Julian Dorey Podcast - #34 - Giovanni Gussen

Episode Date: February 10, 2021

Giovanni Gussen is a Venture Capitalist & Startup Founder. Currently, he is a partner & the head of International Business Development at MoonShot Guru, a Venture Capital Studio headquartered in Singapore and India. MoonShot Guru helps late-stage tech startups (Series B or later) scale their businesses in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, India, Thailand, Hong Kong, Bhutan, Nepal and Sri Lanka. Prior to working with MSG, Giovanni founded a live-streaming startup geared towards high school athletes. ***TIMESTAMPS*** 5:39 - The Wall Street Bets (WSB), Reddit, GameStop (GME), & Robinhood Fiasco 17:02 - Censorship & the Robinhood situation; Big Tech Regulation; Jack Dorsey is a confusing guy; Amazon AWS & Parler situation 36:59 - Peter Thiel’s theory on Monopolies & Competition from “Zero To One”; Is Jack Dorsey calling the shots?; Eric Weinstein & Bret Weinstein 1:06:30 - MoonShot Guru Venture Capital Studio & Giovanni’s role as head of International Business Development; How funding rounds (like Series A) work 1:10:24 - Blockchain; NFT’s (Non-Fungible Tokens); Digital Currency; The Artificial Intelligence (AI) investments Giovanni is evaluating 1:23:30 - UI & UX on social apps; Why Instagram is ruined; Steve Jobs’ theory on Simplicity; Clubhouse App UI & UX 1:33:59 - Apple not innovating the same since Steve Jobs died; Revisiting Horo’s argument from #17 on Big Tech vs. Startup workplace culture 1:38:31 - Giovanni’s journey from college dropout to founding a startup; What makes sense about a college education and what doesn’t 1:57:20 - Why other people who aren’t entrepreneurs don’t understand what it’s like to be an entrepreneur; Elon Musk & his tireless vision as an entrepreneur 2:12:00 - Elon Musk & Tulsi Gabbard as individuals fighting back against archaic institutions; The inherent problems with politics that simply competes for more votes in the next election 2:23:11 - The paradox of the Individual vs. Institution battle during the Covid Era (The two sides of it); Humans have bias 2:33:03 - What defines the public square in modern day speech; The problem with repealing Section 230; The  reasons Twitter gave about why Trump got banned from Twitter 2:46:52 - Trump didn’t pardon Edward Snowden; Discussion about Snowden’s case and arguing against the slippery slope counter argument some make against it 2:55:39 - Discussion on the Clubhouse App & whether or not it can change the political landscape; The Francis Suarez / London Breed Clubhouse Room recap 3:07:50 - Capturing Gen Z on Clubhouse; The communities who are crushing Clubhouse early on; Authenticity vs. Aesthetic within Gen Z 3:16:20 - Discussion on Bryan Fogel’s New Documentary, “The Dissident,” about the murder of Washington Post Reporter, Jamal Khashoggi, at the hand... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

that's a beautiful thing too once the room's over it carries over see the reaction it carries over and then you get the people in the audience who weren't speaking to just blast their thoughts and then it's just a trickle of like snowball effect it just keeps blowing but at the same time if those people did hypothetically come up to speak yeah they better be able to speak well yeah that's a good point too you know it's not you don't have infinite amount of time to craft a tweet exactly and the tone of your tweet yeah you know how many people type in uppercase and don't even speak in lowercase that's true too a lot a lot that was a good that's a clip that was that what's cooking everybody i am joined in the bunker today by my friend giovanni gussin aka the goose i've actually never called him that in my life but we're gonna go with it anyway giovanni is the international head of business development for a company called Moonshot Guru. And Moonshot Guru is a venture capital studio which helps late stage startups enter markets like India and other southeastern Asian hotspots. Essentially, he's working with Series B and later companies who are in the tech space and funded for tens of millions of dollars.

So suffice it to say he has quite an interesting perspective on things happening out there in the world. Anyway, the beginning of this conversation, we started off the first five, ten minutes going through the GameStop Robin Hood Reddit saga. We were recording this about ten days before the episode was going to come out, and we knew that, so we didn't stay on it too long because we knew some things, more information would come out, and we didn't want it to be dated. But what it did is it opened up the entire conversation to a whole bunch of different issues that affect us across society

that really this guy introduced everything, and we just riffed on it. So this was excellent. In my opinion, I just enjoyed every second of this. And as usual, I literally had to cut it off at the end. I mean, we went downstairs and grabbed takeout and we should have just brought mics because we had another four hour podcast down there. It was one of those. So really, really enjoyed this and really appreciate this guy coming in and doing it and we will definitely do it again and one other thing on the conversation at some point in here we did talk about entrepreneurship and how you're trying to take dreams and get them off the ground and the good and bad that comes with that i will say that in doing this podcast i've been very fortunate to have a chance to bring in a

bunch of people so far who are founders or creators or straight up entrepreneurs and whatever it is they do who understand what it's like to have to get shit done and know that if you don't do it, no one else is gonna. And I don't just say that from my perspective as someone who does this myself for this podcast and is trying to take a dream and get it off the ground but i say it because i know that we have a lot of listeners out there who either are entrepreneurs and completely understand and appreciate thoughts and and and perspectives like somebody like giovanni would have and also we have listeners out there who have a dream to start

something or have an idea and want to go do it and want to do their best to understand what that might entail. And what I'll say is that I don't think you can ever know until you do it. In fact, I'm certain you can never know until you do it and you're on the island and you're trying to get shit done. But having these time capsule conversations to look back on years from now, not just for me but for the people I have in here and for listeners who come in and find the show to see what people who later became very successful like someone like Giovanni is going to be and already is. But I think he's going to do some pretty crazy things. To see what they were thinking at this point in their life and what their struggles were, what their successes were, and what it all meant. I think that is a really invaluable thing that is coming out of this whole Trend to Fire studio, the bunker here. That I don't want to say I didn't know that was going to happen, but I didn't know that was going to happen. And to me, it's been pretty special. So anyway, if you're not subscribed,

please subscribe. We are on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, and we are on YouTube. So if you're watching this right now on YouTube, hit that subscribe button, hit that bell button, and leave a like and comment if you have a second to do that. Also, to all the people who've been leaving five-star reviews on Apple Podcasts, thank you very much. They continue to roll in. The comments are amazing. I really, really appreciate you guys. That is a huge, huge help. So if you haven't had a chance to do that, and you can take a minute to do that, I would really, really appreciate it. That said, you know what it is.

I'm Julian Dory and this is Trendify. Let's go. This is one of the great questions in our culture. Where's the news? You're giving opinions and calling them facts. You feel me? Everyone understands this, but few seem to do it. If you don't like the status quo, start asking questions.

You're the second guy coughing coming in here in the studio. You're scaring me. It's a little phlegm you know what i mean yeah i got i got through like 17 guests or something like that no coughs and then last week i have in the covet expert he's coming in here he's like god damn it john yeah how you doing man i'm good how are you i'm good i'm good thanks for coming in thanks for having me brother you picked you picked a hell of a day to do this shit going on a lot of shit going on. Tell people what's going on. So we got the Robin Hood scandal.

That thing is just an absolute mess. Basically, we had – so there was a group, a hedge fund group, that went and had a plan to short a bunch of stocks. And then we got the Reddit warriors, WallStreetBets. Got to love them, honestly. I really do love them. Heroes. Heroes, honestly. I really do love them. Heroes. Heroes, dude.

Even just like the snark comments that they were posting in the thread. It's awesome. Were you on it last night while I was going down? Kind of. I was popping in and out. But today I was trying to like peep it every seven minutes. Every time you go on though now, there's so many people that you hit refresh. Yeah.

And there's like 7,000 new comments. Yeah, exactly. It's kind of getting hard to keep up with. But they had a subreddit going and they shut that subreddit down. Wait, what's the story there? I heard something about that, but I wasn't really sure what it was. I'm not privy on that too much, but they just had the main reddit going and then there was like, I think they had a million people in the reddit. And then they started, because I guess it was hard to keep up with so they started a subreddit with

a bunch of stuff and then that was the main thing that got taken down but the the main page is still up and running now are you a big reddit guy yourself no honestly got on it just for that there's a lot of people like that but the people who are redditors it's like oh yeah man i've been in that shit since like 07 yeah yeah like they are old school but it's it's interesting because even if people aren't really on twitter like i had a blank twitter account for years they're still on there yeah right like they still look a lot of people especially in the millennial demographic they're always on twitter yeah reddit it's like no i've never been on there no yeah and reddit's almost like clubhouse before clubhouse you know what i mean yeah yeah because it's that's actually interesting because clubhouse is this weird it's almost like they took away stripped away certain things from platforms like they stripped away with zoom offers where you have

the video is a bug instead of a feature and they say we're going all audio and they also went past twitter by saying all right people say all these things from behind a keyboard because no one has to hear them but even if people can't see them they see their picture on clubhouse and they have to hear their voice yeah and like yeah if you want to be a hard-o on clubhouse you can't like drop a 280 character bomb on somebody and say like well you know i think yeah yeah yeah it's crazy yeah it is it's amazing but i do love clubhouse i'm not gonna lie just it's amazing what you're able to do just from a connection standpoint and it's just like you know there's a lot of venture capitalists that are doing rooms and they're holding open pitches. Like, and you know, before clubhouse, we have to send a thousand emails to even get a couple

responses and even getting an introduction there. So it's just like having the opportunity just in a split second, do that. It's amazing. It's, it's amazing. I definitely want to come back to clubhouse. I just want to, I want to stay on our gme warriors and make sure we get this through so the thing that is really really interesting to me because we're recording this about 10 days before i'm going to release the podcast and so we'll know more when this comes out but there's a lot of themes here that are not going to change as far as the significance of what we're seeing and you and i were talking about this down in the kitchen before this but when you look at the blatant way with which these platforms shut down one side of trading

there's almost no way you could be more obvious about we are colluding to fuck you over than what they all just did it's fucking unbelievable and what we're talking about just to be clear we're talking about when robin hood they were the first one i think to really do it and then like td ameritrade yeah i'm gonna miss some companies that what was the one called fidelity did it um weeble that's it which is the one that we were talking about that everyone said we should all go to that one because they're not doing it and then bang everyone gets there and they shut it down too right so they they didn't shut down all of it that's the sketchiest part they they still allowed you to sell which i guess that they have to so if you want to unload yeah they have to but they

wouldn't let you buy so the intonation here or whatever the word is is that all the redditors on the wall street bets community who were high buyers of this stock now can't go in and buy it because by and large they are the individual retail investor they're not major power brokers in the world so it's not like they just have access to you know their own pool to go clear transactions yeah right right it's it's funny too because it's it's almost a stock market's way of censoring like twitter does you know it's like they found a way to censor companies in a way and just like mass population getting behind one theme and really pushing it forward yeah can you pull that mic in just a little bit no you're good that's a whole can of worms but that's the conversation here yeah because when you really look at this everyone gets lost in the minutiae and they should i don't blame them

when they start talking about shorts and you know calls and puts and options it's like that's the language of Wall Street. Yeah, exactly. I'm not even privy to that stuff. Exactly. Some of the smartest people in the world have no fucking idea what that means. So then you get lost and you're like,

all right, I don't want to pay attention. The very simple way of looking at it is that these hedge funds, in this case, I guess, Andrew Left at Citron and Gabe Plotkin's Melvin Capital and some others, were all betting against GameStop. So they were legally, within the rules of the market, doing this thing called a short. We don't need to get into it. Where they were betting against the fact that GameStop was going to be able to go up.

And that is going to push the price down. And then all the Wall Street bets guys came in and said, we love GameStop. And to be able to go up and that is going to push the price down. And then all the Wall Street bets guys came in and said, we love GameStop and they pushed it right back up. And the thing is, the way that they did that, they did it openly and publicly. They did the same thing that these hedge funds do from the other side, where they just have all these tools to be able to have substantial options and all these crazy collars and all these other terms that no one cares about that the regular person doesn't. And so then the regular person comes in and says, well, we're just going to buy the fuck out of it.

And then they do it. And then it's almost like these hedge funds decided, oh my God, they just beat us at our own game. So hold on, let's get the referees. Referees, you got to change all the rules of this game yep that's fucked up yeah it is fucked up and it's crazy because there's not any like it's not like there was insider trading going on no everything that they were talking about is all public information yep so i don't understand the laps there and everything and then portnoy put it

best it's like being in a super bowl game and you know the packers winning and say you're not a packers fan so we're going to take we're going to add 20 minutes to the clock to change the rules so the packers have a chance to win like they mid game they just change the rules that's genius yeah that's that that is entirely what they did so i look at this as like okay especially like coming from that world in previous life working there sure i'm always looking at valuations i'm looking i'm looking at the technical side and much more importantly i'm talking to people who are really focused on one of those things who are in specific areas who know a ton more than i do but was it offensive to me the GameStop was trading it whatever it was it got up to like

350 or something like that sure was it wrong though legally no no none of it and the crazy part is they were also sitting on a hell of a ton of cash where people didn't know they thought our GameStop was on the verge of bankruptcy. They had an absurd amount of cash in their bank. So it's just so much misinformation, honestly, going on. Well, that's the thing. You see that misinformation going back and forth, and these narratives get created. And, like, there was even another video.

It might have been, it wasn't Portnoy. It was another Barstool guy. But he was recapping the whole situation. And nothing wrong with that. I'd laugh my ass off. It was great. But he said right at the front, he was recapping the whole situation and nothing wrong with it i'd laugh my ass off it was great but he was he said right at the front he was like and gamestop the most irrelevant failing company of all time and it's like well it may look that way from the outside from the outside but behind the scenes they're doing all right yeah so you have all these people who now just got fucked and it happened in the shadiest way that it's not about whether or not it was right for it to go up like you can hold two thoughts at the same time this is

what i want your analysis on i look at it from these two kind of outcomes number one gamestop was going to come back to earth I've seen this movie a million times yeah this comes back to Earth people stop their trading action the bigger the group of people this is another thing the bigger the group of people to have to keep in line on an idea the harder it is to keep them in line absolutely so when you have I think that Community was up to like five million people in it by the time, last time I looked a few hours ago, right? When you have 5 million people who are all mostly smaller fish getting in on this thing, all it takes is a few of those fish, you know, one guy's girlfriend dumps them and he has

to go deal with it. Another guy has to go pick up his son from the basketball game. He's got to go deal, well, not in COVID, but he's got to go deal with it, right? And then suddenly he's like, oh yeah, I have that thing. Hold on. I'm sick of it. I got to go deal well not in covet but he's got to go deal with it right and then suddenly he's like oh yeah i have that thing hold on i'm sick of it i gotta get rid of it then the price moves five bucks then simultaneously a hundred more do it and the price moves two bucks and then boom it's a race to the to the down so that that was gonna happen at some point definitely you see it with most stocks right the other side of it though like where you can say two things at the same time is that the hedge funds if they were in on it

allegedly we don't know the hedge funds basically came in and said we're going to do it now and we're going to do it in a way that to me by every view of it looks completely illegal i couldn't agree more it's just it's it's such a slimy space dude that's the crazy thing it's just like top to bottom it's slimy you see you see what they want you to see from a public perspective but behind the scenes they got something totally different going on so it's just and it's almost like, I don't know who's right at sometimes, you know what I mean? Oh my God. Yeah. Yeah. You, there's, you said, you said it yourself, the misinformation. Yeah. That's the basis of everything almost going on these days. It's like, who's the source?

Yeah, exactly. What's their stake in the game? And who's to say that they are right? Because I'm sure there's a hundred other people that have something else to say that are probably right as well. Now you also bring up the censorship thing though at the front end of this and that's brilliant because everything is downstream in culture and can you just explain so i know exactly where you stand you were talking about how this is almost like the next iteration i think you were saying of say the censorship of Trump on his way out of office on Twitter.

Can you explain exactly what you mean by that and how it relates? Well, it's just almost the deplatforming of things, right? You have the Trump situation. So with Trump, you know, they just removed him and basically, well, one, it's crazy that they, tech companies even have the power to remove someone like that not just someone the president of the united states yeah that's absurd to me the the landscape of what we're seeing just with big tech it's just like and i'm coming from the tech space so it's like i didn't i don't want regulation but at the end of the day we're getting to a point that's so crazy that we're silencing

the president of the united states we're gonna need some sort of regulation in there because now you're seeing an impact wall street and the financial market what's next yeah and i love that you bring that up because especially in corona where all government from every angle just seems like it is not just useless but just straight up corrupt and wrong it is very easy to go to the argument of no government these people are all evil and you're not even wrong on the surface but the thing is you do have to level with well what am i giving up if i go complete if i go completely rogue you know maybe like roger vare and just off the deep end like no disrespect but just like government's all bad there should be none of them every man for himself well there's also the protections within capitalism

you know and that's that's really i think what you're getting at there, and correct me if I'm wrong here, but you are looking at a situation where things have gotten too big to fail. Yes. And so they also now have power through their reach that's unlimited because it's in the ether. They can get to anyone with a Wi-Fi connection. And they can, therefore, whether they mean to or not, and that's a whole separate conversation, they can control thought. Yeah, absolutely. And they're also starting to control almost every industry.

Like, it's getting to a point where Jack Dorsey, for example, I really do think he means well in his heart with a lot of things he does, but what ends up happening is not what I think he meant for it to happen. And it's just like, he's, he bought a shit ton of Bitcoin, right? So then when money starts to, you know, vanish in a way and move to decentralization, he's not going to own money, but he probably will have a large chunk of the circulating Bitcoin. So then he almost does end up owning the money market. And then he also owns the speech market.

And then you can get into government too. He shut down Trump. And then there's the congressional hearings where they're bringing in, you know, the CEOs and stuff like that. But at the end of the day, nothing has been done. Nothing. So it's almost like in a couple months, Dorsey, Zuck, and those guys are gonna end up

bringing congress in on a hearing that sounds ridiculous but it's not it's not it's not there there's also an air of this is not a word but there's an air of untouchability been seeing and see it from dorsey too but all these guys whether it's sundar peach i at at is that how you say it yeah google at google bezos of course zuck definitely all these big guys when they come in for these hearings it's almost like they're i i don't want to i don't want to make them all look evil but it's almost like they're smirking at the whole process it just feels that way i'm sorry and when i look at their facial expressions not to read too deep into it but that's just what it looks like to me yeah and

so it's like they view it as a dog and pony show and really what the people up there don't know is that they're the dogs and ponies exactly And then you see the questions these guys ask. Sorry, but half these goddamn congressmen, it's like they never picked up an iPhone. No, that's the thing. They're so removed from reality to a point. So it's, you kind of need to have a whole tech department within the government to be able to even do these things. Because like you said, they're just so removed from everything everything they don't know anything about technology and how it actually

works and it's crazy that they're even having these hearings because they don't know anything so what's the point it's just an endless circle yeah and then we end up with big tech getting even more and more power because nothing is getting done and there's already the gridlock problem in society in political society as it is. Now you inject it into tech where things move at 6,000 millibits or whatever a minute. I mean, it's fast, whatever it is. I do want to put out there that I'm not speaking about the monopoly side of things because... What do you mean by that?

I think monopolies are healthy. Like the congressional hearings are trying to break up Facebook and stuff like that i do think monopolies are healthy to an extent peter teal talks about this a lot it pushes innovation at the end of the day because if everyone's broken up what do you have to fight for you know you're not taking over a space because it's just that you got to be individual at the end of the day. Man, we're getting to a lot of good topics here. I'm trying to chill. I'm like, God damn, this is going fast.

I love that book. I've said that on other podcasts. Zero to One, I read that for the first time last May. And it is easy for anyone to read. Number one from one of the most brilliant people in the world. Which is crazy because his normal conversations are very hard to get oh my god he's on he's on another he's all the way up there yeah but he whoever wrote this one with him i think it was like one of his students or something they were like all right let me dumb it yeah we're gonna make this easy to digest and it's also short yes you read in like two hours what i love about that book is that i

i love it because it makes me think a lot yeah and i don't know whether i agree or disagree with things on a case-by-case basis there are certainly things in there that i thousand percent agree with but then there's other things where it's like well well uh you know what and you can kind of look at it from both ends and the monopoly one is probably the most difficult one for me to think of because I agree with his, with what he asserts. And can you explain exactly what he's saying about competition so people know? I'm going to botch it for sure. High level, like not the... Just that like, it's at the end of the day that's what pushes innovation i'm putting it in kind of my perspective sure if you break everything apart it's just

i don't know i because like when i want some things i want to say i feel like i shouldn't because it's gonna seem it's gonna seem bad because you know to an extent monopolies are kind of a bad thing. But like I said, they push innovation. They give me something to strive for. Like I want to become a Facebook. I want to become an Instagram. I want to become a Twitter.

But if you break them apart, you create too many niches. Can I pick up where you left off? Absolutely. Okay. okay because you're touching on the competition part to start where the idea is that a bunch of players come into the game and the best player wins and it's winner take all that's what a monopoly becomes so what you were saying is you have you had all these different people come in like or companies like maybe myspace back in the day even like a pinterest which is a little bit off to the side right and then certain places won so our attention goes to the facebook owned instagram at this point like even instagram ended up beating facebook yeah and it goes to twitter it doesn't go

to whatever the hell the other not twitter is you know what i mean yeah so it's like they had to create the best product to be able to win and therefore all the all of us the users the end user we get the best utility because we get the best and then i think what you were saying in the second half is that they're there to strive for and to try to disrupt in the future meaning we live in a world where you could potentially innovate to beat in monopoly. Is that what you're getting at? Absolutely. Okay.

I agree with that. The place where it gets a little murky for me is that how far along do places get where they then have too much power that there's an economy of scale that can't be unseated well that's what we're seeing with facebook right like not to knock on suck because you know if he he could kill any platform that someone wants to create at the end of the day but there's sort of like an evil inner child inside of him it seems like you know mean? And then... Who doesn't know how to drink water. Yeah. Yeah. And it's robotic to an extent. Like, he's not even personable. You don't even feel like you're speaking to a real human. It's just like,

you get the sense that he doesn't care about anything. He just wants to win, even if it kills him at the end of the day. And you lose... In social networks specifically, you wanna have that kind of... You wanna create a situation where there's human connection. Right right and i feel like the way he's going about things because he's just so robotic in his you know words and how he acts and everything he's losing that disconnect to people and that's starting to push people away and then you go in the whole censorship hole like that's all another story yeah we're going to stay with that because it's all

this stuff is all tied together you just happen to introduce of what i remember like four or five themes that are all interconnected even if we don't always think of it that way that's why i like this but how do you feel about bezos so i didn't mind him at all you know i thought he was doing a lot of good for the world in a sense until the removal of parlor from the servers and then he just put himself on blast almost with that because now we're living in a space where you have to worry about if you can even publish an app if you're even able to collect any data like anything at all your app's gonna die you can't it's not live anymore so it's he dug himself a hole and now i'm starting to change my opinion on him

because of that and because it's it hurts the next class of entrepreneurs at the end of the day yeah he's a prime example of when people get really really rich through these monopolies yeah it's easy for everyone to go at them. You know, especially with the growing wealth gap that's been happening for 35 years now. It's natural. We have all the tools, their tools, to use to be able to put it public to go at them. So I get it. My attitude always was, I don't give a fuck.

Yeah, you never did anything crazy. You know, Jeff Bezos has $150 billion. God bless. Hopefully he uses some of it for good. And if he doesn't, fuck him. But like, what does that have to do with my day? No. He also employs half a million people.

Sure. Like he is doing something good for the country. You know what I mean? Sure. And then I still believe that if the vaccine situation, that's a whole nother case. But if we gave... You're just hitting all of them, man. If we gave the vaccines to Amazon, everyone would have them in two days.

You know what I mean? All right. Let's not go there. But that's basically what I'm getting at. He tries to do a lot of good for the world, and then he just fucked himself with the whole Parler situation. Because AWS is probably 50% of their revenue, at least. And to be clear, just context for people that aren't aware, Parler was an app that was supposed to be clear just context for people that aren't aware parlor was

an app that was like supposed to be a competitor to twitter that kind of became like a right-wing app just because none of the left wing went there and when i mean it wasn't just amazon but apple took them off the app store in coordination with them getting deplatformed from other places, and then their literal web hosting service, which is AWS, Amazon Web Services, Amazon came in and said, oh, we're not hosting you anymore. So they actually took their website offline, which is the definition of tamping down on speech. So that definitely is a huge red flag i i shared your opinion on that for a long time with him where i i didn't care like i was saying and even as recently as i don't know five six months ago you know first of all let's get one thing straight guy built maybe the best company i've ever seen my experience with amazon is incredible

i have no complaints i have never had a in fact anytime i had a bad experience there because like some delivery that was broken they fixed it and some yep and had me on the line with like multiple people who i then feel compelled to fill out all these surveys about yeah right like it's an incredible company that is not you can't get that innovation lost here my problem is one guy in particularly but a bunch of people were in my ear going you need to re-look at this you need to look at this guy look at his actions you can't know him you're not behind closed doors well then you can't look him in the eyes you know some people can hide when you do that but you don't know him right so look at his actions and there's no end there's no end he like

now he's going after pharmacies so how is he going to go after pharmacies he's going to use same thing he's always done use all of his brilliant economies of scales that he built brilliantly to go in and lose a fuck ton of money and wait it out for all these other competitors who don't have all these other businesses to die. And then he controls that and then he'll go to the next thing and the next thing. And at what point do you start to say, well, Amazon controls everything. Yeah. do you start to say well Amazon controls everything yeah and what does that like I always think about the line that guys cross it's like crossing the chasm right where one day you just lose sight of what you're doing because you're lost in the game and to me he's been lost in that and you know you look at stuff like

what why are you buying the washington post it's a terrible business why do you need that why when i open up my kindle which i love use a kindle get all my books on amazon will continue to do so hate me for it but why when i open that up is everything pushing me the washington post right you know and if by the same token let's say parlor had created this big company if you opened up the parlor kindle if they were a powerful company like amazon and they were pushing you fox news why would they be doing that and then what if you found out their owner owned fox news how would you feel about that you know all these news sources are so far right or so far left and then you look at this guy right in the middle of

it and now he's talking about buying cnn wait till like murdoch teams up with someone and fox news gets more out of control to respond to that this is bad for society that's my point and like maybe it's the radical centrist view but i can think on one hand, hey, great innovator, build an unbelievable company, fuck if I appreciate it. And on the other hand, hey, those actions look mad sketchy, dude. Yeah, and then it becomes full circle to the monopoly aspect. Once you control a lot of things, then you start to be able to control narratives. And that's ultimately in this day and age, that's all that matters. What narrative you control and how you're pushing it. So I guess it's going to be kind of, we're going to have to see how the playing field ends up, you know, what agenda he ends up pushing. Cause as of now, I mean, from what I've seen,

and I could be wrong about this, he hasn't really been pushing one side or the other too hard. He's kind of been in the middle of things too, but then you have to kind of see what happens with the actions of all the businesses he's acquiring at the end of the day yeah the one place i will definitely push back on that where i mean people will give the washington post shit because it very clearly was like anti-trump but yeah i think we're going to start seeing the difference between i hope we're going to start seeing the difference between anti-trump and like anti right right thought right like right side of the aisle i think that there was a separation there it's scary to me that after trump is gone and it's only been a few weeks but after he's gone i'm seeing a lot of people double and quadruple and

triple down on that we'll come back to the censorship on this because now you're talking about just going after an entire school of thought which is not healthy to say nothing of the actual repercussions of that. maybe part of their anti-Trump rhetoric, you know, it's all tied together. The thing about them being a newspaper who openly advocated for, continues to, locking things down, stopping the economy, masking it under, I did not mean to use the word masking there, no pun intended, masking it under, saving lives, right? And yet the guy who owns them stands to benefit more than anyone else from that. That's a good point. That's scary.

Yeah, that's very scary. Especially because he's probably profiting on all the distribution of, you know, the masks and everything like that. I didn't even think of that, but yeah. Yeah. Yeah, he is. So, and even if he wasn't, the other stuff. Yeah. You know, where did I get these cameras?

Yeah, right. Right? I ain't gonna lie. Amazon. Amazon two days you know probably the coldest call i ever had coldest ice cold freezing take of all time was at the beginning of corona i was like i was saying to guys i'm like man you really gotta sell amazon you gotta sell netflix because people are gonna be poor through this like we're all gonna we're gonna be really poor that's the crazy part right is that everyone thought people were losing

a ton of money but then why did their sales go up so much where did all this money come from Netflix too subscriptions through the roof where did all this come from the Netflix one I think I got I got cognitively biased on because i talked to a few people like the week before corona hit like rich people yeah and who were

just really good about their finances and they're like look you know some shit's happening so we just canceled our netflix you know it's it's easy it's it just makes me feel good i took 12 off my month and i'm like well if she's canceling like what's what what's the guy you know who's behind on his bills and in debt doing exactly you know like you want to gamify like oh what the world's ending i'm losing everything i'm gonna lose my house but let me try not to let me gamify my expenses oh i can take netflix off there's 12 bucks like that didn't happen no that definitely didn't people were like i need that goddamn netflix exactly yeah so corona flipped all the power to all these major major tech organizations but i would say maybe a week into corona when i looked in the front area of the apartment and

continued to see it piling up with with amazon every day i was like this might not slow down no never i don't think it's going to either i don't see any signs of it stop and he's done he's done like some things like he pays all his workers 15 bucks now but then turns around and won't let him unionize you know it's like i don't really know with him but the peter teal monopoly argument that started this whole thing, I always say I love that he introduces that because in theory he's correct. Yeah. It's the idea that if these things are so great, it gives us all the most utility like we were saying. So in theory, for the picture part of a storybook of your life, you should love Instagram, right? That's where you go. For the sharing a group chat thought, you should love Twitter. That's where quick ideas are.

If you want to watch a video, you go to YouTube. But you also talked about the government having to come in and regulate some of this stuff while coming at it from the lens of like, oh, don't break up the monopolies. And this is what interests me because i get i get what you're saying and i have the same thought too and then i start to think to myself well do i want it both ways if i'm saying it like that and it's also a question of can you actually have it both ways i don't think you can that's the issue because then i mean we've seen how our government reacts to things if they do step in and do some sort of regulation it's probably going to be the extreme the government so so then how do you how do we dig ourselves back out of that hole when to be honest technology is one of the greatest things about the united states and how much we

push innovation that's what keeps things going you You know, I do work with companies in other countries, and they still, till this day, even when they saw us, you know, up in flames over the past couple months, they still want to come here and live the American dream. That's interesting. Like, they firmly, guys you're talking to firmly are like, I want to go.

The opportunity is just, that's honestly what humbles me, is talking to these people. Because as bad as things seem here, compared to other countries, it's not at all. Like, we just saw... And what country specifically? I'm trying to talk to people. India, a lot of Asian countries.

Not much, not really Singapore, but Singapore to an extent. But Singapore has a good, you know, tech culture over there. So they are pushing a lot of things the apple store in singapore is absolutely beautiful and blows away anything that we've seen in the states but you know even just like japan and then you see the issues with china like it's just we have a lot of opportunity here that people don't really take advantage of and we take for granted retweet on that man and and that's the thing even when things get really bad and there's a lot to be very concerned about right now and i promise we're

going to keep circling back around some of this stuff just because there's so many things in the wind right now that we already brought up we'll get back to it but even when things look this bad it's still it's still way better than the alternative now if you're talking with people in china i'm curious on that because i feel bad for a lot of people there because they have access to so many great innovations and access to a lot of great education too yeah believe it or not but there it seems like there are a lot of people who are still very aware that they don't really have freedom do you find that or do you think more people have just kind of accepted you know the communist party's culture there well that depends on who you talk to and

kind of what industry and you know technology we're in a situation where nine times out of ten people are trying to break rules. They're trying to push boundaries and come up with the next thing and try to pave the way and help regulate things in a different aspect. But then on the flip side of that, you see Jack Ma, the richest man on the continent, says one little sentence that could potentially piss off the government. He didn't even directly come at them. But just because of that he had to go into hiding for months the richest man in the continent where anyone would know if he disappeared because he's involved in so many things but yet he still had to go into hiding that

to this point none of that happens here yeah exactly you know something some dark happens you know they get to kennedy and the cia him or something, like we talk about it incessantly and it's not talked about, right? And it's more one-off because our society is able to push back with the free speech and theirs is not. It's controlled, and that's the part that does have me worried because you still – obviously you have a lot of these people talking you're saying they want to come here and everything but even if they don't realize it a big part of the reason they want to come here is because we've built a culture where people can say whatever the they want whether it's a good idea or a bad idea right so now we're looking at this where if you can decide that oh well we don't like that platform. We like this one. Now you can make that decision. And now you can take things drawn along political lines. And frankly, when you look at the Twitter example with – and it wasn't if you just were kind of sick of him and you wanted him to go away, let's be honest. He didn't know how to go away, so he wouldn't have gone away.

I'm not like, oh, Trump was going to suddenly be quiet. Of course not. But if you wanted him to kind of dig his own grave, as he already had, just leave him. Just leave him. just just leave them yeah just leave them yeah but they made that decision and then they made a decision to go after all the q anon accounts and everything which selfishly hey love not seeing those things on twitter yeah my problem is they're not going after the opposite side who in their own fucked up way is saying things and so now the the volume continues to skew this way and the more it does people start to think about what they're saying yeah you know hope

you'd hope you'd hope what do you mean by that one thing i've kind of seen just over the landscape is that like it's hard just when you think you understand the direction of something's going you really don't because that's one person will fuck it all up by saying something crazy and they don't even know the extent to the power of what they said no there's a there's a clear line though here when you're like like what steve bannon said i don't know if you saw that no he's kind of a crazy person he got deplatformed okay fully supported it wasn't first amendment protected i'm not going to repeat what he said but he was calling for visual violence upon public figures where he described exactly how he hopes it would happen

like like how they would do it when you have by the way post-election all those listeners are angry right when you have millions of people listening to you that's a platform that's that is textbook inciting violence textbook like people have accused trump of inciting violence at that rally and you could make the argument but it was more i mean if anyone incited violence is probably juliani but it's it's like hard it's hard to prove in a court of law. What Steve Bannon said, a jury's going to convict in five minutes on that, right? So when he gets deplatformed, that's fine. But do it from every angle, too.

If you're going to deplatform him, deplatform Kathy Griffin for holding up ahead of Trump, right? I mean, that's a direct it's like a direct assault on someone's name in in a visual absolutely right so there is a line with what speech and what's not speech but when you start attacking ideas and then trying to put it under the lens of words like hate speech and stuff like that well now you're getting outside of what not free speech is what inciting is but then who's the one to draw that line who's the one that's the question that keeps me up at night who do you think should draw like i said it keeps me up at night trying to figure that out because at the end of the day it's it's a complex situation right because they

are private companies even though they're publicly traded so even the ceo doesn't have ultimate say because they have you know um that's a great point there's so much funding behind these companies that the ceo ultimately probably owns 10 of the company so what about the other 90 that are owned by hedge fund guys and stuff like that and then you have your board who you're the board ultimately if you don't have control of they they tell you what to do and you have to do it So how do you even know like we were talking about Jack Dorsey? How do we even know he's the ones making a shot calling shots? You're maybe the only person I've talked to who raises that as a possibility. I've raised that as a possibility It's true. So you think there's a possibility that he is not absolutely. Yeah, absolutely now

I don't know who specifically. I know a couple of his investors, but I don't know who owns the largest chunk and who actually sits on the boards. But that is a huge possibility because we can put the blame as much as we want on Dorsey, but he might not be the one calling the shots. And the same thing with, well, Facebook's just a whole you know even the guys that zuck brought on board with him weren't the best in that aspect what do you mean just in terms of like the censorship they all have very strong views yes okay yeah so it's like how do you who is the one to draw the line because if it isn't the ceo and it is the board but then ultimately you have the government involved too how do you navigate that

landscape of really who should be the one drawing that line and that's the other side too in a nutshell because by the way if you break up these companies well who's breaking them up yeah the government yep so if you utility eyes that's not the, but we'll make that up. If you utility eyes or whatever it is, let's just say Facebook. Yeah. And now you make it like water, which I don't know the whole legality around this, but let's just – broad example. Government comes in and gets control of that. Well, now the government controls the internet in that way. Yeah, and that's what we don't want to happen.

Right? So it's you're damned if you do damned if you don't they already control the media and we see how that goes yeah imagine if they imagine if they took over social media and the internet my other little theory on dorsey put on my little tinfoil hat here i'll always like if i'm about to say something that is just based on sitting at my desk and thinking about it, I'll tell you. So it's not – I don't have anything to prove this other than, again, like what I see and trying to read between the tea leaves here. But I have somewhat of an acceptance that there are groupthink forces that operate within major organizations obviously the government too and people like to put the deep state label on it and sometimes that gets taken out of control but i believe that there

is an aspect of that right and so when i look at trump regardless of everything he says or what his policies are and all that the one thing that everyone can admit on him is that he was an outsider yeah definitely right so he was you know from the private sector he's a fucking reality tv star he also i think everyone can agree is very rash and does whatever the fuck he wants right so you've had two parties control washington dc since the beginning of time they have accrued more power sway and money than ever before with each passing year fair fair okay the thing about the government the rest of it i'm not talking even congress i'm not talking senate i'm talking the agencies the bureaucracies could be everything from the nsa and cia to like

the people who work in the office jobs in the federal bills. Those people were there before a president gets there and they're going to be there after they leave. And their whole thing is they're milked into the process and like anyone else, they like their job. They want to be able to continue to have that and then be able to move up. So let's say like when Obama came in. In government, like everywhere else in all these agencies, you have Republicans, you have

Democrats, and then you probably have a few people who are apolitical. But most of them, they're going to lean one way or the other. Yeah, it's almost like you have to these days to get in those positions. Sure. And that's even more evidence to say it. So let's even assume that they're all one way or the other. When Obama came in, there's no way the people who were on the right wing of government liked him or were fans of him.

They voted against him. He's kind of a typical Democrat president. Fine. The worst thing you ever saw, at least publicly, was like a General McChrystal who just like said a few things behind his back and then got fired. Right? And that was it. The reason is Obama comes in and he was from government and so he runs on de-escalating in the middle east and not using drones and shit becomes the most drone happy president of all time i also don't even fault him for it because what I think is that kind of green senator when it comes to foreign policy and understanding what's going on over there.

He comes in, was a political superstar, had a lot of good ideas domestically, whatever. Gets into office, had all these ideas about foreign policy. And then suddenly they come to him day one. They go, sir, here's all the threats we have. This guy is going to kill these people. And by the way, if this happens, you're to blame for it. Everyone's going to hate you. And it's like, oh, my God, I i just gotta listen to these guys yeah so he plays

the game yeah so all the republicans in government who may like secretly be like yo fuck that guy or whatever they appreciate that he plays the game yep when trump comes in there if it's like the wrong day with his diet pepsi he's not playing the game it doesn't matter if you're right or left like if a hard right wing government official comes in there who's used to a certain way of things being done and says mr president x is happening we need to take this action and trump goes fuck you get out of my office that guy is going to look to destroy him yeah so in a lot of ways and it obviously wasn't every single person in government, but the one thing about him is that every person in government was, excuse me, a lot of people in government, not every person, was looking to delegitimize him. To do things to stop him from doing things, and guess what?

Sometimes it might have been like the right thing to do, but who are you to draw that line? So then I come back and I look at big tech and everything and i look at this power structure and i look at a guy like dorsey and here's the thing again we've talked about it four times now i look at actions i remember when jack dorsey went on joe rogan almost two years ago now yep it was a regular conversation joe was just talking with him i loved it right yeah and then i didn't even think to realize they didn't talk about censorship right yeah yeah so what happened the internet blew a gasket tim pool blew a gasket yeah rogan brings on tim pool like almost apologized right yeah and rogan says to tim pool hey if i got jack to come back in here would you come in right

and he's like fuck yeah and he's like all right this is never gonna work calls up jack jack goes all right bet i'll be there next week what kind of guy he knew he's not dumb no he knew he was gonna get body bagged and yes he even brought vajada or sorry i forget her name but his head of global compliance basically and legal he brought her with him he knew they were going to get crushed on the biggest podcast in the world it takes balls man balls and he openly let it happen and was might i add extremely he had a very good disposition during that whole thing he didn't flip out because tim pool was upset and he had a right to be definitely but dorsey never lost his cool and then when they had the hot mic after he was talking with tim pool so you knew like he was

pretty cool and i'm like that guy that guy who's also very very smart he's openly calling the shots and doing all this and looking like a complete goon doesn't add up no but then so is it the deep state that was that was that was the end of the punch line there that was my whole point with the government but then you could also say like is he just pulling an obama and playing the game well one question on that obama's the president and and I guess if you wanted to get JFK conspiracy, technically, they could take out the president. Not saying that happened, just saying it happened. Anyway, but Obama is at the top of the food chain. Even if we're talking about all this power these companies have, they still – they technically have to report to the president, right?

He can still go to fuck them. Until they remove him. Right, until they remove him. They still, they technically have to report to the president, right? He can still go to fuck them. So... Until they remove him. Right. Until they remove him. But at the time, let's say that he has people coming to him saying, you have to do this. Right. Oh, your sister's in a basement somewhere.

There's some black ops guy with a gun to her head. I'm not saying that happened. That's a ridiculous situation. But is it? I don't know. I don't know anything anymore. Yeah, well, that's the biggest thing is I feel like I don't saying that happened. That's a ridiculous situation. But is it? I don't know. I don't know anything anymore. Yeah, well, that's the biggest thing is I feel like I don't know anything anymore. Each way you look, you just don't know, one, who's telling the truth, and then two, is it real?

Or is it just their own truth? Or is that what's actually going on? The media is really complicit, too. Yeah, very much. I mean, do you consume any mainstream media no absolutely no i stay far away from all that the only thing and i don't even consider it media um why am i drawing a blank the hill the um and they're like centrist dude that's why i love them because you have two people who are on each side of the coin but they always when there's a

disagreement they handle it civilly. And then they get to almost, I don't want to say a solution, in some certain circumstances, they do get to a solution together. But that's how it should be. You shouldn't be polarized one way or the other. It's almost like today, we've lost the power to say no.

Because if you say no, you get labeled an extremist one way or the other. You can't just be in the middle. You can't just be fighting for everyone. That's, and that's a black and white answer, but it's where black and white answer actually should be. No, it's true. Yeah.

You're, you're so, you're like afraid to say the wrong thing based on who you're talking with. Exactly. That you, you don't. You don't. Exactly. You just shut up. you're so you're like afraid to say the wrong thing based on who you're talking with exactly that you you don't you don't exactly you just shut up i don't even know how i said that but you understand what i mean yeah absolutely right and you i think it was you actually you posted a clip from the hill with eric weinstein yeah right that was awesome yes because that and he's he's a savage dude he is an absolute savage that That's why him and Peter Thiel go well together, because they don't just feed you things that you should be doing.

They ask questions that make you go home and think about it. They're not just telling you what to do and what you shouldn't do. They're making you think about what's, in a sense, best for you. Yeah. Did you ever hear the first episode, I think, that Weinstein did on his podcast where he had on Teal? Yes. Yeah. You listen to that for like an hour and you're like, man, I really fucked up in my life. But it's true because they question, a little plug for the show here, they question the status quo.

Yeah. question a little plug for the show here they question the status quo yeah you know they don't really accept things but he's you know he's going through like clubhouse he he just goes room to room and he's like listen all you're gonna fucking hate me but listen you righties you're you're idiots you lefties you're goons all right i'm going to the next room now and but the thing is like he's so smart he lays out this like dissertation case in like a minute and leaves and people are just like all right um next speaker that's why i love him he does a mic drop in every conversation that he's in it's amazing but he's he's very valid and almost i would argue a majority of his points if not all of them now why doesn't a guy like that run for office? Because he's too smart.

He can't be controlled. We see it in the physics community. He just... A lot of people don't like Eric Weinstein because he's so vocal with his opinions, and he doesn't go with the norms, because at the end of the day, it's kind of a political situation situation too because all these physicists and scientists are employed by a university who's funded by who yeah and he doesn't fuck with any of that it's great it's group think 101 exactly

money talks with it too yeah he's and i i always i go back and forth i say weinstein say weinstein it is weinstein correct yeah okay i mean i'm not friends with the guy i wish i was but i'm pretty sure that's it you're a big fan yeah his brother is awesome too yes and his brother is more his brother is more openly ideological he's more of a traditional i i guess I would say like 2000s liberal type and just one of the smartest people I've ever heard talk. But you mentioned like the power structure of people like that running for office. He had a great idea, in my opinion, around that. And I think probably the saddest part about it was that when, as he was saying, and I said, this will never happen, but I still loved it. And what he was talking about was this, before he even started talking about a third party scenario, he was saying, hey, we already know the presidency is a dated job in the sense it was created when there weren't nearly as many things to handle on a day to day basis basis so it's like the symbolic job but what if you had a dual leadership where it wasn't someone really hard left or really hard right but it was someone who was

a little bit left and someone who was a little bit right and you could balance them off and i listened to that i'm like man that would be perfect i'd even go further i said this to a couple friends that i've had this conversation with i'd even go further as having a group of seven people because if's if you have two what happens if there's a disagreement who's making who's calling the shot it's almost like in a company right you in startups when you were kind of building a company as much as you want to strive for 50-50 equal ownership there needs to be someone who owns more because at the end of day you're gonna

get into tough conversations you're gonna need to have someone who ultimately has the power to say, we need to do this, whether you like it or not. And it might be a bad decision. And if it is, it comes back on me. And that's usually how great ideas die when early on they don't have that conversation. Exactly. Or they get into a position where they actually have to make the make or break decisions and they can't because like legally they can't yeah exactly you know yep so if you have a you know a group of seven people who are leading the country you can bring in top leaders in science medicine politics every industry and then you can come collectively together and try to get an educated

decision on any topic because you have the brightest minds in every space and in that aspect maybe eric weinstein hops up and he's one of those people yeah yeah i i just it's a shame that i agree with you right away he just would never do it no but also i would never do it not not that i'm, like, smart at all, but who wants that job? No. Who wants to be in that world? No. Because you immediately get tagged. You know, we're still living in this society where you have these two parties who have complete opposite ideological beliefs and you can only choose one.

Or at least that's what society tells you. That's what society tells you. Which is crazy. Yep. Because there's millions of issues. I was just talking about this on a podcast with someone. There's millions of issues on both sides. So, you mean to tell me that you are going to say, I completely agree with everything that one school of thought thinks. It's crazy to even have that expectation of people. Just because upbringings alone, everyone's situation is so radically different how can you expect them to have the same exact thoughts not even and you might even be referring to this but where people are from yeah yeah too yeah like not even just their environment growing

up not even what they dealt with just is that guy from iowa is that guy from new york yep they're not and that's a healthy thing. Yeah, it is, but we can't, that's not healthy anymore in today's world. You can't have those civil debates. It's either you're with us or you're against us. That's what I worry about. Because if you say,

worry about, I mean, we do it on this podcast all the time. So I guess we're just leaning in. But whenever you start to say like, Hey, Hey, Hey,

Hey, Hey, they'll, they'll label you and they'll say like oh you're you might you must be a hard right winger because you stand up and and say oh this this this censorship ain't it yeah and don't get me wrong there's a lot of hard right wingers who are pounding that table absolutely on on twitter my problem is that there were a lot of people cheering when when trump got deplatformed and i'm like you're not gonna be cheering when it's you yeah you don't know the

repercussions of that the long-term effects either it's already happening yeah exactly i mean brett weinstein had the one where his twitter account got banned yeah great liberal professor great had the audacity to talk about after that that first idea, the two system, he talked about a third party just in general. Banned the account. Yeah. Then Facebook banned him by accident. Yeah. Big air quotes.

And then they got so much shit for it on Twitter, they said, oh, it was an accident. And then one day his account just magically reappears yeah one day it's gone no warning saying this cannot be reversed and then boom oh oh it was a mistake we're back it's like they thought they could get away with it i don't know how either because they're so in the public eye just with everything and that brings it back to the robin hood situation how yes how the hell can you do that you're not they didn't even try to hide anything it's like they live streamed the boardroom conference almost that's it what's the the company citadel is that it who was who bought into the other hedge funds yes so citadel amount right they bailed out the hedge funds that were

really short yes citadel these are the early numbers coming in so we'll fact check this after but citadel clears a ridiculous amount of trades through robin hood it was like 40 or 60 percent like a huge number so they are they are vital to robin hood's business and citadel who stands to lose a fuck ton of money if the retail investor keeps buying on robin hood these stocks because you know it's a time situation with the shorts like how much can you stand to lose with these options expiring citadel is the one that gained the most from giving people the only option of a sale and it's in broad daylight so if they didn't like do they think that the government can't say to that maybe the government will protect them who

the fuck knows at this point seriously but do they think they can't say them oh yeah let's let's see that cell phone pal let's look at those records yeah like what do they think this is oh dude it's wild it really is wild. I just don't get how you can be so public about it and think nothing was going to happen. And I mean, who knows? Maybe like you said, nothing will happen. But if it's not from, you know, I don't even know who would end up suing them, but you would hope it's almost the companies that were involved in the situation, too, because they just trading on their stock i gotta think they're gonna do something you have to right we haven't heard from them because they're just sitting there it's not their fault they're caught no they did nothing to do this no and like it kind of them

because it's gonna in the long term it's gonna kill them because it's gonna come down to earth and it's not their fault that that happened. But, yeah, I would think they're definitely looking at this going, all right, we can't control that this happened. Hate that this whole thing started. But, like, these people do love our company. They got fucked by the big man. The big man was trying to fuck us too.

So, all right's let's join in let's do and can't change it now you know let's do something about it imagine being the ceo of gamestop in that boardroom when the stock shot up you're thinking you're gonna you gotta save your company from dying and then all of a sudden bang if i were him i would just get and he would take the call i'd get elon on the phone and i'd say please just tell me what to do yeah like literally i'm gonna give you my options for this year just tell me what to do man yeah yeah give me a tweet give me something give me something yeah it's all it takes nowadays is a tweet from elon to do to cause some ruckus there you know what though you the circle of life is what at the very beginning of this conversation you identified it they did it in in public because they just watched the biggest things get done in

public and and they're like well if platforms can just get away with banning a sitting president and have half the country cheer him on that's a generalization have a lot of people in this country cheer him on well maybe we can get away with this and then have powerful people in this case cheer us on yeah you know like that that's that's a slippery slope super slippery and it takes i've already said this once but it takes huge balls to do something like that do you think about because and we'll get to what you do we already touched on it touch but do you think about the slippery slope of tech a lot all the time just because i'm always thinking of new ideas and potentially starting this starting that and then just the landscape right now is so

uncertain it's just it's almost disheartening in a sense because you don't have a clear path of what direction it's going to end up being yeah and what specifically actually let's just go there so right now you are what's your official title working with moonshot guru i am partner and i lead sales and strategy for moonshot guru okay and moonshot guru is a company out of india yes but we have a satellite office in new york as well so we kind of operate in both countries and you're the global head of this yes well i would say i'd lead u.s operations majority got So specifically, what do you guys do? So we have, we're a venture growth builder. And we work with a bunch of startups that are typically not typically they are in the growth

phase. So they have majority market capture in the United States, for example. And our goal is to help them expand that and go globally. So you do deal with a lot of US companies? Oh, yeah. Okay. I actually wasn't sure about that. Because I thought maybe you dealt with a lot of Southeastern Asia companies. No, we actually, there's only one company in our cohort. And that's only because of the CEO has a relationship with the guy. And he's just kind of mentoring him in that aspect and helping him grow his business in the country. majority of the companies are us uk we do some in latin

america and basically help them grow over there because you know india is not india specifically but asia is an enormous market and india specifically is two billion people and since you guys are based out of there obviously you know that market very well so you have a good value proposition we'll say we can deliver yep okay what size of startups do you guys target series b or greater so they have at least for the people who don't know in the fundraising space you know there's a pre-seed round which is typically the initial phase of a startup you're just getting going it's it's almost a friends and family round and then you graduate to the seed phase where you have some traction, you're establishing product market fit,

and you're typically going to raise maybe one to two million. And then you get into your series A round, which is you're starting to really scale. You've got product market fit, and you're starting to gain a lot of traction. And then from there on, it's just super hyper growth. So you're looking at businesses that have clear product in market and humming. And so now it's just about literally scaling rather than just planting the seeds of what you're going to do in the future. Right. It's both, but they're already like, all right, let's go. Yeah, exactly.

Because at that point, you raised $50 million plus. You probably have at least 40% to 50% market capture in the United States. So you're kind of looking at other ways to grow that product offering without adding ancillary things to your business. What do you guys call yourself? Do you call yourself venture capitalists, or do you call yourself more like consultants? So, I mean, the technical term is a venture growth studio, but we do have a $5 million investment fund attached to it, so we do invest in companies that we work with and we really enjoy their product. Okay, okay. We do have a $5 million investment fund attached to it. So we do invest in companies that we work with and we really enjoy their product. Okay. Okay.

So it's kind of like a null and I don't want to say one-stop shop, but in a way it kind of is because we help. If you need marketing help, we have guys with that. If you need further product development, we have a team of engineers we can deploy to you. And then fundraising too. We have a huge network plus the investment fund. Okay. And what types of projects are you looking at in in tech or is it just like in general like are you going to invest in artificial intelligence versus you know a

hardware product or do you have a sweet spot so we try we basically stay away from hardware it's all software-based businesses and then artificial artificial intelligence is a big sweet spot um green energy type startups that are helping in that space offset carbon and all that um and then a big one's blockchain because we have you know our guys are big in blockchain and then um you're in the strike zones here this oh fintech too it's like wow you just hit like four right there that's great so let's start with the blockchain because that's a bigger one people run around they say blockchain blockchain blockchain a lot of people don't know what the fuck it means and people at this point maybe not everyone but a lot of people are aware it has to do with the crypto community and and these things but blockchain is in my

opinion one of the greatest technological developments ever because it just has so many things that puts power in the hands of the people and even though it was introduced on bitcoin as the under neath ledger good deal it has applications in so many things that have nothing to do with money that's the biggest thing is the use so what are you guys looking at the various use cases it's just it's unbelievable yeah a big something that i've been looking into personally is the nft space i've just been introduced to that which nfts is non-fungible tokens so it's basically tokenizing modern art in a way and digitizing it so say one of your pictures for example say it was a van gogh painting van goes on with us but imagine he

was you're essentially taking that and putting it online and creating a one-of-one so then you can people can buy into that asset and kind of see it grow as a stock market because paintings and stuff like that over time like stocks continue to grow in value you're securitizing things that previously weren't securitized correct well you know what that's interesting because i i missed that a little bit i had cole cannelli in here and he walked me he just brought that out of left field he started walking me through nfts and i got it from the sense that like you own digital assets on stuff i didn't realize it went and he probably said that i just probably missed it but it goes that far. You are, you're creating pieces of everything.

So potentially there's no end in sight with what could be distributed on the internet as value. That even, yeah. And it even extrapolates into music, right? Like think about Wu-Tang Clan, for example, they had that one album. I forget what it is, but it didn't get released to the public. It was kind of just behind the scenes. And then a couple people got it because they released a limited amount to like friends and family almost so you're almost in a

way have a one-of-one from that artist but we're putting that online so it's stored on my computer right but then over time that would increase in value and you can sell it and you can sell it for say you yeah i mean in that case it was gifted right but then 10 years in the future people are going to want that well here's a price on it here's a question on that we saw all the icos in 2017 and early 2018 during the crypto bubble and we saw a lot of them blow up because they were making tokens on different blockchain networks that were worthless right we still see some problems with this if you're making nfts would it fall under the purview that they're trying to claim the i the icos now which is oh the sec can come in and regulate all this stuff or whatever organizations are within

other governments that are the equivalent of the sec well i think that's the beautiful thing about blockchain is the decentralization aspect of it how are Well, I think that's the beautiful thing about blockchain is the decentralization aspect of it. How are you going to do that? Governments find a way. That's the one thing they do find a way. Like when you start to take power from them, they'll find a way to take it back. But in theory, I guess what you're saying, and we should definitely talk about decentralization, but I guess what you're saying is they, there's only certain things that they can actually track. Correct. But then also, in the NFT specifically, it's like, what are you...

I don't really see the SEC or someone like that stepping in to regulate that aspect, because it's almost like it's an investment piece at the end of the day. People do in the real world. They'll buy an Andy Warhol from 30 years ago and then sell it now for 10x you know what i mean how much do you know about that business the painting the like high art painting uh a little bit i have a friend who owns a business uh in florida but besides that not much i mean i know some but like i would say i'm a novice but it's kind of just on your point, it's kind of wild, the loopholes financially that you can find in that stuff. Oh, in that aspect.

Yeah. So I'm going to speak on some things that probably aren't entirely said correctly. But there are such things as like art in transit or something like where you hold it, where it's physically being held. And then therefore, if it's taxable there or not taxable there and then if it's constantly moving it never becomes taxable and this is like the 100 million foot in the air view this isn't like the exact view but there's weird shit like that so now introduce blockchain to this kind of space and technology you you can probably do a few things to be able to privatize as far as like who knows what's where your assets yeah i never thought of in that aspect but definitely so you guys are heavy in nfts that's a focus no not yet okay that's that no no

yeah you asked um what am i interested in and like that's deal sourcing wise. I'm sorry. I forgot my own question. I'm sorry. No, no, no, no. I'm interested in NFT space just because the applications are endless. And then I'm even seeing some work done in like the virtual reality space. So people are hosting virtual art galleries with these one-on-one NFTs. So it's like you put this headset on, you're literally in a gallery, you get to walk around, see these things, because from that aspect,

those are things you want to get into because they're actually one-of-ones and you don't see them anywhere else. You only see them if maybe you know the person because they can't be published anywhere else. So you get and you can put it in our gallery and go around and see all these beautiful pieces. And that's the whole thing about what's real and what's not and what people appreciate is.

Yeah. We'll come back to that. We can't go down that. I got to keep on Moonshot Guru here. So you guys are – are you involved at all on innovation within, say, the monetary space of blockchain, which people – that's what they're most familiar with because of bitcoin um the partners are myself no because i'm still somewhat of a novice in the space so i'm trying to learn as i go as well but um it's more of just like applications of the protocols we're looking

at not essentially the monetary side of things okay i think i know what you mean but in english applications of the protocols so in blockchain the whole thing is people know it as a token like you said icn like um as an actual alternative to the dollar but what we're looking at is the technology behind the currency yes yes the utility of it correct yeah and that's big in and i know less fewer examples off the top of my head which is bad i should go look at them because my one guy always tells me about them but within like the fintech community there's a lot of projects that are working on that that have nothing to do with the actual transfer of money but it has to do with like the record keeping yes and they're utilizing blockchain so that's something that you guys would look at yes definitely because you also

mentioned fintech. Yes. From the security aspect alone, it's enormous. So it's almost bulletproof in a sense. Not everything is bulletproof, but like I said, in a sense, which is huge in the fintech industry and also from a transparency aspect too. Okay. So blockchain, other things in fintech besides blockchain, what kind of stuff are you guys looking at? Just like different banking applications and like situations in that. So situations in that, I don't know if you want to go into this, if that's like the code word for,

I can't talk more, but if you can, what do you mean? No, just like bookkeeping tools, you know, stuff like that. Okay. Like a QuickBooks or, you know, like that okay like a quick book so that you know competitors to that and yeah basically those things okay artificial intelligence that was the other one you mentioned and this is another it's another buzzword term people just kind of throw around be like oh yeah it's like machines learning shit which yeah it's entirely correct but we don't a lot of people don't think about it in the context of when they go on to instagram or when they go on to youtube and the fact that these are software artificial intelligence algorithms that are learning their every move down to their swipe of their finger on this for two seconds versus one second on that. So there are so many different silos that you could be looking into there. Do you guys focus on one specifically or are you just kind of like, all right, if it's cool machine learning shit, we're looking at it.

Yeah, the latter for sure but of recent we've been targeting autonomous vehicles and then like different applications of customer support because that's a big you know like you said that's one of the greatest things of amazon is their customer support is amazing yeah so that really separates you from the rest of the pack almost is how good your customer support is. So we've been looking at a lot of different applications in terms of artificial intelligence with that. There's one company specifically, I'm not going to drop their name, but they're creating a chatbot almost, but it functions 24-7 and it actually gets things done. Because a typical chatbot is just spitting back information right like if you go on to a website and you're trying to figure out how to get in contact with someone

the the chatbot on the website will just spit back an article for you to read and figure it out yourself is that also like if i go on a if i go on a t-shirt website or something and i and i immediately get to the page i make like one click and then suddenly this thing pops up and a guy's like, how can I help you? He's not really on that end. No. I've never looked into that. Nine times out of ten, it's a bot. Okay.

So that's a similar service, but that's like the ultimate one-dimensional simple one right there, which is just like an auto, all right, that's going to pop up. Right. But the way that the industry is moving, it's almost becoming a person to an extent like it can handle anything you throw at them and it's not going to spit back in a knowledge base article that you that someone in your company made it's going to actually give you action items of what you can do how do you go about sourcing companies to work with this is something guys in your position like we don't ask enough you know like where you get it it's like oh i'm in the world well how do you get in there like how do you say like this company's really gonna go it's a fuck ton of groundwork a fuck ton of groundwork you're

in terms of actually sourcing deals you're doing a ton of outreach cold calls cold emails and then just reaching in your network getting warm introductions and stuff like that so it's yeah it might seem cool from the outside but like behind the scenes it's a it's a ton of work and then at the end of the day then you have to do once you actually speak to these companies you have to meet with the founders you have to do your due diligence meet the team actually prove in a sense that they are who they say they are and that their traction is where they're actually at and then you have to look into the financials and it's just, it's, it's fun if you enjoy this stuff, which I do. Um, but it's tough for a lot of people, I guess, because of the, you're doing a lot of sales too at the end of the day and not a lot of people like sales.

But you're, and that's your sweet spot as far as what you're running globally for them. But are you heavily involved in, in that process where you're identifying projects to work with? Oh, yeah, absolutely. Okay, that's interesting. So I like that. You hear a lot of stereotypes, and it's not just in tech. It's in anything where you have guys who are like, yeah, I'm on the sales side or whatever, even if you're running the global sales department like you are. And it's like, okay, well, you're pushing the product.

You're getting the orders of like here's what it does and then figure out the best way to give it to people. But when you see the integration, and I feel like a lot of tech companies are getting good at this. When you see the integration of the sales departments being a part of the process that builds the product or puts the end product on the table, it highly affects how effective, to use the word twice there, the sales are actually going to be in the end because you not only understand what it is, you understand who you're different companies can apply your products to their situation because not every company is the same. Even if, even within the same industry, there's radically different, you know, companies within each space. Yeah. I gotta, I gotta remind me, I gotta hook you up with my guy, Jake Dunlap, former client in my last job. He's a, uh, he's a major, major tech sales guy, like consultant out of new york and austin texas and so like he's he's in the world and this is what he's talking about all the time he's like fucking sales people

don't understand their product yeah honestly that is the thing because it's complicated it is complicated but you need to know like the back of your hand ultimately yeah and not just in the one like i said in the one sense that you've built it for because you know once you ship a product it's up to the users to tell you how they're going to use your product so you need to learn each use case of how they're going to apply it now there's there's a question for you when you went on instagram for the first time do you remember that yep how easy was it for you to use? To be honest, I would like to think it's fairly easy just because I'm technologically inclined.

But I didn't use it for like four years. Okay. Did you – all right. Let's go to this example. Did you use Facebook pretty early on? Yeah. How easy did you find that compared to the rest of what the market offered? At the time, it was pretty easy. Right? Yeah. How easy did you find that compared to the rest of what the market offered? At the time, it was pretty easy.

Right? Yeah. Meaning like you mess around a few hours, you start to know. Yeah, I got a good profile. There's how I post something. Right. Simple. All the code that goes into this, all the ideas, all the, oh, but what if the user wants this or wants that?

To get it into that type of simple basket for the idiot to know. That's always how I judge it. Could I figure it out? Yeah, absolutely. All right, we're good, man. Anyone can do it. A test for me is I'll give the phone to my dad and say, hey, let me see what you do with this. If you can't figure it out within a couple minutes, I'm like, that's okay. We'll pass on that.

That's like Warren Buffett 101 too. Like you walk in a restaurant, hamburger good, clean place, smile, served it to me, walk out happy, invest in the company. Yeah, right. You know, but that's what it is with software. And it's like the big paradox of software because we're creating all these amazing tools for people to use and we're trying to innovate, innovate, innovate and give people more options and more things that add convenience to their life but the thing that separates the great companies the ones that become the monopolies on whatever they are versus the ones that are like who the is that are the great ones figure out it doesn't just have to look beautiful it has to be simple yes you need to be able especially in today's day and age everyone wants instant

gratification right if you can't accomplish a task in one to two clicks you're dead right right and like even instagram now i it's like personal for me but that was such a beautiful app it was in my yeah now what i'm not i'm not even gonna finish my sentence why isn't Just because of the click situation alone. It takes too long to navigate to where I want to do. And now they're trying to push monetizing it so much that they're taking away from the true value and user experience that initially got everyone onto the app and how simple it was. I can't even find, I mean, now I can obviously, but it took me a while to get used to the notifications in the top right Like why is that not there you want to create? Engagement between users. Why are you pushing that to the side because now they're trying to focus on making money so much So they want to throw shopping in your face Now if they had just moved that up there, you know to make the change

Maybe they had data that said the design was gonna be good. Maybe that would have been fine But they didn't they put what you said was design was going to be good. Maybe that would have been fine. But they didn't. They put what you said was there. They put the shopping down there. There's four tabs at the bottom of Instagram. I couldn't even tell you what they look like right now or what they do. Yep. Because they added all the – they gave the user more choice, which is like we talk about.

It's the dichotomy of it. The user wants more choice, but no, they don't. No, they don't. Now, do you study like the Steve Jobs school of thought on user wants more choice but no they don't no they don't now do you study like the steve jobs school of thought on this yeah he's my favorite guy okay so that makes sense because that's i'm hearing that and where you're going through so i want you to talk about it but steve's biggest thing is like probably the best example in my opinion that i ever heard of him was when he shut down the, what the hell was it called? I think it was called the Edison or something.

Like the Palm Pilot thing they had right when he came back to the company. They had this Palm Pilot thing that had a, forget what it's called, but when you pull up. Stylus. Stylus. And he hated the stylus. And why did he hate the stylus? Because it's just useless. Why would you, you can use your finger.

You got five stylus. You have five useless why would you can use your finger you got five stylus you have five that was his line style styli plural stylized we make up words here it's okay we're talking for a long time but that's exactly it he and that's like his whole thing was how can i pull back from this how can i okay we have a menu that has five options. How can we get it to three? Yep. You know, and like Sister on the Krieger created this beautiful white app that a little old lady could figure out. I double tap and the heart gets red. Yep. You know, my former boss, who was not technologically inclined in the least, would sit at lunch and go like this. Boop, boop.

Boop, boop. He got it, right? He he got it you know the same guy doesn't exactly type fast you know right so i'm not saying anything it's not fast so you know i see that and i'm like wow that's great and now you go on not only do you have all those buttons but all the little things they add the clutter they add all the little sponsored text below stuff they add the options you go to your page well now you have to do an igtv through here and by the way what's an igtv now you have to go do your post through this page right here and here's how you they're all sized differently yeah and that's another thing is you can't even make you can't

even go to the bottom of screen and click the plus button to make a post yeah that's gone yeah so it's like you're limiting people actually using the app for its actual purpose yeah yeah and all in sacrifice of monetization and that's the end of it though yeah because they're a public company now yeah and they're owned by facebook exactly but yeah when i refer to instagram i'm just referring to facebook in general sorry but they have a quarterly to match they have investors to keep happy and and this goes back to the whole circle of life of capitalism and free markets and government and the relationship you know all the people screaming no government well here here's a part of the a part of the

problem here you have a system that is set up within capitalism where they have to the government has to protect the investors by saying you better be doing everything you can to make money and if you don't like we'll come after you i don't know how that works but you get the point right versus that then leads these companies to innovate away off the things that made them great. Yes. Off the founding principles, ultimately. Which, bringing back Clubhouse, that's the beautiful thing about Clubhouse. It's so fucking simple to use.

Please don't fuck it up. That's why you see... Please don't fuck it up. Yeah, seriously, please. Rohan, Paul. I love you guys, but don't fuck it up. Just don't do anything move to a beach in nepal just leave it go ahead um but that's why you see it's it could be

a threat to them in the in the long term but who were majority of the users on clubhouse the older generation i haven't even paid attention to that yet. Really? Yeah. Think about the VCs, right? There's very little young VCs, even though it's, it's a new theme that you're an investor at 21 years old somehow, but a lot of the VCs on there, which ultimately that's what grew clubhouse was the startup community. That's where they first launched as well, blew them up and gave them so much traction because they had these high profile people under that. And there was the hype. They just wanted to get involved people wanted to be in the room in the room in those conversations but it's the older generation and why because

it's so fucking simple to use click the room oh oh i'm in oh that guy's lighting up he oh yeah he's the one talking right now yeah oh wait Oh, wait, there's a mute button there? I watched an older lady figure that out one time. Like, I was watching her picture in the room, and I'm like, inside of two minutes, she's going to figure out there's a mute button. Yep. And what do you know? Like, people start going off mute, back on mute, she's still lighting up, walking around, and then, boop, there goes the mute button.

And she had just said she had just joined the app. I'm like there it is yeah like they just get it in five minutes now anyone can figure it out Clubhouse if you're listening I know you are if you're listening can we shorten the characters more simplicity can we shorten the characters in the bios oh yeah because we have the LinkedIn Mafia coming in and writing their whole resume on there about everything they ever did including the janitorial service to make themselves sound important with emojis and everything. That's like a dissertation of 2000 words. And I don't fucking read any of them. No.

Let's shorten that. Anyway, other than that, it's all right in front of you. And I don't even like the color of it. Like that brown. But do I care? No. No. Because they know I'm not going to care because it's like, how easily can i get from point a to point b all right bet cool yeah i'm bending out

of a room i'll get used to it yep and then maybe it'll change the color one time and i'll be like oh that's better you know it's it's the hardest thing because you like here's an example i hate hate hate love having to post like instagram promos for this because i have a lot of fun as like an artist making the making the borders and then making them for other people and putting cool pngs in there you know i did one where i had a bookie in here and i put like a baseball bat over like a ball of cash. It's fun. I don't like looking at that though. Yeah. I like a feed that just shows up and has the video.

We've created a user base though that on that specific platform, not YouTube, not like this on YouTube. On that platform, they need to have something catch their eye just to stop to actually engage with the video. And so they need something that they can immediately get an idea of what the video is to make that decision to say, I'm going to spend 10 seconds on this, which is a lot to ask of someone, right? So even when I'm doing something where it's like, I know I have to, I hate it because I just wish it would be like, boom, white paper right in front of me. Like they didn't make the iPhone and have 12 physical buttons or, you know, 12 different spaces on the screen.

It was one infinity screen. Here we are, 14 years later, everyone's using it. Yeah, it's almost the same. Yeah, it's the interesting thing because it's, I mean, if you're a big Steve Jobs fan, you know. Where design meets tech is where the genius is. Yeah, exactly. And to their credit, I don't know if you know this, but they just became the world's leading seller in smartphones. That's something Steve Jobs always wanted to strive for.

I didn't know that. Taking over Samsung. He did it. Not him, but you know what I mean. I mean, he did. But he did it. Well, on that specifically though my thing about apple is and this is coming right back to monopoly's point

they have so much fucking money yeah they can buy you know 100 countries in cash in cash straight up like straight cash on me yeah and they have the staying power to be able to and they've done this to use said money to buy ideas and this applies to other companies too but i'm just using them as an example so if they get a major competitor or someone they see is going to be a major competitor like google did with deep mind they just buy them early they identify it and they bring them in oh now you're on the team they give them a big check and it's it's just the law of math and humans it's not the fault of the people they buy they just do that has hidden the fact to me that apple has not really

innovated since steve jobs died i agree yeah go off i agree 100 they lost that you know it's almost like which tim cook he's an amazing guy i truly do love a lot of the things that he does and great business yeah great businessman and even what he's doing for privacy these days like huge apple is the only company to an extent but the only tech company that i truly am okay with because even from a monopolistic standpoint at least they're utilizing the companies they absorb for a better purpose yeah i understand what you're saying yes and it's it's just like you lost that creative genius they you lost the guy who was crazy in a sense i feel like there's they're starting to gain too much order and you need you need to have that startup mentality where things are breaking left and

right because they're working and that's the bridge that gets crossed in every company yes like there's a day yes i don't know if you feel it i've never been in that situation i would probably miss it too because it's happened to every single company ever. Yes, besides Tesla. There's another one we'll come to. There's a day, though, where you go from being the Facebook that was in the garage to like the Facebook that paid some dude in stock to have the mural and then forgot about it. You know? And then it becomes so big. I had in a buddy of mine, Alex Horowitz, who's the chief of staff at Eight Sleep.

Okay. Which is, if you haven't seen that yet. Yeah, it's a fitness app, right? Well, for sleep. Yes. Yeah. So it's, they make the bed. And then it's an artificial intelligence mattress.

Okay. And so completely unrelated to him coming on the podcast, like two weeks later, they just started to explode. Yeah. coming on the podcast like two weeks later they just started to explode yeah and hearing him talk about his shift like he is so tactical he learns everything about everything and then makes decisions based on that and he does it pretty quick he was coming from goldman sachs he did very well goldman sachs he did a really good job and he had come up through the ranks and so he made the decision for reasons you know all kinds of reasons

that he wanted to get out of that world and he wanted to get to where the innovation was which part partially had to do with the fact that it was a bank and you know yeah i understand that you're told what the fuck is right and what's not you're told every reason something can't happen and not why something can but when he was looking out and and learning everything about the venture world and about the startup world he talked about it openly on the podcast. And it is a thought in the community that like if you go to work for a Facebook now, if you go to work for YouTube or something like that, it's generally – like if you're really talented. It's someone who's been around the block and like they're tired and they want to just go somewhere where they got great resources. They can build some cool shit, but they're not really going to push the envelope. It's like to

go get their big sunset package and be able to do what they're good at. Whereas the startup culture is how are we going to break as much shit as possible and maybe break ourselves along the way. Definitely. Do you agree with that whole assessment? Absolutely. As far as like who works at those types of companies? Yeah, absolutely. And that's what breeds creativity in a startup perspective, right?

You need to be able to have the freedom to a sense to try a bunch of different things. Maybe one will stick. Maybe one doesn't. And in that case, you keep trying things that work and you're constantly being creative. You're constantly innovating. You're constantly just striving to do something new that's what ultimately i think is the the driving factor in them is just we want to build something new and we want to have an impact and we'll do honestly whatever it takes to get there now how old are you now 26 okay so you're young as fuck when did you get and that's

a good that's a compliment thanks when did you get, and that's a compliment. Thanks. When did you get into this? Like, was this stuff that you were thinking about when you were growing up? Like, oh, I see this great technology. I want to do shit like that, but do it my own way. Or did you kind of fall into it? Honestly, no. I didn't think about that stuff at all until I got into college. And then I speak a lot about it because I dropped out of college, but I learned a lot.

Okay. Where'd you go to college uh so I went originally to Rider University I played baseball there um and then I got hurt so I transferred to Rowan University and you dropped out of college yes I had a semester left and you dropped out with a semester left yeah to build a startup okay so how did that so you were an athlete in college and then somewhere along the way you fell into something. Yeah. I got into physics, honestly. So that's why I'm kind of, I hate on college to an extent because now I feel like there's enough resources out there that you can supplement a college education. But the experiences that I learned in there were definitely invaluable because I got exposed to things that I never got exposed to before. So I was studying accounting when I was doing baseball. I was, you know,

I never was exposed to the science aspect and just thinking outside the box and physics forced me to do that because you're in a room of almost the brightest minds. You know, they're just, they talk about thinking outside the box, hop in a room full of physicists. I mean, you see from Eric Weinstein, you know those those are deep intellectual people they ask questions that no one is used to they ask the hard questions that no one wants to answer because that's the only way you can grow and you can learn new things from provided they're not bought and sold yeah always yeah always just got to say that yeah definitely you said it yourself earlier yeah yeah um so that's kind of what got me into the technology

side of things because i was doing a little bit of programming in c++ and c yeah um so that's kind of what got me into the technology side of things because i was doing a little bit of programming in c++ and c sharp um so i got a sense of the programming languages and different applications and then i just started thinking of just different use cases of how many because we're just doing modeling essentially and crunching numbers with the programming languages so then I kind of got exposed to that and got into the whole app situation and startups. And the idea that I had initially was because of my sports background. So then I was just like, fuck it, I'm going all in.

So what was the initial idea? Scratching an itch. Yeah, essentially a LinkedIn for recruiting recruiting which at the time no one was doing um if you look now in the space it seems like every recruiting company is just a spinoff of linkedin um but you know i learned to fuck down the lessons we raised just shy of fifty thousand dollars um to get things going build a a team of five people at a time. It was seven. And I just learned so many fucking lessons, man,

because the biggest teacher in life is failure. That's the only way to actually grow on your own, too. Did you drop out to start this? Is that what you were saying? Okay, so you had the idea. You had formulated it, and you're like, all right, I'm going to go do this full time. Right.

Now, I wasn't an asshole about it. I did a little research. I talked to coaches that I still had in my network. I talked to players and athletes and stuff like that. Sure. So I made sure it was a viable decision to do. And I just, in my situation, I throw myself into things, even if I don't know much about it, because I think experience is the best teacher. So I got into that.

Even the same thing with physics, I just threw myself into it. I didn't even take a math in my senior year of high school, but then physics is basically a math degree. You get a minor just for graduating in physics. So I like to throw myself in things like that. And I just said, fuck it, I'm going all in. I've talked to enough people where I think it's a big opportunity for me. And this is something that I could have an impact in, not only just from growing a business, but also impacting people because I'm big on giving back. I help other people almost to a fault where I'll put them above myself.

And that's, I saw a big opportunity in helping underprivileged kids in high school who don't, because it's become a pay to play industry. If you don't have the means to spend thousands of dollars on equipment, travel teams, trainers, odds are you're not going to college for it. So my goal was to essentially level the playing field there. Now, this is important. People don't talk about this, but this is a very, very good point because you do – anytime someone has a lot more resources behind them than a

competitor they have a huge advantage but this is like with kids you know it's not it's not in their control like if their dad can pay for it or not right so your platform though how did it solve for that what was the idea to solve for that specifically because it's not like you were giving out free equipment where they didn't have it yeah like what was what was the end all i guess like punchline of it it was basically matchmaking you with college coaches based on your experience and your attributes at the end of the day so like and i'll use baseball as an example um if you're throwing 85 miles an hour you know odds are you're probably not going to play at a high level d1 school so you can filter that out and kind of you know just based on those attributes match make a lot better but then a big driving force behind it was i didn't want to charge the kids a dime i did

not want to make money off any kid because at the end of the day coaches are the ones who get paid to recruit so why should you be nickel and diamond kids even though at the end of the day it's coming from their parents but like we said trying to level the playing field here sure yeah you don't know what the parents means are exactly yeah and then you see like we're close to camden for example right so you see a hell of a lot of good athletes come out of camden not all of them have the means to go to the next level because they're not getting that exposure i mean now it's getting there because we're starting to see um you know the baller tvs of the world they're doing overtime. They're doing a good job of showcasing athletes. But again, they're kind of like only the cream of the crop

guys. What about the rest of them? Yeah. Like how do you get a kid who could get a great opportunity to play at a D3 school? Yes. Right. So you, and I want to say like trim the edges here, but your kids who could use athletics as a jumping point to their entire life and not necessarily be like pro material are going to be pro material but they can go play it for a smaller school that therefore then gets them access to the education yeah absolutely you get it for them even in my situation that's i got a scholarship to play in college and Just the shit you do alone in the background, just the work ethic you develop and the mentality that you have,

you're tough as nails. I went to Rider University. You played baseball, right? Shout out Barry Davis. Love the guy. He's our head coach. You played baseball there? Correct.

Played baseball. He had us up at 4.30 in the morning doing Indian runs around campus. But you had to battle through that. You had to wake up at three 30, make sure you got breakfast, enough liquids in you. So now you're waking up super early on top of going to sleep at midnight because you had schoolwork to do. These are just qualities that you can't teach. You have to experience that. And I think if everyone had a better opportunity to go through that situation, honestly, the world could be a better place.

But it's giving that opportunity to these kids at the end of the day. Yeah, they get a lot more work out of it, but they get the chance to even have the chance. My best friends in college were D1 football players, right? So I saw that up close. I wouldn't have understood that. I didn't understand that before college I see it in college. That's why I support the these kids getting paid Because of revenue dude, it is a 60 to 70 hour a week job Yeah, forget that. Yeah, for the fighting games not including games

But for like I'm talking offseason these guys when they were in spring practice I mean, it's like film study this, one a day that, lift that. It's like between going there, working your ass off, studying, all this stuff. Then you have the school side where you have to get your work done. Yeah, and you're missing classes majority of the time because you're away traveling. Which, even though we joke about it all the time, there's a lot of classes you can't do that with. No. You can't be missing two out of three classes a week and like expect to do well and yeah and then you also

i mean you're in college you want to have a little bit of fun i i was just always amazed at how they found the time and the only way they did is minus you know some genetics of just being total savages like you know they they could they could manage their time better than anyone else and they probably i know a couple of them would have never gotten that skill. Right. If they hadn't been forced to do it. Exactly. And that's, those things that you learn in the mentality, just that grind, you know,

that's what led me to the, that's what made the startup space so attractive to me. It was because it's the closest industry without being in professional sports, which I knew I wasn't going to get there. I had three shoulder surgeries, so I was never going to be anything like that. What'd you do? I tore my labrum. Join the club, bro. Three times.

Join the club, bro. That's what made me stop. I tore it again. I'm a two-time loser. All right. Welcome. It's nice to have you. But where was I going with that?

Sorry. I had to throw that in. We're boys there. Is the closest thing to athletics, you were saying, the startup community? Yes, because it's the only thing where you have to be so specific about your time management. You have to be willing to put in the extra hours to get there and do the things that you want to do. You have to be open to those things. And at the end of the day, you have to be a team player too because you can't do it alone no no you can't that's a good point i'm hearing a lot of nuance though here which i really like and it's on a hot button issue so we'll go down this rabbit hole

you are a guy who dropped out of college and you have some thoughts around that because you wanted to go get experience and you had a big opportunity especially scratching an itch to go do this but you also appreciated the experiences that to use your words you got there that you wouldn't have gotten and you also appreciate with the thing you literally went to build the idea of build the idea of giving other kids who maybe wouldn't get access to that kind of platform like a collegiate platform to get access there and get an education so i'm not hearing a guy who comes out and says because there's two schools here people are like you must go to college it's ridiculous anyone would say otherwise extreme point of view right it all comes culture's culture or there's the view like yo fuck that drop out

and you technically did drop out yeah with a semester left which is pretty amazing but you're not coming at it from the okay that was everyone should do it like that definitely not because you can supplement majority of the learnings right like even the textbooks they're in a sense legacy textbooks they were made 10 15 20 years ago so they're not a lot of them aren't even current up to date. Where if you hop on YouTube, you take a course on Udemy, Coursera, any of those like that, you're getting real-world knowledge that is from today, not yesterday. But you can't trade it for the experience, right? If you don't go to college, you're going to miss out on those, the friendships, right?

Just the stupid shit that you do with your boys in school. You're going to miss that opportunity because it's a learning lesson. You do a lot of dumb shit, which make a lot of mistakes. I'm not going to mention what mistakes I made in that realm, but- Oh, we mentioned everything here. Get ready to fess up, boy. But it's invaluable experiences. You need to be surrounded with people because if you leave, you know, if you don't go to school and you join the workforce, yeah, nine times out of 10, you're probably going to be surrounded with older people, people, not your age. And you need to feel that sense of community because you need to be able to relate at the end of the day. You need

to be able to have a conversation with someone and say, oh shit, bro, I'm going through the same thing. And that's, if you're talking to older people you're just going to get this is what i did back in the day no i want to know what you're going through right now how can you help me right now and friends are great for that and then just i was blessed with really great teachers i would say that they didn't make me follow the status quo. They made me ask the tough questions that no one wants to ask. And that brought out an animal in me. And that I can attest my college coach to that too. He just, he, he probably hates it. I said I dropped out, but he still is a continuing learner. The guy's like 50 years old he gets a master's every couple weeks but that's a testament he's your coach he was my coach but yeah yeah he's got a doctorate he's got

a master's he's got everything but he kind of made me want to continue to learn just and grow as a person not just in a sports aspect because i saw him you know he'd be when we had the indian runs at 4 30 in the morning we would walk in the. He's on the treadmill already for an hour reading a book while he's on the treadmill waiting for us to do an Indian run at 4.30 in the morning. That's walking the talk. I like that. Exactly. I love that. Yes. He's practicing what he preaches at the end of the day.

There's a lot of coaches that don't do that. No, exactly. But also granted, he was young enough to be able to still do those things. But yeah, I love the guy. He taught me so many different lessons and, and you know that's where you can't replace that you can't get that anywhere else now you had the camaraderie of sports the the life skills that taught you you talk about the experience which anyone can relate to in college of like putting yourself in interesting situations making friends being in that community i buy all that it's also resourcefulness too like what do you mean so say you have three exams in one day oh i crushed studying two of them but the one i forgot

about so let me link up with the boys in the calf and let's figure out how to get there through this together that makes you scrappy those are tools that you need even in the startup space because things change every day you need to be ready to adapt you need to be just ready to collaborate and figure just be ready to figure it out any way you have to. Now, there are people who are members of the WallStreetBets Reddit community that would argue that you could get the same thing on Reddit of resourcefulness. I had to say. No, I know what you mean. It's that personal – it's a personal touch, which you can't get on the internet like that.

I understand that. But there's an argument that a lot of people bring up where they'll say, oh, I went to college because I was supposed to go to college and I didn't know what I wanted to do. So I just did a major. And then the major they felt like had no applicability. But it seems like you had an interest in physics and you knew you were going to be interested in that. And then you were able to grow out of that. So you, at least at the end of the day, whether you knew it or not, you landed in a spot where it's like, oh yeah, that made sense for me. So I didn't know what I was going to do. I initially studied accounting. And then when I transferred, I got into biology and then I was just like, what am I doing? And then luckily I took a calculus course and I had a professor who he was, he was a math, um, he was a math guy and he was very big into like hiking and going into nature and experiencing the stars. And he would always talk about the stars. And every time he would do a math equation, he would talk about the stars. And it just so happened at the time I was going on a hike with my boy to Maine and

just seeing the fucking stars in Maine, dude, it's, it's enough to blow your mind. Like we were on a mountain, the electric shutoff at eight o'clock every night, no telephone, no anything. So it was just complete blackness on the mountain. And it was the start of the Appalachian trail. So it was an enormous mountain. The, you could see the whole Milky Way. It was amazing. And then I got back to school and got back to class. And he actually, I told him I was going on this hike and it was the first week of school. He said, dude, go. I don't care if you're going to miss class. It's a, it's a, it would be an amazing experience. And just that alone, it gave me a different perspective of him so i was way more open to like his teachings and getting into that side of things and then he would always mention physics and astronomy

and after the experience i just had i was like fuck dude maybe this is this is it for me and switch my major the next week and again you get a great teacher in that case. Not just someone who knows the stuff, but is invested, understands, is open-minded. He doesn't have the horse blinders on. He was open to getting a well-rounded experience as a young kid. And there are a lot of professors like that. We have to remember that. There are a lot. There are also a lot who aren't like that.

Correct, which hurts. And that's the luck of the draw with some people it's amazing the different viewpoints i mean from all over the place i get from people in college they're they're across the spectrum and they have like it's not a or b it's it's a or b in the end like fuck it or love it right but there's different ways they got there you know some people are talking about, well, this professor specifically, or that one too, or this subject matter, or this thing that came out of that. You have a bunch of these things, by the way. So you like really hit the jackpot. I did. I was lucky. I like that because you're not a guy who comes out here and said, I dropped out.

Fuck it. What are you going to do? Like, that's it. You're looking at it like, hey, this is a part of the process here. And the process got me to this point. It got me to be able to start something. Yeah, I had to do what I got to do because, honestly, if I didn't drop out, I'd probably be a researcher somewhere doing something in physics. You'd be an accountant. I'm kidding. Yeah, but if I didn't drop out, that's what I would be doing. I'd have a degree in physics, a minor in astrophysics, and a minor in math. And I'd be so deep in that space i would have never got into startups and

i wouldn't change anything could you like do you ever sit back and think about with all the crazy shit you're doing right now and the technology you get to see on a day-to-day basis which i'm very jealous of do you ever sit back and think like damn i could be filing a fucking 1099 for some jerk off who's asking me about my hundred dollar fee right now yeah all the time all the time it's just that's what's that's what i love so much about the startup space you know it's people get caught in the routine of things and you're waking up eight o'clock going to the job and doing you have six things that you have to do every single day and then you clock out of four i don't have that i wake up and i gotta figure out what i'm doing'm doing, you have six things that you have to do every single day. And then you clock out of four. I don't have that. I wake up and I got to figure out what

I'm doing for the day. I have a bunch of things that I need to do, but okay. What time is he? He's, he's 12 hours behind me. What time do I have to link with him? Oh yeah. You got the whole damn. Yeah. So, but it's, I love it because it's, it's something new every day. I never get caught in that routine. I could have, you know, eight o'clock to 12 p.m. to myself, and then the next day I have to wake up at 6 o'clock to hop on a call at 7 because it's the 12-hour time difference. So I get to, you know, it's just dynamic, and that's what I love about it. That's honestly what intrigued me so much about physics was that every time you get deeper into a subject, you stumble across something that changes your entire perspective. Yeah.

And now you're introducing another thing we made. We probably won't even get to that, but I'm not even going to go there. I have to ask about the pathway here, though, because you hinted at it already, but I'm not really sure how this ended. We didn't have a chance to talk about that. You did this project. You went to create this quote-unquote LinkedIn for the recruiting world to kind of level the playing field and this is what like 2015 2016 four years ago so yeah 26 20 2016 2017 yeah it was about four and a half so

yeah 2016 2017 but this is not obviously what you're involved in now so at some point this ended yes what what happened there you said you learned a lot of lessons and that there was a But this is not obviously what you're involved in now. So at some point this ended. Yes. What happened there? You said you learned a lot of lessons and that there was a little bit of failure. Yeah. What went on there? So I learned that not everyone works as hard as I do. And you're going to come across people who don't have that work ethic and they're not going to be just motivated to put in the extra hours, stay up until 1, 2, 3 in the morning just to get something you need done for the next day um granted so we basically my partner and i we he was my technical co-founder um he had a different idea of the direction that he wanted to go with the platform and i had something else and then

it also turned into he wasn't really doing as much work as like we needed to be at the time because you know i still love the guy. I talk to him still to this day. No bad blood there at all. He was a genius guy. I really lucked out with him initially. That's great, though. You don't hear that very often.

This is someone that accompanied your baby ended, right? That's how you're looking at it at the time, even if you shouldn't. That's how you're looking at it. And yet you can have a good relationship with that guy yeah because there's everyone has different walks of life so you got to appreciate where they're coming from the guy lives in silicon valley he works for a top fortune 500 engineering company um you know fresh out of college he's making 150 000 a year so for him even to be willing to take that risk and take that leap with me oh he did that at the time oh yeah i took him away from that job oh shit yeah wow yeah okay and like i said

he was a genius he helped program the mars rover like he did a bunch of things man he's a very bright kid and yeah so we just ultimately he didn't he didn't have the time that we thought he was going to have and then he wanted to take the platform a different direction than I did. So we just kind of had to, you know, we were a year and a half into it. I didn't take a paycheck the entire time. All the funding we raised went directly into the company. It was lean, too. Yeah, very lean.

I mean, $50,000 isn't a lot of money. No, very lean. You can go through that very fast. Luckily, because he had that job that made him secure, so he didn't need that funding. And then, to be honest, I just took advantage of the situation of, you know, I was home with my parents still. So I had the opportunity to not take a paycheck, even though, obviously, money is good. You need money to do things. But I had to sacrifice.

I had to stay in. If you talk to my friends, there was a period where I really didn't talk to anyone. They didn't see me in, like, a year because I would never go out but those are things i needed to do because all the money went back into the company did they understand uh i'd say one of them did that's more than most people can say yeah um they were supportive to an extent um but it's just if you're not if you're not in the startup space, man, it's hard to understand. It really is just because of the things you deal with, how many different hats you have to wear. You're not just trying to raise money for the business.

You're trying to come up with a business plan, how you're going to monetize. And then even when you think you have a monetization strategy, you probably don't because you need to see how the users interact and how you can actually implement a monetization strategy. Because as we've seen with other companies, if you implement it the wrong way, you're going to fail. You're doing marketing. In my case, I basically designed our UI UX. So I was heavily involved in development of the front end of the product. Um, yeah, you just have to wear a lot of hats and not everyone understands that. And the mental, even the mental side of things, man, it takes, it takes a toll on you. It's not their fault, right? In the sense that I used to, I used to have a great opportunity when I didn't do anything on my own per se, but my last job gave me access to know a lot of entrepreneurs, whether it be in tech or in other things.

Yeah. And I basically had a front row seat to learn about these guys. And I had to build business too, but I was not. I did work for a company, right? I had that backstop. I had that salary, whatever. And these guys used to say to me, they're like, when you go to do this, people don't understand. Even the closest people to you. And after I always just assumed and I try to do this all the time that like I don't know what I don't know.

So I would never say like, yeah, man, I get it. I'd be like, yeah, I probably don't understand either. But then you spend enough time around these guys and then you see some situation where shit goes bad and you have a front row seat and then they say it after a while there's there's a part of you that does get it even if you're not in it right i'm just speaking from my own experience but then you do it and that last part that second half kicks in and you're like oh i get it because your friends don't mean anything bad your family doesn't mean anything bad they just want what they legit if they actually like care about you they want what's best for you right so they're like oh come on you've been

working hard you can take the night off yeah yeah you know what we you got to come to the bar you need some balance in your life exactly some balance in your life exactly and like look it'll be there it'll be there on monday and the thing is time money both tied together along with opportunity and when you are running your own thing and i'm getting this vibe from you hard it's you or no one's gonna to do it. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. It has to be that way, though, to an extent. And circling back to the friend situation and their defense, it was probably my fault as well because I never communicated these things because at the time I was throwing myself into a new space.

I didn't know what I was getting into at the time. I didn't know the effort it was going to take out of me i didn't know all the different things i was going to have to do i didn't know i was going to have to sacrifice all this stuff but you know the back to the upbringing and sports and all that stuff i was okay with sacrificing all that stuff but you know if you're not communicating that with other people they're not going to you know telepathy sadly is not a thing yet so no one's going to know what you're thinking give it a couple years yeah neuro link yeah give it a couple years no dude you're i i love hearing that from guys who have been in there because now i also get it and i can say that

and it's why when i see people whatever it is when they deliver on a great idea and they didn't just win the lottery overnight and come up with something. Yeah. Which everyone thinks is what happens. Exactly. Like even the clubhouse guys, and I don't know much about them yet, but I know a little bit of their backstory, but like, yeah. All right. So what do you know? You probably know more. Paul Davison has been in social specifically for many years now. He initially built an app that was kind of like a location meetup app. He was always encouraging real conversations and real connection between people.

So it was basically, if we're connected on the app and you and I go to, say, the Baby concert, right? And we're both there. Shout out to Baby. You can go on the app and we can see that we're both at the concert together so let's meet up like it was location based in that aspect ended up selling to pinterest for x amount of money i don't think it was disclosed the last time i checked but then he moved on to another social app and then it was basically real-time streaming for podcasts so it was always about the audio and then i'm not

sure if that took off or not but that ultimately led to clubhouse so this all makes the point it makes it better than it than i would have been able to make it this entire vortex to get the clubhouse because people might say with clubhouse oh my god they literally like i think they designed it in like january yeah and they got the money from andreessen horowitz 10 million dollars in march so it's like oh well they caught it right away yeah what about all the companies it took to get there what about all the before that first fucking company that we probably have never heard of yeah maybe never maybe nothing ever even came of it right but he got a little payday out of it think about all the years that may have gone into building that all the

years eating fucking you know exactly eating ramen noodles and working in his at his mom's kitchen table and building it because that was the idea and even if people couldn't see it like it was going to work and there was going to be something something that was gonna get them to the next thing and be able to get them there this is what happens it is not you don't just make a fucking tiktok and suddenly become dog face 208 that's not how it works like those are the even with that stuff it's the exception to the rule yeah and like nothing against like that guy's great you know it's awesome and like when people get that the yodeler kid in the walmart who now will never have to go to school the rest of his life if he doesn't want to, great. You cannot count on that.

No, no, absolutely not. So you have to build. Yeah, definitely. And you get that. You even see it with Elon Musk. Like, I don't understand how people can hate on the guy the way that he gets hate. Like, they just say he's an overnight millionaire and he's just pushing the edge. Like, you've got to be kidding me. He's failed failed companies he got kicked out of two of companies that he built

that you know it took a fuck ton of work for him to get to where he is and they think tesla tesla was an overnight success the company's almost 20 years old now it took 20 years for them to get to where they are today fen you and me talked about it but the christmas eve 2008 story yeah you heard that yeah oh yeah oh yeah he put his entire net worth on the line that guy think about the balls not just the balls the belief that's the thing is that he has such strong beliefs and he really does just i mean this is all saying without knowing the guy but just he really does want to do whatever he can to help humanity well in college he sat in his dorm as he puts it you know cuz I was totally doing this when I was 20 years old and said okay what uh what are the the five ways in which I believe I can

use my life's work to to foster the future of humanity he sits in there and of course we were all asking that right yeah you know we're sitting there i'm i'm i'm passing the blunt to somebody going hey how can i help out yeah you know i i can't even i can't even figure out where i'm getting lunch that day and this guy's sitting in a dorm going how can i force to the future of humanity okay uh artificial intelligence sustainability interplanetary connectivity. Starts going through all these things and he's like, if I'm lucky, I will get to three in my career. Yeah. And this is what my life is for.

Yep. Within 20 years, he was at all five and he doesn't stop. He doesn't stop. And we talk about these dudes who operate in the back room earlier, right? All these elitists and whatever. This fucking guy just tweets what's on his mind. That's why I love him. he sits on a conference call he do you know he gets sued in delaware every week because they're incorporated in delaware my dad tells me he gets sued in delaware like every week

i can't give a fuck no like then the last lawsuit pays for this lawsuit exactly you know it's like okay like keep suing me it's very very hard to hate on a guy who has nothing to lose no exactly and you like you said christmas 2008 he had everything to lose and he still put his neck out there his company for background on that he had his main two were tesla and spacex at the time which do two separate things and he had he had used all his PayPal money when he sold PayPal. And he was down, I think he said he was down to the last $20 million or something. He had to A, close a financing round for like a bridge loan from VCs who were going to take like a little stake in return. And B, had to decide to put the rest of his money into a company. And so the way he looked at it, you know, world's falling apart, is like, he said, okay, if I take all the money and put it in one and let the other die, I'm going to make it.

It's like, it's not, nothing's guaranteed, but it's like, we're going to be all right. If I take it and split it between the two, though, there's a very good chance both die. And he believed in it so much that he said, then I guess they'll have to die. Yep. And anyone who would do that, and then anyone who just like on a whim would go out and help out like he did in coronavirus at the front for California and New York, and then make a stand and say when this was bullshit before any of us thought that way or had the balls to. And then also say, like, you know what? I'm a billionaire and people are really coming at people who just use ridiculous shit with their money. Hey, I think I'll sell every house I have.

This is not normal. No. Like, if I were betting on the aliens, Trump and Musk for very different reasons. Very different reasons, I might i might add yeah but like he's a good alien it's like all right i fuck with that guy yeah he just doesn't it's it you're right it is if you hate on that guy you have some sort of skin in the game yeah you have to because he's ultimately just people hate on spacex for trying to get. And they say, why are you so focused on colonizing another planet? They forget about Tesla. He's literally trying to save earth

and colonize another planet. He just wants to have, you know, hope for civilization that we can be a multi-planetary speciesary species you know while conserving earth for as long as we fucking can because it's a beautiful planet and it's a as far as we know a dime a dozen i mean there are thousands and thousands and thousands of other planets that are that we assume to be habitable like earth but at the end of the day we don't know because we can't get there yet so he does want to save this planet as much as he can with solar and all the things that he's doing there but then also he wants to give hope to people that there's a bright future to look to where we can have a future like the jetsons which i think everyone if you don't think that was something amazing then i question

who you are because seeing that shit is just it's amazing and that's all he's trying to do yet again we're coming back though with this answer with elon it's once again the argument of the individual in the institution which we at least touched on earlier because he technically from the outside you look at it and say well fuck that guy's got five different tech companies he's the institution he's he's the big swinging dick like he's the guy he's with the zuckerberg the bezos and all them but he's a rogue individual and you're already painting the picture of it but you're talking about a guy who just he cannot be swayed to do something that is outside the purview of what his goals for his life's meaning are. And that sounds like a really deep mesh of words, but that's what he's about.

He is a slave to these are the things I wanted to accomplish, like the things we were talking about in his dorm room, and that's it. Yeah, he basically, he just doesn't, he abides by his own laws, essentially, because he has a goal that he has to reach and he'll do whatever he can to get there. And at the end of the day, he can't be controlled. Like, you can even look at it from the politics perspective. Tulsi Gabbard, why did she not go as far as she could have? Because she can't be controlled. She doesn't, even she's been open about it, just like funding that people wanted to throw at her

during her campaign. She didn't take it because she knew she would have to answer to someone and she didn't want to. She wanted to stick by her morals and things that she wanted to accomplish. So it's all about that. At the end of the day, it seems like who funds you, right?

But that's the beautiful thing about Elon. He doesn't care because he'll do whatever he can to accomplish his goal that's why i see a sticker of him smoking pot on joe rogan oh there's two there's two there's a picture right there what other ceo of two enormous companies would you expect to do that none because he doesn't give a he will do whatever he needs to do and he doesn't care now some people say that makes him crazy or it makes him insert whatever word to describe somebody where you want to take him down here but that's the beauty of it where there's great creativity and where there's people who are doing things differently like everyone in silicon valley oh we want to be

different well unless you think differently yes right yeah this guy does yep and whether it's right the argument isn't like is he right or wrong about everything I happen to think a lot of things he says it's like wow yeah it's pretty spot on yeah I'm sure I'll go find some things I know I have in the past where it's like yeah I think you missed on that one yeah definitely doesn't matter it shows he's human he's human he's being honest about it and the the tulsi point i love that did you listen to her on jre yeah i listened to the first one too and honestly i was during her whole campaign i was kind of just following her because i really enjoyed how she was so outspoken about things like that i agree i i i was just talking about this with with brady

on a on a podcast but i never get to listen to jre anymore anymore but the last now i've listened to like four in the last two months i think and the last two i listened to like back to back i'd done like an hour of the tulsi thing and i was like oh my god and then he had lex friedman on who i'd loved him since day one on the big lex guy right yeah and with the tulsi one though because lex is like a radical centrist too i love listening to him but with tulsi she was in the game yeah you know she was in the middle of it and there were some things where i think she was almost describing like these events that happened as if we were all going to be shocked and we weren't but she was actually giving the

play-by-play from the inside of how it went down and saying yeah I didn't like that and mind you this lady was she was I think like the assistant head of the DNC at one point She's been in the middle of it And so to hear that type of perspective and how she just kind of kept her campaign going even when she was getting Nuked by all sides, you know, she at least stood for something, even when she knew she couldn't win. It was more or less like, well, I want to be able to point to something to say, like, these ideas were on the table, and then I'll leave Congress and actually be able to talk about it in the private sector and see if people take up that mantle. That's a beautiful thing.

Yeah, absolutely. And the biggest, the most impactful thing I think that she could have said, and probably people just discarded and didn't even, it didn't even register in their head was that when he asked her like something about being comfortable in Washington and she straight up said, I never, I only stayed in Washington maybe a couple of times a month, but I was always made it a point to get back to Hawaii because I never wanted to feel comfortable in the environment of Washington because they are so disconnected to actual reality that she wanted to be with her people. She wanted to see what they were going through every day, the struggles, the good things. She wanted to be there and not get involved in that own world that Washington is.

And for her to not take some of the things that happened to her personally, and I'm sure she did, but for her to be so gracious of the things that happened to her personally, and I'm sure she did. Yeah. But for her to be so gracious about it on the public stage, I mean, I'm calling her a Russian asset and all that shit. It's like, bro, the level of stupidity that people in Washington will throw at the rest of the country and expect them to eat it is stunning. And then it's even more stunning when you realize a lot of people do. And I don't want to say like a lot of people are dumb. That's not it at all. A lot of people have lives. They got shit to worry about, stuff to do. They don't have time. They don't know who their assemblymen running for offices, let alone their actual congressional candidate and what they really stand for. They don't have

time to hear things other than the quick like oh Yeah, that lady did that thing. Oh, she must be a Russian asset. It's not like you're stupid Yeah, it's like well you're going about your day Yeah, now the people who sit there and study all this shit and then actually believe that alright You're a fucking moron, but and there are some people like absolutely right, but we make these generalizations like oh everyone just must be dumb No, those people know how to commoditize people's limited attention spans and capitalize on it. Yes. And you even see that all the way going down to your local government. People don't actually know who they're voting for. They just know, oh, he's with that party and she's with

that party. So I'm going to stick with this side and I'm just going to put them in office. And then they go and complain about the things that are are happening in their community but at the end of the day they were the ones that didn't take the time to do any research and actually see who that person was and what they stood for so they just vote them in an office and now they're seeing the repercussions of that you see it in california like newsom how does that guy even get in office good looking dude chosen one comes in and says hey you know let's just keep it going right that was his campaign and then everyone hates on it but then again like even before newsom the governor before him i think was equally as you know messed up and

who was the governor before i forget his name but i'm almost i'm pretty sure he got recalled too jerry something yeah that it yeah i think of the right guy yeah but it's like look it up later you can't keep doing that you're just following to say someone's got to step outside the box and actually do the research and take the time to actually be conscious of who you're voting in or else nothing is gonna change well when when these people are making the decisions they do it doesn't just have to be in coronavirus with everything else they're always looking at the finish line of the next vote yeah and when i look at the leadership in congress and senate you know you see mcconnell you see schumer you see pelosi these are people

that haven't had real jobs sorry dude yeah but you're there for 40 years i think mcconnell's been there like 40 years schumer's been there since like 82 or 83 pelosi since like maybe 88 89 and i gotta give them a lot of credit they're politically genius because over that time span they've just consistently gained more and more power yet the same ideas are staying in this power vacuum that then controls the other ideas and whipping up votes to figure out what to do, tit for tat type trade. And you saw it when Obama was president. You saw McConnell just automatically stop everything he went to do regardless of whether it was good, bad, or indifferent because it was like, oh, I stopped Obama. you just saw the same thing with trump from the other side with with schumer and pelosi who actually in on many accounts if you're looking at it like did they get that job done of just stopping shit they did a great job you know they did almost as good a job as mitch did right with obama and it's like well and i think tulsi said this on that podcast you are legislating with

people's lives yeah this is not just like oh well who's going to get the most budget for this thing it's like well no what's the downstream effects of that yeah who's going to get hurt by not giving it to them and these are things that i don't think that they don't think about you know what maybe they do that's just how corrupt they are that's that's the sad part personal gender is so important to them that they'll step on any bug that comes across their way i think that i think there is some inherent evil yeah i know there is i mean there are people who are drunk on this shit and it's very those those three in particularly because they're the longest tenured ones it's very easy to look at them and and look at act

again look at actions they are that long they've said so many things to contradict themselves just for political gain they go where the wind goes. I mean, you even saw it, and it was a shame that they threw the lady in the middle of it, but you saw it with the whole Supreme Court thing at the end there. You had every single Republican on camera saying in an election year, look me in the eyes, look me in the eyes, camera. In an election year, we will not place a justice in there. They said nothing about a Senate majority and all this crap. And, you know, then Mitch McConnell puts out a statement behind a paper and says it has been precedent since 1865. You know, that's probably how he would have said it, but it was written on a paper.

That when the Senate is controlled by a Republican or one party, well, you can play some. And that makes it different than 2016. No, it fucking doesn't. Because you're all on camera saying that is not what makes it different. But then people just go with it. Yep. And, like, that's the Supreme Court. They'll do it with anything.

They'll do it with anything. And it doesn't matter who they put in there. Whoever they – same thing with the Merrick Garland guy four years ago. He was, he lost before he gained. It's not his fault. He was a political football. Yeah. You know, she be, Amy Comey Barrett, that's her name, right?

Yeah. Yeah. I always fucked that up. She, she became a political football this time around. And, and that's the, for, for those, for the rest of us, it's like people look at it and worry about their futures, which I don't think they should do, but it doesn't mean it's not very, very consequential. Whereas they just look at it like, yo, this is our game.

Like NBA plays on a court. Like we play in DC. Yeah. It's fucking crazy, man. It's just, uh, what, what has to, what has to happen for the change like that's that's a question i ask a lot is like what how many of these crazy things needs to happen before actually something's done about it can we get crazier yeah of course yeah we can yeah yeah i answered that one for myself but staying with the institution individual point government's one of the oldest institutions there is.

Yeah. Talk about Musk is like technically a member of these institutions, but he's the individual. Right. That's why you don't put him in those classes with Zuck and Dorsey and those guys. It's like there's them and then like, oh, yeah, Musk because he has the ability to like think for himself. It's that simple. Yeah. But I see this dual like catch-22 paradox i'm not really

sure which one of the terms i should use there but this opposite effect happening in society right now that i wanted to ask you about where corona definitely put the big red button on it but you have this struggle between institution and individual that's going in two very opposite directions on the one hand you are seeing some of the oldest institutions get take and and get and then therefore keep more power over individuals than ever before you have governments telling people who they're allowed to breathe on. And by the way, what face covering they should wear in their own home. You are locking people down. We'll talk about the restaurant industry too, because you know a lot about that. We'll get there. But they're telling everyone what they can do with their life. And what's even scarier

is that there is a big segment of the country who not only is okay with that but is is is advocating and pounding the table and saying you're not patriotic if you don't ask them to do that not looking at the downstream effects of this same types of people who were cheering when trump gets deplatformed you know like okay they didn't like anything he tweets fine agree with you but what's the repercussions of that they didn didn't think about the downstream effect, like you said. Right. So that's one side. The other side is, though, and this, again, pre-corona, this was happening. Corona just really put the focus on it. You have the individual fighting back to take power publicly

over the institution more than ever before. Our most recent example is the one we talked about today in the world of high finance, where you have all these individuals on Reddit, on a subreddit, moving markets, doing it legally. Whether it's right or wrong, they're doing it legally. And these hedge funds who – these guys are usually picking out their plots of land in Miami to buy two separate houses next to each other because that's going to be their third house now because miami's the place to go these hedge funds are losing money hand over fist and all their very very very wealthy accredited investor clients are losing money too and so now because that's happening they're like oh my god all these little idiot individuals they're taking they're using our game against

us and they're beating us so we got to change the rules but the first action of the individual is actually doing that is a prime example of the individuals going after the institution. You look at the entire concept of Bitcoin. I've talked about this before. You look at decentralization, which is this buzzword you and I have thrown around, but we'll talk about it more, where the whole idea is to take away where the process happens previously or happened in institutions like banks or like companies, middlemen that had to take part in the process and say, hey, anyone can get access to this. Anyone can have hope to be able to control their own data and have that personal responsibility over what their life is about, like in whatever subject matter it is. We also see individuals rising up through organization,

right? So, and they even then support some institutions through it how did bernie sanders fund his last two campaigns grassroots right very small donations mostly right so those are all individuals putting their piece in there and making his war chest compete yeah with the hillary clinton i'm not saying it was that big but right yep so all these actions are happening and then you also have now everyone's remote the gig economy just exploded through corona all the the concept of going into groups and and literally being among groups of people is changing and it's more on you to say like how am i controlling my day what am i getting done and what am i working for myself or even if I'm working for a company, how much am I deciding what happens here?

So, the individual is fighting hard to go get stuff, but both truths exist where the institutions have taken power over the freedom of people, but people are taking the power over the freedom of the things they're allowed to do in life. It's bizarre. Have you seen anything like this? No, never. But I really hope that it's, you know, it's a testament to the power of community. When you get enough people behind you for a good cause, you know, whether it's in the sense of the finance space right now and what's going on, whether it's right or wrong, they're doing it for a good purpose. You know, they're showing the power of what actually getting people together can do. You can't overthrow the top dogs. You can't overthrow the institutions. You know, it's,

I hope this trickles down into other aspects like government, for example. Like, I hope we can get a group of people together who have, you know, kind of the middle ground views of things where they're really in it for the advancement of everyone else not just for one side's agenda over the other they're just doing it for the hope of humanity so i really hope that i have hope and aspirations that it does happen in other spaces to this as well i mean i hope so too but going back to our friend jack dorsey like that's even that's even a tricky thing because you know he's he has this essentially autonomy within the Twitter universe because that's what it is it is a universe at the end of the day but then on the same side of the coin he's

creating project blue sky which is a decentralized social network so he's essentially building the thing that's going to take down twitter okay i should know about this i don't know about this so not a lot of public information is out about it so i only know a limited amount as well but it's basically he funded a team of eight to ten engineers and they're solely trying to build a decentralized social network which means no one could control what happens exactly whatever goes goes exactly so it's like how much hate can you throw at the guy because he is doing that but then like you could also ask the conspiracy side of things is what's his ulterior motives behind that who's who's making him do shit yeah exactly i don't even know if you knew what i was going to say but you did, and that just makes the case ten times stronger.

He is a walking, breathing, total confusion of an individual. I don't know how you say it. I'm missing the word right now. But the same guy who wants to go ban people and take away people's platforms, well, that's another thing. There's a lot of things I keep wanting to ask you about we're not getting to all of them this happens every goddamn podcast talking to people that just smart guys like we introduce so many things but he's coming in he's banning all these things and going against freedoms and he's the same guy who has been a not maybe not day one but the closest thing

to day one bitcoiner right which is the whole concept of taking away power from institutions and he's funding something like this which would mean that like technically that at that point the kkk could go on there and like incite violence and hypothetically you can do nothing about it which sounds crazy but that's what you're looking at with decentralized social media do you know how it works though no but it's what you're looking at with decentralized social media. Do you know how it works, though? No, but it's also a question of you see the thing with Apple and Parler. Apple came out and explicitly said that they removed Parler

because there is no form of censorship in a way, where if they just made a little bit of edits to their guidelines and added some sort of censorship policies where you can't say whatever the fuck you want to say, then they can get back on the App Store. So it's like... Do you know that that wasn't true?

Oh, no. We need to check this. So everything I'm saying right now, we'll stick it in the show notes. I'll verify this after. But I did... I think this was... I think Tulsi actually talked about this. Okay. On that.

I might be wrong about that. Hopefully I'm right about that. But they had a process where they had a board. Maybe it was like 100 people. Right. Who determined whether or not it crosses the line of free speech or like planning shit. Parler does. Yes.

Yeah, yeah. Right. But it's people. it crosses the line of free speech or like yeah planning shit parlor does yes yeah yeah right but it's people it's not an automated algorithm which by the way is the same thing twitter was doing with these accounts right they had to do it through people yeah and so there's a 24-hour turnaround on some of this stuff yeah yeah and so they couldn't necessarily get to everything right away so they did have a plan in place and what's the difference between that and like their argument because they're a right-wing platform as it turned out like they don't say they are but they are let's call it what it is yeah then looking at Twitter and saying well Antifa

is organized on on your platform before yeah and they never got banned right so if that is true that's that's another thing where it's like well even apple how do you even defend that i don't know that gets down a slippery slippery slip too because you just said it there's a hundred people bias is inherent whether you want to ignore it or not everyone has some sort of bias regarding something i'm cool with that too yeah Yeah, me too. It's human. That's what makes you human, exactly. But then how do you leave it up to people and then go and trash them for something? Because it's like, well, at the end of the day,

someone's had some sort of bias and it's impossible to remove a bias. So what are you going to do? There's almost no good answer for it. You try to, well... If you you got an answer we're building the next social network we're doing it right now in this in in the bunker right here we're doing it maybe maybe we could start with the question then and the question is what constitutes the public square i love this topic it's been talked about before on here and everyone always has like very good ideas

and different answers so my friend Horo who's in here talked about this in something that aged extremely well in October where we were talking about Brett Weinstein being banned from Facebook that whole snafu which at the time he was still banned

it hadn't been fixed yet like we did it like that day and I said can they do this and he said they absolutely can they're legally allowed to do this they did absolutely nothing wrong they can take him off for any reason they want and he said if you come into my restaurant and would not like if i own a restaurant and you come in you're in the restaurant business your family's in that so you know if you want someone to get the fuck out they got to get the fuck out yeah that was going to be my next point you think you look back at the the situation with the bakery right within the gay guy

they kicked him out but like at the end of the day he technically can do that whether it was right or wrong he can do that fucked up yeah slippery slope exactly if you say they can't do that then what what can they do right you know so and again provided you're not that one was based on religious freedom right which regardless of what our opinion of that is there's like a stipulation with that yeah however today i think and i could be wrong about this my legal friends might yell at me, but if you – if somebody who was a different ethnicity walked into your restaurant and you said, if you're dumb enough to say, like, oh, I'm racist against your type, get out. Get out. Then it's different. Yeah.

They can be like, nah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, that ain't going to work. And then you get charged with something and shut down, as you should. Right. then you get charged with something and shut down as you should but provided that none of that's the case if you walk into the restaurant and you want someone to get out of your restaurant if they walk into your restaurant you can do that so with social media you can do that and the section 230 thing by the way like i don't want to go down that whole thing but when people are yelling that they don't actually know what that means because it would essentially mean that social media would

have to police everything and so the same reasons we hate it for people just being so extreme and going at each other are the reasons we love to an extent it because people can express opinions and ideas if you the very dumbed down way of putting it is that if you opened up the section 230 and declared these platforms as publishers responsible for stuff no one would be able to put any kind of opinion on social media and they would die no so i'm not even going to go there but since they are protected by that and they can legally kick people off it now comes and we talked about you brought this up too it comes back to the well who do you want to have control of it like do you want the government to come in and fix it because that

means that the only alternative is to have them legislated against doing it yeah and so then they are controlled by a body that maybe you don't trust like that it would be the government there's no one else so the second level to it is that regardless of how you solve it, we define these platforms as the public squares. The founders rode out in the public square expressing an idea of free speech. And my example I give is that if I'm hosting a rally for whatever in Union Square in york city right not during corona when there's actually like all kinds of people let's say there's 3 000 people in my rally there's all the office buildings the starbucks it's a big happening area let's say over this three-hour rally 100 000 people total whether they're in starbucks the office building up there passing by

witness my rally where they hear at least two lines of it to know what it was about and have that ingrained in their head like oh they are talking about this oh let me think about that right if anyone's taking a video or posting about it and social media decides to censor all of it the only people who find out about it are those hundred thousand and then it's up to good old fashion word of mouth when they're with somebody to hopefully tell them and spread it, which doesn't work at the level of social media. If the next day a same size rally happened with the same number of people going by, but they don't censor all of it, like social media doesn't censor any of the videos or posts, that rally can meet billions of people around the world right in their newsfeed yep so it is the public square but you can't it is it's this conundrum because if you then decide that and legislate it as such you then have to admit that the government's coming in to fix it now does the government decide what free speech is yeah a bunch

of people like we mentioned in the hearing don't know shit about technology so how can you rely on them to make educated decisions on the future because that's regardless of what's going on right now you have to think about the future because technology we're in a technologically driven world it's going to own the future whether we want it to or not so you need to create legislation around that that inhibits it but also creates a certain restriction to an extent but then that's the question what is that restriction who's making that rule i don't know the answer no at all i think this is one i sit up with it yeah ever since we had that conversation he put it that black and white for me i was like oh shit okay now i know

how to think about it but then that didn't do anything yeah so it's like another damned if you do damned if you don't but what i do know the answer part of the answer the easiest part is that you just kind of let everything go and if if steve bannon wants to come out and like openly call for people to be murdered okay okay, well, that's an easy one. You can defend that in court very easily. No problem. Take it down. Get them off.

But if people aren't doing that, like, did you read why they banned Trump? The statement? The actual case? No. I want to pull this up. Yeah, do it. So that we read it. Jamie, pull that up for us.

There's no Jamie. I am Jamie out here, unfortunately. But I want to do that so that I read this so that people know that we're not fucking it up. Yep, yep, yep. All right, give me one sec. Twitter safety. Was it Twitter safety or Twitter support? I'm not entirely sure.

Oh, Twitter support. Nope, Twitter safety. i'm not entirely sure oh twitter support nope twitter safety okay i got it so this concerned me when i saw this now i gotta get the tv back on google over here i'm a mess see i need you jamie we're working on it but um this is what concerned me because the whole question the thing around trump was he held that fucking idiot rally in dc where you know nothing's gonna go wrong right and you know dc mayor loves you they're they're gonna make sure everything's completely locked down for you i mean he walked right into it so he's got nothing but himself to blame that said the argument was over his words that he spoke at the rally which then of course appeared on social media and there's in a court of law i i don't think you could convict him because he was vague

enough but at the very least it was to say nothing of the rally it was completely completely irresponsible yeah saying what he did and then it was just it was it was a cluster and and everyone was pretty horrified what they saw absolutely that's not why twitter kicked them off no they suspended them for 12 hours for that and i think oh yeah i remember that yeah i remember talking to someone about that that night and i'm like it's a dangerous precedent but like it's 12 hours okay which that did not age well. But they went through this. I'm not going to read the entire thing. It's right up there behind us. Twitter broke down after his 12-hour thing came up.

They broke down the two tweets that he tweeted after that and used this as grounds to ban him. Okay, so tweet one was January 8th, the day that they banned him in the morning, he tweeted, the 75 million great American patriots who voted for me, America first and make America great again, will have a giant voice long into the future. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form. The second tweet said, to all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the inauguration on January 20th. Now, sentence one right there, the 75 million great American patriots who voted for me.

I am not the grammar police guy. I forget what the fuck a direct object is and all that. I know I love writing, but I do it from here, right? Yeah. Can we agree that he is clearly saying, referring to the 75 million great people who voted for him as patriots there? Yes, for sure. Okay. Here's what Twitter said on that.

The use of the words American patriots to describe some of his supporters is also being interpreted as support for those committing violent acts at the U.S. Capitol. First of all, he didn't even use that to describe some of his supporters. He used it to describe all of them. 75 million people who voted for him, approximately. They then took that 75 million to assume that those people are... The assumption they're making right here is that those people are all capable of being a redneck jerk off going into the capital yeah to do that thing yeah and they should throw all those people in jail absolutely every single one of them

but that that's the level they took it to so think of anyone in your life who you respect who voted for trump we all know people who did definitely that's what they're saying they are yeah that's absurd. Okay. We got to send them back to grammar school. Here's the next one. The mention of his supporters having a, quote, giant voice long into the future and that, quote, they will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape, or form. Which, can you and I agree that that is just him rallying the base and saying hey you know what i hear you and and we're going to make sure you're listened to definitely okay is being interpreted as further indication that

president trump does not plan to facilitate an orderly transition and instead that he plans to continue to support empower and shield those who believe he won the election the election thing's a whole nother thing and i think it got to the point where it's like it was just so bad for the country regardless of whatever the hell he thought they're just putting a lot of words in this guy's mouth right that that's what i'm getting at they're basically saying we can read his mind yeah right we know what he meant right i don't need to go through the rest of this i will put this link in the show notes so people can see it but if you cannot see the danger in a platform making the decision on the leader of the free world on the basis of what they think he meant and deciding that they at twitter who

fucking hates him and he hates them yep they know exactly what his mind thinks. Yeah. And then they know that like, they take things to such extremes. I mean, look, this guy said more irresponsible, you know, if you want to judge it as racist shit than any president in recent memory. Still the same guy who pardoned Kodak Black and Lil Wayne. Yeah. There are these weird like truths where you have to be like, well, maybe he's just half an old fart. He just has no fucking regard for anything. Which, I mean, is a very viable option here

because you got to think about, like, I said this to my buddies the one time, like, we're sitting here in a situation where we have to elect. So the average mortality rate in the United States is like 78 years old, I last time I checked we're in a situation where we have to choose between two guys who within their four terms based on that statistic will die geriatric fucks when I go to a party with my family you know

the grandpop is usually in the corner farting himself and I'm making fun of them but yet that's who we're electing the president. That's what I'm saying, man. You can think all these things at the same time. Isn't that amazing? It's crazy, right? You can think all these things. It's amazing.

It's just, I can't believe that that's the situation we put ourselves in. And I'm not defending anything he said. No, me neither. And when people come up to me and they're like like here is all the evidence and here's why he's the biggest racist in the world man you got a great case one on him you got a great case yeah because if he's dumb enough to keep saying that stuff over and over again when people say you know you can't really say that then even if you don't think that stuff and i don't know for sure because i'm not in his mind you take that credit publicly and that's a separate issue from this by the way because by the way that's still up as it

is it's protected speech yes right so this is the slippery slope in true form and no one that i could find on twitter was talking about including all the people who were who were livid at this including far right-wing people who were livid at the downstream effects of this. No one looked at the words and broke down the words that they were saying, and that is terrifying to me. Well, you also brought up Section 230 and the journalism aspect. That seems like something a journalist would do. What do you mean?

Take a bunch of quotes and spin it however they want to spin it. A commentator. Commentator. Who's every journalist now. Correct. But the traditional journalists shouldn't. Correct. Right.

But you're right. Yeah. Because that's what a journalist is. Yep. They're just masquerading as... It's a weird thing. But also, I wanted to ask you, what's your opinion on that? You brought up the Kodak Black and Lil Waynene pardoning he did all that which cool i'm i don't care either way

honestly why aren't you pardoning eric snowden the guy's a true american hero don't get me started in the very definition of what that means that's him how did there there are two possibilities on trump outgoing here regardless of you know what his whole presidency was right again he was the outsider right yeah we can agree probably hated the deep state yeah all that we can agree that whether or not you agreed with how he was going to handle it or how he talked there were things about him where he identified stuff that had nothing to do necessarily with like your political ideology it had everything to do with bullshit happening behind people's backs okay the fact that he left office with a pardon list and outside and kodak black you make the argument that you really deserve that i don't

know maybe that's just trump throwing a pop culture one at there. Lil Wayne, I think, perfectly deserved it. Yeah, sure. But besides, like, those one-offs, and there were a few more. Someone was telling me about a few. He pardoned a lot of cronies. Yeah. Like, a lot of people who committed fraud, stole from people, were backhanded, backroom political animals.

He left Snowden out there. Didn't pardon animals. He left Snowden out there. Didn't pardon him. He left Assange out there. Didn't pardon him. And he didn't commute Ross Ulbrich, which is a separate issue that I talked about for a long time on a couple podcasts ago. So my thought is that there's two possibilities.

Donald Trump is either the biggest pussy of all time and all talk which is a absolutely a possibility all talk no action full of shit right the other possibility is the blackmail that interested parties got on him and people around him is beyond the pale because he walked out of there tail between his legs like a bitch yeah it's a fact yeah it was a fact it's a good point and you obviously thought snowden should have been pardoned as i did absolutely the guy is literally an american hero he exposed everything that is a major issue today okay let's i like this because it it sounds like you're very well versed on that

case i don't know very well but i know a little bit okay we're gonna call that very well because most people know fucking nothing okay with him and i fully supported the pardon yeah was asking for it for a long time yeah really admire the story and what he did once i read up through all of it and you know like glenn greenwald for my money is one of the best reporters in the world he's somebody who genuinely wants to get at the truth on stuff and also is like you know he's married to a socialist like that openly talks about it right so there is so much trustworthy shit there the argument with snowden is that it's another slippery slope thing

because he did this thing who's to say that the next guy for some totally different thing says well snowden did it so i can and it's like a little less important right okay where i and this is the reason i fully support the pardon of snowden no questions asked where i come in and say you have to ignore it is the fact that snowden number one had everything to lose everything though he's got a kid this is not a family this is not a mad soldier dude no he had a great job great great job lived in hawaii yeah everything was going as well been around the world he'd been a cia agent had done everything he had it made yep he couldn't even tell his family he

was doing this he lost everything yep number two he exposed something the group think and the government would never let be exposed never and he exposed something that none of us gave a shit about apparently yeah seriously and now we're complaining about it he was trying he's been trying to tell us for fucking eight years he uncovered one of the greatest constitutional violations in the history of this country and so thank you for doing it absolutely and i will take people are going to say well there you go you're taking the argument on slippery slope you have to on some things yeah absolutely especially when a guy literally like we said put his life on the line

everything he's in hiding in another country away from his family i'm pretty sure his wife was You have to on some things. Yeah, absolutely. Especially when a guy literally, like we said, put his life on the line. Everything. He's in hiding in another country, away from his family. I'm pretty sure his wife was pregnant at the time when he had to flee. Couldn't tell her. Couldn't tell her. I think I said that. If you're not going to do it then, when are you going to do it? Yeah, exactly.

No one else is. The privacy violations, and now you're seeing them take advantage of it again like we talk about it with all the big tech companies yep okay fair if i'm a big tech company the one thing i am saying not that we shouldn't address that i'm saying what the fuck about the government that's a good point that's a very good point how do you just let that go but everyone wants to put the focus on big tech now again i'm not advocating for them because one i am in tech so i understand their perspective but then i also understand the average consumer perspective that there it does need to be some sort because you can't let the censorship go to the extremes that it is but how do you just ignore what the

government did did we did did probably still do yeah i'm saying we we did ignore it yeah oh yeah we did ignore it and we still do too and he also not that he he couldn't guarantee it if the government wants to make that argument they can make that argument he could not guarantee it but he worked for months and months and months to very carefully redact information that could put american lives in danger and zero people died as a result of his leaks zero zero zero that's a fact and he basically just put it out there through i forget who he used as a source to release this information but even after that he just let it go he just said i need to get this out there and let the people know that this is what's happening if they want to take it and do something about it

then sure if they want to let it go, then whatever. But I had to do this because I believed it was such a breach of privacy. I had a conversation with my friend, Ty Martin, about this. He didn't know much about the case at all. He was just asking me to go through it. And on the slippery slope side, I looked at some of the people who were most against what he did and some of the people who are most adamantly against outside of the corrupt deep staters i'm just like i'm full tin it's just it's such a fun thing to say it is outside the corrupt government bureaucrats who just wanted to protect their own ass some of the people who had the most visceral reaction were military guys yep and i get it

because the military is based on the chain of command right and if we to be fair if we didn't have the chain of command with with the military we wouldn't have a military right and so especially guys who maybe went through west point were rangers and stuff like that that's true that is the most sacred thing in their life it doesn't't make it 100% right, which is what they're there for arguing. Also doesn't make them bad people for arguing that. But I really want the opinion of some of these guys where the case is put in front of them and they don't just immediately go to he broke the chain of command. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Because you're also dealing with a computer programmer who to an extent these guys are free thinkers in a way. So you have to they're not going to be as strict in that aspect of following the chain of command and all that stuff because they do have some sort of freedom in their head that they would need to pursue and in his situation it was for the freedom of the people and even if that weren't applicable which i think it is yeah it's still a question of what what was right here and what was wrong that's also true like honestly if it's me the chain of command like this is millions and millions and millions of people who could just be trying to have a conversation with their grandma i'm not saying at all but like why do you got to listen to that i heard someone make the argument i

don't remember who i was talking about the case is somebody this is a few months ago who was saying there were ways he could have gotten it out without doing this where he or they were saying he didn't make efforts to go through the chain of command which is not true yeah he did talk and now did he go six levels on it no why didn't he go six levels on it he didn't go six levels on it for the whole problem of it which is not only the get told to be swept under the rug, we'll take it from here, son, but suddenly he doesn't have a job anymore. Yep. He gets threatened. Yep.

Because we, and what are they doing it in the name of? They're doing it in the name of for the good of country and national security. Yeah, yeah. Which also, if you're doing it for the good of the country, should you do in that situation i'm probably letting it go i'm leaking it because it's in the best interest of the people to know that it's not i mean especially in today's age like we keep blaming big tech it's a common theme it's not just big tech it's not it's not just big tech but we got to remind that yeah we do that because there's a lot of great things that came out of big tech absolutely fuck if i appreciate the utility i

get i've said about amazon on this show yeah exactly like all of them yep you know even the downsides and negatives see the social dilemma and all that all the things they created are only possible because they did yes right so i i do really appreciate that and you can't just we just want to point and blame in society and say one person. That's why you saw a lot of people run a campaign on voting for Trump of like, ooh, orange man bad. Because that's all people knew how to say. They didn't know why or what. And they're not wrong about that.

And then they were able to meme that and get people to vote for them. You will get – when you point a finger and you're only going to point it in one place, you're going to get the other side to use that to and get people to vote for him yep you will get when you point a finger and you're only going to point in one place you're going to get the other side to use that to their advantage in some way definitely that's how that's how trump blew up in the beginning he was literally on every media platform every media platform they were trashing him but at the end of the day negative publicity is still publicity and never admitting that you were wrong yeah exactly which is sick but that's you know when when guys are just unapologetic about stuff there's something in our society that just eventually a lot of us let it go yep which i think is a sad commentary yep

to this to the whole political aspect point though i keep bringing up clubhouse just because it's so it's such a hot topic right now it is i as long as it continues the path that it's going down i believe clubhouse has the power to change the political landscape because for example the other night i was in a room with eric weinstein and tulsa gabbard i was in that room what other medium are you in a situation like that tim dylan yeah where you have some of the brightest minds with a, well, I don't know if she still is considered a politician, but who was in the space for a long time. Imagine the impact it could have if, I mean, it takes balls to be a politician and hop on there, but that could really open doors to transparency in the process. And just like Bernie Sanders, for example example did i agree with everything the guy said no do i agree with some things yes did he mean well behind majority of the things he said yes he just had a bad time explaining it and people took it the wrong way so because it's what it's

30 second hits exactly sanders you have third we're gonna end the education system and that's where they left wall street's taking your money. And so it's like, oh, did I hit the next? My mittens are going to be a meme. You know, it's not like, okay, Bernie, how are you going to do that? Yes, exactly. No one took the time to even listen to that. But then you, I'm not sure if you saw him on the Rogan show, but, you know, he was a lot of the points that he was bringing up that people called extremely radical crazy stupid he had a good basis and a good plan to implement those things where that's where i think a platform like clubhouse can come in and you can have joe rogan type personalities who are very good

at asking questions and stuff like that ask actually ask these guys questions and have them explain it to a room of 2 000 3 000 3,000, who knows in a couple months, a million people in a room. And you have to answer. And you have to answer. It's your voice. Yeah. You can't sit there on mute because that's awkward silence and everyone's leaving and then no one's supporting you. And it's not a statement. And it's not. You have to actually provide your point of view and a plan because no one's going to let you go unless you have a plan. We saw it with, I'm not sure if you were in any of the rooms with the whole San Francisco situation. I was just taking the words out of my mouth. Keep going.

The one with the three mayors? No, the defense guy. Oh, you're talking about something different. Shit. It might be all intertwined because San Francisco is such a mess. They're all involved yeah there's a lot of san francisco rooms in there i forget the guy's name i can't believe i'm drawing a blank right now but he basically there was a bunch of high-level vcs and entrepreneurs in the room just talking about the future of san francisco how they're gonna you know change things for the better how we're gonna

change politics in the city because that ultimately that's the only way to advance it and the guy ended up hopping in the clubhouse room unannounced no one invited him nothing and he just got ripped apart but he also did not have any good defense he got put on blast because he didn't have he didn't have a list of talking points he didn't have any of this people were just firing questions that they had. And he had to defend himself on spot in real time. And he botched it. And then it all took to Twitter. And then everyone basically recalled this guy.

And now he's on his way out. When you see someone put out a tweet, put out a statement link on a tweet or on instagram put out a video it's nice maybe it's a straight form of them talking but you don't know how many takes it took what planning went into it you don't see any of that you see the final product yes on clubhouse it's live it's live it's right there and your voice is behind it and you can either answer the question or you can't get the fuck out if you can't and there was another one there's been a lot of san francisco rooms and i don't think i was in that one but i've been in some awkward ones where people i mean weinstein just comes in and be like what the fuck are you doing like yeah i think you guys are done and all these people are like no no don't say that

but there was a room with i like gail king was in there van jones a lady who i'm actually not familiar with and she was running the room but she's like big she's got a huge following she's some sort of reporter i'll go look up who she was and she was run the whole thing and they had a lot of speakers up there mark andreason was a speaker but most speakers were on mute yeah and a couple of of the of the people were kind of asking most of the questions But the three featured speakers of this room were the mayor of San Francisco the mayor of Austin, Texas and The goat mayor Suarez of Miami who by the way

Austin's getting a lot of people because they're within Texas and they follow those laws and like it's nice open whatever san francisco's going to miami right now oh 100 as far as it's on fire he's killing it on fire he's absolutely killing it just in how he's even hopping on you know casey adams the big podcaster yeah yeah he even hopped on his show dude he's everywhere he's literally everywhere and he is tapping into the tech community to take that and you know how he did it no the first tweet oh okay how can i help yes yes yes yes delian delian i keith keith rabos and delian delian are the two guys i call keith rabos for boys left and right yeah can't get it right honestly and delian delian i don't know it's like weinstein weinstein i've really got to learn and i'll

fuck this up but he tweets founders fun guy tweets out like hear me out guys yeah december 4th this is recently this is like two months ago tweets out hear me out guys what if we move silicon valley to miami and mayor suarez twitter king comes in sub tweets and goes how can i help and it wasn't just some bullshit politician tweet because then he backed it the fuck up yep he said come out here just tell me what i am not the smartest guy in the room tell me what you need from me i'll get it done yep he doesn't even put the guy i think he is a republican right yeah yeah right you never hear about that no so he's in this clubhouse room, and the Austin guy was kind of irrelevant. People are going to Austin.

They were already there, too. He just was sitting there clearly chilling, probably not even listening to what's happening. It's San Francisco and Miami because that's where the move is right now. And so you got London Breed on there. What was she doing? She was coming out like a typical politician deflecting blame saying why she had to do everything she did saving lives we did so well we beat new york with this our people are not leaving she even said people don't want to leave san francisco because they'll

get married here people are good looking here which is like okay You're comparing that to Miami? Yeah, it's like, read the room, hon. Read the fucking room. Has she been on the beach? Dude. And she'd been talking earlier. She's like, I was out there with Mayor Suarez last year when my Niners were in the Super Bowl. We were partying it up and having a good time.

And you can't see Suarez, but you know he's like, that could be a campaign finance violation why are we saying that you're here in this so the lady who's running the room is clearly friends with london breed doesn't have any she was very nice to suarez but clearly close with london yeah so they had invited in all these entrepreneurs like i mentioned andreessen who's a bc guy who was he's still out there right all these guys who had moved to miami though of all different demographics too and like they're bringing them up to the stage these guys just sitting on mute letting this happen and then they'd like leave the stage and

then she'd be like oh where'd so-and-so go we got to bring you back and so you just see london brie goes first sorry made an ass out of herself from from politician perspective then suarez gets up and he's like nervous a little bit just like listen i have to do what's best for the city because that's my job and if i can get talent to come here to build to show us how to build because i don't know how to build i'm gonna ask them to cut like that's what he was saying and it's like oh my god this guy's a politician yeah you're hearing this right and so everyone in the room the lady who's around the room's like damn i'm getting texts from people in this room saying you need to run for president and so then they're called they start calling back these

entrepreneurs who left and they're like oh come back so they bring them in they're like so when are you coming back and these guys the answers were always the same they'd be like well you know i i mean see like the thing like silicon valley man is silicon valley right but like you know yeah i'm not coming back. Everyone's just like, silence. Suarez, staying on mute. London Breed, going on and off mute, not saying anything, doesn't know what to say. And the answer is,

all you got to do is be somebody that just recognizes I'm a fucking politician. I don't know what I don't know. If I want to build a good community, I have to ask people how things are done. That's all it is. It's not hard. Top leaders in the space who

have been doing this for a long time it's not hard and without them silicon valley isn't shit nope and your whole point with this a clubhouse like you can't hide that's why you're right you can't hide did you well you weren't in that room but i went and looked at twitter after that that's a beautiful thing too once the room's over it carries over see the reaction it carries over and then you get the people in the audience who weren't speaking to just blast their thoughts and then it's just a trickle of like snowball effect it just keeps blowing but at the same time if those people did hypothetically come up to speak yeah they better be able to speak well yeah that's a good point too you know it's not you don't have infinite amount of time to craft a tweet exactly and the tone of your tweet yeah you know how many people type in uppercase

and don't even speak in lowercase that's true too a lot a lot that was a good that's a clip that was that was pretty good i'm not gonna lie yeah but that that's the truth and then there's a lot of people who speak in lowercase and maybe tone-wise they speak in lowercase, but when they speak, everyone's fucking shutting up and listening. Yeah, facts. You know? And on Clubhouse, you see that. You see people rising to the top, getting attention

because they are putting themselves out there. Yep, yep. I just really hope it continues down this path because it could be a tool that really enables change because it's like, it seems that empathy is almost at the forefront of their platform. You never see, I mean, there's always outside cases, right, where you're going to have a room that people are freaking out and arguing about. But like in this situation, so far from what I've seen, it's not enough to even cause a ruckus on the platform. And it's, they are genuine. They do have people's best interest in

mind but then on the flip side of that is how do you capture gen z because gen z is not on the platform and gen z ultimately is what is going to make the platform continue on well as we stand right now i know fen you said they crossed a million users uh they're like a week ago and yeah they're like three now, I think. Yeah, okay. So it's like 50% growth week over week. Yeah. Not month over month, week over week.

So we're going to start to see that naturally coming in. It is interesting that they started this platform not appealing to the youngest demographic. Very interesting. That's how every platform starts. Yep. Every single one. Look through history. It started with the 14 to 16-year that's how you win you know i was on tiktok in march 2019 and i was

begging some talented people i know who were like 20 years old i'm like get the fuck on there and they're like that's for kids and i'm like you don't understand don't get it like it's yes it's all 14 year olds lip-syncing in a camera right now half of them are gonna be famous but like get the fuck on there and they didn't and they missed their shot you know and with clubhouse you said like there's older demographics in there but there there's some clear demographics who are crushing it oh definitely right so i see that where and you were saying i think the older demographics an example would be like within the vc community you see a lot of 40 50 year olds because that's where a lot of successful VCs are right the VC community's crushing it on there definitely big time the Aussies are crushing it on there okay the Aussies

in the morning are lit man oh actually that's true but there are I've seen a lot of from like in the VC rooms a lot of them in there probably yeah yeah even guys in the UK a lot of UK people are on there I believe it well maybe I'm hearing some aussies who are actually uk and that's just me being the ugly american but i i there's don't there's some who are definitely like surfing on a beach in sydney while they're talking but are there beaches in sydney i don't know but i see i say something sometimes i don't know that's cool yeah there has to be some beautiful there's gotta be something it's on the coast either way they. They're surfing. They're loving it.

So they're killing it. The black community is crushing it. They are. I think they're crushing clubhouse more than anyone else. There is such a diversity of different directions that they're taking their rooms. Some, dude, some of the rooms that come into them,

like, God damn, like it, you can go to one that's like simple where they're talking about like this musician versus that musician it's like a really fun conversation and then you get one on like the state of race relations in america which are always interesting you know the next room's a rap battle between two or two rappers and then the next room's a personal finance room it's like god damn they're using it like they're they're killing it so that's good to see and then what was oh yeah the one that you know i could do without is the linkedin mafia is killing it on there yeah talking about effort and you know putting in

putting in the drive sales tactics shout out jake dunlap i see you but like there's some good there but there's something that's like okay but it can be one so when gen z gets on there they're gonna get their silos and they're gonna be like oh shit you know and then they're gonna want that personal touch too because they do crave that yeah but i feel like it doesn't have enough tricks for them like what what's tiktok because it's super interesting you can do so much shit you can't it's like it's a filter at the end of the day right you can be someone who you're really not but on clubhouse you can't be and i feel like that's what's appealing to gen z even on instagram right you can edit photos left

and right give yourself a facelift whatever you want you you're you're right i don't know what percentage you're right but you're right there is another big percentage in there though it could be 30 could be 60 yeah i did research for a podcast early on in this podcast where i talked about this because a big portion of it is exactly what you just said where gen z is the next bootloader of the millennials and they want they only know a world that's superficial which is not their fault and it's no it's not but yeah there's another big movement within gen z though which like, take a fucking picture of yourself, like chilling on your porch, no filter, the Huji cam thing. That's a Gen Z thing that started with them.

Now, do you, is there a certain group that is associated with that? Because I know what you're talking about and I've seen it from, there's a group on Clubhouse, Gen Z VCs. It's a lot of tech people who are exposing that side of like, hey, listen, I'm fucking busting my ass. I don't have time to edit these pictures. This is what I look like right behind the desk right now. So is there a certain demographic associated with that that you're seeing? I got to look at that more.

I was looking at it through information that was filtered to me and obviously sourced that i could go check which is check out the disinfluencer that one they were different ones travel beauty yeah uh regular just lifestyle like even like some superficial stuff but they're all about like the one line it was a taylor lorenz article was one main one i had sourced it through like five articles she had some great lines and hers though she's great reporter where she the closer was a quote from someone saying the days have taken a picture of avocado toast are over for a lot of these kids they're not like the millennials in that way or the the millennial demographic which i'm on the very back end of we're all superficial it's like maybe that's starting to shift but it's been that that way. Right. So Gen Z does have a movement

like that, but yeah, there's another part of Gen Z that is just the next level up of millennials. You're a hundred percent right about that. So there are some kids who are going to be too scared of their own shadow to show something real to get on there. And it's interesting because they are also, I don't want to generalize here but a certain portion of that community is also the ones on Twitter who don't care about the decent like censorship side of things right so they just use it for their own purposes and then on the flip side of that Twitter has Twitter spaces will that ultimately kill Clubhouse at the end of day because Twitter has direct access to Gen Z already?

And they don't show any signs of getting off the platform because they don't care about these political issues? I don't know. It's a great question. I have no idea. Which I hope it doesn't. I could see it going both ways. Yeah. I need Clubhouse and Twitter to be separate.

Yeah. yeah i need clubhouse and twitter to be separate yeah i mean clubhouse is it's because it's adopted people differently though like i can't see mark andreessen going on and using twitter spaces now where he uses clubhouse right right i can't see some of these guys people have built big followings through clubhouse i can't see them suddenly be like i'll go to twitter spaces yeah it's similar to people didn't go to instagram reels that's true you know tick tock had a lot of too young stuff where people who were 20 years old and older were like i can't do this yeah and so then instagram creates reels tries to do the same thing in a place where they're already addicted and people are just repurposing their twit their tick tocks exactly and it's only gone so far you

know tick tock stronger than ever so i don't know but it's a valid question because we see how fast this stuff shifts yeah and i mean kudos to the guys at clubhouse because they did a killer job and just one executing above all things because it's very hard in the startup space to spit shit out as fast as they did and even continually to adjust their features, add features, fix bugs, all that stuff. It's amazing.

It really is amazing. And the most amazing thing about it is their path to monetization. They're already, in the letter they put out in their recent fundraising raise, they're already working with creators to establish a monetization factor in it unbelievable i don't think i've seen ideas too yes very good ideas because they're not ads and ads kill platforms in my opinion they're more in they're more in the patreon yes yes almost vip exclusivity side of

things more personal too yeah you're directly the people can directly support people they want to support not just a big company yeah well there's time's going to tell with this like everything else and it's still like the first inning believe it or not of what they're doing yeah but their valuation is now at like two billion and we're basically still in private beta still private beta but the personal aspect of it is amazing and on on that other point too where you talk about the people who are who don't care about free speech and whatever we said this earlier but when it comes for them they will and it'll be too late yeah that's scary to me though um i just watched this documentary that just came out you ever seen a documentary icarus

about the russian it's been viewed like 800 million times or something on netflix but it was 2017 won the oscar it uncovered the whole russian doping scandal okay by accident that became the documentary was supposed to be this guy was gonna he was a big cycling fan so he wanted to do this it was not a professional race but one where big time amateur race internationally where people get drug tested and so he wanted to record himself training to do every steroid known to man document it pass all the drug tests and then reveal the whole thing and be like i just cheated on camera for two years and you know won this race and you guys didn't catch me this system is broken right brilliant idea

definitely but he ends up getting connected with this anti-doping tester out in russia talking to the guy on zoom right or on google hangout yeah and the guy's teaching him like from the opposite end like he is supposed to train like how to catch people doping so he's teaching this guy how to dope to get around it which is the same access that like lance armstrong had right so this guy's documenting all, and the dude who was teaching him was this funny stereotypical Russian guy. Like a bad stereotype. Brilliant guy. But he was almost like Brad.

He's like, hello, Dan. And then one day he gets on there. Dan? Or Brian. Brian was the director's name. Brian, my life is in danger. I need asylum. Can you get me out?

They are coming to kill my family. And like the guys are like, what the fuck? They end up uncovering the whole Russian doping scandal because this guy who's the anti-doper was on the instruction of the government doping every single athlete except the figure skaters. But all of them, doping all of them and did this documentary. So it was amazing. Wins the Oscar. People got to watch that if you haven't makes his next documentary called the dissident which now just came out it's been done for a year though i'm gonna check these out it's on jamal khashoggi

okay the reporter who saudi reporter who walked into the consulate in istanbul yeah and was murdered yeah by the saudi regime yeah you have to rent this for 20 or buy it for 24 because or 25 because none of the platforms including netflix would put it on because they are financially incentivized through saudi including by the way jeff bezos whose phone was later hacked and revealed by the saudi government because of this whole thing because he cut ties talking with them after the kashogi thing because kashogi worked for the washington post and worked for him and he won't put it on his platform without the paywall so i actually give reed hastings credit the ceo of netflix because he was honest right he said our job is not to speak truth

to power our job is to create great content i appreciate someone who actually comes out and tells the truth i don't have to agree with it but kudos to him yeah because he didn't sit there and say well you know it's a business decision yeah there's a lot of aspects you know no corporate speak he said look we have a lot of business in saudi arabia whatever but this documentary is unbelievable because the whole concept was jamal khashoggi was murdered by muhammad bin salman on his orders by 15 of his men who flied in flew in it's all on record flew in on private jets that he sent to murder this guy and chop up his body in the consulate it's all on tape all on tape and nothing's come of it and he was he was it's disgusting but some of the same people who are adamantly talking about this documentary

which is inherently a documentary promoting free speech they go into everything that the saudi government does to push down free speech are some of the same people celebrating the deplatforming of free speech in america and it's scary to me because it's full circle and they don't see it and i love the documentary by the way it's incredible to me because it's full circle and they don't fucking see it and i love the documentary by the way it's incredible everyone should watch it yeah definitely gotta see that but you should watch it from the lens of watch it without a political view watch it as if you don't care about politics at all which it really has nothing to do with that but that concept of the free speech then think about it without politics and say regardless of whether i am left

or right if i really disagree with what someone's saying or center i gotta throw or said of course wherever i am do i want this because that's the next step fuck man and he got protected too he got he got protected by trump because kushner's number one thing is Israel. Hey, I think Israel's great. I'm strongly pro-Israel. Goddamn. But not at the... No, that also brings up the UFC guy who was involved in a protest in his home country.

I forget the country now. But he was murdered because there was a protest. Iranian wrestler. Yes. He wasn't in the UFC? He was a wrestler. He was a great professional wrestler. He wasn't in the UFC. Why did I think the was a great professional wrestler. He wasn't in UFC.

Fuck, why did I think the UFC? Because Dana White tried to save his life. That's why. Yeah, man. That's scary. The Ayatollah of Iran is tweeting right now. About death to Israel, by the way. Yeah, yep.

So, this full circle thing... God. Who draws the line and where is it drawn? And the same person you're arguing for there you can body bag from that film because trump is on record fucking denying this thing like well he told me he didn't do it which is like almost funny to listen to him actually say that on camera but i mean it is funny but it's not funny no right like they have it on tape they i i think the one thing the turkish government said is i assume

they said this you can't play the tape we don't want people to hear it yeah here's the script so the guy heard the tape and he had the full script and it's they did it beautifully they read it like a movie script in bits and pieces and it's like the bone saw turns on and the and the arm comes off and they say are we putting it in no this bag goes separate to saudi yeah it's it's stone cold proof they murdered a reporter i don't get how you can just disregard that kind of stuff just because like you said it's it's a testament of like is that what we want and then even if it's not, how do you avoid it? I'm not saying like we're run by a crown prince or anything.

Who, by the way, like blackmailed his whole family to get that office. But what are you okay with and what are you not? Yeah. Where's your moral boundaries at? Yeah. Like give me a politician who went like, let's say that that dual thing happened right the weinstein wanted to do yeah we had a left and right but instead of that it was nasty it was like steve king and alexandro ocasio-cortez so you got like pretty racist dude and and aoc right i would rather see that happen and know that free speech was

protected in the process for it to happen for it to be able to win out in the long term then try to say well let's avoid that at all costs and put ourselves down the slippery slope of knocking down free speech whatever context it might be in that place right and i shouldn't be crazy for saying that no but it's valid and it's just uh yeah it's a tough question man it really is and that's when i try to try to figure out you know because i really would love to have an impact in that and it's in the sense of like social media perspective like the whole free speech and everything like that building a new one but it's just like to anyone in that space who is building and you think you have the right idea continue to build and i really do hope everything goes well for you because it is a fucking tough space and it is hairy as hell yeah yeah and great and despite all the negativity

we're just trying to perfect things that are already great too. Yes. You know, it's not like we're like, it's all broken. You work in it. I love it. Yeah. Right. And I, and I talked to some guys who are probably closed minded, still love those people. Right. Yeah. Like they're amazing thinkers. I, with innovation, I hope they would think differently and like actually like question some things but you know like that's their life you know just don't legislate it on everyone else yes don't i change my mind every five minutes if you

don't believe me go listen to my old podcast from two months ago i'll say something on a podcast and a week later i'll call up the guy i was on with and i'll be like man that aged real bad i don't care like you stand behind it and so if if you know you can be wrong about stuff then you know that you have to allow the platform for you be wrong yes exactly you can't be attached to your opinions yeah at the end of the day all right man well listen we got to get dinner it's been it's been a long day this was great i know we're going to do this again i would love to all right cool and we're we're hitting clubhouse a little bit too which which has been yeah definitely let's get all over that i've been i've been much more active lately hopping in rooms trying to speak as much as i can so i'm down i can tell you're using it as a great tool though because you're always online

and i know you're working a lot but you'll just be on there sitting in a room which is great because maybe you don't listen for an hour and then you turn the volume on and then you get 10 minutes on a break and you're like, oh wow, that was really cool. I heard that pitch. It's great, man. Dude, it really is. Kudos to them again. Can't suggest it enough to people

just from a networking perspective and just honestly career advancement too. It's amazing. Yeah, well, the career advancement's a great point, but I'll cut it there. Giovanni, thanks for coming in thanks for having me brother appreciate it again soon absolutely everybody else give it a thought get back to me peace