All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg - E47: Facebook's week from hell, Ellen Pao on sexism in Elizabeth Holmes coverage, Newsom's win, frauds & more

Episode Date: September 18, 2021

Show Notes: 0:00 Besties intro, TPB Symposium recap, rapid generations in tech 7:00 UBI, incentives for success, social safety nets 19:45 Newsom's recall victory in California, where the GOP went wrong 33:59 Facebook's week from hell, Instagram's harmful impact on teen girls 42:42 How to properly regulate social media's impact on certain groups 1:04:46 Pentagon admits to killing 10 Afghan civilians (including seven children) in drone strike 1:07:17 Ellen Pao on sexism around the Elizabeth Holmes trial; Juicero, JUUL, and other male-led failures/frauds 1:25:54 Mailchimp sells for $12B, employees got no equity 1:29:43 AOC at the Met Gala Follow the besties: https://twitter.com/chamath https://linktr.ee/calacanis https://twitter.com/DavidSacks https://twitter.com/friedberg Follow the pod: https://twitter.com/theallinpod https://linktr.ee/allinpodcast Intro Music Credit: https://rb.gy/tppkzl https://twitter.com/yung_spielburg Intro Video Credit: https://twitter.com/TheZachEffect Links: https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2021-02-16/as-social-media-time-rises-so-does-teen-girls-suicide-risk https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/09/15/stolen-election-myth-gop-511988 https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-knows-instagram-is-toxic-for-teen-girls-company-documents-show-11631620739 https://www.publichealthlawcenter.org/topics/commercial-tobacco-control/commercial-tobacco-control-litigation/master-settlement-agreement https://twitter.com/DavidSacks/status/1438597853320908811 https://www.kff.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Slide1.png https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-04-19/silicon-valley-s-400-juicer-may-be-feeling-the-squeeze https://scorpioncapital.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/reports/BLI.pdf https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2021-176 https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2021-164 https://ag.ny.gov/press-release/2021/attorney-general-james-ends-virtual-currency-trading-platform-bitfinexs-illegal https://coingeek.com/tether-banned-on-canada-first-2-licensed-digital-currency-exchanges/ https://investors.intuit.com/news/news-details/2021/Intuit-to-Acquire-Mailchimp/default.aspx https://twitter.com/stoolpresidente/status/1437585404010582016 https://shop.ocasiocortez.com/collections/all/collections_-tax-the-rich?sort_by=manual https://www.bestiesapparel.com/

Where were you on Thursday? Were you streaming your own L.A.? I was at home. I got family **** to do. Oh, family, have you met them? Were they like... Are they everything you're expecting? I did meet the new kid.

He's 19! What's his major? What? What? So we know, Lee. You know what, your winner's ride. Bring man David's side. I know we know him. And it said we open source it to the fans. And they just go crazy. Love you guys.

Queen of King Wild. I'm going to Lee. Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of The All in Podcast. Yes, we made it to episode 47 in three episodes. It would be episode 50. 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 I went into Wednesday, but David Freeberg's 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? Freberg. So, you know, half the room were scientific to have made never heard of this podcast before, and they were like, what the hell did we just show up to? It's like these four guys on stage drinking.

It's why I'm talking about politics for an hour to have. But dropping F bombs. 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 fantastic. People loved it. You guys were 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. And with us again, of course, David Sacks, the Rain Man himself and the dictator, Tremoth, Polly, Haapatia. What did you think, Sacks of the live event format? Obviously, half the audience were fans of the show, half warrant, which is, I better than putting people randomly into it, but I'm glad

that the people who are not fans of, who have never heard of the show didn't walk out. We didn't have walk out, so that was good, so. Yeah, I mean, look, we were slightly more palatable to them than Andrew Dice Clay or something like that. But, uh, yeah. Hey, hey, hey, hey commented that the lighting, the production values weren't that great. They seem fine to us at the time, but so we're going to have to do better on that next time. And other people speculated that we were 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. I thought we got a better read on each other in person and we had more dialogue than we I didn't feel that while sitting there, but you guys tell me if you think that was true. I thought that we got a better read on each other in person and we had more dialogue than we normally would over assume. I don't know if you guys felt the same. Very good. I think so.

And then I kind of like the evening podcast, the glass of wine. I think there's something about it, like just like a little, yeah, you kind of for a landing, you kind of do a nice evening, the payload cards after. It could be a thing. It could in for a landing. Yeah, coming in for a nice evening, the payload cards after. It could be a thing.

It could definitely be a thing. It could 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. Oh my God. Harlan 2012, what is, that's a good bottle of wine.

Oh my God. Even Jake Al knows that? Look at him pretending out what pretending to be a man with the people that's the 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 worse. Looks like it's high. You guys think we could do a talk 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. Yeah, maybe two. I think the wine with poker, no.

Yeah. I think for a first time, the audio was great. So that's, you know, job one is to get the audio and the original 99%. Conception happens that way. To do a line of light in Friedberg's face. That's great. It's a great bit.

I'm for all commentators. You know, it was my going to actually got up and fix that like no one else of the crew, you know, of light in Friedberg's face. That's a great part. They're coming for all commentators. You know what I'm going to do? 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. She's a great person. And what was the empty seat about between me and Jamath? I mean, there wasn't any? 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 were really great. Skydaten didn't come in. They all showed up at like nine o'clock. Yeah, there's only a reason for that. Yeah. Actually, was the back channel. They were Skydaten. The back channel was Skydaten and somebody else

waited outside because they knew they might get pulled up. I got that from... You know, you're gonna have to beep his name out. Yeah, the first time thing is name on the... Skydatin' he's not gonna want his name out. No, he's not gonna want his name out. So, how do you kidding me? He's been on my podcast.

He's been on this week in service. He's one of the first thing, yes. That was the last press appearance he did was 11 years ago. He literally does not, I mean, everybody knows the Skydatin' is Earthling founder, Boingo founder. Everybody of our generation, but it's amazing how, quickly the tech crowd moves on.

So true. There's a famous story actually when Mark Andreson met Mark Zuckerberg for the first time, Zuckerberg didn't know that, Andreson had created Netscape. I'm not even sure he knew what net scape was. I think he said something like I created Mosaic and he's like, what's that?

Oh, right, right, Mosaic, yeah, yeah. So that's like, look, yeah, yeah. Yeah, look, in the tech industry, we're all concerned about the future. No one pays a lot of attention to history. Do you guys feel like last generations, entrepreneurs and investors at this point? Well, some of us are still currently creating things,

free bird. Oh man. What do you think I'm gonna do? Whoa! We try to hit. I can't mention the name of the app as per. Here we go! We got our anti-promotion rules,

but I have recently launched a new app. You could download it by app. Beeeeee! We're redacted. But 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, because you know, creating products. Well, you have, you know, 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 then, you know, you don't see them again. You also see the right. I mean, it's a big adventure, yeah. I think there's a lot of truth to that that, you know, I worry about this with my own kids, that I think deprivation creates motivation. It's supposed to do something as hard as creating a company. Deprivation, creative motivation.

Welcome to David Sack's Impalmarshall. No, no, no, I mean, look, I think, you know, I think you forgot me to my tent. At least to fornication. You know, beep, beep, beep, beep. Our friend, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep to do it again once they've reached that point. And it does take a certain amount of, like I said, deprivation to do this stuff, which is why giving everybody the participation trophy and trying to make people's lives as easy as possible.

I mean, yes, you don't want to deprive people on the one hand, but on the other hand, it does often lead to good things. Totally agree. We're seeing a bit of a dry run of this if people believe that they have UBI or the government's gonna take care of them. I would be fine with UBI,

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? 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, those entry-level jobs that may not pay much better than the UBI are an important stepping stone to where they get to next to their career. And I think it's demotivating. We've already seen in California, we've been doing this.

UBI is not gonna pay you to go to college, but Amazon will, that's an example. So you're absolutely right, there's the GI Bill. There's all kinds of examples where in history, we've used entry-level jobs as 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, 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 in activating yourself in your 40s fifties 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 but I But I started taking Italian lessons and you know the last four or five percent of a language is brutalizing Right because it's like it's every little grammatatical 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 don't have to.

I can get a buy to speak it. But I've made a commitment to myself. Same thing in biotech, you know, I got introduced to it by Friedberg and obviously not, and now I'm trying to learn, and 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, we've all collectively had, and you have to start from scratch. My God, it's really tough. It's really tough. Our age, it is just hard.

Kids, you're screaming in the background, you're trying to manage all the 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, the there is, you have some motivation to get something, right? But if you still have nothing, you're going to climb up the mountain because like staying at the shore means you can go watch out to see or something. Hours and hours work. Hours and hours and hours. In my 20s and 30s, like it was like 10 to 16 hour days. I couldn't take the office.

Is that different today? Yeah. I don't work in the same way I did before because 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. But when I was in my 20s and I was a PM grinding out a product or writing a feature spec or building a model and trying to put all these things together It was so much thankless work. I learned a ton and it was all worth it No, look this is the thing about work this is the thing about work-life balance that the people are always complaining about People who are working too hard don't realize is that

Yeah, you you want to think about work life balance, 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 wanna be in your 50s. And so, Jamatha 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 skills set where he can delegate more.

So, yeah, I think 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 that are going to make them successful later on. 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 in no benefits.

And, you know, this is kind of unnecessary greed in my mind. And I think that's what my first job was at Bernie. I made $455 an hour. Yeah, I made $4.25 an hour in 1996 with my first job cleaning a pool. Yeah. 250 for me when I worked at Fordham's Fordham's Computer Center. I think it was four two three three dollars that had gone to but when I started in the workforce in 88 It was 250 was the minimum wage. What was the minimum wage were you or do?

What was it like in that 19th century sucks? Yeah, tell us When I when I was working at in that 19th century sucks. Yeah, trust. When I was working at... Would you tilt the fence? 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'm also making some money while I'm sitting here. And they paid me seven bucks an hour. That's what I did my senior year. Well, it was pretty good. Yeah, pretty good. That's pretty good. Well, paying jobs, seven bucks a day. 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 who's 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 going to cost $10,000,000 or whatever the estimate is to kind of fund that sort of program. Suddenly, the cost of a burger goes from $0.49 to $0.99,

or $0.99, because there's much greater demand on that kind of area of the economy for consumption. You see an inflationary effect, which trickles its way through. And so what ends up happening ultimately is 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. And 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 costs of living climb so much that you need to raise the UBI again to give people basic living expenses. So it becomes this kind of nasty runaway effect.

So it's not really sustainable is one argument that's made against the UBI. But obviously, a different point than what we were saying I'm all in a cup. Anyway. I think people don't know what they want and if they get it, they're going to, I think of a form of a form of UBI does make sense and I do think we need to subsidize folks. But 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, 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. Oh, 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 sort of a split. What's the open job step right now? It's like nine million open jobs in the US.

It's been bouncing from eight to 10 million, yeah. There's more unfilled jobs and there are unemployed people, right? Yeah. Or unemployment is high, but unfilled jobs is even higher. Yeah. We 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 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. 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 that welfare reform in the past of 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 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 un-American. 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, it's, yeah, it's like, it feels insulting to 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 a bus boy, I'll go be a waiter or a bus boy 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

and take yourself out of the economy? Well, 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 human labor and I think there always will be. 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 in folks' best interests? Well, that's what I mean. Yeah, but yeah. So is it in best people's best interests? I'll phrase it the way you're saying. Is it in people's best interests? I think the point where we're gonna 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. 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 is in the exact way Jason that you said, which is 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, that just seems like the height of entitlement. Sometimes you just need a job because you need money to pay your bills, right? But you're saying if you get a job candidate, you know, citizen fit, the uptake will be better. UBI is a benefit. It's like universal health care. We don't make a decision about universal health care 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. We're talking politics. Why don wrong way to figure this out? We're talking politics. Why don't we shift to the recall? Yeah. All right.

So post-mortem on the Newsom recall. He, uh, Secretary of State says the recall cost over 300 million, obviously, Gavin Newsom won in a bit of a landslide. Hold on, hold on. The 300 million point. Let me just take care of this real quick, okay? Because I saw this all day on social media. You know what? Yeah, it did cost 300 million dollars,

but all the people crying about that, clutching their pearls about the 300 million, never said a word about the 30 billion, the 100 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 referring to? I'm not sure I know enough about this. This is the EDD fraud where 30 billion basically went to anyone claiming unemployment insurance

and 30 billion and fake claims were paid out. The process was poorly administered. So I mean, people were just creating fake addresses. They were descending claims from anywhere and uh... and thirty billion went out so so look i mean that's a kind of incompetence and corruption that we have in california so fact your point is that because it's a single

party state where the state uh... where the democrats have super majority in the assembly and obviously have the the the governorship that the only mechanism for the minority the the Republican Party, is to kind of run recall. Not even, not the Republicans, just the citizens. I mean, look, let's remember how the, how the recall and the ballot issue 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 the the electoral process and and get control of all these elective 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 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-spended, 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 shalacking for supporters of the recall. And I do think that whenever you suffer a defeat, I think it's important for you to think about what went wrong. And certainly as a supporter of the recall, I think it's worth doing a post mortem.

I think any political party when it loses needs to do some introspection. So what went wrong? Well I think a couple of things. So 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. You 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, it provided a very convenient and rich target for Newsom to shoot at. And so you would have to say that tactically, there a public party 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,

Tremoth, I wanted you to run. And so Falcner was sort of that candidate. And so you kind of had a choice on the Republican side between a moderate candidate who wasn't very charismatic, which was Falcunor, and a very charismatic candidate who wasn't moderate, and it really played into New Sons' hands. And he was then able to nationalize the election in the wake of that. So he branded, I think someone unfairly, he branded Elder as a Trumper, and he ran against Trumpism,

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

knew some 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, because 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 recall moved away from the issues that had galvanized supporters in the poll, just one month ago, which were homelessness, crime, schools, and school closures and lockdowns. And Newson was able to very effectively change the subject. Well, he 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. I mean, if you remember. Do you think policy has shifted because of the recall tax at 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 and just send a message to 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 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 re-opening. I think because he was facing this

recall. So look, I think the recall was worth it just for that but uh... do you think things could have been different if there was a fringe candidate like i don't know about uh... Sri Lankan billionaire uh... that was you know uh... not kind of this this hard-and-re-public in the big yes yes i i blame i blame chama for this i think i think i think i like chama that could have won okay a democratic centrist obvious i I'm joking.

I don't blame you for Jamoth, I understand why you wouldn't want to run, but I'm saying I can't like Jamoth, 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 for a pro-life gana. I think he was pro gay marriage before the Clintons. Yes, he was very early on that. He was socially very liberal and very tolerant. You got to

be in California. In general, do you think the unions in California, 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? I think it's a long-term project 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. Well, I mean, if you look at the recalls happening locally too with Chesa-Budin 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-Budin is thinking about outcomes a little bit more now. The implications of this recall, I think are really important. And I think it plays out in who runs in two years when Newsom is up for re-election. And absolutely, it'll change who runs on the Democratic side in four years, assuming new some wins. You have to remember, there had been a massive degradation in the quality of life. The most popular state in America, which represents the fifth largest economy in the world, under

one party control. 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 democratic or a republican thing, it's back to centrism,

and I think it's checking special interests, exactly what SAC 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 interest of the general public, our kids, the environment, water quality. And if you can't walk into a state where everybody up in the ticket is on your same team and get shit done, it's a really tough report card.

Yeah. I'm just super uninspired by this guy. Like, where is there audacious plan for California? Has anybody stated like an audacious, like here's what this state's possible? No, I mean, no, and there'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, like, you know, should the free government. Well, they're in competition. They are, they're in competition with Florida and Texas. They have to compete for business and citizens. And if it's not done 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, this startup is an umbrella organization of 50 other startups. It's a holding company.

And there'll be these small little rules and differences amongst these 50 states and that'll allow us collectively to thrive. So, you put out a tweet, I'm sorry, go ahead. No, I just wanna, I think we wanna 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 just rugged, individualists who are self-sustaining and resourceful. This state is not 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, Zach, you put in a competition, you put out a tweet saying often, or Miami, 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 line in California is not good. I think what you've already seen in the trend line in California is not good. I think what you've already seen in the days since the recall is that Gavin Newsom has 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 Trumpism, and they're going to demonize and otherwise, whoever the candidate is on the other side as a Trumpist, whether they are or 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 like unbelievable. But- Black clansmen. Yeah, they basically try to make him out of your black, which, look, he is not. Okay, Larry Elder's a libertarian. Maybe his politics are not in the mainstreaming

California, but he's not a black clansman. But look, 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 trumpest and and the irony of it will be that they will have total control over the problems that people really care about, crime, schools, homelessness, and somehow, you know, what news improved is that you can whip people up into, you can stir their partisan political tribalism when you do that, right? That's why it's effective

is he gets people just to see blue 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 a Republican party not play into this. And there was a very good editorial. I think there's too big. There's a fact to say, how come the Republicans are still pursuing a Trumpian, you know, just framework? There's too bad.

They are. They're so screws. They're stupid. They are. Look, they're so dumb. They're dumb. It's a really stupid strategy, and there's two things they got to fix right away, okay? So number one, Rich Lowry from Nashville, you had 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 gonna bring them down in 2020. And the other thing is this anti-vax stuff. I mean, you know, voters completely forgot about the way that Newsom locked down this state

and then broke his own lockdowns. Why? Because he's provaxed even to the point of vaccine mandates, whereas the Republicans were not. And frankly, I think, Jamoth, your instincts on this were right on, which is, people, given a choice between vaccine mandates or an anti-vax position, they will take the Vax mandates. Speaking of instincts, you want to go to this this week in Facebook's dumpster fire? Sure Sure

So I mean where to begin This all started on 2016 at the Stanford Graduate School of Business Okay, well we'll get to your victory lab in a moment 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 was stated in 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. Teen's blame Instagram for increases in the rate of anxiety and depression. This reaction was unpromptant and consistent across all groups, according to the Wall Street Journal. And Instagram, obviously, is a jug or not over a billion month, month the active users and over 40% of them are under the age of

22. This is a really interesting issue because we are this is 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 issue you guys, 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 more good place to be, right? I don't think that's what we want is a healthy society, in a healthy society. Our daughters, and it's probably, by the way, it's probably more than just our daughters, it's probably our sons and daughters that are going through these issues. The question is now about, is it really a public health issue? If you know about it, what responsibility do you have to do something? And before I apply, and 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, Arge Reynolds, Brown and Williamson, and Laurie Ard, okay.

And the attorney generals of 46 states, and essentially it was an agreement that basically said, okay, we're gonna net all these Medicaid lawsuits together, we're gonna hold these folks responsible for the downstream implications of the product that they've been selling our kids and our adults population without the proper disclosures, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. 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 fifties all the way to the big nine of David knows all this because he 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, 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 here. And it's definitely a may or may not have been covered up. There could be criminal liability.

There's probably civil liability. If you're a mother or father who's lost their kid to a needing disorder or to depression, anxiety, bullying, suicide, and I think the article in the Wall Street Journal yesterday was about human trafficking. I mean, these are some horribly complicated, gnarly issues. To me, that's how I can edit the dots. So I'd just love to hear that.

Well, I mean, who's the Jeffrey Wigand in this case? I mean, this is literally the movie The Insider like somebody is leaking these documents out. There's a 10th and that 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 then they had 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? Well, 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, can it really be the case that using Facebook as bad for you as lighting something on fire and sucking its carbonized ash into your lungs? I mean, I just, you know, 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 are existed, but I don't know that it created them. And if you're going to blame Facebook for this, there's a lot of other places you could blame too. I mean, why don't we blame the Met Gala, you know, like, you know, look at all those beautiful people. Well, we have had actually a blame on the fashion industry for making unrealistic body types and the magazines and they started to go into it. Yeah, my kids 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. So this body image and self-esteem issue is everywhere in our society. And I think what social media does, as it doesn't so many of these cases,

is really just hold up a mirror to our society. And 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, you know, here's one thing, David. The, there have been other industries that have influenced this, but I don't think that they

were as prenicious and as frequent in their use of as social media. Reading a fashion magazine or watching TV, 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 an image into the Zoom chat there about suicide rates in the United States. In this chart, you'll see goes up to 2018. And right around 2006, when we were at 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 evidence? And that correlates directly with social media becoming part of what we're doing here. But what's your connection to what's happening? Is that among teens? I mean, what is that? This is overall suicide rate.

So I just think social media and the anxiety of produce could be actually having it. I'm open-minded to that. Can I clear up one thing, Saks? I think that 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, 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, 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. 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 long 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 is equivalent to looking

at a screen could actually do that to you. I guess the question is what's the threshold for regulatory intervention? 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 cost of the company's claim might be. But to find out, are we going to end up creating kind of a regulatory framework across all of the strengths? 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 SACS's former colleague companies that scale, the assumption is they did something wrong in order to get to that scale. You know, roll off both the SACS' former colleague and obviously famed investor. Now it's a Coya capital said that he always invests 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's self-to consumers. And if that is actually true, people aren't making kind of altruistic purchasing and consumption decisions or making decisions based on envy and based on greed and based on gluttony. And all of those drivers, we kind of, you know, are drivers, we are effectively kind of related back to these physiological drivers. Right? And so like, yeah. 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 a eating disorder or anxiety and blame it on one of these apps. Of course, we can convince 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 table of politicians, desks in Germany, Belgium, France, Thailand, they're going to find their issue in this treasure trove of content that's being continuously

dripped that out to the public. I guess my point is that this is today's issue. And business success, ultimately over time time in 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 is the largest beverage company in the world They sell 40 grams of sugar in 12 ounces of water and everyone buys that and they feel great from that and the sugar Creates a addictive problem that we've got no BC 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 and then help the difference. The difference is that this is not sugar, which is 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'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 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 produce essentially discouraging 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 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 it.

So in preparation for the segment, I asked my 11 year old girl daughter. I know Jake how you don't think I talked to my kids, but actually, I made no joke. I made joke of no joke. I was thinking of pre-era fun. Did you hear that?

I was scared of you were the fat ex. She was like, why are you? Why are you in my room? Security. Security. So the first thing she said is who are you? And after I said I'm your dad. And the second thing she said is, the second thing she said is who are you? And the second, and after I said, I'm your dad. And the second thing she said is,

the second thing she said is, I don't use Instagram. I'm like, okay, well, what do you use? She said TikTok. I'm like, well, the worst. So I'm like, what do you use TikTok for? And she said, well, I watch dance videos. I'm like, well, I've been reading press articles that say that the only thing on TikTok is sex and drugs and that it's, you know,

it's bringing you into a vortex of that. And she said, I don't watch that, I watch dance videos. And then, as far as the whip, she said, the only people who end up watching that are the ones who keep indicating, she didn'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 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 cigarettes. If they banned kids from using TikTok and Instagram until 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, but I don't let her anywhere near.

We have a complete mortuary. TikTok. 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 are you crazy? I mean, like all they use it for is to watch the dance videos. So, I don't know. But I think the sexist point is an interesting one, which is, you know,

based on what your daughter said that is effectively what's going on. It creates an acceleration of the natural evolution of these markets that historically may have taken, called it 50 years for everyone to want to watch. You know, MTV didn't emerge for 60 years until, there was radio and television broadcast signals. Then everyone said, you know what, I want to watch rockers dancing on stage and go nuts and whatever the consumer demand was that eventually

evolved there, what's happening in social media is within seconds you make evolutionary votes on what you want in an immediate cycle. And then all of a sudden a few hours later, you're kind of what you want in an media cycle. 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. We've definitely talked about the danger of getting trapped in an information bubble and a feedback loop. I do think that is a danger of these products. But so is cable news. I mean, you look at Twitter, it's an outrage machine and people get trapped in a cycle and they only want to either follow people to get outraged by them or just because they want to kind of self-addoctinate themselves.

But that is basically why people watch cable news as well. I mean, it is an outrage machine. For your friend Tucker. Or Rachel Maddo on MSNBC. They're both feeding different variations of outrage. 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 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 Instagram influencers. Well, you do more than that, right? You put it behind a counter and there's a strict prohibition on people under the age of 18 being able to use them.

When it looks like companies like Jewel were 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. There's a really interesting topic there, which is should people under the age of 16 or 18 be prohibited from using products? Yes, 100%. If you think about 16 or 18, let's say 16 or 100%. 16 or 100% and then there needs to be a way of opting up because I think 16

yearls 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 this shit. 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 to service. 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 fucked up. And a lot of the research that's come out, I dropped a couple of links in the chat, you don't have to 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 veer is females are more adept or more frequently in dynamic or complex social situations. In other words, cyber-bowling type situations where people use the social media to kind of blow each other. I see you guys have a real point with respect to ages 13 to 16 because I don't think you're a lot to use social media, at least the terms used for Hibidon or age 13. We all know that's a joke.

You and I have to build products that have to abide by copper 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 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 tech scoops and techs chats and they'll be in signal and you wouldn't be able to see what they're doing I mean at least on social media you can see it. The whole point of that though that makes sense to me because I remember when I was growing up And we all wanted to smoke it was a pain in the ass to get get cigarettes. So most of us just said, 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 lunchroom and passing out berry flavored vape pins. Yeah. Well, that's what they basically saying. Well, that's crazy. Obviously that's a great package. If you look at the package, they pray out rage around jewel and berry

flavor, they're not this. But why do you care about jewel or why should we generally care about 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 and we've already accepted. So we've still liked to go back to, except we've smoked it for a long time. And then we had this kind of tobacco moratorium that's now kind of shut up.

If she's not smoking. But Freberg, if you said, if you said right now, COVID is a disease of the old and the obese, you would be canceled like Somebody tried to say that No, no, 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 They need to make 40% of Americans with type 2 diabetes or whatever

There's also personal freedom and do you want to drink a Coke zero exactly water? And so if you have personal freedom, why should some regulator tell you what social media tool you should or should you? That's how the cover up is what we're talking about. If we're talking about minors, if we're talking about what are you going to do with a 13 to 16 year old? What are you going to do with the end free? 11 year old.

That's the best part of your argument. That's the best part of your argument is when we're dealing with minors. I could see the argument for more restrictions and potentially support them depending what they are. I think that's something. What about minors not being able to drink soda? You have to be 16 year old to drink soda. I mean, that's actually, that's where most diabetes and obesity is rooted in this country.

I actually am reminded to that position, actually. I know it sounds crazy, but no, I think that that makes it a little bit more sense. It's drinking Coca-Cola makes no sense if we have a crazy obesity. If we could actually show that. So let's ask the question then. So let me ask a let me ask a second order question about this, which is freeberg is right that drinking sodas for 13 rolls 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're looking at publicize took their 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 gonna 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 the traditional media has an incentive to blow this out of proportion a little bit. Because they have an agenda for your science. Yeah, 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, it enables us to stay

in touch with people we care about, friends, family, and it 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 to consume things. Okay, so we never talk about that, 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 the third estate being the press. And in the same way that there are people who want to empower, who want to censor the press, I do believe that there are people in power

who 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. 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, actually, this is a 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. I think I think we're only talking about ages. If we're talking about the minors, the kids, I think you and I can find agreement on this issue. I think, but'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. 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. Do you guys believe, and this is a theory that's been growing, that TikTok run by the Chinese government is trying to reprogram ethics morals and doing psychop, basically.

There's something on our children. No, Jay, there's something bigger than that. I mean, I think all of you guys probably upgraded to 14.8 IOS this week. I hope if 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 Jason and I were talking about this, and I think Jason, you were the one that said, you're like, yeah, we've been living with that with TikTok for years. It's not as if NSO just licensed it randomly to this Audi government. I mean, this tool has been available for a while, so to your point. But do we think that the Chinese government, TikTok, are trying to program our children to be more deviant and to create social unrest?

And 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. And if you look at that Wall Street, did you see the Wall Street Journal article that I just sent to you guys? 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 started to go down a rabbit hole.

And just with one keyword search, these kids went into deep, kink, BDSM, sort of result. This is a pretty straightforward way to tree algorithm. So 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 way 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 don't know, I'm not sure that this is repeating anything that's so, you know, it's pretty obvious that that's how it should work if they want to have maximum utilization. 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 post it in some ranked order. It's the entire corpus of like, WongTale. And so what they show in this TikTok is like, how quickly a child who just types in one keyword can have their feed be 90% drug use and, you know, say domestic, whatever you're into, SAC, I don't know.

Um. I have a question. 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 flat out prohibition or what.

But yeah, but look, 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 kids toward certain kinds of content around sex or drugs or violence. I have to constantly remember my 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 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, everything else that you've done. I'll tell you what does happen. My, I put kids YouTube on my kids, my four-year-olds iPad. And then the other day, she said she saw some scary horror thing on there and she couldn't sleep

and she woke up in the middle of the night. But if 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 left. And that's what I realized I did. My laziness in just thinking, oh, there was something she wanted to watch. I put it at 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. Sound something scary. It's too hard. I don't know if you guys use this, but I use an app called Castodio. It's with a Q, Q U ST U DiO. 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,

he's the only one that has a phone. But that's nice. And you had a discussion with him about that, okay? Yeah, and the rules have this. And yeah, but I agree, it's still super, super hard, but this is 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 instruments are you're not allowed to have. Well, the ones that we've we're not allowed to have TikTok, 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 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 know, I'm sure. You asked military acknowledges Kabul drone strike killed 10 civilians, including seven children. We knew this. They're just confirming something that had been exposed. Your time's to excellent reporting on this. Excellent reporting by the New York Times.

That was incredible 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. It was really the, I mean, it's obviously a tragedy.

It 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 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 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 standard family including seven children.

Now, I mean, I think I understand why this, well, 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 had just had that bombing at the airport. And it was the bloodiest day for America in Afghanistan. I think we had 13 soldiers killed a few days before this. But it just shows the kind of mistakes that we can make even fighting

drone warfare. You know, the idea was that the term casualty is of war exists for a reason. Like, this is how war works. You cannot do it perfectly. It's messy. Everybody innocent people dies is by war is worse thing. But how do we ensure the last resort? Right.

And how do we ever think we're going to win hearts and minds in this country by, you know, like we, we, we made too long to stay. We talked about this. Like they're, they're not interested in democracy, like in the way we want them to be and the West wants them to be. By the way, that's forcing it down their throats. Yeah. It's not going to work. We, we, we could have maintained a base there. There were better ways to exit, but let's fix the schools in California first. Yeah. I think that's, I think that'll ultimately, I think 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, and hopefully there's not another 9-11. All right, let's wrap with Ellen Powell wrote a piece for the New York Times op-ed section on sexism in tech using the Elizabeth

Homestrial as the main example. She was also on Techchecks, the NBC show, and discussed her op-ed quote, home should be held accountable for her actions as chief executive of Theranos. And it can be sexist to hold her accountable for alleged serious wrongdoing and not hold an array of men accountable

for reports of wrongdoing and bad judgment. She uses Travis Kalinick and Adam Newman as examples of men who have engaged in questionable and ethical, even dangerous behavior in tech without much legal penalty. And that they both went on to start new companies. Her main example, however, is bias is tech executive Kevin Burns, who is the former CEO of Jewel, J.U.L., who helped the e-cigarette vaping company raise $12 billion, but he left

jewel amidst a lot of legal blowback. And just this past week. With a bunch of cash. With a bunch of cash. With a bunch of cash. Yeah, I mean, of course, you get to secure the bag on the way out. Adam Newman 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 drop. And do not drop the bag. So she meant she meant to another story story is like juice arrow if you guys remember this company a couple years ago they raised $100 million pre launch right it was a juicer that you know was supposed to juice my juice from my juicer. Yeah, I enjoyed it.

The claim that they made was that inside of the packet was like fresh vegetables and the things squeeze the fresh vegetables and fresh juice juice came out and it turns out that the bag was just filled with juice. And so you know, I think the bag was filled with shaved vegetables or whatever, but you could squeeze the bag. You could squeeze it. It was squeezed the bag. So it was already pre-juiced is what, you know, Olivia's the last game is now, Olivia Peterson.

It was, she basically put, she kind of made a whole video and put on Bloomberg. They had juice in these baggons and they were selling people what they thought was juice. Should I put it into a machine and paste seven dollars? They put it in a bag, that was supposed to be fresh vegetables. And then it sold that as fresh vegetables to then get juice. To get the juice. And it charged $8 a bag for the stuff. And there was a whole.

Who invested in that? Who invested in that? Who wrote the $1 million dollar? Google Ventures. Anyway, a lot of people invested in this thing. It was a huge, it was a 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 until 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. granted no lives or at risk in this particular case, but some might argue lives were at risk in the case of Jewel. But I think you see this a lot more in these kind of hardware, particularly in life sciences companies.

There's a business like Xymrgins a good example, right? It's very heart-tech, very deep tech. Josh Hoffman did an incredible job fundraising, raised a $400 million round from Softbank, took the company public, then they go public in 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 pages or a port on these guys, showing that Berkeley Lights, which went public. And yesterday, Scorpion Capital, one of these short sellers, put out 160 page or a port on these guys, showing that Berkeley Lights' product actually, it's a hardware, life science is hardware, that costs $2 million. They sold it into all the farming companies.

And Scorpion saying, look, this thing doesn't work. It's a total fraud. Like there's no, the machine doesn't do what they claim it does. Okay, but such a Alan Pous Point, is there a double-spandard or not? Right, and so these were all run by mail CEOs and nothing happened to them. And are they all white?

As well. Yeah, they're all white. All right, first of all, let's take it easy on the white guys, Jamoth. Yeah. It's three other white guys on the bottom. I'm asking a qualifying question. It is.

So here's what I'll ask is, I mean, is this a surprise that white dudes will get a halt pass? I don't think that's a shocker. Yeah, it's considered entrepreneurial failure, but 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, there's two different things. Yeah, go ahead. Is it free, is there two different things 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 habit 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 security fraud. In these other cases, is it people who are ambitious, if you look at the juicer row, it's kind of like, this is a stupid idea that I got overfunded. He put, he put juice in a packet and told you to put a shovel. No, he put, he put, he put, sheff, shaved vegetables in the packet and then used hydrox, which is a actual real thing. That's actually not correct. Watch the video that Olivia put on Bloomberg a few years ago, which is sort of the gum. I just think you pictures of it.

I mean, maybe there's a different one than that. What they showed is that it was already squeezed. Yes, there was shit in there, but it was already squeezed. All right, well, that guy should go to jazz. I take it all back. I mean, it was like a crazy story when this came out. Everyone's like, oh my god.

Like, it was a standard 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. And this isn't just in hardware, it's also in like science, as you see this a lot, where you ship a product. I would probably say that if regulators believe that 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

went after Elizabeth Holmes? Because it was actually, there was a legal case. I think there's, 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 powerful folks, not necessarily 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, 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 self-read cancer DNA in blood, using a very small quantum of blood.

Companies like Garden, Tengreil have actually done and built a great business out of it. But it requires extremely sophisticated machinery sold to them by aluminum 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 chat. So the investors in Juicero were Google Ventures, Cliner Perkins, Thrive Capital. I mean, these are all very sophisticated folks that made a decision and it's probably not the case that they were lied to. I understand why they made the Juicero mistake because at the time, fresh pressed juice using hydraulics was a thing.

And this guy said, that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to use hydraulics. I'm going to squeeze the vegetables so you get the best stuff out of here. I understand why they felt that. Because my wife was buying that. I love fucker, you dog. Jay, my wife, Jay was buying that press jewellery juice in LA.

You remember this trend? It's pure sugar. That stuff is pure sugar. Well, it's 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 Ellen Powell's story is she brings up, you know, the harassment stuff and, you know, this is an issue of gender, etc. But on this week in startups, I've been covering fraud after fraud. I don't know if you saw app Annie got an SCC for some yesterday. What happened Jason? Because I saw you. With that, Annie, they told people who were using their analytics products, building apps. There's like 8 million people that they would never sell their data except an 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 a fine of it. It is like that's the whole point of. 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, 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, 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, oops, I accidentally said this. Right. So there's now where does this is an end around around things like regularity. I think that's a really big deal. Well, and then I guess the question is like what 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 public information service, that says one thing. Yes. And you're violating that, but then you may also be violating reg FD. So they haven't gone after people for on the other side of the trade for securities for a, but they charge Shimon securities fraud. He pays 10 million bucks. I think he's in the penalty box. Can 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 and just basically straight up lying about their sass offer then you have tether the stablecoin 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. 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. So you're saying they're all but I'm seeing them all the time. Yeah, they're just not the press is not obsessed with them because let's face it. Let's just say 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 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. A new man. They were talking about him being a hippie walking around with bare feet being six seven.

Every profile, she's, she's wrong in that case. Every profile of Anda Newman talked about his personal life and his wife is married to what's her name? No, Paul Tro's cousin. So Ellen's 100% wrong on that one. Yeah, and didn't, didn't Elizabeth Holmes make it relevant by dressing deliberately styling herself in the fashion of Steve Jobs with a black turtleneck and the glasses? and didn't Elizabeth Holmes make it relevant by dressing deliberately styling herself in the fashion Steve Jobs with a black turtleneck

and the glasses? I mean, you know, she portrayed herself as the next Steve Jobs, I mean, it was part of the grift. So now, 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 stirring them in the face. I mean, look, if a man had gotten out there wearing the black turtleneck and the John Leonard and Rosses or whatever, they would have said, who is this clown? Yeah, exactly, but they suspended. They suspended. You have to dress up as Steve Jobs in the next episode. You can make it work. Can we all do it?

Can we see you in the next episode? Let's do a Halloween episode where we all show up. We all do Elizabeth Holmes for Halloween episode. No, but that's like a nested Steve Jobs. So like you're going to be Elizabeth Holmes. Yeah, we should all do our own verses of Elizabeth as Steve Jobs. I think that's exactly right.

I think you're right. I think this is the way that gender has played into it is that there's a lot of people who really wanted the Elizabeth home story to be true and frankly, she used that in order to perpetuate her fraud. Well, she may not have used it, but she was definitely influenced. Or she benefit from it. No, no, she used it. She definitely used it. I want to ask you guys kind of a controversial question. You 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 and 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, more capital floats all boats and more money will rush into that market. 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, because then capital will stop coming in, people will come after you, and we're much more of kind of a supportive open community. But there is this experience that I have with at least two companies in the last year, and I've kept my mouth shut because, and by the way, I don't think that there's necessarily a 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, why you don't want to call 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, why you don't want to call these things out. I called it out and I've still got a crazy founder denouncing me years later. I mean, look, I hate. Who has an SEC enforcement against him? Yeah, exactly. A sanction. So, yeah, I mean, look, you're right, Freeberg, that there's very little upshot to doing it.

But look, I hate, we have to distinguish between fraud and sort of puffing, okay. Here's the thing that I think, Ellen Powell's kind of missing is when she criticizes all these founders who are visionary and evangelical 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 come true doesn't make it fraud. I think that a lot of people out in the non-silicon valley investing world wouldn't interpret that as fraud because a founder told them something that ends up not happening, not ends

up being true. 100% correct. This is why you really, it's very dangerous to take money outside of Silicon Valley because people don't really understand this distinction. 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, I said it 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 and actually falsifying documents. She actually falsified documents. That is the fraud. That is the line you cannot cross. They changed blood test results. Listen, set another way, SACs. Elizabeth Holmes vision of taking less blood and doing more tests with it and being more efficient is a completely valid thing to pursue.

Chamokja said he pursued it five times in fail funds. Completely failed. Hardly lying, completely failed. 10s and millions of dollars burned in a pile. But what we all buy into here is what if it does work one and a thousand times, but what Elizabeth Honest did was she lied about the results. And she told me she lied about the results. She lied about real people's blood test results, like actual civilians. Well, I have some empathy for Elizabeth Jobs in the following way.

When I was told, when I was told, when I was Steve Holmes. No, hold on, when I was told, I think I told this story. I was asking an investor, hey, what's the hottest company around? This is in 2013 or 2014. 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 bullet point, one drop of blood, full characterization of your, you know, be able to do a blood test, et cetera. 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, fuck it. I'll just start my own version. I'll figure out how to do this. 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 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 should happen, that's really unfair. Yeah, it's what do you think of the defense that Balwani, this friend, Goli defense?

I saw Cara Swisher and some New York Times reporters and other reporters were basically not buying it. Don't we talk about this left hand, didn't we? Yeah, I'm just curious if you have been following me, Trial. I think it's hard for somebody who, in the moment, took credit for every decision, for every piece of press, for claim to be the jobs in 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. Yeah, also I think, you know, this is gonna come out, but she actually fired Balwani. So if she fired him, how was she, you know, it's hard to do the Schvengalley defense, I think. Well, maybe they're both guilty. Schvengalley, maybe it's a

guilty. It could be an ant. It could be a Goli, Sven, Sven, Sven Goli. All right, listen, we'll close on this. Mailchimp has sold to into it for $12 billion in the largest bootstrap acquisition ever. We all know Mailchimp and we all know QuickBooks. It's a huge deal. I have one issue with 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 it was about to get you. Employees didn't have equity, however, and I have no MailChimp for a while for over a decade, but using the product and know the founder had them on the podcast before. Have they been a sponsor of your product? They sponsored 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 gonna ever raise money. And... He also said he was never, ever gonna sell. And he was also never gonna sell. I, I, they gave... You have 12 billion reasons to change his mind. Exactly.

They gave him, the 20% of my my understanding was employees got a 20% cash bonus and they were amongst the highest paid in the industry. So their plan was instead of giving people some big reward at the end. They were just distributing cash. They were just distributing cash. So if you had 150K developer, you got 30K on top. That's not an unreasonable way to run a business that has no outside investors that, you know, and 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, a few companies that I 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 have like an ownership in the business. I think you should be paying a lot of money and we should pay cash bonuses for achieving results. We do that. But then what we also say is if you want to buy equity, come and buy it. But you're probably right from a performance perspective, Chimata. I don't 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 made the choice. 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 equity in the team, but in other countries, right? I think in soccer, you can. Yes, but I think one of the best things about Silicon Valley is the fact that 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 techie. It's beautiful. It's wonderful. You never hear about that when all the press is doing is writing stories about greedy VCs and all that kind of stuff.

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 life taking care of forever because they work really hard at a great company that worked out. That's the most common story, and it's never reported. By the way, look, there's nothing wrong with bootstrapping your company. So congrats to this Mailchimp founder for doing it. Certainly, as an investor,

I have no desire. Just describe what, yeah. Just explain what bootstrapping is, Zach's real product. What's strapping is just when you don't raise outside money and he did it himself and he basically, fund it.

Yeah, he funded the company with the profits, which is just amazing. But, but here's the thing about that is, he started the company back in 2001 at the Nadir after the dot com crash and there was very little money going into new starts 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 gonna bootstrap it, you're probably gonna 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 bootstrap 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 a disadvantage Hard to compete your son. Yeah, what about AOC, what she wore to the Met Gala? Tax the rich, she wore a tax the rich dress to the Met Gala. Dave Portanoi had the best tweet about this, which is she's about to go have the best night of her life, parting her ass off with all these rich people, and she's wearing this tax the tax the rich. It's total hypocrisy. taxorich. 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 deride. 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 all the guests of the Gala don't have to wear a mask. I mean, it's completely incredible. It's new. Well, she also drops a merch. You can buy a tax the rich. There's an official AOC team shop. I can't believe that that's true.

That's what makes it the most loathsome. She goes to the ring and now she's selling $58. You can buy a t-shirt. Sweat shirts. A $58 sweatshirt, $28 dad hat, a $10 sticker pack, $27 to bet. Oh, what's a dad hat?, $28 dad hat, $10 sticker pack, $27 to pay, $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 hat. Tax the rich, yeah. Wow. I think no dad hat was a category. No dad jokes and dad bods. I've never started dad hat. Dad hat. Fantastic, fantastic.

Yeah, I thought it was kind of gross. Is it wrong to buy some of this? I think that it's kind of cool actually. I mean, the tax the rich hat is pretty funny. It's pretty cool. Oh my God, if you were a tax the hat. If a sweatshirt, I think the best thing is if I bought this sweatshirt and wore it around.

We're on CNBC, doing your next seat. If you were a tax the rich hat on CNBC, that would be peak to Moth. I think that would be peak. That would be great. Get assigned by everybody got any plugs? Anybody have plugs? The craziest thing about that Dave Portnoy tweet was that 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 in the morning. They put a warning label on it. Oh God. So no warning warning liberals and socialists at Twitter don't agree with this tweet. Right. No, exactly. Warning somebody in the out crowd Dave Portnoy is

criticizing somebody in the in crowd that by definition important. Yes, it's the seed at all in summit, right? He's a is the is the cybermectin fake story from Rachel Maddow. Is that fact checked or no? No. She posted some update or other, but 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 double stand. No, there's, you know, absolutely. There is no fact check on that. For some reason,

the Rachel Maddow tweets when on fact checked, as far as I know, there's still oh, absolutely. There is no fact check on that. For some reason, the Rachel Maddell tweets when on fact checked, as far as I know, they're still on fact checked. You know what, you should wear the rich hat and then get your buy the Hamptons shirt. I think we're those on your next scene. Oh my God, what a great combo. It tags the red. Wait, can I show you guys a great piece of merch

hold on so I'll be back in a second. Yeah, but I, but can I just say, I don't look here in the house's it's merged for the big app. I don't I don't look good in hats No, you don't know. I've wanted to wear a hat for a long time, but I just it just doesn't get good on me Let's see his this is my favorite piece of merch Which is somebody made Fabulous absolutely great wait, can we just say by the way? made a party. That's fabulous. Absolutely great. Wait, can we just say, by the way, there's a person that did make a Bestie's merch site.

None of us knows who he is, but there's an incredible thing that he tweeted at us, right, J.K.L., which is he's paying his way through college? Yeah, he puts a note into it. He told me he made like five grand over the summer. And so, you know, he's probably making like 30 grand a year off of merch. If you're anybody's interested in some Bestie's merch, we don't make a single dime from it, but there's a young hard work in dude paying him, paying his way through school. I don't know.

It's Bestie apparel. He's Bestie apparel, right? Bestie apparel. Bestieapparel.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, you know, he did his pen his way through his script. For him, yeah.

And I think they did, you know, the band is way through square. For him. Yeah. And I think they did, you know, the shirts that people wore on their all-in bar crawl came from them. But I really wanted to do the, I wanted you to do all-in the t-shirt. I'm buying this t-shirt, the 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 with taxed a rich on the backside for you? For when we're in Italy? I would buy that. We can have all we can matching speed up. Oh, let me, she would walk. I always threaten to buy a speedo. She always says, we have to buy speedos next time we're in Italy.

And we have to do our bestie walk from peer to peer on the beaches of Italy and a speedo. Can you imagine if that image got leaked to us in speedos? I did, I did a bestie love with sex all right boys I gotta go I gotta eat lunch you are all right love you besties love you guys take care we're like your winners ride brain man David's act

and it said we open-source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it. I'm the U.S. queen of kinwap! I'm going on a leave! What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? Besties are gone! Go thrift! That's my dog taking away. I wish you drive away. Sets x. Get it off!

Oh man! I'm a disaster when we get to the police station. We should all just get a room and just have one big hug or two, because they're all... It's just like this sexual tension that we just need to release that house. What, you're the big, what, you're the purest. Big, what? That's good for you. We need to get my cheese aren't that bad. I'm going on, Leon! I'm going on, Leon!

I'm going on with it!