Doomed to Fail - Ep 128 - Cash, Check, or COD?: The PayPal Mafia - Part 1

Episode Date: August 13, 2024

We are technically old enough to remember when you couldn't send money or pay for things online, but it feels like it was centuries ago! This week, Farz starts us off on his PayPal series with a peek at the origins, who was involved, and what the right place, time, and amount of money was able to create! Join our Founders Club on Patreon to get ad-free episodes for life! patreon.com/DoomedtoFailPodWe would love to hear from you! Please follow along! Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/doomedtofailpod/  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/doomedtofailpod  Youtube:  https://www.youtube.com/@doomedtofailpod TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@doomed.to.fail.pod Email: [e-mail] 

It's a matter of the people of the state of California versus Hortonthal James Simpson, case number B.A.019. And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your... And we are live and recording. Hi, Taylor. Happy Sunday. How are you? Good. How are you? I'm very, very well. Thank you. One of our... Well, I don't know, even though if you were really good friends with him, but a friend, I guess, of mine, Armagon. You remember Armagon, right? yeah yeah he's visiting he's staying here and he is going to be cooking us up a vegan dish

um that he is really proud of he said it's like it's so it's going to be the best vegan food ever apparently so i'm really excited about them i love vegan vegan food yeah we don't really have much of it here in austin yes you do do you think that's true blair's my sister's a vegan and she lives there so there's two that i know of which is um costa day lose and there's another restaurant i i can't remember the name bolden creek i think it's called um But you can always get something vegan at a restaurant here. But like dedicated vegan restaurants the way like Cafe Gratitude we had in L.A., it's not like that. But anyways, I forgot.

Oh, let me just, hold on. I'm doing like four things for no reason. Let me introduce us. Go for it. Hi, everyone. Welcome. Welcome to Doom to Fail. We're the podcast that brings you history's most notorious disasters and epic failures twice a week.

I am Taylor joined by Fars. If you're just joining us for the first time, we have. like 120 episodes you can go back and binge and learn a lot we've been learning a lot for the past year and a half we've been learning a lot and actually this week was really exciting for me taylor because i started researching so i started researching a topic then i found another topic then i found another right now i have like 14 different tabs open yes yeah have like all these ideas i have like a bunch of ideas but i'm just like jealous that you learn it never happens like that for the record just so you know like i never actually get that lucky but i started researching one thing like

oh my god yeah and then another thing and then another and now i have like 14 different half started outlines that's awesome so um before you start though metal count talk about the olympics yes oh my god okay i was just i just had to pause to text my friend that he used to work with because he works at figs which is like the um scrubs company they make scrubs for doctors okay um and their olympic serum serum serum Ceremony commercials were so good. I cried during those. I cried all afternoon watching the closing ceremonies today.

Did you watch them? No. Incredible. It was incredible. They were like, they were singing, there was dancing. Everyone's there holding their medals. Everyone's super proud. And then the mayor of Paris handed the Olympic flag to Karen Bass and built mayor of ballet.

Oh. And she had it. And then her and Simone Biles stood while her, the singer, her, H-E-R, she sang the national anthem and she played the guitar and it was awesome. Then Tom Cruise comes from the top of the stadium. He ziplines down the stadium. He runs through the crowd. He grabs the Olympic flag from Karen Bass.

Nicely. He takes it from her. Huts her. Takes it. It takes it from her. Motorcycles out of the stadium. Then it goes to a video of him riding his motorcycle through Paris, getting on a plane. On the plane, he ties the flag to a parachute.

Then he's in L.A. He parachutes down to the Hollywood Hills. He's running through the Hollywood Hills. Then he covers the O's in Hollywood. And as three more, he personally covers them in fabric. So they're the Olympic rings now. And then they take the flag and put it on like a speed bicycle person's bike. She takes it down through L.A.

People start joining her, joining her at the go to the Coliseum. The skateboard or gold medal guy, he grabs it, he skates. Oh, they're in Venice Beach. Guess who's there? Bread hot chili peppers. Billy Elish. Snoop is back. Dr.

is there. It was so exciting. I feel like I don't need to see it actually now. I was like, Florence was like, who's Dr. Dre? I'm like, it was so good. It was such a great closing ceremony. It was so like the way, the, the people who spoke, you know, I'm so freaking jealous of people in Europe who speak like six languages.

But like the people who spoke, you know, were like, we know the Olympics can't bring peace, but this was a very peaceful thing, which was so wonderful, you know? So I'm really happy when I thought of hitch, para Olympics are next. I do want to have some highlights from those. a couple of things just of note we tied with china for the number of gold medals but we have more medals in total um the men's basketball won the gold and the women's basketball won the gold for the ninth time in a row so i mean i don't know how the u.s doesn't win basketball every year ever honestly like a disgrace when they don't win it um and then another one kind of thing that is still up up in the air so a lot of the gymnastics was last week and uh jordan childs who is um one of our female gymnasts, she got bronze in the floor, I think, or vault.

I don't remember, but whatever it was, she got it and then she got it because her coaches filed a motion against, like, the judging, but they did it four seconds too late, so they're taking it away from her. So, like, that's going to, like, go to trial, whatever that means. I don't even know what that means, yeah. I don't get it. Yeah, they had like a minute to challenge it. And they challenged it like a minute and four seconds.

And so like there's like, it's like very whole picky thing. So we'll see, we'll see where that goes. The women runners ran the 400 meter relay and we got gold in that. That was super fun. So yeah, a lot of really fun things that kind of ended out. Women's soccer got the gold, which is super exciting. Yeah. It was great.

I loved it. I heard that if Texas was a country, it had the six highest metal count. I'm sure because it's. huge. Yeah. Well, yeah, fair. And like there's some countries where some people got like the first medal their country's ever had, which is so lovely. One thing that I did learn that was like really disgusting was that Iran was like there as like the the athletes were there under like the generic Olympic refugee state banner. It was like, oh my God, these people turned Iran into like a refugee stayed in the globe it's like so did so yeah it's winning but yeah that's um i'm happy that

they got there um i should find you think of what else was like super awesome and i i did learn that breaking is no longer going to be an sport oh i'm still going to talk about this okay so i think i think that people are like oh we knew it would just be an exhibition and just be like one year because i was also looking at like a list of sports and when they started and like karate was in there only one year, which I think is weird. I feel like I don't know why I wouldn't be there more, but like something's only have one year. Next time it's flag football is going to be in the Olympics.

But oh my God, that Australian woman, that Australian bee girl, it was, that's all I've done the best two days is watch videos of her. Apparently she's like a has her PhD in brig dancing. There's something so like patently offensive that like this thing that was rooted in like Brooklyn black culture and then like this woman is. in Sydney. Like, it's just like, cool.

And I'm not even somebody who... There's women of all races who do it. The winner was Japanese. Like, whatever. I know, but they're good at it. But that woman did not deserve to be there. I know, but they're good at it. Like, they actually...

What I'm saying is, like, like, they didn't treat it like a joke the way she did. I just, like, some of the commentaries of just have laughed so hard. It is really wild that she was able to do that. But it was fun to watch because, like, you know, the emcees are all like yelling in French and everybody's screaming and like I don't know it was fun um yeah I mean yeah my my Olympic consumption has been pre-limited this past week so I missed all of it I actually didn't even know today was the closing closing day but I were watching did my did you see my reel

when I did my uh artistic swimming yes I did see that I put that on our on our thing we get our friends have a pool and we it was spent through all day yesterday and it was so nice and I was like let's see if I can put my leg straight in the air and the answer is no You can make the Australian swim team. I mean, like, no, I'm sure Australians are really good summers. No, like even like Miles can't swim very much. He weighs like 50 pounds maybe. And so I would like have to jump into the deep end and like kind of like help him across.

And that is really hard. Like I can't imagine like having enough treading water to, you know, a person who weighs probably like 100 pounds. But like to push them out of the water. It's wild. So. Yeah, it's super fun. I feel, I feel very emotionally drained after watching the closing ceremony. Well, hopefully this can bounce you back. Yes, yes.

We're getting into some fun topics today, and you can bounce back from the emotional withdrawal. Emotional, yeah, trauma of just being a person who watches Olympics to be. It's been hard for us. There's billions of us. There's billions of us. All right, but you go. You're first, right? I'm first, and I am going to do a series.

I'll start a series. And again, like, has nothing to do with Doom to Fail. So forget the entire premise of what we're doing here is a show. So I'm going to start a three-part series on an organization slash collection of individuals who have had one of the most, like, huge, tremendous, long-lasting impacts on society, technology, business, finances, politics, you name it. I am going to be covering the PayPal Mafia. Taylor, you must be familiar with this term.

I am, but I really don't know a lot about it. Okay, which is great because I said, listen, if you are familiar with it, and I know a lot of you all are, and if you think you know the story, you probably don't, so you should keep listening. Because I learned so much going through this. And I actually thought I knew a lot before, and then as I was going into it was like, oh,

like it all kind of kind of comes together. So this is, I know I'm super interested when I, so my daughter, Florence is almost 10, but the time, the three months that I was out of the office on maternity leave, was the three months that Venmo became a thing. I remember coming back to the office and feeling like I was a thousand years old because everyone was like, oh, we have Venmo me. And I was like, I have never heard that word before. I have been home with my infant for three months. And it was just like hilarious. And it was like in that three months, it became something that we couldn't live without. I'm going to actually bring up Benmo.

Nice. I'm going to use it all the time. yeah oh yeah yeah it's like invaluable um so to talk about the impact real quickly just so we have a sense of who these folks are so to kind of summarize the impact uh it is presumed that for the folks who are part of the PayPal mafia that they essentially funded founded or in some way took ownership of businesses that roughly have a market cap about two trillion dollars which is crazy and it is it is assumed or the math has been assumed assume that they have been responsible directly or indirectly for creating millions of job in the tech sector. And this all comes from like 19 or so people. It's like insane the impact they've had. I also think that, I don't know if you're going to mention this, but like my job and your job aren't jobs that I could have grown up wanting to have because I didn't know that they existed. Totally. They didn't exist. You know, I think that's so interesting too that you're

like, once these companies exist and it's in this, then you're creating jobs that. didn't exist before you know okay taylor think about it this way think about it this way so one person who's part of the paypal mafia was the initial seed investor for facebook and was being pitched by then uh president of facebook um uh sean parker okay and then because he was able to secure this half million dollar investment the company was able to accelerate and grow into becoming a multi-billion company and Sean Parker became a multi-billionaire himself and was able to turn around and invest in the business

that our founder founded. You see what I'm saying? Like it's all like... No, wild. So... I laugh only because he's nothing like Justin Timberlake and I don't even like Justin Timberlake, but in person you're like, I can't believe you got Justin Timberlake to play you in a movie. Great job.

I know. He did be good for himself. Really, really great job. Like... This was on elevator with him once. Was it you? We were at a party with him. We were at a party. I remember the party,

but we were also, somebody was also on elevator with him once. Anyways, so if I say that most of the way tech companies today think and do building of software, iterating and marketing their businesses, these guys basically invented those concepts that we just consider like totally normal, which I'm going to get into here a little bit. So I'm going to break this down,

this series down into three parts. So today's part is going to start with the most obvious thing, which is the conception slash exit of PayPal and who all was involved in that. Part two will be about the rise of the PayPal Mafia because really like it's after the exit that they became a thing. Then we're going to call out some of the key stakeholders and individuals that are within it. Part three will be about some controversy surrounding them

and final thoughts and lessons about what we've learned from what they were able to achieve in the tech sector. So that's kind of the layout I have here. But if there's other things folks want to hear, again, write to us to a humanefel pod at gmail.com. This is a hugely rich topic. like there's again it spins in so many different directions and also I learned that there's a whole host of other kind of mafia types in Silicon Valley too which could be interesting to cover but anyways we'll start with these guys because they have been the most impactful I think so I structured it this way because as it implies the PayPal Mafia consists of the founders and early employees of PayPal so starting with its history is kind of like an obvious starting point so let's get into part one which is the formation so we i'm going to do a little bit of a history lesson here and you definitely should chime in because

i bet i'll uncover some old distant memories for you so we're hopping into the wayback machine to the internet of the late 1990s so between 1990 and 1997 household ownership of personal computers increased from 15 to 35 percent and around the same time in 1993 mosaic introduced the web browser netscape which was the first popular web browser some people are going to find stuff on the internet. Also, interestingly, the guy who invented Mosaic was the guy who funded the last business that Taylor and I worked at.

That's what I thought. And, you know, so I was thinking on this other day, do you remember that? Have you seen that commercial for Microsoft Excel from the 80s where they're in the elevator and they quickly make the spreadsheet? No. You've seen that?

It's like really crazy. It's like, it's two dudes. And they're like, we don't have the reports. It's this business. What are we going to do? And then the guy takes out his laptop, which is like, you know, a brick. and he's like making this spreadsheet

and he's like there's no way you're going to get it done in time and it's like poor lines you know but he like makes it it's like the sum function and changes the font and everybody's like oh my god the boss is going to love this and I'm like what did spreadsheets do before then you just had to like manually put the numbers in

and that's why I feel about like browsers on the internet because I'm like I was not there before that and I don't understand I don't totally understand either if I'm being honest how did you navigate it you know Yeah, I don't understand it. I do remember having to type in file directories to actually find stuff on a computer,

but how you can connect to something else on the internet before a browser. I don't actually know how that works. So, but anyways, so Mosaic comes around, Netscape comes around, and all of a sudden, as a result of this, the internet basically develops into this new potential storefront for commerce, which is how we came to know the word e-com. in the days before PayPal existed, let's say you set up an online shop

that you wanted to sell products through, your options to complete a transaction were of the following. One, you asked the customer to mail you a check or money order. That sucks. You could ask for what's called COD cash on delivery, which meant that the delivery person

would literally take the cash off of you in the moment. It's like, again, stupid option. All the commercials in the 80s, they'd be like no COD. Yeah, no, COD, yeah, totally. Totally. You had the option of doing a wire transfer, but that would require you to physically go to a bank, pay $35 to $100 fee,

and then wait several businesses for the transaction and complete. Also sucked. Then there was the more preferable option, which was to pay using a credit card, which I know today, duh, obvious, super easy to do. But the reason that's super easy to do is because Stripe exists is because a company came about that tied together all the different credit card.

companies into one payment gateway that you can just copy, paste, a line of code, embedded it onto a website, and now you can process payments yourself. It wasn't like that before. Before, you would have to hire a developer, or actually a team of developers, to create the forms to tie into banks, and it would have to tie them individually. It was insane. It was an insane proposition. I think that there's also, like, I don't know, this isn't true, but didn't, like,

when you first, when you used your credit card at, like, a store, and they did the thing where they, like, did the ch-ch, and they took the, happy of it. Didn't someone at the end of the day have to call the credit card company and tell them all the transactions? That was also a thing. Yes. Yes.

That was also a thing. Or the other option you had actually, now that you mentioned that is you could actually call the company and give them your credit card information in that moment, which like none of this is secure. It's a good way to transact business. I definitely still do that. You still do that? I've done that because like when you send a contractor to the Home Depot, that guy will

stand in a line and then get the end of the line and then someone will call. call you and be like, can this guy buy a bunch of wood on your behalf? And you say yes and give them your credit card. It's exceedingly rare. It's exceedingly. Yeah. That's my only example. There you go. Yeah. So in nine, so that was what the, what the internet looked like. So in 1998, three individuals named Max Lefchin, Peter Thiel and Luke Nosek founded a company named Field Link, which will later be renamed Confinity. And the point of Confinity was to basically create some security software applications for the Palm pilot which was the most popular phone at the time this is how old this shit is like i love that i'm reading

like a dumb mystery novel and they just mentioned the palm pilot and i left yeah no i think i had one um so that was basically going nowhere and so they decided to pivot into the digital wallet space by creating a product called paypal it was a product of confinity which launched in 1999 so back then the value proposition was the user could send them receive money through their email address and they especially focused on what was becoming the largest e-com website at the time, eBay. So they're really, really hyper-focused on doing transactions for eBay customers. So around the same time, again, this stuff's going to blow your mind, Taylor. Like, I think you're going to be like pleasantly surprised by how much it's going to blow your mind.

So around the same time that PayPal was launched, literally their next door neighbor, the next door to confinities office was another young enterprising startup let me let me do this so is it amazon like is it just no it was let me tell you this it was founded by four people three of which are irrelevant so it was founded by a guy named ed ho harris fricker christopher pain and elon musk guess what the name of that company was Tesla no what's name of the company x.com really Really? That's so stupid.

Really. Okay. That's been a long one for him. It's been a long day from 1999 until today. Almost kind of excited for him that he got that. Yeah. And then I was like, I was trying to go into like how he, he ended up having to go back to eBay and PayPal and then buy the domain of his own company off.

It's insane. It's insane. So when I refer to X, I'm not referring to Twitter. I'm referring to this business. That's hilarious. Anyways. So X's business model was to run financial services online through a particular bank. There was one specific banking in Colorado.

I think it was there doing all these financial services. I would argue that X was way, way more practical and useful and closer to what we consider online banking today, but on a much smaller scale. So they provided the portal through which you could do online banking like you would today and also sent money digitally through it through an email address so again we look at your bank online today and like it's such an obvious easy thing that you should do that didn't exist like they literally created that concept everything was so hard so hard so hard so yeah they would imagine that x actually took off like immediately it didn't have this weird fit and start thing

that confinity had within two months it attracted 200,000 users which is like kind of almost on par with the growth rate of our podcast listenership. Thank you. That was incredible. So Confidenti and X realized that they had obvious overlap and an ability to kind of dominate the

growing space if they joined forces, which is ultimately what they ended up doing by merging. So in March of 2000, the two companies merged and started operating under the brand of PayPal with Musk installed as the CEO. Wow. This actually only lasted a few months,

because he was replaced as CEO while he was on his way to his honeymoon on a plane by Peter Thiel. Like he was a really ugly, ugly, like, replacement. Like, it was not done in a very tactful way. But I did find this story really interesting because it actually shows, like, who he always kind of was. As you see what he's doing now. So just as a little background, today, Elon Musk has had a hand and found. owning, buying, or controlling SpaceX, Tesla, Solar City, OpenAI, Hyperloop, Neurolink, the Boring Company, and Twitter.

How is it is a Hyperloop? I don't have no idea. They're going to build. It was like tunnels for cars. Yeah, the whole idea was to go under, under L.A., instead of through the traffic of the 405, but I have no idea what's going on with it. So this all was going on when he was 29 years old is when he got replaced as a CEO of then PayPal. But even then, he was also kind of like this scatterbrow.

brain focused on a thousand different things at once his reason the reason for his replacement was because peter teal and a bunch of the other early founders of paypal they were like hey we should just become exceptionally great at online payments whereas musk wanted them to become a full-fledged financial services company like an online bank essentially and like on the one hand i can appreciate someone wanting to tackle a hard problem but on the other hand the magnitude of what he was trying to do was basically like almost impossible he was going to have to basically found a legal company a regulatory company an accounting company a dc based lobbying firm and a tech company just for this thing to actually happen yeah so there was other issues too he was also like considered like a

rough and kind of like not a great manager and he also wanted to migrate platforms at a time that made no sense to the founders were like why are we doing this so anyways that's what happened Peter Thiel replaced Musk, and Musk ends up saying active, but not operationally active within PayPal. He actually's on the board of directors, but he's off doing his own thing. It was only a year after this that he found SpaceX, which I never knew was that early on. Is that why SpaceX has the X in it? Huh? Is that why SpaceX has the X in it?

What accident? The X. Oh. Oh my God. Because he loves the X so much. My God, Taylor. It probably is. See, I told you you learned something new.

I know, look at this. Damn, yeah, it's all, yeah, it must be. Because I also read that he was adamant, that the emerged business should be called X. And then a focus group did through some marketers. They're like, everybody thinks it's a porn site. So that's why he dropped it. But yeah, he probably did.

Yeah, wild, wild. So, Teal ended up taking the company public in 2002. In about four months after he took it public, eBay acquired them for $1.5 billion in eBay stock. This made Musk who was already rich. Musk had already sold one business off to compact. He was already worth like $34-something million. This made him exceptionally richer. I think it came out to somewhere at $165 million was his ownership interest once that sale went through.

from then on PayPal operated independently of eBay and continued to grow until 2014 when it was spun off as its own independent company and that's when they went on a tear with some acquisitions acquiring Venmo

so that's what that's where they ended up so we're actually going to pause on the story about PayPal there because that's kind of there from conception to $1.5 billion exit dude four years four years yeah yeah But I've already brought up a few members of the PayPal Mafia.

So let's do a quick recap of these guys. So Max Lepchin, who was the founder and CTO of PayPal, made off with about $34 million from the acquisition. He went on to create a company called Slide, which was a photo sharing technology acquired by Google for $182 million. He was also the very first investor in Yelp. So if you like to share photos on your camera or on your cell phone or you like to use Yelp, you can thank this guy. Luke Nosek, who was also co-founder of PayPal and more focused on the go-to-market activities of the business, he ended up founding a VC firm called Founders Fund. And he was, his fund was a launch pad for Stripe, Airbnb, Facebook, Spotify, Lyft, Twilio,

and like a thousand other businesses that you don't even know you use because they created some underlying technology that is he found. foundational technology of the other technology you use. Right. Totally. Ed Ho, Harris Fricker, and Christopher Payne, those were the ones that founded Musk at X.com with Elon Musk. They, frankly, they just ended up unceremoniously leaving the business due to conflicts with Musk.

And they went on to have great careers in tech, but no shade of them. They're not really part of the PayPal Mafia. They just ended up going away. It's really interesting because like a couple of these ended up going to Twitter and then we're at Twitter when Elon Musk came back and bought it. So I can't imagine what that meaning was like. Jesus Christ, welcome back. Not again.

You nerd. Yeah. So then we had Peter Thiel, who I would argue is the most fascinating member of the PayPal Mafia. I think Elon gets all the press because he's like the Uber crazy richest out of all of them and like his hands in like 5,000 different things. But Peter Thiel's what they consider like, they call him the dawn of the PayPal Mafia. Like he's the, he's a central cog that kind of is the hub through which all these guys are

kind of operating on. he was again the confinity founder who replaced musk's CEO was the driving force behind the acquisition with eBay and he's going to play a huge huge role in part two of our series when we get to the rise of the PayPal Mafia and highlight some of the most notable members within it Lincoln Reid Hoffman PayPal Mafia wow it's just it's everybody it's crazy

it's really interesting because it's these guys and then like in recent Horowitz like yeah they own all of it uh Dave McClure he's the founder of 500 startups which ended up becoming 500 global which launched thousands of other businesses also paypal mafia like it is crazy once we get into the details of who these guys are and what they do now they're super involved in politics you'll hear a lot about peter teal's involvement in politics um heavily supportive of trump in the republican party as now is Elon Musk and a whole host of the other folks that are part of that organization which is like resulting in a really strange party switching that's happening within Silicon Valley because it's not just these guys like it's happening yeah i i i don't know for sure but i get the impression that Zuckerberg is flipping i get the impression like i get the impression that a lot of those like middle-aged-ish billionaire types who are super progressive are now becoming super conservative

and I'm not entirely sure what the genesis of that is. I don't know either. No, I know like a husband has expressed his sorrow when you see some folks like getting really weird on Twitter. You know, I've been like, oh, you were like a cool thought leader and now this is like the way you're acting.

And like, I don't know if it's like just about the money, you know, where they're like, we don't want to be taxed. I don't think it can be. Here's the thing, like these guys, the amount of money they have it's just it's just astronomer like it was seriously I told you about the conversation I had earlier this week with somebody and it's just they live on such a different plane like it's such a different level than the rest of us that I don't think that like 2% marginal tax increase versus 5% like I don't think they give a shit

about that and I don't know what then I don't know what it is because like some of the things that I'm seeing like against um like Democrats is like well oh like okay so like one of the big things that like this is me off is when people don't want to give kids free lunch at school and like one state was like it'll make them spoiled you're like they're fucking children and they're hungry you know like but how dare you but um one of their arguments is like well community organizations do this anyway they are the ones who solve the problem and you're like no they don't what are you're talking about but my assumption was I think you're I think that might be going a layer deeper than my assumption was my assumption actually was. that they are they built businesses and they build businesses as a matter of like course day to day and that democratic policies include regulations and restrictions that make it almost impossible to like move fast in the way that you'd want to move fast if you're of this industry it's seriously because totally coincidentally I was just listening to another one of Ezra Klein's shows I think I should be sponsored at this point because they keep name drop into this show listen Ezra Klein Show, it's a New York Times podcast. It is awesome, and he's like an amazing interviewer and speaker. Anyways, he was interviewing someone about the $1.7 million toilet in San Francisco. And again, he comes from like a liberal perspective, but he was like, even I, from my perspective,

things is absolutely ludicrous. And he was interviewing somebody who is studied up on the politics of things that go on with regulatory boards in San Francisco. And what she was saying was, yeah, because every special interest has something that is their pet project and it comes in a place where like rest of thinking is like rampant you want to be as inclusive as possible

but when you're inclusive as possible you can't do anything because everybody's opinion is the most valuable and I think that that's that's the train of thought that I kind of picked up on with the with Silicon Valley billionaires is like the ability to run as fast as you want to run

becomes inhibited by having to listen to every voice that comes into your purview I just I feel like there are social things that are more important like I don't know people not having health care and dying that's that's what I'm getting at when you bring that up I'm like I'm like dude you're talking about people who have so much much they don't understand what you're talking about tell you're they're trying to figure out how to colonize Mars they don't give a shit about that not having lunch is an option and that sucks you know I don't know. I think that sucks.

There was one of our athletes in the Olympics when it was like her, whatever, her post was viral because she kept going to the doctor because they get free healthcare when they're there. And they were like, cool. And she was like, cool, can I get all these tests? Can I like do all these things? Like I can't do this at home, you know? You're appreciating the choir.

You have to tell me that. I literally haven't seen a dentist like seven years. I literally do not know how to log in to my dental insurance. schedule an appointment with the dentist. Like, I don't understand how this stuff works, but anyway, that's, that's my theory. I would love to hear other people's perspective. Like I said, it's three parts. And if there's other things that you want to know about, this stuff is so fascinating to me.

Like, I could do this for the next 20 years. And it'll always be interesting. Righteous of Doomedepal pot at g1.com. Let us know where your thoughts on this stuff is. And I would love to incorporate any of that into the rest of this series. And if you are interested in this kind of topic, I'd be so into doing other versions of this Like I said, there's the other

Versions of these groups Like I mentioned the founder of Mosaic Like again, nobody younger than Taylor and I know Even heard of Netscape, even know what the hell Netscape is But if it's actually going to the weeds on it There was an antitrust lawsuit It Netscape reshaped

Antitrust laws and reshape Microsoft For the first time Since Rockefeller had to break up it is crazy what these things but anyways it's fascinating so it's fascinating yeah and i thought talked about like the internet in general before but like it's just wild how you're like well of course we need that yeah we could not live without that you know like i literally we like get our groceries delivered because we buy them online like there's just no amount part of my life that like it's not affected by it our jobs like yeah yeah yeah

this podcast podcasting at all what you know i learned about the word podcast came from ipod oh okay that makes sense that's where the pod part comes from um which is hilarious and like we all have iPods now they're all in the trash so wild i know there's a mountain of garbage and it's all iPods yeah old phones yeah um anyways do you have anything to report out i do actually i have a bunch of stuff and i'm actually going to have to like spread it out because we got some like YouTube comments. Oh, hold on that. Hold that thought. That's a YouTube comments. But let me first just tell you that my dad, he texted me, and I told you this. Hold on. I made a whole page to share it with you. But my dad used to work at the Board of Trade in Chicago when in the 80s. And so he knew a lot of people who worked in commodities. So people who were like farmers and they traded like cattle and grain and all of those things. But one of his customers was a, farmer who died in his grain silo. He said that he was like accidentally in it and then the door opened and he got smothered.

So terrifying. So absolutely terrifying. He said he said, my dad said, I listened to a recent podcast. I had a farm customer in the early 90s. Talk to him and a couple days later his wife called to close the account. He was smothered in a grain storage unit on the farm. Wild. Yeah.

In terms of ways to go, that ranks is one of the worst. Yeah. Absolutely terrible. but then also I just wanted to announce our new initiative that you didn't know about until I did it are found footage on YouTube this is also terrifying so what Taylor's doing now is she found some footage some old old vintage 8mm reels in her house that is obviously haunted and she watched them or got them digitized and then uploads them to like music that you can kind of just like have in the background listening you've seen sinister I don't get why no I know well so

I know. So I moved into this house, I don't know, nine years ago, and they were in the back of the pantry on like the top shelf. And I'll take a picture of them. They're just like real to real things. And I've always wanted to watch them and I kept them. And then our friend Jay, who loves horror movies, they came over one weekend and I really wanted to watch it with them, like, because of sinister. I thought like our favorite guesses were a murder, homemade porn or the Kennedy assassination. It's done of those. It's just like a lovely family trips. And there's like one of them that I put in, there's like houses that are destroyed by a hurricane. There's an anniversary. party there's snow there's a dog that they have like a cute little poodle um so they're really fun and so i got i was like i don't know how i'm going to get to watch these and then i found a place called legacy box online and i was like they had like a 50% off sale but i was like it still would be like a hundred dollars but i was like i don't know maybe i'll do it and then i went in and did it and i have one of those things that automatically puts coupons in and i found a hundred percent off coupon so i got for free that is awesome it was awesome and then i um so then i just down i downloaded them and there's 11 of them one of them is all of their I don't know who it is it's like so the people who live in

this house were from pennsylvania so it's probably like their family it's from the 1960s um and one of them is just holidays and it has like Halloween and it does have like really weird creepy 60s kids Halloween costumes so that one's fun um you should it might be fun to look up like the property records and find out who own the house and then like send them links yeah i mean i know who owned my house only one other person owned my house. Seriously? Yeah. It's like 16 years old, isn't it?

No, it's from 1987. Oh, I thought I was... Seriously? Wow, okay. They built it. I have the plans that they signed off on framed in the hallway. You know what? I just literally, it didn't occur to me that if the footage is from the 60s, the house might not be from the 60s? Yeah, I know. The footage is not from here. The footage is definitely from the East Coast

and, like, travels around. So I have two of them up right now. now they're on our YouTube channel and there's just like a half hour of like nice stuff and we did get a comment on them that was like I love watching fond footage thank you like it's fun to like see someone else's life and I was thinking about that the weekend like I was looking at pictures at my mom's house for my childhood and I love like the background details like oh I remember that wallpaper and I remember that picture and like blah blah so that's kind of fun thank you for doing that I think that was a really really cool idea and I wanted to find somewhere yeah I did let

it run I was telling Taylor reminds you of like that Netflix channel where it's just like a crackling fire fireplace let it run and like the music's lovely the footage is lovely um i'm just waiting for like a devil to like pop out me too me too um there was one where there's people kissing and i was like oh is this is it happening and um it's like someone was recording um all my children like it's like a it's i don't know it's super fun so yeah is it happening I was like is this homemade porn what does happen but no I mean you can find that elsewhere No, I know that wouldn't be cool to find it in your house? Yes, yes, I would.

Yeah, maybe I'll watch Sinister later. Very cool. Yeah, so that's my updates. Thank you, Dad, for listening. And I will, yeah, if you have any questions or ideas for us, we're at Doom to FailPod at Gmail.com at Doom to Fail on all the social media and YouTube. Sweet. We'll rejoin you all in a few days.

Thanks, Taylor. Thanks, nice. Thank you.