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Thank you for listening to Off the Hook. 
The Telephone Keeps Ringing So I ripped it off the wall I cut myself while shaving Now I can't make a cough We couldn't get much worse But if they could, they would One day, let's go The best is fake and worst I hope that's understood One day, let's go Is the right? 
Ha ha ha ha I'll be eating It's so cute Good boy You can't wait I can't wait You can't wait It's so powerful Wait At the Whitaker So What would you say The things I would Thank you. 
And out in Skypeland, let's see, who do we have there? 
I see Rob T. Firefly. 
Good evening. 
Is that Gila, I see? 
Hello. 
How are you doing? 
It's been so long. 
The last time you guys were on the air, were we FM? 
Were we still broadcasting on AM back in the 1920s or whatever that was? 
It's been a long time. 
There's been all sorts of reasons why we've been preempted. 
You guys have gone places. 
Welcome back. 
It's good to be back. 
It's very good to be back. 
I trust it hasn't changed too much since you were away. 
I don't know. 
That new theme song remix was really kind of a surprise. 
I worked hard on it. 
Yeah. 
And, of course, on the Skypeland, on a different version of Skypeland, we have Alex. 
Yeah. 
It's been a while. 
Good to be back. 
And where are you this week? 
Because you're always traveling throughout the planet. 
Yeah. 
I'm actually in Manhattan this week. 
Oh. 
How exotic. 
Okay. 
Good. 
Yeah. 
And we have a special guest, Weldon Chang, joining us tonight. 
Greetings. 
Hey, everyone. 
It's great to be here. 
Thanks for having me on. 
Well, you know, the reason you're here and the reason we're all here, I guess, is this is one of our shows, our post-election day shows. 
We've done a bunch of them. 
And it's kind of traditional for us to gather the day after election day and kind of brood a little bit, you know, and say, oh, my God, how did that happen? 
And I kind of want to say the same thing, except with a little bit of a different tone today, because, oh, my God, how did that happen? 
It's actually not nearly as bad as so many of us were thinking it might have been. 
And I think a lot of that goes to the media. 
They get the credit for scaring the crap out of us over the last few months and just basically catastrophizing everything they could possibly think of, pointing to polls that had really no scientific basis in reality. 
But when you said that, you know, pretty much everybody believed what the mass media was telling them, even though there was really no good reason for you to take them seriously. 
I don't know. 
You guys feel the same way? 
Alex, how about you? 
Yeah, I you know, I think that a lot of our concerns were were valid, but nobody thought that the Democrats are going to do as well as they did. 
And, you know, I don't want to rehash everything that's already been said on CNN and MSNBC. 
But, yeah, it seems like a lot of the issues that we thought would bring voters out to the polls actually did bring voters out to the polls. 
But I'm happy to see that, you know, there wasn't a tremendous amount of violence or intimidation and that democracy seems to have worked like it should have. 
But I think leading up to it, you're right. 
There was a massive amount of disinformation. 
And that's why we have Welton here. 
And let me introduce Welton properly, if you don't mind. 
I'm sorry for my improper introduction. 
Go ahead. 
Give us, you know, give us the right one. 
You're usually at a lack of social decorum and I have to pick it up. 
I'm used to picking up this kind of slack. 
So, you know, we go back many, many years. 
It's just like Welton and I, actually, although you and I, man, we'll go back, I think, even farther than Welton. 
So I have known Welton since he was an undergraduate at Dartmouth and I was a law student in Vermont. 
And we both worked at the Institute for Security Technology Studies, which was a federally funded counterterrorism cybersecurity research center. 
Welton then went on to a career. 
He was ROTC, I believe, as an undergrad and then went on to a career with the U.S. Army where he was an intelligence officer and then worked for the DIA, as in Delta India Alpha, the Defense Intelligence Agency. 
And then from there, I think he did something at UPenn, you know, did some kind of PhD or something. 
So, you know, I guess we have to call him Dr. 
Welton Chang these days. 
And then, well, I hadn't talked for a while. 
We reconnected during the pandemic when he was the CTO of Human Rights First. 
And this is your life, Welton. 
We're going to basically go over everything you've ever accomplished. 
It's going to take the whole hour. 
Well, we're getting there. 
We're getting there. 
He's not that old. 
Come on. 
You know, we're almost there. 
So the pandemic happens. 
Welton and I reconnect. 
He's CTO of Human Rights First. 
He puts me on the technology advisory board that he had created for Human Rights First. 
And then he promptly decides to leave. 
And, I mean, I don't blame him. 
You know, once I enter any organization, people start departing. 
And so Welton left because he actually started a spinoff company on something that he and I were working together on a human rights first. 
But it was really much more of Welton's endeavor. 
And it was - and he started a company called Pyra, P-Y-R-R-A. 
And Pyra is a fascinating platform that connects into a lot of these other, I would say, fringe platforms. 
And, Welton, you can correct me if I'm wrong, but, you know, you connect into Gab. 
You connect into Parler. 
You connect into all these different types of forum. 
And you collect information, analyze it, and can actually track extremist activity and disinformation trends. 
And, you know, I'm going to pass it over to you, Welton, to describe more fully what you actually do. 
Well, I think one thing that Emmanuel pointed out in terms of how the media was framing the midterms was actually very right in that the threats to democracy were very real. 
And if you spend enough time reading Truth Social and Gab and Parler, I think one of the things that you take away from that, other than living in a completely alternate reality, is that the amount of election denial, you know, going back to 2020, right, the big lie, that may have backfired in some ways, where that actually reduced the willingness and the political will of people to go out and vote for their preferred candidate. 
Because essentially, if you believe that elections are totally rigged, then what would be the point of actually going out there and voting? 
And so I think in a lot of ways, and this is borne out by the data that we've seen, by, you know, a couple of posts from last night that kind of stayed out of my mind, people saying the time for voting is over, the time for revolution is now, right? 
That's the kind of rhetoric that you're seeing on these platforms. 
All the way to former President Trump saying, we should go out and protest these results, because we think that the voting irregularities in Maricopa and some of these other places, some of which are completely blown out of proportion, right, going into that disinformation theme. 
I think that's actually tamping down enthusiasm for folks of that political ideology to actually go and participate in the electoral process. 
And that may have had some impact on the results that we saw yesterday. 
Well, Wilton, were you hearing, is that what Trump said this election, or were you quoting him from last election about the protesting? 
No, he was talking, this is like last night. 
Because the quote I saw from him is that this is a tremendous victory, very Stalinist, or Putinist, you know, basically saying, yes, we're winning when everybody knows you're not. 
Is he just basically saying whatever you think might stick? 
Absolutely, yeah. 
And I think if you look at the trends in terms of what are people grasping onto on the platforms that we look at, which I think the latest Pew Research poll says something like 6% of Americans get all of their news information from alternative platforms, right? 
Which you say to yourself, how many people is that? 
It's like 20 million people, right? 
All they do is stew in essentially a sea of disinformation all day, all night. 
They're really ramped up about, you know, essentially the results in Arizona and the, you know, what the media is calling a ripple, right? 
That is being reflected in this other kind of alternative information sphere as this whole thing was rigged and we can't trust these results. 
And I would not be surprised if we saw some pretty significant, I don't call it unrest, but like, you know, some actions taken in the weeks to come. 
And, you know, definitely have our eyes and feelers out for what's going to happen in Georgia, right? 
Because that's going to run off. 
One of my instincts or reactions, because I was thinking something along those lines, is the sheer cost of mounting that legally, aside from let's not use the legal system and the bureaucratic, something so complex or quaint as elections boards and so forth. 
But isn't it basically on them to provide some kind of evidence and pursue that to whatever end there is, as we saw? 
Oh, that's so old fashioned evidence. 
Wow. 
Well, I remember that. 
Surely, if they believe that, then that activity, that disruption you're talking about, other than anything else, through what mechanisms there are, is costly. 
And I think it's up to them to kind of pony up. 
And, you know, if it's based on nothing, it's going to be even more costly to continue pretending nothing is something. 
I mean, this might be too philosophical of a point, but like, what are the penalties for not believing in the truth? 
I think the reality of what happened yesterday in terms of the results, like, that's the penalty for not actually believing in reality, not looking at the table in front of you and saying, that's a table, right? 
And so, you know, there may be some self-correction here. 
And I don't want to be overly optimistic about the results, right? 
Because clearly, well, it doesn't look like the Dems are going to retain the House, right? 
So there are some - the amount of election deniers that have made it into office, including, you know, now newly elected Senator or J.D. 
Vance, right? 
Like, some of that stuff is still extremely worrying. 
But I do think that there are costs to not believing the things that your eyes are telling you, right, staring you right in your face. 
You know, I saw some analysis of the J.D. 
Vance victory just before the show about how Mitch McConnell poured money into that Ohio race at the expense of other races in places like Pennsylvania, where basically Democrats prevailed. 
And it was actually - it seems to be a very good chess move, that they basically sacrificed somebody in Ohio, one seat, but were able to prevail in other places that were probably very, very important in the bigger picture. 
Gila, you had something? 
The thing that I found very interesting, something that I've seen throughout last night and today, is people are congratulating candidates who lost for conceding their races. 
And it is fascinating to me that people are like, hey, this morning I saw a bunch of flutter on social media that Dr. 
Oz called John Fetterman to concede this morning. 
And congratulations to Dr. 
Oz for the fact that conceding an election is now on par with a child taking their first steps. 
We are so proud of you for this thing. 
We weren't sure you'd be able to pull - it's part of the process, man. 
It's an election, and someone wins, and someone loses, and that's just the way that it is. 
And the fact that we're now really proud of people for understanding that that's the way it works terrifies me in such a profound way. 
Also, thinking about misinformation, echo chambers, things of that nature, I'm reading a book right now called A Murder on W Street, and thinking about the - I don't necessarily want to say it's the seeds of where we are now, but watching some of these pieces in their embryonic form six years ago and what they've turned into is also heartbreaking. 
I have a lot of opinions about the story in the book for other reasons that we're not going to go into right now, but watching and seeing where things have gone in six years and six years ago when there wasn't Truth Social and there wasn't Parler and there wasn't Gab and there wasn't all of these free speech social media platforms that exist for everybody. 
But I don't know. 
I think the splintering of the world and the - like even the proliferation of news channels and where you can go if you want to hear what you want to hear and where we go in that misinformation sphere - I have lost the end of my sentence, so I'm going to stop. 
Well, maybe think of what we were talking about at the very beginning of the show, which was the media coverage before the election and how that seems to have influenced a lot of people and shifted in some degrees, particularly CNN, seems to have adopted this both sides of every single issue where, okay, let's hear what the Nazi has to say and basically weighing everything equally, but also making things seem so dire. 
There was a headline that I saw a few days ago that basically said that Democrats are preparing for staggering losses and when they do, they're going to blame Eric Adams. 
I mean, what kind of a headline is that? 
Basically saying that everything is going to be chaotic and this is how they are going to do the circular firing squad when that hasn't even happened. 
There are so many stories like that. 
Meanwhile, all the Republican faux pas and various other funny quotes that they came up with kind of ignored because, well, we all know they're out of their minds, so we're not even going to cover it anymore. 
We're just going to focus on Democrats. 
I saw headlines today where basically - you almost wonder if they're joking, saying that Democrats did not fail as badly as predicted and why this is bad for Biden. 
How is this possibly bad for Biden? 
I mean, yeah, you know, there are scenarios I guess you could concoct where he might be at a disadvantage a couple of years down the road if certain things happen in a particular way. 
But please, you know, it just doesn't seem like they can say anything that might make us not feel like there's some kind of catastrophe coming. 
I don't know about you guys, but I do know in the days leading up to Election Day, I was feeling nothing but dread, and it was all based on what I was hearing in the mass media. 
And this is me trying not to listen to the mass media. 
It still seeps through, you know? 
And I think, you know, this is something that, you know, I'd like to ask Welton, why? 
What is the advantage? 
I understand disinformation, what comes from governments and people trying to influence the masses. 
But why does mass media engage in, like I consider it, misinformation, just to sell papers and to get viewers? 
Does that work? 
Well, I think definitely partially it's the business model, and especially in the kind of post-Google, post-Facebook age of how news outlets have to, you know, generate revenue. 
But, you know, just in terms of their, what they're basing their judgments off of, right, a lot of it was polling. 
And I think it just goes back to the challenge of how do we gauge public opinion in an age where nobody trusts anybody else? 
And you look at gold standard, quote-unquote gold standard polling in the past. 
It doesn't exist anymore. 
You can't do it. 
You know, no one's picking up the phone. 
I mean, how many robocalls do you get on your phone on a daily basis? 
You're not picking up from a, you know, a pollster. 
And somebody even gets through to you, identifies that they're doing a poll you hang up on. 
Of course. 
So this is part of the challenge. 
It's a measurement issue. 
And then the media is trying to do, I would say, the best that it can, adhering to the journalistic standards that they think are still in play, you know, which I think that there's a lot of criticism, certainly, of this whole both sides-ism that, you know, plagues much of popular mass media. 
So, you know, I wouldn't classify what happened in the run-up as misinformation. 
Part of it is, it's just incorrect, turned out to be incorrect based off of the best information available at the time. 
I think it goes to our ability to critically think and say, do I trust this information or not? 
Should I believe the judgments that these people are making? 
Are they well-founded, right? 
Would you say it's just bad journalism? 
I wouldn't go that far. 
I think where you get your information from and how you base your judgments, that's got to be critically examined, right? 
I mean, I, you know, spend all day and all night on fringe platforms reading this stuff. 
And I have to pull myself out of that because I have to tell myself this isn't a reality, right? 
And similarly, if you're a journalist and you spend all day on Twitter or, you know, only talk to other journalists, you're not going to get an accurate view of, like, how, quote, unquote, Americans are feeling, right? 
And, and, and, and again, this is, this is a hard problem. 
Like, I, I remember I was talking with somebody at NPR the other day and I was quoted as saying, like, you know, hey, Mark Zuckerberg couldn't tell you what people on Facebook are saying today. 
Right? 
Like the whole concept of being able to understand what millions and hundreds of millions of people are saying, right? 
That's, that's the issue. 
You can't measure the thing that you want to measure. 
Right? 
So. 
I hear it as a very noisy atmosphere, especially in the run up to elections. 
There's so many, the stakes are very high and there are so many interested parties, literally and figuratively and this networked media escape. 
And I think my gut or my intuition was that it was various forces colliding, like this idea that there's a sense of duty because the stakes are so high to raise people's awareness and to, to, as has been pointed out, a panic level. 
And I think that the amount of energy we were reminded again, the energy expended, uh, uh, trying to get, um, action with negative, um, uh, feedback and, and, and so forth is perhaps more than something that is inspiring that, that people, um, believe in the process or their, their communities and that there, it is their civic duty to participate and so forth. 
So that I think was a part of it. 
And I think there were also like really, um, I don't know, uh, interested, um, groups that, that were exploiting some of the vulnerabilities in the media escape, uh, especially this, in the timing of an election that probably also were able to get things circulated that ordinarily people would maybe not be so alarmist about or react to so quickly. 
So I don't know that confluence to me just felt suspicious to the point of, I think even the, the New York times headline was, uh, being widely criticized and it's almost like, Oh, they need this to be bland. 
Wait, you mean the one that came out last night that basically said that Democrats are losing, uh, uh, key races and things like that. 
They want it. 
They, they watched the first minute of the story. 
They want it so bad. 
They want it to be negative and panic mode so badly that like, um, it's almost as like a safety valve so that, um, those that are losing have, uh, don't feel, don't, uh, feel any of it. 
But that's, that's my point. 
I think that, um, uh, us being in a state of perpetual, uh, stress and just fearing the worst, I think that's where they want us. 
They want us to be that because then we keep tuning in and going to them for more, uh, info. 
I remember, you know, we, we, we basically, uh, got away from this and, and we went of all places to the, uh, the progressive channel on, on Sirius XM. 
Um, and, uh, you know, it's, it's kind of like WBAI light, uh, and they were, they, they were basically, um, talking in a much more sane, rational way saying, look, these, these polls, what Welton was saying just now, who picks up the phone? 
Nobody picks up the phone. 
So, you know, the kinds of people who are picking up the phone are, are, are probably of a particular political bent, uh, you know, maybe they're homebound or something, or they just like talking on the phone a lot. 
But most young people don't even have a landline. 
Do they even call cell phones? 
Do people pick up numbers they don't recognize? 
So, you know, with all that in mind, all these, um, facts and figures that are being presented to us with basically no research involved, how accurate could they possibly be? 
Go ahead, Rob. 
Uh, yeah, and, uh, there, I think there's something to be said too, for not only, uh, trying, not only sort of the major media outlets trying to keep people in a constant state of stress, but also just, uh, really blatantly cherry picking things, um, in order to cater to their base. 
Uh, the front page of the New York Post today was spectacular. 
It's this huge full color photo of, uh, Ron DeSantis and his family. 
He's holding a baby, you know, they're in front of a huge American flag. 
It's, it says, the future. 
And it's, uh, you know, young GOP, young GOP star, uh, DeSantis romps to victory in Florida. 
And then a little bar on the bottom that says, Hochul claims victory in New York. 
This is a New York newspaper talk, you know, ostensibly where you get news about New York. 
And, you know, our, our governor, our history making governor is, uh, is a small bar on the bottom while the big spectacle is of course the, the Republican who's the rising star of the party. 
And I should also point out, you said the future, it was the future. 
Like that's what makes sure their joke is it lands like DeSantis, the future funny. 
Yes. 
There's a lot of New Yorkers that live in Florida, right? 
And, and, and, you know, this is something that I found very disturbing. 
Uh, all of Long Island went red and, um, you know, we're starting to turn into the Florida of the North. 
And, you know, or Staten Island or something like that. 
No offense, Staten Island listeners, but my God, what's happening to us? 
Uh, go ahead, Gila. 
No, I think this also kind of, uh, ties in with what we were talking about a couple of months ago when we were talking about the ring camera show on Amazon. 
And I said that, you know, the fact that there are now all these streaming services, all these platforms, everybody's reaching for eyeballs and they want, first of all, I have to figure out enough content to fill 24 hours a day. 
And then they have to keep people tuning in 24 hours a day. 
So the fact that everybody's got their own outrage cycle and they have to keep people focused on whatever it is. 
And it is now is your shampoo trying to kill you 24 hours a day on every topic in the whole entire world. 
And I'm also wondering why it is or how it is that the voices that get this kind of traction tend to be voices moving more toward the right wing. 
Like, you remember Air America? 
What happened there, man? 
I miss Air America. 
And how that, there's no answer, I think, is another part of the problem. 
And, yes. 
Well, I think the answer is that left wing people, with the exception of Pacifica and BAI, I mean it, can't really run a radio network. 
I think, you know, right wing people, for some reason, they're, you know, the way they operate things, which is basically I'm right, you're wrong, and not open to nuance or, you know, alternative ideas or things that might be a challenge for your point of view. 
So, yeah, you don't see that as much. 
So, it's a lot simpler to just run a business that way. 
I don't know. 
That's my theory. 
But Air America was a good idea. 
It just wasn't run very well. 
But there should be more variety on the radio. 
And let me just, for a second, step on the soapbox and say that that's why a station like WBAI is so hugely important. 
Because look around, you don't hear voices like this anywhere. 
You basically, certainly on the AM dial, nothing but right wing. 
You know, it's because of what Gila brought up. 
Places like Air America disappear. 
Fortunately, places like WBAI have not disappeared. 
The reason for that is you, listeners. 
So, please, go to the website, give2wbai.org. 
That's give, the number 2, wbai.org. 
Or call 212-209-2950. 
And please be generous. 
Please be generous. 
It keeps us on the air. 
It keeps us talking about these issues and talking about all kinds of other issues that are going to be happening between now and 2024. 
We need as many voices as possible that are questioning the system and questioning the way things happen. 
So, it's never been more important. 
We've also been off the air for a number of days because of all the transmitter maintenance going on in Midtown. 
Oh, what a nightmare. 
But you can help fix that just by giving a generous donation, 212-209-2950, or give to WBAI.org. 
Okay, I'm getting off the soapbox now. 
Alex, go ahead. 
Just for the record, Air America was also a cargo airline that the CIA covertly owned. 
I think between 1950 and probably the end of the Vietnam War, and it was used actually to supply covert operations in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War. 
So, just want to clarify that. 
But speaking of clandestine things and what not, you know, leading up to the election, I want to offer an observation because I spent a lot of time in Pennsylvania. 
As you know, I usually do the show from Pennsylvania, and we're out in the Poconos quite a bit. 
And I have a son that watches an inordinate and probably unhealthy amount of YouTube videos about video games and all kinds of things that, you know, kids his age do. 
And one thing that was extremely concerning to me is that he came to me asking me about, you know, who this Fetterman guy was, and is he really too radical for Pennsylvania? 
I said, what the hell are you talking about? 
Wait, how old is your kid? 
Nine. 
Nine, and he asked you if John Fetterman was too radical for Pennsylvania. 
That's almost an exact quote from a commercial. 
Well, that's where you think, where do you think he got it? 
It was from these YouTube ads that they're playing, that they bombarded everybody with in Pennsylvania. 
It was absolutely extraordinary. 
You couldn't go on any kind of social media. 
You know, if you had an IP address that traced back to Pennsylvania, you were going to be bombarded with this load of crap. 
You know, and he knew about Dr. 
Oz. 
You know, is he really an extremist? 
Is Fetterman too radical? 
And this was concerning to him because he's nine years old. 
He's being bombarded by these ads, thinking that there's going to be some radical in charge of the state in which he's living at the moment. 
And he doesn't know what's going to happen. 
I mean, so it was really crazy. 
But on the other hand, it really makes you wonder about the ethics of bombarding anybody with an IP address in Pennsylvania with these types of ads, especially when you know that the videos with which the ads are associated relate to children. 
And what's the play there? 
I mean, they're obviously going for people that are a lower voting age. 
But, you know, maybe in this, you know, crazy scheme to make a profit here, they just kept playing the ads over and over and over and over again because they knew the budget from the Democrats and Republicans was so through the roof. 
Well, Alex, let's just say that you weren't an informed parent and that your child came to you and asked you that simple question in a very innocent tone. 
And it got you thinking, is John Fetterman too radical for the state of Pennsylvania? 
And you heard it from your own child. 
You see how they manipulate things. 
Yeah, well, you know, trust me, when a nine-year-old asks you whether a political candidate for the Senate is too radical for the state that he spends some time during the weekend, it does get you thinking whether or not that candidate is too radical for Pennsylvania. 
Where the hell did he get this? 
And then you realize, oh, my God, he's just getting inundated with these ads. 
So but it's it's a weird thing. 
And I will say this, too. 
I mean, I think I can bring this up every election cycle, but I think there is some serious problem on both sides of the aisle here when it comes to sharing data about voters and information, in particular, contact details of voters, because I I signed up, I will tell you, years ago, maybe six years ago. 
I think it was I signed up for to be on the email list or something for a friend of mine who's in Congress now. 
And he won again last night. 
Andy Kim, he's a friend of mine from from Oxford. 
He was at at Maudlin. 
I was at New College right across the street. 
And I think it was six years ago he ran for Congress and won. 
And I signed up for his campaign. 
But I think that the D triple C or something takes all that data and sends it around because I'm getting inundated with text messages from Chuck Schumer. 
And any time they send me these messages, even though I am a Democrat and I vote mostly for Democrats, I just find it offensive that somebody posing as Chuck Schumer is texting me in the middle of my workday, reminding me to go out and vote. 
So I always ask the question, I always respond to the text message, where did you get this number? 
You know, from where did you get this number? 
And the response is always the same. 
And that's why I want to bring this up to you, Emmanuel, because they always say we got this. 
We got all the information from the voter rolls. 
And I don't think that that's necessarily the case. 
I don't think that there's my I don't think my cell phone number. 
Well, hold on a second. 
Is are you getting this in New York or are you getting this in Pennsylvania? 
New York, New York. 
In New York, phone numbers are not part of of what is kept on the voter registration. 
Some states, though, do have phone numbers. 
Some states have email addresses. 
But as far as I know, New York is not one of those. 
Now, I had a similar thing happen where I got a text message from one candidate. 
And then within the next day, I got a text message from their opponent. 
So somehow my number is being shared. 
I think there there might be some other lists going around where more information is shared based on initial contact information. 
They're called calling lists. 
And there are companies that sell them to campaigns. 
And it's probably that what they really mean is that the voter rolls themselves are compared with other commercially available resources that might have your correct phone number. 
And that compilation is sold in sets based on districts to campaigns who want to make calls and solicit. 
Yeah, it might not even be related to, Alex, to your previous relationship politically. 
It might be from somewhere else entirely. 
Just I mean, you know, people get all kinds of I get Donald Trump messages sometimes. 
They're really funny, and I saved them all. 
But, you know, they make it seem like all sorts of different people are personally texting you or emailing you. 
And it's, you know, I don't know how many people fall for that. 
But it's very common. 
And it's also an increasing problem because, you know, you can you can opt out of commercial spam. 
You can't opt out of political spam. 
Someone correct me if I'm wrong on that. 
But that's that's what I heard. 
You can't you can't put political calls on do not call list. 
They can call you with impunity. 
Yeah. 
Or to be more accurate, political organizations don't have to abide by the do not call list. 
They can call whoever they like. 
All the more reason to associate yourself with affiliation, you'll get half as much because the other side won't even try you. 
If you're undecided or independent, they're all going to bombard you. 
If you're if you're firmly in one camp, I mean, you just you'll basically get stuff that you don't need to hear anyway. 
Go ahead, Gila. 
Something that I find interesting is that all of the in in our home, one of us is associated with and one of us is registered with a political party and one of us is not. 
And all the mailers that came out before the primary were obviously mailed to the person with a party affiliation. 
And since then, they've all come to the person without one. 
But for the party that the one of us who is affiliated is affiliated with, which I found fascinating. 
I know that my phone has been just completely blown up the last couple of days. 
Today was nice. 
How was your phone the last couple of days? 
Yeah, about the same. 
I don't know why they got my number, but I just wish they would save the money on the mailers. 
That's all I'm saying. 
Well, it's traditional and it seems to work. 
It's a lot of people talking and going back and forth. 
And it's it's a hard thing to put an end to. 
Yeah, Alex, go ahead. 
I want to read you the repartee I had with Chuck Schumer here. 
So I get a message a couple of days ago. 
Hi, it's Chuck Schumer. 
Delivery workers stepped up during the pandemic, but they were denied the most basic benefits. 
I've probably worked with them to make things right. 
And we won big. 
See what we accomplished. 
Blah, blah, blah. 
Link. 
And I write back. 
Where did you get this number? 
And he writes. 
He, you know, in quotation. 
Yeah, it's probably an it. 
It's probably just a machine. 
He writes the next day at probably about, I don't know, almost 24 hours later, I get this response. 
We got your number from the list of registered voters in New York. 
We want to make sure that all our folks are voting. 
Do you want to receive your local polling station and time so you can vote? 
And then my response is, you got my phone number from a voter registration list? 
I don't think that's accurate. 
I'm a registered Democrat, but the voter rolls do not contain my telephone number. 
Please tell me specifically how you obtained this telephone number. 
And do you know what they said in response? 
Nothing. 
T-D-E. 
Nothing. 
Nothing. 
No, that's what I would expect. 
Nothing. 
So I think I think, you know, what Kyle said is accurate, that basically there is a voter registration list. 
But then to counter what I said before, because you did get involved with someone politically, your name was matched with your phone number, and now they have both. 
And they cross-referenced and they shared. 
So that's good luck getting that to stop. 
Yeah. 
I remember seeing those lists on that green and white paper with the dot matrix. 
Yeah, yeah. 
That wide paper, that dot matrix. 
Yeah. 
And that was like a call list. 
And you would go through it and you'd rip half of a stack to volunteers. 
I don't think I still use that. 
In my head, they do. 
Or punch cards or anything like that. 
But the thought is the same. 
Yeah, you rip off the ends. 
What I'd like to do in the time remaining, and we have so much more to talk about. 
We'll be on overtime at 8 o'clock on YouTube. 
But does anybody have any stories from voting, from going to the polls? 
For me, going yesterday in a place where there's almost never a line. 
It's basically you go in, you vote, and you leave maybe one person ahead of you. 
I had to wait a half hour. 
I had to wait a half hour, and there were a lot of people. 
Many of them seemed to be younger people. 
And, of course, in the end, it turned out that Lyle and voted pretty red, pretty much across the board. 
But technically, things seemed to work pretty well. 
You know, filling out those pieces of paper, sliding it into the fax machine or whatever that thing is, and having it cast successfully, I didn't notice any problems out on Long Island. 
But maybe you guys saw something, Alex? 
Well, yeah, I want to bring it back to my nearly radicalized nine-year-old again here, because I brought my son with me to vote for the first time yesterday at our local polling station in the West Village. 
And it was a really great experience, I think, for him, because this was his way of seeing democracy in action. 
And he asked me, you know, is it going to be exciting when we go over there? 
Is this going to be fun? 
And I said, well, you know, if you think, you know, reading about propositions and things on the back of the ballot is fun, then, you know, absolutely. 
And I said, but, you know, this is what government, you know, for the people and by the people and of the people looks like. 
This is what people have fought for, bled for, and died for since the 18th century in this country. 
And it may seem boring, but it's really... 
It's kind of scary the way you say it, fought for and died for. 
You said that to your nine-year-old? 
Okay. 
Absolutely. 
He's a big history buff, too. 
So I think he really enjoyed the experience of going in there. 
They looked through the rolls. 
We get the ballot. 
I showed him how everything works. 
And we chose, you know, the candidates for whom we wanted to vote. 
And then we got down to the areas in the ballots where we're voting for justices of the Supreme Court and justices of the Civil Court. 
And there was only one candidate. 
Let's say where there were three candidates and you had to choose three. 
Yeah. 
Where there was one candidate for the Civil Court and you have to choose one. 
And it's just this exercise and stupidity. 
I hate the idea of only having one candidate. 
I agree. 
I skipped all of those. 
Well, what I do for them is I write in candidates to oppose them. 
And they're mostly my dogs. 
Dogs that are both living and dead. 
And so I said to my son, all right, so, all right, let's do, you know, Winston, Julia, you know, all of our dogs' names that we wrote in for all of these. 
And then he looked at me and said, Daddy, are you sure that this is legal? 
I was about to ask you the same question. 
Okay. 
I'm glad I think like a nine-year-old. 
But basically, yeah, you know, you're writing in fake names pretty much. 
I don't know. 
It sounds like it's kind of a... 
You can vote for whomever you want to vote. 
I guess you can. 
I guess you can. 
But, you know, you bring up a very good point, though. 
Those judges, not only is there only one choice, but they represent Democrats, Republicans, conservatives, and working families. 
They're all four. 
What is the point of even running? 
I don't get that. 
So there's no reason in the world for me to select any of them. 
I don't write in names because I just have this suspicion if I write in a name, it's going to somehow get flagged and put aside and counted later. 
And I don't really have any names to give anyway. 
Well, I feel like I may have given you some ideas for the next election cycle, Emmanuel. 
But the other thing that was interesting to my son was that when we finished filling out the ballot and we went over to put it into the ballot scanner, I had told him, I said, look, you know, this is a voter verified paper record that we have in our hand right here. 
We're going to put it into the system. 
It's going to scan it. 
And all those choices that we made, all those bubbles that we filled in, those are going to be turned into some kind of electronic tabulation. 
But let's say there's some tampering with the machine or we don't know what happened or there's a memory problem, the hard drive fails, whatever. 
At least we still have this paper ballot. 
That's why it's called a voter verified paper ballot, because if something happens to the election, we can always go back to the paper trail. 
And that's different from these direct recording electronic systems that other states have. 
And by this time, a small crowd had gathered around Alex as he continued his lecture. 
Well, one of the electoral workers was listening to me, you know, lecture my son on the merits and demerits of various voting systems. 
And at the end of this lecture, we were talking about the direct recording electronic system that doesn't have some kind of voter verified record. 
So if there's tampering, how do you audit that system? 
And Sasha said, well, that seems really unsafe. 
And I said, well, you're absolutely right. 
And people have actually filed lawsuits claiming that this is an equal protection issue under the 14th Amendment. 
But this voter, this ballot poll worker person came over and said, that was absolutely amazing. 
He said, you know, can we just adopt you for the rest of the night? 
You can lecture him. 
I said, no, I have to go. 
I've got things to do. 
But it was fun. 
I really enjoyed it. 
It was a great experience for my son. 
And where we vote in the West Village, it's extraordinarily diverse. 
It's in one of the LGBT centers. 
And everybody, I felt like, was happy and great to be out and voting. 
And no Oath Keepers watching what you did. 
Not that I was aware of. 
That's tremendous. 
Rob, go ahead. 
Well, we went to vote in Queens. 
And it was, I think, really well populated, considering it was a midterm election. 
So, you know, lots of people. 
But the staff, the poll workers were on point, getting everyone through very quickly. 
The interesting thing from a tech perspective is we all got our I voted pens. 
You get pens? 
I don't even get stickers. 
I got pens and stickers. 
No, they never. 
My voting place never has stickers. 
They even said that to me yesterday. 
Let alone pens. 
I didn't even know there were pens. 
But what's interesting about these is that historically, since I've begun voting, you would sign your name in ink in a book that they have with everyone's names and addresses in the area. 
But that is no longer. 
You no longer sign a physical book. 
You're signing an iPad now. 
Yeah, I did that. 
So these pens have a touchscreen nipple on the end. 
So you can use them on the touchscreen to sign your name. 
And that's new. 
So you use the stylus part to sign the iPad. 
And then you use the pen part to vote. 
And it's very exciting. 
And there's enough that everybody can have their own because, you know, pandemic. 
The interesting thing, we vote at a school, in the cafeteria, in the basement. 
So we got flashbacks just everywhere. 
And we got up to our precinct table. 
And interestingly enough, there was a line at the next precinct table over. 
Ten people were waiting at the precinct table next to ours. 
But we got right up there. 
And she said, I'm so sorry. 
The signal down here is really bad. 
So it's just going to take a second for the whole thing to reset. 
She showed me the moving. 
I said, we're in the basement. 
It's fine. 
We're totally fine. 
But yeah, we have pens. 
We got stickers. 
I was voter 364 at my particular scanner. 
Wow. 
I was voter 599. 
I was in a gym in an elementary school. 
And I said to Kyle, who I brought with me, not to watch over what I was voting for, but just so he could be a part of the New York process. 
But basically, it's the most time I spent in a gym in years because I was there for a half hour just waiting in line. 
I noticed that there are so many baskets for basketball in a typical gym. 
There were eight of them. 
And I just wonder, why do you need so many baskets? 
You know, it's like this one sport. 
They really invest in that sport, in gymnasiums. 
It's interesting. 
So that's what I noticed. 
Did anyone else have any interesting experiences? 
Kyle, no, you vote by mail in Washington State. 
And Washington has this great system where they will mail you anywhere. 
And it works 100% mail-in. 
This is the model, I think, for the rest of us. 
Yeah, it's traditionally called absentee or all-mail voting, mail-in, whatever it is. 
And then, of course, for a couple of years, they required postage. 
Now there's no postage necessary. 
Oh, wow. 
So there's certain little changes and accommodations that have been made over the years. 
But you don't get a sticker either, though. 
You get a virtual sticker. 
I don't even get that. 
Yeah. 
And, yeah, you can check things. 
And it's a very interesting process. 
And I just noted that they had the tablets in the polling center that we visited. 
And so things were sort of a little bit futuristic. 
And I used one of those pens, but they didn't say I could keep it. 
So, Gila, then we're going to ask Weldon for his experience. 
So, one non-tech thing that I noticed, they had - oh, and thank you, by the way, for retweeting us from the 2600 account, our picture with our stickers. 
Right next to that was a bulletin board with student work pinned up on it. 
And it looked like these kids had had to write papers for gym class about who their favorite athletes were. 
I actually got angry in the high school because one child had written a little essay explaining that his favorite athlete was Kyrie Irving because he has - oh, it's about to get better. 
Because, well, he has the courage of his convictions and was such a good player that they had to make a COVID exemption for him. 
And I hope to God that this paper was not written in the last week or so. 
Oh, boy. 
And it baffles me that they didn't take it down. 
We only have two minutes left. 
Weldon, anything happen to you in your polling place? 
Well, like Kyle, in Washington, D.C., we have all mail-in - every registered voter gets a mail-in ballot now. 
They mail the stickers to you as part of your ballot. 
And the nice thing here in D.C. is that you get text messages as your ballot is moving its way through the system. 
Wow. 
So once it's accepted by the Postal Service, once it makes it to the counting and all that, there's a lot of integrity and transparency in the system here. 
And it is something that the fringe social media networks, they hate. 
They hate the mail-in. 
They hate the drop boxes. 
They hate all that stuff because they know that it's making it easier for people to vote. 
And you vote in Washington, D.C., you said? 
That's right. 
So you don't get a senator. 
You don't get representation. 
No, no. 
Yeah, we don't get any of that. 
We vote for a mayor. 
We, you know, council member. 
But, yeah, all of the actual power, you know, taxation without representation, that's our motto here. 
Wow. 
Well, maybe someday that will be fixed. 
I know we keep talking about it, but it never seems to actually go anywhere. 
But it's interesting to hear that particular experience. 
You can write to us here at offthehook. 
O-T-H at 2600.com is our email address. 
And, of course, we will be going to Overtime in just a few minutes over on YouTube. 
You get there by going to youtube.com slash channel 2600 or go to 2600.com and click on the link on top of the page. 
And you'll be connected to our YouTube, I guess, podcast called Overtime. 
We're on the air for about an hour or so there. 
And you can call us. 
You can call us and share your experiences about what you did on Election Day or really just about anything else. 
We haven't talked about Twitter at all. 
I wanted to talk about Twitter and what Elon Musk is doing and all that. 
We're going to talk about all that in the next hour over on YouTube. 
And you can participate as listeners. 
Weldon, I want to thank you so much for joining us tonight. 
Hopefully, you can join us on Overtime as well. 
Weldon Chang is basically an expert on disinformation and how things can go horribly wrong with elections. 
And I'm sure we'll be calling on you many times in the future. 
Thanks for having me on. 
All right. 
We will see you soon over on Overtime, again, starting at 8 o'clock. 
And hopefully, we'll be back again next week on WBAI for Off the Hook. 
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That's going to do it for Off the Hook. 
We'll see you next week.