SPEAKER_04: Where were you on Thursday? Were you up here or in LA?
SPEAKER_06: I was at home. I got, I got family to do.
SPEAKER_05: Well, family, have you met them? What were they like?
SPEAKER_01: Are they everything you expected?
SPEAKER_06: I had to meet, I had to meet the new kid. He's 19.
SPEAKER_01: Hey, everybody, welcome to another episode of the All In podcast. Yes, we made it to episode 47 in three episodes. It'll be episode 50.
SPEAKER_05: No plans to do anything other than just try to record this every week for you, the loyal audience with us again, coming off an amazing event, a live event on Monday, Tuesday, and I don't know if it went into Wednesday, but David freebergs the production board event, we recorded our first live, all in, it seems like it went well on an AV basis, and the audience seemed to enjoy it. What was the feedback? freeburg? So, you know, half the room were scientists, and they'd never heard of this podcast before and they were like, what the hell did we just show up to?
SPEAKER_02: It's like these four guys on stage drinking this wine talking about politics for an hour to have, but And dropping F bombs.
SPEAKER_06: And dropping F bombs. And there was a little bit of kind of seasoning we had to do afterwards to get everyone kind of comfortable. But actually, it was it was fantastic. People loved it. You guys are the highlight. And I thought it was super fun to do that in person. I don't know what you guys thought. It's cool energy. It's super cool. It was great.
SPEAKER_04: And with us again, of course, David sacks the rain man himself and the dictator, Jamal poly hop at Tia, what did you think? sacks of the live event format? Obviously, half the audience were fans of the show half warrant, which is a better than putting people randomly into it. But I'm glad that the people who are not fans of or have never heard of the show didn't walk out. We didn't have walkout. So that was good.
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, I mean, look, we were slightly more palatable to them than Andrew dice clay or something like that.
SPEAKER_06: But
SPEAKER_01: it was a good change. Doc, the production board. When I smell something, you think that's farted. It was a good change of pace. I mean, I think some people commented that the lighting, the production values weren't that great. They seem fine to us at the time. But so we're gonna have to do better on that next time. And other people speculated that we took we're easier on each other in terms of debating topics because we were in person. I didn't feel that while sitting there. But you guys tell me if you think that was true.
SPEAKER_00:
SPEAKER_06: I thought we got a better read on each other in person. And we had more dialogue than we normally would over zoom. I don't know if you guys felt the same.
SPEAKER_02: I think so. And then I kind of like the evening podcast, the glass of wine, just like a little nice evening, the cards after it could be a thing. It could definitely definitely make Harlan 2012 a regular part of taping this pod. The problem is we taped too early on a Friday, right? If we could change the taping to like happy hour or something like that, it might work better.
SPEAKER_06: Oh my god, that Harlan 2012. What is that's a good bottle of wine. Oh, even J Cal knows that look at him pretending that one pretending to be. It's the one with the round label. I know it. I know I'm looking at it right now. Oh my lord, some of those go up in value. Those things are as looks like as high as you guys think we could do a pod where we like record after playing poker for two hours. So you're two hours into the wine and poker and then you record wouldn't work. No way. No way.
SPEAKER_05: Maybe two. I think the wine yes. Okay. Yeah. I think for a first time, the audio was great. So that's, you know, job one is to get the consumption happens that way. To do like a line of light in Friedberg's face. For all commenting, you know, it was my going, I actually got up and fixed that like no one else of the crew. You know, the dozens of people working there. Did anything about it. My wife stood up and fixed the curtain. Dude without Al, you would be nowhere. Be nowhere in life.
SPEAKER_04: She's she's a great person. What was the empty seat about between me and her moth? I mean, there was an that was if we wanted to bring up a guest. So unfortunately, all the people's names that were written on that piece of paper are quote unquote besties did not show up on time. Yeah, right. Exactly. No bill girl. They all showed up at like nine o'clock. Yeah, there's only a reason for that. Yeah. Sky date in the back channel was sky date and then somebody else waited outside because they knew they might get pulled up.
SPEAKER_06:
SPEAKER_05: I got that from I got you're gonna have to beep his name out. Yeah, it's your first time saying his name on the sky. No, he's not gonna want his name mentioned. Are you kidding me? He's been on my pockets. But in this week, it serves as well. Yes. 10 guests. That was the last press appearance he did was 11 years ago. He literally does not I mean, everybody knows who sky DNS earthling founder, bingo founder, everybody of our generation, but it's amazing how, you know, quickly, the tech, the tech crowd, you know, moves on. So true. There's a there's a
SPEAKER_06: famous story actually, when, when Mark Andreessen met Mark Zuckerberg for the first time, Zuckerberg didn't know that, you know, Andreessen had created Netscape. I'm not even sure he knew what Netscape was. I think he said something like I created mosaic and he's like, what's that? Oh, right. Yeah, yeah. So that's like, yeah, look in the tech industry, we're all concerned about the future. No one pays a lot of attention to history. Do you feel like generations, entrepreneurs and investors at this point?
SPEAKER_02: Well, some of us are still currently creating things freebird. I can't mention the name of the app as per our anti promotion rules. But I have recently launched a new product. You could download my app.
SPEAKER_01: But there's not there's not a lot of there's not a lot of kind of long careers in Silicon Valley, right? A lot of people kind of have creating products. Well, you just kind of if you have asymmetric success, right, you have these kind of like big bursts, and then, you know, it's a it's a different kind of life, you don't go kind of push again for the next hard entrepreneurial project, typically not everyone, obviously. And then you end up seeing like a generation kind of die out, like, you know, web 1.0 and web 2.0. And there's a lot of different things that you could do with that.
SPEAKER_02: And then you know, you don't see them again. You also see the right percent of them.
SPEAKER_06: I think I think there's a lot of truth to that, that you and I worry about this with my own kids that I think deprivation creates motivation, especially to do something as hard as create a company.
SPEAKER_04: Create a show.
SPEAKER_01: Welcome to David. No, no, I mean, look, I think, you know,
SPEAKER_06: you forgot me to my 10th least fornication. You know, beep beep, beep, our friend beep, has a has a saying that that sort of became famous when Elon then repeated it, which is that creating a startup is like steering into the abyss and eating glass.
SPEAKER_06: And it is really hard to create these companies when they're successful. And so not a lot of people want to do it again, once they've reached that point. And, you know, it does take a certain amount of, like I said, deprivation, you know, to do this, which is why giving everybody the participation trophy and trying to make people's lives as easy as possible. I mean, yes, you want, you don't want to deprive people on the one hand, but on the other hand, it does often lead to two good things. Totally agree. We're seeing a bit of a dry run of this. If people believe that, you know, they have UBI, or the government's going to take care of them, I would be fine with UBI, you know, everybody getting a little bit of money. And if it was a safety net, the only thing I worry about is it seems like a little bit of money, if you're clever means you could never work. And then what happens to those people in society, right? Like,
SPEAKER_05: well, I just I think it's anti compassionate, because what you do is you kick out the bottom rungs of the ladder of economic success when you basically pay able bodied people not to work. I mean, they need those entry level jobs that may not pay much better than the UBI are an important stepping stone to where they get to next in their career. And I think it's it's demotivating. And we've already seen in California, we've been UBI, UBI is not going to pay you to go to college, but Amazon will, as an example. So you're absolutely right. There's a there's a lot of people who are going to be able to pay you to go to college, and you're going to be able to do that. And you're going to be able to do that. And you're going to be able to do that. And you're going to be able to do that. And you're going to be able to do that. And you're going to be able to do that. And you're going to be able
SPEAKER_04: to do that with the GI Bill. You know, there's all kinds of examples where in history reviews, you know, entry level jobs is exactly as they're meant to be an entry level opportunity and on ramp to work your ass off and to make something of yourself. If you if you all of a sudden, let people opt out of it, then it's going to be a very it's getting what they're not going to realize is by the time they get old enough where they will want to have some kind of purpose. It'll be too late, because then activating yourself in your 40s and 50s to essentially start your life is really hard. I'll give you an example of this. Like, you know, right now I you know, I would say I'm like fairly fluent in Italian. That's pretty impressive. But I but I started taking Italian lessons. And, you know, the last four or 5% of a language is brutalizing, right? Because it's like it's every little grammatical thing, you want to get it completely right. And it's very demotivating for me sometimes, because I'm like, God, why the fuck am I doing this? I've got to get it. I don't have to I can get it by just speak it. But I've made a commitment to myself. Same thing in biotech, you know, I got introduced to it by Friedberg and, and obviously not and, and now I'm trying to learn and it is a it is a grind. And I think it's so easy to quit. Now, you take that to the extreme and some random person that doesn't have necessarily the ability to fall back on the success that you know, we've all collectively had, and you have to start from scratch. My God, it's it's really tough. It's really tough.
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, at our age, it is just hard. Kids are screaming in the background. You're trying to manage all this stuff. It's impossible. So you think it's easier when you're in your early 20s? Yeah, be careful what you wish for. But why is it easier when you're in your early 20s? Isn't it always a grind to learn something and push yourself to develop yourself? I mean, well, you have nothing. So the the various you have some motivation to get something right? Because you're gonna climb up the mountain because like staying at the shore means you can go wash out to sea or something. Tides hours and hours and hours working.
SPEAKER_04: hours and hours and hours in my 20s and 30s. Like it was like 10 to 16 hour days. I couldn't leave the office is that different today? Yeah, I don't work in the same way I did before because I, I'm trying to do a different job. But I've earned the right and I now put myself under pressure to do it differently because I have a different job to do right. But when I was in my 20s and I was a pm, you know, grinding out a product or you know, writing a feature spec or, you know, building a model and trying to put all these
SPEAKER_04: things together. It was so much thankless work, I learned a ton. And it was all worth it. Right about to ask you, do you regret it or not? No, look, this is the thing about this is the thing about work life balance that the people are always complaining about people are working too hard to realize is that, yeah, you want to think about work life balance, but but across your entire life. I mean, one of the things you'll do in your 20s is work much harder to set yourself up to where you want to be in your 50s. And so
SPEAKER_06: tomorrow doesn't have to work as hard in his 50s because he worked much harder earlier in his life. And now he's got the skill set where he can delegate more. So yeah, I think we're, you know, we really shortchange people when we tell them as young people that they don't need to work hard, or in the extreme case of UBI that we're actually paying people not to work. That's not developing the right habits, they're going to make them successful later on. And in fairness, though, if you look at minimum wage, and you look at entry level jobs, many of them paid too little historically, these companies like McDonald's, I know it's a free market, but we're paying very little we're talking $70 an hour, and no benefits. And yeah, this is kind of unnecessary greed in my mind. And I think that's what my job was a bird over made for 55 an hour.
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, I made $4 and 25 cents an hour in 1996. That's my first job cleaning cleaning a pool. Yeah. 250 for me when I worked at Fordham's. Fordham's computer center, I think it was for two, no, three, $3 that had gone to but when I started in the workforce in 88 it was 250 was the minimum wage was the minimum wage where you are.
SPEAKER_05: What was it like in the 19th century? It sucks. When I when I when I was working at when you killed the fields. No, I remember when I was in college, I worked at a bar. And I mean, I was there drinking so much. I finally was like, why don't you just give me a job. So I might as well make some money while I'm sitting here. And they pay me seven bucks an hour. That's what I did my senior year.
SPEAKER_06: Pretty good. Yeah, pretty good. That's a pretty well paying job. Seven bucks. One of the other problems. But one of the other problems of UBI that Larry Summers has been he's the former US Secretary of Treasury has been on the record about is the inflationary effect. So you know, they're pretty smart economists like himself who kind of highlight that as you give people everyone, you know, $10,000 a year, first of all, it's gonna cost $10 trillion, whatever the estimate is, to kind of fund that sort of program. And, you know, suddenly the cost of a burger is $10,000 a year.
SPEAKER_02: And so the market goes from 49 cents to 99 cents or 99 cents to $1.99 because there's, you know, much greater demand on that kind of area of the economy for consumption. And so you see an inflationary effect, which trickles its way through. And so what ends up happening ultimately, by pumping more of that money in for free without productivity coming out of it, you effectively see inflation. And so it wipes itself out. So this is kind of one economic theory on UBI is that it can actually just end up being within 10 years, completely useless and pointless, because then the basic cost of living climbs so much that you need to raise the UBI again to give people basic living expenses. And so it becomes this kind of nasty runaway effect. So it's not really sustainable is one argument that's made against UBI. But, you know, obviously different point than what we were kind of saying a moment ago. I think people don't know what they want. And if they get it, they're going to... I think of a form of UBI does make sense. And I do think we need to subsidize folks. But, you know, I think maybe it's probably just a fancier word for welfare. I grew up on welfare. And I can tell you that I don't think our family benefited from it. Psychologically, we benefited from it socioeconomically, because we needed it to not starve. But the knock on effects of, you know, when you're in that loop of, you know, the
SPEAKER_04: loop of, again, being in your 30s, 40s, and 50s, not finding purpose, you know, which my parents had to struggle through coping, you cope with alcohol, you cope with depression, the knock on effects to your kids, I don't think we want to see that. And so when people think about UBI, I think they need to understand that, you know, we've run a long experiment in this thing called welfare, you know what welfare does. A lot of us have felt it. And there needs to be a better way. Because if you just let people opt out, I don't think you really understand what happens over long durations of time when you're not doing anything.
SPEAKER_05: It's getting really weird right now. Right? I mean, the fact that restaurants are closing that have customers, but they can't operate. And so we're starting to actually see the effect of it. You know, in some service, open job stat right now. It's like 9 million open jobs in the US.
SPEAKER_02: It's been bouncing from eight to 10 million. Yeah,
SPEAKER_05: there's more unfilled jobs and there are unemployed people, right? Yeah. Or unemployment, unemployment is high, but unfilled jobs is even higher. Yeah, we've somehow moved away from a political consensus we had in the 1990s that I think made a lot of sense when Bill Clinton passed welfare reform with, you know, a lot of Republican support is, look, we need to have a welfare system, we need to take care of people who either can't work or can't find a job for a good reason.
SPEAKER_06: There needs to be a social safety net. But if you're an able bodied person, who can find a job, you should be working and, and that that that welfare reform they passed in the 90s did lead to a lot of people finding meaningful work, which I think resulted in happier lives. And somehow we've moved off that political consensus that everyone kind of agrees, yes, social safety net, but but able by people should work to now we have this elite. It's really an elite ideology of UBI, which is look, we're going to pay people not to work. Which I just think is sort of like, unamerican.
SPEAKER_05: And isn't it also like a little insulting being like, you know what, don't even bother working. You're making too little money. We'll just give you money. It's Yeah, it's like,
SPEAKER_06: a lot of people's dignity. I'll be honest, like, I wouldn't want to take it. I would rather go out and be I was a waiter or busboy. I'll go be a waiter or busboy and make enough money to pay my rent. And yeah, one of the things you wanted for free. Yeah, one of the things you hear is, well, your job's gonna be replaced by a machine anyway. It's not productive work. So why don't we just pay you to sit back
SPEAKER_06: and you know, take yourself out of the economy? Well, I like you said, the unfilled jobs number shows that even with all the automation that's happening in the economy, and that's a trend that will continue. There's still a need for, you know, human labor, and I think there always will be. And, and it's a little bit too soon to be throwing in the towel on the idea that entire groups of people can't productively work. Does everybody believe able bodied people should work and not get free money? It's not that it should or shouldn't. I think the question is, what's what's in folks is best interests. Well, that's what I mean. Yeah. Yeah. So is it in best people's best interests are phrases where you're saying is in people's best interests. I think the I think the point where we're going to go wrong is when we couple UBI with actually having to work or not work. And I don't think that's the right idea.
SPEAKER_04: I think we have to do a decent job of letting people find the things that they want to work on, because everybody can find something that they want to work on. And that shouldn't exclude you or disqualify you from getting UBI so that all that does is then just raise the general standard of living. I think that idea is better. The problem is when we talk about UBI, what we are talking about it is in the exact way, Jason, that you said, which is letting people opt out. So, I think that's the point. E.aaa, that's the way it is. I think that's the way that you say it, like, letting people opt out. So, I mean, think about how privileged that is to, there are places in the world where there's not enough jobs and people are like, wait a second, an American has to be fulfilled with their job selection. In addition to getting a job, it just seems like the height of entitlements. Like, sometimes you just need a job because you need money to pay your bills, right. But you're saying if you get product, if you get job, job candidate, you know, citizen fit, the uptick will be better. UBI is a benefit. It's like
SPEAKER_04: healthcare. We don't we don't make a decision about universal healthcare based on who does or does not have a job. And so UBI should basically be about evening, you know, the bottom few rungs of economic viability so that everybody has a reasonable ability to have a decent life. That's a nice idea. I think that makes a ton of sense. But coupling it to having to work or not work, where some people say, Oh, great, I can take this money and not work is the wrong way to figure this out.
SPEAKER_06: We're talking politics, why don't we shift to the recall?
SPEAKER_05: Yeah. All right. So post more on the Newsome recall. He Secretary of State says the recall cost over 300 million, obviously. Gavin Newsome one in hold on the 300 million point. Let me just take care of this
SPEAKER_06: real quick. Okay, because I saw this all day on social media. You know what? Yeah, it did cost $300 million. But all the people crying about that clutching their pearls about the 300 million never said a word about the 30 billion, the hundred times greater EDD fraud that was perpetrated by our state and by our one party rule of the state and the recall process and the ballot initiative process is the only check we have on elected leadership in a one party state. So listen, I'll start clutching my pearls about the 300 million when they start talking about the 30 billion. But look, let's shift to the result of this. What are you? Wait, what are you referring to? I'm not sure I
SPEAKER_02: know enough about this is this is the this is the EDD fraud
SPEAKER_06: where 30 billion basically went to anyone claiming unemployment insurance, and 30 billion and fake claims were paid out that process was poorly administered. So I mean, people were just creating fake addresses, they were just sending in claims from anywhere and, and 30 billion went out. So So look, I mean, that's a kind of incompetence and corruption that we have in California. So in fact, your point is that because it's a
SPEAKER_02: single party state where the state where the democrats have supermajority in the assembly, and obviously have the governorship, that the only mechanism for the minority, the Republican Party is to kind of run recall, not even not the Republicans, just citizens. I mean, look, let's remember how
SPEAKER_06: the how the recall and the ballot initiative came to be that process. It actually came from progressives early in the 20th century, who said, we need the people to have some direct democracy because special interests might usurp the the electoral process and right and get control over all these elected representatives. And frankly, that's exactly what's happened in the state of California. But the people who you know, have that power are progressives, and so they want to amend or abolish the recall process. But so look, I think 300 million once every 20 years to put the fear of God into politicians is not is money well spent, in my view, even if this particular recall wasn't close, there are much greater examples of waste, fraud and abuse that the people complaining about this should be wanting to tackle. And I'll believe them about the 300 million when they complain about the 30 billion. But look, this was a total shellacking for supporters of the recall. And I do think that whenever you suffer defeat, I think it's important for you to think about what went wrong, you know, and certainly as a supporter of the recall, I think it's worth doing a post mortem. I think, you know, any political party when it loses needs to do some some introspection. And so what went wrong? Well, I think a couple of things. Okay. So if you if you go back to the polls, a month ago, or so it was a dead heat. We even had that shock poll that Newsom was down by 10. And then what happened? Well, the Republican Party basically consolidated their support around Larry Elder prior to that you kind of had this amorphous blob of five different candidates who didn't have a lot of name recognition, they were pretty moderate. They were a hard target for Newsom to shoot at. Once the Republican Party consolidated around elder provided a very convenient and rich target for for Newsom to shoot at. And so you'd have to say that, tactically, the Republican Party made it made a mistake there. Now I understand why they did it. I mean, Elder is smart, he's charismatic. He appeals to that base. But he's not the moderate candidate that like a Schwarzenegger was or that I, you know, Chumath, I wanted you to run. And so Falconer was sort of that candidate. And so you kind of had a choice on the republican side between a moderate candidate who was a very charismatic, which was Falconer, and a very charismatic candidate who wasn't moderate, and it really played into Newsom's hands. And he was then able to nationalize the election in the wake of that. So he branded, I think somewhat unfairly, he branded elder as a as a Trumper, and he ran against Trump ism. And even Biden came to California to denounce elder as a Trump clone, which look, there's a lot of things you may not like about Larry Elder, I don't think it's fair to call him a Trump clone. But that's what they did. And so they demonized him. And so if you look at the issues that Newsom ran on, they were all national issues. He was talking about what was happening in Texas with abortion. And he talked about COVID. We should come back to that one. So I think that is a state issue, too, we should talk about it. But he started talking about issues that were really more national issues. And so the the recall moved away from the issues that had galvanized supporters in the poll, just one polls just one month ago, which were homelessness, crime, schools, and school closures and lockdowns. And Newsom was able to very effectively change the subject.
SPEAKER_05: Well, you got everybody back to school, right? If people didn't go back to school, could have been a different result. I think the recall is very helpful in that in that I mean,
SPEAKER_06: if you remember, do you think policy has shifted because of the recall sacks at
SPEAKER_02: this point? And doesn't that ultimately kind of benefit the issues you were most kind of concerned about? Look, the 300 million was worth it just to get businesses open
SPEAKER_06: and just send a message to the the education unions that they could not keep schools closed for another year. I, you know, if you look at when Newsom relaxed the lockdowns, it was at every step of the recall process when when the recall finally got enough signatures to get put over the top, he all of a sudden started liberalizing the lockdowns, he knew they were very unpopular, and he gave up on that issue. And he got the education unions to stand down on the issue of school reopenings, I think because he was facing this recall. So look, I think that the recall was worth it just just for that. But
SPEAKER_02: do you think things could have been different if there was a fringe candidate like I don't know, Sri Lankan billionaire that was, you know, not kind of this this hardened republican that they could charge. I blame I blame Chamath for this. I think I think a candidate
SPEAKER_06: like Chamath could have won. Okay, a democratic centrist, obviously, I'm joking. I don't I don't blame you, Chamath. I understand why you wouldn't want to run but but I'm saying a candidate like Chamath, which is who I supported, or a candidate like Schwarzenegger. Remember, Schwarzenegger when he ran in the early 2000s, he was pro choice, and pro game gay marriage at a time that gay marriage was not very popular. He was socially very liberal. You have to take those issues off the table. Because California is not going to vote. He was pro life can I think he was pro gay marriage before the Clintons? Yes, he was
SPEAKER_06: very early on the on that he was he was socially very liberal and very tolerant. And you got to be in California.
SPEAKER_02: In general, do you think the unions in California, you know, which is an issue that's been talked about a lot on this pod have been weakened because of the recall and the voice that kind of rose up during this period of time? Or do you think that nothing's really changed kind of long term?
SPEAKER_06: I think it's I think it's a long term project for to get the public to see that the education unions are like any special interest, which is that they will pursue their interest at the expense of the general interest, and they have to be controlled, again, like any special interest, I think, because teachers are rightfully very popular. People haven't realized what the union bosses are up to. I think that that has been exposed because of COVID. And the school closures to a much, much greater degree. And I think that's that's a good thing.
SPEAKER_05: Well, I mean, if you look at the recalls happening locally, too, with Chesa Boon and the San Francisco school board, it seems like now the citizenship is saying, Oh, we do have a recourse. It's called doing a recall and stating our opinion very strongly and then attempting to removing people. And yeah, I think that does change people's behavior. You can be sure Chesa Boon is thinking about outcomes a little bit more now. The implications of this recall, I think are really important. And
SPEAKER_04: I think it plays out in who runs in two years when Newsom is up for reelection. And absolutely, it'll change who runs on the Democratic side in four years. Assuming Newsom wins, you have
SPEAKER_04: to remember, there have been a massive degradation in the quality of life, the most populous state in America, which represents the fifth largest economy in the world, under one party control. Right, so there is not a single law that cannot be passed. There's not a single program that cannot be implemented. There's not a single idea that can't be pursued. Yet, we have had an absolute decline in quality of life under that rubric. And so when people really come to terms with that, that's, I think, when there's a sea change, and I hope the sea change is not necessarily a Democrat or Republican thing. It's back to centrism. And I think it's checking special interests, exactly what Sacks says, and realizing that just because you use a different name, like union or something else, you're still a special interest. And you need to actually be focused on the interests of the general public, our kids, the environment, water quality. And if you can't walk into a state where everybody up another ticket is on your same team and get shit done. It's a really tough report card.
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, I'm just super uninspired by these guys. Like, where is their audacious plan for California? Has anybody stated like an audacious like, here's what this state? No, I mean, here's what's possible. We could be the best economy with the greatest education system. And we can build a million units of housing. Should that be the role of the state government? I mean,
SPEAKER_02: like, you know, should or should they're in competition? They
SPEAKER_05: are they're in competition with with Florida and Texas, they have to compete for business and citizens. And if it's not done
SPEAKER_04: at the state level, we're gonna have to rely on the federal level. And we know that that doesn't work because we have 50 states that are increasingly more diverse every day. So the whole idea with the Constitution and the founding fathers was like, we have this incredible startup. But over time, I think we've decided that, you know, this startup is an umbrella organization of 50 other startups, to hold in company, and there'll be these small little, you know, rules and differences amongst these 50 states. And that'll allow us collectively to thrive. So you put out a tweet. Oh, sorry, go ahead. No, I just want to I think we want to believe in that idea. Like, there is no Savior. You know what I mean? There's no Savior for 350 people. And there's barely a Savior for the 60 million people in California. But it's not going to happen by just throwing your hands up in the air and expecting some president to come around because that's just too hard of a problem. Each state has to act like the citizens and be, you
SPEAKER_05: know, just rugged individualists who are self sustaining, and resourceful. And this state is not self sustaining, resourceful or ambitious. And it's falling behind Texas and Florida and other competitors. So sexy. We're in a competition, you're
SPEAKER_02: you put out a tweet saying often in Miami, are you? Are you in the active transition phase? Or where are you at? Well, I don't know. I mean, we'll see. I think the trend
SPEAKER_06: line in California is not good. I think what you've already seen in the days since the recall is that Gavin Newsom has Nate now laid out the strategy for all progressives in like even from San Francisco to anywhere in the country of how they're going to run. And what they're going to do is this, that no matter how bad things get in terms of crime, in terms of homelessness, in terms of quality of schools, in cities and states that they have complete control over, they're always going to campaign against Trump and Trump ism. And they're going to demonize and other rise, whoever the candidate is on the other side, as a Trump is whether they are not, that's going to be the playbook from now on. And this is where I think the attacks against Larry Elder were very unfair is before he even had a chance to define what he was about. You have publications, like the LA Times calling him the new face of white supremacy. I mean, it was it was like unbelievable, but black clansmen. Yeah, they basically tried to make him out to be a black witch. Look, he is not okay. Larry elders are libertarian. Maybe his politics are not in the mainstream in California, but he's not a black landsman. But look, this is what the progressive playbook is going to be for the next two decades, which is to demonize anybody who stands up to them as basically being a Trumpist and and the irony of it will be that they will have total control over over the problems that people really can care about crimes, schools, homelessness, and, and somehow, you know, they would news improved is that you can whip people up into you can stir their their partisan political tribalism when you do that, right. That's why it's effective is he gets people to see blue and, and he gets a free pass on these issues that just a month ago, people were very dissatisfied with. Now, I do think it's very, very important that our Republican Party not play into this and there was a very good editorial. I think there's to say how come the
SPEAKER_05: Republicans are still pursuing a Trumpian you know, string up there. They're stupid. They are. They're so dumb. It's a really
SPEAKER_06: stupid strategy. And there's two things they got to fix right away. Okay, so number one, Rich Lowry from Nashville view had a police a piece in Politico where he said that this election, the stolen election myth has become an albatross for Republicans, they have to get off that. I think it's ridiculous. That's going to bring him down to and the other thing is this anti vac stuff. I mean, you know, voters completely forgot about the way that Newsome locked down this state and then broke his own lockdowns. Why? Because he's pro vax even to the point of vaccine mandates, whereas the republicans were not and frankly, I think Jamaat your instincts on this were were right on which is people given a choice between vaccine mandates or an anti vax position, they will take the the the vax mandates.
SPEAKER_04: Speaking of instincts, you want to go to the this weekend Facebook's dumpster fire? Sure. Sure. So I mean, where to begin?
SPEAKER_05: This all started on Tuesday, 2016 at the Graduate School of
SPEAKER_04: Business. Okay, well, we'll get to your victory lab in a moment.
SPEAKER_05: But just to queue up this past week on Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Facebook conducted in depth research on the impacts of Instagram on children's mental health from 2018 to 2020. But they never made the research public, nor did they make it available to academics or lawmakers who requested it. You will remember that last year or earlier this year, Facebook started floating the idea of Instagram for kids. So in addition to having this research which they didn't share, and here is the slide from a presentation, it seems like the Wall Street Journal has somebody inside of Facebook giving them everything literally. But here is the quote from presentation slides from 2019 internal Facebook presentation slides. We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls, teens blame Instagram for increases in the rate of anxiety and depression. This reaction was unprompted and consistent across all groups according to the Wall Street Journal. And Instagram obviously is a juggernaut over a billion monthly active users and over 40% of them are under the age of 22. This is a really interesting issue because we are this is
SPEAKER_04: probably the first example of a broad based public policy public health issue that tech has created not necessarily amplified, right, or exacerbated but actually created and now we're going to have to deal with this. Before I want to do this, how would you define that issue? Well, I think it is a public health issue. If you have a large percentage of a cohort of our population, subject to mental health issues and eating disorders, that's not a good place to be right. I don't think that's what we want as a healthy society in a healthy society. Our daughters, and it's probably by the way, it's probably not more than just our daughters, it's probably our sons and daughters that are going through these issues. The question is, now about, you know, is it really a public health issue? If you know about it, what responsibility do you have to do something? And before I apply, I just want to give you guys a little bit of data and just get your reaction. I actually want to go back to what's called the tobacco master settlement agreement. And the tobacco master settlement agreement was entered in November of 1998. Originally between the four largest US tobacco companies, Philip Morris, RJ Reynolds, Brown and Williamson and Loryard, okay. And the attorney generals of 46 states. And essentially, it was an agreement that basically said, okay, we're going to net all these Medicaid lawsuits together, we're going to hold these folks responsible for the downstream implications of the product that they've been selling our kids, and our, you know, adults population without the proper disclosures, etc, etc, etc. The what happened before this tobacco MSA in big tobacco, though, was there was about eight or 900 private claims that were filed from the mid 50s, all the way to the midnight. David knows all this because he made a movie about this. The reason why I think this is interesting is that whether it happens in the United States or someplace else, when I read that article, I think it
SPEAKER_04: was my immediate thought went to the tobacco MSA because I was like, well, okay, there's a public health issue that may or may not have been covered up cover up, you know, it's definitely may or may not have been covered up, there could be criminal liability, there's probably civil liability. If you're, you know, a mother or father who's lost their kid to an eating disorder or to depression, anxiety, bullying, suicide. And I think like, I think the article in the Wall Street Journal yesterday was about like human trafficking. I mean, these are some gnarly horribly complicated gnarly issues. To me, that's how I can edit the dots. So I just love to
SPEAKER_05: hear. I mean, who's the Jeffrey Weigand in this case? I mean, this is literally the movie The Insider, like, somebody is leaking these documents out. There's a deep inside Facebook. Yeah, well, yeah. And that's what the Brown and Williamson was really about is that somebody had the studies from the 70s of when, correct me if I'm wrong, David, when the tobacco industry knew and did nothing and covered it up, and it was the whistleblower. So do you feel this is exactly analogous? sacks? Or how close to analogous? Are we taking too big of a jump here?
SPEAKER_06: Well, this this idea that social media is as bad for you as cigarettes has been around for several years now. And I've always wondered whether that was a hyperbolic claim. I mean, it can it really be the case that using Facebook is as bad for you as lighting something on fire and sucking its carbonized ash in your lungs. I mean, I just, you know, I Yes, I think there's like a kernel of truth here in terms of yes, it does exacerbate body image issues. But I don't believe that Facebook, or social media created those issues. I mean, these issues existed before. And what Facebook does is connect people in a more intense way than they were connected. And so it might intensify some of the social dynamics that already existed, but I don't know that it created them. And if you're blaming Facebook for this, there's a lot of other places you could blame too. I mean, why don't we be Why don't we blame the Met gala? You know, like, you know, look at all those people had actually blame on the fashion industry for making
SPEAKER_05: unrealistic body types and the magazines and they saw my kids
SPEAKER_06: can't wear the full body stocking to school that Kim Kardashian wore to the Met gala or whatever. I mean, and they're upset about that. So should we ban the Met gala? Or, I mean, let's look at all advertising. I mean, all advertising just about focuses on unrealistically beautiful people. And what about TV and movies? I mean, Hollywood tends to cast people are better looking or even the people reading the news off teleprompters. I mean, so this like body image and self esteem issue is everywhere in our society. And I think what social media does, as it does in so many of these cases is really just hold up a mirror to our society. And it's it's not and yes, there's a lot of bad stuff happening on social media. But that's because there's a lot of bad stuff happening in our society. Well, let me I you know, here's one thing, David, the I, there,
SPEAKER_05: there have been other industries that have influenced this, but I don't think that they were as pernicious and as frequent in their use of as social media, you know, reading a fashion magazine or watching TV, like slightly different than an interactive version of that, that you might use for five hours a day, like TikTok, or Instagram. And I just dropped in an image into the zoom chat there about suicide rates in the United States. And this chart you'll see goes up to 2018. And right around 2006, when we were at 11%, 11 suicides, I think, per 10,000 per 100,000. You'll see from 2006 to 2008, we go from, you know, 10 or 11, basically, suicides per 100,000 Americans all the way up to 14, a 40% increase. So what's your correlates directly with social media becoming part of what we're doing here? But what's your connection to what's that? I mean, is that
SPEAKER_06: among teens? I mean, what is the this is overall suicide rate. So I just think social media and
SPEAKER_05: the anxiety of produce could be actually having it. I'm open minded to that. Can I clear up one thing, Sax, I think that
SPEAKER_04: your argument would be reasonable if the first part of your argument made more sense. And to me, it doesn't. And when you don't think that smoking and looking at your screen for an hour a day are the same. Let me just in from my perspective, explain to you why they are the same, whether or not you're ingesting something into your lungs, or whether or not it's your eyes. At the end of the day, you're still activating physiological pathways, okay, there are specific chemicals that are being created through smoking specific chemicals that are created through how your brain and your mind is reacting. And all of these things when you're bathed in these chemicals for long periods of time, have known deleterious consequences. Some manifests in tumors, which then result in cancer, you die, lung cancer, cigarettes. But what we're learning is some of these things result in long term imbalances of these critical hormones and chemicals you need in your brain to stay healthy. And that results in anxiety or the propensity to overeat or the propensity to then throw stuff up. And so I would be careful about not assuming they're not physiologically the same, I actually think they're more similar than different at a core physiological level. It's just that we're not used to the fact that something that that is equivalent to looking at a screen could actually do that to you. I guess the question is, what's the what's the what's
SPEAKER_02: the threshold for regulatory intervention? If, if someone did this at the scale, let's say there was a social network that was had 100,000 users, and people were actively using the social network every day and having body issues or whatever the you know, the consequences claim might be, we're about to find out, you know, are we going to end up creating kind of a regulatory framework across all of these things. And I think that this goes also to the point of scale, because at the end of the day, if you end up starting a business, and you're not successful, you don't really kind of find yourself in the sort of framing of, well, what are you doing wrong? All of the companies that scale the assumption is they did something wrong in order to get to that scale, you know, roll off both the Saks's former colleague and obviously famed investor at now at Sequoia Capital, said that he always in the only invest in businesses that pursue one of the seven deadly sins, because those are ultimately the things that consumers kind of increment their consumption of, there has to be a seven deadly sin driver, you know, underscoring the success of any business that sells to consumers. And if that is actually true, people aren't making kind of altruistic purchasing and consumption decisions, they're making decisions based on envy and based on greed and based on gluttony. And all of those drivers, we kind of, you know, are effectively chamath kind of related back to these physiological drivers, right? And so like, like, yeah,
SPEAKER_04: no two things can be right, what you said can be right. But I think what also can be right is, are we really willing to bet that now there are not 50 individually ambitious politically ambitious state ags licking their chops reading this stuff, wondering how many kids in their state may have suffered from an eating disorder or anxiety and blame it on one of these apps? Of course, are we convinced that not a single lawsuit will get filed? Are we convinced that there's not going to be any class action? And by the way, that's just the United States. What is somebody that's sitting around a, you know, around a table of politicians desks in, you know, Germany, Belgium, France, Thailand, they're gonna find their issue in this treasure trove of content that's being, you know, continuously drip fed out to the public. I guess my point is that
SPEAKER_02: this is today's issue. And business success, ultimately, over time, and consumer markets will always ultimately be driven by products that have at scale deleterious effects on the consumer market. And those deleterious effects will be a result of some sort of kind of addictive or negative kind of consequence that arises when folks use these things frequently. And the market figures out how to optimize the utilization of products to increase revenue to increase profit. And that's what a free market does. And I'm not saying it's right or wrong. I'm just pointing out that there isn't, in my opinion, something unique here. I mean, you know, Coca Cola, the largest beverage company in the world, they sell 40 grams of sugar and 12 ounces of water. And everyone buys that and they feel great from that. And the sugar creates this addictive problem that we've gotten obesity epidemic, I'm not blaming Coca Cola. But that's the general trend in CPG over the last 50 years, increasing sugar, increasing salt, and the difference is, the difference is that this is not sugar, which is
SPEAKER_04: a generic compound. This is, for example, no different than when Purdue Pharma started to make fentanyl. It's a really great drug, it has incredibly superior advantages, it's used for a lot of very important things. When that spilled over, knowingly to a level of abuse, and I don't think it was a lot of abuse, but there was enough that essentially was overlooked in in the building of a business. It started with state AGs who stepped in, and then it basically ultimately drove a federal agreement, states agreements, a master settlement agreement around fentanyl, and then Purdue essentially disgorging all the profits that they made. So you're right, free markets should act in however way they're going to act. But when those free market operators themselves are producing data that shows that, oh, shit, hold on, something could be going wrong here. Then I do think that politicians will step in regulators could step in. I mean, what's crazy here is, you know, the FDA could actually act like if the FDA is willing to act on jewel, what is the difference if the FDA says they feel like let's just assume that somebody in the FDA says we feel like we should have a responsibility to think about mental health and eating disorders, but that's the
SPEAKER_02: slippery slope, right? What's the threshold? Right? At what point do they say no, we're not touching this? And at what point do they say yes, we are touching this because at the end of the day, any successful consumer product will have some degree of deleterious effect. Exactly. And this is why we have to have some perspective about
SPEAKER_06: it. So in preparation for the segment, I asked my 11 year old girl daughter. I know Jake, I you don't think I talked to my kids, but actually, I made no joke. No joke. I was thinking of
SPEAKER_01: you were the FedEx.
SPEAKER_03: Security.
SPEAKER_06: So the first thing she said is, Who are you? And the second and after I said, I'm your dad, and then the second thing she said, the second thing she said is, I don't use Instagram. Like, okay, well, what do you use? She said, Tick tock. I'm like, well, the worst. So I'm like, what do you what do you use Tick tock for? And she said, Well, I watched dance videos. I'm like, well, the I've been reading press articles that say that the only thing on Tick tock is sex and drugs. And that it's, you know, it's it's bringing you into a vortex of that. And she said, I don't watch I watch dance videos. And then smart as a whip. She said, the only people who end up watching that are the ones who keep indicating shouldn't use word preference, but she basically said that they keep getting that stuff because they like it, and they keep getting fed more of what they're watching. So look, I think we have to have a sense of perspective about this at the end of the day. Products like Facebook, and Instagram, are ways for people to share content
SPEAKER_06: and consume content for people they follow. I mean, that's basically it. Now, is there a lot of bad shit on there? Yeah, because there's a lot of bad shit in the world. And should Facebook be trying to control this stuff? Absolutely. But I don't at the end of the day think it's it's it's cigarettes. If they banned kids from using Tick Tock and Instagram until
SPEAKER_05: they were 16 years old, would you be opposed to that? Because I don't let my kids use it. And I have an 11 year old letter anywhere near we have a complete moratorium. No social media is our rule. I can't believe you let your kids use social media. I mean, I'm not passing judgment, but I mean, like all they use it for us to watch dance videos. So
SPEAKER_06: but I think Sax's point is an interesting one, which is, you
SPEAKER_02: know, based on what your daughter said that they have a lot of good content that is effectively what's going on, it creates an acceleration of the natural evolution of these markets that historically may have taken call it 50 years, for everyone to want to watch, you know, MTV didn't emerge for 60 years until, you know, there was kind of radio and television broadcast signals. And then everyone said, you know what, I want to watch rockers dancing on stage and going nuts and whatever the kind of consumer demand was that eventually evolved there. What's happening in social media is within seconds, you make evolutionary votes on kind of what you want to call and then all of a sudden, a few hours later, you're getting exactly what you want over and over again. And you can't say no. And that's effectively what digital media generally social media in particular has some nuances to it. But digital media generally has enabled is an acceleration of the natural consumption trend that we see with humans, which is they eventually want to go to one of the seven deadly sins. And that's what they kind of get stuck with.
SPEAKER_06: We've definitely talked about the danger of getting trapped in an information bubble and in a feedback loop. And I do think that is a danger of these products. But so is cable news. I mean, you know, you look at Twitter, it's an outrage machine and people get trapped in a cycle and they only want to they either follow people to get outraged by them or just because they want to kind of self indoctrinate themselves. But that is basically why people watch cable news as well. I mean, it is an outrage machine, your friend Tucker, or Rachel
SPEAKER_06: Maddow on MSNBC, they're both feeding different variations of rage. And so my point is, look, I don't think these problems are unique to social media. I think they pervade Hollywood and the entertainment industry and even the news industry. Maybe look, maybe we should put warning labels on them. At the end of the day, we don't prohibit cigarettes, we have an assumption of risk argument, we put warning labels on them. Maybe we need warning labels on these influencers. And that right, you put it you put it behind a counter, and
SPEAKER_04: there's a strict prohibition on people under the age of 18, being able to use them. And when it looks like, you know, companies like jewel, we're trying to circumvent those things or make it appear more valuable, basically to hook kids at a younger and younger age when they weren't capable of making those decisions. They were held liable. So
SPEAKER_06: okay, so there's a really interesting topic there, which is should people under the age of say, 16 or 18 be prohibited by original products? Yes. 100% 100%. Look, if you if you think 16 or 1816 or 18,
SPEAKER_04:
SPEAKER_06: let's 1600% 1816 100%. And then there needs to be a way of
SPEAKER_04: opting out because I think 16 year olds are quite sophisticated. But here's the thing, we are living longer and longer than ever, it is very likely that we're all going to generally live to our hundreds. It's not the end of the world for these kids to have to wait an extra two or three years until their literal physiology is a little bit better form so that they have better antibodies to the ship. And I think that if we as a adult population aren't necessarily going to take responsibility for these kids, I think we're doing them a huge disservice. You don't let your kids run around wherever they want. You don't let them hold guns whenever they want. You don't let them do a whole bunch of things that they may think is okay, but you know, could have really bad consequences. And so if you know that this stuff is happening, I think it's very different to look at a 22 year old and tell them what to do or not to do. That's not what we're debating. But what that data was about was about long term systemic health issues to a large percentage of girls. That's really fun. And a lot of the research that's come out, I dropped a couple of
SPEAKER_05: links in the chat. You know, I haven't read the studies, but they're starting to show a correlation between suicide rates and depression in young kids with social media. And it does skew towards females. The theory is, females are more adept or more frequently in dynamic or complex social situations. In other words, cyberbullying type situations where people use the social media to kind of pull each other out. I mean, look, I think you guys have a real point with respect to ages 13 to 16. Because I don't think you're allowed to
SPEAKER_06: use social media, or at least in terms of use prohibited under age 13. We all know that's a joke. You and I have had to
SPEAKER_04: build products that have to, you know, abide by COPPA laws, and we always just kind of laugh at it because they're bullshit. Right. Okay, fair enough. But what I'm saying is, I think you
SPEAKER_06: guys have a real issue that needs to be explored around what's the usage for ages 13 to 16. But look, what I worry about with these things is you're always playing whack a mole, right? I mean, you basically ban social media and all of a sudden these kids because they're very tech savvy, you're gonna find themselves on text groups and text chats, and they'll be in signal. And you won't even be able to see what they're doing. I mean, at least on social media. The whole point of that, though, that makes sense to me, because
SPEAKER_04: I remember when I was growing up, and we all wanted to smoke, it was a pain in the ass to get cigarettes. So most of us just said, well, it's not worth it. But yeah, you're right, a handful of people found a way to get the cigarettes to sneak behind the school to smoke them. That's fine. But that's very different than jewel walking into the middle of the lunch room and passing out berry flavored vape pens. Yeah, coconut. Wow. That's a basically saying, well, that's
SPEAKER_05: crazy. Obviously, that's a great package. If you look at the outrage around jewel and berry flavored. Why do you look Why
SPEAKER_04: do you care about jewel? Or why should we generally care about
SPEAKER_02: jewel and not care about soda companies making 40 grams per 12 ounces of sugar, which is truly dangerous and damaging to the health because we've been drinking soda for a long time.
SPEAKER_05: And we've already accepted so we've allowed ourselves to accept it. We essentially essentially a long time and then we had this kind of, you know, tobacco moratorium that's now
SPEAKER_02: kind of smoking. But free break if you say if you said right
SPEAKER_05: now, COVID is a disease of the old and the obese, you would be canceled. Like, somebody tried to say that. But the point is, you're talking about like, people are very sensitive about this obesity thing. And the second you say like, we need to monitor it for you. They need to make 40% of Americans with type
SPEAKER_02: two diabetes or whatever. There's also personal freedom. And do you want to drink a Coke? Exactly. Water or
SPEAKER_05: personal freedom? Why should some regulator tell you what
SPEAKER_02: social media tool you should or should not be eating that? Right? The cover up is what we're talking about. If we're talking
SPEAKER_05: about minors, if we're talking about what are you going to do
SPEAKER_06: with a 13 to 16 year old? What are you going to do with the
SPEAKER_04: 11 year old? That's the best part of your argument. That's
SPEAKER_06: the best part of your argument is when we're dealing with minors, I could I could see the argument for more restrictions and potentially support them depending on what they are. I think that's what about minors not being able to drink soda,
SPEAKER_05: you have to drink soda. I mean, that's actually that's where
SPEAKER_02: most diabetes and obesity is rooted in this country. Open minded to that position. Actually, I know it sounds
SPEAKER_05: crazy. But no, I think that that makes drinking Coca Cola makes
SPEAKER_05: no sense if we have a crazy obesity if we can actually show that. So let's ask the question. So let me let me ask, let me ask
SPEAKER_06: the second order question about this, which is free burgers, right, that drinking sodas for 13 year olds has got to be as harmful or more than using Facebook. Okay, so why do we never hear about that? I would argue that there's something else going on here with this massive amount of attacks on social networking companies. There's a lot of people who hate social networking in the traditional legacy media, because they've been disrupted by Facebook by these social media companies. And so they're looking at money, they took their money, and they're looking to publicize any article about the negative effects of these companies, which they're not threatened by Coca Cola. So they're not going to publish those kinds of studies. So I just think that there's an argument that perhaps I'm not saying you're wrong. I think there's absolutely truth in what you're saying. It's all a matter of degree, though, and perspective. And I do think that that the traditional media has an incentive to blow this out of proportion a little bit because they have an agenda. Yeah,
SPEAKER_06: absolutely. And I think I think people in power. Look, I think there's a positive thing about social networking. I mean, because we haven't said one positive thing about it. Okay. social networking overall enables us to stay in touch with people we care about friends, family and allows us to receive information from people we want to follow. Okay, we never talk about those positives. I find it an incredibly convenient way. Those are consuming users. Okay, so we never talked about that. But but here, but here's why is because social media is fundamentally a democratizing force, right? It enables people to coordinate in a much more democratized way than they ever had been able to before. I do think that is threatening to people in power. And given the chance they would like to suppress it. Zuckerberg gave a speech a few years ago about social networks being the I think called the fourth estate, with a third state being the press. And in the same way that that there are people who want to empower who want to censor the press. I do believe that there are people in power want to censor social networks, because they don't like the disruptive democratizing force that it represents. And there is a lot of positive to that in the world.
SPEAKER_04: You're I think you're mixing up a lot of things there. So yeah, you're right. And I don't think any of us are saying cancel these companies and remove them from the internet. I think what we're saying is there are very specific ways in which certain features are built, that they are expressed in features that are now apparently, according to their own work and exploration, are linked to mental health issues. So I think the point is, people should now decide whether to your point, we should ignore it because the good vastly outweighs, you know, what's a third of girls who the fuck airs, right? I mean, they're chicks, so whatever. Or you say, uh, actually, this is a really really big problem. And so let's step up and fix it because somebody needs to protect these people. And when you're 16, or 17, or 18, do whatever you want, like we let people do today. You want to drink a Coca Cola every day, get diabetes, you can do that. Nobody tries to stop you. Right? You want to smoke a pack of smokes a day, you can do that nobody stops you. But we do a lot of other things to try to help kids.
SPEAKER_06: I think I think we're only talking about ages if we're talking about the miners, the kids, I think you and I can find agreement on this issue, I think but but I do think that the demonization of social media goes well beyond that. But look, I think you've got a great point with respect to the kids.
SPEAKER_05: Do you guys believe this is a theory that's been growing that tick tock run by the Chinese government is trying to reprogram ethics morals and doing psych psych ops basically if there's an ops on our children? No, Jay, there's
SPEAKER_04: something bigger than that. I mean, I think all of you guys probably upgraded to 14.8 iOS this week, I hope you haven't and everybody listening if you haven't, please go upgrade it. But you know, the Israeli spy firm, NSO had apparently created a zero click exploit for the iPhone, where you could turn on the camera and the microphone and basically spy on folks completely unaware. And you know, Jason and I were talking
SPEAKER_04: about this. And I think Jason, you were the one that said, you're like, yeah, we've been living with that with tick tock for years. It's not as if, you know, NSO just licensed it randomly to the Saudi government. I mean, this tool has been available for a while. So to your point, but do we
SPEAKER_05: think that the Chinese government tick tock are trying to program our children to be more deviant and to create social unrest and no, you don't think that they're trying to steer them with the algorithm towards bad results because they're not letting their kids play video games. No, I think that Wall Street. Did you see the Wall Street Journal article that I just sent to you guys? Wall Street Journal article basically created a bunch of kids accounts, and then did searches or what started to go down a rabbit hole. And just with one keyword search, you know, these kids went into deep, you know, kink BDSM. This is a this is a pretty straightforward
SPEAKER_04: weighted tree algorithm. Okay, so like, when you start on a branch of a tree and you keep clicking on those things, that's what you will get. This is no different than how Facebook's algorithm works, how Google search algorithm works for you. Once you start behaving with clicks, or swipes, or likes, they use that as a feedback loop. And they wait basically weigh the next set of results. So David's daughter is right, if you click on sex, drugs and rock and roll, that's, it's not all you're going to get. But it's going to be a large percentage of what you get, because the algorithm in a blunt way, assumes that that's what you like. Yeah. So I'm not sure that this is repeating anything that so you know, it's pretty obvious that that's how it should work if they want to have maximum utilization.
SPEAKER_05: Well, you know, the thing that's slightly different about Tiktok is, you know, in Facebook or Instagram, you build your feed and Twitter, and then it serves it up algorithmically on Tiktok, it uses the entire corpus. So if you do one search for a keyword, now, it's not just a subset of what your friends posted in some ranked order, it's the entire corpus of like long tail. And so what they show in this Tiktok is like how quickly a child who just types in one keyword can be have their feed be 90% drug use, and you know, sadomasochistic, whatever you're into sex, I don't know.
SPEAKER_06: If the content is obscene, then it should be taken down to begin with. Okay. And look, I might take away from this conversation is that we need to do something different for kids. I don't know if it's a it's a flat out prohibition or what, but but but yeah, but look, so so the Tiktok algorithm thing, if you want to keep seeing more and more content related to something, fine, the algorithm is going to give you more and more of what you want as a consumer. But maybe for kids, there needs to be some guardrails around that. And we don't direct we don't direct kids towards certain kinds of content around, you know, sex or drugs or violence.
SPEAKER_05: I have to constantly remind parents like YouTube, kids should not use YouTube, because it goes really to crazy dark places. And there's kids YouTube, and kids YouTube, they add each and every video. Now you'll still get some of that consumption and unboxing of things and your kids will ask you to buy a bunch of stuff, but you're not going to get straight up sex, violence and, you know, no, but I'll tell you what does happen. My I put kids YouTube on
SPEAKER_02: my kids, my four year olds iPad. And then the other day, she said she saw some like scary horror thing on there, and she couldn't sleep and she woke up in the middle of the night because you know, we're not doing our job as parents curating the content and curating what our kids are doing. And we're leaving it to this app. We're totally out. And and that's what I realized I did my laziness in like just thinking like, oh, there was something she wanted to watch. I put the app on there and didn't pay attention for a few weeks. And all of a sudden she had gone down the rabbit hole found something scary. It's I use a I don't know if you guys use this, but I use an app
SPEAKER_04: called custodio. It's with a Q, Q u s t u di o. And you can kind of like lock down all these devices. And then at the end of every week, it gives you an email of all the app usage and all the links that these that my kids clicked on, or just my oldest one could be he's the only one that has a phone. But that's nice. And you had a discussion with them about that.
SPEAKER_05: Like, okay, yeah. And the rules. And yeah, it's gonna tell me what you I agree. It's still super, super hard. But this is
SPEAKER_04: why I think you need to have some blunt force instruments right now. And my blunt force instruments are you're not allowed to have. Well, the ones that we've, we're not allowed to have tik tok, Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. Yes, hard now. And the only reason we allow YouTube is because a lot of the school links are to videos inside of YouTube. And so you can't lock it down. But that's why I use this custodio app to see what they're watching on YouTube. Even then, though, it's not perfect. By the way, this thing
SPEAKER_06: that just came from the Pentagon is a total Friday news drop. I mean, talk about a Friday news drop. I don't know what we don't
SPEAKER_05: know what you're talking us military acknowledges cobble
SPEAKER_06: drone strike killed 10 civilians, including seven children. We knew this, they're just confirming something that had been exposed. New York Times did excellent reporting on the reporting by the New York Times. That was incredible
SPEAKER_04: journalism. I mean, did you guys see that they were like watching frame for frame of like a video, then they were like going to Google Maps, they were comparing colors of cars, they were looking at sides of buildings. Incredible reporting by the New York Times.
SPEAKER_06: It was really the I mean, it's obviously a tragedy was the final debacle of our Afghanistan involvement. This was a foreign aid worker, who actually he was there as an aid worker. And they stay had him on video loading up his car with plastic jugs of water, and somehow they thought these were explosives or something like that. And he was doing his errands and then he comes home. And they hit the car with you know, a massive missile from one of these Reaper drones. And it kills him as well as, you know, it's basically 10 members of his extended family, including seven children. Now, the I mean, I think I understand why this but we don't exactly know why this happened. And I think it needs to be investigated. Obviously, the military in Kabul was on high alert, because we just had that bombing at the airport. And it was the bloodiest day for America in Afghanistan. I think we had 313 soldiers killed a few days before this, but but it just shows the kind of mistakes that we can make even fighting drone warfare. You know, the idea was the term casualties of war exists for a reason like
SPEAKER_05: this is how war works. You cannot do it perfectly. It's messy. Everybody innocent people dies is by war is the worst thing. But how did we ever be the last resort? Right? And how
SPEAKER_06: did we ever think we're gonna win hearts and minds in this country by you know, like we made too many mistakes. Like
SPEAKER_05: they're they're not interested in democracy, like in the way we want them to be and the West wants them to be we by the way, that's forcing it down their throats is not going to work. We could have maintained a base there. There were better ways to exit but let's fix the schools in California first.
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, I think that's I think that'll ultimately I think
SPEAKER_05: people are going to forget those images of people on planes and just think thank God that's over. I think now that there hasn't been 20 year and hopefully there's not another 911. All right, let's wrap with Ellen Powell wrote a piece for the New York Times op ed section section on sexism in tech using the Elizabeth Holmes trial as the main example. She was also on tech checks, NBC show and discussed her op ed quote, home should be held accountable for her actions as chief executive of their nose. And it can be sexist to hold her accountable for alleged very serious wrongdoing and not hold an array of men accountable for reports of wrongdoing and bad judgment. She uses Travis Kalanick and Adam Neumann as examples of men who have engaged in questionable unethical even dangerous behavior in tech without much legal penalty. And that they both went on to start new companies. Her main example, however, if bias is tech executive Kevin Burns, who is the former CEO of Juul, J U U L, who helped the cigarette vaping company raise $12 billion, but he left Juul amidst a lot of legal blowback. And just this past week with a bunch of with a bunch of cash with about Yeah, I mean, of course you get the
SPEAKER_05: secure the bag on the way out Adam Neumann too. And don't drop the bag. Don't drop the bag. You have one job to do. Don't drop the bag. Yes, run. But don't do not drop the bag. So she met she
SPEAKER_02: mentioned other stories like Juucero. If you guys remember this company. A couple years ago, they raised $1 million pre launched right it was a juicer that you know was supposed to use for my juicer. Yeah, I enjoyed the claim that they made
SPEAKER_05: was that inside of the packets was like fresh vegetables and
SPEAKER_02: this thing squeezed the fresh vegetables and fresh juice juice came out. And it turns out that the bag was just filled with juice. And so no, no, I think the bag was filled with shaved vegetables or whatever, but you can squeeze the bag, squeeze the
SPEAKER_05: bag. So that it was already produced is what, you know,
SPEAKER_02: Olivia Zalewski who's now Olivia Peterson. It was she basically put they she kind of made a video and put it on Bloomberg. They had juice in these packets and they were telling people what they thought fresh juice. Like Yeah, so they could have
SPEAKER_01: opened the drawer. Sorry, sir. They could have put it into a machine and paid $7. Yeah, juice then took that juice, put it in a bag. Yeah, that was supposed to be fresh vegetables sold that
SPEAKER_04: as fresh vegetables to then get juiced. To then get charged $8 a bag for this stuff.
SPEAKER_02: Who invested in that? Who invested in that? Who wrote
SPEAKER_04: ventures? Anyway, a lot of people. It was a huge, it was a
SPEAKER_02: huge, like, you know, better for the planet story. But it turns out that the hardware didn't work. And then they ended up kind of faking it till you make it. It was very similar to Theranos in the sense that there was a piece of hardware that made a claim that wasn't necessarily true. And granted, no lives were at risk in this particular case. But some might argue lives were at risk in the case of Juul. But I think you know, you see this a lot more in these kinds of hardware, particularly in life sciences companies. There's a business like like Zymergens a good example, right? It's very hard tech, very deep tech. Josh Hoffman did an incredible job fundraising rates of $400 million round from SoftBank took the company public, then they go public and a few weeks later, they're like, Oh, wait, sorry, we don't actually have any product or any revenue. And we talked about this a few months ago, a few weeks ago, the stock completely collapsed. There's another company called Berkeley lights, which went public. And yesterday, scorpion capital, one of these short sellers put out 160 page report on these guys, showing that Berkeley lights his product actually, it's a hardware life sciences hardware that costs $2 million. They've sold it into all the pharma companies. And scorpion saying, look, this thing doesn't work. It's a total fraud. Like there's no machine doesn't do what they claim it does.
SPEAKER_05: Okay, but so to Alan Pao's point, is there a double spandard or not? Right. And so these were all run by male CEOs and nothing
SPEAKER_02: happened to them. And, and they all work as well. Um, yeah, yeah,
SPEAKER_02: they're all white. All right. First of all, let's take it easy
SPEAKER_05: on the white guys to math.
SPEAKER_01: It's three on the white guys. No, I'm asking a qualifying question. It is. So here's what
SPEAKER_05: I'll ask is, I mean, this is a surprise that white dudes will
SPEAKER_04: get a hall pass. And I don't think that's a shock. Yeah, it's considered it's considered entrepreneurial failure. But
SPEAKER_02: when it comes to the woman that everyone I think was excited about seeing succeed because she was a woman, it becomes fraud. And I think, well, you know, there's two different things. Yeah. Is it free? But isn't there two different things
SPEAKER_05: between, you know, where she obviously misled people in a premeditated way and lied to them, like taking their blood sample, and then putting it in a fake machine, then doing it in the back on an Abbott machine, and then bringing the results back and making it on her. There are no Edison machine. I mean, this is literal wire for a securities fraud. In these other cases, is it people who are ambitious, if you look at the juicer Oh, it's kind of like this is a stupid idea that got overfunded. He put he produced in a packet and told you know, he put shaved, he put chef shaved vegetables in the packet, and then used hydraulics, which is actual real thing. That's actually not correct. Watch the video that Olivia put on
SPEAKER_02: Bloomberg a few years ago, which I just gave you pictures of it. I mean, maybe there's a different one. What they showed
SPEAKER_05: is that it was already squeezed. Yes, there was
SPEAKER_02: shit. It was already squeezed. Like, all right. Well, that guy should go to jail. I mean, it was like, it was like a crazy story when this came out. And everyone's like, Oh, my God, like, it was a standard, like, hardware is really difficult. You know, novel hardware technology is really difficult. So you fake it till you make it in some cases, you launch a product that doesn't even work. You know, and there's just and this isn't just in hardware. It's also in like science, and you see this a lot where you ship a product, I would probably
SPEAKER_04: say that if if regulators believe that those CEOs are going to have to have those CEOs tried to commit fraud, they would have done challenges, right? Maybe they still will. They should follow up with those folks. So why do you think they
SPEAKER_02: went after Elizabeth Holmes?
SPEAKER_04: I think there's one really important there are two things at play in Theranos, which is different. Number one is the kinds of investors that were involved here are extremely focused, not necessarily, you know, technology capable, but very, very well known, highly connected people in the establishment. And the second was that they were operating in a regulated market, which has very strict laws. Look, I've tried to build competing products to Theranos for years, I've been pretty public about this, I've tried five or six times, they failed every single time, I couldn't even get out of the starting line. You know, these tests would never work without with a single drop of blood, it just didn't make any sense. The only version of this problem that has been solved well, is the ability to detect cell free cancer DNA in blood, right using a very small quantum of blood. Companies like Guardant and Grail have actually done and built a great business out of it. But it requires extremely sophisticated machinery sold to them by Illumina and others. So if you're operating in a regulated market, the bar is higher. There is a lot more scrutiny. And then on top of that, I think she compounded it by including folks and raising capital from folks that may not have actually known and been able to diligence. And so that's the cycle of fraud that may or may not have occurred there. And she has to, or they had, there's a burden to prove that. It's very different, I think, over here in an unregulated market where you can just kind of build whatever you want. And if smart investors look, Nick just put in the group so the investors in Juicero were Google Ventures, Kleiner Perkins thrive capital. I mean, these are all very sophisticated folks that, you know, made a decision and you know, it's probably not the case that they were lied to. I understand why they made the juicer Oh mistake because at the
SPEAKER_05: time, fresh pressed juice using hydraulics was a thing and this guy said that's what I'm going to do. I'm gonna use hydraulics I'm going to squeeze the vegetables so you get the best stuff. I understand why they felt because my wife was buying that press fuck are you talking to me my wife Jay was buying that press juicery juice in LA you remember this trends pure sugar that stuff is pure sugar is vegetable juice too but it would cost like $11 because they would use so much vegetables and I saw these presses they used it's incredibly inefficient but the juice tastes really great but the thing I have a problem with with Ellen Powell story is she brings up you know the harassment stuff and you know this is an issue of gender etc but on this weekend startups I've been covering fraud after fraud out of your app Annie got
SPEAKER_05: an SEC yesterday what happened what happened Jason because I
SPEAKER_04: saw that Annie they told people who were using their analytics
SPEAKER_05: products building apps there's like 8 million people that they would never sell their data except in aggregate and then they went to Wall Street people and said here's actually we'll sell you the data and you can trade on it and so yeah yeah so I don't think that's like insider trading exactly but it might be but anyway they got it is like that's the whole point
SPEAKER_04: of that that's the whole point of reg FD the whole point is if somebody knows something if you're a financial actor Jason and you know something so like if all of us were sitting around a table you know and somebody said something about a random public company if that's not public information if that's not known two things have to happen number one is I when I receive it must not do anything with it and that second that person who disclosed it needs to then file an 8k and say whoops I accidentally said this right so there's now what where this is an end around around things like reg fd I think that's a really big deal well and then I guess the question is like what
SPEAKER_05: happens with people who use planet labs or whatever to you know to satellite images of the target parking lot or put people as spotters outside of Starbucks and count the people coming in and out is that public information that's public but if you have a terms of service that says one thing yes and you're
SPEAKER_04: violating that but then you may also be violating reg fd so they
SPEAKER_05: haven't gone after people for on the other side of the trade for securities fraud but they charged him with securities fraud he pays 10 million bucks I think he's in the penalty box can't be you know run up be a public officer for three years then we had head spin I don't know if you saw that sass company but head spin was involved in just basically straight up lying about their sass offer then you have tether the stable coin they've been banned from New York by the DOJ they've been banned by the Canadian regulators for the first two crypto exchanges there and supposedly the DOJ is investigating them and then there's about five ICOs in New York that have been prosecuted already so I know Ellen saying like they're not you're saying you're saying there are but I'm seeing them all the time yeah they're just not right the press is not obsessed with them because let's face it or less interesting than Elizabeth Holmes she was weird I mean the voice there's a lot of peculiar things about her that you don't see in other folks who are boring right by the way what you
SPEAKER_02: just said is part of the sexist claim that Ellen made which is that we talked about her dress and how she dressed and how she talked we don't talk about that kind of stuff when it comes to other entrepreneurs and of course they did that and they were talking about him being a hippie walking around with bare
SPEAKER_05: feet being six seven every profile she's she's wrong in that case every profile of and a Newman talked about his personal life and his wife is married to what's her name's no point of paltrows cousin so Ellen's 100% wrong on that one yeah and did
SPEAKER_06: it didn't Elizabeth Holmes make it relevant by dressing deliberately styling herself in the fashion of Steve Jobs with the black turtleneck and the glasses I mean you know she portrayed herself as the next Steve Jobs I mean was part of the grift so yeah exactly now did gender play into it yeah but I think not necessarily in the way that Ellen Powell thinks in this sense that the media wanted to believe so badly that the next few jobs was going to be a woman that they kind of look past what should have been staring them in the face I mean look if a man had gotten out there wearing the black turtleneck and the john leonard glasses or whatever they would have said who is this clown exactly but they suspended they
SPEAKER_01: suspended you have to dress up as Steve Jobs in the next episode of reverb you can make it where we all do it can we see the Halloween episode where we all show up I'll do Elizabeth Holmes for Halloween episode but no but that's like a nested
SPEAKER_04: Steve Jobs so like you're gonna be Elizabeth we should all do our own versions of Elizabeth and Steve Jobs I think sacks you're entirely right I think I think you're right I think this is the way that gender has played into it is that there's a
SPEAKER_06: lot of people who really wanted the Elizabeth Holmes story to be true and frankly she used that yeah in order to perpetuate her fraud she may not have used it but she was definitely
SPEAKER_04: influenced or she benefited from it is that she definitely used
SPEAKER_05: it I want to ask you guys kind of a controversial question you
SPEAKER_02: know because this story made me think a lot about some of what's gone on in businesses that I know of and where I know that there is to some degree fraud and misrepresentation happening by the CEO and founder and this is a little known secret in Silicon Valley or a little spoken of secret which is that you know more often than not if you know about fraud at a company in Silicon Valley you're encouraged to keep your mouth shut because the idea is at the end of the day if they're gaining lots of capital and you know more capital floats all boats and more money will rush into that market and so if there's businesses that you're competing with that are committing fraud rather than raise your hand which men people say hey look if you're going to raise your hand and claim fraud and talk negatively about another company people are going to start doing that about you and they're going to start doing that about your portfolio and so you guys know this right like you're discouraged from calling out these sorts of moments when you see them in Silicon Valley because there is the perceived kind of look we're all in a club together we're all in it together we got to be careful not to talk smack is in capital will stop coming in people will come after you and we're much more kind of a supportive open community but there is you guys experience that trust I have with
SPEAKER_02: at least two companies in the last year and you know I've kept my mouth shut because and by the way I don't think there's necessarily harm going on but I know of misrepresentation but the investors are like look we'd love to see these guys succeed because that would be good for you in this way because then you would be more money flowing in and yada yada and there's always a narrative around why you don't want to do this you know what you don't want to call these things out I called it out and
SPEAKER_06: I've still got a crazy founder denouncing me years later I mean look I hate who has an SEC enforcement against him yeah
SPEAKER_06: exactly a sanction so yeah I mean look I you're right freeburg that there's very little upshot to doing it but but look I hate but we have to distinguish between fraud and sort of puffing okay here's the thing that I think you know Ellen Powell's kind of missing is when she criticizes all these founders who are visionary and evangelical and and promoting something that ends up not working that is not fraud I mean every startup we ask the founder how are you going to change the world what is your big idea what is the big dream and then they lay out this really pretty unrealistic set of things unrealistic in the sense that it comes true maybe one out of a thousand times right every startup their founding mission is a bit of an over promise and just because it doesn't come true doesn't make it fraud I think that a lot of people out in the non-silicon valley investing world would interpret that as fraud because the founder told them something that ends up not happening not ends up being true and this is why you really it's very dangerous to take money outside of silicon valley because people don't really understand this distinction okay just because it doesn't work out and what you said ended up not being true does not make it fraud what is fraud is when you lie about like I said before when you lie about the past and what Elizabeth Holmes is accused of doing by these prosecutors is again lying about the present day capabilities of her product is actually falsifying documents she actually falsifying documents that is the fraud that is the line you cannot cross they
SPEAKER_05: change blood test results listen set another way sacks Elizabeth Holmes vision of taking less blood and let it and doing more tests with it and being more efficient is a completely valid thing to pursue Chamath just said he pursued it five times and failed five times completely lying completely failed tens of millions of dollars burned in a pile but what we all buy into here is what if it does work someone in a thousand times but what we would be honest it was she lied about the results and she's not only she lied about the results she lied about real people's blood test results like actual civilians well I have some empathy for Elizabeth
SPEAKER_04: Jobs in the following way when I was told when I was when I was
SPEAKER_03: told when I was Steve Holmes hold on when I was told I think
SPEAKER_04: I told the story I was asking an investor hey what's the hottest company around this is in you know 2013 or 14 he said Theranos and there was no way to get connected to the company so then I was like you know I had heard just the the bullet point one drop of blood full characterization of your you know be able to do a blood test etcetera. I thought this is an incredible idea, but because I had no way of getting connected now. Thank god that turned out to be a good thing. I was like well **** it. I'll just start my own version. I'll figure out how to do this and and and Jason as you said it turned out to be much much harder than I thought and five different iterations five different teams and you know PhDs from MIT Stanford everything we couldn't Caltech we couldn't figure it out. So it's not wrong to want to believe that something is possible and it's not illegal to do that, but as David said the minute that you try to you tell lies about the past in order to basically then change the future in a way that shouldn't happen. That's that's really unfair. Yeah. It's what
SPEAKER_05: do you think of the defense that Balwani the Svengali defense I saw Kara Swisher and some New York Times reporters and other reporters were basically not buying it. We talked about this last time didn't we? Yeah. Yeah. I'm just curious if you're have been following the trial. I I think it's hard for somebody
SPEAKER_06: who in the moment took credit for every decision for every piece of press for claim to be the jobs and micromanager to all of a sudden now turn around and say no, that wasn't me making the decisions. I was under the spell of somebody else. I think that's a tough argument to make.
SPEAKER_05: Yeah. Also, I think, you know, this is going to come out but she actually fired Balwani. So if she fired him, how was she? Yeah, it's harder to do the Svengali defense, I think.
SPEAKER_06: Well, maybe they're both guilty. Maybe they're guilty. It could be Svengali Svengali. All right, listen, we'll close on this.
SPEAKER_05: MailChimp has sold to Intuit for $12 billion in the largest bootstrapped acquisition ever. We all know MailChimp. And we all know QuickBooks. It's a huge deal. I have one issue with
SPEAKER_04: this. And I don't know if it's true or not. But apparently, none of the employees have any equity. Yes. And that was what
SPEAKER_05: it's about to get to employees didn't have equity. However, and I've known MailChimp for a while, for over a decade, but using the product and know the founder had him on the podcast before. Have they been a sponsor of your product? They sponsored
SPEAKER_05: in the first year, I think, or two. And were you an angel investor? I was not I tried to be and he said, we're never going to ever raise money. And he was never ever going to sell.
SPEAKER_05: And he was also never going to sell I they gave 12 billion
SPEAKER_06: reasons to change his mind. Exactly. They gave him the 20%
SPEAKER_05: my understanding was employees got a 20% cash bonus, and they were amongst the highest paid, you know, in the industry. So their plan was, instead of giving people some big reward at the end, they were just distributing cash, basically, they were just distributing cash. So if you had 100, if you
SPEAKER_05: were 150k developer, you got 30k on top, that's not an unreasonable way to run a business that has no outside
SPEAKER_02: investors that, you know, the employees know that going in, they didn't go in with the expectation of equity, they went in with the expectation of a high salary and a big bonus, and they got it. I do that a few companies, few companies that I
SPEAKER_04: own, I do that. But what I also do is I let them buy into the company every year. I just think that it's a good principle to
SPEAKER_04: have like an ownership in the business. I think you should be paying a lot of money, and we should pay cash bonuses for, for achieving results. We do that. But then what we also say is if you want to buy equity, come in buy it. But you're probably right from a performance perspective, Chima, that I don't
SPEAKER_02: think it's necessarily a moral obligation to do that, right? How this guy wants to run his business up to him, you know, people make the choice voted. Yeah, I mean, people that work at your house, you don't give them equity in your house, right? I mean, you own the house, you give them cash, or people who play for a basketball team are not allowed to get
SPEAKER_05: equity in the team. But in other countries, right? I think in soccer, you can. Yes. But I think one of the best things
SPEAKER_06: about Silicon Valley is the fact that there's a there's a practice of giving broad based options to everybody in the company. And there's all those great stories about the chef at Google who got rich and the secretaries at Microsoft who got rich. And that is a beautiful thing about the tech ecosystem. It's beautiful. It's wonderful. You never and you never hear about that when all the press is doing is writing stories about greedy VCs and all that kind of stuff. They, they talk about VC, but they don't bring up the point that in these non VC companies, the employees never end up with anything. Someone who came from nothing can afford a beautiful home and have their
SPEAKER_02: life taken care of forever because they work really hard at a great company that worked out. And that's that's the most common story. And it's never reported. But yeah, and by the way, look, there's there's nothing wrong with bootstrapping
SPEAKER_06: your company. So congrats to this MailChimp founder for doing it. I mean, certainly, you know, like as a investor, I've no desire to describe what just explain what bootstrapping is
SPEAKER_02: sex. bootstrapping is just when you don't raise outside money.
SPEAKER_06: And he did it himself. And he basically funded profits. Yeah, he funded the company with the profits, which is just amazing. But But but here's the thing about that is, he did this, he started the company back in 2001 at the nadir after the dot com crash, and there was very little money going into new stars back then. And he managed to create this. So kudos to him. But the environment now is very different. If you look at the amount of funding that goes into startups, I mean, it's now in the hundreds of billions every year. And so if you have this mentality of I'm going to bootstrap it, you're probably going to lose to a competitor who's simply willing to raise money and pursue that same idea with more funding. Now, look, I'm not in the business of pushing money on people who don't want it. I'm just saying realistically, the times are different now. If you can boost up a business, great, go for it. But I do think that if you're in competition with someone who can raise VC money, you're gonna be at a disadvantage. Hard to compete yourself. Yeah. What about AOC what she wore to the
SPEAKER_04: Met Gala? tax the rich she was taxed the rich dress to the Met Gala. Dave Portnoy, Dave Portnoy had the best tweet about
SPEAKER_06: this, which is she's about to go have the best night of her life partying her ass off with all these rich people and she's wearing this tax the tax the rich it's total hypocrisy. So it's total hypocrisy. This is classic socialism where they do this virtue signaling while being friends and hanging out with the people the owners of capital they're purporting to derive and frankly, it's just like the mass things. I mean, you've got the servant class working at the Met Gala wearing mass while every while all the guests of the gala are don't have to wear a mask. I mean, it's like all over again. It's nice. Well, she she she also dropped some merch you can
SPEAKER_04: get tax the rich there's an official AOC team shop. I can't
SPEAKER_05: believe that that's true. That's what makes it the most loathsome she goes to the thing and now she's selling $58 sweaters t shirt sweatshirts a $58 sweatshirt $28 dad hat a $10
SPEAKER_04: sticker pack $27 tote bag $27 mug what's a dad hat it's like a hat for dads like for us you know oh yeah tax the rich dad
SPEAKER_04: that's the rich yeah wow I didn't know dad hat was a
SPEAKER_05: category I know dad jokes and dad bods I've never saw dad hat hat and fantastic fantastic yeah I thought it was kind of
SPEAKER_04: gross is it wrong to buy some of this I I think that it's kind of cool actually I mean the tax the rich hat is pretty
SPEAKER_01: funny it's pretty cool oh my god if you were attached to the
SPEAKER_04: sweatshirt I think the best thing is if I bought this sweatshirt and wore it around wear it on CNBC do your next
SPEAKER_05: scene if you wear a tax the rich hat on CNBC that would be Pete Chamath I think that would be great that'd be great get
SPEAKER_05: assigned by all right anybody got any plugs anybody have plugs the craziest thing about that Dave Portnoy tweet was that
SPEAKER_06: it got fact checked can you believe that it got fact checked I mean it was just mind blowing that this is what when you say fact check they put a fact check they put a warning
SPEAKER_05: label on oh god so warning liberals and socialists at twitter don't agree with this tweet right no exactly warning
SPEAKER_06: somebody in the out crowd Dave Portnoy is criticizing somebody in the in crowd that by definition Portnoy definitely gets to see that all in summit right he definitely is the is
SPEAKER_04: the hypermectin fake story from Rachel Maddow is that fact checked or no no she posted some update or other but
SPEAKER_06: begrudgingly presenting other information but I mean the story should have been completely retracted and it wasn't no no I'm just curious whether there's a fact check
SPEAKER_04: double standard no there's oh absolutely there is no fact
SPEAKER_06: check on that for some reason the Rachel Maddow tweets went on fact checked as far as I know they're still on fact checked you know what you should wear the get the rich hat
SPEAKER_05: and then get your by the Hamptons shirt and wear those on your next scene what a great combo can I show you guys a
SPEAKER_06: great piece of merch hold on sir I'll be back in a second yeah oh he's got but can I just say I don't look here we go it's
SPEAKER_04: it's merch for the app I don't I don't look good in hats no
SPEAKER_05: you don't no no I've wanted to wear a hat for a long time but
SPEAKER_04: I just it just doesn't look good on me let's see this this
SPEAKER_06: is my favorite piece of merch merch which is somebody made oh he's like that's fabulous absolutely great wait can we
SPEAKER_01: just say by the way there's a person that did make a besties
SPEAKER_04: merch site none of us knows who he is but there's an incredible thing that he tweeted at us right J. Cal which is he's paying his way through college he puts a note into it
SPEAKER_05: he he told me he made like five grand over the summer right and so you know he's probably making like 30 grand a year off of merch if you're any anybody's interested in some
SPEAKER_04: besties merch we don't make a single dime from it but there's a young hard working dude paying him paying his way through school I don't know it's a bestie apparel he's bestie
SPEAKER_05: apparel right bestie apparel bestie apparel.com we don't really want to encourage too many people to go crazy doing this but this is our guy I guess and I mean he's paying his way through school for him yeah and I think they did you know the they the shirts that people wore on their all in bar crawl came from that but I really want to do the I want to do the rich I'm buying this tax the rich sweatshirt boys and the
SPEAKER_04: t shirt and the sticker pack I'm going for all of it you got me AOC you got me on the hook do they have a men's bikini
SPEAKER_05: with tax the rich on the backside for you for when we're in Italy I would buy that we can have all we get matching
SPEAKER_01: speedos let me walk I always threatened to buy a speedo she
SPEAKER_04: always says well we have to buy speedos next time we're in
SPEAKER_05: Italy she won't let me and we have to do our bestie walk from peer to peer on the beaches of Italy in a speedo can you imagine if that image got leaked of us in speedos I did I
SPEAKER_04: did a bestie walk with sex all right boys I gotta go I gotta eat lunch all right love you besties love you guys take care
SPEAKER_05: we'll let your winners ride rain man David Sacks
SPEAKER_06: and it said we open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it love you
SPEAKER_01: besties are gone we should all just get a room and just have one big huge or because they're all just like this like sexual tension but
SPEAKER_06: let your be we need to get
