Pirate Wires - Operation Chokepoint 2.0 (ft. Nic Carter), VCs For Kamala, Google’s Bizarre Search Results

Episode Date: August 4, 2024

EPISODE #63:  Welcome Back! Apologies for the delay this week, Mike Solana came down with a bad case of strep throat. But we’re still delivering the pod! Nic Carter is here to give us the latest update on Bitcoin & Crypto after Trump mentioned Operation Chokepoint 2.0 at the Bitcoin Conference. Crypto money is started to change the landscape of elections. We then get into VCs for Kamala, Google searches editing Trump’s assassination attempt, controversy at the Olympics involving an intersex boxer, and Melinda Gates philanthropic mission to destroy us all. Enjoy! Featuring Mike Solana, Brandon Gorrell, Sanjana Friedman, Nic Carter We have partnered with Polymarket! Insights into everything from election coverage to astronauts stuck in space: https://polymarket.com Sign Up To Pirate Wires For Free! https://piratewires.co/free_newsletter Topics Discussed: https://www.piratewires.com/p/crypto-choke-point?f=home https://www.piratewires.com/p/is-silicon-valley-shifting-right?f=home Pirate Wires Twitter: https://twitter.com/PirateWires Mike Twitter: https://twitter.com/micsolana Brandon Twitter: https://twitter.com/brandongorrell Sanjana Twitter: https://twitter.com/metaversehell Nic Twitter: https://x.com/nic__carter TIMESTAMPS: 0:00 - Welcome Back To The Pod! 0:50 - Solana Had Strep Throat - Welcome Nic Carter To The Pod! 1:50 - Operation Chokepoint 2.0 - Trump At BTC Conference Mentions Pirate Wires Piece 12:50 - Crypto Money Is Starting To Change Elections 16:00 - VCs For Kamala 25:40 - Google's Bizarre Search Results - Are They Hiding Trump Results To Help Sway The Election? 36:15 - Astronauts Stuck In Space! What Are The Odds They'll Make It Home? - Sponsored By Polymaket  41:50 - Nic's First MMA Fight! 46:15 - Olympics Controversy! Internet Erupts After Boxing Match With An Intersex Boxer From Algeria 1:03:25 - Attack Of The Ex-Billionaire Wives!  1:15:40 - Biggest Lesson That Nic Learned While Training For MMA Fight 1:17:10 - Thanks For Watching! Like & Subscribe - See You Next Week! #podcast #technology #politics #culture

As president, I will immediately shut down Operation Chokepoint 2.0. Trump was at the Bitcoin conference, just fucking randomly mentions Operation Chokepoint 2.0. This is a piece that you wrote for us in PirateWires over a year ago. Every aspect of financial regulation in this country has been weaponized against the crypto space. I'm not exaggerating. I just don't see anything meaningfully changing under a Harris administration. Maybe we could carry enough seats in the Senate to stop the next Gensler or the next Gruenberg being confirmed. what's up guys welcome back to the pod uh thanks for your patience i had a pretty gnarly case of strep throat which um god antibiotics like fucking miracle it was crazy how it just vanished in

literally about a day, but I was totally incapacitated. Thank you for putting up with it. You have two episodes this week. You're going to start with us and then end with us. Right at the top, I got to introduce my man, Nick Carter, who's joining us today. He's the GP of Castle Island Ventures and now an undefeated MMA fighter just in our midst. Very excited to have you, man. We're going to talk about Bitcoin and a bunch of other shit with you, including the fight and fighting generally. We have a polymarket segment coming up as our new partner. We'll be talking about the betting markets and specifically the stranded astronauts. I shouldn't laugh at the space

station. Thanks to Boeing. But first up again, just welcome to nick thank you man thanks for uh for joining us thanks mike glad to be here the very first thing obviously we have to talk about is the fact that trump was at the bitcoin conference and just fucking randomly mentions operation chokepoint 2.0 which he says he's going to put an end to. A lot of things change. As president, I will immediately shut down Operation Choke Point 2.0. They want to choke you. They want to choke you out of business. We're not going to let that happen. This is a piece that you wrote for us in Pirate Wires over a year ago, coined the term, broke down the entire argument that is really just the Biden administration's secret sort of strategy for ending cryptocurrency in America.

It is now a topic that is, I don't know, not only relevant, but dominant, I would say, within crypto. And I think we have to just start with it start right there just first of all maybe like you know where are we today in the sort of operation chokepoint 2.0 uh i don't want to say the news i mean are we is it still sort of in the crosshairs and then i want to talk about the trump stuff a little bit because i do think it was just cool yeah i mean so just to briefly summarize chokepoint 1.0 is just called Chokepoint. It was an actual Obama administration operation plan to debank certain industries that the Obama admin did not like. And the main way they did this was via the FDIC, which is one of the main bank regulators,

which went to certain banks, told the banks to tell payment processors to cut off certain industries. Initially, it was payday lending, but then they moved on to politically disfavored industries like firearms manufacturing. And so that ended when Trump came into office. That was unconstitutional, obviously. That ended when Trump came into office. Then Biden comes into office. FDIC Chair Gruenberg regains his post. He becomes chair again. And after FTX collapses, the Biden admin feels they have the political air cover to launch this campaign, and this time targeting crypto.

And they did the same thing. It involved the Federal Reserve as well. And they basically went to all the major banks. There was also happening bank crisis at this point. This was in early 2023. So simultaneously, which is not a coincidence, there was a bank crisis specifically focusing on crypto focused banks. banks. And it became very, very difficult as a US-based crypto firm to obtain banking, especially any kind of transactional banking. Virtually impossible if you're doing anything complex. And so that's still the case today, actually. Gruenberg was forced to announce his resignation due to horrible culture issues at the FDIC. has not resigned he's still there and uh chokepoint 2.0 which is what we call it that's not the official name i don't know what the biden admin calls it or the harris admin now uh that's still in effect uh it still remains a huge problem i would argue it's actually the number one issue for crypto startups in this country is the banking specifically yeah because like you like if you start a company in any other domain,

banking is just something you get. That's not a question mark, you know? But it is for crypto firms. It's a massive additional cost burden. The importance of Trump talking about it at the Bitcoin conference, I think, can't be understated. Not only because it's cool that you coined it and it happened. I mean, that was just awesome because it was awesome.

But it's important that he's sort of over the target. And you have right now this interesting, I think, fight for crypto money, it looks like, in politics. So it looked like the Biden administration had overreached. Trump capitalized on that and made um sort of extended himself to the cryptocurrency community more broadly uh was well received that altered politics in the valley to a certain extent you see like the winklevoss guys um and there was just a handful and even on my own team um our crypto focused investors are like we only we we're one-issue voters, and we're one-issue funders, and this is a huge deal to us. Now you have Kamala reaching out to the crypto community, and you yourself just wrote about this

publicly. You were sort of like, I'm willing to listen, but these are the things that we need. Trump is saying, before we can sort of of move beyond this we need to have a conversation about the fact that you've tried to destroy the entire industry and i think that's sort of like where your head's at as well right yeah and look kamala was part of the biden admin right so she owns the failures of the biden admin as they pertain to crypto which are failures for a deliberate attempt to destroy and marginalize the domestic crypto industry and it goes beyond choke point it's at least a half dozen things biden used one of his vetoes on this uh there was this rule this sec rule that prohibited banks from

touching crypto he used one of his vetoes to ensure that that rule stayed in place from touching crypto, he used one of his vetoes to ensure that that rule stayed in place. And it's, of course, the SEC is a very activist SEC, very, very hostile, far beyond their mandate. It's the CFTC, it's the Fed. So every aspect of financial regulation in this country has been weaponized against the crypto space. I'm not exaggerating. It's just been an all out assault. And I've seen no indication that they want to change that. Probably the conversation that no one is having. And I want to get now all of you guys into this because I think we can probably all jump in

on this next topic. It's pretty adjacent, not adjacent. This next topic related to the Bitcoin stuff is just, does it even make sense for the Democratic Party to have a pro BitcoinBitcoin stance? I mean, you're talking about a party of spending. It's like a, it's a giant, it's a, I think a giant sort of statist philosophy at this point that requires a lot of money, that requires a lot of taxation to a certain extent.

I mean, crypto was not to a certain extent. It's in the white paper, right? It's like, it's, this is designed to defend you against these things. It's not a natural home really for either party. I'm surprised that it's been embraced to the extent that it has in mainstream politics period, but it certainly doesn't make sense on the democratic side. I got into some trouble. I was on a Bitcoin focused podcast a few weeks back and this topic came up and I was just shocked that it was even a question. Like, obviously if you were obsessed

with crypto, you were not going to vote for Democrats, because they're sort of, they're against it at the conceptual level. They sort of have to be. Elizabeth Warren, I think, speaks pretty honestly about this kind of stuff. Everything that she wants to do is contra the goals of cryptocurrency. Am I off base here? Or is that, I mean, where do you sit on just like, separate from all of the sort of minutiae of the drama here the drama here where are you on the high level there yeah i mean i'll start i think you're absolutely correct and this is why this common line that's trotted out in the crypto industry about crypto being non-partisan is a total myth i mean there is ideology imbued with the technology that we're building it's not pure technology all technology has some kind of ideological thrust to it. Crypto especially,

it's about hard money. It's about stripping some of the monetary discretion from governments. And then it's about transacting in a more free manner. What we've seen from the progressives is a desire to politicize transactional rails through a number of different means. So whether it's Bitcoin, whether it's DeFi, whether it's stable coins, all of those things are contrary to the progressive agenda. So progressives will never, ever come on board. So you're right. Warren is actually consistent on this. The crypto folks that think Kamala might evolve,

she was the furthest left senator when she was in office. I know. I think that is total pie in the sky fantasy. I think there's just no way that she does it. It is totally contrary to what her base wants. It seems like Bitcoin just makes communism impossible, fundamentally. If there was mass adoption of even just this one currency, you would not be able to have a communist state. And so if that's the case, then how are you ever going to get the Democrats on board here? Sanjay, it looks like you had a thought.

Did you want to jump in? Well, I'm just sort of wondering, because I understand the ideological divide here, but thinking kind of pragmatically in a world where Kamala wins, which seems, I mean, you know, the most recent poll I saw is that she's like gaining, uh, in the polls. What is kind of Nick, what do you see the, the crypto industry's kind of best pivot to potentially working in a continued hostile political lands landscape for potentially

the next four years? Yeah. There's a big divide within crypto about this, you know, on the one side, there's, there's people like me that say, well, let's not reward our enemies, let's not direct funding to basically our opponents in an effort to hedge, let's just focus on winning, which is we're sort of all in, right? It's when we're unhedged. And then there's the other side, which is perhaps more pragmatic, or they see themselves that way. It's like, okay, well, we have to be prepared for both outcomes here. I just don't see anything meaningfully changing under a Harris administration relative to Biden. I don't know why anything would change. So would at that point just be status quo? And we would hope that maybe we could carry enough seats in the Senate to stop the next Gensler or the next Gruenberg being

confirmed. So that would be the hope maybe that we could eliminate the worst parts of the overreach that we saw under Biden with the admin, the administrative state, Supreme Court's part of that as well. But there isn't really a plan B, to be honest with you. Nick, do you have a sense of the size of the crypto constituency? Is it concerns like actual votes? Like, what does that look like? Yeah, the estimates vary. There's some disagreement on the size of the crypto vote in the US.

It's between 30 and 50 million US adults own some form of cryptocurrency. Obviously, they're not all single issue voters. But that's something it's not nothing. And then from a financial perspective, I think it's where it's more meaningful. Crypto is now the largest single issue focus super PAC. There's a super PAC called fair shake. They've raised over 200 million. That's larger than any other single policy-focused pack out there that's super interesting yeah that will swing elections look at ohio that's the case we have sherrod brown highly highly critical of crypto huge blocker in the senate bernie moreno huge booster those will be the races where actually crypto could swing

things i think this is one of the most interesting things in politics right now and it's one of the things that's interesting about it is the degree to which the democrats were sort of caught with their pants down i think they did not realize what they had stepped into somehow considering all this stuff is public but we saw a little bit of it there There was that case that, um, there was that, uh, what was the race in New York? The, with the clannish dude who got kicked out Jamal Bowman versus the other guy. So crypto money jumped in there. That case felt to me like, um, maybe crypto was getting blamed, but it wasn't entirely the story. You know, that's not really what we were seeing there. But the broader thing, what you're talking about is

like the, just the sheer amount of money that is behind this. And then the other thing, which you also mentioned, the fact that so many Americans now have some exposure to crypto, that is that number jumps, you know, election to election in huge, enormous like ways. This is not like the same amount of people who are interested in 2017 or even 2021. Every time there's a run, you have way more people develop some exposure, including, I think, a lot of politicians, which is, I think, probably one of the motivations behind Congress dragging its feet for as long as it has on legislation is I think a lot of people have

exposure to it and are like, I don't really want to ban it. And now they're at a point where it's, I think, just very, very difficult, just practically difficult, because as you said, there are so many people and there's so much money. I think you're going to see one huge push to do it from diehard left-wingers. And probably they're going to want to tie it to terrorism or white nationalist crime of some kind. And we're going to see some sort of moral panic because I don't know how else they're going to push this through. It's got to be- We'll call it weird. Yeah, it's just weird. Bitcoin's weird. It's just too weird. Am I right, ladies? It's weird.

But I don't know. Is that it? What is the failure path here? Where's the Death Star weakness for Bitcoin? My analogy here is that the crypto issue, not to get too controversial, is the abortion issue for the right. So crypto on the left is abortion for the right, as in it's a losing electoral issue but ideologically they're committed to pushing their view so it's only going to hurt them at the polls staying hostile but they're never going to persuade the base to become a pro-crypto you're saying the right wing how the right wing feels about abortion is how the left wing feels about crypto you're saying yeah so like the right could be more pragmatic about abortion yeah right yeah yeah probably

on that they're losing votes because of it but they're not going to change their minds on it it's the same i don't think progressives will ever be pro for bitcoin for instance as the environmental concerns they don't like hard money they operate within a soft money regime because the whole point of progressivism in the left is growing the size of government spending a lot and you know bitcoin is counter to that and controlling the rails of finance so i do not think they will abandon their view on it and i do think it will cost them at the polls man well uh i think that this really relates to the next in the next topic I've got on the docket here, which is just the, I mean, we're talking about politics.

Obviously, politics is an election year. Politics has infected every aspect of our world, like to a relentless degree, tech included. We have the crypto piece here, but it's broader than that, right? We just saw the VCs for Kamala piece. I don't know if you were following. A hundred people signed an open letter. It's interesting in the way that I think the difference between the way that Democrats and Republicans do this stuff in politics.

So you have this sort of ongoing narrative of we have a lot of MAGA people in Silicon Valley now. We've done a lot of reporting on this. It doesn't seem to be true. I think there are a handful of people who have sort of raised their hand this time around. It's not clear how many of them have really changed their position from years ago and how many are just sort of speaking up more now that we have the vibe shift. I think a couple, but on the margins, it's really the same in terms of funding. It's overwhelmingly Democrat.

uh, uh, you now have the sort of the like fight back, um, led by, uh, Paul, not really Paul Graham. Uh, you know, he's a, he's a never Trumper, but really it's like a Vinod Khosla, it's Reid Hoffman, it's Reid Hastings, uh, Mark Cuban and Mark Suster, all the Marks. Um, they're your sort of standard normie libs and they're like we have to get together and stop trump blah blah they have this open letter um bunch of signatories most of whom you've never heard and uh and i guess the framing is like um the polite framing is, let's get together and stop this sort of like orange tyrant. The implication there for me is like, we need to get back to a place where you're not allowed to sort of espouse these mega views. Like something has gone horribly wrong here and we need to sort of reset the prior culture in tech, which is you just fund along party lines and you move forward. I think

it's strange. Again, on the crypto dimension, it's strange to see so many people say things like, I believe they use the phrase, the fate of our industry depends on this election. I think it's one thing to say the fate of the world or something. You can make some strange, ambiguous argument about how Donald Trump is going to end America and therefore the world. It's very hard to make the argument that Trump is going to be worse for the tech industry than the Democrats, which have spent the last four years trying to dismantle it. But that's in play now. And we have a separate topic, which we're going to talk about in relation to this, which is the way it's affecting potentially our companies, Google censorship. But first up, like, I mean, have you guys watched the VC vibe shifts? Is it much ado about nothing? You know, where are people really funding? Do you

think? I think it's actually quite interesting that top tier VCs like the Mark Andreessen's of the world and Elon's not a VC, of course, but like probably the most important entrepreneur on the planet. It is now acceptable to be openly pro-Trump. That is quite different from the last cycle. So there is a new acceptability. And certainly in crypto, I know a bunch of lifelong Democrats that have pivoted because of this. But that's crypto. It's a niche industry. It's very much existential. But it is very notable, I think, that there is now a renewed acceptability to be openly pro-Trump in elite circles. I mean, you got that backlash. So you had the article in The New York Times.

They quoted, this is the standard thing that they loved to do years ago, where they would mint these tech leaders. They'd be like, this is so-and-so. They're a leader in the space of tech. They've worked at X company forever. They're an important voice, but like, you've never heard of them before. It was this woman who did product at, I think it was Slack or something like that. And, uh, and she had, her name's Mercy, I believe. And she had this long thing about how she felt that A16Z had abandoned women. Um, just like the conceptual female, they'd, they'd sacrificed her for America. Um, and I mean, the time they tried right they did a whole

thing about this and it was really ac i don't know why mark andreason is the is the lightning rod here like he's really he's really the one they like to attack for all this stuff like no one's going after peter at this point um but uh yeah i mean they're trying it's just not landing like like it used to yeah i mean there's an there's a very simple economic explanation, which is Trump with Vance is supportive of little tech, like startups, startup formation, entrepreneurs. And I would argue that Biden admin and a putative Harris administration would be supportive of big tech because, you know, they found it very convenient to work with big tech in order to, you know, do censorship to use them as an outsource arm of the government. We know that there's been a tight collaboration between big tech and the state. If you look at their policy proposals, it would make entrepreneurship expensive,

difficult, taxing unrealized gains. The big Vinod Khosla, Marc Andreessen debate about AI, open source AI versus closed source AI, you know, like, you know, allowing regulatory capture by the open AIs of the world versus open source models. So I see the divide is basically big tech versus little tech. So from a seed VC perspective, I think trump vance makes a ton of sense just economically speaking i think that's definitely the way it's been reframed and i i it's clever i and i appreciate it i just don't see lena khan as being friendly to either big or little tech uh in the long run and i i really don't like this total reworking of of her and what she represents recently we saw her.

She was at YC. We do see it with the little tech stuff. We see it with JD Vance. It's a weird friend to try and make. This is a woman who, to me, has really proven that she's not interested in anybody who is building successfully. And if she has to make some allies in the industry it's not because she believes in like little tech it's it's because she sees a way to wedge us against ourselves

is my read on that um i think she's really dangerous i was just gonna say wasn't reed hoffman uh like criticizing her recently yes he was well this is why it's this is i'm frustrated because yes exactly and so it's politicized her in a weird way where, and JD Vance has recently taken up for Lena Kahn. So you now have this bizarre politicization of her where she's palatable to right-wing people who are typically more pro-business. I think that's crazy. Like she just wants to dismantle everything. She talks about competition and whatnot. The reason she's talking about competition, and we now have an interest in her on the artificial intelligence stuff. So the framing there is like,

she has to go after the big, huge companies like Microsoft, like OpenAI, which is not even a big, it's still a startup, right? Google, because we have to protect the smaller guys and their ability to compete on the along the artificial intelligence dimension um the reason she's even talking about competition is because to run antitrust against companies that aren't affecting consumers you have to rework why we even have antitrust historically right it's like consumer harm that That's the benchmark. Is your monopoly hurting consumers? And if it's not, then there's not a case here. There is no big tech company that, well, maybe you can make some arguments.

You'd have to really make some clever arguments for why Amazon's monopoly is hurting the consumer. Okay, Amazon, which has lowered prices to a degree we've never before seen on consumer goods. How is that hurting the consumer? It's not, but Democrats specifically of this like ideologically opposed to success and business type Democrat, right? They're still mad. So they have to find something else. And it's now it's competition. It's like, well, they're bad for competition. That's not against the law to be really, really good at competition, but they're sort of pushing it through. And I do get a little bit worried that, I don't know, that's obviously attractive to VCs who are investing in early stage companies. But I think that long-term, it's potentially a cell phone. She's not going to stop at just regulating a few of these giant

companies. She wants to be ending, I think, the engine of productivity itself. I think she really has a problem with people making lots of money. The concept of that is what seems to be on the table to me, because why else would you change up your approach to antitrust in this way? It just seems like a strange ideological cancer that we need to be thinking about. The one, not to traffic in rumors or anything, but I have heard from operatives in DC that Khan is actually on the outs with the Harris campaign. Why? Is it because of this stuff?

Is it because of Hoffman? I believe it's an attempt to strike a more pro-business tone with that campaign. So we haven't seen that confirmed yet, but that is one thing I have heard from like folks on the Hill. Man, they really are just going to try and frame her as a moderate now. It's really going to be funny to watch. The other thing I mean, we talk obviously endlessly about and not even just in tech, but more broadly, this is a huge national conversation is the question of

how politicized tech is. Because at this point in human history, companies like Google exercise tremendous influence over the way that we learn about the world. So we've had two sort of reasonably big controversies over the last week. One was the weird search results or weird search, the sort of autocomplete for Trump's assassination, where it sort of wouldn't show you, it wouldn of autocomplete for Trump's assassination, um, where it's, it sort of wouldn't show you, it wouldn't autocomplete to Trump's assassination, no matter how far down the word Trump's assassination of Trump or Trump assassination, you went, um, it would only show you sort of older news. The second is just the difference between when you Google Trump or you Google Kamala. I know Brandon, you did a little bit

of research on this. Do you want to break it down? Yeah, I mean, you basically just described what people were upset about. They responded about the autocompletes. They said that it was basically a bug. They said it wasn't returning results about Trump's attempted assassination because of quote-unquote built-in protections related to political violence. Those systems were out of date, and once the issue was flagged, we started working on improvements. So, as proof, I think they posted a screenshot of, you know, a correct autocomplete of the Trump

assassination. With the labels that you described, so just to just to like flesh out a little bit more, what people were noticing was that when they searched for Trump, for example, the search would return a result or what that was labeled, you know, something like Kamala Harris, Trump. But when you search for Kamala, you would just get news about Kamala. Google responded to that too. They responded to us. They also responded on Twitter, their Google comms account, and said that the labels are automatically generated based on common topics across many news articles. They change over time. And you can see this happening across many topics like the Olympics, public figures,

companies, and more. Again, they posted a screenshot showing that labels are kind of dynamic and they appear based on what's in the news. So yeah, like the question is really, did Google block or bias Trump searches? My contract take is is that Google didn't have anything to do with this. The much simpler explanation is that there are way more newspapers and trusted sources of information

publishing content about Kamala than Trump. And it's all way more positive than Trump. You should also remember that search results are dynamic and they await timeliness. So, like, right now, I think it's arguably Kamala is like owning the media cycle. And scapegoating tech for something that the media is doing, which is just acting as a second arm of the DNC and flooding search results with pro-Kamala content right after she's presumably the nominee. But before she's given any concrete, you know, sort of policy positions, speeches, debates, anything like that.

So I think what we're seeing here really is just an incredibly biased media ecosystem. And I think that should be the focus of the conversation, not whether or not Google's algorithm is like, you know, biasing results. I mean, it seems to me that when there is a mistake or a bug it always favors the left and it never favors the right so we've heard this so many times this isn't the first time google's been accused of gaming search results and you know when there's like a mass shooting or something and you search for it google will say the results are changing quickly so we're not giving you anything, right? So Google controls what exists. They are the

epistemic gatekeepers for now. Maybe we will have AI models be the search engines of the future, and then it'll be the same question. Are we going to defer to open AI for what the, you know, acknowledged source of truth is? But I don don't know i think it is very clear that google consistently biases results i think we have so much evidence of that well i think the ai thing is clearly why this is such a huge issue in washington it like took people a minute to can to convince senators of this i think once that once they realized that we were looking at a search competitor we haven haven't had one in 25 years, right? It's like it's just been Google.

Once there's a real credible competitor, that's very nerve-wracking to Democrats because, as you said, they've lost their – what was that phenomenal phrase you just used? Epistemic gateway? What was that? I forgot what I said. Fuck, it was so good. Epistemic gatekeepers, I think it was so good keepers yes let's go yeah they lost it it's called into question i mean i think brandon i sort of i agree to an extent with you on this um i think it's it's interesting that we sort of you saw a lot of people who have

criticized the media for the last correctly for the last you know 10 years about their overwhelming bias longer than that um kind of forget that most people who are writing about politics are super left wing. And so naturally, you know, most articles would be that way. But I will say like when, when I, when I Googled Trump's name and then when I Googled Kamala's name, um, the very weird thing to me was, first of all, the stories were not the same. It wasn't, you would, you would, if, if this was just a matter of who was writing about what they were linked whatever you see both stories they were not the same trump stories were all about they were all just they were is a different set of pro kamala stories or anti-trump stories uh there was one really i

don't that came up was the project 2025 thing but the really alarming thing to me was that the subject head which was um what returns to you you when I Google Trump, what returned was Trump plus Kamala. It said it right there in the headline above all of the stories. When I did with Kamala, that did not happen. They didn't link the two. There was no, it wasn't in that headline. And I guess you could say like, well, there's some maybe tech thing that I don't understand, some reason that existed, some whatever.

I think at the ground floor, to me, that looks like a bug. And I agree that it's very strange that this only seems to happen in one direction. I also think it's strange that it would happen at all given the fact that everybody is watching this. This is the single most important issue for Google right now. There's nothing more important in the world than this race.

For the world, I think generally, genuinely, it's that important. And then also for Google, right? Like you have to either appease the Dems, um, both, you have to appease the Dems and not sufficiently infuriate the Republicans because someone's going to be in charge of your fate over the next four years. And you'd think, not you'd think, you know, that they're thinking about this. So how do you make a mistake like that? Um, I don't know. I don't,'t i just don't believe it maybe that's a bigger problem that we have that this trust has been so completely annihilated that we're sitting here like what is going on there someone else in my mention said something about just the

they're like listen the real problem is just google software is ancient and terrible and um i don't know i'm maybe i'm a little bit partial to that as well i mean we can speculate about the algo you know until the end of this podcast and i don't think we would get get anywhere but the fact of the matter is is like what was that um new york mag piece that they ran on kamala where she's like the coconut one i don't know i mean nobody's sitting on the giant coconut yeah and there's all the other democrats around camelot nobody nobody is writing something like that about trump and they're coming out in droves for kamala so again i don't know we've been having this conversation like this is a conversation also that our parents were having our parents talked about this it's

always been like this it's not even a trump thing sorry i don't know what do you mean the media's always been in the bag for the democrats it's just because they're more right right that's what i'm saying that's what i'm saying and so if so like if you if you just think about the algo as like dealing with the inputs right because it's not um google doesn't control what news is made what news is written it collates and collects and control what news is made, what news is written. It collates and collects and orders what news is written. And if, if there's like, um, 99 news articles about Kamala in the space of time where there was two articles about Trump, well then searches for Trump are going to return Kamala results, um, because Trump has got to be mentioned in those. And yeah, but Trump has

been mentioned in plenty of articles. There are no shortage of go to Fox news. I mean, how many articles has Fox published on Trump in the last 24 hours? I'm sure it's like, it's fewer, it's fewer than it's fewer than have been published about Kamala positively. Brendan, the answer,

there was zero that sort of zero Trump stories sourced. When you Google Trump, there's Fox, there's the New York post. There's like any number of smaller outlets. There was no excuse for zero to, to, to be sourced or to be to uh what is it uh to be delivered here to be like that doesn't make any sense yeah you could say i agree that most yes but zero that's come on let's yeah no i, I think Google has tremendous institutional inertia, and there is an established

trust and safety commission there. And I don't think anything has changed. And I don't think they are preparing for a Trump presidency or anything like that. And I think it's just the exact same MO. They've just carried that forward and continue to bias results deliberately. Right. Trump does not pass the trust and safety vibe check. They're like, nope, don't trust him. Don't think he's safe. So we're censoring his existence. We got to talk about the

astronauts that are stranded in space. So there we have astronauts at the International Space Station who have not been able to come home. Sanjay, can you break that story down for me really quickly? And then I want to talk about just like the sort of strange insights maybe we're getting from the polymarket betting markets on this one. Yeah. I mean, the kind of TLDR is that back in June, Boeing sent its Starliner up to the International Space Station. So this was supposed to be like an eight-day trip to kind of test out the capacity of the starliner but it's since extended into an almost 60-day ordeal because they have um these faulty thrusters um and so they've got to figure out a way to kind of safely get the astronauts back to um to earth and this is complicated by the fact that um the

international space system has six ports four of which are russian and kind of i guess adapted to russian uh spacecraft and two of which are american and kind of, I guess, adapted to Russian spacecraft, and two of which are American. And one of the ports is currently occupied by a SpaceX craft, and the other one's occupied by Boeing. But SpaceX is preparing for another launch with NASA in a couple of weeks. And so there's this question. I mean, Boeing has some time pressure here where they do need to get these astronauts back down so that spacex can launch so there's this yeah this basically been this kind of long

drawn out very bad uh pr disaster for boeing which obviously doesn't need uh yet another disaster um but that's the kind of where we're at right now when When were they supposed to be home? They were supposed to be home eight days after June 5th. So, okay. Yeah. So poly, poly market is a partner of pirate wires. And, uh, as I've said multiple times now, I love to bring them in. Um, I think they add a sort of interesting information layer into these discussions. It's like the different kinds of polling, basically. Um, we've been doing more political ones. This one was an interesting one in that it just is more of a judgment on our state capacity, I would say. And I'll unpack that in just one quick second. So Polymarket currently has a 25% chance that they leave by the 15th of August. So like two weeks from now. There is no confidence that our government via

There's no confidence that our government via these huge defense contractors are going to be able to bring the astronauts home. And there's a lot to talk about here. One, it is interesting, I think, that this is potentially complicating the next SpaceX launch. Two, I think it's interesting that we're not hearing about maybe SpaceX stepping in and helping. Both this, the Boeing thing and the SpaceX thing, you have these manned launches happening because the government stopped doing its own shuttle program in, what was it, 2011. This in itself is sort of a state capacity question, I think.

You know, we were sending people to the moon. The government will never do that again. The government is hiring people to send astronauts to space. You have now a competition. And I think that the government loves to be like, we're giving everybody a fair chance. SpaceX has been crushing it. And Boeing is a disaster. Boeing is a disaster in many different dimensions. They're the old favorite of the government. But this one's pretty bad and i i think that um it reminds me of the tesla stuff actually where you have this really successful company that is doing something the government wants to say that it can still do and it can do with a

private partner um and then it sort of publicly to a certain certain extent, insults them. And I think it's because it's just straight up Elon Musk is like kind of unpalatable to a lot of people on the Democratic base. But nobody has done a better job at this, and nobody has done a better job at the electric vehicle mainstreaming thing. And I think that it's just like, this one's going to be even easier. I think that they have to just move to SpaceX. I think there's no way that you move forward with Boeing at this point,

but I could be wrong. I don't know. What do you guys think of this? I mean, they sent the whole reason they're stuck up there is because there were, they, they sent them up there in a, in a sort of vehicle that was questionable in a way,

which was, which is what I heard. And, um, I think that the choice to send them down on the starliner would be similarly sort of complicated in that way so i think it remains to be seen what will happen but maybe boeing should just go back to trying to fix their um emergency exit doors on their right i keep asking i'm always like checking to see what kind of jet i'm on man I'm not just doing Airbus now. At Founders Fund, everyone makes fun of me.

They're like, you know, you have a higher chance of getting struck by lightning. You're just reading too much news. I don't think so, man. I think that this is the kind, like a disaster is going to happen and everyone's going to look back and say, man, how stupid could we have been

to be flying on those jets? We saw all of these, there was so much smoke and we thought there'd be no fire. Like, I don't think it's safe, man. I just don't. Like, I don't want, if I had the option, what I really want is a train. And that sounds, I mean, people maybe say decel. I don't, that's not what I'm talking. I'm talking about like a luxury bullet train cutting across the country, like Atlas shrugged aesthetics and like really sexy, like bar cart, uh, first-class carriage. I get to kind of like have a martini in the bar area with like these sort of sultry, strange, quiet, I don't know, strangers smoking a cigarette or something like that. I do want that. And I want it to happen. It's like maybe a, it's like a 12

hour ride or something. I would do that every time. I would never fly again, at least across the country. But we can't have that country. And the reason is because of state capacity, because we could not build something like that. And if someone can build something like that, the government will not, it will actively stop them from building something like that. It will actively do everything in its power to get in the way of them building something like that. This is what, one of the weirdest things watching the Brightline success in Florida has been the detractors who rise up and it's like, you can see them grasping for reasons to hate this stuff. And they don't have one. Cause it's like, it's a train. How are like, we love those. You love

those. You specifically love those. Like, what could you really be mad about here? And it's like, there's just something about shit working that drives this particular type of, I don't want to, I don't want to even politicize it. Cause I think it's beyond that. There's some sort of like anti-growth anti-human person who is like alarm bells go off and they get mad. Anyway, hope the astronauts come home. Holly market better. They don't think, I mean, they're not, they're not enthusiastic. Uh, I hope you guys lose your money because it will be sad if they were stuck up there for very much longer um what we have to talk about now is the fact that nick is

an mma fighter can you just like tell us about your journey um you're totally victorious i think you had to be i'm glad you are for your sake um you know break down the motivation tell me about what it felt like in the ring tell me about your training give it to me yeah i mean uh you know some context i was always like kind of a fit person but there is a huge difference between that and being fit for a fight like unbelievable difference actually and uh i just like the sport of fighting like as a fan and so i'd been to Karate Combat events before. That's the promotion I did, which is basically MMA. There's no submissions.

But it's effectively what you would see in the UFC without arm bars or jokes, things like that. And in March, I think, I decided to take a fight. It was meant to be against David Hoffman. He's a crypto guy, another crypto guy. And I had two months. I'm like, yeah, I can be ready take a fight it was meant to be against david hoffman he's a crypto guy another crypto guy and uh i had two months i'm like yeah i can be ready for a fight and i found a coach and i you know my first session he's like you gotta cancel the fight i'm like what do you mean and i'd never thrown a punch i've never been any kind of fight before ever. And I did a basically the equivalent of a professional

fight camp. So six days a week, three to four sessions a day, you know, weights, sprints, a lot of cardio, obviously a lot of bag work, and then sparring sustained a ton of injuries over the course of the camp, which I,, which I didn't talk about. I didn't want to give my opponent any ammo. And then I went out, the first fight was canceled, another one recently, and luckily he was able to get the win. I got the knockout in the first round. So very, very happy with that. I was aware that if I got knocked out myself or didn't perform, If I got knocked out myself or didn't perform, didn't look physically good or didn't look coordinated, I would be a laughingstock of crypto Twitter for all time. So the stakes were extremely high for me.

Not because of the physical risks, but because of the reputational side. So I'm very glad it worked out. Yeah, I agree. You had mentioned something. I had not caught it. side so i'm very glad it worked out yeah i i agree i when i i didn't you had mentioned something i had not caught it i didn't realize what had happened and when i did i thought jesus christ it's good that you won i can't imagine i can't imagine because when you google it or like when you uh twitter search it it's just like endless people talking about this right it was a huge deal you have a lot of you have a lot of like fans i would say like they're like nick carter guys a lot of haters too i i knew that i was giving such a golden opportunity to the haters

because i knew if i got knocked out that highlight would follow me around for the rest of all time so when i won i went absolutely ballistic in the. I was like running around the side of the ring going crazy. And it's because I was so relieved not because of the fight, but because I knew that I wouldn't be humiliated. Yeah. I think the physical transformation itself must've been so cool. Can you like, what, what was the, what was, uh, what did you learn about yourself while doing it? Cause I mean, you did have to just change, right? You're becoming stronger. You look different.

You're faster. What did you learn? Yeah. I mean, I started the camp running about a seven-minute mile. And at the end of the camp, I was running a 550-minute mile. So it's very dramatic cardio improvement. Obviously, significant change in musculature. And I lost 20 pounds over the course of the camp which

is like i have a full-time job you know like i run a venture fund it's very hard to actually find the time to do this and you just have to so during the course of the camp which by the way i'm still in a fight camp for i have another fight booked for september you just are you fighting he's a crypto trader called hedge tog this is actually a boxing match this time so like when you're in a camp like that you have no time for anything so my social life evaporated i couldn't go out to dinner i had to cut weight so it's just completely all-consuming um so it was kind of like a lonely difficult time but it was worth it you know like people genuinely respect me more now that i did that i think what you might have some insight into now is sort of a controversial topic that we're going to wait into uh this week blew up online. So this Olympics, um, we have female boxing and, uh, an Italian boxer

left her fight after, I think one punch less than a round. And, um, the reason because she had never been hit so hard in her life. And the person that she was fighting has, there's a controversy surrounding her gender or sex rather um Sanj can you just break down the bare bones of that story and then I want to get into it because I think we all have not a culture war view on this and it is weirdly an important story so yeah I mean I don't have that much context to add other than that the Algerian fighter um who I guess the internet immediately seized on is like trans identified um doesn't seem to be trans identified but seems to be someone who's intersex so i think that there were

in a in previous competitions genetic tests done that indicated that they had a y chromosome um but my you know there's a number of kind of intersex conditions where you could have like xxy and maybe um like castor seminia who's's an intersex runner who has run in female races, has an XXY condition where she identifies as a woman but has undescended testes and male sort of levels of testosterone, I think. And so there's this question of, you know, what specific intersex condition does this person have? And all the kind of attendant questions about musculature and testosterone and things like that. But it doesn't appear to be that this is an Algerian trans individual.

But certainly there are some, like, genetic anomalies here. What I immediately thought, well, the first thing you see is everybody freaking out because it's a guy in a race with a woman. Obviously, that would be terrible. I would just immediately gut, be against, let's just stay away from what I would be against and talk about this case specifically. Because what we're talking about is someone who was raised as a girl, who believes that she's a girl.

Parents have, I mean, we're making a lot, we're filling in a lot of blanks here, but about is someone who was raised as a girl um who believes that she's a girl parents have i mean we're making a lot we're filling in a lot of blanks here but we're dealing with somebody who has xy chromosome um is potentially intersex and uh and yet is a woman i start thinking about women who just test with lots of testosterone not even intersex women who have too much testosterone uh if you test with too much testosterone in your blood, you can't compete in many female only sports categories. And it's the opposite when it comes to men, right? If you're a guy and you are born just pumping tea,

you're a genetic freak, but also a hero, you're the best. And the women's categories are weirdly just, you know, pumping tea, you're a genetic freak, but also a hero. You're the best. And the women's categories are, are weirdly just the opposite. There's like a limit of how great, how much of a genetic anomaly you can be. I understand why that's because you want to basically create a weaker category so women can compete and you don't want to ruin that. Whereas the men are like, anyone can come in, but doesn't it sort of call into question a lot of just, I guess, the validity of some of these categories in general, like female fighting in general. Like what if this is, I mean, a very controversial, uh, this is a very controversial topic. Um, but I just, I wonder why, and Sanj, you and I were talking about this earlier, like, like why, why don't we just focus more on sports categories where women actually excel? And there are several, right?

I do have a controversial, I guess I should preface this by saying I support women's sports and I think it's great. Like female athleticism is great. And I, um, my dream growing up was to be a baseball player, but it was stymied by my, by my sex, um, I guess, although I doubt that if I was a male, I would be a baseball player either. Um, but I, I sort of think at the Olympic level, the sports I'm interested in watching personally as a spectator are sports where you see sort of peak human performance in, you know, sort of just absolutely. And so it's not to say I don't think there should be, you know, female boxing or female sprinting, that kind of thing. female boxing or female sprinting that kind of thing but as a as a spectator i'm more interested in watching like the female sports where they can kind of uniquely excel um and there are sports like that like figure skating synchronized swimming um i guess in some sort of gymnastics events and things like that um long distance swimming that was one that blew my mind i didn't

realize that i think i was looking up um i was looking up the channel crossing and women have an edge there when they are uh from france the uk which is just interesting and like we don't hear stories about that i think because we're always focused on the issue of like fairness in sports when it comes to things like like this i i listen i think there are a lot of there are a lot of, there are a lot of versions to here, but one of them is just, I think you really brought up an interesting point, which is just, there are these sports that already exist where women do have an edge and we just don't really talk about them. I mean, we do, we do like, we talk about gymnastics, right? It comes up, people love it, but it's never like she can do something that no one, including men can do on the uneven bars or whatever it is like that's

that's cool and i don't know why we don't frame it that way um nick what was your thought as a fighter about all this yeah i mean i think it's actually very clear like an intersex woman uh competing against uh you know uh i don't know like orthodox biological women that comparative advantage is similar to a male competing against a male who's doping. And we ban doping, right? For a good reason, for fairness. And if you go back to the Castro-Semanya situation, she was banned from competing in athletics. There are court cases about it. And I believe in that 800-meter race that she won, the top three finishers were all intersex. So my concern would be that if we just narrow the analysis to, okay, what are you?

Okay, you have female genitalia, so you're a woman. Then you will have countries selecting and curating intersex athletes for the female category in order to win, to stack the odds and win all the medals. And in racing, we've had all these controversies about swimming, right? Female males, trans males in swimming. And then we had the Samania situation with athletics. In boxing, you're actually potentially harming the opponent. So it's not even fairness, it's about safety. And I can tell you, I have a female sparring partner, Chelsea. She's a very accomplished boxer. She actually has professional fights. I'm a terrible boxer. If you watch the fight, I didn't look good on the boxing. But I would absolutely destroy her,

right? Just because there's a huge, huge advantage to being a male, physiologically speaking. And so that's why we have weight classes. And that's obviously why men and women don't fight. And so there is a very real issue of safety. And I will say the right wing Twittersphere was totally wrong about this because they assumed that the Algerian boxer was trans, she's not, but even despite that, I do not think we should allow intersex individuals to box because they have tremendous advantage and this, the Algerian boxer had been banned from other boxing federations before. So the Olympics just simply didn't carry that forward and they deferred to

a very simplistic analysis of what does your passport say whereas it should really be like what are you yeah like what what did the genetic tests say like we we have the technology now to just know for sure what's going on here i guess there is just ambiguity when it comes to what intersects even i mean people don't this. This is not something that comes up in conversation. It's extremely rare condition. And I think you have a lot of, to a certain extent, obviously the right looked terrible. The sort of anti-trans right looked really stupid yesterday. They got it wrong.

They were totally wrong. Going after this person for being trans. And I mean, it's a weird thing to get wrong because you could literally just check her out on Wikipedia and you learn a lot really quick. There's a huge difference between what intersex is and what it's not. They're not. It's just they're different, period. There's not even like a gradient there. It's like intersex is a condition.

You're a man born with ambiguous genitalia or the other way around. And this case, I think it's like not actually clear yeah it happened here it's not there's a lot that's being probably for privacy reasons kept away from the public and i'm fine with that except like now you are in this competition and so if you are x y that's kind of got to be a hard line but we don't know what we don't know what the fighter knew like you're raised in this islamic country um doctor sees you maybe you haven't this is like all speculation now but i'm trying to empathize here and it's like with this person like you are born with ambiguous genitalia your parents have to make a decision on how to raise you they raise you as a woman um and

i don't know like like i just i i don't. That's a really tricky place to be in. There's a great book by Alice Dreger called Galileo's middle finger that talks about intersex stuff at length. That's where I learned a lot. Um, and parents typically have to make a decision on sort of which direction to go. And very rarely are when, when genitalia are surgically altered, very, very rarely are adults happy with that decision um it's just a really really tough call and there's a lot of weird shit that follows and now we're in a really weird situation where we have to have a nuanced conversation about something at a moment where we are like uniquely primed not to have a nuanced conversation about this um i do i am inclined to

agree with you nick like i think there's a pretty black and white thing here it's just like you have to be tested and if you have this advantage then you can't be allowed in but i think the bigger problem is just the concept of of a category where i guess maybe i might have gotten something wrong earlier i wonder if you are are there t limits straight up like it's not just a testes thing like are there t limits like like if you're a if you're a natal female xx chromosome and you have too much t are you are you still allowed to compete is there not a limit there well it depends on the basically the gender testing rules imposed by the specific federation and in this case the old federation that had banned

this athlete is actually dissolved now and the olympic boxing uh i don't know what they're called exactly they didn't appear to do any testing of any sort. So they were totally lackadaisical about it. So it's not clear what the rules are. The passport thing is crazy. Don't even say that out loud because that throws the fighter under the bus. That is like even worse for the fighter that you have something that stupid that was said. Anyone can get a passport gender change. Maybe they can't in Algeria. I don't know what the Algerian rules are in America. It's fucking anything goes.

Right. Um, so yeah, that was crazy. Brandon, what are your thoughts on this? Um, be careful.

I think I have the solution to all this. Um, like, so the man, the man and the women category, we have that in sports because it's a, basically, I think a proxy for the natural divisions that make competition unfair.

But it actually seems to be, in light of this intersex boxer, it actually seems to be too rough of a proxy, right? you know, if you determine the sex of a person by their genitals, their chromosome pair, it's still a proxy for like who has more muscle mass, who has like the skeletal advantage, you know, faster twitch muscles, you know, stuff that generally men and women are way different on. But here I think the proxy is actually just too rough. So my best solution for this would be to introduce like a full body metric like weight class and boxing, which includes like skeletal dimensions, muscle mass, twitch response times. And we should just replace that metric and order people by like class categories and they can compete against each other. I think that this would very, very, very occasionally lead to men fighting women, but more often it would be women who want to fight men, I think. But for the most part, it would neutralize the issue.

And in this case, I think the boxer, I can't remember if her name is Imam or something like that, she wouldn't have been fighting a woman, but a man with this sort of scheme. She wouldn't be fighting at all because she would be fighting a man or she wouldn't be good enough to fight a man yeah right yeah she would never win this is the issue is they fall into this very narrow band of like probably would not be a biological male with normal testosterone levels but like could easily be probably any well then i mean she could compete like then she wouldn't be in the olympics but she could still be a boxer she would just be fighting

weaker men right and she shouldn't be in the olympics fighting weaker women and i so i again i i stand by my my suggestion i think it works i mean we already impose hormonal thresholds for what's allowed like because the Olympics is drug tested, right? So you can't have exogenous levels of hormones. So this isn't even complicated to me. We should just be consistent. And if there is a level that's inconsistent with what the ordinary band for women, then they shouldn't be allowed to compete because it is a safety issue there was a case of a ufc mma fighter called fall on fox yeah who was a trans fighter a true trans fighter male to female and i believe she shattered the orbital

bone of one of the women that she fought with at one point it was you know it's very dangerous this is and this is the reason that we can't even have a, we can't have a calm conversation about this online or really anywhere is because we already have seen the excesses of the other side on this issue. Where it's like, if you allow any room for ambiguity at all, you get, you get a just straight up biological male in an arena with a biological female just clearly abusing her in my opinion and there's just something gut reaction that feels wrong about that um yeah i don't know it's crazy i think it just i think there's something here though that does just hint at the i think there's something uncomfortable in this story that hints at the validity of the category itself of like a female fighter category there is the famous question of what is a woman um i think a woman born with like a freakish level of testosterone provided there's not an xy chromosome right like that should be valid and if it's not that's weird

that's it's strange that you would put limits there maybe they don't maybe i'm just getting this totally wrong and it's like it's very simple if you're tested with an xy chromosome you're out um and maybe it should just be that but it it would be i think unusual to have a woman without an intersex disorder to have extra extremely like five standard deviations too high testosterone like because if you can compare testosterone level between women and men, it's not close. It's multiples and multiples. So I think it'd be very unusual to have a true non-intersex natural born woman with T levels that are male, unless they had some kind of adrenal disorder or some hormonal disorder. Yeah, I would be surprised. I feel like intersex women are probably really overrepresented in boxing and other kind of like martial art adjacent sports. And so I feel like this, the more I think about it, the more I'm like, yeah, wow, this category is actually probably pretty dangerous for a non-intersex woman to be competing at the elite level because, you know, there's very few intersex people in the world but of those people since they're disproportionately strong um if they're if they grow up competing with women then they're gonna you know excel um and potentially to elite levels so it does seem like this would it would become a legal loophole for countries that want medals

yeah it probably already has been i mean i mean we've had these sports for a long time i believe it predates genetic when did we start genetic testing for this like not that far ago long ago so probably you know the history of in the history of great female athletes there's a lot of um well there's an asterisk there. It sort of muddies the water generally. And I don't know what's going to... I mean... She'll probably win the gold medal, actually. She's the favorite.

The Algerian. Wow. I didn't know that. Damn. Well, then... Makes sense, I guess. Looking forward to the controversy to burn even hotter because people are not going to let this go.

They're not going to give an inch. One thing we got to talk about before we leave, I want to quickly get in here. We have the attack of the ex-billionaire wives. Just something light and fun to close it out. Sanjana, tell me about the menace that is Melinda Gates. Melinda Gates, Melinda French Gates. She often includes her maiden name. She fucking would be. But she, yeah, I mean, basically Melinda Gates got divorced from Bill Gates a few years ago. But in May, she announced she was leaving the Gates Foundation. So this sort of gives her carte blanche to give away or invest her $12.1 billion divorce settlement as she sees fit and she's embarked on this very high profile kind of press tour so she has a new youtube channel where she's done all of these

interviews this the interview series are called moments that make us but she's done interviews with michelle obama oprah reese witherspoon um i think this is sort of in honor of her upcoming 60th birthday um she has been interviewed in cbs she was on the cover of time magazine um and she just had a piece really splashy profile in the new york times um where she says you know she's she's taking sides. And that was kind of the tagline, because she has finally sort of come out and endorsed, she endorsed Biden initially, and I assume is now endorsing Kamala. But she's, yeah, she's being very sort of explicitly political about, you know, her commitment to abortion rights and, you know, aligning herself

in this New York Times profile with Mackenzie Bezos, who's also been a huge left-wing philanthropist who's given away an astounding $16.5 billion since she got divorced from Jeff Bezos in 2019, mainly in the form of what's called trust-based giving, which is this, I guess, kind of novel form of philanthropy where you basically just give people money with no strings attached. I mean, I guess in some ways, a lot of philanthropy has operated this way sort of de facto for years, but Mackenzie is kind of explicitly saying, I'm just giving money to these, you know, maybe women of color or whatever, who I think just deserve it and can do what they want with it. So Melinda's done a

similar thing. She's given away $20 million to 12 women and I guess a couple men who she's kind of chosen at random. I mean, one of them is Ava DuVernay, who's the film director who directed 13th. Another one is someone who runs a childcare clinic in East Africa. But yeah, I mean, she's basically just, she's unchanged. She's going to be on a kind of giving spree, I guess.

It's her money. She can do whatever she wants with it. I do think that these people, the money needs to be tracked. Like we need to, we need to actually look back at the impact of the money we need to. And I'm not saying that it goes, who cares if it goes to waste? I don't give a shit if she burned, lights her money on fire. What I'm worried about is the negative impact. I'm worried about like, who is funding the people blocking the golden gate bridge, right? Like where do those people get their money? Where do all these activist groups get their money? And every sort of socially destructive organization that exists, that is

a nonprofit, all of the NGOs, right? That are sort of de facto a member of our aristocracy who are quietly shaping policy either via activism or actual direct contributions. All of the organizations in San Francisco controlling the homeless shit that constantly mainstream more, their existence depends on the ongoing existence of homelessness as a problem, right? So they're incentivized to keep it going. I want to know about that. I want more transparency into this, I say as a journalist.

I think that we need to know exactly who everyone is giving the money to. I think we also need to follow it for impact. And, um, I think it's potentially really, really dangerous to give money to people who are crazy again and again and again. I mean, $16.5 billion. How do you do that? That's a lot of money. Okay. That's so much money that I don't know that I don't know that you could actually know what you're giving that money to that. That's how much money it is. I don't think you really know who you've given it to or what the impact is going to be. You're just giving it away because I think it makes you feel good about yourself. And that is really the opposite of selfless.

I think it's like extremely selfish. There's no way that you could be making a positive impact that thoughtlessly. She also went after Teal. And who was the other one? Was it Elon? Well, she went after Peter,al and yeah who was the other one was it elon well she went after uh peter elon jack dorsey um dorsey and she's like they're not what did she call them not not non-philanthropists it's one word that she invented non-philanthropist one word that's possibly true in in the sort of technical sense of the word but when you talk about positive

impact on the world and putting your money into into organizations that produce more value and more jobs new technologies that improve everybody's lives that is at least some that's not just at least something i think that's that's remarkable and exciting um and you as someone giving your money away should be measuring it against impact like that. You should be, and I think there are nonprofits that can do this. My mom spent her whole life in a nonprofit. It's a school for kids with autism. Most of the really great schools in the state of New Jersey, at least, are nonprofits. That's a school. You can sort of measure the impact. Okay, like these kids had nowhere else to go. They go to this school and they get a great education as much as you can as a uh a person with classically presenting autism um that is like i just i want to see what you're

giving it to and i don't believe that they did i don't believe she has any i don't believe these women have any idea what they're giving the money to it's just the scale of it is too great i think elon is the greatest philanthropist of all time because he bought twitter for way too much money and he saved us from the libs i think it should count i think it should count right you're it's definitely mission oriented it's just straight up like i'm not going to make money on this thing i'm going to make sure that free speech is allowed and so i'm lighting well however many billions of dollars on fire to do it yeah so you can and you can judge him so with him the great thing about it is you can judge him against the impact of that you say okay well he did it now what's going on in the world because

of it and you can have an opinion on that i want the same thing for all of these women um for all the billionaire ex-wives who are just like so committed to the most socially degenerate non-profits in history someone commented because I posted something about Melinda on Twitter, and someone commented, you'd actually probably have a better chance of a Teal Fellow solving the kind of malaria crisis that they've poured almost a billion dollars in trying to solve through this very ineffective apparatus of nonprofits than them doing it, because they're just such inefficient capital allocators. Let's talk about the Teal Fellowship really quick. What is the difference between the Teal Fellowship and what she's doing other than the Thiel Fellowship is successful? I first met Peter when he was starting the Thiel Fellowship. It was 2020.

The whole point was like, it was a fun, he thought it was fun. It was like an interesting way to get to the problem of college, generally speaking, which was something that nobody was talking about back then. The idea that it cost too much money, the value was too low, and the student debt crisis was important. The idea that you had to go to college was sort of off. There were these other ways about it. Maybe actually those four years are being wasted in an institution that does not celebrate the kinds of qualities we need to see in the world, et cetera.

So he just gives $100,000 to 20 kids to stop out of school, take a pause and do whatever you want. Now it's been fashioned into sort of like, oh, you'll build a company or something. That's not how it was in the beginning. It was straight up like 20 brilliant kids, take a break, do something cool. And, you know, like Vitalik was one of them. Like Ethereum came out of that. Like Dylan Field was one of them.

Figma came out of that. Like they were all of the, and they've both produced how much value in the world that was straight up. I think that they were, it was a nonprofit. So that's, how is that not? That's philanthropy. It's, it's just has an impact, which I think for someone like Melinda Gates is hard to wrap your head around because she's just been lighting fire, uh, lighting money on fire for, for this long. Though I do to her credit didn't, I think she made an impact on the malaria stuff right she's done she has made she hasn't eliminated it but she's made some progress she yeah well if you pour like enough hundreds of millions of dollars at the problem you'll make some impact we should be gene driving them though and that would be philanthropy too in

my mind like why are you giving it to just like random people like we should be putting all the money into politicians who support the gene drive research into gene drives and labs that are developing um genetically modified mosquitoes that can gene drive mosquitoes that carry malaria um out of existence i think that's that's the way that we should be going about this and that would be philanthropic and very interesting and um i would happily write a positive piece about it but that's not what she's going to do. I would just say on the tracking side, I don't know what Gates has done, but there is this trend of ultra millionaires, billionaires giving to donor advised funds, which basically separate the donor from what charity the fund gives that money to. basically separate the donor from what charity the fund gives that money to and so it's this sort of mixer where you know money goes in from one donor and what comes out is not tracked and back to the donor and so um we're gonna have a hard time i think potentially tracking

these uh billionaire wives is uh well i think it's designed on purpose right this is i say this if you're a writer out there and you're and you're interested in NGOs, I am looking for a full-time are driving us crazy right now, have the fingerprints of this kind of funding on them. Because really, to make an impact in culture, it's a full-time job, right? Like all of us are doing it. We're all working on culture to a certain extent. We're writing, we're, you know, we're podcasting, we're reporting, we're researching, we're funding in things like that, that takes, it's a full-time job. So who is paying for people who have a full-time job, um, doing highly anti-social destructive things. Um, that's been going on for decades and decades and decades. I think it's a weird loophole, uh, that has been capitalized

on by some of the worst people alive and we need to figure out who they are. This is a, it's a huge deal that this money is just being, it's not just, it's again, it would be better if it was just lit on fire, but it's not, it's funding something that is going to have an impact and no one is ever going to get a credit that impact with Melinda Gates. She's just going to get puff piece after puff piece after puff piece from the New York Times. That is outrageous, I think. Like this is, I don't, a colleague of mine criticized a piece on, from the New York Times written by, was it the New York Times? It was Teddy Schleifer. I can't remember if he was at Puck or the New York Times at that point. But he was reporting on the Trump fundraiser that Sacks threw. And my colleague was like, oh, this isn't reporting or why do we need this? This is bullshit. It's like, who cares? And I thought,

I don't agree with that. I care. I definitely care. I want to know. I want to know who the really wealthy donors of each candidate are. And Teddy's done a really good job of covering money broadly, I think. I mean, he could change, but so far, I think he's done a very good job of that. And I do think it's a valuable service, that kind of reporting. It's really important that we know which wealthy people are connected to the people who are in our country who are passing laws, creating laws and that affect our lives. This is a piece of that. This is like, this is the, this is like an, like an arm of the shadow government to it,

to an extent. And we have no insight into it whatsoever. Like we need reporting on that, I think. Yeah. So join the team. Nick, if you find anyone, let me know. Last thoughts on, I want you to like impart, leave us with a lesson from the fight.

Something that you learned, something positive that you want, you want the folks to sort of like absorb into their life and use to grow. Yeah. I mean, I made a tweet about this but the which people really liked but my main takeaway from this is like you just have to put yourself in uncomfortable situations i know it sounds like such a truism but like it really was like i'm a tech bro and i went to this gym with like blue collar guys like cops people that are totally outside my social sphere and i sucked i still suck like i'm i only have like six months of training and i got beat up all the time you know and got a whole bunch of injuries which i won't even go into detail on and uh it

was so refreshing you know to uh be a total beginner at something especially if you're accomplished in your field, and you feel like on top of the world and everyone loves you, whatever. Exposing yourself to a situation where you're absolutely awful at a thing is so satisfying as you grow and improve. And the other takeaway is like yeah like you can just do this stuff you know i just chose to get in the ring and expose myself to harm and risk and you know do like change my fitness completely uh the catalyst was because i had dealt with some horrible health issues last year and uh that's just a choice i made. And anyone can do that.

And you don't need anything special. You just need discipline and desire. And that was all it took. And that was that. Catch you here next time. Nick, thank you. And the rest of you, like, subscribe, comment. Give us a shout on Twitter. See you later.

Thank you.