Grubstakers - Episode 53: Larry Page and Sergey Brin (Part 1)

Episode Date: February 11, 2019

Part 1 of 3 in our dive in to Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and the weird world of early Google. Parts 2 and 3 are focused on Google's shady business practices, but this one focuses more on fucking. Turns out these weirdos fuck. Look at that picture of them. Pretty gross. Also, we got a midi keyboard to do our drops!

Hey, thanks for listening to Grubstakers. This week, we're doing something a little different. We've taken a three-part approach to Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Google.com. It's a huge topic. We were originally going to do a two-parter, but there's so much information here, and there's so much abuse of surveillance capitalism that goes on there. We couldn't even get to all of it. But on this part one, we're primarily talking about the biographies of these two men,

these two billionaires, and the various misdeeds they get up to in the Google massage room. But we talk about the founding of the company and their personal behavior on part one. Parts two and three will be really about the sheer scale of the surveillance economy and just how terrifying it's gotten and if there's anything we can do about it. But check out part one right here. And then next week, we'll be back with part two and then part three. Thanks for listening. Coming right up on Grubstakers. Thank you. I can tell you that every job has its ups and downs, and a union can't change that fact. I mean it is the magic elixir of our age and of all ages. What it does for prostate cancer is amazing.

You get a $200 billion profit and you didn't have to pay any tax. Isn't that true? Listen, it's not a... Is that true or not? Yes or no? It is. You do not pay a profit when someone... A tax when someone makes you sell assets.

Maybe that's why you become Secretary of Treasury so you didn't have to pay the tax there oh it's in five four three two hello welcome back to grub stakers the podcast about billionaires I'm Sean P McCarthy I'm here as always I am joined by my friends Yogi Poliwal Andy Palmer Steve Jeffers. And, you know, this week, this is the first of a three-parter about the founders of Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two of the richest men ever to learn to code. But before we get into them, we've been just a little bit of housekeeping. We've gotten some people commenting on Twitter about our use of drops.

Oh, really? Uh-huh. And so in the spirit of innovation... Somebody nominated us for the award for most inept use of drops on a podcast. So in that sense, they were commenting on it. Yes, Andy. I think it was the Crypt Keeper 679. Crypto Keeper. Yeah, um, I think it was the crypt, crypt keeper, six, seven, nine crypto keeper.

The thing we've been doing is, you know, we've been mixing them between live drops and like, uh, post-production drops. And we're going to try to do as many live drops as we can now. And to aid with that, we've learned to code,

we've learned to code. That's right. And now we have a, uh, a Kai professional MPK mini keyboard. Um, sponsored. Uh, yeah, sponsored. I think it's pronounced assay. professional MPK mini keyboard sponsored I think it's pronounced

acai that we can just hit any drop with I can't wait to see how many listeners we lose we're now the Linkin Park of podcasts. All right. So the point is, we will never again have a shortage of drops.

What the fuck is a brain scientist? We've moved beyond our one drop per episode policy. He never gets fully hard. He never gets fully hard. He never gets fully hard. He never gets fully hard. I don't think it was a good idea to put this in the lap of the most ADHD member of the podcast. www.whatthefuck.com All right.

But anyways. We have Andy in another room doing this, by the way. But regardless, we were talking today about Larry Page and Sergey Brin. The founders of Google, two of the richest people on earth. You might be a little familiar with them, but it is interesting. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, their story is like they're very private people so like just to give you an example like to kind of start off for uh the research here i actually did read this book uh called the google guys by richard l brant and uh i can say that it is very impressive

that richard l brant was able to write an entire book with his head firmly in Sergey Brin's asshole. He typed that whole thing. It was written in 2011. And the thing is, like, you know, I got mad because I read it, and then it's like, well, why didn't I read one of the other books? It's like, oh, there's no other books. Oh, really?

There's just this one, like, flowing ass-kissy biography from 2011, which is, like, peak, you know, learn to code. Where did you look up their biographies? Amazon. Yeah, Google. Google. No. 11 which is like peak you know learn to code where did you look up their biographies amazon yeah google google no um strange you couldn't find any other results for books about google on google but it is it does kind of speak to the power of these guys that it's like um nobody's really bothered to write a biography about them except for this kind of like flowy, ass-kissing stream of cliches and sniveling supplication that I read.

Well, this is why I did all my research on Bing, ladies and gentlemen, and I found several articles on Breitbart. Yes. Oh, I am pleased to announce that this episode on Google and the privacy invasion they do through the Chrome browser is sponsored by Mozilla Firefox. We finally got a sponsor thanks to the big influx from the chrisman episode so uh we we hope you guys i really you

know what man i think we should just kind of sell out i think we should start like focusing our episodes attacking products uh and be secretly sponsored by competing products well you know a good way to get targeted advertising and correctly direct where our ads go. How's this, Haiti? It's a mechanism created by a couple young upstarts in the Valley. What's their names? Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

Oh, seems like good dudes. How are their marriages doing? That's just not true. But so, yeah, so the book, The Google Guys, that's going to get really annoying. My wife.

Oh, wait, here's my favorite one. That's Jeff Bezos saying, my wife. My wife. My wife. My wife. My wife. My wife. Oh, yeah.

David Pecker from the National Enquirer. Take my wife, please. My wife. Our next guest is going to be Weirdo Yankovic. I actually did a little look at the iTunes reviews, and somebody said that we are one of the few podcasts that aren't annoying and unfunny with drops.

So I'm glad that we have let that person down. But so the thing I want to talk about in this book that I read, The Google Guys by Richard Brandt, it provides general biography but again it's just so ass kissy and so stuck in this like 2011 Obama era, learn to code, Silicon Valley is going to save us kind of zeitgeist.

And it annoyed the hell out of me because I read this book and then I read like an excerpt from the book Valley of Genius by Adam adam fisher which is just like interviews with various early google and other tech company employees and it's so funny because of course in the book that i read the google guys they don't mention this but the guy who like actually went and just sat and interviewed google employees is like all of the early google employees are like yeah so there weren't any locks on the door so we could all see sergey brin fucking employees there and it's like you have like eight google employees saying the exact same thing and i'm like what the fuck was richard brant doing with this book where he just doesn't talk to any of

these google employees or like uh you know like uh yeah what do i remember from the early days of google uh the ceo's dick fucking people on the massage table not so much the coding just burning man and uh lots of uh sexual harassment cases oh and then the other great thing was innovating sexual harassment the other great thing is that uh uh the larry page and sergeant brent found google and then in 2001 they bring in the guy eric schmidt to be ceo and he's supposed to be the adult in 2001 they bring in the guy Eric Schmidt to be CEO and he's supposed to be the adult in the room and clean up the frat boy atmosphere and then Eric

Schmidt starts fucking a bunch of people and you know future episode but it's rumored that's why he had to step down as CEO because he had his hand in the cookie jar so to speak he's also a billionaire yes yes yes so future episode we will be going into

him a bit in the um the episode after this one i think yeah uh we'll talk about him a little bit uh just because he's like oh he's kind of the public face so he's the one who always makes the kind of orwellian statements like yeah no we're we're not keeping any of your data and if we were you would have to like consent to it and we would tell you explicitly he's more kind of the benign evil that we're used to from like a neoliberal stooge right right as opposed to like two tech bros eric i like to imagine eric smith's uh public comments like denying that they're doing privacy invasion are practiced for when he gets home and talks to his wife oh and one other thing uh before we kind of uh go through this chronologically about the book the google guys by richard l brandt they don't even mention this guy named scott hasson and scott

hasson is is kind of referred to as the third founder of google he was a guy who helped larry page build his uh what's called page rank algorithm but he left google early and he's kind of like written out of most of the official histories. It's just weird where it's like, yeah, three. I mean, three people, at least initially, the employees, they built this company. But then this fucking biography of Google that's like 200 some pages doesn't even mention the name of this guy. So it was just it pissed me off because it's like I waste my weekend reading this fucking book that's just so shoddily written and uh leaves out all the juicy interesting bits man the worst thing about google is sean had to read a shitty book yes well i checked the google reviews and they were all five stars so

i was lured into a false sense of complacency this is the problem with google should check goodreads but i guess uh before we kind of go through uh larry page and sergey brandon and roughly sense of complacency. And this is the problem with Google. Should have checked Goodreads. But I guess before we kind of go through Larry Page and Sergey Brin in roughly chronological fashion, we can just kind of give a brief overview of Google the company if you haven't heard of it. I was going to say we were lucky Andy was distracted on his phone

so that he couldn't be distracted just playing meaningless drops to irritate the listeners. He never gets fully hard. So Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, in addition to being the founders, they own about a third of the company's stock. That's why they each have about a $50 billion net worth. But besides owning a third of the stock, they have priority shares. So essentially, Larry Page and Sergey Brin have set up the company so that they will always control half of the voting rights on all board

level decisions. So Larry Page and Sergey Brinin they've kind of stepped away from the company they're letting it manage themselves itself in many ways but at the end of the day they control the company still is priority shares a thing companies do often is that like yeah is that a common practice yeah yeah it's it's a way of like if you're going to do an ipo you um uh can keep decision making power power in management. Well, Google pioneered it. Oh, really? They were the first ones to have multi-tiered shares where the owners have shares that are worth 10 votes each, and then they sell shares that are worth one vote each.

Right, right. So they had Class B shares, I guess, which are worth 10 votes. The ordering doesn't make any sense. The Class A shares were one vote each, and then later they released Class C shares ordering doesn't make any sense. The class A shares were one vote each. And then later they released class C shares that didn't have any voting power. And this is a model that was later,

we talked about this on the Facebook episode, or the Zuckerberg episode. It was later used by Mark Zuckerberg in the Aaron Sorkin film to screw over a Zuckerberg's best friend. Also real life. He did it in real life too. Only in the Aaron Sorkin film to screw over a Zuckerberg's best friend. Also real life. He did it in real life too. Only in the movie. And that's kind of the thing though,

as far as culpability goes, because we go through all these like privacy invasions that Google is doing and all these other abuses, you know, China or whatever. And it's like, at the end of the day, Larry Page and Sergey Brin,

they control the company. They're worth $50 billion each. dollars each so you know they can't it's on them at the end of the day you know yeah it's not like and i mean they were probably from everything i've read idealists when they started this thing but at some point they create a monster and they have the ability to uh undo a lot of the abuses and they decide not to. They're on a Caribbean island or banging D-list comedians. More on that later.

My wife. No longer. The way they restructured the company into Alphabet being the holding company of Google allowed them to retain a lot of control over Google. Oh, really? While also kind of basically just going onto an island and fucking people.

Right, right. I mean, they've kind of... Larry Page, I know, has retreated to this... According to the New York Post, he's currently on some Caribbean island he owns, and he mostly just deals with the company to work on moonshot projects, like flying self-driving cars and those kinds of things. Space, you know, whatever billionaires are most interested in these days.

Sending people to die on Mars. So let's just kind of go through this here. So Google and Facebook, we mentioned this on the Facebook episode, as of 2017, they control about 73% of all digital advertising in the U.S. That's according to CNBC. So it's like when we talk about internet advertising, it is just basically Google and Facebook. I mean, you know, very few other companies are making money, much less serious money, off the internet advertising model. And interestingly, there's been recently these rounds of layoffs at BuzzFeed, Vice, Huffington Post, essentially all of these news companies that have a business model based on ad revenues.

But because Google and Facebook are sucking up so much ad revenues, like new sites can't compare because they don't have the same kind of, um, sure. Uh, well, sir, they don't have the same kind of like surveillance and behavioral, uh, analytics models that Facebook and Google do that allow them to kind of present themselves as being able to target ads so effectively that, um, essentially like the traditional modes of advertising are no longer useful.

Yeah, it's kind of like the difference between like Netflix and NBC where Netflix knows exactly how long and what you're watching, whereas NBC only has Nielsen ratings to go off of. I know it's slightly different, but with Netflix, when they make a new show, they know exactly what the people that have Netflix want to watch. So when they produce something, they're like, like well we know this will work because uh 93 of our viewers like this whereas nbc is like oh we've got nielsen ratings from 12 years ago that say they like uh i don't know a reboot of will and grace right they they're fucking they're they're shot in the foot because they don't have enough information and at the same time they're also probably getting screwed

over a bit by google because you know there's only so many advertising dollars in the world and NBC, all the networks, they're sustained by advertisers. I just want to say, if you happen to be a laid off journalist listening to this, we are going to teach you how to code. We're going to tell you how Larry Page and Sergey Brin became billionaires. So if you're out of work, maybe you're desperate, don't worry. We're going to tell you how you get a Department of Defense research contract to help the Pentagon study research papers. And then you just kind of run off with it and make a multi-billion dollar behemoth that controls the information flow and is synonymous with the Internet. This is like really stupid, but always thought about like Like a python class But it's not like the coding It's just a class on pythons

Amazing creatures aren't they Anyway $200 Right right You charge like $10,000 up front Just put a python on a table Yeah yeah And at first people are pissed

But then they see it And they hit a check in And they're like Alright Well that was creepy feel better about my situation admission hon how was your python class babe i gotta tell you a lot you know you know python handlers are making six figures starting salary um but yeah so i mean like the larry page sergey brin story it's uh it's interesting but uh the broad strokes are basically they were both stanford grad students phds in computer science and they meet there on as i mentioned essentially larry page was working on a project which was

funded by the department of defense which was they were trying to find a better method to search published research papers. And he brings Sergey Brin into that, and then they're like, oh, hey, while we're at it, let's look at this internet thing. Let's try to, and we'll get into that in just a minute here. But I did just want to mention, Google's kind of key insight was called, they call it page rank.

And this is the idea that most search engines at the time, again, we mentioned Ask Jeeves and Yahoo. Those were like the competition and they were already established. And a lot of people were like, oh, we don't need a new search engine, you know? But most of those search engines would essentially just search websites by keywords. By the way, did you call it Yahoo? Yahoo? Yeah, you did. Okay. I just want that documented. Most Americans put the emphasis on the first O, not the first A. I was pronouncing the exclamation point. But so the point was essentially those search engines and most of the major ones were just searching keywords on websites. Whereas the page rank algorithm that Larry, along with Scott Hasson, created essentially would look for links within sites.

So it would search by links from sites to sites. And this was partly based on the idea of academic papers where you can rank academic papers by how much they're cited in other academic papers. So that was the insight that did make their search engine better than other competing ones at the time. And I just brought that up because Stanford, to this day, holds the patent to the page rank that they created because they created it at Stanford as part of this DOD research project. And basically, Google gaveford 1.8 million shares of google stock in exchange for long-term rights to the patent so stanford made about 336 million dollars on this but uh that's it yeah i mean you know kind of chump change in the giant scheme but it is just like something where it's like you know chomsky's made this point a million times like every time

you talk about capitalism people will say oh look at google you know these geniusomsky's made this point a million times, like every time you talk about capitalism, people will say, oh, look at Google, you know, these geniuses. And it's like, again, these people were government funded in a university. And then they took the idea that they came up with with the government funding and privatized the profits. Well, also a lot of what Google did was they would kind of take someone else's idea

and improve on it. And so pretty much every market you look at that Google has, they're taking it from somewhere else and then making it their own. And then I guess their biggest innovation is actually within their advertising engine. I think they stole their advertising model from that movie Enemy of the State, though. That Will Smith movie about the dangers of surveillance but so i just

want to kind of like go through uh briefly the biography of uh larry page and then sergey brin um and again this is from the book the google guys by richard brant um interestingly enough larry page's grandfather was a leftist member of the teamsters Union and an autoworker. And he was part of one of the most famous strikes of the 20th century, which was the 1937 Flint's sit-down strike, which helped form United Autoworkers. And there was an image, I think my favorite image, of the American labor movement. We'll put it up either on the Patreon or the Tumblr or something.

But it's a picture of these striking auto workers in 1937 shredding a court injunction, ordering them back to work. And you can see like the paper being rained like confetti out of the windows of the factory. And one of the workers is holding out a sign that says injunctions won't produce cars. You know, it's just like a very inspiring moment in American labor history and class consciousness that has been beaten out of workers for the last 40 years. But I guess my point was, essentially, it is interesting that Larry Page's grandfather was there at that historic moment that built much of the American middle class. And interestingly enough, Larry, according

to the book, Larry still keeps a memento from those days, a hammer that his grandfather carried with him for protection during the acrimonious strikes. Really? Yeah. And it's nice that he's been using it against labor. He's been using it to lay off

thousands of journalists. And they say that's the hammer he used to put up the nails that bored the buildings of the businesses he shut down. But, you know, so Larry Page comes from, again, like his grandfather, a leftist, a striking auto worker. His father, for his part, was a University of Michigan. His father gets a teaching job at the University of Michigan. Larry Page's father gets a PhD in computer science from the University of Michigan.

And random fact, Larry Page has an older brother called Carl Jr. who also earned a... I know. What is so funny about this? His name's Carl's Jr.? Yeah, it is.

Carl Jr.? He has an older brother named Carl Jr. Yeah, that's great. Who has settled several sexual harassment lawsuits. He loves making burgers, that Carl. He's got a younger brother named McDonald as well. Are you fucking serious? His sister named wendy uh but oh yeah so his his brother gets

a a master's degree in uh computer science i believe uh his brother co-founds a dot-com company called e-groups which he sells to yahoo in uh 2000 for 432 million dollars which was uh uh right when the bottom fell out of the dot com boom right right so it's kind of funny his brother founded a company that he unloaded uh which i'm sure was worth about a tenth of what he sold it for uh but interestingly enough both larry page and sergey brin attend montessori schools early on. Those are those schools where you can basically do what the fuck ever you want, you know? And it's like this is credited for like being the inspiration for the Google campus. Like Google has like this famous thing called the 20% rule, which is supposedly if you're a Google employee, you get to spend one day of your work week working on whatever project

you want. But basically every Google employee says that like, yeah, we're too overworked to do that. So, I mean, it is just kind of a marketing thing. Maybe it was true before the IPO, but certainly after the IPO, they're like a much more numbers driven company, you know. But so Larry Page attends this Montessori school. Again, you know, self-learning environment. Larry Page gets his undergraduate degree from the University of Michigan in engineering in 1995.

And then he's going on to Stanford. He's getting a PhD in computer science. And the way it's told, in 1995, one of Page's advisors at Stanford, Larry Page comes into his office and shows him this trick he discovered, which AltaVista was another competing search engine. And he said, Larry Page found that AltaVista, it not only collected the keywords from the sites, but it could also show what sites link to them. So Larry Page is saying AltaVista doesn't exploit this information, but it would be a good way to rank them, again, based on these links rather than just these keywords.

Right, right. And so Larry Page kind of has the insight there, and then he builds this with the help of Scott Hasson, who's, again, written out of the early Google history. So how did, what happened to Scott, and where did Sergey come in? Scott, so Sergey builds the crawler and that's like the other part of this. But Scott exits Google early. Like I don't know exactly how much he made, but...

But I'm sure he's happy about it. Scott Hassan is worth with a few hundred million, but he's obviously not as rich as the other two. But regardless, the point here was essentially Larry Page was working on this project we've mentioned. It was called the Digital Library Initiative. And again, Department of Defense is trying to make it easier to find computer research papers electronically. They need a search engine for that. So that's what Larry Page is doing, along with Scott Hassan. And then they bring Sergey Brin in.

Sergey Brin's also a PhD comp sci at Stanford. And they bring Sergey Brin in to write the program for The Crawler that's going to search initially these research papers, but later the actual internet in order to make these rankings. Which I guess brings us to Sergey Brin. We'll do his bio kind of briefly here. The perv of Google. Yeah. Sergey Brin, the'll do his bio kind of briefly here. The perv of Google. Yeah. Sergei Brin, the only Russian man the Democratic

Party likes. He was born in Moscow. He puts the ogle in Google. Sergei Brin is born in Moscow 1973. Sergei's father, Mikhail, he changes his name to Michael when he comes to the United States. I'll be right back.

But Sergey Brin's father, Sergey Brin's father, so basically he wants to study physics. Sergey Brin's father is a gifted Russian mathematician. But there's anti-Semitism in... There's anti-Semitism in in there's anti-semitism in uh soviet russia what uh yeah so uh basically sergey brin's father is turned down um because the communist party this is according to the uh the book i mentioned the google guys the communist party at the time banned jews from physics departments uh the government didn't want them to have access to Soviet nuclear secrets, so Sergey Brin's father, Mikhail Michael, decides to study mathematics instead.

And then one interesting anecdote from the book, he took the entrance exams in rooms reserved for Jewish students, which were nicknamed the, quote, gas chambers. Really? Yes. They have a subtle sense of humor we can't really grasp in Russia. But he does take the, and Mikhail graduates with distinction in 1970.

And then Sergei is born three years later in Moscow. Listen, man, he's probably. I taught the. Wait, I like that drop. Let's try that. Don't worry guys in about 10 episodes Andy will learn where the drops are we'll be right back but anyways so the point is that he's working in mathematics he's like doing statistics for the Soviet government in 1977 he attends an international conference where he meets some foreign researchers and academics,

and then he decides, I have to get the fuck out of Soviet Russia. Right, right. And in 1979, the application is approved, and... Sean. Yes. Would you say that in Soviet Russia, Injun searches you?

Watch this space. I'll give you credit. Seriously. I'll give you credit because the entire time you started saying that, I'm like, he's trying to decide

how to finish this, isn't he? But so, they leave in 1979. Now Michael Bren, he ends up getting a teaching position at the University of Maryland in mathematics. And Sergey Brin is kind of a math prodigy early on. He also gets his first computer at Commodore 64 around 1982

when he was nine years old. And again, quoting from the Google Guys book, he soon discovered the internet for a while he frequented primitive chat rooms then called ircs or internet relay chats but later recalled that he grew bored with them once they became dominated by quote 10 year old boys trying to talk about sex unquote and uh later he would become a 50-something man trying to talk about sex with a 20-something aspiring Brooklyn comedian. I'm just kidding. She's West Coast based, I think.

SF. Yeah. But he was also interested in, like, they were called multi-user dungeons, which were kind of like Dungeons and Dragons over the internet, basically. He even, apparently apparently he wrote one of these games. He wrote his own multi-user dungeon game. If our listeners can find this multi-user dungeon game by Sergey Brin we will be thankful. It's like they go to the credit it's like funded by the Department of Defense. That's weird. But so as we mentioned sergey brin also attends a montessori school um but he's bored in high school and he actually drops out but again he's a math prodigy so sergey brin manages

to apply to the university of maryland and he gets accepted a year earlier than the average high school graduate and he's taking you know senior and graduate level mathematics classes and he he graduates with distinction. Is that a prodigy though? I mean that's a smart kid but his dad's smart. His mom is probably pretty smart as well. I don't know if that's prodigy. She managed to get

a job. I forget what she was doing but she managed to get a job as well because they both left the Soviet Union with basically nothing but they had uh degrees essentially um and that is how this went down so i'll get back to you i think she got a teaching job as well if memory serves they both ended up getting teaching jobs that sounds about right but you know i think yeah i think you know what family is she was teaching she was teaching russian his uh his mother was teaching Russian. His mother was teaching Russian.

His dad was teaching mathematics. I'll be right back. It's interesting how the basis of the page rank, page ranking is based on the logic of citations in academic journals, like, pretty thoroughly. Well, that is also kind of Google's, part of Google's cultural penetration and ability to avoid oversight is their penetration of academia. I thought you were going to say of D-list comedians.

My wife. Well, we'll get to it in just one second. But yeah, I mean, mean essentially like in most of their early hires were stanford uh larry page and sergey brin meet at stanford uh sergey graduates 1993 from university of maryland with dual degree in both math and computer science he enters the phd program at stanford in 1994 and i believe larry page and sergey brin meet around 1995, if not 1994. And then just random anecdote, Sergey had a fondness for skinny dipping with friends or picking locks at Stanford.

Apparently they would pick locks to enter the old economics building at Stanford. How many times was he arrested for these crimes? A permanent stain on his record that made it impossible for him to get a job later in life um apparently one former stanford colleague said sergey's quote a phenomenal lock pick um but uh this friend insists that they never did anything illegal picking locks and trespassing is illegal uh such as entry it's a rhetorical device they would uh

get better at as the years went on. Sergey Brin would... We're accessing your camera to evaluate your emotions on your face to better decide what your reactions to brands are, but we're not doing anything illegal. He and his brother, Carl's Jr., used to

go in and out of buildings all right sergey brin insists you have to explicitly opt into the google service where he enters your apartment illegally no really we wouldn't do that unless you explicitly give us permission to pick your lock and go through your house it's crazy to me that like all the rules and regulations of like if you break a crime you can't be employed by blah blah blah are completely thrown out the window if you just start your own company and become a billionaire you can commit as many crimes as you want if you can start your own company and then become a billionaire well more on that later particularly regarding the sexual harassment aspect but uh so yeah they're like picking

locks and doing skinny dipping and getting up to dumb shit. But I did just want one other random anecdote. Sergey, while he's at Stanford, according to the book, writes a scholarly paper about the early creation of Google titled, quote, The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, unquote. In the paper, he argued against an ad supported service as a corrupted influence quote advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers end quote he writes this in i believe in 1995 he's a man of principle he's like except when i do it i like to imagine he wrote that paper and then immediately

tried dmt and forgot everything he went to burning man so he did clear things up a bit uh but so as we mentioned sergey's on this data mining thing and they meet uh larry page and sergey meet and uh again sergey's writing the crawler um and then at this point say the dmt thing again uh larry uh sergey brin tried dmt right man he's probably that guy's you know that they think he might have invented bitcoin um but so joe rogan come on grubsters uh so sergey Brin and Larry Page They play around with different names

Put Joe Rogan on and make him not do any drugs So Larry Page and Sergey Brin They play around with different names for the search engine Initially One of them was called Whatbox But they decided initially one of them was called quote what box but they decide and this is from the Google guys book imagine if they went with that and like why don't

you what box it they decided that it sounded like wet box which sounded like some kind of porn site Sergei recalled my wife would have been popular you learned this from time trying to talk about sex yes um but so they were looking for a big number and they intended to call to crawl the call the crawler like a thousand yeah no two thousand they wanted to call the crawler Google because it was this crawler that searches all these millions of websites, you know, and then they end up just calling the company Google.

They changed the spelling. Yes. Yeah. But so basically, they're working on it against, they want to build a system to test their theory. They're both again in the PhD program at Stanford at this point and one more quote from the Google

guys book Larry Page and Sergey were repeatedly borrowing money from other students and faculty and quote borrowing equipment that arrived in loading docks at Gates Hall at Stanford before the owners could claim it so they were basically taking computers out of Stanford to set up their servers and all this stuff. Oh, you mean they're stealing just straight up from a university? And in fact, Sergey says, quote, we had stolen all these computers from all over the computer science department, recalled Sergey.

Finally, a professor asked Larry exactly how much of the internet he wanted to search. Larry's response, all of it. And then this professor actually manages to get them some money from the Department of Defense Digital Libraries project so that they could buy more computers. So in addition to the initial research being funded by the Department of Defense, their initial startup period of the private company, Google, was also funded by the Department of Defense. And apparently a significant part of their startup capital was just stolen computers. Hey, what was Whatbox again? Yeah, Whatbox. What was that?

That was their initial name that they came up with. I thought it was Backrub. Yes. That was a project name, right? Oh, it was really. I'd seen that in a couple of the results, that Backrub. It's funny they kept coming up with these names, and then for some reason, Sergey Brin is fucking all of the employees all right this is what we're gonna call wet pussy

let's see uh so type that into blowjob did you blowjob it yeah i like i like when uh they asked sir larry uh how many website how much of the internet he wanted to search, and he said all of it, like Frank Underwood just asked him how many PS Vita games he has. All of them. Well, it's also like, what was that, 1997? 95, yeah. Yeah, 300 websites. But so, interestingly enough, by late 1996,

Google perfected their language engine, Analingus. Oh, really? Analingus? All right. That's their language analysis program. But regardless, again, to their credit, their search engine was, for the most part, better than the competition. And they keep this very kind of bare and austere front page, you know, with like no more than 28 words, I think is their max.

But the point is, by late 1996, they have actually launched this algorithm and it's widely used within the Stanford campus. Again, they're still in their PhD program and they still don't think this is going to be the basis for a company. So they're trying to sell their search algorithm. So Larry Page and Sergey Brin and the other guy, Scott Hassan, they go around to AltaVista and some of the other, I think they might have gone to Ask Jeeves or Yahoo as well. Netscape? I don't know. But they go to some of the different companies,

and they're trying to sell their algorithm for like a million dollars, basically. And AltaVista, for their part... Like, hey, guys. Yes. We know that people want to do Mad Libs online, but they don't know how to find it. That's right. That's right.

So AltaVista... We've got a way to find one of the three websites. So too many times, your users will be looking for the Captain Kirk versus Captain Picard debate threads. And it can take them upwards of 30 seconds to find one of those debate threads. One of the two debate threads that make up one of the 10 websites on the internet we can get there than there in ten seconds it

should be noted that at this time the way people use the internet was they would search something and then literally go away from their computer and do other stuff and then come back to the computer and see the results because the internet speeds were that that that that that was the speed yeah yeah child pornographers would get horny and then like forget about it eight hours later they would just hear the screeching of their modem and be like my porn's in epstein was like there needs to be a better way you know it is true that epstein did start offending right around the release of high-speed internet. But so the point here is that in 1997, they try to sell their tech to AltaVista.

AltaVista kind of laughs them out the door. Everybody thinks search engines are fine. Everybody thinks a million dollars is... To be fair, they went into AltaVista and said, hey, we've got a back rub for you. Jon Hamm walks in. What do we think of when we think of a box? What about a what box? It's something we store things in

and don't tell our wives about. He never gets fully hard. But so in 1997, again, they can't sell the company. So when they can't sell the company, and again, historical irony, people could have bought the fucking Google tech for a million dollars. But in 1998, they can't sell the company, so they begin looking for investors. Google tech on its own at that point was not profitable at all. Right, but it was.

I mean, in fairness, it was a better way of searching the internet as opposed to keywords but it's still at that point it's still a free service and making money from google was not um on their minds yeah i mean it is true like they we'll get to how they actually make money on the advertising but it's not inherently intuitive how you make money on a search engine right right some of their competitors would sell ads, but the way that they would do it is either the ads would be based on keywords provided by other companies. So, you know, you would type in shoes

and then like the first result would be Nike or something. And then other ways that they would sell ads would be like a company would pay money to be higher up on the search results. Right, which Larry Page and Sergey Brin were very against. Yeah, they were very against that because, you know, it basically corrupts the search engine and it basically undermines people's trust in the search engine. And it makes it so that the people with the most money can get the best results.

And so basically, like, they're able to get funding just because the computer science department at Stanford happens to link directly into the Silicon Valley venture capital psychopaths. They got a direct vein to the most insane people willing to bet on tech. Cheriton, who is a computer science professor at Stanford who had started a couple companies with Silicon Valley entrepreneur Andy Bechtolsheim, I think, for help finding funding. So he introduces them to Bechtolsheim and just taking the step of... Bechtolsheim basically didn't care that they had a business, no business plan or formal pitch. According to Sergei, he simply said, oh, we could discuss a a number of issues why don't i just write you a check unquote he filled out a check for one hundred thousand dollars and then once he was involved all the other venture capitalists are like oh this respected guy's getting in so we'll get into and uh yeah you know that's the

herd mentality that controls capital allocation in this country. You'd think there would be a bubble coming from that country, maybe. At this time, he wrote the check out to Google Inc., but they weren't even a company at that point, and they're working out of a garage. But I did just want to say, according to the book Valley of Genius, immediately after they got this check for $100,000, they went to Burning Man. Oh, I thought it was exaggerated.

According to Ray Sidney, Google employee number five, quote, Sergey put up a Burning Man logo on the Google website. It was kind of like an out of the office gone to Burning Man thing. Right, right. It was the first Google doodle. But yeah, so, and and sergey uh for his part would continue this uh love of burning man throughout basically most of his life apparently uh which we'll get to in one second um he wanted to publicly announce the separation from his wife

so that he could go to burning man with his mistress really yeah that's that's because they hadn't announced the separation yeah. Oh, gotcha, yeah. Yeah. But yeah, so... Real quick, the garage they worked at was... My wife. Sergei's ex-wife's older sister's house, basically. Yes. She charged a rent, $1,700 for that garage.

It was seven employees working in Susan Wojcicki's house. Some fucking Polack name. Sean, with the casual racism. I know. When I saw his, when I saw Sergey Brin's ex-wife's last name was Wojcicki, I was like,

oh, he must have like, it must have been really easy to convince her he wasn't having an affair. Yeah, because they're Polish. Oh, I see what you're saying. Yeah, yeah. He's like, no, I'm just screwing in a light bulb he decides to like having a fair down by the water and his wife's like what are you doing

he's like oh i'm just going to my submarine she's like oh remember to close the screen door uh but more on that later but yeah so basically it's seven employees working out of uh uh this house which apparently they say they did like most their work in the bedroom it was like half of the house yeah um and uh just like one uh heather uh uh cairns uh was an early employee she says quote we were allowed to use susan's washer and dryer that was in the garage but we were working out of the out of bedrooms we weren't in the. That's the folklore because every startup is supposed to be in a garage. The parties would be rocking like they'd be rocking by anyone's standard, let alone an office party standard.

We'd have 100 people come, and we had props from movie theater companies, and we had a hot tub, too, so you can take it from there. Cholo came to the early part but this is one of the worst things about these companies is they promote such a fun exciting you know nightlife business work balance but the reality is is they're just throwing parties to make it so that when you're working all night to create this company, you don't complain because you're like, well, I did get to get drunk at 2 a.m. Right.

In between my working from midnight to... Well, also, I think at the time, like, they're just like these dipshit kids. Yeah, they're 20-something Stanford grad students. Yeah, so they're just like, they're also just partying because they just, you know, someone just threw a pile of money at them and they partied their asses off and then later they kind of create the myth that like yeah we worked real hard to to create this thing it was just you know lots of lots of devotion lots of uh coding and typing and analyzing but you know then like every night you know they're probably doing all that coding with a coke over and yeah and uh again

just uh this house is in menlo park and this is where sergey meets his future wife because as we mentioned this is this is the sister of his uh his future wife is renting out this house to them and he only started dating her to get a cut in the rent by the way he was like 1700 for the garage maybe if i'm starting fucking the sister she'll give us a break but so this is uh this is 1998 beautiful story yeah i mean you know he he hustles man sergey brand's willing to go down to brown town to let the world know uh so night 1998 they they found this company they're working out of a garage. But again, from the Google guys book, the initial funding could only get them so far. So in spring of 1999, Larry and Sergey started seeking

another $25 million in venture capital. And interestingly, as we've mentioned, Ask Jeeves, Yahoo. Cocaine's expensive. For the good stuff. Yeah. So they start, they go on another venture capital raise and they're actually like very i guess confident at this point they're trying to raise 25 million

dollars um for i believe a fifth yeah they're trying to sell a fifth of the company for 25 million so they're already valuing their company at 125 million dollars they just have like uh one of those like pitch boards and they just pull off the blank one, and it says, not yet profitable. And it's like all these Valley VC idiots, and they're like, yeah, I'm in. What do you want? $8 million?

How about $9? $9? $10? $10? Fine, I'll give you $20. They're just actively doing coke in front of table as they listen to them yeah i love it search search fast i like fast they're all doing the shut up take my money gift all right i'll give you a fifth of the company and we'll throw in

8 to 9 p.m exclusive hot tub access i'm gonna give you 8 million and you take a hit of this right now. But I mean, they're all fucking bros. Yeah. Like growing up mentally, I remember feeling like, oh, well, as an adult, bros will like fizzle out or like dissipate. But from everything I've learned from this podcast is that billionaires are bros. Fucking surgeons are bros. Anybody that's in a high technical reputable position is probably a bro yeah and so basically the the the smart thing they do here uh sergey and larry is they get

two different venture capital firms to partner on this together like the firms initially the vc is like want to be exclusive because they want to be able to direct these companies and control them and make sure they're profitable but they finally they have such a hot product apparently that these two venture capital firms cave and they go in together and so neither controls too much of the firm so again they're selling off a fifth of google but they're splitting it in half between two venture capital firms and they do this they get 25 million dollar cash injection and now they can buy an office and this is where like serious partying yeah right um just from and again none of this was in the google guys book so fuck that guy

for making me miss all of this exciting research but so on night in 1999 again they get this 25 million dollar injection they hire charlie ayers Charlie Ayers, which was apparently formerly the Grateful Dead chef. Right. We'll talk about that. Yeah, they hire the Grateful Dead chef to be their head caterer. Yeah. Wait. Oh, hold on.

The Grateful Dead had a chef? Yeah. Oh, yeah. When you're on tour, yeah. You don't want to fucking be eating McDonald's all week. You can't do 80 road dates a year and not have a chef. I just assume road food is just McDonald's. Andy, the Grateful Dead made a lot of money.

The Grateful Dead chef makes one meal that takes two hours to eat. It doesn't fill you up, but it sounds pretty cool. Not a lot of people like his food, but the people who do are really weird. There's like 20 foodies following him all over the country. That feels like something where that guy's just out of work and on his resume he's like, I was the Grateful Dead chef. And then when Sergey and Larry look at it,

they're like, yo, we need this guy. We need him. So you know how to make pot brownies, right? Well, actually. There aren't websites about that yet. Quite literally. So Charlie Ayers, again, he's giving this interview to the guy who wrote the book. Adam Fisher writes the book Valley of Genius.

And in 1999, after they get this big hit of cash, they start doing these annual ski trips. Yeah, a hit of cash. Yes. They go on their ski trip. They start doing these annual ski trips to Squaw Valley. Just hitting the powder. I'm so hungover. I did so much cash last night. Alright, so here's Charlie Ayers. Quote, on the ski trips in

Squaw Valley, I would have all these unsanctioned parties and finally the company was like, alright, we'll give Charlie what he wants. And I created Charlie's Den. I had live bands, DJs, and we bought truckloads of alcohol and a bunch of pot and made ganja goo balls i remember people coming up to me and saying i'm hallucinating what the fuck is in

those larry and sergey had like this gaggle of girls who were hot and all became like their little harangue their little harem of admins i called them the lns harem yes admins. I called them the LNS harem. Yes. All those girls are now different heads of department in that company years later. And then, and that, that one ends with a spokesperson for Google declined to comment. Did any of them, um,

lean in? Does it, Does it say? Yeah. So I'll just continue. No comment. Yeah. So Heather Cairns was another early employee. She says, quote,

You kind of trusted Larry Page with his personal life. We always kind of worried that Sergey was going to date somebody in the company. Charlie Ayers, the cook, continues, Sergey's the Google playboy. He was known for getting his fingers caught in the cookie jar With employees that worked for the company In the masseuse room He got around

Heather Cairns How are you going to be surprised that the CEO's Fucking employees When your office has a masseuse room Those should be banned So Heather continues And we didn't have locks so you can't help it if you walk in on people if there's no lock remember we're a bunch of young 20-somethings except for me ancient at 35 so there's some hormones and they're raging

charlie airs hr told me that sergey's response to it was quote why not they're my employees but you don't have employees for fucking that's not what the job is heather uh oh my god this is a sexual harassment claim waiting to happen that was my concern charlie airs when cheryl sandberg joined in 2001 the company is when i saw a vast shift in everything people came in wearing suits who came in wearing suits were actually being hired whereas like before 2001 if you came to an interview in a suit, they'd say, go the fuck home and change. But then in 2001, because it's more button-up, they hire Eric Schmidt as CEO,

but he's also fucking people in the masseuse room. Once Eric sees, you can probably fucking get away with it. He starts doing it too. Eric Schmidt came from more like uh traditional work environments and i'm sure like a big part of him going to work at google is like oh finally a place where i can fuck one other quote this is from biz stone he was apparently a co-founder of twitter i guess he was an early google employee as well he says quote google was a weird place like a weird kid land adults worked there but there were all these big, colorful, bouncy balls.

Eric Schmidt had a twisty playground slide that he could exit his office from, which now seems almost perverted. He was like 40 or something when he joined. He was. He was supposed to be the adult in the room. Eric, are you going to take the stairs or the slide? I think you know what I'm going to do. But so I guess we're going to have to wrap up here in a second.

But we teased it, so I do just want to go through the affair that Sergey Brin gets into. And then we'll return to kind of the surveillance state stuff next episode. Essentially how they monetize. In 2004, they have their IPO. 2002, they kind of launch adwords and this is really where the surveillance state kind of kicks off google chrome itself they launch a web browser because when you leave google they can't surveil you anymore so they're like oh let's launch a fucking web browser so we can always surveil people no matter where they are on the internet essentially instead of making their home page where you need

to be to search and look at them, they made your entire browser a way to look at you. That's fucking sadly genius. Yeah, so, Sergey got married, I believe, in 2007 in the Bahamas. My wife. He got married to, again, the

sister of the woman they were renting the garage from. She would go on to found the company 23andMe, which I really do not recommend using if you are a rapist and serial murderer. If you happen to be a police officer who has been killing people in the California area, I do not recommend sending your DNA to 23andMe.

Oh, the cop of Sodia? But so what happened here is Ashley ashley rosenberg is um no amanda amanda rosenberg yeah yeah so uh amanda rosenberg famous uh betrayer of the american state play the electricity drop It's very loud. So what you're saying that Sergey collaborated with Ms. Rosenberg? And that is how this went down.

Hey there, I'm Chris Hayes from MSNBC. Yeah, only 50 years ago we had a way of dealing with Rosenbergs who collaborated with russians this is so fucking stupid i know i love that job though but uh interestingly enough in 2007 uh sergey brins gets married uh to this lady uh wojcikai uh they invite guests to a secret location in the bahamas this is from a vanity fair article written in 2014 about the affair um during her years on wall street she saw bankers cheating on their wives all the time so that made her reluctant to get married whoops

so uh wojcikai she founds co-founds 23 and me and raises uh several rounds of financing including 6.5 million from google you know for some reason that money yeah um but so they they do these uh these dna tests that in addition to like telling you your ancestry they're able to like test you for for some sort of genetic um predisposition to various genetic diseases right and it's here that uh she tests her husband sergey brin and she finds that his great aunt suffers from Parkinson's. He's very likely to get Parkinson's. According to Vanity Fair, Sergey

Brin read the results as possibly having only about 10 good years left. I don't know how much that had to do with his midlife crisis, but that might have been the seeds for destruction. I think it's more of a later life crisis. Yes. But also, I think we should mention that the woman that broke his ex-wife's back is not the only woman he probably cheated on her with.

Oh, yeah, I'm sure. I mean, like we mentioned earlier, he was just banging people in the masseuse room. I mean, like, you know, because they were separated for, I mean, after the Rosenberg thing. That's so loud, Andy. Oh, and one other thing from this Vanity Fair piece. Over the years, there have been several notable workplace romances at the top levels of Google,

including one between Larry Page and Marissa Mayer, now the CEO of Yahoo as of 2014. There were hallway discussions about the two of them dating, and some believe that being close to Mayer was helpful when trying to secure Page's approval for a project. And again, it's just funny. I read that book, The Google Guys, and everything's just so reverential about their genius. And it's like, I'm sure they're smart guys, but clearly if you want to become a department head

or if you want to get close to them, just be friendly to whatever employee they happen to be dating at the time. It's just all this kind of like corrupting stuff that this reverence of Silicon Valley ignores that, you know, people have clay feet and they're easily corruptible and easily led in directions that are not actually in the best interests

of the company, the shareholders, people, humanity. Take me, take me. His first wife's silhouette seemed to say to him. But, oh, and also the Vanity Fair article. We'll get to it another time. But it basically talks about how, like, Eric Schmidt's wife is, like, holed up in their mansion. And he's repeatedly seen at events with younger women. Oh, my God.

What a piece of shit. I know. And he's supposed to be the adult in the room. But so... Also, I want to mention Amanda Rosenberg three years ago created a web series. Which was... The channel was called Grown Ass Woman and the series is called Apartment. You know, like a good

web series. And the three episodes are Staying Up to Go Out, Keeping Up Appearances and the controversial Leggings vs. Jeans. You know what the saddest fucking thing is about this lady? She used to work at Google and yet her web presence is fucking terrible. Like, you literally worked at where web presence exists, and you can't get more than 7,000 followers on Twitter?

What's wrong with you, Amanda? You can cuck a billionaire out of his money, but you can't cuck the internet for fame? She does have more followers than we do, though. Listen, we're not fucking... We're gonna cut that. We're not fucking billionaires, Sean. If I was fucking a billionaire, you wouldn't even see me. Well, maybe you're not dedicated enough

to this podcast. You put a billionaire that wants to fuck me, I'll get it done. I might be engaged, but I'm not disengaging from this podcast. You have an agreement. Well, Sergey Brin's ex-wife is single. She used to date A-Rod.

Yeah, in 2016 she was dating A-Rod. Apparently like... I will say, going over to Brin, you're going from an A-Rod to a B-Rod. I like the idea of Sergey Brin using page rank to order his mistresses. But is this a first page mistress? Because I really want to get that A grade mistress game. No, it just clicks.

I'm feeling lucky. And so Amanda Rosenberg, we've kind of mentioned, she has like a web series. She was in like some sort of Funny or Die video for like depression olympics about getting out of bed she's got a book coming out this november called that's mental which is probably about mental issues i don't know man i don't like her at all she's got this thing where she's chinese but also british and so she's got that like you know she's got a british accent but looks chinese type of thing and i'm not bothered by that but isn't living in an apartment pretty weird? Oh, it's the kookiest, especially when you don't know what to wear.

Leggings or jeans. Guys, we should make a web series where it's just us, but we're like hanging out in an apartment. Technically, we already do. I'm half Chinese and half British, so that means I'm starving to death, but it's also my fault. She opens her stand up with that. That's right. But one more.

I get my opium at gunpoint. So one more thing for the Vanity Fair article as of 2014. A couple months ago, Amanda Rosenberg ran into a rough patch as she wrote in an essay that she posted on her Tumblr, quote, I suffer from clinical depression. Whilst I'm not proud of it, I'm not ashamed of it either. She called depression, quote, a sneaky bugger,

adding, you might seem happy on the outside, smiling, talking to people at parties, saying things like, did you put lime in this hummus?'s delicious my face is having such a great time but you and others around you may not realize how deeply the depression runs and cool our great sympathies to amanda rosenberg um the richest person to start a web series it's not even a good web series it's like you have the money to produce something that doesn't suck and you just make like low-grade apartment i mean you don't you don't automatically get sergey brin's money from fucking him you get some of it i mean you get access to his his benefits you get to fucking a mansion or a helicopter if i got one week of

sergey brin level money access i would make so many bad good decisions. But it's not like, unless he gives you like a, I mean, maybe if you fuck Sergey Brin, he gives you like a spending account. I think we just kind of like, we didn't get to everything. We'll circle back next week. I think next week in particular, we're going to talk about the advertising and the surveillance state

model that Google is based on. And we'll get to like a couple of the miscellaneous details we didn't get to on this episode, but we think we gave a basic point of what happened with the startup of Google and some of the extracurricular activities some of the founders have been getting up to.

But I guess that's about it this week. Check us out next week and we'll follow up the story of Google and the surveillance state that they have created. And with that, this has been Grubstakers. I'm Yogi Paiwal. I'm Andy Palmer. I'm Steve Jeffries.

I'm Sean P. McCarthy. Check back next week. Thank you.