of—

PF He’s thin!

RZ—of soil. 

PF He’s pretty healthy. 

RZ He’s very healthy. What would you do? You’ve got total power. I mean, you’re the CEO of Twitter. You’ve got total power. I mean you’re the CEO of Twitter, do you want the market cap of Twitter to help frame your decision? 

PF This is where it gets tricky. From a moral point of view, I think we resolved it pretty well.  You booed ‘em off the platform. It’s a disaster. It is terr—It’s bad for the platform. It’s the worst kind of audience. It generates noise, it’s poisonous for the brand, and I would actually now make an argument which I wasn’t as able to make several years ago, and you and I agreed on this at the time too which was—but I would actually add to it: it’s bad for the shareholders. You are in the middle of a violent shit show that is global and awful. You are an enabler. And instead of—

RZ Long term, you think it’s bad. 

PF It’s not just an ethical issue, you are—you’re sitting there, in the position of having this sensor, the most powerful human being on Earth because they are just spewing violent garbage. Ok? And so like—so that’s not good for your company. 

RZ Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Yeah. 

PF [Chuckles] Like your advertisers don’t wanna ad—What’s the first thing that happens? At Postlight? When we see unrest in the world, as—we turn off our marketing spin on Twitter. I don’t wanna be anywhere near that toxic mess! With the message about my company. I want it immediately. I want it off, right? 

RZ Yeah. 

PF Your—your product is creating a situation in which your product . . .

RZ Ok. 

PF —doesn’t do its job. 

[16:14]

RZ Interesting, so you’re—you’re actually saying, “You know what? I’m gonna be CEO. I’m gonna make a business case here. This is bad. This isn’t a moral thing. I don’t feel obligation or responsibility cuz he’s there. That’s where he is, right? He’s like, “Wait [yeah] you’re confusing people about voting rights. We must step in,” which to me is like I kinda wince cuz I’m like, “Ah, dude, you’re gonna have to do this again and again.” 

PF Oh no because, especially, you have a creature on the other side that won’t stop doin’ it. Like it will do it—it’s like when my son wants to piss me off. 

RZ Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s just an attention thing and yeah. 

PF He’s just gonna like—He’s gonna keep throwing books at my head until I get angry. 

RZ Interesting. Ok. I wanna ask the same question: you are now Mark Zukerberg and you’re on Facebook. “Hi, Mark! Congratulations on the success of Facebook. I’m very happy for you and your family [laughs].” 

PF “Thanks, Rich. At Facebook we try to take care of the security and well being of everybody who uses our service. You all matter to us very much. Augustus was a great, great Roman leader. I like [Rich laughing] computers.” 

RZ Ok. 

PF “It’s me, Mark Zukerberg.” 

RZ That’s very accurate. “So, Mark, you know, there’s a lot goin’ on and, you know—” 

PF “At Facebook, we take your security very seriously.” 

RZ Twitter has taken—they’ve taken a step forward. I’m gonna say—I have to say: I’m a little proud of Twitter. That is no small step to take and when—The President’s kind of a bully and Twitter said, “We’re not gonna take it,” and they pushed back. You’ve taken a different position. So tell us what you’re thinking.” 

PF “Well, I don’t think that anything really—and also—but it’s all just, you know, data and information people. So I don’t—you know, how it—when then—or you go and so here we are! And that’s what it is!” 

[18:02]

RZ [Laughing] That is a compelling case. I guess you’re saying you’re not gonna restrict anyone from saying anything. 

PF “We take your security seriously!!!” 

RZ Even though you do sometimes . . . do that. So, it feels a little arbitrary, I will say. So, ok, Mark, what you’re saying is you’re not gonna shut ‘em down. You’re not gonna do anything? You’re not gonna—I mean, the guy is saying, “We’re gonna shoot people.” The guy is spinning lies; he’s manipulating—

PF Well! Now, Rich. 

RZ C’mon, man!

PF At Facebook, we value everyone’s expression! Look, I think this guy has just gone so far in, he can’t see it. He’s sittin’ on top of a nation state and he’s got a set of core principles that he has worked out for himself with his team. And they’re being tested. And they’re failing. They’re failing, right? [Yeah, yeah] They’re just—Like people are just going, “You can’t do this. It’s leading to terrible things and he’s going,” and he’s going, “I know what you’re saying and I might even agree with you but the larger picture is if I don’t’ have this law, this rule, then—” 

RZ It all unravels, yeah.

PF “It all unravels. If I, you know, and who am I—you know, who am I to determine what a fact is and who am I to say, ‘uh, you know, what’s real,’”. 

RZ Yeah. 

PF And he’s not wrong, frankly. Like, you gotta look at it. Like, the minute—it’s just you gotta look at it, like, it’s just this is unprecedented because you can look at it, it’s everybody is going, “Woah! Woah! Woah! We’re slippin’.” Somebody went and asked all—it was like all the Republican senators, what they thought about Trump going and holding up the Bible and they literally all went like, “Gotta get the lunch! Don’t know—Oh yeah, didn’t see it.” No one wants any part of this. 

RZ Yeah. 

PF And everyone is just trying to get it over with. And so Facebook is making the bad situation worse. This isn’t good—this isn’t good for the shareholders. It’s not good for the users. It’s not good for people. 

[19:54]

RZ Yeah, I think that’s the other case is that I think he’s—he doesn’t know how thin the ice is getting. 

PF It’s time to change the rules so that you are minimizing harm! 

RZ Yeah! You know, I try to understand how people reach this point and I think—I think his thinking is—his thinking is that fundamentally it plays out in the right way. I think that’s what his thinking is. 

PF He’s literally saying that. He’s like, just—you know, “Just close your eyes and just like think about—” 

RZ “An election’s coming! This guy’s diggin’ his own grave. It’s gonna work itself out.” The problem with that thinking is that all of history is a counterargument to it [laughs]. 

PF Yeah, that’s the problem. Well, you know, here’s what’s been very tricky about this era, right? Is that you get—there’s an American idealism and ideology that is very profound, it’s sitting on the hill, and you can invoke it and you—and it’s free speech and it’s—

RZ It’s very meaningful, actually. It’s real. 

PF Exactly. It’s real. And we—you know, when we’re at our best we believe it. And it’s been tested and what’s happening is the physical reality is jamming hard against it. Like, literally the pandemic is not ideological. It doesn’t matter where you are in the spectrum: you might believe that people should have a right to free assembly and protest and the consequences of that is that people might die and get sick. And you might believe that. There’s all these things, you know. Or you might believe that the Boat and Road Initiative is absolutely critical for China’s development but it doesn’t matter if the pandemic is having its way with you. This is also true about climate change. And this is true about other things. And we have—we rarely, in America, have to deal with a new version of physical reality, right? And that landed on us [yeah] and it made a lot of the ideologies ineffective. They’re not good guides for how to behave right now. Which is why you have absolute chowder heads with guns [yeah] standing in front of state capitals. 

RZ I think one of the beautiful things about, you know, we’re a common-law society meaning we know that the laws are not airtight and so case precedent fills in all those weird cases. Right? That’s essentially what the Supreme Court is; what the courts are around the country; which is for those strange edge cases, common-law kicks in and what that acknowledges is that—

PF That’s why you can’t program law into a computer. You need judges to interpret it cuz events keep changing.

[22:11]

RZ And not only do they interpret it but they refine it because then the cases after that reference the cases before, right? And what that is essentially acknowledging is that absolute principles simply don’t work. They just don’t, right? What we talked about before around these exceptions to free speech, right? They are not because someone said, “Let’s sit down and come up with a list.” It took 200 years for those exceptions to surface over time. And in fact, they’ve changed! Like, as our customs and our values changed, they change. And it can—you  have to acknowledge that and so what I think Facebook and Twitter need is the equivalent of common-law, of case precedent, right? And the ability to refine these principles. Which is something that is incredibly powerful in the law. Without common-law, there are countries around the world—and that is exactly—common-law is a dictator’s worst enemy because it provides fluidity whereas you need total control, right? And that’s [right] what is needed here and what you have with—with a Zukerberg is, you know, he’s applying the programmer’s mindset to rules and how principles are—

PF Well, we’ve established a policy and we must stay with it. 

RZ And history has shown it doesn’t work that—[clear throat] that way. 

PF Look: and private organizations hate this. He doesn’t like his board. He’s got a board that doesn’t have a lot of power and look, even the, you know, sort of like an august sort of, you know, criticism welcoming organization like The New York Times, had an excellent ombudsman. They had a series of them and boy, did they push that policy out cuz nobody wants somebody who has a sort of quasi legal ability to come in and interrogate your own people and say, “What the hell were you thinking?” 

RZ That’s right. 

PF And they will fight it tooth and nail and they will say, “This is a terrible distraction,” even if it was and The Times was a great example. It was absolutely in the public’s best interest to have that role cuz it meant that you could say, “What are you doing? I trust you. And I don’t trust you here. So go find out,” and Margaret Solomon will go find out. 

RZ Yeah. 

PF And like so now Facebook has this board, like this oversight board, and I guess it’s going to function this way but who the hell knows? It’s got this new oversight apparatus and what’s—what you’re seeing is like . . . nothing’s changing. 

RZ No. No, no, no. 

[24:24]

PF Right? Like there’s no—Zuckerberg, I don’t think he’s agreed to be—

RZ You have a dictatorship. 

PF I don’t he’s agreed to be bound. 

RZ No, that’s the thing, right? Is what you have here is someone that is thinking about his control. And his legacy. As he runs down what are you going to do to my—my kingdom? This is mine! I think that’s really there. And I don’t mean it in an evil way [that’s right] of power grabbing. I think he’s feeling like, “We got here because of me. And how I steered this thing.” 

PF Mm hmm. 

RZ “And I’m going to continue to assert . . . my power over it. And I don’t think—again, I don’t think it’s money—

PF You know the problem here? The problem is that they’re still trying to grow? Growth at Facebook, at this stage, is very dangerous to society. Like it doesn’t need to necessarily keep growing in order for it to accomplish any goals at all. Like, it could do a million different things. So, if you were to say, “Ok, like, first of all, that is”—I just said something that will, you know, no good capitalists can tolerate. I’m ok with that. But it’s just like. “Where are you gonna take this thing? Because it’s certainly causing a lot of pain. . .” Really, the right thing to do is to declare victory and say, “I have created something so unbelievably powerful that obviously one human being at the top, without clear checks and balances that are real, is ineffective. And as an act of true foundational bravery, I’m gonna take what I learned and I’m gonna create checks and balances. I’m gonna have a—I’m gonna have the ability to be—I’m gonna have, you know, something a little bit like the US government where there’d be Facebook Senate and Facebook House of Representatives and they could be—” 

RZ I don’t think you have that here! I don’t think you have that in this—I mean, by the way, you can grow. And it’s very one—If that’s true, then that’s a very one dimensional view of growth, right? Like, you know, Microsoft has 13 business lines that all with different trajectories of growth. He bought Oculus! I mean, they bought Oculus. Like, they were clearly thinking—There’s apparently—there’s a Slack competitor, I forget the name of it. Facebook Something. And it’s apparently huge. It’s a huge line item in their revenue. There’s plenty of opportunities. They’re an incredibly nimble—you know, smart organization that can grow. 

[26:30]

PF They wanna be that nation state but they don’t want that kind of governance that you need—And like, [stammers] you know, what we’re seeing right now is as broken at is it and as much as I would—I want to throw tomatoes at many of the people in it: like, Congress is doing its job. Sometimes. Right? Like, without Congress we’d be in an even worse position. 

RZ Correct, that’s right. That’s right. It’s interesting. So, and I think we’re saying the same thing which is, you know, applying some of the check and balance mechanisms that exist in government and in the press cuz this thing is that powerful. That’s what we’re saying. 

PF Well, and what you see is the level—I mean they talk about themselves; they think about themselves as a government. What you see is that even though the founding fathers come in for some nice, deserved criticism in 2020, the actual Enlightenment when they asked George Washington if he was going to be, you know, king of America and, no.

RZ Yeah. Fundamental, in fact. 

PF No. Yeah, like that relinquishing of power. Everything else aside, it’s the one foundational thing that allows a society to grow [yeah] is for someone to say, “I don’t have power.” And at a certain point they’ll take it away from you. They will shoot you in the head [music fades in] if you have power and you hold onto it too long. And so we built those tendencies into our culture and we built corrective mechanisms. Facebook’s hit a scale and it loves the good parts of being in government. It loves to talk about enlightenment and sharing information and all the good things it’s doing. But there’s a reason the governments look the way they do. And it’s not doing that. And it’s not . . . it’s just not. It’s doing fake things that make it look like it believes that and then it isn’t doing it. So, what are you gonna do? Like, that’s the power. That thing has all that power and it’s not budging cuz you got that guy. 

RZ I wonder how it plays out. You know, I think the mechanism are [sic] government, there’s regulation. Another mechanism is the markets, right? And the market’s finally saying, “You know what? Mmmmm no more shampoo ads for you.” So who knows where it goes—where it goes. It’ll be interesting to see. We don’t have to pitch Postlight. It feels tone deaf right now. 

PF No, today it’s not marketing time. But if anybody needs us: hello@postlight.com. We’re listening. 

RZ Yeah. And stay safe out there; have a great week. 
PF Bye, everybody! [Music ramps up, plays along for two seconds, fades out to end.]