A political firestorm erupted this week when Twitter flagged two of President Trump’s tweets about mail-in voting, calling them potentially misleading and amending them with some timid attempts at fact-checking. This action caused the president to lash out at the social media platform by signing an executive order demanding a legal review of the protections it enjoys under the Communications Decency Act. The order doesn’t just affect Twitter, but also Facebook, YouTube, and any platform that allows users to post their own content.
This week on Gadget Lab, WIRED politics writer Gilad Edelman joins us to talk about Twitter's foray into fact-checking, why it enraged the president, and what potential fallout we could see from the White House’s actions. We also discuss the November vote—the very topic Trump was tweeting about when this whole mess started.
Read about President Trump’s executive order targeting social media platforms here. Read Gilad’s stories about in-person voting and Twitter’s fact-checking efforts.
Gilad recommends using a sleep mask and putting mayonnaise on your egg and cheese sandwiches. Mike recommends The Midnight Gospel on Netflix. Lauren recommends Bookshop.org.
Gilad Edelman can be found on Twitter @GiladEdelman. Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. Michael Calore is @snackfight. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth (@booneashworth). Our executive producer is Alex Kapelman (@alexkapelman). Our theme music is by Solar Keys.
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[Intro theme music]
Lauren Goode: Hi, everyone. Welcome to Gadget Lab. I'm Lauren Goode, a senior writer at WIRED, and I'm joined remotely, as always, by my cohost, WIRED senior editor Michael Calore.
Michael Calore: Hello, hello.
LG: Hello. How is working from home treating you this week?
MC: It's good. We got a bunch of plants, o now I'm surrounded by succulents. It's improved the mood.
LG: Have you also started baking sourdough bread and doing Peloton exercises?
MC: Are you projecting?
LG: No. Just wondering perhaps if we've both become work-from-home clichés. All right. Well, I feel lucky to be working from home, because it has been a dire week in unemployment numbers once again. And I think it's got to be a long time before we see our way out of this. This week though, we are talking about something else. We're joined by WIRED politics writer, Gilad Edelman, his first time on Gadget Lab. Thanks for joining us.
Gilad Edelman: Very excited to be here.
LG: I'll be honest. We originally planned this week's show to be about mail-in voting. It's an important topic to talk about right now, and it's going to be happening in the coming months. And we are still going to talk about that today. But then Twitter happened, or should I say the president on Twitter happened, or should I say Twitter added a fact-check label to a couple of the president's tweets, which also happened to be about mail-in voting. OK, now this has turned into a political firestorm, and it has forced a much bigger conversation about the role that tech platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Google play in the dissemination of information. So Gilad, take us through this step-by-step, maybe start with the tweets. What happened?
GE: Sure. So earlier this week, the president fired off a bunch of tweets insinuating that Joe Scarborough, the former congressman and current MSNBC TV host, whom the president is kind of obsessed with, had murdered a former employee. And then later on Tuesday, Twitter slapped a fact-checking label on one of his tweets. The incredible thing was that it wasn't the murder tweets. Twitter actually broke the seal on fact-checking the president for another tweet thread that the president sent out on Tuesday morning, about another one of his favorite hobby horses, absentee voting. President Trump has been arguing for a while now that expanding access to vote-by-mail, which we're going to talk about later, is a recipe for fraud and a way for Democrats to steal the election from him. On Tuesday he upped the ante by making a demonstrably false claim, saying that California was going to mail ballots to everyone in the state. In fact, they're just mailing ballots to every registered voter, pretty big difference. And later in the day, Twitter added a label to that pair of tweets, directing users to more information about absentee voting in the form of a Twitter moment, listing tweets that kind of debunked what the president has been saying.
MC: So then what happened next? How did the president react?
GE: The president reacted with a lot of equanimity. He really didn't seem to care at all. Just kidding, he obviously went back on Twitter and accused the platform of violating free speech and trying to censor conservatives. And as I think we can get into a little bit later, there are plans announced to issue an executive order that would somehow address the problem.
LG: Now in the past, Twitter has been criticized, and a lot of this criticism is directed at Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter, for not doing anything really about the president's tweets that may have veered into what would be considered abusive territory, right?
GE: Right. And the interesting thing is that what Twitter finally did here is a classic compromise that's going to leave nobody happy. Because a lot of conservatives have been howling for years that Twitter and other social media platforms are biased against conservatives. But at the same time, a lot of liberals—and you don't have to be liberal to hold this view—a lot of people have argued that Twitter and other platforms should be doing a lot more. For example, when the president implies that a TV host committed a murder.
And what Twitter did in this case was, they didn't even take Trump's tweets down. In fact, the notice they put on the tweets just says, "Get the facts about mail-in voting." So it doesn't even clearly say that it's false. You have to click that link to see that the platform is actually disagreeing with the content of the tweets. And then, if you go to that Twitter moment that serves as the fact-check, it's a bit of a mess. At the top there are a few bullet points provided by Twitter itself, and they've cleaned this up. But at first, one of the three bullet points gave actually misleading information about mail-in voting. So their own fact-check included not totally clarifying information.
MC: So they're using the Moments platform on Twitter as a fact-check mechanism. So they're basically just pulling in tweets from other people on Twitter. So what sorts of voices are being represented in this fact-check moment?
GE: It's a really weird format to use, and it's quite constraining. Fact-checking the president of the United States is kind of tricky to begin with, and then to choose to do it in the format of Twitter moments is pretty limiting. So what they did was, it's basically a bunch of tweets, many of them linking to articles in publications like CNN, The Washington Post, Vox, other places. And one thing that's kind of weird about that is, much like Facebook's fact-checking system, they're really outsourcing the process to these third parties. And the problem with doing that is, not every article that's published is right. A lot of the articles in this Twitter moment themselves just reference or link to other studies or other articles that have been written. And so, if you're going to take the trouble to say here are the facts, it's weird to then just link to a bunch of articles that may or may not actually have the facts right.
LG: So it's exactly these kinds of issues, which have come up before, that have led to a broader conversation about whether or not platforms like Facebook and Twitter should be "arbiters of truth." And there are some rules and institutions that exist in our society, here in the United States, that sort of create this structure in which platforms can operate just as platforms. But that's different from, say, what we do as a media outlet. And a lot of people talk about Section 230. So talk about what that is and how that plays into this.
GE: OK, great. And that gets us into Trump's executive order, which, as we're taping this podcast, I've got tabs open on my computer just waiting for the order to actually drop. But according to early leaks of the order, Trump is taking aim at this law called Section 230. It's actually Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996. It's a law that is often credited with creating the modern internet, although that might be an overstatement, but here's what it does: If you go back to the '90s, early internet forums had a problem. The legal doctrine at the time held interactive web services, as they were called, immune from what users posted on the site. So if Michael got on a platform and said I murdered Lauren's dog, I couldn't sue the platform for libel.
But there was a catch. As soon as the platform imposed any kind of content moderation, they opened themselves up to liability. It was a legal doctrine that dated from originally a case about bookstores in like the 1950s. So it wasn't really carefully thought out for the internet era, if it ever made sense at all. And it created a really bad incentive. The incentive it created was just don't regulate content at all, because as soon as you do, you're going to be potentially legally liable. And so if that had remained the state of the law, maybe the whole internet would look like at 8chan right now.
So what Section 230 did was it said, "OK, platforms are not going to be liable for what users post on them, even if they do content moderation." So it gave them protection, both from what users do and it gave them protection to impose whatever kind of content moderation they wanted to. Now, the reason this is coming up now is, because you might be wondering what does that have to do with what Twitter did. Well, Section 230 gives Twitter the right to just take down tweets that violate its terms of service. That's part of what Section 230 does. It didn't take down Trump's tweets. So you might be wondering, "Wait, why is Trump getting bent out of shape about Section 230? The reason is that certain conservatives have long kind of targeted Section 230 as the way to punish the platforms. Senator Josh Hawley, a Republican from Missouri, has introduced legislation that would strip this immunity from any platform that is found to be politically biased. So there's this effort by Hawley, also Ted Cruz, to paint Section 230 as a special privilege that the platforms have to earn by being politically neutral. And so the Trump executive order today is widely expected to try to impose that.
LG: But how would someone actually go about proving that a platform is biased? Especially when we're living in this era now where we can't really agree on what truth is, or it's hard to determine what is actually politically neutral.
GE: Yeah. I mean, it's a incredibly complex challenge to even contemplate. And I should say by the way that this is not something that Trump actually can do by executive order. Section 230 is a law passed by Congress. And it's really clear, it's actually more clear than the typical federal statute, just like platforms are not liable for this and they can do that. So Trump can tell the Federal Communications Commission to look into it, but there's not really anything they can do. It's up to Congress and Congress has shown very little appetite to actually do the kind of thing that we're talking about. As far as how you would actually go about it, I mean, I could imagine, you'd have to prove that Twitter took two tweets that were identical and censored the one that was by a conservative and not the one that was by a liberal, I guess. It's a hard thing for me to imagine too.
MC: Yeah. And it seems unenforceable and it also seems like it would fall apart if it ever got to the courts.
GE: Yeah. The legal questions and the first amendment questions are all pretty thorny if this actually ever happened. But again, I think we're a really long way from it actually happening. But Lauren, your question gets to another issue here that does apply to the Twitter fact check of Trump, which is deciding what's true in politics. I think when it comes to fact checking, the political realm is where things get really hard. It's where a lot of people kind of expect the most from the platforms. And it's also where the platforms probably can do the least. So disinformation about science, like take COVID-19, which is where Twitter originally rolled out their new fact checking policies. There's still a lot we don't know, but the field of science, the field of medicine, other academic fields have respected authorities and established ways of deciding collectively, this is true, this is false.
Politics doesn't have that because the whole point of politics is, "No, my side is right and that side is wrong." So, so, so, so much of political debate is really about deciding whose interpretation of reality is correct, which is why efforts to fact check statements by politicians can often get really ridiculous.
MC: So real quickly here, because we need to move on, but Twitter is in the crosshairs this week, but I'm curious, how is Facebook weathering this change and is Facebook even a concern of the president at this point?
GE: The Facebook/Twitter contrast is really interesting because as Twitter is leaning more into controversy and mixing it up a little bit in politics, under their COVID-19 fact checking policy for example, they actually removed tweets by the Brazilian and Venezuelan presidents that were promoting quack science. Facebook has shown no desire to do that. So last fall, they drew a lot of heat for clarifying or updating their policy on political ads, making clear that lies would get fact-checked and potentially taken down unless they were by politicians. So politicians actually get an extra wide berth to lie in political ads. So Facebook is really tacking in the other direction and saying, "Hey, if you're a political figure, if you're a politician, go crazy. You can go ham with as much BS as you want. We're not going to touch it."
LG: Gilad, I wonder how much of this is political posturing at this stage? Everything from the president's tweets to Twitter offering a solution that perhaps doesn't solve all of that much, to Mark Zuckerberg weighing in by going on national television. I want to believe that people want to contribute to the conversation in a meaningful way. But part of me also wonders how much of this is just yeah, posturing.
GE: So all of it, or most of it. It's somewhere from most to all. If you take Trump it's all, right? Republican politicians have been pretty good at working the refs, crying, censorship and bias to sort of scare the platforms into being nice to them. And there's some really killer reporting from The Wall Street Journal this week, showing for the umpteenth time, how well that strategy has paid off at Facebook, which really seems to be, to live in mortal fear more than the other platforms of pissing off Trump. Because Google and YouTube, for example, they said, "You know what? We're going to take away micro-targeting in political ads. So if you want to run ads that are lies, you can't serve them to the most gullible people." Facebook wouldn't even do that. So it does work to some extent.
However, I can see a scenario where this kind of backfires on Trump because after Twitter did, by the way, a super mild fact check, it didn't take the tweets down. Right? Many, many people wish they had been more aggressive. Trump said, "I'm not going to let this happen." He got on Twitter of course, to say it, but he said, "Twitter is censoring my free speech. I'm not going to let this happen." But if this executive order is his way of following through on that, well it kind of proves that he has no power to stop this from happening. And so in a way, if this is his best shot, Twitter should be relieved because maybe he can't really strike back in any legally meaningful way.
LG: All right, we're going to take a quick break to each fire off some crazy tweets. And then we're going to come back and talk about mail-in voting.
OK, so back to those original tweets from the president, mail-in voting. The coronavirus pandemic has raised questions about how exactly people are going to vote. Is it safe to go to a polling place? Is widespread mail-in voting more susceptible to fraud? November is still a ways off, but how officials plan for it now will greatly affect what happens when we do go to the polls. So Gilad, how are States preparing to hold an election during this pandemic?
GE: So the first wave of preparation revolved around expanding access to mail-in voting because when it became clear that this pandemic was real and it wasn't going away anytime soon, a lot of people realized that it would be a lot safer if people, instead of having to go to the polls were able to vote by mail. And one of the States that voted right as the pandemic was accelerating, was Washington State, which is a universal vote by mail state. And so a lot of people looked at that and said, "Oh, that's a good idea." And there have been a lot of really heated, legal and political battles around efforts to expand access to vote by mail because to boil it down, Republicans think that that's going to help Democrats more. The most bitter fight so far was probably in Wisconsin, which had their primary in early April and the governor there, who's a Democrat, kind of dragged his heels.
And then at the last minute he tried to postpone it. But the Wisconsin Supreme Court wouldn't let him. Then they tried to expand the window for returning absentee ballots. And it was all kind of crazy. And long story short, a lot of people, especially in Wisconsin's bigger cities, had to end up voting in person, even though they would have preferred to vote by mail. And what a lot of people, including yours truly, thought at the time was this is insane. These people are having to choose between their health and voting. There's obviously going to be a big explosion of COVID-19 cases because an election looks really dangerous, right? It's lots of people going to the same place on the same day. But a couple of weeks ago, I started to wonder, wait a minute, whatever happened in Wisconsin, where was that explosion of cases?
Because as we learn a little bit more about this virus, some of the things that look scary about voting, maybe aren't so bad. So there were these viral photos out of Wisconsin, of people waiting in these crazy long lines around the block. And that happens every election and it's always an outrage against democracy. In this case, it also looked like these people were all going to get sick. But if you think about it, wait a minute, they're standing outside. Most of them were wearing masks and they were pretty spread out. And what we know now is this disease doesn't seem to really spread that much in that kind of situation. What we really need to be scared about is being indoors in close contact with people for extended periods of time. So it got me wondering, wait a minute, was that in-person vote in Wisconsin really so dangerous?
And it turns out, probably not. There have been some scattered reports of cases of coronavirus traced back to the election. But if you dig into them as I did, they don't really show that much. The City of Milwaukee reported six cases connected to the election. Green Bay, which was the other city where people had to wait in egregiously long lines, they haven't been able to connect to any cases to the election. So it's a bit of good news really, that even though people should absolutely have the option to vote by mail, like I don't want my grandparents going and voting in person for example. And not just old people, right? I mean, everybody should have that option. But the good news is if you can't get an absentee ballot because your state isn't choosing to make them available, like I just tried to apply for an absentee ballot here in D.C. And the online system for that glitched out. So I'm going to have to go vote in person. The good news is it's not like mortally perilous.
MC: The big reason for that, as you mentioned in your story, is that election officials around the country are going to be taking precautions to make voting sites as safe as possible for people to show up, stand in line and cast their vote in person. So I'm curious what a safe polling place would look like in November?
GE: Yeah, and don't get me wrong. I mean, safe is relative. I'm not saying there's zero risk, just like there's some risk when you go to the grocery store, right? Or when you go to get takeout. But there are lots of things that can be done and are being done to mitigate the risk. The most important is to protect the poll workers, because they're the ones who are going to be there all day, right? It doesn't have to take long to vote, but if you're a poll worker, you're going to be there for a while.
And so I spoke with a elections director in Omaha, Nebraska, and he told me how they had, at their primary election a couple of weeks ago, and they gave all the poll workers N95 masks and gloves. In other places, poll workers also get face shields, lots of disinfectant supplies. And then apart from keeping the poll workers safe, the other important thing is to keep voters outside until they actually have to go vote. If you're only popping in there to go in, fill out your ballot and leave, your exposure is really quite limited. Some places have even experimented with mobile voting, where you can drive up and fill out a ballot without getting out of your car. That seems like a really good idea to expand in places that are more car heavy.
And then the last key thing, and this is where Milwaukee and Green Bay really went wrong, is to have as many polling places open as possible. And that's kind of counterintuitive because we're thinking, "OK, voting in person is less desirable so we should close down in person voting." No, the fewer polling places you have, the more crowded each polling place is going to be. And that's kind of the danger zone. So what you want to do is keep them open so that there's not that many people going to any individual polling place. So even if, God forbid, somebody is sick, right, a voter or a poll worker, if you've got enough polling sites open, at least they're not going to expose that many people.
LG: Gilad, very quickly, for States and localities that will still rely on mail-in voting, how much of a concern is fraud?
GE: All the best research suggests that it's not that much of a concern. To the extent that there is voter fraud, it's true that it's more likely to be done via mail than in person. So the real canard is that you need to ID card people when they show up to vote in person. But even fraud via mail-in voting is really hard to pull off because any kind of voter fraud that's going to make a difference requires tons of votes and tons of people to be involved. And so it seems pretty easy for those people to get busted as from time to time they do. The States that have had universal vote by mail systems for a while have really sophisticated ways of preserving electoral integrity, from really good signature matching processes, to text-based ballot tracking procedures. The question is less about fraud, I think, and it's more about, will the States that are revving up the vote by mail, be able to do a good job putting those systems in place to convince voters that their votes are getting counted? I think that's the bigger concern, is are voters going to be able to have faith that their vote is going to count?
LG: Gilad, thanks for breaking that down for us. We're going to take another quick break and when we come back, it's time for recommendations.
All right, Gilad since you're our guest, you should go first. What's your recommendation this week?
GE: My recommendation is putting a little bit of mayonnaise on your egg and cheese sandwich.
LG: Oh, all right. The show's over. This podcast is over. That's it.
GE: That's such an unsophisticated response.
LG: This is like an egg on a roll. Like you go to the deli, or in the before times, you'd go to the deli and just say, "I want an egg on a roll." And you're saying put mayonnaise on that, that beautiful thing.
GE: So that's what I'm saying, Lauren. Here's the thing. Eggs are good, cheese is good. Egg and cheese is good. Mayonnaise is good. So mayonnaise with your egg and cheese should be good. And I tried it this week, it was good. I also put Sriracha on. Not a lot of mayo though.
LG: Did you make this yourself or did you order?
GE: Yeah, but I didn't make the mayo.
LG: OK.
GE: But it's important to keep in mind that egg is a crucial ingredient in mayonnaise. So there's a sort of circle of life thing to this.
LG: Mike, what do you make of this?
MC: Well, Gilad I want to yes and your recommendation, and here's what to do. You get a squeeze bottle and you fill up the squeeze bottle halfway with mayonnaise and halfway with Sriracha, and then you mix it up and make one-to-one Sriracha mayo squeezy.
GE: Mike, I'm literally crying. That suggestion is so good that it made me tear up.
MC: OK. Next level, Japanese mayonnaise.
GE: Tell me more.
LG: I mean, is this still an egg and cheese sandwich or do we need to like, give it a new name now? Are you also going to start recommending that we put like, I don't know, avocado on this and maybe a little bit of sour cream while we're at it?
GE: I would try sour cream.
LG: I feel like maybe we are destroying the sanctity of a simple egg and cheese on a roll.
MC: No, you're just making it a Megg and cheese.
LG: All right. You know what? I don't want to dissuade Gilad from coming back on the show.
GE: Yeah, I didn't come here to be vilified.
LG: So I will accept this recommendation for now. Maybe I'll even try it, but I make no promises. Do you have any other recommendations you'd like to share.
GE: Me?
LG: Yeah.
GE: Yes, sleep masks.
LG: Oh, what kind of sleep masks? Like the kind that are like heavy over your eyes or are you like into the lotiony masks?
GE: No, just your basic strap around the back of your head mask over your eyes. I used to have a lot of trouble sleeping unless it was total darkness. And in my current place, I haven't been able to hang up blackout curtains yet. And if we ever go back to normal and you find yourself staying with a friend who doesn't have blackout curtains, or you're sleeping on a couch or something, just bring that handy little sleep mask in your bag and you got blackout curtains wherever you go, sister.
LG: Is there a particular brand of sleep masks that you like?
GE: Yeah but they didn't pay me for the promotion so I'm not going to just give them a free shout out.
LG: It's also good for when we go back on planes someday in 2024.
GE: Totally.
LG: All right. Thank you for that recommendation. Mike, what's yours this week. Is this the part where you like recommend that you put like kimchi on a taco or something else?
MC: I mean, kimchi on a taco is pretty, pretty baller, I must say.
LG: It's probably pretty good. Yeah, yeah.
MC: It's excellent. But my recommendation is actually a piece of content that you can stream on the internet. It's a show on Netflix, it's called The Midnight Gospel. It's an animated series. Each episode is about half an hour. It's really unique because it's a collaboration between a podcaster and a standup comedian, named Duncan Trussell, and an animator and a show runner named Pendleton Ward, who you may know as the brain behind Adventure Time, which is one of the greatest television shows of the 21st century. They've teamed up to make this show called The Midnight Gospel and what they do is they use old recordings from Duncan's podcast. It's called The Duncan Trussell Family Hour. So they'll take old interviews that he's done, and then they edit them down and they record new audio to sort of bookend it. And they turn it into like an animated fantasy adventure where two characters are walking around through some alien world, having a conversation about all sorts of like esoteric and sort of metaphysical things like death and life and reincarnation and meditation and yoga and psychedelic drugs. It's really something else.
[Excerpt from Midnight Gospel episode 3]
Darryl the Fish: Just a little explanation before we even start.
Clancy: Oh, we're starting. OK.
Darryl the Fish: Magic is what I am. The reason that meditation is so important in magic is because whatever we fastened our attention on, that's the direction that our energy is going to flow in. So when you're doing magic, you want to keep your mind as single pointedly focused on whatever you're trying to accomplish as possible. So that's what meditation does, it trains your mind so it's not constantly scattered and going into all different directions and dispersing the energy that you're trying to build up.
Clancy: Right. I know what you're talking about. I've read some books on magic.
MC: So they sort of used the artifact of the podcast as a way into the narrative of the show because the main character, voiced by Duncan Trussell, does this podcast. It's a space cast. So it's basically like what we know as a podcast, except it shoots out into space instead of going out over an RSS feed. So it's pretty wild. I've been watching it for a couple of weeks and I was originally hesitant to recommend it just because it's really violent. It's certainly not for kids. The subject matter is pretty out there because there's a lot of talk about drugs and other things that are not exactly mainstream. But I've been thinking about it and I just can't stop thinking about the show and the effect that it had on me. So I'm compelled to recommend it. So you can get it on Netflix, it's called The Midnight Gospel. And give it a shot, the first episode is really violent. The whole show is not as violent as the first episode. But stick with it, if you find that at least mildly interesting, and I promise you, you will be rewarded when you get to the end.
LG: So that sounds like it would have interesting implications for just podcasters in the world of content, that this started out as podcast, audio clips, and Netflix has turned this into a streaming visual program. And I would have to think too, that Dunkin held the IP for his podcast or that it was someone other than Netflix who had the IP for that podcast prior to that. And then Netflix had to acquire that to turn that into a show, right?
MC: Yeah. It's a pretty convoluted legal situation, I'm sure.
GE: I think what Lauren is really saying is when they make a TV show out of this podcast, Michael, who do you want to play the Michael Calore character?
LG: That's exactly what I was getting at. And I was wondering if perhaps there would be a cooking segment on the show for Gilad. Mike, really, who would play you on the Netflix show?
MC: You mean like if it's animated or if it's not animated?
LG: No, if it's not animated, or I guess we could do a voice actor. But if it's not animated, who would play you? I have an idea of who would play you, but who do you think would play you?
MC: No, I got to hear this.
LG: OK, it's this show, I'm going to have to look it up, live on the air, that you and I both watched, Mike. And I said that the actor reminded me of you. And he's a surfer guy whose family loses their home. Do you remember this?
MC: Oh, yeah. Lodge 49, Wyatt Russell.
LG: Yes. That's right. Isn't that a Kurt Russell's son?
MC: Yeah, and Goldie Hawn, yeah.
LG: That's who would play you?
MC: I will take that.
GE: Yeah, that sounds solid, dude. I would love someone to say I look related to Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn. I more often get Seth Rogan and Michael Cera.
LG: I'm afraid to ask you would play me. But all right, who would play me?
MC: I'll have to think about that.
LG: I think what we're saying is, Netflix we're available for a show. Gadget Lab is available. Probably have to talk to Condé Nast about that, but we're here.
GE: That IP doesn't come cheap, though.
LG: That's right.
MC: Lauren, what's what's your recommendation?
LG: My recommendation has nothing to do with food or streaming, it has to do with going offline, reading some books, specifically books from bookshop.org. If you're not familiar with bookshop.org, it's an online bookstore that exists to connect you to local independent bookstores. The company claims that they're mission-based and that they give away over 75% of their profit margin to the stores and authors and others who are part of this marketplace. And they say that to date, I'm on the website right now, they've raised more than $1.8 million for local bookstores.
So the way it works is that you can go to bookshop.org, if you have a specific local bookstore in mind that you want to support, and you can look them up and see if they've decided to list their inventory or provide online services and shipping and whatnot through bookshop.org. If they haven't, you can just go browse bookshop.org the way that you might have browsed Amazon or another marketplace for books. And then what you're buying ends up going into this pool and then the earnings are kind of distributed among all of the different affiliates that are on the website, rather than going to the one specific bookshop that you looked up. So I've ordered about five books so far, maybe a few more, during the pandemic. Most of them were sent to family, but I do have a few here. I'm happy to say that I'm not getting so far in my reading. I'm trying, I'm really trying. But I think more importantly, it's a nice idea to support your local independent bookstores if you can, and you can do that through Bookshop.
MC: Solid.
LG: All right. That's our show for this week. That was as fun as a show could be when you're talking about the things we're talking about these days. Thanks to Gilad for joining us.
GE: Thanks for having me.
LG: And thanks to all of you for listening. If you have feedback, we would love to hear it. You can find all of us on Twitter. Just check the show notes. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth. Our executive producer is Alex Kapelman. We'll be back next week.
[Outro theme music]
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