Grubstakers - {Patreon Unlocked} Episode 140: Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn)

Episode Date: July 29, 2021

It's another Buttigieg supporter and this time it's the man who invented MySpace for careerist psychopaths: LinkedIn. We've endorsed his skills at making less money selling his property to Microsoft than the Minecraft guy and rehabilitating Jeffrey Epstein. He also made an Apples to Apples ripoff called "Trumped Up Cards", which you can buy at trumpedupcards.com or alternatively put your money into a paper shredder.

It's the kind of thing that makes the average citizen puke. I look at this system and say, yeah, you know, what's going on? I don't know anything about this man except I've read bad stuff about him. And I don't like, you know, I don't like what I read about him. We have more than just one coin. We create the world around this coin. Cop. Invention. Cop. Cop. In 5, 4, 3, 2...

The evil has gone. Hello, and welcome to Grubstakers, the podcast about billionaires. My name is Sean P. McCarthy, and I'm joined here today by... Steve Jeffers. Andy Palmer. And so, on Grubstakers, we're continuing our look into the disaster of the Iowa caucuses. The non-profit political group acronym. Because we're recording this before we have seen the New Hampshire results

that have made that completely irrelevant. Yes. But which, by the time you're hearing this, are definitely real. This is still real for us, okay? You can't laugh at this. Yeah, don't trivialize our reality. Because Stephen's going on vacation

and Yogi's getting married a second time. So we're, yeah, I mean, we're still picking through the wreckage of Iowa while you folks are just living it up after Bernie wins New Hampshire. Yeah, we're just black-pilled, sifting through Iowa, total Iowa brain, looking at what happened, looking at how they stole it, while you are all living in the world where he just won by 10 points in new hampshire and nira tandon just like put a fucking katana through her chest on msnbc jonathan shade lit himself on fire outside of a chapo trap houses brooklyn apartment you you all you the listener live in a world we wish we could experience, but we are here in the past. This is like the X-Men Days of Future's past right now.

We're just struggling to get on the right timeline. We wish we could live in that world, but unfortunately right after we finish recording this, we have planned a group suicide. And we're very strict about making plans here on Grubstakers. This is our time capsule to you and the utopian future. Yogi still has to edit this. But yeah, so we're talking about,

well, we wanted to talk about some of the billionaires linked to some of these shadowy Epstein-linked billionaires behind the equally shadowy and equally Epstein-linked Pete Buttigieg campaign for president. I'm on retro. created the disastrous Iowa caucus vote counting app, which crashed spectacularly. And we'll talk a little bit about that. But I just wanted to say with Reid Hoffman, you're dealing with a person who has poured tens of millions of dollars since 2016 into funding various Democratic political groups like Indivisible, Run for Something. We'll kind of go through a partial list over a hundred different groups and this is a man who has really bought an equity stake they were not trying with

run for something were they this is a man who has bought an equity stake in the democratic politics popper fix our business situations but it's just like these groups that are recruiting candidates for the democrats or you know providing them with their web pages or whatever else the case may be if reid hoffman the silicon valley linkedin billionaire if he's the one found funding that then these candidates that he's recruiting are going to be influenced by and indebted to him so it's a very insidious uh connection reid hoffman is one of the most insidious Settlers of Catan players in the entire world. He's actually more of a Cards Against Humanity guy,

as is evidenced by his creation of the game, Trumped Up Cards. Settler Colonialists of Catan. This is not... I want to do a Your Kickstarter Sucks crossover. Had I known about this, I would have pitched it to them because for those of you who listen to that show, you already know a good third of their episodes,

they have a Cards Against Humanity ripoff that someone makes on Kickstarter. And Reid Hoffman is a contributor to that he didn't use a kickstarter but he made trumped up cards this is a game democracy isn't a reality tv star in the white house if you're ready to laugh liberally in the wake of this unprecedented outcome then grab a copy of what many people are calling the world's biggest deck um good and well okay so here here's an example it's basically you know apples to apples rules as all these games are so someone puts down a card that says what's the biggest threat facing america crying babies unreleased tax returns day 293 of the

trump presidency we're probably we're definitely we're way way past that aren't we we're in day like a thousand uh tom brady's under inflated balls that semi-obscene trump pence logo uh all this and more can be yours you can't they don't show all the cards on their website even though it's for charity you have to pay to see them uh you can also be the biggest buzzkill at a party to play this there are also three expansion packs for this game i heard trump's approval ratings went up 10 points when this came out this came out right before the election so i think we can safely blame it on the game he actually the uh he went on the the daily show to unveil this game uh let's he here he is uh talking about how how his friends thought it was so funny it's called

trumped up cards and it's a game of just dissing Trump, basically. Why would you do this? Because you realize if he becomes president, you're dead. I am aware of that. I first made it for friends, because I thought it would be hilarious. And he was right. What's funny is he talks about real real billionaire mindset here because he's like i

made it for friends clearly even even though i'm sure someone of his caliber could write this stuff he clearly did not make it he bought a group of graphic designers to make it and you know some writers who may have gotten laid off from cards against humanity. I can see him writing them. I was going to say, yeah, I was going to say like that. That's the real sucker's path is trying to be a comedy writer.

When what you should do is just become a billionaire and then nobody will tell you your shit is not funny. A party game for people with big hands. There are like at least a hundred people whose job is to pretend Reid Hoffman is funny. Just like, yes, this like just laugh way over enthusiastically when he bumps out, busts out the trump card game. Official rules. One, first, all players must thoroughly sanitize their hands with Purell. Oh my God.

Then they should pledge their loyalty to trumped-up cards, the world's biggest deck, by raising their right hands and saying, Believe me, folks, this deck is so huge, you won't believe it. People all over the world are talking about it. Trump's just a Seinfeld. Then each player draws 10 very clean white cards. Then the player with the greatest net worth begins as the card evaluating officer ceo i'm i'm gonna spare the listeners the rest of the rules oh wait

no rule four the ceo must say i'm really rich and make a dismissive hand gesture apparently reid hoffman does like get togethers with his friends where they play settlers of katan and could you just imagine a hostage situation could you just imagine how pissed you would be if you went to go play katan and he busts this shit out and is like making everybody play and then you have to lose to him you have to be a worse settler than he is this is very illustrative because this is a man who owns a large chunk of today's Democratic Party. You know, when we talk about Reid Hoffman, and I think this is kind of a guiding light of our podcast, is that you talk about the politicians and then you talk about the billionaires who are the people who own the politicians. And it's worthwhile to understand how they think, what goes through their heads.

And Reid Hoffman is a guy who again owns a large chunk of the democratic party and he has kind of like liberal uh really bad daily show sense of humor plus entrepreneur brain and this is a guy on the really bad daily show twice now at least i didn't bother to look into i just know he's been on twice because i was like does he really talk about trumped up cards on The Daily Show? And then I clicked on a video and it was the wrong video. And that's how I know he's been there twice. But like, yeah, so if this is the guy providing the money or much of the money for Indivisible, Run for Something, all these other groups, Acronym, Shadow,

you have to imagine that the sort of establishment Democratic Party will reflect his point of view and his way of looking at the world, which might explain, you know, some of the Trump-Russia stuff, some of the Mueller baby, all the kind of mainstream liberal stuff. He very much seems to embody it and fund it. And I actually wanted to just kind of start before we even go through, you know, the biography here. There's a very great New Yorker profile of him written in 2015. It's called The Network Man by Nicholas Lehman. But I wanted to just start with a quote from it.

When I say he has entrepreneur brain. I'm tepid as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore. When I say he has entrepreneur brain, according to this profile, he sometimes asks people, what's your tribe? And he says his tribe is, quote, entrepreneur. And then quoting from the profile, he says, I think our religion is entrepreneurship. He calls himself a mystical atheist, but he says that he is deeply engaged in religious questions. The world he has created around him has elaborate customs and rituals and it has something to say about every part of life and every major issue not long ago hoffman worked child sacrifice

not long ago hoffman worked with a branding company to devise a system of 28 images they look like the petroglyphs at ancient Native American sites in the West. Ritual castration. One for each essential human virtue and one for Hoffman's initials. Hoffman shares the meaning of the images with members of his tribe, unquote. Would it surprise you as Andy was... Midsomer deflowering. As Andy was alluding to, he's the person

Reid Hoffman is who invited Jeffrey Epstein to a 2015 Palo Alto dinner at which Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk also attended. And at this dinner, according to press reports, Elon Musk introduced

Jeffrey Epstein to Mark Zuckerberg. Sean did a road comic swig of beer after that, like it was his big punchline. And we will get more into all these connections, but it's just the kind of thing that it really blows your mind that this is a guy who is a major part of the Democratic Party and seems to be funding so much of what we just saw go wrong in Iowa. He's the type of dark money that Pete Buttigieg, if he had any honesty, would actually be railing against. Instead of the dark money in scare quotes that is like our revolution or DSA. Today he literally called it black money. Yeah, he did accidentally call it black money once.

Why is it going to be black? But according to Forbes, as of February 2020, Reid Hoffman's worth about $1.9 billion. He co-founded LinkedIn in 2003. They sold it to Microsoft in 2016 for about $26.2 billion. What's really funny about that is he's he's they sold it for 26 billion he's one of the founders of linkedin and he walked away from that deal with he has 1.5 billion he clearly walked away from that deal with less money from microsoft than notch the minecraft

guy it is weird like i think i think in the past reid hoffman was at like three or four billion and i i don't have exact i don't think anybody has exact numbers on how much he's dumped into the democratic came up with trumped up cards trumped up cards took a lot of money that was half of his net worth 20 of the best people to work on it just like once you have a billionaire who just doesn't know anybody who's not a billionaire you can just be like yeah graphic design that's like 10 million i'm hiring graphic design from the ivy league so prestigious no one's heard of it except the ultra rich and you have to pay them 500 million each um but yeah and so you know he's he sold linkedin to microsoft and now

he kind of works primarily on this silicon Valley venture capital fund called Greylock Partners. Greylock Partners was one of the first investors in Airbnb. Apparently, he's invested in Twitch and some other startups. He's the guy who introduced Mark Zuckerberg to Peter Thiel, which is how Facebook got their initial startup capital. So he's really really plugged into Justin Timberlake. Silicon Valley. And you have to imagine that when according to Tara McGowan, who's again the person who founded Acronym,

which created Shadow, which created this... Who had nothing to do with Shadow. Yeah. She met Shadow once at a party and doesn't even remember Shadow. Which, yeah, did this Iowa voting app. Tara McGowan told Politico in 2019 that Hoffman, quote, took a chance on acronym, unquote, in, I believe, 2018.

And so because he's such a plugged in Silicon Valley guy, once he puts money in, a bunch of other people follow. So it's very influential for how these various shadowy democratic organizations are able to get $75 million as he puts his little stamp on it. But I guess before we even start the biography, I wanted to just spend five minutes talking about his political network, which is called Investing in Us, like capital U.S. So it's like investing in the U.S. or investing in us, however you want to do it.

Investing in not-me-us. This sounds like some Koch brothers level stuff. Just for centrist Democrats. Right. Like, apparently I forget the profile, but there's a profile of him where he recounts that a friend told him he should become the

Koch brothers for the left. And he said he bristled at that, not because of the Koch brothers comparison, but because he's not on the left. But yeah, he is kind of like a centrist entrepreneur type guy. But this is very much, like you were saying, what's happened here. Because he, you know, was a big Obama backer. He was kind of disappointed with politics, but he was, you he was supposedly, he says, horrified by Donald Trump. And that's where Investing in Us, his political action group, came to be.

At least he's honest about not being on the left and not on that Elon Musk, mescaline, I'm actually the realist socialist there is bullshit. Right. Karl Marx loved capitalism is the Elon Musk quote. And also my brother met his girlfriend through Jeffrey Epstein is the other Elon Musk quote. Elon is cyberpunk, just so we're clear. He can't think beyond the capitalist horizon.

Yeah. But I wanted to start with Max Blumenthal in The Gray Zone wrote a good piece talking a little bit about this group, Investing in Us. And again, this is Reid Hoffman's political action group. This has invested tens of millions of dollars in various Democratic-affiliated startup groups. But so Max Blumenthal kind of goes through. He says, to run Investing in Us on a day-to-day basis, Hoffman tapped a guy named Dimitri Melhorn. He's a venture capitalist and political strategist. He's a former McKinsey guy. He graduated the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. He worked as a COO at Michelle Rhee's charter school group, Students First, in the D.C. area. And then I'll just quote this. According to Dimitri Melhorn's bio, he sits on the board of the American Prison Data Systems,

a company that claims to reduce recidivism by giving prisoners tablets to study coding for five hours a day. So this is the guy that... Wait, he's teaching prisoners to code? Yes. And would you be surprised that Reid Hoffman is also an investor in the group uh code for america what the fuck are prisoners coding like are they trying to are they are they trying to i mean they're probably doing qa is what

for since an hour yeah for since i mean that's that's definitely some race to the bottom of shit where it's like, we, you know, people talk about how the learn to code shit is really for the Silicon Valley vampires to try to make coding so ubiquitous that people who can code, yeah, lowers wages. And it seems like in this case, they're just cutting to the chase and like just going straight to prison slavery. Yeah. This is probably like an app that someone dreamed up to, like, match up prisoners who want to learn to code. Yeah, teach prisoners to code. And then you get them to QA for you. Yeah.

Well, Jason, I don't know if your parole officer would approve of you trying to unionize. Maybe we should let him know and check for a random drug test there, Jason. We've actually partnered with the commissary so that they can get an extra bag of chips a week. But he's, yeah, so I mean, this is just like a McKinsey, Harvard Kennedy School of Government guy who's, you know, giving prisoners tablets to learn to code. And there's an article in Vanity Fair in 2019 called the...

You know who they're not giving tablets uh chelsea manning okay like that's so they're like they're they're doing this thing where they're like well we're teaching prisoners to code they're not allowed on the internet and they'll get put in solitary if they talk to journalists on the phone but no they at least they can learn to code they can't even go to github yeah yeah they can't go to github uh but so there's a vanity fair article from uh and they can't use stack exchange how are you teaching people to code without stack exchange good point like that's i i tried to learn from just books that's a nightmare i can't no google no stack exchange yeah that's no way to learn from just books. That's a nightmare. I can't. No Google? No Stack Exchange?

Yeah. That's no way to learn. No. Yeah, there's a Vanity Fair article about investing in us. And the title is from April 2019. It's called The Left's Capital Arm of the Resistance, unquote. LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman is spending hundreds of millions to growth hack democracy this is the headline of the article and they interview dimitri melhorn again this mckinsey guy who's running reid hoffman's organization again very legit objective there growth hack

democracy again like this guy has permanent entrepreneur brain. You can't conceive. We don't have a choice of whether or not to listen to him. Yes. I'm sure he has like his own elevator pitch on how like, well, the Russians hacked our election, Dimitri Melhorn sent Hoffman a 10-page memo laying out his fears that the norms of the Enlightenment era, the rule of law, respect for people as people, basic belief in the scientific method, unquote, The transatlantic slave trade. faced an existential threat in Trump.

The manifesto was eventually translated into a more traditional pitch deck for potential investors written in their native silicon valley argot flow charts explaining the quote-unquote flat fascist playbook charts detailing the asymmetrics of republican versus democratic messaging analyses of the current socio-political ecosystem from unengaged centrists to neo-nazis and racists and proposals on how to rapidly engage untapped electoral markets and so you can like see like this is exactly where people like tara mcgowan the acronym ceo come in where it's just like you put together these fucking pitch decks for these silicon valley vc freaks you can get yourself 75 million or 10 million or however much

money you want from them you just speak their language and act like yeah we're gonna growth hack democracy some of that actually we should put down the microphones and uh find a better find a new way to make some money some of that actually sounded like somewhat promising like i actually would like to see a huge deck be presented on the fascist playbook as we understand it but in his hands like is he really the most trusted person to give that presentation right well and the article continues dimitri melhorn said uh the answer was a political investment company that could mimic the tactics of a silicon valley seed fund allocating small amounts of capital to innumerable founders with crazy ideas, then sitting back to see which ones worked.

There was no risk capital or growth capital arm of the resistance. So that is what we've tried to build, Mel Horn told me. And, you know, and then in terms of what that implies, it says we're backing founders, people of big, potentially game changing ideas. And they talk about it's enormous. Keep in mind, this is the man behind LinkedIn, the resume website. It's all about building connections. Investing in Us has an enormous, diverse portfolio of companies, nonprofits, and activist groups,

including Higher Ground Labs, a tech accelerator that helps companies build campaign software for progressives, Run for Something, which recruits candidates and helps them run for office, and Indivisible, a voter action group whose founders were recently named for Time's 100 list. There's also Stand Up Republic, which ran ads against Roy Moore in the 2017 Alabama special election, Woke Vote, aimed at mobilizing African American voters the people's house project and the arena was that working out with the Buttigieg campaign and the arena organizations devoted to finding and trading candidates and staffers and integrity first for America which filed lawsuits against the white nationalists involved in Charlottesville

and they say all told they have directly invested hoffman and melhorn in a hundred different group groups and efforts and then indirectly they've invested in hundreds more through companies like the higher ground accelerator and recruited thousands of candidates through organizations like run for something and it worked they stopped fascism but it's just like you know and this article talks about essentially reid hoff's network, because he's spending hundreds of millions of dollars on this thing, becoming potentially supplanting the Democratic National Committee. Like they have some DNC staffers on backgrounds who are like welcoming his money, but kind of nervous about the fact that he's not just giving it to them, he's using it independently. So you can see how pernicious this is where well yeah i mean you have to be immediately suspicious of this because the main takeaway from uh the silicon valley crowd of the last couple decades is they're not exactly great

at inventing things on their own like it's it's public knowledge and you know we've certainly driven the point home that everything that they've made is really a collection of other technologies that were mostly made either from government funding or in various nonprofit contexts that were co-opted or like, or universities that were co-opted to make money. And so what these people are good at doing is not innovating, which is, you know, their own pitch for themselves, but they're good at um taking existing systems and making themselves money and so it it seems like from the outside that is what's going on here is he's you know uh or at least that's that's what you should probably how you should look at this um uh when he says these things that we're trying to innovate and create innovative solutions for

elections it's more of well no you're trying to pump your own money into an existing system so that you can use it to make yourself more money uh right and you know that's uh it is briefly gestured out in the article that there are some concerns about all the data privacy scandals uh involving silicon valley tech billionaires and we will briefly mention you know, LinkedIn has these concerns where the other thing is, you know, if he's funding all these organizations that are turning out voters, that are recruiting candidates for higher office, and also, you know,

putting their traditional voter profiles together, he can absolutely use that to make money off it. There's actually an article that came out recently that ICE is buying user data from different games that track people's locations oh my god um and they don't need a warrant because they're just buying private data and so and then they're using that to track people down it's also worth noting that leon uh steven's cat is attacking his own tail right now and it's very adorable it's attached to your body like you don't need to be doing that he's going to town on it he's finding an innovative solution

he's growth hacking his tail blitz what was it blitz scaling yes reid hoffman yeah we will talk about it but reid hoffman's wrote a bunch of like fucking entrepreneur brooks and we could spend the entire hour going through all of this guy's entrepreneur brain blitz scaling is about how like startups have to you know use blitzkrieg to fucking become big like airbnb did even before they can make money or even before they're like good einsatz group investing and i just like if er Eric von Manstein could see what his sickle cut through the Ardennes Forest was being used for today, he would be ashamed. Final business solutions. But I guess I wanted to kind of start the chronological biography and then we'll go through some of the scandals. When we talk about Reid Hoffman, the best profile, and again, I really

do recommend people read this, the New Yorker profile from 2015. It's called The Network Man by Nicholas Lehman. And it begins, I'll just read the first paragraph for you. Early on a Monday evening in June, Reid Hoffman, the founder and executive chairman of the business oriented networking site LinkedIn, met Mark Pincus, the founder and chief executive of the gaming site Zynga, for dinner at a casual restaurant in Portolo Valley, California. Didn't Zynga make Farmville? I think so, yes. Mark Pincus is also a billionaire, so future episode. They have dinner in this wealthy residential town at the western edge of Silicon Valley.

Breakfasts and dinners are a big part of Hoffmanman's life which i just wanted to say is the most new yorker way of calling somebody fat because they go through how he has all of these breakfast and uh lunch and dinner meetings basically all day and uh yes he's a pretty portly fellow uh but i just like that this inner this meeting with mark penkis uh again the zanga billionaire uh this is in 2015 this is before trump was elected mark it's another example of someone just finding a way to make um sim farm as profitable as possible like what if we made sim farm but you bug all of your relatives to play it and you have to pay real money. Well, here's why I'm excited for our inevitable Mark Penkis episode, because just like so the New Yorker profile talks about how Reid Hoffman has all these, you know, lunch, breakfast, dinner meetings with various people. And he always brings like an ideas list to the

meeting, like he brings a list of things to talk about. And then he starts the meeting by asking them for their list of things they want to talk about at this meeting. And so Mark Penkis, again, the Zanga Farmville billionaire, he says this is 2015 before Trump is elected. His idea is, quote, in this election, we'd want a million people to raise one billion dollars to run Mike Bloomberg for president, unquote. He says through Kickstarter, say the minimum is 500 i think he'd be the best it'd be pretty cool that would change politics forever and then he talks about you know what i really need to it would for the worse i really need to follow up with mike hale your Your Kickstarter sucks.

Let's raise a billion dollars for the guy who has $40 billion. So he goes on. He talks about this massive multiplayer online game called Star Citizen, which through crowdfunding brought in some $80 million to finance further game development. And he says a similar model could work for the mike bloomberg presidential campaign you know that game that we all know and play star citizen that certainly got finished and he says about it because what else would you do with 80 million dollars

that you got through a largely unaccountable crowdfunding website. He's like, let's use a million in seed capital to create a guild on EVE Online and then let's steal from the other guilds until we get a billion dollars and we just give it to Bloomberg. What was the name of that game? A Star Citizen. How much money did they raise? Apparently they

raised 80 million dollars. I'm guessing they raised 5 million and then put 80 million in so that they could make it over the threshold before their time expired but i mean like again these are two billionaires having lunch on the political solution to america and this is how they think this country is operating that there's a grassroots demand to raise 1 billion dollars for mike bloomberg to run for president or should we give a billion dollars to? Oh, I know, the person who brutally cracked down on the Occupy movement.

You know who needs all that money for, who needs a billion dollars to run for president? The guy with 60 of it. Well, and this is just like, so Mark Penkis says, quote, a million people give $1,000 a piece. I believe there's a million people who'd like to give a fuck you to both political parties and it's like and there's actually way more than that and they're all donating uh eighteen dollars to bernie sanders and that's exactly it it's like you're so close but you're just in like this silicon valley billionaire brain where you think the people want

mike bloomberg and you know these are the people who are controlling the let's call it the business wing of the democratic party right now i don't think he actually thinks the people want Mike Bloomberg. And, you know, these are the people who are controlling the, let's call it the business wing of the Democratic Party right now. I don't think he actually thinks the people want Mike Bloomberg, or else he wouldn't suggest that people raise a billion dollars for Mike Bloomberg. Why do you have to raise any money for Mike Bloomberg? I mean, his other billionaire friend just never even questioned him about that. And it's also just the guy who costs money to speak in public. He's so uncharismatic. It's a financial hit to talk in public for him.

Qualified for the debate, but didn't show up. Yeah. Yeah, like every time he gives a speech, the investing website odds get longer for him. But, you know, and this is just all of this is kind of background to give you an idea of who these people are and what is going on with the people who own the Democratic Party. And, you know, to go from the same New Yorker profile to talk about Reid Hoffman, he was born in 1967 during the Summer of Love at Stanfordford hospital in palo alto his father was attending law school at stanford university uh bill hoffman his grandfather was a los angeles newspaper man who wrote a series of pulp westerns with titles like gun gospel and law of the lash um his mother dad definitely went to stanford to fuck well yes uh hoffman's mother deanna uh ruth rutter grew up in

silicon valley and also became a lawyer so both of his parents were uh lawyers they had like a summer of love fling and they conceived him and they divorced or they didn't stick together so he was raised uh with uh you know separated parents oh yeah they they married and promptly separated leaving hoffman the only child of estranged parents who were still in their early 20s. And he was brought up initially by his mother in California.

Then he went back to his father. He says he's been told through relatives that he was tear gassed as a child at demonstrations. Again, this is born 67, summer of love maybe early late vietnam war stuff they were protesting that's what he says anyways um but his father according to the same new yorker profile worked for the federal war on poverty in its dying days and

with the black i never heard from someone getting so much less cool so quickly so early in life this is like some jim simons level well just like this thing about his father i mean really sums up the 60s it sounds like as a baby he was dropping acid and going to woodstock and then he turned five and he's like i gotta button up and get a job someone who lies about that so brazenly is also at least a little bit cool yeah he was he was protesting war but then he thought you know what's better settlers of katan you know what's better ironic card games about the president yeah there's no wars and settlers of katan you just stick your road in front of someone else's road but uh you you and you and other wealthy settlers get to a totally unexplored not inhabited land yeah no there's no one already no one's already there yeah this is just settlers wild

frontier no violence whatsoever you all you trade things maybe you get drunk and get in an argument with your family but that's about it they should release the uh disease patch for settlers of katan where it's like the board is full and you have to clear it out and then you can settle katan there's an add-on where people people are already there you can't settle until you you do something about them you know there probably is some well i don't know there's a lot of expansions people are like complaining on the reddit like they need to nerf blankets because i keep trading for them and all my citizens are getting decimated but the new yorker profile uh just sums up the 60s here. It says, quote, his father, Reid Hoffman's father, worked for the federal war on poverty in its dying days and with the Black Panthers and other radical clients, though he wound up a conventional business lawyer.

So he had like some sort of radical-ish parents for a time. Some would argue that he continued the war on poverty. And his son continues that fight to this day. It's a guerrilla warfare. He doesn't even know the war has ended. He had radical-ish parents who both sold out and became, you know, lawyers, corporate lawyers, and they were able to send him to a private boarding school. So this is, you know,id hoffman grows up he grows up very affluent in uh in silicon valley and he talks about you know in middle school he was big i mean at that time it was still vacuum tube valley uh he was big into like dungeons and dragons apparently from the

age of nine he played dungeons and dragons there was another independent game company called Chaosium which had an office in a neighboring city and it invited him to come like beta test its products and they even like paid him some money to help beta test their little new game if you try to clown on him for this Sean I am totally bringing up your giant binders of Magic

the Gathering cards I have nothing but respect for my D&D playing brethren this is not why we have an issue with reid hoffman but solidarity from the planeswalkers uh but so you know and this kind of like i guess he he to this day likes dnd like settlers of katan and this is partly why he wanted to make a card game about donald trump he just likes this kind of bullshit which nothing wrong with it but he says you know informs his life outlook and he always talks about not always but he sometimes talks about how it gives him the skills to do entrepreneurship bullshit which

really not what dungeons and dragons was attended intended for you know uh having better growth of your fucking airbnb startup it was not what the designers of the Paladin had in mind. What? Yeah. What's his alignment anyway? Lawful evil. Yeah. Probably lawful evil.

In fact, I think most billionaires probably would be. Yeah. Cause they write the law. I guess Epstein would be chaotic evil. I would like the... No, he's still lawful evil because he operates within the... Like, yeah.

At least within the framework of the state. He still showed deference to the state. I guess he doesn't work within the frameworks of the law, but he works within the framework of the state. But, like, John McAfee would be chaotic neutral. Chaotic neutral to evil. Let's not forget that he he's raped and killed

allegedly. We're going to publish an alignment chart for the billionaires covered by grub stakers at some point. Chaotic neutrals can rape and murder as a treat. He's probably the richest person to block me. And all I did was ask if he paid five thousand dollars to have his neighbor murdered

the funniest idea oh not the funniest but one of the funniest ideas andy came up with online is uh john mccafee was having a contest to make a photoshopped uh make memes for his presidential run and andy was submitting memes with uh the face of the neighbor he murdered photoshopped into the background in the hopes that he would retweet it without knowing and then this was only interrupted by him having to flee the federal government yeah that that the little experiment got cut short by literally the FBI and possibly the CIA. Those guys know how to ruin a good time, if we have learned one thing about the Epstein network.

But so, yeah, Reid Hoffman is like a nerd. He's playing Dungeons and Dragons. But then he goes to a private boarding school in Vermont, the Putney School, which is like a progressive boarding school in Vermont. And I just wanted to play just a short clip from, there's this kind of ass-kissy CNBC documentary series called The Brave Ones, where they profile different entrepreneurs. You can watch it on YouTube if you're curious. But just a short little drop of Reid Hoffman talking about the worst experience of his life. Overcome challenges, overcome difficulty.

The first year of boarding school was probably one of the hardest years of my life. So we talk about the billionaire struggle story and being bullied at boarding school really takes the cake. I mean, looking at his childhood, a lot of that was probably because he had the DTs But yeah This is off in the Vermont countryside Yes somewhere in Vermont Apparently they learned how to like milk cows And that kind of stuff It was like a weird boarding school

But he says he was bullied there I thought you said milk cows No he has That's That's more of his we'll get to that when we talk about the bildberg group um but yeah he talks about getting bullied there and apparently he like learned he says he tells the new yorker he used logic to solve the problem the way you deal with bullies is you change the economic equation you make it more expensive for them to hassle you he said he went to the chief bully and said if you continue to to bully me quote i will break everything you own unquote and then he stopped so that is how he said

that being bullied taught him a business sense putting financial disincentives on uh you like talk to the bully's manager that's like it's like saying you know the the real way you stop a bully is you just throw up on them or you just you just shit yourself when they start they'll stop holding you right away he's like yeah you know i stopped a bully by being insane yeah all you gotta do is just humiliate yourself in front of the bully and everyone else yeah i'm just imagining like the the private Vermont boarding school bullies who are like, uh, nerd, Paladin is the worst character alignment. I can see him playing as Paladin and do lawful good as a kid.

He's a healer. He didn't go with his original idea of making a card game about his bully. Yeah, he really learned how to deal with bullies from his experience. But yeah, so he goes to this private boarding school in Vermont, and this is all just to show the worst experience of his life is going to boarding school. So he's clearly not a self-made billionaire. He grows up rich to well-to-do lawyers as parents.

He goes to Stanford University in 1989. He enrolled in a new major called Symbolic Systems, which is a combination of philosophy, linguistics, psychology, and computer science. He met his wife, Michelle Yee, at Stanford. So he majored in nothing. Yes. A way to do CS with more fluff courses.

He majored in good vibes. He even said that the computer science majors at Stanford would make fun of him and call his major CS light. Because it has less computer science classes than a typical CS major, basically. Leak. Yeah. He met his wife. He met Peter Thiel, who will become important the paypal founder um and uh then hoffman after stanford he goes he originally wants to be a philosopher apparently

gets a master's in philosophy at oxford on a marshall scholarship he spends three years studying at oxford university um and uh he claims that he says he originally wanted to be like a public intellectual, but then he says he saw, you know, these professors at Oxford who would publish books that only 50 people read. And he thought by software, he could influence the world much more. He decided to be a private intellectual. Yes. He thought that, you know, by going into software or business,

he could influence the world much more than by being, you know, a going into software or business, he could influence the world much more than by being, you know, a philosopher or public intellectual or whatever else. And then in the 1990s, he returned from Oxford to California. He met up with his, by this point, good friend, Peter Thiel. And Peter Thiel is important because Hoffman works for Apple in, I believe, 1997 or 96, around that time, in the mid-90s when Apple's not doing so hot, after Steve Jobs gets kicked out. He's working for Apple on something called eWorld, which is an early internet, one of the early kind of social networking style sites. It doesn't really go anywhere because apple's in free fall at this point this is probably 96 97 around this time uh it says in 1997 the new yorker profile says uh he started his own company called social net which created a way

for people to connect with each other those years when they were when apple was basically just delivering old computing devices to schools by the truckload like apple was in such a shitty place that like they were the computers used in public schools oh yeah my elementary school mine too yeah um but yeah like and so according to the new yorker profile according to the new yorker profile he works at worlds Away, a quote, virtual chat community owned by Fujitsu around 96, 97. Users interacted

through fictionalized graphic representations of themselves. So kind of the point is like, he's working at these very early social media-ish networks where people don't really

quite understand the internet where people might want to connect with their real names, real whatever. Sounds like he made like a shitty cross between a message board and the sims but yes he does start his own company in 97 social net which created a way for people to connect with each other for various purposes mainly dating using pseudonyms social net was

soon acquired for a modest sum by a company called Spark Networks, which now owns the religious dating sites J-Date and Christian Mingle. So he does manage to sell his company kind of early on and make a little bit of money doing that. I did not know that those were owned by the same company. And there's something very weird about that to me. They have a monopoly on the Abrahamic religious abrahamic yeah religious dating sites i think there's a muslim one too the the kind of dating sites where you really have to spend a lot on the first date to hope anything's gonna happen there well it's there's like isn't people are already like innovating on irc at this point doing all this stuff yeah oh no this is like yeah this is late irc early like

irc they're already doing social net sort of well he's clearly trying to profit so he's trying to like put it under like a brand right um that's like when we talk about the geniuses of silicon valley it's just the people who stole from IRC groups and hacker clubs are the ones who are considered the founding geniuses of Silicon Valley. And we're like, what if we charge people for this and use government patent law to

have a monopoly on this? What's the underlying framework of macOS? Unix. I was having fun on IRC, but I realized I'm not making any money from this. But so, yes. So, he sells his little fake dating pseudonym site, and he joins PayPal. And we did an episode on Peter Thiel.

I would recommend it, but just a brief recap. PayPal was founded by Peter Thiel with, quote, one million from friends and family. LLC. Which might have included some money from uh his father peter thiel's father was a german chemical engineer who worked in namibia uh nambia and apartheid era south africa so uh the the thing that connects the paypal mafia is uh apartheid south africa money uh you know what i don't think they they own the Muslim dating app. That's too bad. Yeah, it's someone else.

All the board meetings are like terrified charts about how the Muslim dating app is going to take over the Christian dating app. They're having too many babies and they're joining our dating app. But yeah, so Reid Hoffman, he sells his dating site in 1997 he sells social net or in 1999 he sells social net and he goes on to work for paypal and um he he works for paypal in 1999 uh peter teal calls uh calls him like a firefighter he he uh puts out these various fires he like goes and meets with elliot spitzer the new y attorney general, who's investigating PayPal for like violating banking laws or some shit. So he goes on and,

you know, he meets, apparently he finds some workaround for regulators. He gives Elliot Spitzer a phone number, shuts him up. Yeah, there was, you are right.

When I heard that, there was no elaboration on how he solved that problem. But considering he's flying Epstein out to dinners in Palo Alto, that might have been a solution. Oh, yeah. I know this lady. Her name is Liz Smith. But so according to the New Yorker profile, basically what happened with his work at PayPal, he's like, we're going to put out these various fires. I mean, that's another connection is that this guy's funding Pete Buttigieg.

Pete Buttigieg's campaign manager is Liz Smith, who was caught in a resort hot tub, topless, sucking on Eliot Spitzer's toes. I did not know that. Yeah. They have rules, though. Good for her. By, like, children. Wait, what? they have rules though good for her by like children wait what look we we we make a lot of fun of the booty judge campaign being robots but i think we should be consistent and give props where it's due

that's the kind of hunter s thompson spirit we need to bring to the barney sanders campaign uh but yeah so according to the new yorker profile his time at paypal reed hoffman's time at paypal ends in 2002 or 2001 basically the way they describe it is he's working on these various problems but in october 2001 with the passage of the patriot act it severely damaged damaged PayPal's second line of business, handling cash transactions for gamblers. Oh, wait. I want to issue a correction. He was sucking on her toes. Oh.

Yeah. All right. Well, you know, that's good. Anyway, carry on. Yeah. He's a GGG. It's good to be giving. But so, yes, according to the New Yorker, the Patriot Act limited PayPal's business for handling cash transactions for gamblers.

So they kind of had a crisis. So Reid Hoffman arranged the sale to eBay in 2002 or 2000, late 2001, early 2002. Yeah, it turns out their fraud protections were pretty lucrative because it gave them kind of a I mean, this this is ended up being one of those um ebay was used i was looking into this that ebay early on was used for fraud and so they issued their fraud protections but what that led to was a lot of freezing of accounts to the point where then a class action lawsuit was brought against them because um turns out it's pretty lucrative when you run a payment transfer website to freeze a lot of accounts. But yeah, definitely eBay and PayPal were getting up to some rather shady stuff.

It was kind of the Wild West of, you know, sending money through the Internet. Banking laws were not very clear. So Reid Hoffman's job was to go and interface with various regulators and competitors and just make them not shut down PayPal. And he did a good enough job that they were able to get themselves bought out by eBay. Well, I mean, they, quote, weren't clear. Yes. Because they certainly, unquote, weren't followed. But yes, so eBay buys them out.

And according to The New Yorker, he took six weeks off after eBay buys out PayPal, Reid Hoffman did. And then I guess that's the way he tells it is he took six weeks off and then saw that social networking wasn't taking into account business networking. So as The New Yorker describes it, in 2003, for $700,000, he and Mark Penkis, the game developer we talked about earlier, bought the Six earlier bought the six degrees patent a methodology for constructing social networks that year hoffman officially incorporated a new social network it was like social net except this time people would use their real names and focus on their professional lives he called it linkedin so he bought the technology for linkedin for seven hundred,000. Wait, they paid someone for, you said the Six Degrees Network? The Six Degrees, the patent. Someone patented the Kevin Bacon game.

And then he bought that and made it into LinkedIn. I think he's saying that this is like a programming. No, no, I i mean that's how linkedin works is it tells you like how many degrees separated you are from people in terms of your connections yeah yeah so they just made an algorithmic version of the kevin bacon game someone who's not reed hoffman did yeah yeah yeah it's like people debate what you would do with a time machine and i think one of the best would be just go back to 1995 and patent every meme that you're familiar with could be like the warren buffett of everything people talk about on reddit uh but yeah so he buys the six degrees patent which is the methodology for

constructing social networks that they use to launch linkedin and side note did you know that goat c dot cx is now a website that's trying to make a cryptocurrency based around memes and they're trying to find a way to monetize it for meme creators by putting memes on the blockchain yeah i mean this is real i made people look at that in high school yeah it was a good time you can't find it anymore uh but yeah no i mean this is basically how uh what what happened is, you know, you're all familiar with, you get the emails from LinkedIn. He got various people he knew to give him access to their business network. And then he just progressively expanded the business network.

And when you join LinkedIn, you can upload your contacts. And if you do, LinkedIn will email spam everyone you know saying hey your friend is on linkedin would you like to network with them on linkedin as well so it grows pretty rapidly and it is pretty successful from 2003 onwards yeah i had a co-worker in like 2012 who um i mean it was a shitty job and so like he left it and then i saw him again at a birthday party and he's like oh yeah man the whole time I was there, like I was just on LinkedIn like all day. This is the first time I heard about it was like 2012.

He's like, I was on LinkedIn just all day and I found a job and you know, oh man, you'll find one too, man. I was like, wherever you are, I do not want to be there. But so, you know, yes. It's a very interesting business model but it's you know just facebook for psychopath networkers um around this time it's more of just like uh facebook where your profile is your resume right and and also uh getting that connection number up and also where you can send a message to uh jisland maxwell's ex-boyfriend surviving ex-boyfriend and ask where she is and he will not reply to me

well doesn't he know you're gonna burn him with your professional network you'll never work in brooklyn podcasting again buddy i uh not around the time that he died i actually tried to find as many people in um tara marr jiseline maxwell's uh her her quote-unquote charity yeah um and i actually managed to like go through a bunch of the linkedin profiles of people involved in that and they were all you know upwardly mobile like yeah i'm gonna get a charity on my resume because in um you know just very like vapid people and now it's impossible to find any of that information like everyone who is remotely like uh connected to that company has wiped any associations with it but right right before they really knew how like how deep in the shit they were,

you could find that stuff pretty easily on LinkedIn. I was reading an FT article from 2012 interviewing Hoffman about LinkedIn. And it starts out with a little anecdote. Apparently, Robin Dunbar, an evolutionary psychologist, has also been drawn into Hoffman's cosmology, if he writes. His contribution was to estimate the maximum number of relationships that people are capable of maintaining at any one time, given the size of the human neocortex. The result, known as Dunbar's number, 150. That's the max amount of, like, sort of meaningful human relationships that you can maintain at any given time, according to this evolutionary psychologist.

And so they go on. While Hoffman says he thinks that's a fair estimate of the number of active relationships, he also believes that it underestimates the much bigger circle of looser connections that the well-organized, internet-connected person can now sustain. He once limited his own online network... You know, people you can make money off of. He once limited his own online network to people he had worked with directly,

but these days he includes anyone for whom he would be willing to provide a personal introduction, which in his case is thousands of people. It's so weird how, how quickly that goes from like something that's, it's fairly interesting. It's like how many relationships is the human mind capable of maintaining at any given moment? You know, that's like an interesting psychological pursuit.

And then jumping from that to like, okay. And how does that pertain to networking for like, boosting your career? Well, yeah. And so, you know, we talked about LinkedIn, though, it should be mentioned. So he found LinkedIn 2003. In 2004, he's the guy who puts Peter Thiel in contact with Mark Zuckerberg. Peter Thiel gives Mark, I believe half a million dollars. He's the first major investor in Facebook. Reid Hoffman is also a minor investor in Facebook. And he thought about coming on the board, but he wanted to focus on LinkedIn. But he does make a good bit of money investing in Facebook.

But I wanted to kind of mention, you know, so we talk about Reid buys the technology for LinkedIn for, you know, $700,000. and we talked about in the New Yorker profile his job is basically going to these lunch and breakfast and dinner meetings his job is like going to eat and having these meetings well like every Silicon Valley it's making trumped up cards like every so this is only job right now like Like every Silicon Valley startup, when you talk about LinkedIn going from launching in 2003 to selling for $26 point some billion to Microsoft in 2016, the people who actually did the... Definitely not because Microsoft wants to harvest people's data. The people who did the brunt of the work for that were engineers and programmers and people putting in crazy hours. And the New Yorker profile only kind of hints at that, but they talk about the CEO and various engineers would check the LinkedIn site

and they would see that the CEO, the only time that he wasn't on the LinkedIn site was between 3.30 and 4 a.m. And so this implies, of course, that the CEO that followed Reid Hoffman was working a lot. But it also implies that the engineers were working a lot because they were checking the site at 3.30 and 4 a.m. to see what's going on. So you have to imagine these people who made him his fortune were burned into the absolute ground, just like every fucking employee in the Valley. Well, yeah, it's like, I mean, if you look at every successful website, you know how when it gets millions of users it doesn't crash and burn into flames that's not because someone had a good idea

that's a shit ton of work and then the the other uh workload paragraph from this new yorker profile uh reid hoffman travels three or four times a year to China, LinkedIn's fastest growing market, and he is impressed by the Chinese work ethic. He told one conference audience about a startup in Beijing that was able to ship its first product in just six months by renting a block of hotel rooms and requiring all employees to live there, taking breaks only to eat, sleep, and exercise. LinkedIn's forced march towards economic growth and the network age continues. Emphasis on forced march. The long march? You know, it's so inspiring over there how it's not very sustainable anymore to live in the countryside, and so people are forced into the

cities in order to make a living. And in order to survive in the cities, they have to work under borderline slave conditions. It's just I mean, it's just amazing what they're able to accomplish over there. It's so inspiring that the closest thing to a labor party in American history is now owned by a guy who admires the fact that Chinese companies have hotels where the employees have to live and can only leave to eat, exercise, and sleep. But yeah, I mean, that's your Democratic Party. And I guess with just the time we have left, I want to talk about Jeffrey Epstein, and I want to just quickly gesture at what invest in the uh the political action group he set up in 2017 i want to talk about some of his uh side hobbies um real quick as well okay yeah uh such as the uh

billaberg group which he is a member of and uh at the risk of joining the ranks of the greats, such as Jesse Ventura, Lyndon LaRoche, and Nigel Farage, it is interesting how they are actually... I mean, I wasn't very aware of them until actually just now. Um, I've heard, I'd heard the name, but, uh, apparently they have,

uh, annual meetings where they, it's some of the most powerful people in the world, including high level government officials. We've mentioned them before on the rice spin episode. Like she was, she was a member of the builders work group for a while. Oh, I don't,

Oh, I wasn't on that one. Was I? No. Oh, well, I don't listen either when i'm on or off the show um they've come up a few times it's it is fascinating that they have these meetings with high level government officials um and high level uh uh and you know some of the richest CEOs including like Eric Schmidt from Google and then after these meetings they have not had a press conference since the 70s and then apparently one of the topics of discussion in the 2017 meeting was quote the war on information committed by donald trump uh another group he's in the topic of the meeting was the plot line of metal gear solid 2

and how we can make that a reality uh he's also in the council on foreign relations uh a non-profit shadow hod a non-profit think tank and its board members include David Robenstein, the co-founder of the Carlisle Group, Jamie Missick, the CEO of Kissinger Associates, which is Henry Kissinger's geopolitical consulting firm, and she had a 20-year career in the CIA, Thad W. Allen, who is the senior executive advisor of Booz Allen Hamilton the

group or the company that was being rented out by the CIA to spy on people let's see Lawrence D. Fink the chairman and CEO of BlackRock and then also Timothy Geithner and then former board members include Madeline Albright, Colin Powell and David Rockefeller and so

he's a member of that group if you're looking for another CIA connection to Pete Buttigieg. It's a very deep state. Pete has a couple different Bilderberg alumni. Yeah. Well, that was Bilderberg. This is the Council on Foreign Relations. Yeah.

Please don't look too much into the fact that Osama bin Laden's brother was at a Carlisle Group conference in D.C. on the day of 9-11. But yes, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Bilderberg Group. If you are a conspiracy person, you might have read a lot about those things that this guy linked to Jeffrey Epstein and running the Democratic Party seems to be involved in. And if you're not a conspiracy person, they do both state outright that their goal is to spread global capitalism. So you don't even have to be a conspiracy person to just read what they say their goals are. Right. I mean, that's the thing with these organizations. It's like clearly they are networking for the people who basically run the government and business in the Western world. Yeah, it's Illuminati LinkedIn.

Spreading global capitalism. So it's like, I guess you become conspiracy theorist when like, you know, I guess there was a guy who protested, I think, the Council on Foreign Relations with like a sign about how they did 9-11. Which may be, but we can at least say it's a networking conference for the powerful unfortunately that's most people's gateway into looking at the Bilderberg group is like just through like yes there's the planet the nutty people or like the people who are like you know jet fuel can't melt steel beams and it's like well it can weaken them but Saudi Arabia uh-huh put a lot of money into that you look up yeah if you look up like a nine hour YouTube video on Bilderberg when you're like 15 years old,

that's how it usually goes. It is true. It is entirely convenient for them to basically associate the word Bilderberg group with conspiracy. So like if, you know, if it's only the prison planet, Alex Jones types,

then anybody who has built up a group is like, Oh, shut up. You know, I'm not a psychopath like you, but it prevents you from just looking at the simple fact that there is a networking operation between the most powerful people on earth and we don't really know what they're talking about there but clearly they're coordinating well it's like you know the that thing in the 90s where um the government

would kind of like wink at uh ufo conspiracies as a way of kind of covering up things that would look weird in the sky that were really just classified aircraft testing. Well, I wanted to talk a bit about just kind of how these hundreds of millions of dollars investing in us have been spent. Because, again, from this Vanity Fair profile I quoted earlier, and also from Max Blumenthal's reporting in the Gray Zone, just two interesting examples. So, Reid Hoffman and, again, Dimitri Melhorn, who's the person who he by Mikey Dickerson, a former Google engineer who worked for the Obama administration and knew someone who eventually connected him to investing in us. And this is kind of what we've been talking about with Tara McGowan. She was, you know, a former Clinton person, Hillary Clinton person who had connections and got Obama's campaign manager, David Plouffe, on her board.

So it's like once you can link to these Clinton and Obama people. And she did it without his knowledge or consent. Once you can link to these Clinton or Obama people, or in this case, this guy, Mikey Dickerson, is also a former Google engineer. Once you can link to them, then you can link to their fundraising networks, all these Silicon Valley people who funded Barack Obama. So he's able to link to them and get $750,000. And we know he apparently paid $100,000 to a subcontractor

who created Facebook pages posing as a conservative Alabamans to spread fake news and encourage Republicans to support a rival candidate during the Roy Moore-Doug Jones Senate race in Alabama. And, you know, you might not particularly care about that. Apparently, Dimitri Melhorn actually gave a quote where he said their goal was to imitate the Russian... Imitate the Russian tactics in the 2016 election, which is, it's such like, they're both telling on themselves, and it shows that they're getting high on their own supply.

Because it's clearly, they've not only bought into this conspiracy that if you you know uh put a hundred thousand dollars into facebook ads you can buy the president uh which is what a bunch of people seem to believe happened in 2016 but um like they not only believe that but then they're like okay but we can use it for good. Right. Good being third-way Democratic candidates. Yeah. Yeah. Our version of good. So to quote from Max Blumenthal's piece,

Dimitri Melhorn told the Washington Post that through projects like the group News for Democracy they invested in, he aimed to, quote, mirror the tactics of the Russian Internet Research Agency troll farm. And, you know, he talks about in the Vanity Fair piece, talks about how these groups that they were funding, you know, putting $750,000 or whatever else into, they would set up these Facebook pages, which would... Wait, troll farms?

They're actually paying people to, like, be uh thomas real american 5385 basically yes to talk about roy moore as though he needed more to take him down and as if you didn't have enough reasons to for roy moore to just take himself down right and so you know the blumenthal piece talks about sure he's a pedophile but did you hear that he said he had foot sores to get out of the vietnam war so the blumenthal piece talks about news for democracy what they would do is um this group that reid hoffman is investing in they would create community facebook pages initially focused on sports christianity patriotism and other topics with the goal of being generating interest from right-wing voters.

And then as the election approached, they would switch to promoting Beto O'Rourke or attacking various Republican candidates. And, you know, they spread this thing about Roy Moore. They encouraged people to vote for a write-in candidate, you know, a Republican. Wait, where was the Beto O'Rourke thing coming from? I'm not sure, but they were pushing Beto O'Rourke for some reason oh like in a senate campaign against ted cruz i guess so this is like too clever by half like like all of this like the much simpler solution is just like run a candidate who supports medicare for all i mean he's he's basically just doing to defeat republicans he's basically just doing the thing where virgil

texas found a right-wing facebook group and turned it into um like gay love for hillary clinton right but like when you have hundreds of millions of dollars to throw around you can just kind of do that and you know he got exposed yeah my point is that virgil texas didn't need that he got exposed by the New York Times. He apologized. They came up with some whole story of like, we wrote this guy a check and then we didn't ask him what he was doing with it. You know, startup culture is messy. You invest in all these little things and then you don't know which one's going to work, which one's not going to.

I wonder if they used that another time. The Blumenthal piece also talks about Tara McGowan, of course, invented the app that crashed and burned in Iowa. McGowan. She had nothing to do with it. She was actually having a nap at the time. McGowan, they founded these Facebook pages like the Courier Newsroom, a seemingly journalistic initiative that appeared to take an overly partisan role with time courier news had opened local news pages on facebook with unassuming names like the virginia dogwood or the arizona's copper courier after seeding the pages with folksy local news stories

courier newsroom bombards users with pro-democratic political messaging and so you know i guess that's a long way to go, and you might not particularly care about them spreading fake news against, you know, pedophile Roy Moore or whatever, but you have to imagine that if they're deploying these tactics against Republicans, they will do the same thing against Bernie or any leftist who is

a threat to their wealth and their way of life. And it would probably, it would save them a lot of money even to just run, to run a candidate who is actually worth a damn against Roy Moore. I'm still not desensitized to the just blatant irony of paying a bunch of money to run, quote, pro-democratic messages. Well, my theory of the establishment Democratic Party is there is two wings. There's the demonic pedophile wing and then there's the consultant grifter wing so you have all these people where it's like one of

the demonic pedophiles is going around throwing hundreds of millions of dollars so they're like how do i get in on that i'm just gonna put together a slide deck and say we'll run fucking analytic facebook ads and fake news and do whatever else to generate you know controversy and it's like these grifters they're so reliant on these job opportunities that they want a million democratic candidates in the race they want all this stuff so it was because the pedophiles and the consultants could not come together that bernie sanders was able to emerge from a crowded field and that's the real story of 2020 it's because the thorax of that butterfly with those two wings got destroyed

in 2016. But I guess to kind of close out, we'll just kind of go through the Reid Hoffman, Jeffrey Epstein connections, because we've talked a lot about Pete Buttigieg, who of course, you know, Reid Hoffman has backed among others. Reid Hoffman, of course, we've beat this point to the ground here, funded the software that destroyed the Iowa caucuses, the app. Reid Hoffman is pretty intimately connected to Jeffrey Epstein. Just according to a piece in Vox, Vox Recode, Joy Ito was the former head of MIT Media Lab. He's since had to resign because they were taking all this money from Jeffrey Epstein and, you know, very strange connections there. Reid Hoffman gave an interview to Axios where he said,

by agreeing to participate in any fundraising activity where Epstein was present, I helped to repair his reputation and perpetuate injustice. For this, I am deeply regretful. And then Hoffman has kind of thrown Joy Ito under the bus, again, the former head of MIT Media Lab, saying that because Ito vouched for him, said he had cleared MIT's media vetting process. That's why Reid Hoffman trusted Epstein and, you know, flew

him out, invited Epstein to this Palo Alto dinner in 2015. Again, after Epstein had been convicted on child prostitution charges, this dinner with Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel. Elon Musk introduces Epstein to Mark Zuckerberg at this dinner. Again, at Reid Hoffman's invitation. But, so Reid Hoffman throws

the head of MIT Media Labs under the bus for saying he vouched for Epstein. But according to the same Vox piece, in July 2016, Ito sought advice from Reid Hoffman about whether to allow Epstein to attend a conference, perhaps the announcement of the Media Labs director's fellows with, quote, lots of people who, quote, may see him and know he's involved, unquote. They don't know what Hoffman actually advised Ito there. So the head of MIT Media Lab was emailing him and saying these quotes about people might see Epstein at the MIT Media Lab and know he's involved. And whatever Hoffman sent back, we don't know for sure, but we know Epstein showed up and was encouraged to attend and apparently even got this award from the MIT Media Lab in 2016.

He's like, how devastated would you be if we invited the pedophile? Right. And this is the MIT report that looked at the MIT Epstein connection. According to the same report, in July 2013, Epstein visited the MIT campus to meet with Reid Hoffman and others, and Hoffman continued to be consulted on Epstein matters. And then there's a business insider profile that goes through it. Joy Ito, the MIT Media Labs director, was invited to this August 2015 dinner in Palo Alto with Elon Musk, Epstein, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel. And the other thing about that that I found very concerning was in late August. I don't find any of it concerning. from the Business Insider profile. The LinkedIn co-founder sprang to the defense of Joy Ito, then the director of MIT Media Labs,

who reportedly concealed donations from the convicted multimillionaire sex offender. It happened in a testy email exchange that was revealed by the writer Anand Girhadas. He wrote this book about denouncing billionaire charities and these sorts of things. But he was writing on this. He was apparently part of this MIT Media Lab.

Oh, he made Jonathan Chait look like a dipshit on TV a couple days ago. Right. Yeah, he seems like a decent enough guy, at least from this exchange. In this email exchange that he had with the head of MIT Media Labs, he was on the selection jury. He's also a Warren guy, though, so let's not suck his dick too hard. So Anand was on the selection jury for an award given by MIT Media Labs. Gerhardus, shaken by the revelations of Ito's ties to Epstein and on the verge of resignation,

wrote to Hoffman, Reid Hoffman, Ito, and his fellow jurors on the selection committee requesting that Ito's correspondence with Epstein be made public. Ito, who not only cultivated Epstein's patronage of the MIT Media Lab, but also took more than a million dollars for his own personal investments from Jeffrey Epstein, did not respond. Doesn't that mean he just took a million dollars from Jeffrey Epstein? Yeah, I just took a million dollars for my bank. That was for investing. Yeah. Yes.

It's you're right. It does sound like slightly less bad. If you say I took it for investments. Yeah. For personal investment. Like as opposed to, I just put it in my bank account. At least it's,

at least it's earning something. I invested in a sick fucking gaming console. Look, I'm not some kind of piece of shit who just lets pedophile money sit in a checking account. He swivels around in his game chair. I am getting a 6% to 7% return per year on any pedophile money I accept. But so, Ido did not respond to this email

asking him to turn over his epstein correspondent but reid hoffman owner of the democrat significant equity stake owner of the democratic party linkedin billionaire did respond to this email uh he he accused gherhadis of being dramatic according to the author uh quote your responses frankly make me concerned about your ability to serve on an awards committee unquote reed hoffman wrote about this guy complaining that this pedophile was involved in mit media labs this uh serial uh multi-millionaire pedophile this is just like do they just have like an email template that they share with hollywood for like you know that just the epstein and the weinstein emails they just send out the same form response and

they all you don't have what it takes to be on an award show they all should know about his history yeah he pled guilty in 2008 yes yeah so by this point it's knowledge, but he was rehabbed by a bunch of different people. Honestly, had I known how deep in Reid Hoffman was with Jeffrey Epstein, I would not have used his platform to message Ghislaine Maxwell's ex-boyfriend asking where he is. Or asking where she is. Honestly, shame on you. Oh, I mean for my own safety. When Girhatis said he would step down if ito

didn't hoffman reportedly accused the writer of making it quote all about you unquote uh saying that he was being you know dramatic about epstein hoffman remains quote close to mit media lab and funded a 250 000 no strings attached prize known as the Disobedience Award. The principles that form selection criteria for the award are, quote, nonviolence, creativity, courage, and taking responsibility for one's own actions. In 2017, the MIT Media Lab gave one of its honorary orbs

a replica of its Disobedience Award to Jeffrey Epstein. They've denied that this was a Disobedience Award, but it is the exact same trophy they give out for the Disobedience Award. So they gave Jeffrey Epstein an orb. Yes. An orb?

Yes. A ceremonial orb. For Disobedience. Cool. Part of why they gave it to him is because he was taking responsibility for his actions exactly creativity courage uh non-violence where's that orb now it was uh used to fucking strangle him is that the orb that trump was touching

you can you can twist the head and fiber wire comes out yeah you guys you guys saw that 60 minutes thing where they showed like the autopsy footage of jeffrey i've seen and like they they showed the ligature that he supposedly hung himself with and they're like it's like just this bed sheet and it's kind of like wide and then they show the mark on his neck and it's clearly from an extent from like a wire from like a cord and at the same time like you think well they wouldn't have any cords in his jail cell but apparently it was full of like uh like toasters and shit yeah and then i guess final irony the next year after epstein gets this award in 2017 the mit media labs disobedience award goes to the creator of the me too hashtag

so you know and it's just one of those things where it's like, why is Reid Hoffman flying this guy out to this dinner and introducing him to all these other Silicon Valley billionaire assholes that he's known, you know, his whole life and given the startup capital from Mark Zuckerberg, known Peter Thiel since they were in college, you know, clearly close with Elon Musk, as well as as all these other people and he's the one who's bringing jeffrey epstein into that circle defending him and email chains uh to uh for his involvement with mit media labs it's very disturbing that this is a power player in the democratic party who's also backing pete budaj well i'm sure it has nothing to do with the fact that he also has connections to the Department of Defense, the DIB is one of several independent federal advisory committees, which advises the Secretary of Defense on proposals for,

you know, optimizing the Department of Defense. Reid Hoffman sits on this board with former Google CEO, Eric Schmidt and a pop scientist, Neil deGrasse Tyson. No, but mentally I'm folding my arms in my head. pop scientist Neil deGrasse Tyson. No. Mentally, I'm folding my arms in my head right now and smiling knowingly. But I guess I just wanted to close out

my contribution to this episode with one last little bit from that New Yorker profile. They talk about in the decades after the Second World War, people thought about the economy. What if every time you see Neil deGrasse Tyson on TV, he does one of those slow crossing his arms and smiling? What's going on in his head is,

yeah, I know what happens in that temple on the island. The only way you're going to see the ritual is through our spaceship of the imagination. Before the orgy, we slaughter five billion water bears. It is a test of our power for they are some of the most resilient life forms on Earth. They have like a cutesy like animation of the sundial pointing towards the number nine. And then Seth MacFarlane's doing the voice of one of the nine-year-olds getting a steak driven through her heart.

We don't know why, but, you know, he wanted to do the voices. But I guess I wanted to close out my contribution to this with, you know, again, this is a guy who's put hundreds of millions of dollars into an independent establishment business democratic party and you know besides the epstein links are terrifying but even if you uh say that's all bullshit his regular views that he admits to are terrifying enough because the new yorker profile it talks about after the second world war people thought about the economy in terms of corporations government agencies labor unions and so on people would work for a corporation stay there their entire lives,

and retire with a pension. Well, Americans thought about it that way. Yes, people in America. And Reid Hoffman has essentially said in various profiles that we're looking backwards if we try to go back to that. He's saying in this New Yorker profile, quote, I'm trying to get politicians

to understand that solving the this problem is about facilitation of a network as opposed to he says this sarcastically quote the new deal uh he has a soaring optimism about the power of his model to make life better for everybody and what he's essentially talking about is he wants to rebuild the american middle class by getting everybody on linkedin by making every single middle class person a quote unquote entrepreneur of their own network. So his idea, he writes these books about, you know, people should stay at a company like a maximum or a minimum of four years and then keep all the contacts from that company on their LinkedIn and go to the next company. And everybody's become their own little entrepreneur who has their Rolodex of LinkedIn

connections. And this is how we'll rebuild the middle class by getting everybody on LinkedIn and making every single fucking worker an entrepreneur. I mean, his vision for the future is literally that everyone has his mental illness. That's his utopia. Small business density has historically not been associated with economic growth. Right. Like all of the, not saying, not defending massive multinational corporations or anything, but like just his model of development is like on just already bad footing. Right.

And he talks about, you know, you'll put a lot of effort into maintaining and making your personal network very extensive because it's you know vital to your ability to command wages in the market and that's the entire title of the the New Yorker piece is the network man he says that American workers should go from the organization man or the company man to the network man and you know this is for i think most people who aren't brain damaged psychopaths a terrifying vision of the future where you are just perpetually updating your linkedin and ass kissing and networking and being being expected to totally pick up and move every three to four years even if you don't want to. Yep. And also to have no power against massive corporations.

You know, he's, the reality of what he's pitching is of course the exact opposite where it's like you don't have more power to negotiate your wages when you're more atomized. You have way less power by becoming atomized and that's ultimately the goal

for people like him. It must have been like a real thrill when you got that Jeffrey Epstein wants to connect with you on LinkedIn email, though. That's when you know you're really moving in the LinkedIn power networks, the private server they set up. I'm just like wondering, like now that I sent that, is it like now is every resume that I try to send on LinkedIn just going to get spiked. That'd be so great if like two years from now, Andy can't find a job and he doesn't understand why. He's on like the fucking LinkedIn Epstein blacklist. Well, these are the people running the American economy and your Democratic Party. So vote for Bernie Sanders and let's get this done.

And this has been Grubstakers. I'm Andy Palmer. I'm Steve Jeffers. I'm Sean P. McCarthy. Thanks for listening. See you next week. I'm on Rat Patrol. I'm on rat patrol Well, the miscegenation Almost make a footstep from

And I turn into a drop And this is the eye It's even the eye I'm on Red Patrol I'm on Red Patrol guitar solo Yeah Yeah Yeah. Yeah. Bye.