Pirate Wires - Biden Drops Out, Kamala's Image Makeover, & Battle Of The Billionaires (ft. John Coogan)

Episode Date: July 26, 2024

EPISODE #62: Welcome back! Biden officially dropped out of the race this past week. Democrats decide to not do democracy this year and just replaced Biden with Kamala Harris. We get into the hot swap, Kamala’s image makeover, and what democracy actually means. Friend of the show, John Coogan, stops in to talk about the battle of the billionaires on X. The TDS of Silicon Valley has brought out current and past disputes with David Sacks, Paul Graham, Vinod Khosla, Parker Conrad, and our very own billionaire Mike Solana. We then take a deep dive into the Crowdstrike outage last week that took our our airports and work computers. We’re EU regulations to blame for all of this? Enjoy! Featuring: Mike Solana, Sanjana Friedman, Riley Nork, John Coogan We have partnered with Polymarket! Get your 2024 Presidential Election Predictions: https://polymarket.com/elections Sign Up To Pirate Wires For Free! https://piratewires.co/free_newsletter Topics Discussed: https://www.piratewires.com/p/eu-weaponizes-regulation-us-tech-companies?f=home Pirate Wires Twitter: https://twitter.com/PirateWires Mike Twitter: https://twitter.com/micsolana Sanjana Twitter: https://twitter.com/metaversehell Riley Twitter: https://x.com/rylzdigital John Twitter: https://x.com/johncoogan TIMESTAMPS: 0:00 - Welcome Back To The Pod! 1:00 - Hot Swap Complete - Biden Drops Out Of The Race 11:00 - The Coconut Queen - Kamala Is Now The Democrat Nominee 21:30 - The Latest Election Polls - Brought To You By Polymarket 27:00 - Democracy Is On The Ballad? 37:30 - Welcome John Coogan! The Battle Of The Billionaires 1:12:00 - Crowdstrike Outage - Was It Caused By EU Regulations? 1:34:15 - Gavin Newsom Finally Getting Rid Of The Homeless?! 1:35:45 - Thanks For Watching! Like & Subscribe! #podcast #technology #politics #biden #culture

You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you. I knew it, man. Last week I said, I was like, he's about to drop. The thing that we have in common with Joe Biden is that none of us will remember that he was president. They're just not doing democracy this season. We're just supposed to not even talk about it. He is. I think it shows that he can put his country before his ego. They had this rebrand ready to go. Charlie XCX posted on Twitter, Kamala is brat. I can't stop talking about the context that I exist in. You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?

what's up guys welcome back to the pod brandon's internet is once again does that chaos disaster apocalypse he uh is melting down right now in los angeles will not be able to join us but we've got our good friend riley with us today we've got john coogan coming up in a few minutes. In a little bit, we're going to be doing our polymarket segment, checking out the betting markets on Kamala's odds, let's say, of victory. And I think the really interesting one that we're going to have some interesting conversation about is the question of whether or not Biden will finish this term, which I don't know. We can get into in a minute.

A lot of great stuff today. CrowdStrike, obviously have to talk about it. But first, before all of that, I knew it, man. Last week I said, I was like, he's about to drop. And I think that's going to be the thing that we're talking about next week. Next week, it's going to be absolute bananas because my gut is that Biden's going to step down. But now the nature of the internet and this insane election as it is, there are a lot of things to talk about this week. One of them is the fact that President Biden dropped from the race. And he did this on Sunday.

The kind of response today has been something along the lines of i mean it depends on who you are right it depends on if you were voting for trump or if you're not voting for trump and if you weren't voting for trump joe biden went from uh dangerously brain addled um a person who maybe had to have the 25th amendment invoked so we could get him out of office and run somebody else against trump to one of the greatest presidents in history literally this has been said um by many many people online the one that comes to my vote that is really sunny hostin saying this on the view okay all the new ladies obviously i love the view uh i've never loved it as much as i did when megan mccain was on you're for decriminalizing border crossings you're one of the people at

the debate do you agree with aoc that we should get rid of DHS altogether? That is not correct. You guys got to go back and watch some of those old clips. That was a woman who really just held their feet to the fire, didn't care. People would boo her. She did not give a shit. They don't have that anymore. It's all talking heads who agree. So they're all going around talking about how awesome Biden was and what a great man for dropping and blah, blah, blah. Sonny says he's going to be the remembered as the best he will be remembered she used that word as um the the greatest one of the greatest presidents in american history and i'm thinking like lincoln or something i think it shows what a statesman he is

i think it shows what a patriot he is i think it shows that he can put his country before his ego because he had such a great record as president. Has. Has. I think that history will note him as one of the greatest presidents that we've had. The thing that we have in common with Joe Biden is that none of us will remember that he was president. Okay? That's the thing that we all have in common. But with Sanjay, what you mentioned,

and I also noted as it was happening, I think I might have mentioned on Twitter, I'm not sure, maybe one of our takes, the news dropped on X. Whoever is on Biden's team running a social media account shared it to X first, not even just social media. Because I actually went back and I looked at the Times and X was the very first one. After that was Instagram and Meta. There was no leak to the press. There was no special scoop from the New York Times. There was no interview.

In fact, he vanished for a few days, which was also very strange. in fact he vanished for a few days um which was also very strange uh part of this i think is fueled just by the fact that i mean listen joe is old and he's now angry and he's like the whole entire media establishment rose up along with my fellow democrats to do a coup a sort of political let's maybe let's not call it a coup um a it was kind of political, maybe let's not call it a coup. It was kind of a coup, but an uprising, a mini revolution and unseating. Here's what we know. What we know is that Kamala Harris, after just like two days, is now somehow the new Democratic nominee for president. And there was no vote. There was no primary. She's just running and we're now accepting that. And Joe's not. I think he's mad and I think he doesn't really care. I think part of that's this. He's like, fuck it, I'm going

to X or do it on X. I don't care. Maybe even his social media team is also sufficiently mad that they're doing this. Certainly the team around him is mad because who else are they going to go and work for? They've been with Biden forever. I think it's not really clear what they're going to be doing in their careers now. So I think it's not really clear what they're going to be doing in their careers now. So I think there's probably a lot of bitterness there, especially targeted towards Team Kamala. And they didn't really care. But part of it is also the fact that X is just undeniably a very important platform for this kind of discussion, for going direct to your audience, to your fans, for just announcing something. I believe it was Olivia Nuzzi who said, or Olivia Nuzzi, rather, who said,

he just tweeted it. And he did. Sanj, what do you make of this? I mean, I thought it was insane that his senior advisors didn't find out. Apparently, they found out a minute before the tweet went live. And I do think like, you know, the coup speculation, like whether or not this was actually some kind of like Nancy Pelosi driven sort of backdoor maneuver to force Biden's hand. Again, I don't think it's unfounded. I don't I don't I don't know if it actually happened. And I personally, you know, don't have strongly held opinions on it it but i don't think it's unfounded because of how it happened on x and because like pelosi i think was interviewed in um the the times did a profile of her actually a few days before he announced biden announced he was uh not going to pursue

the nomination and uh sort of highlighted that you know Pelosi has been such a kind of power broker in the Democratic Party for decades and brought up once again how cagey she had been in interviews in the weeks leading up to Biden dropping out when she said you know you know Biden can make up his mind and then you know someone the talk show host is like well he has made up his mind and then she was like no he can make his own decision. And then, you know, someone, the talk show host is like, well, he has made up his mind. And then she was like, no, he can make his own decision. I want him to do whatever he decides to do. And that's, that's the way it is. Honestly, I felt kind of sad for Biden when I watched his Oval Office address, where he talked about, like, he said something sort of

he said something sort of uh suggestive when he was talking about how he needs to put his personal ambition aside and do its best for the country and you really got the sense that like he's pissed yeah uh from that speech it was strange for him to reveal his own pride yeah uh like why would he say that i i don't and and, and rather than just be like, listen, I, I did some soul searching and I, I realized that I don't have it in me and, uh, I, I'm not going to be the best president for you guys. Um, he didn't even, he reiterated, he was like, I think I would be the best person. Like he said something like, you know, something along the lines of, I think I'd be the best person to do the job, which is like not necessarily a glowing endorsement of of kamala um yeah i don't know i mean it it again it's this kind of thing where it just gives fodder to the kind of you can't blame people for

you know having conspiracy theories about whether or not there was a coup when it was done in such a bizarre opaque way and then biden didn't appear for a few days later. I mean, it's sort of, you know. I just don't even know what the other read is. I mean, what are we supposed to, what do we think happened here other than a democratic revolution internally? What is the non-conspiracy theory

that Biden just did some soul searching and was like, actually, you know what? I finally remembered that I have dementia and so I'm dropping and it had nothing to do with what anybody said. It's like, obviously what happened was they forced him out. And I don't think it was necessarily stupid of them. Just tactically speaking, it makes a lot of sense. Certainly it's hypocritical because of the Democratic Party and they're just not doing democracy this season. But that is, yeah, it's just like, it's very weird to call

something like that a quote, dangerous. It's a dangerous question to ask when you're asking whether or not there was a conspiracy to unseat him. And what does a conspiracy mean? That means like Nancy Pelosi talking to Barack Obama and saying, hey, he has dementia. He's not going to beat Trump. If he doesn't beat Trump, everybody down ticket is going to be fucked. How do we stop that total disaster for the Democratic Party? And they were like, here's what we got to do. We got to get him out and we got to get in, I guess, Kamala, because she can use his money. We need you to be Mamala of the country. And then they orchestrate whatever they need to orchestrate to make that happen including i think encouraging him to push the debate up for all sorts of stupid reasons i'm sure they were like listen you know this is going to prove to the world that you can do it and um or it could have

been hardball listen if you can't do it we're not gonna give you money or we're gonna force a primary so you have to force the thing up like who knows what it was certainly what i know is that that happened they had those conversations behind the scenes they orchestrated what in every way they possibly could including leaks to the press where did all that information come over the last couple of weeks yeah about about biden's about biden's um ongoing mental deterioration like That is coming from the DNC putting on a pressure campaign to get him out after doing a lot of orchestration. And I think it's really, really, really, it's crazy because Paul Graham went after Balaji for being irresponsible, he said, for suggesting that this happened. I think it was really irresponsible for him to go after someone

for something so obviously true. And not even because I think it's dangerous for people to read it, I think for him, and we're going to talk about this later, but I think that he's just kind of constantly owning himself right now in a way that's really embarrassing and he's not going to recover from. But I want to get off that because we're going to get back to the battle of the billionaires later. Riley, what are you thinking about the coconut queen, Team Coconut? Are you in it? Are you feeling the context? Where are we right now? Well, one thing that is very surprising to me about a team coconut is just how quick they had this rebrand ready to go. Like it was instantaneous. And so that sort of like leads me to believe like either one, this hot swap was in the works for

Democrats longer than they would have us like lead us to believe or two they were just like a bunch of bored interns like at the dnc just like hating their lives having to post about malarkey and like dark brandon uh just like daydreaming like please let this old guy drop out so i can post my brat memes um what is going on with the brat thing where what is the genesis of that did you guys follow that at all? I followed it. Tell me everything about the Brat thing that's happening. Well, I would preface this by saying I'm a CharlieXX fan. I doubt many of our listeners are. I love that red one, the red, the 2017 album.

Yeah. So CharlieXX has a new album, Brat, that came out. And it's a little bit unfortunate that it's now become i think so associated with mainstream politics but basically from what i saw and i don't know if this is actually genesis someone posted a tiktok on it was like right after biden announced i mean it was maybe like an hour or so afterward um which was like sort of a spliced together series of clips of kamala saying like her sort of catchphrases where, you know, You think you just fell out of a coconut tree? You know, you exist in the context of all that became before you, the coconut tree thing,

her dancing with those kids, which is a great clip. And they spliced it over Von Dutch by Charli XCX. And it's just this very funny like kind of ridiculous uh clip um which i think included like text saying kamala is brat in the charlie xcx font and then shortly thereafter charlie xcx who's british i don't know what the fuck she has to do with any of this but she's just this like british chick who hangs out with gay dudes um posted on twitter like kamala is brat um which and then followed kamala's instagram i guess or something they both followed each other i don't know if kamala followed charlie but charlie followed kamala and then uh the joe biden

like gen z led social media page on twitter rebranded as kamala hq with a brat theme and which is the green the neon green and the black and exactly um and began like amplifying some of these memes which are apparently now proliferating on tiktok the memeification of her is really powerful and um like the coconut stuff is fun. It works in her favor. I like talking about it. I want to talk about Team Coconut, the Coconut Queen, Coconut Season. Give me a coconut beverage.

Like, I don't even like that woman. And I'm like, I am fucking down for Coconut Season. I think the Brad thing was really clever. I think that the things that she said, like the context, I can't stop talking about the context that I exist in. You think you just fell out of a coconut tree you exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you

the greater i can't it's like very very sticky it's a new kind of um it's really a new kind of speech that we haven't had in politics in a very long time it's a soft it's like a more palatable marianne williamson yeah um she gives like a little bit of that right and then uh what was the the very last one that i saw i saw these guys online right-wing influencers uh making fun of her kamala for um this interview that she gave where she's talking about meeting her husband's mother her husband's jewish which is relevant because she does like this like old little old lady jewish kind of impersonation of like grabbing her face and i believe the woman says something like um uh in kamala's relaying the story of of the mother-in-law

saying something along the lines of, uh, you're so much more beautiful in person than you are on television. Um, and it's very self-deprecating and extremely charming. Uh, and Kamala laughs, she's cracking up.

She's clearly actually laughing and people are saying, you know, look at this idiot. And, this is, you know, she's got a likability problem. I mean,

she might have a likability problem, but that's not what I saw in that clip. What I saw in that clip was like a very fun wine ant that I would be totally down to watch like horror movies with and certainly gossip with. Like that's like she's got all sorts of tea about everyone in Congress and she tells crazy stories probably. And I think it's dangerous for Trump. I feel that she's got, if she's smart enough to lean into her strengths here, which are, I guess, there's something feminine about her that is interesting and I think really relatable to people. It feels grounded and earthy.

Like if she can just be that, if she can tap into her sort of authentic self and not run away from the kooky, weird shit she says, and then also have moderate policy positions, which are not hers. I mean, she's totally pivoting away from anything she's ever said before. And we're memory holing the fact, for example, that she was the border czar and she had just super left-wing positions on immigration and everything else. If she can actually memory hole all that and just be relatable, I think it's dangerous for Trump. But maybe I'm wrong. I don't know. Yeah. I mean, they say like the winner of elections is often like the person you'd most like want to like go get a beer with. And I would

imagine like getting a glass of Chardonnay with Kamala is like a pretty close second because I agree she does seem pretty fun. And yeah, the memes are definitely working in her favor. And if there was like if Democrats were losing the youth vote based off like you know the israel palestine situation or whatever i think there is um a world in which she is sort of like slowly but surely winning them back so remains to be seen but i can see it working for her she's gonna have to start talking about positions and things and i think that you know, it is, I will say just to maybe temper this a little bit, it's really easy to spin a fun story out of just a few clips. She's going to have to start talking about, for example, what she believes in.

I think it's crazy watching people say that they're endorsing her and giving her $10 million, $20 million. And they don't even, I think she raised more money in over 24 hours or something than like any candidate in history. That's how desperate the Democrats were for a sad statement on what politics are in America, like the fact that nobody even cares what her positions are on any of the important issues of the day. But she's going to have to start talking about them. And once she does, I mean, listen, I've seen enough of her interviews long before to know that she's going to say some stupid shit. So we'll see how that lands.

But for now, I mean, coconut season is powerful, I think. Yeah. I mean, I guess Kamalaala it's interesting because she's really gotten so little airtime as vp and and um i think the way that she could play into this and sort of uh because she's also mocked for saying like completely vacuous things like there's all these clips of her there's an amazing clip of her where she's asked what culture is and she goes on this like minute-long rant where she's like it's how you feel when you wake up in the morning. Culture is the way we express how we're feeling about the moment.

And, and we should always find times to express how we feel about the moment that is a reflection of joy. Cause every, you know, it comes in the morning. joy because every you know it comes in the morning but you know she does i think the the issue with kamala is because she's been in politics for so long and she has adapted her political views in ways that to most people read as very kind of cynically um you know in search of of what's most politically expeditious it's hard to understand what she believes because at first she was this very tough on crime prosecutor uh when she was uh in in san francisco in some ways um where you know felony prosecutions skyrocket under her and she tried to get uh undocumented minors who were convicted of felonies deported against sanctuary city rules.

And this is why like Democrats, a lot of sort of more far left Democrats hate her. But then she kind of pivoted completely during the Black Lives Matter stuff, at least in rhetoric in a lot of cases. There's a great old clip of her, speaking of The View, where McCain is grilling her on Ocasio-Cortez. And McCain just lists all of her positions. One of them is something like an 80% marginal income tax or something. I mean, Matt, we should just play the clip, actually. She's on 60 Minutes this weekend proudly calling herself a radical.

And she's promoting policies like saying that every single carbon emission in the country every car should be eliminated within the next 11 years everything from a 70 to 80 percent tax rate do you agree that she could possibly in this ideology of the socialist left could splinter your party no you know I think that she is challenging the status quo I think that's fantastic I think that, you know, I used to teach before, especially before, like, in the last few years. And the thing that I always loved about teaching was when you teach, it requires you to defend the premise. And it requires you to re-examine the premise and question, is still relevant and um that's not like you said

it's not like that's not who she was in san francisco and so there's a question of i mean i think we all know who she is is she's just a political creature in the classic american mold which means she believes in absolutely nothing power but it will be interesting to see how she intends to govern. I think extremely left-wing, based on what I know about her family and what she's done so far and the kind of stuff that she said

throughout the last four years. It's just unclear what the voters will believe, if they'll really believe her when she says, no, I think we should have a border now. I mean, we'll see. You know what? We actually do have some information on it because what I would like to kind of bring in now is a little bit more from our partner, Polymarket. So Polymarket, as we've discussed before, this is the betting market that we like. We are partnered with them.

And I've talked about them a while now. Previously, we brought in their information before. I think it adds a really interesting, I said this before, it adds an interesting kind of layer to the conversation. It's more interesting to me than polling. And, or certainly in with polling, I think it's very interesting. Trump versus Kamala. Following Biden's announcement that he'll be stepping down, the odds of who will win obviously shifted to Trump. Before the announcement on Sunday, she was at 18%. So I think people already kind of thought this would happen. She jumped to 30. And now she's at about 34% as of Thursday when we're recording. Trump's a little bit steadier. He's at 62%, losing most of the gains he's made since the attempted assassination. And comparing to Polly Market, we've got on 538, Trump's only up 47% to her 45. But 538 has currently suspended that forecast. I think the more interesting one here, and something that we're going to have to talk about right now, I think, is the question of will Biden finish his term? And there's currently a 70% chance on Polymarket that Biden will finish it, dip below 50 on Monday due to rumors about his illness. This is when he was sort of, it vanished. And you had like Laura Loomer talking about like helicopters and shit flying or not being allowed to fly overhead and he was dying

and it was imminent and i mean people were going nuts online and i just remember thinking i don't know um i don't know why jill biden would be setting a little heart emoji and not freaking out or sharing information but um he didn't die we saw him speak uh and now we're at uh the odds of him being removed via the 25th Amendment as high as 60% on Monday are down to 6% today. So seems pretty low, but I will say that we still have months to go. And I saw that Biden gave a speech Wednesday night. So after kind of vanishing from Sunday until he vanished from Sunday until Wednesday,

and that's when all those crazy rumors began circulating. And he finally spoke out more than just the statement that he gave to X or that he posted to X. I've heard people say it was good. I think it's probably falling along ideological lines to a certain extent. He seemed not well to me in that he seemed totally far gone there's something weird with his face i think they must have botoxed the hell out of him yeah um and maybe just like jabbed him with some kind of stimulants and sent him out there uh but he looks

like he's barely alive and um i was sad to see it it made me uncomfortable and um uh i don't know that he's going to make it through i really don't i don't know how he can he's clearly not in charge and i think i think what this is going to come down to is do the republicans think that they have something that they can gain from going after him or will they lose something it'll come down to politics um but should he be in office i don't think so not after seeing that speech he also went after democracy you know like i think he said something crazy like uh this was the greatest attack on american democracy since the civil war and i was like okay well maybe there was world war ii right like like i mean uh what was it um russia was how we answered uh pearl

harbor happened and um like we fought the japanese and we fought um and we fought uh the germans and then there was like a long a very long cold war and a lot happened but um i don't know january 6th that i i was not very intimidated by that personally. He is really clinging to that. He said, he really framed it like, he said, I brought us out of that. He said, this is like his accomplishment was bringing the country out of the darkness of almost losing our democracy. When I guess the guy, the shaman dude walked into the halls of Congress and stood at the podium or whatever. I mean, maybe we almost magically became an authoritarian country at that moment. Again, wasn't my read, but what do you guys think? Is

he going to finish the term or what? I've seen, I think Trump has actually came out against the 25th amendment because he's like, this is going to be a dangerous precedent. They're going to use it against me. So that's an interesting wrinkle, but- Oh, that is interesting. Yeah. So I would guess i'd put my odds on on no at this point but yeah we'll see it's not worth it for the republicans to force the question yeah yeah i i don't i don't see who would stand to benefit except obviously the american people but they're never involved in any political calculation i mean it reminds me like in the weeks leading up to Biden dropping out when you had this barrage of like Democratic leaks suggesting what everyone knew for months, but that was an unspeakable sort of reality about Biden's mental health, not mental health, his mental condition is sort of, you know, whether or not he was senile. you know, whether or not he was senile. There was a really interesting leak that was reported in Semaphore by a Biden staffer who was not part of the like inner circle that, you know, sort of

Biden's closest confidants, but who worked apparently in the in the White House and said that they were concerned because major policy decisions were seemingly made without Biden's involvement, or there was this kind of convoluted process by which, you know, they would send a policy memo, and then it would go through all these mysterious channels. They never talked to Biden, and then it would come back with modifications, and they didn't know how this was happening. And so my assumption would be at this point, the White House staffers are probably very used to working with a kind of physically diminished Biden and getting things done without him. And he's kind of, my assumption is basically just kind of a figurehead who occasionally gets up and gives speeches. um and if he can stay in like minimal the minimal physical condition required to keep doing that which clearly isn't very high because you know he routinely gives speeches with these kind of um remarkable gaffes uh then i don't see why they would remove him and it just seems like it would

be a distraction i saw incidentally i saw willie brown uh kamala's ex paramore and former mayor of san francisco came out anymore that's sexist you cannot bring up how kamala got her first job i mean i don't i don't i think it's interesting color i think you have to judge her based on her long political career um i also think it's a bad i don't think it's a good tactic to uh for the right to highlight like that she she did this because i think it's a bad i don't think it's a good tactic to uh for the right to highlight like that she she did this because i think it will backfire and it like there was a big um i don't know if this is that relevant but there was a influencer on twitter who posted a picture of uh her stepdaughter um and said something like you know kamala doesn't have any natural

children of her own uh and and like posted a picture of this young woman, and everyone was sort of angrily replying about how, why are you going after her daughter, et cetera. But that aside, Willie Brown came out and said Biden should step down. I don't know if anyone in DC is listening to Willie Brown at this point, but I thought that was kind of interesting. Well, I guess because the last piece here is, I mean, he's obviously a hardcore Democrat. He's obviously a huge kamala fan i mean we know that and uh

does it work in her favor to be the president going into this election i mean suddenly she's the incumbent uh first female president ever i don't know what that means i i think it could i mean i would be outraged. Would I be outraged? This isn't really the question. Is it better to have the deep state de facto in charge right now, or like a sort of, I mean, almost officially in charge at this point, because we know that Biden's not, or Kamala? You know, like, who do I trust more as the commander in chief? And I don't know.

I don't know the answer to that question but i think it's scary to think that i mean in some ways this whole fast swap of biden whatever hot swap has been kind of scary because it's shown how the power of the executive can be undermined pretty dramatically like yes i mean you know biden clearly didn't want to drop out and and his hand was forced yes absolutely there is a very scary authoritarian thing happening in the country right now and this is another example of it and it's a huge example and um i don't i get it i get And I get really... I had a conversation with a reporter yesterday, and he was really pressing me on democracy. He thinks that we are maybe anti-democracy. He wanted to know if I thought we should have a dictator. And I was like, what the fuck? What the fuck are you... Where did you get that? And it's because we like joke around about

shit and he was like picking up one of my jokes and being like well do you think this and he's like really scared and it's because he thinks that anybody who's not a biden supporter or anyone who's like and we haven't even like publicly endorsed trump or anything but he he's like he perceived they're very afraid of authoritarianism the left let's say and i just they're they're afraid of losing democracy and i look around and i'm like, what democracy? What democracy are you talking about? We're talking about, we're talking about trying to jail the front runner opposition candidate in the middle of an election that's still happening. position now on the left is seizing the courts, packing them with open partisans, and using that to legislate from the bench. That's one of their policy proposals now. And now you have this, this straight up coup in the party. And that's following years of evolution ideologically on really important things, ranging everywhere from freedom of speech to bodily autonomy, right?

We had coerced vaccination throughout the Biden years, where government workers were literally forced to get a vaccine. And if they didn't, they would lose their jobs. People were always like, well, they weren't forced. They could have lost their livelihood. You know, they could have sacrificed their ability to feed their kids. It wasn't being forced. They were forced.

They were forced to jab themselves with an experiment brought to you by pfizer you know that evolution was happening while they were making uh and now we're here in the election and all these other things are happening and you know they want to talk about they want to talk about january 6th which was to me a riot we had seen six months of rioting before that, which were absolutely deranged. It reminds me a lot of the fact right now. So in D.C., Wednesday, Netanyahu spoke and we had all of these. We joke around sometimes and call them the Hamas supporters. um i we joke around sometimes and call them the ahamas supporters these were literal hamas supporters waving hamas flags talking about scrawling hamas graffiti on our statues

and the liberty is there a liberty bell in dc by the way it said liberty bell but that's in philadelphia so what so what was that i think it's a replica that they put. So graffiti scrawled all over it, all the Hamas shit. Flag burning, okay? Flags have been ripped down and Palestinian flags were raised and there was burning flags. I'm trying not to focus on this too much because I think it's like of interesting about it, which is the question of, you know, everybody obviously rushing to the internet, getting mad about it, saying these people should be, there should be consequences. Kamala herself came out against all this stuff. Okay, but what are you going to do about it? And to me, I'm like, well, there's not really much you can do about it.

This is free speech. And I mean, the public defacing of things, of course, you can do something about that. You can stop them from doing that. If someone wants to bring a flag and burn it, I think that's disgusting, but they can do it, right? Here, it's a little bit complicated because they took the flag down for public property. So maybe they can get arrested for defacing public property or something. I don't know. I don't think the crime for just random public destruction is probably that high in Washington, DC. So it would be a stretch to me if

you were suddenly arresting somebody and jailing them for burning a flag but then i looked online and dude they're in story after story about people uh throughout like let's start with 2020 or the 2020 era the blm era um the proud boys dude going down for burning a BLM flag. Now there's some complicated, there are complications to the story. He, um, took the flag from a church. He, so it's already, he's, it's like, it's a theft of some kind. And, uh, and then he was caught with, I think, magazines or something in his car, which was, uh, some sort of an arms charge, but the actual charges against him that sent him to prison for five, or at least he was convicted. He was supposed to, I don't know,

I didn't follow the story very closely, but he was convicted for, the sentence was five months in prison. Included the destruction of private property. How many times in San Francisco, when someone breaks into a car, do they go to prison? Never? Zero times? Is it like only if you burn something from that car publicly, do you go to prison? Is it only if you burn a BLM flag? Because I think it's probably that. We see all of these kids who are facing jail time for defacing the rainbow crosswalk. And I saw another one that I have to look into because it was really crazy facing years of prison. I think it was in Illinois for burning a rainbow flag that was charged, I believe, as a hate crime. And so it's like, that's, we can't, I'm okay, burning the flag, free speech,

down, but it can't be only the American flag. Okay. And when it's not, that makes me feel like we are playing by a new set of rules. We all sort of intuitively know that and understand that on some level that these other people, leftists are in charge culturally and politically. And if you run afoul of them, really horrible things can happen to you. And it's like, oh, well, that's the law. You have to follow the law. I agree people should follow the law, but only one kind of person actually seems to receive consequences. The fact that she's just running for president and they're not even going to,

we're just supposed to not even talk about it. I tweeted about this the other day. I mean, I'm flooded with lefties and my mentions like, you're an idiot for not knowing that this is how politics, this is how the democratic nomination process works. They're pulling all the shit out of their ass. If you weren't so ignorant, you would know that this was totally normal. Really? Is it normal? Has there ever in our lifetime been a democratic candidate for president who was not voted for in a primary? Has that ever happened? Has that ever happened in our parents' lives? Our grandparent, when was the last time that that happened? I guess probably post-assassination um you would have had probably ford maybe would have counted did he even run it's like that's it's clearly a problem i think

it's just like clearly a huge problem i don't know how to get at it it's a it's a it's a danger i think that we're currently facing is this like this gradual slip into real authoritarianism. Yeah. And yet the other side will say the real danger to democracy and the real authoritarian thing is Project 2025, which is like something that Trump continues to disavow. Exactly. Firing bureaucrats is the real danger here, is it? I don't care about bureaucrats. I care about, do I care about democracy? Let's start with the fucking Democratic Party. Do they care about bureaucrats i care about do i care about democracy let's start with the fucking democratic party do they care about democracy when is the vote when is the vote when is that

happening um god damn you know who we got to bring in john coogan to talk about the battle of the billionaires dialing in from domestic bliss sunny pasadena, Domestic Bliss Coogan who just had or Coogan's wife who just had twins, you know he's got three kids now running around well I guess two are not running around yet but first of all congratulations on that. Thank you, thank you

and second of all thanks for joining us on the pod Coogan is here just for a segment today he is gonna help us navigate this escalating vc status war um along one specific dimension that i really want to um i really want to focus on which is uh the history of zenefits um which i think is about to become a very big part of the sort of ongoing escalating drama that you're watching unfold online um that i do think is mostly politically motivated but we can talk about

that in a second um first i think just sort of like it's a funny i mean i think it's funny i don't think they think it's funny i don't think i don't think that anyone at kosla thinks it's funny um i we got to talk about the battle of the billionaires so um vinod kosla uh i mean he's a sort of super trump deranged like very angry older gentleman who's also a famous investor and founder in the valley has a lot of these very high status um has a lot of friends uh and attracts a certain level of attention no matter what he says um you know no matter how stupid it is and uh what he came out with was um this idea of the global citizen he's been going on and on about the need to i guess support kamala now. He wants everybody to come together. Anyone who's not MAGA selfish or Trump or sort of a, anyone who is a never Trumper should come together,

support Kamala. He's not saying what her positions are. I don't think that she's decided what her positions are yet is probably what's going on there. But the thing that's, and I'm fine with that. I don't support kamala i really i don't i'm totally happy with it someone else who came out with one of those was um uh mark pinkus um and i thought that was sort of well stated he talked about moderation and he's going to support her until whatever blah blah blah he said in a thoughtful way i think it's like we're in a moment now when people need to voice their opinion they feel like very strongly about something and we're all getting a little amped up and whatever uh what i don't like about his is the nodes is um the way

he talked about the importance of being a global citizen a good global citizen um that's a concept that i don't believe is real and i think it's also like pretty dangerous concept for only americans to believe in the idea that you know we're not american citizens first but the rest of the world can be you know like kenyan first or uh i don't know whatever other country yet like australian first or uh certainly maybe the french i think the french kind of have french first down even though they are dealing with a lot of the same immigration problems that we are anyway i tweeted about it uh i did not quote the node i did not say the notes name but the note coastly quote

tweeted me and um and in so doing it was like you know it's a very sort of aggressive action and it's called me selfish and uh we got into it and we had a it was a little it was a brief back and forth um that absolutely blew up uh group chats were a blaze every person in tech had a sort of opinion about it and that's because not because of me though i do wonder why vinod was so stupid to lower himself and talk to someone like me online. But he did. And I will just say on that, you know, again, I was not looking for this. And it's like Vinod knocked on the door.

I answered the door. I'm always going to answer the door. I am incapable of not answering the door. Okay. That's why I'm in the seat that I'm in. That's why we're here. That's how Pirate Warriors exist. It's not because I'm like, I need to be really thoughtful about the fight. And, you know, like, it's just a very,

I can't help myself. So you all need to know that. For people listening who are maybe thinking about, like, should I say some shit to Mike Solana online? Should I quote tweet him? You can do it. I cannot control myself. Okay, I'm going to respond.

But the reason everyone got involved is because we're watching is this like very politicized, escalating, um, intratech war happening. And it's all over the question of Trump, people who are associated with Trump, or they seem to be associated with Trump versus the people who are never Trumpers. I think that you have people on the left,

very, very nervous because they feel like they've lost power for the first time ever in history in Silicon Valley. Now, Coogan, you wrote a piece for Pirate Wires that I think did a great job of adding some context to that. I'm not convinced that that's the case. I think that the evidence still clearly indicates that all of the money is on the side of the Democrats. I think especially now you're seeing that that's totally true. But the status piece is still really interesting.

Like the fact that David Sachs can talk about Trump and Chamath can talk about Trump and even Jason Calacanis can be like, I'm going to be a sort of both sides are making good points kind of guy right now about Trump. That is really threatening to people. And the way that bubbled over, which is a much more interesting drama than the battle of the billionaires, was

all on the question of, well, it started with the question of a coup. David Sachs, tweeting about politics, as per usual, references the democratic coup that unseated Joe Biden and placed in Kamala, which I will say is very interesting that nobody voted for this woman and she's running for president. Don't know how it happened, but, you know, just putting that out there. We can maybe discuss it later. He's like, that's a coup. And he goes off in his david saxian way well parker conrad quote tweets him and he says something along the lines of like this man knows

about coups now what parker conrad is referencing is is the zenefits story parker's company that um ended with him being unseated and david saxacks became ceo it was huge drama john's going to break it down in just one more second because i want to add one final piece of context to this which is paul graham responded uh paul graham who is also a never trumper um who has also been sort of very vocal on the question of politics who um you know is pro the uh the presidential um the the trump uh prosecution um he is definitely in people's mentions talking about this he's been making sort of lots of little comments um clearly frustrated about the the this magazine that's happening in silicon valley uh he backs up parker um sort of makes it more explicit

what he's talking about which is you know the idea that david sacks stole his company he's saying um and says that david um he was talking paul's always talking to his friends he's always talking to founders and one of the founders he was talking to said david sacks is there a more evil person in silicon valley we couldn't think of one um david then quote tweets that uh and and now david's effort david is a whole long thing jamath's piling on we're going to talk about it on the all-in pod which is happening today so you guys should all check that out because i think it's going to be absolutely like a nuclear bomb promising receipts david receipts. David Sachs, in his clapback to Paul, while breaking down

stuff about Zenefits, which John's going to tell us the whole story in a second, he also includes one really final important piece, which is the rumor that during the outbreak of war in Israel, when everybody sort of

lost their mind, some people still have, that are really, really animated about this issue. Paul, apparently, possibly, allegedly reached out to the general partners of more than one major venture capital firm. firm one of the like we're talking about the top firms in silicon valley and told the gp to fire junior partners who were vocally supportive of israel um it could be more than that i'm not entirely sure why he allegedly reached out and asked these people to fire them it could be like because of conversations that he himself had with them online. But that is now, I would say, the rumor circulating. David Sachs went directly for it, said, I'm evil, what is that? And now it's just sort of evolving drama. And I have a lot of thoughts about it, why it's happening. I know you guys do as well. But first, the piece that I think is going to kind of become central throughout

the rest of the week, probably, is the zenefits thing um what are people talking about when they reference that uh the coup at zenefits and like what is the real history between parker and and sax and why does it matter and how do you protect your company from that kind of thing if you're a founder uh coogan thank you for coming i know that was a long intro, but there's a lot here. Take it away. Yeah. I mean, the Parker Conrad Zenevitz story is potentially the greatest comeback story in Silicon Valley history. It's definitely up there. It's one of my favorite stories. Parker grew up in New York, went to Harvard, wrote for the Crimson, and then moves out to Silicon Valley, starts one company that doesn't go that well. And then finally, while he's struggling to get the first company working,

interestingly, that first company actually went on and did well after he left. And there was actually an earlier coup where his co-founder's parents came in and said, hey, this business needs money. We'll bridge it if you get rid of Parker. It was a chaotic situation. But in that experience, he's trying to make payroll. He's trying to pay his employees and give them health benefits. And he can't figure it out. He has so many different forms to fill out. It's a hassle. And so the classic kind of YC story of like, solve a problem that you intimately know, a problem that you're having. He wants to found a new company that's focused on HR software. So pay your employees, give them healthcare. And he calls it Zenefits. He gets

into YC and very quickly becomes the fastest growing software company of all time. And a lot of that was due to the fact that they had this very clever business model where they would give you the software for free. And when you clicked, I want this healthcare plan, they would get the commission as if they were a healthcare sales person, basically, which is a ton of money because these healthcare plans, like if you're on a healthcare plan, your company might be paying a thousand dollars a month for that, something like that. Um, and so a thousand dollars a month for years and years and years, the commission pulls forward and it's thousands or tens of thousands of dollars.

So Zenefits was just racking these up. It was like an incredible business model. And so they were just piling venture dollars into hiring salespeople, scaling really, really quickly. Tons of money comes in. They very quickly go from a YC company. In two years, they were worth like billions. I was actually using, I used Zenefits at the time. It was very helpful. It was actually pretty good software. I also used the same lawyer as them.

And so I was doing a Series A at the time. It was taking us forever. And I was talking to the counsel who did the Zenefits deal and was like, they raised $500 million. It must have taken months to get that across the finish line. He was like, they raised 500 million. It must have taken months to get that across the finish line. He was like, oh no, it goes faster when it's so big and everyone just wants to put their money in. So everything was just scaling super, super fast. And of course, things start breaking. And so then there's a series of reporting that comes out. Interestingly, it started with BuzzFeed, which was not really known for their investigative journalism.

But eventually, this guy, Ralph Winkler, at The Wall Street Journal, takes over and writes the definitive investigative journalism pieces. There's allegations of using a tool to cheat these state licensing exams. There's a general bro culture. There's a lot of bro-topia type criticism around them it's like they had probably a thousand sales guys maybe not a thousand but like they had like a lot of sales guys in an office in phoenix arizona these guys stories about partying yeah i remember stories about people having sex in the stairwells yes and so yeah that was the one that i think really blew up which i was by, by the way, highly in favor of.

I was like, come on, let them live. And they lived. I thought we were pro-natalists. I thought we were pro-natalists. Yeah, and you want to know what happened? They punished him for that. And a few years later, population decline. Exactly.

That's where it started, for sure. But the funny thing is that that was potentially fake news because they were in a building with a lot of other companies. And what happened was the landlord sent out an email saying, hey, we found a condom wrapper in the stairwell. They sent it out to all the tenants. Okay, Karen. But because Zenefits was like, okay, the eye is on us. We need to send out an email to our employees saying like look it could have been anyone in this building

But it can't be a zenefits employee and then that became the story So even though they were like one of ten companies that could have been responsible They they took all the fire because no one knows who the other companies were as like law firm or you know Whatever marketing firm and so all of this culminates with like immense pressure on Parker because there's just so many hit piece after hit piece after hit piece. And so the investors come in and David Sachs had come in as chief operating officer and he was an amazing get for Zenefits.

And Parker's on record at the time saying, I'm the luckiest CEO ever. I have this God tier operator on my team because David Sachs is PayPal mafia. He'd started Yammer and sold it to another B2B software company that he'd sold to Microsoft for a billion dollars. And then he was a huge investor. And it was like, it was crazy that he was going back in the arena

and actually working for a company. But everyone thought Zenefits was going to be incredible. And the guy who led the deal at Andreessen, this guy, Lars Dalgard, doesn't work there anymore. He had started a very similar company called in the HR IS space called Success Factors, and he sold it for $3 billion. And so Lars was looking at this and was like, this is the same business.

I've seen this playbook before. When it works, just pour fuel on the fire. And so all of these, all the arrows were pointing in the same direction, just pour fuel on the fire. And so all of these, like, you know, all the arrows were pointing in the same direction, like just push, push, push. But then there's this question about, oh, Parker, you know, there's all this scrutiny. Can we push him out? And they went, wait, pause. There was, we're not an SACS alleges there's some kind of sec. Yeah. So, so during this time, there were a number of fines that came from state and local agencies. Um,

and I, I, I actually haven't seen the SEC one that he's talking about, but Parker very clearly wasn't normally when there's like an SEC thing, you know, like Screlly can never run a hedge fund again because the SEC said like your band, same thing with,

uh, Henry blog, it, the founder of business insider he can never trade stocks again or run a fund because the sec like sanctioned him um and i think uh theranos elizabeth home same thing clearly that's not the case with parker because he's running the exact same company he started rippling and he grew rippling bigger than zenefits ever was so you know like clearly like the SEC fine, most of these fines, when I looked into them, I mean, they were speeding tickets. Like it was like 50 K, which sounds like a lot to like normal

people. But like when you have $500 million in your bank account, because you're one of the fastest growing startups in history, it's like, yeah, you probably shouldn't be breaking the law. You should clean up your act. Like don't get fines. But at the end of the day, 50 K for like making a mistake on a form or doing something, it's not that big of a deal. This stuff does happen. Even Apple pays fines. Facebook has paid fines.

Big, successful... A couple of fines does not preclude you from building a solid business model. And clearly, Parker knew something that everyone else didn't, which is this concept of, we shouldn't just be doing payroll or just be doing HR. We need to do it all. And so that's what he did when he came back with, with rippling. He kind of built the, the, the vision that he had, which was this compound startup that does a little bit of everything instead of just being focused on one thing.

Saks when he took over was like, no, we don't need to be doing too many things. That's too complicated. We need to focus on just one really strong execution, one thing, healthcare and payroll or whatever. And we saw the two companies diverge. Rippling started growing, growing, growing, and has now been on a tear. And Rippling wound up or Zenefits wound up selling for kind of pennies on the dollar. It was not a very good outcome. And so I think Parker feels very vindicated at this point. I think the market has really vindicated Parker, at least as an operator of a healthcare B2B SaaS company. Not to say anything about political or is investing.

I mean, Saks has a bunch of great accolades as well. But in terms of running this type of company, Parker clearly saw something that no one else did. And I think that's what exactly happened, though. Let's let's I want to focus on how Parker lost his job. Yeah, I mean, I think it was just like immense pressure. David's company was tough. Yeah.

Yeah. So David Sachs is already there as the CEO. And Sachs was always, you know, he'd been the CEO of a large startup before that had sold. He was ready for that role. And I think, you know, it made a lot of sense. You're in a crisis. Let the more advanced, let the adults take over. Of course, we now know that that almost never works unless they're really, really far along.

When you're in those first few years, having the founder mentality, having the founder drive things is so important. And that's what wound up playing out. But yeah, I mean, at the time, the investors kind of asked him to take a leave of absence and then kind of pushed him to the side. And then there was a big, the first big debate. So as Parker tells it, he was okay with the idea of like, look, yeah, there is a ton of pressure. Let's let David take over for a little bit. Um, but then he was like, you know, if I'm out, I'm out, I'm going to go start another company. I want to, I want a fresh start. And then the real boiling point, I think as, at least as he tells it is that, is that they had communications that were agreed on, like what the press release was going to say. And the original press release that Parker had kind of approved said, you know, we thank Parker Conrad for his service. Like he's been great. Like we're excited for this new, new era of

leadership, like nothing negative. And then Parker claims that David switched out the press release the last second and made it much more negative towards Parker. And that's something that Parker's basically never forgiven and keeps bringing up on podcasts when he talks about it. So your sense is that actually it could have been... The transition could have happened and not been quite so bitter had maybe... Absolutely. You little things change at the end. It wasn't even necessarily that Parker was leaving. absolutely you little things change at the end it wasn't even necessarily that parker was leaving yeah yeah absolutely i mean like we know that there are ways to weather these storms we've seen it with brian armstrong we've seen it with zuck we've seen it with you know plenty of

entrepreneurs that we love and have made it through the ringer of all the negative press you just need everyone on your team really aligned and backing you from start to finish. And the problem is that in this case, they broke rank and all the investors were like, hey, we're the big shots. You're this new guy. You've only been in Silicon Valley a year or two. You're young.

Yeah, it's cool what you built. You clearly found a really interesting business model, but we can take it from here. They clearly couldn't have taken it from there. And Parker really did have something special, which is fascinating. I, yeah,

this is, um, this is in an era of, I mean, Travis Kalanick lost his company in a similar way and, or it feels like similar to me, um, with a media pile on that leads to an opening for um a transition let's

let's call it um and i think it's really sad when things break down this way i think with brian armstrong what you saw was the industry defending him they were like we're not doing this again which was interesting. Man, this one's tough. This whole entire controversy is really tough, and it's going to get a lot tougher, I think, as the next week moves on. Obviously, John, you and I work at Founders Fund. Founders Fund's invested in Parker's new company. I like Parker.

David Sachs has been around forever. He's one of Petereter's oldest friends like love david sacks um this is friendly fire i like all these guys pg pg battle both of them i don't think that that is they're not friendly for us i mean we're kind of we're not involved in this founders by the way never fired a founder never will um but this stuff is like definitely deep wounds it is super bitter it is now being i think capitalized on by people for political purposes and i think the thing that's important to keep in mind right now is uh it's falling along very obviously like the drama that we're watching online unfolds crazily on on x where people

do it's crazy to see like well so sanjana you had a good take on that and we'll get to that in a second um it's straight up like paul is voting he's not voting for trump he's anti-trump parker is anti-trump parker has been in my mentions talking i don't want to get too much into that because i would like to actually talk to parker about some of this stuff one-on-one i don't want to get too much into that because i would like to actually talk to parker about some of this stuff one-on-one i don't want him to feel like i'm going after him publicly in this way but uh he's definitely made it clear online that he has a problem with trump um sax is donating to trump like venoad is a never trumper who's donating to kamala harris like all of them are clearly divided not really divided. They're divided along political lines.

There's this increasingly hostile political war happening in Silicon Valley that now the media is about to amplify. They're circling around it. I think that Sachs definitely is going to become the villain in this story because Sachs is a huge funder of Donald Trump and most of the press hates Donald Trump. So I think that you're probably going to see, it's going to be very in this story because sax is a huge funder of donald trump and most of the press hates donald trump so i think that you're probably going to see it's going to be very interesting because the press really spent a lot of years or at least one very decisive year totally demonizing parker and doing everything it possibly could to destroy his company and now in about five minutes you're going to see them turn him into a hero that was destroyed by david sax i think that's the story

that's going to happen yeah i, I think you're right. That fucking pisses me off. And I really hope that... I know it's hard because everyone's pissed at everyone right now. This is what happens in every election cycle. This one happens to be way crazier than most by prediction of a boring election. Totally wrong. This one is very, very bitter. I think that you have both sides feeling like the other side is actually authoritarian, actually wants to destroy them. It's going to get worse, I think. I know it's hard to see through that, but the press manipulation that's coming, man, I wish that people could just lock it up and see that for what it is and resist it,

but I don't know that they will be able to. Okay. I have one question and then I got to run. Do you... How do you think about... I mean, you talked to a lot of founders. How do you think founders should think about positioning their political ideology? I've talked to some people about like being minimally viably political in the sense that like, look, if there's an existential to your business, if there's an existential risk to your business, yeah, you probably got to go and support that political issue one way or another. But you shouldn't just be out there cheering for one side or the other because you're basically just creating landmines that you could step on later. How do you think founders...

I don't think you should be... Yes. I don't think that you should be... People are always like, how do I be more open about my opinions? And I'm like, fucking do not do it. Why would you be talking about politics online unless it's part of what you're doing, unless there's a benefit. If you cannot discern a benefit from that, then you should not be doing it. I think there is a benefit in being really political in the way that Brian Armstrong really paved the way forward on which is just like i will be highly political on topics related to to my business only um for founders i think for vcs it's very different because vcs have a much easier job and um they are not going to be losing customers because they're just money and people want that um but for everybody else it's much more dangerous there's much more risk to the press i i would i

would probably um i would probably avoid that. And I would definitely select venture capitalists. When you're looking for VCs, you should always be asking them like, what founders have you fired and what was the reason? I think that's a pretty important question to ask always. And I think it's one that people have lost sight of somehow, which is crazy because we've seen these really high profile ones. I mean, I still think about Travis Kalanick and how Gurley is just has been canonized as this incredible person. Did you see Emile Michael in the replies? Oh, yes.

Yeah. Emile Michael is like, whoa, like, let's not go after Saks. Let's go after. Let's keep the focus. He's like, we got to stay focused on the real enemy here. Yeah, exactly. The fact that people just are like, oh, that's a celebrated guy, Gurley,

after what he did there is, that's gnarly. I mean, founders need to be just aware that this is always a dynamic and you're always at risk. Coogan, thank you for joining. Sajid, Riley, we're going to keep this one up, but I'll see you later, man. See you later. Bye. So I want to carry on before we get to the next segment

on the battle of the billionaires thing. And Sanjay, I want to start with you. You had a thought about just the nature of it all happening on Twitter in general that I thought was pretty funny. Yeah, I mean, I... So I'll admit I have not been following this billionaire drama nearly as long as you guys have. But I do think it's interesting that this is on the heels of Biden surprise announcing his departure or the fact that he's not pursuing the nomination on X, apparently a minute before his senior advisors found out.

And now you've got this feud happening in live time that you can only find on X as well. And so to me, it's just like X in some ways is like the greatest sort of entertainment on earth. I mean, it's also we said at one point, like it's also kind of this toxic gas station, like waste dump where you're sort of constantly inundated with insane, potentially AI-generated, brain-cell-killing content. So it's certainly not like everything you see on X is edifying or even entertaining. But I do think it's actually a big credit to the platform that this kind of stuff is happening on it and that it's only happening on it.

And Elon has, I think, repeatedly said in interviews that really X is kind of the only platform that gives you kind of direct access to some of the most powerful people in the world and that like it's one of the few platforms where you can potentially as a nobody sort of reach out to these people and get their attention and to me this this kind of lends uh credence to it um but i was i mean sort of getting into the specifics of the the conflict itself i was a little bit confused as to why paul graham got into the uh the arena in the first place i don't know mike if you could speak to that a bit um i think that he is completely trump deranged in a way that is dangerous to his own reputation at this point, because it's dragging him into conflicts like this, where he really does not seem to have a leg to stand on when it comes to like, really, I think, listen, I don't know.

I don't know what's going to come out about him trying to get people fired. I don't know what's going to come out about him trying to get people fired. But for the sort of cancel culture guy who's been beating the drum on that forever, him, I mean, like, and I've done it too, right? But I've never tried to get someone fired. Okay. I'm not calling up VCs and saying, you got to get rid of this guy who I disagree with about Palestine on Twitter. You got to kick him out of your fund.

That's, that's, again, I don't,'t listen i hadn't seen the emails i i have trying to get what to say here because i feel bad i think why commentator is going to get caught up in this um and i love those guys i they had nothing to do with what paul has or has not been using them as a bargaining tool for potentially. My sense is that he's been, well, again, I don't listen. More noise is going to come out. I don't want to preemptively say anything that I don't know for sure. I think this is too sensitive of a subject. But I do know that these rumors have been around for a while.

And they're more than rumors. And the fact that Paul would go after David like this, of course, this was going to come out. Of course it was going to be used against him. You cannot be calling someone evil when you have skeletons in your closet like this. And probably you shouldn't be doing it anyway. I mean, we're all in the same space. We're all in the same field. It's really immature. And again, it's sort of contra his brand. He's supposed to be the thoughtful guy, the anti-cancel culture guy, the let's have a polite discussion guy. I don't want any spicy language kind of guy. Even the way he talks about writing, which is so boring. I'm so tired. I'm going to say one pointed thing about Paul Graham,

which is his advice on writing, do not listen to it. I'm like Kamala Harris right now. Do not come. Do not come. I'm going to come. Okay. Stay the fuck away from Paul Graham's advice on writing. If you want to be an adequate, if you want to be an adequate writer, if you want to be able to just write a coherent email that gets the point across, if that's your goal in writing, then I think, I think Paul Graham's advice, which is totally stripped down to the bare bones, is perfectly fine. In terms of style, what he's talking about is not his. He's cribbing from Hemingway. And Hemingway does it with a kind of elegance that I've not seen, let's say, other contemporary writers do. If your goal is to be

a great writer, you need to write with your entire being. This is a longer conversation we can all have later, but you need to be able to bring people into your world and make them feel what you're feeling and then take them on a journey. And he does not do that. He is an adequate writer and he's a successful writer in that he's used writing to become very popular in Silicon Valley. And he's very, you know, clearly expressed, I think, very several interesting opinions and points and things like this throughout his career. But broadly, no, not into his advice on writing. And I think that his Trump derangement has really led him astray here and led him into a battle that he can't win.

Trump derangement has really led him astray here and led him into a battle that he can't win. And, um, maybe he doesn't care. I mean, I think he lives in England now in a castle somewhere. Uh, he's not super plugged into tech. I think he likes to pretend that he still is. I think it probably hurts him on some level that the status has shifted. Uh, and I think all of this, the node stuff for sure. Um, uh, we saw this previously with the node targeting the all-in guys. Now we see Paul Graham going after them. Um, and, uh, I, I think, and even with, even with, honestly, I don't mean to drag myself into it, but even with Vinod sort of targeting me in the way that he did, um, you know, who am I? Um, I'll tell you who I am. I'm someone who gets attention on Twitter. And I think he's seeing that very, and very stupidly be being sort of jealous of it,

which is so embarrassing for a billionaire famous investor. Like, dude, you know who's not on Twitter? Peter Thiel. Okay. There's a reason for that because it's sort of embarrassing to be here. Like, why are you getting in these fights? And I think that most of what's happening with those guys versus especially the all-in guys I think that most of what's happening with those guys versus especially the all-in guys is a response to the shifting status right now and a feeling of just professional jealousy and jealousy more broadly. And I think it's getting everybody into these really stupid arguments. And I think they're going to escalate because the election is only going to get more bitter, right? It's like this is – it's never this bad in July.

This one is getting just really, really really really bitter i mean every single side is saying the other side wants to kill them so uh i don't know i don't remember ever everyone always says you know this election is the most important election in history or whatever but i've never seen an election be so um jaded before where and hateful before and um it's just it feels very dark uh i guess maybe part of that is because in the last elections you weren't allowed to say that you liked trump um and so at least in the silicon valley one in the silicon valley context certainly what happened to peter in 2016 was absolutely disgusting and despicable, and everybody was a coward back then. And so we didn't see the bitterness because nobody was talking about these things in public. People were just being silent. I think maybe four years ago was a little bit of the same. But yeah, that's kind of roughly what I think about the Battle of the Billionaires. Riley, last thoughts? last thoughts yeah i agree with sanjana it's just surprising to see it all being aired out publicly like this and i think i sort of realized like x is sort of the court of public opinion so in that way it sort of makes sense if you want people to get on your side it makes sense to lay out your

opinion publicly but i guess i'm very grateful for that because as a result i got to enjoy this nice little like billionaire reality tv show so i say keep it up crazy story uh last week it's somehow and it's i mean the really crazy thing about it is that it is like the third craziest story of the last 10 days or whatever um friday last friday the whole world just sort of turns off. There is a major CrowdStrike glitch that takes down banks, sort of customer-facing stores across the country, and crucially, airlines, for not just a few hours, but in some cases, literally days. I was on my way to New Jersey to visit my family, or I was supposed to be, and the flight was canceled. Could not get a new flight until the following Tuesday, and I ended up canceling it. I had colleagues from Founders Fund stranded in Miami for literally days. And I want to talk about sort of how that happened. I want to talk about sort of how that happened. I want to talk about the glitch itself. I want to talk about, well, I'll let Sanjana take it away in a second.

There's an interesting EU connection here that really needs to be addressed. But first and foremost, what I want to talk about is how crazy it was that it barely made the news. want to talk about is how crazy it was that it barely made the news. This is the largest IT failure in, I think, human history, certainly in American history. I can't imagine. I don't know what you count as IT, right? If the aqueducts went down or something, maybe that would count. I don't know. But I'm pretty sure in human history, this was the largest IT failure. We're talking about billions and billions and billions in damages. And people immobilized for days and days. And we're just sort of used to it. And that was my main takeaway from it was, I originally on Friday before it really started evolving, I kind of, I had a brief take on it.

I was kind of flippant. And then over the weekend, when the reality of it set in, I realized, man, I'm being part of the problem right now. This isn't really funny. This is a failure, once again, of our capacity to build and do things in this world. And it extends not only throughout the government, which you expect, but the private sector. This would not have been acceptable 10 or 20 years ago. And in fact, I was thinking back to the 1965, I think it was 65 or 67, the blackouts throughout the Northeast. My mom still talks about those. That was a huge, huge, huge, huge deal for the boomers. This was a 13, I think a 13-hour blackout and books were written about it. People still, there were documentaries. It was a huge, huge deal. There are blackouts in California constantly now. Nobody talks about it. And I think that we've internalized that failure to build, that inability to build, and that's the thing that scares me. Saj, I would love you to kind of break down what happened there before you get into the actual glitch and then the EU Connect. if you had any thoughts about any of this, you can also share, feel free. I mean, just very high level in terms of, uh,

why most people probably won't remember this. I just feel like it's information overload. Like we, we have this constant never ending feed of content, um, and, you know, new trending topics sort of every second, it seems. And so it's just, I feel like mentally we're not equipped to, I mean, who's, are people still in their day-to-day lives talking about the assassination attempt? Maybe. But I feel anecdotally, like a lot of people are now, now we're talking about Kamala,

we're talking about Brat, whatever. But like, it just like um information is moving so quickly that we're not actually able to uh give things the attention and time they need to like cement in our minds and sort of form core memories it's a little bit scary honestly that's interesting that piece right that would the inability to form the memories themselves. Yeah. We've all touched on pieces of this, I think, in our work at Pirate Wires. It does feel like we, like the last 10 years are a blur.

I mean, the last five years certainly are a blur. And I think it has to do with the internet. The nature of the medium itself has gotten us to this point where obviously the digital record is totally impermanent super ephemeral it changes constantly uh we saw a bit of this where do we see oh we've been seeing this with kamala as um as i mean there's a soft this is a softer version but i mean sometimes you know entries and dictionaries and things just straight up change magically in

front of you as words become controversial but But in the case of Kamala, you're seeing people retroactively, Axios, for example, going back into old reporting and saying on the question of the border czar, right? They said recently, this week, she was not a border czar. That never happened. This is a Republican talking point. That's a piece of reporting from Axios. Not only did Axios report that she was a border czar, that exact phrase being used by Axios reporting, the same writer is covering this in a totally different way. As outrageous as that is, the most outrageous part was that Axios finally succumbed to outrage and did an editor's note. And the editor's note was not on the new piece of reporting to say, hey, oops, yes, she was charged with authority over the

border or certainly biden had a whole big song and a dance about how she was going to be in charge of the border they corrected the original reporting and said that she was never a border czar um this is just the culture now is is like separate from even the medium and i think you know the culture has followed the medium it's this ephemeral sort of anything goes, we just shape things based on our whims. I think Trump was early to sort of understanding this. That's certainly his political style. And everyone does it now. And it is super maddening. And it's a kind of gaslighting constantly every day. And it makes you feel like you're going crazy, which is maybe why so many people clock out. But as you mentioned, Sajna, it is interesting that

the memories cannot be formed. They can't even be held. You're right. Like the assassination. That was a week ago, the attempted assassination. It's like, it's not a thing that people talk about. Yeah. I mean, to get into some of the specifics on exactly what happened, and I'm reading from Brandon's notes, so forgive me if there's any issues in this. But basically, it seems like this all came down to one software update that CrowdStrike pushed, which affected around 8.5 million Windows-based computers to crash. They were all showing this blue screen of death, apparently. And CrowdStrike is this massive cybersecurity company that has something close to 30,000 customers worldwide.

And it was this one software update. And I guess one of the reasons why it was so hard to fix is that it required someone physically sort of enter some information into the computer and reboot it and all this stuff. So this all had to be done kind of manually. And there's an interesting component to this story where Microsoft's chief communications officer came out and kind of suggested that, you know, obviously the immediate cause of this was the software, the sort of buggy software update from CrowdStrike. But he suggested that the reason, the sort of second order reason was because of EU regulation from 2009 which I guess had required that Microsoft give CrowdStrike or maybe sort of like broadly third-party cyber security

that it worked with kernel access over its software. And kernel access, I guess, basically means that the software has the same access to, or the third party has the same access to the software as Microsoft does. And so this somehow explains how this one software update, buggy software update from a third party, had such an extensive catastrophic effect on Windows systems. And so it's a kind of interesting little caveat here. Another reason to be mad at the EU for regulating something that it shouldn't be regulating. Basically, yeah.

You know what? Okay, so CrowdStrike, I i mean what is left to talk about this other than it was a disaster people forgot about it riley where were you in the great air blackout of 2024 so i was i was flying back from la this weekend first flight was canceled second flight like delayed so much i almost like missed my connection and like i just remember thinking to myself like air travel did not used to always be like this like things used to work in this country and yeah i agree it's it's just like been a general stagnation like that has like permeated through so much of society specifically our infrastructure um and if i was almost stranded in lax because of the eu there's something deeply

wrong with that i that hurts me to my core yo europe's i mean europe's awesome but brussels sucks i want to tell me the um you've been working on a piece kind of breaking down all the various ways they've been fucking with us i would love you to just kind of like trace through that a little bit and then i want to talk a little bit just for a moment cap this episode off on uh on some of the reaction that we're seeing from tech yeah i mean we have a piece out i think it's coming out today hopefully um on basically how eu vampire regulators have been sucking the blood of american big tech companies for about a decade now um and i guess longer indirectly but basically um europe has a number of regulations related to data privacy and competition that in some cases seem to explicitly target big American tech companies and kind of, if not be designed to, their kind of overall effect is to basically siphon massive amounts of money, billions of euros from these

companies for non-compliance. So the one that most people are familiar with is GDPR, which is this general data protection regulation that was passed in 2016. 84% of the amount of fines has been levied at American companies. So they've levied thousands of fines but american companies have paid uh 84 of them because america has the biggest tech companies in the world um so america's paid at this point around 3.8 billion euros in fines of which meta alone has paid over 2 billion um in a couple of fines and so this is money that basically, it's a little bit complicated to figure out exactly where it goes, but in many cases,

it seems to go back to the country that fined the company. So Ireland hit meta with an over a billion euro fine. And it looks like some of that money probably went to like Irish healthcare or whatever. So they have that GDPR. But what's really pretty scary is their new regulations, the Digital Market and Digital Services Act, which have just come into effect.

They were passed, I think, in 2022 or 23. But the compliance deadline was in March. And these explicitly seem to target American companies. So the DMA digital markets act is this anti-competition targeting brands that they think are anti-competitive. So it targets six companies. All but one is American. So ByteDance is the only non-American, the rest, Apple,

Amazon, Microsoft, Meta are, are American. And then the Digital Services Act targets very large online platforms or VLOPs, which seems to be an EU neologism that they've come up with, mainly American companies, some Chinese companies in there. But these new regulations allow them to impose fines of up to 10% of a company's global annual turnover.

So that's the DMA. The DSA is up to 6%. But the EU has already begun weaponizing this. So their compliance deadline was in March. This sort of vast new set of regulations the companies have to scramble and hire lawyers to get into compliance with uh and then in june they announced that apple could be fined up to 38 billion dollars uh which is around 20 of its net annual income it looks like um to uh unless unless they adapt to the new regulations and similarly threatened Meta a few days ago, I think, with a fine.

And now, of course, the thing that brought a lot of this to our attention was the EU commissioner, when it was Terry Breton or whatever, saying that... The weird face, the frog-looking face. Yeah, saying, you know, when it was Terry Breton or whatever. Oh yeah. The weird face, like the like frog looking face. Yeah. I'm saying, you know,

we're going to slap daily fines on X because their new sort of policies around blue checks for premium users violates the DSA. So they're threatening daily fines effects. So that's kind of where we're at in the landscape. Yeah. You've seen some other, so separate from that, now you have a handful of African countries that have jumped in as well.

And they're like, we're going to sue you too. And we want money. We're fining you. Send us $200 million to Meta. Recently got one. I think, listen to the question of why they're doing this. It's clearly they just want money. And that's, I think, certainly where

it started. To do that, they have to justify it with things like, oh, these companies are anti-competitive. They're anti-private competitive with who, first of all, Europe doesn't build tech companies. So who has an unfair advantage in Europe? Show me the company, and then we can have a conversation about that. But I think they somewhere along the lines have come to believe some of the shit they're saying which is why they're not backing down um but the interesting term that we're finally seeing since god knows our own government is not fighting back on behalf of our companies which are being clearly targeted uh unfairly by europe these are just, it's easy trade policy for me is to retaliate back,

to strike back, to say, no, we need a fair, balanced kind of set of rules here. Our government will never do it. I think maybe Trump would do something like this if he gets just in his gum, if it sticks in his craw.

Certainly Biden wouldn't. I mean, he's trying to, Lena Khan is trying to dismantle our companies herself. They don't care about our our industry um but you've seen tech doing a little bit more so two things came up recently that i thought were interesting one is more broad um in that it's a little more global and we've talked about it a little bit before which is the media stuff so you see these efforts in places like australia canada UK, I believe, and certainly Europe more generally is talking about this, California tribe, but I don't think that's going to happen,

to force Meta to pay publishers per click, local news publishers and things like this. Meta's response, which is, I mean, it's crazy, right? It's traffic for you, first of all, and it's like a gift. You're welcome. They like no you have to you have to pay us because you're robbing our content creators or whatever meanwhile it's like the most popular shit online is just dumb people saying things for free it's random influencers it's not the i don't know uh what is a funny the timbuk2 chronicle or something um it's mattis is shutting off. Mark's like, no, I'm just not doing news links anymore. So he shut them off in places like Canada and Europe.

And of course they blame that. They're like, that's the reason that we don't know that there's like a forest fire happening or something. It's irrelevant. Mark doesn't care. He's playing hardball, which I love to see. He's got that like sick gold chain. He's got the excellent hair now.

If he could grow a beard, I think he would. That would look great. I hope he can. He should look into a transplant or something. That's got the excellent hair now. If he could grow a beard, I think he would, that would look great. I hope he can. He should look into a transplant or something. That's the next step for him for sure. But he's fighting back. He did it in another way recently. That was,

I think even more important. One of the weird E rules targeted AI famously fraud guy said, you know, we were the first, it was, he, I think it's still pinned his tweet that said, it was a pie chart and it's uh

all of the uh blue is the eu and then yellow is like every other country in the world and the meme was just um countries that have successfully passed ai regulation and it was a huge blue circle for the eu and he was super proud of this um coming from the continent where there are no relevant ai comments people keep talking about this one in France. We'll see. Mistral, I believe. He passes regulation that makes it really, really difficult for Meta's new model to operate abroad. And what do they do? They just don't ship it to Europe rather than deal with the regulation. And so now you're starting to see these companies fight back on their own and box themselves out of Europe. I think that if they don't back down on the regulation, this has to happen more broadly.

Every company is going to have to do this. They're not going to be able to operate there. You can't, there's no way Apple is just going to send, maybe, I just, it seems really shocking to me that Apple would just send $30 billion to Brussels. And it's not tenable if they do it. And obviously, this is why the African countries are following suit. They're like, fuck, there's just free money on the table. Why wouldn't big techs just going to hand us a paycheck for crying about something publicly and saying, I don't know, you're like stealing our data or something.

We're doing that. And it's sort of rational. If you're a foreign country and you don't have any tech industry at all to speak of, why not try and get a little paycheck from these guys? They've got to say no. And once they say no, we'll see what happens in the countryside. Does the EU just shut all these companies out and plummet its continent to the dark ages? Because God knows they're not going to be building any companies of their own, or do they end up just letting Chinese companies in after they burn the bridge with the US, which would be really worst case scenario for them. I understand the

impulse to want your own companies, but they just don't build them. So why are they doing this? It's a game of chicken. Where do you think it ends? Do you think they back down? Do you think big tech backs down? I think there's probably a middle ground. I mean, Meta is not releasing its new model in the EU yet. And Apple's not releasing its Apple intelligence in the EU either. And I think my sense is the regulators have gotten so used to just saying, okay, comply with this insane, you know, convoluted list of regulations. And they've just, for so long, assumed that these companies are going to hire the lawyers and then implement the changes that are often very costly

and comply. And now if they see that companies are just going to pull out, I wonder if... I would think that they would have to moderate their stance. Because I don't think it would be ideal either for companies like Meta or or apple to lose the european market um which is you know a pretty big market of people um but i i thought you solana had an interesting take uh on twitter about i don't know if this was related to the nigeria finding x but that like it is interesting to think that we've lived in this time of pretty, like where everyone's kind of had access to the internet globally and that we've all shared this kind of increasingly insane, untenable, global town square with each other. And I do wonder if that paradigm is coming to an end and sort of see parallels to what you were talking about with Jack Dorsey a few months ago about kind of decentralized social media platforms. I do wonder if like, we're entering a time where the tech you have access to,

you know, even online in the US looks a lot different than what you have access to in Europe and China. I think that with these serious fines on the table to the point where it would impact the businesses dramatically, they have to say no. And then it comes down to what the other countries will do. I think there is something in a country's interest to have its own industry, its own tech industry. The question is if they can build it or not. I don't know. They can't be that stupid like i mean i'm sure they can build a social media company someone can over there will they work at it you know do they want to work we'll see but yeah i think the decentralization is the future of these things at least into big markets i see there being you know like a probably north south american like like all of north and south america maybe share a market um i think africa backs down and probably is a part of that market and then dips maybe into if it wants to i think the europeans maybe get their own market um certainly china already has its own market and that's the other question is like do you join are you in china's

market are you the american market um i don't see i don't but i do think the open internet is kind of unfortunately over and it was chaotic and crazy and wondrous and horrifying and exciting and not normal and not tenable and like everything else in our country kind of maps to the nationalist globalist conversation and um the increasing uh what appears to be increasingly the fragmentation of the globalist order you see it in the internet as well and um and that medium tends to shape our reality so i think that's the future um i don't think it'll be like every country has its own internet i think there'll be you know a handful of of big competing markets with weird overlap in some places. But I just don't see another way.

The only way that you stop that is if the EU really just backs off of the regulation. And at this point, I don't know that they can. All they have are regulators. This is what they do. And it seems somehow too damaging to them to lose this fight so my sense is that if neither side can lose um i think both sides will actually lose yeah all right um maybe we need like something just last like can we have one last less gloomy thought is there anything positive going on right now gavin newsom says he wants to clear the homeless encampments let's california fucking go yeah get him out of here gavin so we'll see but it cleared the tents so this is the california law that allows him to

and now he's going to expect everybody to clear them and yeah well so this is coming on the the heels of the supreme court ruling so grants pass versus Johnson, where the Supreme Court scrapped this made up ACLU sort of driven, quote unquote, right to public camping, which was always on shaky legal ground, but has now been definitively killed by the Supreme Court. And, yeah, Gavin has said, you got to clear the tents. He tweeted something like Time's Up. But it's not, he can't, you know, force them to clear encampments. This is something that's handled at the local level. And then there's this question of where do people go? And, you know, California has 150,000 unsheltered homeless people, I think at this point. And so, you know, you have to give all these people presumably shelter and that's incredibly costly. They bus ticket home. That is what I think is probably the best option,

but that's not what they're doing. They're trying to put people in shelter and that kind of thing. So, well, a little bit of progress on the insane california front um i guess gavin looking ahead for 2028 yeah provided kamala doesn't succeed which she might the coconut season feels evocative uh powerful um but is it perhaps just a coconut mirage? Wait and see.

We'll talk to you guys next week. It's been real. Later.