The Bill Simmons Podcast - Ep. 95: Billionaire Investor Chris Sacca

Episode Date: April 28, 2016

HBO and The Ringer's Bill Simmons is joined by billionaire investor and ‘Shark Tank’ star Chris Sacca to discuss Google's profit ceiling (8:00), Twitter's lack of innovation (20:00), YouTube vs. Google Videos (28:00), the genesis of Uber (38:00), the e-sports revolution or lack thereof (46:00), Snapchat's success (1:01:00), Mark Cuban and 'Shark Tank' (1:11:00), and the future of live video at sporting events (1:16:00). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Uh, let's go. Yeah. Clear enough for you. We're taping this on a Monday and I don't know when it's running. Chris Saka, the legendary angel investor. When did the term angel investor start? Can I ask you a question quick?

So that jam, do you play that at home alone sometimes? That's my song, that's Tupac. Do you light the candles next to the bath and just play that on loop? Do you know how hard it was to clear that song? It was probably one of my three greatest achievements. I love it. It definitely sets a vibe. Yeah.

I'm glad we're finally doing this. Yeah, thanks for having me over. We've known each other a little bit over the last couple years or so. But ever since all the, basically when I got suspended on and I started thinking about starting my own thing, what that would look like, and I just kind of went into the abyss of the whole world. How do you start a business? What are people like?

What do they invest in? And I became more and more fascinated by all of it, and you've been in that world basically, I would say, the last 10 years. I mean, when did you really start investing in stuff? I moved out to Silicon Valley during law school. I was I was ostensibly a law student. I just knew I never was going to be a lawyer. But that was basically the quickest way to get a seat at the table so that people in Silicon Valley would would hear me out. And I felt like at that point, the world was moving towards Silicon Valley and you

just wanted to be involved? It really was. Everything, you know, so I started going to university for math back when I was in junior high. I had a regular life. And then at night, I would go up to the University of Buffalo and take math classes. I was obsessed with math and computers. I had a math burnout in like 11th grade.

Stopped taking any of it. What's a math burnout? That's where you just like, yeah, kind of. There was just number smoke coming out of my ears. It's like, I can't do this anymore. So I went to the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown, which is like the best academic program in the United States that doesn't have a math or science requirement.

Did that, was living abroad in Spain when Netscape went public. And I remember reading about that in the International Herald Tribune and feeling FOMO, like, oh man, this internet thing is really starting to happen at scale and I am going to miss it. And so I got back to the United States and wanted to get involved. But as a kid who grew up without any money on the East Coast without a big technical network around me. I didn't know many entrepreneurs. I was trying to figure out a way to get out West.

You needed a few years of work experience in order to get to an MBA program. And so what I realized, there was a back door. You could basically get a law degree, move out there. During your law studies, you could be in the mix. Doing work at Fenwick and West is where I ended up working with the top shelf VCs, the top shelf companies out there in the first bubble. And so that's what I did. I kind of hacked the system by going to Georgetown Law School and then working my way into the Valley. How'd you end up at Google?

I ended up at Google a strange way. So I mean, the short bio is I took my law school student loans and I started day trading them. I told the law school they hadn't shown up yet. And I cashed them and started day trading that money. And I made a ton of money on paper. At my height, I was worth $12 million. Just from day trading? From day trading. Wow.

Well, there was a little rule called Reg T that I kind of broke where I would use that to buy. I would lever up. I would buy way more stock than I could actually afford and then wait for the margin call. But ultimately, I made $12 million on paper and was living out in just all over the place. But I was spending time with some guys in Parks and Utah, some buddies of mine who own a record store, sleeping on their couch, hanging out in the store, day trading, ski bumming, while ostensibly in law school. And then the market fell apart. So spring of 2000, I lost it all plus $4 million more in a matter of days.

So that left me $4 million in the hole. I was 25 years old. I had nothing to show for it other than a bunch of stories, basically. And so I needed to take a job as a lawyer. So I made my way out. I worked at Fenwick during the day. And at night, I was just grinding, moonlighting, doing anything I could to generate cash to pay back uh all this debt i was able to negotiate the debt down to two and an eighth million from four million and so um i just worked it off i was i was doing contracts on elance i was taking jobs off of craigslist uh craigslist i did a voice over for a craigslist thing sounds a little shady yeah Yeah. You have to use your body. And a little bit of mild lubricant.

I mean, I needed the money. But literally, I just did everything I could to try and crawl back out of the hole. Eventually, I started working with a bunch of startup companies. For some of them, I was their business development guy. For some of them, I was a lawyer. Some of them, I was their strategist, helping them raise money or name the product or design the consumer funnel i just i was kind of faking it till you make it if you came to me and asked me if i was good at something i was like yeah sure in fact i had a business card once that said chris sacca and i would go to these networking

events and people like oh yeah you sound like a smart kid. Things will work out for you. And I don't think they realized I was check to check. Like I was going to have to move back to Buffalo. Yeah. And can you imagine a worse fate than having to move back to Buffalo? So I eventually was able to put something together. I basically created an entity called the Salinger Group. It sounded really erudite and fancy.

It sounds mnemonic, right? And so my then best friend, which is now my wife, Crystal, made me a really cool business card that said Salinger Group. And I was the principal and I would hand it out to people. And they're like, oh, yeah, I know you guys. You guys do good work. And my career started taking off. And it was all spoken bears? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I didn't even have an address on it because I lived in a hovel in Foster City, California. I had no phone number because I didn't have one. Yeah.

You know, it was all BS. But as a result, I was able to claw my way back in the game. I went to every networking meeting in Silicon Valley ever. So the Churchill Club, the World Internet Forum the Chinese Software Professionals Association the Indus entrepreneurs which are basically Indians Pakistanis Bangladeshis and oftentimes they had like a $20 entrance fee to their networking events so I would just sneak in through the kitchen because I speak Spanish and just glad hand and before I know it you know I just have this rule

if somebody makes eye contact I've convinced myself they want to know you and so I just go in for it. I just press flesh and made it work and so eventually I had a stable of companies I was working for and Google found me in one of those companies and pulled me in in 2003. And then you were there for four or five years, right?

I was there for exactly four years i basically stayed till i vested so right um an amazing amazing place to work i mean we literally could feel a scale that had never been felt before on the planet i mean we we had a globe where you could visualize in real time every a dot would flow out for every single search being conducted on the planet on our system at the time and i mean in the middle of the night there'd be searches coming from the gobi desert you know there'd be searches coming from the tip of madagascar they're just you're just like wow we're building something at a scale that is just hard for humans to really process what is like in 2005 what's the sense of the ceiling of Google at that point?

By then we were public and we knew we were unstoppable. And when I got there in 03, I think I was like number 700 at the company. And yet it still felt like one of the smallest startups ever because they believe in radical sharing of information. So every meeting you take notes and then those meetings can be seen by anybody else in the company. And there was just so much transparency and inclusion among employees there. Every Friday, they did an all-hands, where they went over the board of directors deck to a few thousand people, and we rarely had any leaks because they treated everybody like an owner of the company. And so we knew we were working on something huge and important there it felt incredibly special to me

when i left i mean i got to do all kinds of stuff like i was well hold on wait a second though because there was a time with google that everybody was like yeah this is great this is really useful but how the hell do you monetize it well Well, I love that. When did that end? Yeah, but so that's the funny thing. I got there in 2003, and it was already making millions and millions of dollars and wildly profitable, and that was the big secret. They're like, don't let Microsoft know how much money we're making because they're asleep at the wheel.

Right. I mean, in fact, one of my first jobs there was to build out our data centers, our big server farms. So these things uh you know a billion dollars goes into each of them and they require as much power as a city like a buffalo new york i mean they're massive they only employ maybe a dozen or a couple dozen people but they're just these massive buildings jam-packed of really hot computers that are constantly churning through search index information in Gmail and Blogger and all their other stuff.

And so if you know the data center capacity a company has, you can infer from that how big they are. So one of the first things they did when I was at Google was send me around the country and ultimately the planet as the Salinger Group and buy up data center space. So people didn't know they were dealing with Google, but I had a billion dollar budget. So I was just knocking on doors in Oregon. Actually, in Oregon, I had Department of Homeland Security called on me once because they're like, who is this guy driving on a rental car? He's got a very suspicious looking beard and he's going town to town asking all these questions

about electrical power and fiber optics. Like this guy's got to be Al-Qaeda or something. But I was empowered in a way that no company ever empowers a young person like that. And they realized pretty early that all the data that they were bringing in could be used in 7,000 different business advantages. Yeah. I mean, one of the things they learned was the thing that you're looking for, they might not have even known ahead of time to go find for you. So if they cast the widest net possible and gathered as much information as possible that dramatically increased the likelihood they would have great answers and ultimately that they might find some

synergy between their businesses. So one of the things that motivated the YouTube acquisition was YouTube just had all the video, right? Some of it was violative of rights, and they were very wary of bringing on any litigation as a result. But they'd started their Google video enterprise, and people just weren't uploading to it at scale. And yet YouTube, even back then in like 06, already had so much cool stuff in it. And so at Google's mission is this mission statement, organize all the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. And that was something that wasn't just like stapled on the wall.

We would talk about it every time we made a decision to do something there. But I had one of the best times ever. I mean, I got to start a group that's now called Access. So it's fiber and wireless and all this stuff that competes with the carriers and competes with the cable companies. And so I got to be a rebel, but a rebel backed by billions of dollars. I got to go to this FCC spectrum auction and play the biggest hand of poker that's ever been played. I mean,

I got to bid the $4.7 billion price just to call bullshit on verizon yeah and where the hell else in the world do you get to do that those are amazing times so when i i left i was starting to get a little big and political and provincial you know department by department you've worked in big companies yeah recently yeah but uh so i i left because i was really missing working in a startup environment and with startups and when i did there was was a New York Times article that came out a few days later. I was at my parents' house for the holidays, and it said something along the lines of, why would this guy leave the greatest job in the world? And I sat there at my parents' house and cried.

I'm like, oh, my God, what did I do? But it really was the greatest job in the world and one of the greatest places to work ever. It seemed like it had a lot of great people. It's almost like one of those NBA teams where they just had a lot of young talented people and you look back and you know wow a lot of people are on that team well one of the things they did that's kind of like an nba team yeah is they they hired just for sheer capability not necessarily for culture fit and so they were just like if we get the smartest most driven ambitious people in the world all to work here let's see what happens and so but that's

there was see i i disagreed that strategy but it worked no but you've seen some teams implode as a result yeah yeah i was gonna say that's and so and so other teams are like well i don't know if this guy's gonna work well with this guy you know a lot a lot of raw talent. But but, you know, if you look at Eric Schmidt and Larry and Sergey as the owners and general managers, they're like, let's just get the smartest people in the world here and then see what happens. And so there were definitely some people on the spectrum there who had no interpersonal skills or definitely some assholes, you know, but we would hire like the world puzzle champion you know and just say like look come to google and it turns out the world puzzle champion was a total badass an amazing engineer but we would hire um hackers like actual criminal hackers who had done time uh because of their sheer talent and this is like a path that sounds like a Netflix show yeah we we really did I I had a contractor work for me there once and he was one of the best employees we ever had and I was like

look we'd really like you to come on board I don't know why we keep paying your your boss you should come over here and he's like well I have something to tell you I you know I actually was convicted of computer fraud and abuse and did some time and I was like like, oh, bummer. And I surfaced it up to the top and they're like, he sounds really talented. Like how, you know, and so he worked there. I mean, there's a guy who had to change his name to kind of expunge his record, but he ended up working there and he was great. But that's a company that focused on talent unlike any I've ever seen. And that's why I think there's a really powerful group of alumni there. You know, if you know somebody from Google, the odds are they're smart and driven and unbound by practicality. They think in a way that frees them change the lives of users, that would make out-of-scale amounts of money,

that would have some unbounded impact on the world, and to forget initially how it was going to pay for itself. Don't let your mind be burdened by thinking about how this thing might work. Just make it work, and then we'll figure out how to pay for it along the way. That's a revolutionary way of thinking about building a business. Like Gmail changed everything in mail. And yet it was a horrible business idea up front, right?

Just let's offer a shitload of storage to everybody. Let's change it from constantly having to delete your mail to just keeping it all. Let's keep all your mail there all the time. And yet it was genius. They reached out to me what was it like oh three oh four when they came up with gmail like hey man we we're big fans in the office we have this coming do you want to lock up some of your names yeah for gmail and i'm like i i guess i like why i already have i I am very happy with my AOL. And then, but yeah, I mean, the way they pulled everything off, it did seem like there was a catch.

It's like, yeah, you get all the storage, get this email address, and we want absolutely nothing. Well, what we did was we had data that showed if you're using Gmail, you were just going to be more of a searcher, right? I mean, we had all this data that showed the more you search, the more money we make. You want to keep people on the platform. Yeah, so let's install a Google toolbar. And if you have a Google toolbar, you're that much more likely to search. Just like if Amazon knows they got you on Prime,

you're that much more likely to buy stuff. And so the more they can keep you within the Google family of products, the more likely it is you're going to go to the places that make them money. Being free was a great idea. Being free is an incredible, I'm not going to say Silicon Valley came up with the concept, but it has contributed to so much damn growth there. So back to your question about when people were like, how is Google ever going to make any money?

I love that question. I love that question about Twitter. I spent the first couple of years as a Twitter investor trying to convince people that Twitter was going to be a business. And finally, I was like, you know what? Fuck it. I'm not here to convince you anymore. Just give me your stock. And I just started buying it all because I was like, if you can't see- That's a famous story. You went around and you bought up all the employees. Explain it quickly. I mean, well, so just to complete the timeline, I left Google and started investing on my own. While I was at Google, I made two

angel investments, as you said. So individual investments in startups. One was in a company called Photo Bucket that we sold to News Corp. That worked out well. And thankfully, because I'd written a credit card check as my angel investment there, I needed that money. And the second was into Twitter. I was in the seed round at Twitter. Evan Williams, one of the co-founders, and a good friend of mine invited me into that. But I needed that $25,000 back someday. That was real money for me. As much as I worked at Google in the early days, I did not get Google rich. I left there worth just under a million dollars, which in real life is rich, but not for angel investing.

Not for what you wanted to do. Yeah, not for what I want to do. And so most of the angel investors you know are worth a couple hundred million dollars, and they just kind of shotgun checks of $25,000 to $50,000 out and a little spray and pray, and hopefully one of them hits. But my investment in Twitter, I really needed to get that money back someday, and so I just started showing up to the company unannounced. Jack didn't even really like me. Jack Dorsey, the inventor, the now CEO again.

I was too businessy for him because I wanted it to work. And so, and, and most of the time that, I mean, that was pretty atypical for you to just show up and be like, I have some stock. I want to be involved. Well, in the early days it wasn't because I didn't have any other option. I didn't, I left Google. I didn't have any source of income. I didn't have a ton of money in the bank and I needed to, to the extent I thought possible, de-risk these things by having some impact, right? One of my rules for investing then and now has been only invest in things where I think I personally can impact the outcome. So it has to be a preexisting, like before I get involved, it has to be awesome.

And then I think I can make it just that much more awesome by my involvement. So when you play blackjack, you sit in the third base seat because you can affect the hand the most. I can count it. You can watch everyone's hand and third base is the key seat and you need to affect the outcomes. Yeah. No, you know what I do? I actually studied so much math. I can't sit at a Vegas table at all. It drives me crazy. You know, the odds are against you know what i do i actually studied so much math i can't sit at a vegas table at all it drives me crazy you know the ads are against you yeah i mean i used to write papers against that you know like the five cents and the dollar you lose 5.3 cents i think on every spin of the roulette wheel and stuff but what i like to do instead is go to vegas get all messed up and then with my buddies do like kind of side bets on, Hey, let's

do over under on her age right there. And then, you know, part of it is the guessing. And part of it is you have to get her to reveal her driver's license to validate the bet. Or I'll, I like to get two total strangers in a pushup contest against each other right on the floor of Caesars or something like that. There's just a dramatic thrill for that. And it's even money. And, uh, it allows you to take advantage of your friends who might be weaker minded or, uh, you know, but this sounds like the greatest Snapchat feed ever. It could, just walking around forcing people to do pushups. Dude, you're building a media empire. Like how you think you're looking, you're constantly looking for new sources of content. Yeah.

You know, you wire yourself. So wait, Twitter. Yeah. Well, Twitter can't make money. But I mean, to the Firehost. We gave her a little chunk of Twitter data. And we said, go parse that and see what you think. And she came back and said, you know what's amazing? 62% of the URLs that are in three days' worth of Twitter data had never been seen by the Google crawler. So Google has this incredibly pervasive and comprehensive index where it's constantly out spidering and rolling up all the pages it can find on the web. And 62% of the links that we had in Twitter, they had never seen. So we knew right away it had this incredible, incredible corpus body of data. Plus it was real time in a way that the other sites weren't. And so we knew we were onto something great and that it wouldn't be that hard to monetize, both in a stream as well as on a search basis.

And yet, it was just the number one objection I would get when I would speak on behalf of Twitter or be on a panel. It's just, how is this thing ever going to make money? I'm just like, if it's not obvious to you right now, then maybe you should be in another line of work. But people are still asking that in April 2016. For a company that makes a couple billion dollars a year, I love it. It's fascinating.

I'm not a Snapchat investor, but I see the same thing where people are like, will Snapchat be able to turn the attention of a few hundred million daily active users into money? The jury, it remains to be seen. You're like, come on, are you kidding me? Of course, they've got all this attention. Flipping that around though, I mean, MySpace had a lot of users at one point. Yeah, but they hadn't turned on the monetization that we did.

In fact, they farmed it out to us at Google. We were doing basically remnant AdSense ads where we did like a $900 million three-year guarantee with MySpace to just monetize that with some really poorly targeted AdSense ads. So there wasn't a native format. Like if you think about Twitter's advertising, those tweets, the advertising format itself is a tweet, right? That was a genius notion that Evan Williams came up with is just the ad shouldn't be a banner and it shouldn't be

some ad cast off to the side, but it should be the tweet. It should be the trend. It should be native and specific to that platform. And that's worked incredibly well for them. With Twitter, I've been frustrated by them the last few years. I know some people that work for Twitter and we talk about it. I'd be asking some of these same questions. What I never understood with Twitter was why they were so afraid to innovate and take

chances and grow the product and their attitude from 2009 to like 2013 was basically look we're twitter we're doing great we don't need this other stuff that's how i felt as a user we don't need to do this because people are already using us and people in all these countries are tweeting and we're affecting elections so we're fine and now it seems like they're like oh shit we need to do stuff yeah i mean look nobody's more frustrated than i am i know you're the most famously frustrated person i mean just for the sake of reference by the time of the ipo i own around 18 of the stock yeah i was the I own around 18% of the stock. I mean, I was the largest, my kind of group of funds were the largest shareholder in the company. And so I've, there's literally no

one who's as frustrated as I am by what I see too as just stagnant growth. You know, one of the things that I think happened and a theme you've come across in your own career and you've seen in other people's careers is that this was a company that was previously run by the founders and in 2010 the one of the co-founders Evan Williams who's CEO was pushed out in favor of the COO who was a business guy and and for a long time, basically the next three to four years, maybe five years, there was no real product person at Twitter. There was no one who lives and breathes and thinks differently about product. Instead, it was a company where we had an incredibly successful head of revenue in Adam Bain. He's amazing. And he was innovating a little bit on revenue product. But we didn't really have at the very top of the company, a core consumer product

person driving innovation there. And we see this sometimes in companies that are no longer run by the founder. You don't necessarily have the moral conviction to go ahead and change everything up. One of the things I admire about Snapchat is that they're innovating before they have to. They keep making changes on the platform, even though everyone likes the thing they've got today. And one of the reasons they can do that is because Evan can just wave his hand and say, make it so. Zuck does something really similar. Zuck's even been successful just buying companies by waving his hand, just saying, the Oculus guys are doing something surreal over there.

They should just be working here. The Instagram guys are beating us at our own game with image sharing. They should just be working here. And I think Twitter didn't have that for the longest time. At the leadership level, they didn't have anyone with the presence and the gravitas of a founder, an inventor. And so they couldn't do anything bold. It was being managed more like by consultants in a way. The board didn't have great leadership. And so the company went sideways for a while. Isn't that the story of how so many big powerful companies no

matter what genre you're talking about that's the biggest issue right when people try to basically protect the lead versus you know to use football is a good metaphor for a lot of different things but in football sometimes when you're just handing the ball off three times and punting it's a bad idea and sometimes you actually have to do a little play action things like that and i think like places like rolling stone sports illustrious i think espn has been in this place this decade where they're trying to hold the lead and say they're trying to fix sports center for six seven years because that was their meal ticket instead of saying wait a second sports center actually is becoming increasingly irrelevant every year

instead of trying to fix it we should be trying to figure out what the next SportsCenter is. Basically, ESPN is a tech company and they don't realize it yet. They're still thinking like a TV network. It's like, you guys are actually a tech company now. And they don't appreciate that. So go back to Google. On your point, one of the most pivotal moments in the history of Google was buying YouTube. Because it was the first public acknowledgement in the history of Google was buying YouTube because it was the first public acknowledgement

in the history of that company that somebody outside of Google was doing something that we had tried way better than we were. Yeah. Right. And there's an amazing document that's internal there, like a postmortem of why did Google video fail? And it was just, there was just a lot of conceit in the product that we internally, I mean, you hire that many smart people and there was just there was just a lot of conceit in the product that we internally i mean you hire that many smart people and there's just hubris there there's like hey we we can do no wrong we were forcing people to download a piece of software called vlc rather than just use flash you know flash is a proprietary standard but we're like hey we're better than that we use something called open source but it just wasn't working we are pre-screening all content for copyright turns out at that time a lot of copyright holders wanted their stuff on YouTube because it was generating buzz and views

and that kind of stuff. And so as a result, when Google finally said, look, this YouTube stuff is better than anything we could make, it really cracked open a wave of acquisitions there and an attitude across Silicon Valley that I think has empowered some of the greatest companies to continue evolving to just say not everything amazing is necessarily going to get built in-house organically. We might not be able to step outside ourselves and see our own assumptions. Yeah. ESPN had that with the ESPN phone. Remember that?

They made their own phone. Had to be the plan. They created this whole division. And really, they should have just done a deal with a phone company that had all the existing infrastructure and just figured out a way to add ESPN scores into it, and they would have won and not spent any of the money. They would have crushed it. It's funny. A guy you're working with now, Evan Williams over at Medium.

Yeah. Evan and I are good buddies. Smart dude. He's different than smart. He's like from the future. And so Evan and I are buddies. But when it comes to product, I think I'm a good critic of current products. And I don't consider myself to be a visionary of future products.

Evan just lives a few years ahead of the rest of us. I mean, literally a couple years ago, he was pounding the table saying, live table saying live video live video we need live video and nobody at twitter was listening to him nobody's building it and now look at what's changing everything it's periscope and it's facebook live it's just there's no doubt about it i mean it's twitch it's it's all these things meerkat was kind of the the tourney if there was a 30 for 30 for tech the eight days of meerkat would be like the best documentary eight days of Meerkat would be like the best documentary. The eight days of Meerkat seemed like the next big thing. Then Twitter just annihilated it.

Yeah, Meerkat, the technical execution was not their strong suit. And then building on top of Twitter's graph was a bummer. So, but point being, Evan's superpower is finding and identifying the assumptions that you and I don't know we're even making. The things we're just taking for granted, the things that just seem implicitly like the rules, he can find those and turn them upside down. Yeah. And that's why he's serially successful, blogger, Twitter, and Medium now, which is just huge and blowing up. And your traditional business guy just doesn't think like that. Your traditional operator, your traditional MBA and COO just doesn't have that kind of vision. And so what's setting some companies apart from the rest, you know, there are companies that are grinding out trying to find a 6% bottom line

improvement, you know, so they can issue a dividend. But when you really look at Silicon Valley, the ones that are growing by leaps and bounds that are blowing people's minds, there is an independence of thought that's just unbounded by reality. And so they can see into the future, they can make bold predictions, and they can really stake the future of the product on things that you and i might not see yet you never told me how twitter was going to make money i mean twitter like literally that's the funny thing twitter has a user problem definitely not a money problem yeah so i mean it's in fact you know they're they report earnings tomorrow by the time people

hear this they will have reported earnings. Most of Wall Street expects their monetization per user to have gone up, and then the jury's out on whether they're going to have more users or not. Probably a mild increase. But they have figured out how to monetize the attention you spend there. They just haven't evolved the way you engage with those tweets to make more and more people go there. I mean, it's frustrating to hear people say Twitter may never go mainstream when you're like, okay, so 67 million Americans use it a month.

That's more than watch all the major sports leagues combined. But it could be more. And compared to Facebook, it looks like a small network. I always say I'm buying blank stock like I'm buying Marcus smart stock like talking about athletes teams I'm not literally buying Twitter stock but I I wouldn't rule out Twitter yet well I know I mean I know you're way too close to this conversation but the the database they have and how important it is in weird little circles of people's lives I don't see how that fades away.

There's nowhere to move to from Twitter. Yeah, they've got something to interest everyone in there. That's the crazy thing, and that's so frustrating that you bang your head against the wall. You're just like, everything sports is in there. Everything politics is in there. Everything news is in there. Every hobby you could ever think of. Every environmental issue.

Every celebrity thing. It's all in there. Every hobby you could ever think of, every environmental issue, every celebrity thing, it's all in there. They just do a horrible job of surfacing that to you, right? So there's the serendipitous feed, which some of us have adapted our mind to. Like, all right, let's spin the arbitrary wheel of interestingness and see what comes up when I refresh this. And that's kind of a fun, distracting mode. But there's only so many brains that want to engage that way. Other people want to compartmentalize the way they've learned from newspapers and television.

People want programming. They want curation. They want best of. The mute button was three years too late. I think I was calling for that in like 2011 because when you unfollow somebody, they know. That's political. And you need some way to unfollow somebody without actually unfollowing them yeah um i have a lot of muted people in my life there's a there's a tool called twitter counter that it's unaffiliated with twitter but you can go there plug in your

account and then you can see who's unfollowed you like ranked by how many followers they have and so you can see the power follows and unfollows over time. I'm sure I get unfollowed a lot during moments like Patriots playoff games. Well, I like the Celtics game on Sunday. I mean, I think, I think Tom Brady's a felon. And so I, that hurts my feelings. Actually, if I say that on your show, that's going to get quoted somewhere. Right. So, I mean, I don't know if anyone's actually proven.

Well, you're a Buffalo fan. No, it's, it's, you, you sports hate Tom Brady. You don't actually. I sports hate Tom Brady. You don't actually hate Tom Brady. I've met him once in real life. He seems like a really nice guy. Like devoted husband.

He's a very nice guy. Nice parent. Great guy. But just him and Belichick are just filthy. You would have loved them if he was on the Bills. No, they're filthy. They're filthy combatants. So that said, sorry, I knew this was going to come up today.

I love it. It had to come up. Well, we've won a lot of Super Bowls. That's painful. I know. Have you seen the Four Falls of Buffalo yet? I was still at ESPN when we were talking about that idea. It's tough.

I thought it was too long. I watched it. There's only so much pain you can relive with the Buffalo Bills. I watched it once alone. And then I watched it once with my mom and dad. And my wife walked in and we were all crying. And she's like, what is this? Why do you keep replaying it?

I'm just openly weeping. Those were tough years. You saw Twitter. You were super early on Twitter, and you were super early on Uber. What did those two super early opinions have in common? Yeah, so Uber was something started by my buddy Garrett Camp, originally just with his own car. I mean, he had a car and a driver, and he built an app

so that the rest of us could try it and use it. And we were having jam sessions, is what Travis Klanick, now the CEO, he was an advisor to the company and a co-founder back in the early days. We were having jam sessions about what it could be and what it would look like. Can you explain what a jam session is to people? Oh, yeah, because we've been to some jam sessions.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, hold on. You've got to explain it because somebody's listening to that and they don't know what that means. Yeah, yeah. A jam session is a free form, usually free form. They can be mildly moderated, but freeform discussion on, there's no real agenda. They can be on the future of technology, on policy, on who's running for president, on which companies are going down, that kind of thing.

So you'll just be like, I'm going to invite these 12 people, they're going to come over, we're going to have dinner, and then we're going to shoot the shit for three hours about where's TV going next year. Yeah. So I remember there was a jam session back at South by Southwest interactive 2006. It was in Gary Vaynerchuk's hotel room. I don't know if you come across Gary V in your travels, but it was Gary, uh, myself, Travis clinic, Garrett camp. I think Dave Morin was there. Michael Galpert.

Uh, uh, I'm going to,pert. Owen Brainerd was there. He's now money manager to everyone in Silicon Valley. And now the guy who runs my venture fund day-to-day, Matt Mazzeo, that's where I met him, was in that jam session. And we stayed up until the sun came up yelling at each other about companies and making bold predictions about what was going to work and what was going to fail. And everybody comes to their own biases. And it's like busting balls and shouting over top of one each other,

but learning from each other and kind of building a bond that way. And so this is one of the ways that products get built in the early days is you sit in a room and yell at each other and test each other's assumptions and think wildly and make bold predictions. I mean, Travis spent a lot of time at our house, uh, the Uber CEO now spent a lot of time at our house up in Truckee, California, where I live a lot of the year. And, um, he's legendary for being able to spend eight hours in a hot tub. In fact, he can spend so much time on a hot tub. We put a whiteboard near our hot tub so that he could write down things he was thinking about while he was pacing around in our hot tub but we would talk for hours and hours and hours about what uber could be i mean the earliest days of that company we were talking about its global reach we were talking

about how uber wasn't just about moving people around it was about moving any atoms in the world around anything that we would have more information about how the world moved than any company before in history had ever had. And the original Uber idea was basically like, I wish I could call a black car that would show up at a moment's notice. Yep. Somebody had that idea and then somebody else said that should be a company and then we're off. Yeah. Garrett had that idea. And, and then, and then the way that makes Garrett unique, he didn't just have that idea. Ideas are cheap. Execution is what matters. Idea, Garrett started coding it up and hired a guy named Oscar Salazar, who was the first

coder at Uber, to start building it. And he started letting friends use it and monkeying around with it. And thus, Uber was born. And they had to get the name. It was originally called Uber Cab. Yeah. Do you know where the name. It was originally called Uber Cab. Yeah. Do you know where the name Uber came from? They had to buy it from somebody, right?

I remember reading about this once. I did that deal. It was pretty funny. Somebody big, right? Somebody here in LA. Yeah. So it was Universal Records. Wow.

So I think this story has been told. I'm probably breaking an NDA telling it. But yeah, we found out. So Uber Cab. I i mean this is after the company had raised some money was a real thing i mean i was just gonna say back to those jam sessions in the early days this thing hadn't been incorporated yet hadn't raised any money you know one of the things that a lot of silicon valley companies have in common is that the guys who go on to become the investors are helping way before they've actually gotten money in the company. They're part of that initial thought process. They're part of trying to build it out and test the assumptions and think about hiring the next

couple of people and getting the first few years. It's a way of investing without actually investing because you want to make sure if when you do invest, you've already kind of helped shape it a tiny bit. Yeah. I mean, an investor is a collaborator. You're, you know, if, if I were going to invest in your company, there's, you're basically, we, we always use this parlance, like these investors gave us money, but it's not a magnanimous thing, right? I'm looking for a return, but you're also, as the entrepreneur, you're saying, I have to believe that in exchange for letting these guys buy some of my stock, my remaining stock is going to be worth more as a result, that these guys

aren't just bringing money, but they're bringing enough other value, enough help, whether it's a strategy or hiring or whatever it is that my remaining stock is going to be worth more. And, and so a lot of us, our model is to just dive in and be helpful early on. And then we'll talk about how to invest later. But that's evolved over the last 10 years. I mean, initially the VC, the VC people were a little more, I don't know, cold. And now it seems like your generation and a lot of the people that are either your friends or your rivals are, have that mindset where they want to collaborate as well as invest well it used to be you know the venture capitalists were mostly bankers investment bankers because the exit path was

taking your company public yeah when the first bubble evaporated um you know when everything crashed the bankers all moved on. There was no public market exit. So the banker VCs were shit out of luck. The other thing that happened was the original founders of all those Web 4.0 companies were mostly MBA types because it was a lot of hand-wavy bullshit, a lot of smoke and mirrors. They left town too. And so what was left was the Y Combinator resurgence, The actual engineers being empowered to run their companies. The makers being empowered. Open source comes along.

Now you don't need millions of dollars to start your company. You can start it on a few thousand dollars. That kind of thing. And so there was a democratization there that I think empowered a different type of founder and a different type of investor. And as Garrett was a testament to, you could just hack together an app

and get something like Uber started. And the big thing with Uber was just they were worried about what the taxicab unions, whether people would want to get in a car with somebody that was sent to them on an app. I mean, there was kind of a public fear. It was almost like in the 1999, 2000, 2001 range when everyone was so terrified to buy anything online. Remember that? Sure, sure. That's interesting. If I put my credit card on there what's good they'll know they'll know everything yeah so that's interesting because we had you know our initial vision was look this is a lot safer than a cab a cab is such an anonymized transaction for both the driver and the passenger i mean you

there's so many assaults and so many robberies in both directions there that it's a really unsafe transaction. Especially in Vegas. You want enough money and you've just never seen it again. You're going to get hijacked. Whereas with Uber, there's total knowledge about who's on either end of that transaction. And so it's frustrating sometimes when assaults by Uber drivers get published because it sucks that that happens.

But you're having hundreds of thousands of riots. Not all of them are going to... Yeah, I mean, at scale, I like to say Walmart employs a couple million people, right? If you look at a couple million people and then you look at the daily murder statistics, the odds are incredibly high that a handful of Walmart employees murdered someone last night. And so that's just what happens when you start working with big numbers.

But with Uber, and this is not, I'm not an official Uber spokesperson. This is not a great talking point. But my point is that the reason that bad things get reported is because you know exactly who the driver was. You know exactly who picked you up and where they took you. You have an electronic record of it. And so it's actually way safer for individuals in Uber because there's that much more information. There's accountability and it's way safer for drivers as a result too. And so there will always be exceptions to that and it sucks.

But we knew from the beginning, like, this is going to be a thing that's safer. We also knew it was going to take a lot of drunk drivers off the road. And so it was a company that it's funny to me because I think Uber has a culture that can seem tone deaf sometimes. And some of the things that come out of the company are just bad PR. But in reality, we actually believe Uber is a good thing for the planet it's you know who's a good thing for us who uh people with kids i i think that there's no way to prove this but it has to be um people who have kids who no longer has to be like all right honey you drive this time and i'll be the one that drinks. Like that was a thing.

And now it's like, let's just Uber. I think my theory is that people with kids are just getting bombed at a record right now because they don't have to worry about driving. Well, people, you know, there's a lot of mistake kids. This next generation is going to be a lot of mistake. Third kids. I thought you guys were done. You know, a lot of people put their kids in an Uber because they know whether they're going to make it somewhere or not.

I have a buddy in San Francisco who used to put his kids in Uber to go to school. That makes me nervous. It could. And there's Uber for kids specifically. There's a few of those that have started and stuff like that. But, I mean, I certainly, my kids will likely, by the time they're of driving age, they'll never get driver's license. They'll have autonomous cars. So you think that's going to happen? Do you have have a tesla you ever ridden in one of those teslas are amazing they are amazing have you taken your hands off the wheel

um i couldn't because it's scary right i i just say i couldn't do it it's scary but it's so much safer they just released some data yesterday that show that it's way safer and they have so many accidents that have been avoided even just with that driving assist that they have my wife and if you were driving personally i told kimo about it about the hands-free thing he's like this is unbelievable so people are masturbating and crying like all around the country as they drive i was like yeah this is a new wrinkle for highways it's highway masturbation i mean if you have you seen the google seen the Google, they call it the gondola because there's no wheel in it. You're just kind of sitting there and you have nothing you can do. I'm too old because I'm so scared of all this stuff.

They're scary, but they're absolutely fascinating. This is the most evil science fiction movie nobody's made yet. It's when somebody just hacks in and takes over the self-driving cars. That is a real concern. It could very much be hackable. But these things are fascinating. I mean, it's so much safer. Humans are horrible machine operators.

This is true. And particularly 16-year-old humans. Well, particularly the last five years, now that everybody looks at their phone as they're driving. They're so bad. There's so many more accidents than usual from that. Robots are just a lot better at this. Nobody wants to admit it, but they're a. They're so bad. There's got to be so many more accidents than usual from that. Robots are just a lot better at this. Nobody wants to admit it, but they're a lot better. Yeah.

And so. So you think in the next 10 years? It's literally going to be up to state legislatures and regulators. Oh, that'll go great. I mean, the technology's there. So tens of millions of miles have been driven by Google, and there have been two accidents. One was human intervention that caused the accident,

and the other one was a two-mile-an-hour plus 15 mile an hour collision with a, with a bus. And so, uh, that's over tens of millions of miles. That's, that would have otherwise been hundreds of, of human fatalities. What else do you see coming? What else do I see coming? Self-driving cars. Yeah. What else? Well else are you excited about? What are you fascinated by right now? So we argued about eSports once. I argued about that with Matt. I think eSports is being totally rigged by all the rich people who have invested in it.

Well, you know, my business partner, Matt, owns an eSports team. We had a huge argument about it. I'm not against it. Everyone's like, it's the next thing. It's a slam dunk. It's like, all right, well. Have you ever visited any of these athletes? Yeah, I know.

I'm not against it. Air quotes don't really come across in your podcast, but these are athletes, right? I'm not against it. Have you been to their homes? I'm always dubious of slam dunks. Have you been to their homes at all or anything? No. It's so, I've asked.

I haven't visited yet, but they they live together usually yeah and because they have to train together and a lot of them have trainer like physical trainers now because you need to be like fit and mentally you know high mental acuity and you actually have to be like in yeah you don't want to you don't have any most of these guys are not like the traditional you know like pimply fat ass that that gaming nerds have been portrayed to be like no fatigue at all yeah yeah they also have nutritionists and cooks who live in these houses like this is a real thing like i think you should go visit one of these things i'm not against it i i'm i i just my guard always goes up whenever people are just telling me what's going to happen with something

like that because you know like lots of lots of things sell out arenas sure like monster truck people sell out arenas you're not a grave digger fan uh not really okay so don't underestimate the american people's penchant for entertainment but no the gaming stuff is fascinating we don't have a lot of investments in that space but the ones we do are led by matt my matt mazzi my partner who understands it incredibly well and look i just think you have to believe in the attention right is that you know if you're betting against professional sports you're betting against every trend and attention right now yeah and you're also betting against every trend and identity did you see that study

about tribes 93 of the 100 events that people watched live last year were like sports events yeah other than like seven were scripted or non-scripted or the oscars or something yeah yeah i mean humans crave shared experiences that's just as simple as it is I mean God bless the iPod For letting us download All our music And

You know And play it Atomically So you're listening to one thing I'm listening to another thing With our headphones And that's a fun experience But

We've seen the live music business Take off While recorded music has crashed Live music has taken off Because we want to go see that With other people We still go to the theaters We go see that with other people we still go to the theaters we can still laugh with other people i'm holding up my phone yeah yeah you go to

a concert now everyone's just holding up their phone yeah i mean facebook live and periscope are blowing up because we want to be experiencing the same thing at the same time game of thrones i mean crashed the internet last night you know i, it's just people want to watch that thing together. So with esports, I want it to happen because I feel like I was playing video games from basically the moment they were created. You know? Like from Pong. What was your first one, Pong? That was your first system.

I was, remember when, I think we're almost the same age. Intellivision versus Atari was a thing. So I was Intelliv I think we're almost the same age and television versus Atari was a thing. So I was in television. Yeah. And then eventually I broke down and also got the Atari 2600. But I hit like Nintendo, Sega Genesis. Like I went through basically everything all the way through the PS3. And then I finally retired.

I grew up in a very limited television house and no game system house. So I had to play him at other kids houses. Yeah. But that's why I have all the game systems now as an adult, including the Atari 2600. What's your favorite cartridge? Do you remember? Atari 2600. I love the baseball game.

Really? Yeah. I used to love video baseball games, which was like, I used to love RBI baseball. I loved Intellivision baseball. Baseball and football are my favorites. River Raid. You remember that one? Yeah. Yeah.

And then for paddles, I love Kaboom. I mean, you could just get into a Kaboom zone right there where you're just scrolling back and forth. I had an intern a few years ago who could do, he was a young kid too. I don't know how he could do this, but he could do the entire first level of pitfall with his eyes closed going left. Not right. But really? Yeah. I mean, it was like he picked it up as a retro cool thing. He could just dofall with his eyes closed going left not right but really yeah i mean it was

like he picked it up as a retro cool thing he could just do his eyes closed my favorite game ever was i think it was pga tour 3 on sega genesis it was a golf game it's like 25 minutes it was the perfect length were you ever like to play other people were you an arcade guy at all i was were you a golden that was the only child yeah it was all that stuff when you golden t do you use two thumbs or do you just spin with like do you use the palm of your hand use the palm for the hits but then for putting i use the the two thumbs yeah which i think is the way to do it i was a i was a two-thumb driver and i've got a lot of you know i think i've got like some ligament damage in the thumbs um so esports i if i had to bet on it i would bet okay fine but i still don't think it's it's 100 slam dunk i still want to see like two years from now are we at the same point

we were right now okay um vr yep feels like even though people are saying it's ready now i still think it'll take five years to work out all the kinks and everything. And we'll see which platforms win, too. Yeah. But shared VR will be unbelievable. Right. So that'll be another one of those communal experiences in VR. Do you worry at all that you can't do anything else when you're doing VR?

Yeah. Because that is what killed 3D to some degree was that if you had 3D glasses on your house, you couldn't do anything else. My buddy David Ulovich put it. I'm going to get this wrong. You met David your house, you couldn't do anything else. My buddy David Ulovich put it, I'm gonna get this wrong. You met David? Yeah, you met David. You know that basically podcasts are passively passive. And one of the reasons why

we've seen this research in podcasts is you can do all this other stuff while ingesting a podcast, right? Video podcasts are actively passive. So you have to be watching them but you can cut you're not participating in them per se so you can kind of get some other things done the way when television's on you can do that but but vr is actively active it's exclusive to everything else you want to be doing so vr though is which is tough because you you're basically telling people you're doing this. Yeah. So let's then cleave off AR, augmented reality.

So augmented reality doesn't necessarily take you out of the other things you're doing, right? It could be a Google Glass type thing or a heads up display that basically what the Magic Leap guys are working on. It lets you see your calendar and all these other things laid over, overlaid over your real-life environment. And then there's the fully immersive VR stuff, whether it's for an entertainment experience or gaming, et cetera. That's going to require all of you. Let's take a break to talk about our friends at Blue Apron. They know that when you cook with incredible ingredients,

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So don't wait. I might force my wife to do this because she's let me down lately with dinners. Anyway, that's blueapron.com slash BS. Blue Apron, a better way to cook. And since we're here, let's talk about audible.com. Do you love books, but you find that you never have time to read them? That's my wife, by the way. My wife keeps popping into these things.

She listens to Audible in the car when she's driving with our kids because it's probably better than Howard Stern. Anyway, Audible has the perfect solution. Get audiobooks. Listen to those books you've been meaning to read while on the go at the gym during your commute, like my wife. Audible.com provides over 250,000 titles from leading audio book publishers,

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You can access them. Audible.com also has the great listen guarantee. If you decide you don't like the book you chose, no worries. Exchange it for another title anytime. No questions asked. Two of my friends narrated their own books that are on Audible. Chuck Klosterman and my man Jalen Rose, who I miss dearly. I miss him every day. I miss you man Jalen Rose, who I miss dearly. I miss him every day.

I miss you, Jalen Rose. Just for my listeners, Audible.com is offering a free 30-day trial membership. Go to Audible.com slash BS. Start your free trial today. Back to Chris Saka. We're getting very close to nobody ever having to leave their house. That'd be fun. VR, you just can't have you

have you tried any art or or uh postmates to bring you food and you're just home have you tried any of them that any of the vr yeah no not yet okay i'm afraid for my kids a little bit because i do wonder if this vr world you dive into is almost superior to the actual world you're in and instead of just having human interactions, I can just go into this VR place and do VR things. And that's going to be my life. That's very legit. One of the things that's interesting about technology is the improvement in resolution and sound modeling responsiveness is outpacing our own physiological development. So our biology has been kind of the same, you know, and we weren't necessarily built

to ingest all this light and all the sound and in this incredibly coordinated way. So our biology doesn't actually know what's happening. If you put on even Google Cardboard and watch some of the early videos, there's one. What's the name of those guys? Verse, I think VRSE, who did one with JR, the famous artist, where you are on top of a skyscraper and your body will not let you step forward. Like your body is just convinced that is the edge of the skyscraper. Right. You have to intellectually override everything that your brainstem is telling you to like don't step there because you'll die

and it's just it's fully tricked and that's not even a super high res or super immersive vr platform and so we've got some crazy days ahead of us i mean this i remember i had a sony psp a long time i remember those tiny little ones so he used to send me this stuff and i was playing grand theft auto once on a flight and I landed and I got in my car and I started driving like an asshole and like, I'm not a big advocate for game censorship or anything, but I was like,

wait a minute, this thing literally just rewired some neural pathways such that it changed how I drove in real life. I have a worse story than that. I, every, I think every, everybody has that one

grand theft auto where they just had to finish the game and that's all they did for six weeks or however long it took i remember going on one of those runs and getting in my car and driving because sometimes the grand theft auto is just fun to run pedestrians over for no reason and i'm in my car i'm like hey there's and i'm like oh no i'm this is real life like my brain had been corrupted to the point like for like a split split split second yeah i thought i was in the game i was like this is bad yeah and so i i i worry about some of that i mean i've i've seen this you've seen this i bet so um you're like i'm not a real celebrity but i have a million and a half plus followers on twitter yeah and so i will be out walking around you're kind of be you're in shark tank now like you're much more recognizable now yeah so this is more of a data set pre-shark tank okay when and i would and i

would be walking down the street with a friend of mine in new york who is an actual celebrity let's say like an edward norton so we're walking side by side. And I watched the difference between how people interact with us. They come up to him and they literally put their arm out. They like, our arms length from him. They're like,

oh my God, Mr. Norton. Oh my God, it's so cool to see you. I loved you in Primal Fear. Or like the Hulk is like my favorite movie. You're amazing. You're amazing. And they get legitimately nervous and intimidated by him

because he's like famous, right? He's a famous actor. Did I mention Rounders? I think Rounders is awesome. I know. know god i know you love to throw cards but well they mentioned the hulk which i find more upsetting so that's deeply upsetting but people will come up to me that you know it's fewer people who know me than edward norton but they know me from my tweets and they have their their brain is convinced we have a connection because they hear from me six to eight times a day and they see pictures of my of my wife and my kids and you know where i hang out and stuff like that and so as a result they don't put out their arm and say

arm's length they actually come in for the hug and and their first statement won't be like oh dude i'm such a huge fan their first statement is so how was dinner last night man and and so their brain is convinced we know each other because there was no biological or historical or evolutionary precedent for hearing from someone six times a day that you don't actually know well and and so my wife can pick up on this way better than i can she'd be like that is a stranger that is an absolute stranger I don't know because their body is so convinced they know me that it convinces my body I know them and so they're coming in for the hug and I'm like I must know this guy I must have met him somewhere and and that is from 140 characters right so when I started Grandland and I think I've talked about this before but I'll say it again like you don't realize you've gotten a little bit old until you're around young people all the time.

And I learned a couple things just from the first year of Grantland watching people in their 20s. They could listen to a podcast. They could be on Gmail. They could be chatting. But they could also be talking to somebody. And they could be working and sending their emails. They could be doing six things at once. And I would be looking like, wow, like I can do like two things at once max.

So that was one thing. The continuous partial attention. My friend Linda Stone called it that. It's very spread around. Continuous partial attention, yeah. And it's like I think there's a clear age range. Maybe it's like 33. You kind of have to grow up with the internet a little bit.

But now people in their 20s, I've noticed're they consider their friends like their actual friends like people that went to college with high school with people they room with after but then also like people online who they met once or twice in their relationship is the online relationship in the emails and chat whatever else those people like we tried to hire somebody once and it was like oh so and so is friends with them yeah yeah oh yeah they've been and then it turned out they never actually met right and i was like i thought you were like good friends with them he's like i am i just we you know they they're in new york and we're here and it's like i was like wow i i've absolutely built relationships with people that follow me on Twitter that I DM with frequently.

You feel like they're buddies, but. Yeah. There's a guy named BW, his Twitter handle is BW Jones. He was like one of my very first Twitter followers. And so I just followed him back. I mean, 2007, right. You know, and, uh, and he and I have gone back and forth thousands of times maybe and i met him for the first time just a few months ago i he happened to me in la i happened to be speaking i was like come

by he took some pictures i shook hands with him for the very first time uh after like seven you know i guess it's nine years now yeah like that was totally amazing but there's um there are people like if if i find something interesting i'll engage do Do you know this guy Brian Koppelman? Does the show Billions? Yeah. Is he like a buddy of yours? Pretty decent friend. I've never been in the same room with him, but we keep publicly replying to each other

and DMing, and I hope I bump into him when I get to New York next time. Are you pro-Billions or anti-Billions? I love Billions. Okay, good. Yeah. There's a few bad castings. There are a few characters in there that i just can't believe but for the most part the main characters are amazing the plot's great

and i know i feel like i know the people on that show i have a couple quick speed round questions for you yeah um what are the apps on your home screen that everyone else should have that you feel like not enough people know about yet? Let's see. Well, Slack. Do you guys use Slack? Love Slack. Okay, Slack changes everything. The ringer is very, very, very, very, very Slack friendly.

Yeah, so we're Slack investors. I should probably disclose that, but big Slack investors. Do you use Nuzzle at all? Yes. Yeah, N-U-Z-Z-E-L. I feel use nuzzle at all yes yeah and use easy el so i feel like nuzzle is about six months where it's from where it's going to be but i still really like it it's excellent especially if you haven't been able to go on twitter for for you know 12 hours but you

kind of want to have a feel for what happened nuzzle basically for people listening it it is an app that takes every every story that somebody suggested on your twitter feed and just organizes those stories so you don't see the tweets and it's really useful uh i love what else i have periscope here which i love rex hasn't publicly launched it will really soon rex rex so rex is a name a way to uh to basically publish post and collect all of your favorite things and so you basically post things that i'll show you like that you know reflect you and kind of so i published this album home again uh this book evicted i've been reading it's amazing this book just mercy um love that judd Apatow show is great. And so I put these things up and then people will individually interact with that.

And what you can do is if you see somebody else's thing you like, you save it to your vault, it's called. So in my vault, if I'm like sitting down at Spotify and I'm like, I wonder what kind of music I want to listen to. These are all the albums I've vaulted off there to explore new stuff. That sounds like a very positive app it's just amazing people people like it's good it's good energy all over it look these are all the movies to watch on netflix so you know somebody's gonna create bizarro wrecks or just things i hate yeah here's six 16 television shows look there's uh there's horace and pete i know you know something about that yeah it is a privilege to be sharing the same couch as louis uk it still smells like him 16 television shows. Look, there's Horace and Pete. I know you know something about that.

It is a privilege to be sharing the same couch as Louis C.K. It still smells like him a little bit, doesn't it? A little bit. So it still has that Horace and Pete bar smell. Yeah. All right, what was your next one? Snapchat. Of course.

I mean, that's on my home screen. People say Snapchat and Uber are going to be the new companies of this decade. You agree with that? Uber already is. I mean, it's a $60-plus billion company right now. We have four years left in the decade. I'm saying it's 2020 and we look back. Yeah, Uber's success is inevitable.

They're clearly the favorites. Okay. Yeah. Snapchat's amazing. I think they are innovating incredibly quickly. They understand a broad, a diverse set of audiences. They've shown they can be good partners to content companies. They have enough attention.

They'll have no problem monetizing it. I'm bullish on Snapchat, and I'm not an investor. In fact, not only am I not an investor, but those guys came to me after a talk I gave in L.A. once and said, we really admire your work. We want you involved in the company. And I was like, uh, the dick pics thing,

you know, like, uh, and clear, they hadn't been doing stories yet, which I think completely transformed that company. But my bad, I went home and told my,

I went back to the office and told my younger partner, Matt, who's like 10 years younger than I am. And he's like, you said no to Snapchat. What? You know? And like freaking out. But by the time we went back to fix it, it was broken.

So is that your biggest misfire? I mean, I misfire all the time. I told the Airbnb guys that what they were doing was unsafe and somebody was going to get raped and murdered, you know, in a shared house. I told the Dropbox guys that Google was going to crush them, Google Drive, because we'd already been using it at Google at the time. I've got a bunch of these. Dropbox, to me, is kind of lurking, because it does seem like we're heading to... The Sony thing was really interesting to me,

because I think it put the fear of God into everybody who owns things. The Sony hack? Yeah. It put the fear of God into people who run things or own things that they could be next. And so I think guarding information and personal stuff has become more and more and more and more important. And Dropbox is just good at stuff. So Shark Tank's a Sony show. Yeah.

And the people I communicate with there still don't use their Sony email addresses. Like we communicate through Gmail. My very first day of visiting the Sony studio to negotiate that deal was the day after it all happened. They didn't have phone service. The thing was shut down. I have a question for you. Did you go through any of the leaked data? It's a big ethical question.

I have a complicated uh answer that no um but i did think about it and i didn't want to and i read some of the stories about it but it just felt wrong i'm like a big karma guy yeah and to me that felt like bad karma to be like all right none of this i should have no access to this stuff so i'm gonna throw myself into it and read everything you didn't even go and look for your own name no i went i i i searched i i believe it now i wish i had done that see i felt like that would have been cool to do that so this is gonna make me a bad person but i looked for two things i looked for my own name yeah which wasn't in there uh which is good i don't know if i expected it to

be but i was just curious. And then I actually used it. I was negotiating my per episode price on Shark Tank and I used it to find out what the other sharks made that was in there. That's just smart. There was some back and forth about Cuban's price in there. Cuban's a buddy and a rival

and I like to bust his balls and I didn't want him to be making a bunch more money than I was. So that was great data to have. A couple more speed round things. You had fairly high profile clashes with CEOs of Twitter and with Uber. Coincidence or is that part of just who you are and you want to be involved and you have opinions yeah so i don't have a boss and so there's no filter on me you sound like me yeah i'm very yeah i mean there there was a legendary guy who just passed away in in silicon valley did you

hear about coach campbell yeah i saw the tweets and, former football coach who went on to be like Larry and Sergey's personal coach, Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google. Steve Jobs, he's on the board of Apple. He was the chairman of Intuit. I mean, one of the most widely respected kind of personal coaches in the history of Silicon Valley. And while I wasn't a senior executive at Google, he took me under his wing there as one of his projects. And when I went to leave the company, I had offers to go join hedge funds and other venture funds and stuff. And I said, you know, coach, what should I do? And he said, go on your own because you suck at having a boss. And I was like, you're right. Like

I just, it has just been in my DNA from the beginning. Like I always pissed off my teachers and my principals. I always had hearings about whether I was going to be able to stay in school. I, uh, I've been a mess my whole life in terms of authority. By the way, I have a two-year old who is exactly like me right now. So usually that's how the guy gets you back. Yeah. Uh, but, but so, and I'm glad I went my own way. I would I would have never made it in a bigger partnership. But I just I am not going to bite my tongue if I think something's fucked. I just can't. out against it, even though that burns some ties with a lot of people at the White House. I'm very close to this White House and this president, and I did a lot of work for them. But I'm not going to kind of, and that's why I'm not an ambassador. I'm just not going to read from anybody else's script.

And so, yeah, and I can be a real pain in the ass to work with because I just don't butter anything up. Kids haven't mellowed you out at all? I mean, I love my kids. Sometimes people have kids and they reassess things. It didn't happen for me, unfortunately. Well, no. I mean, I spend all my time with my kids. I fly home specifically to climb into bed with those

kids at night and stuff so they're four and a half two and a half and seven months so my life revolves around them but you had the third one the mistake uber kid yeah exactly but if anything they have hardened my resolve to just be authentic and candid. Yeah. That, you know, I will only do deals that I want to be proud to tell my kids I did. And I only want to say the things I'm willing to stand by. I will just not. I mean, you know, one of the conditions and one of we're going to talk about Shark Tank at some point. But one of the reasons I'm on that show, one of the reasons I love that show is because of the most authentic show on television. They don't tell us to say anything. They don't make us do any deals.

It is completely unscripted and spontaneous. If you see a fight break out between the sharks, that's real and authentic. If you see a pitch go sideways, that's real. The only thing that happens is they edit it down from an hour-long pitch to eight to ten minutes of television. But even then, they don't betray the essence of what happened there. Because most of the questions are boring. So the pitches are an hour? They're about an hour, yeah.

I mean, we get to ask way more questions there than I do at a new product demo day in Silicon Valley. But it's an amazing show because I just get to say exactly what's on my mind and be as candid as I want, which is not something you get to do in most shows on television. In fact, the episode that's coming up this Friday, Cuban and I go at it, which we normally do in private, but we go at it on the show. And I think he drops an S-bomb at some point. I was like, are you leaving it in? And last I heard, they're leaving it in the show.

So it's awesome. So how many shows do you do with him a year? Last year, or in this season, I did four episodes. I was originally slated to do one or two, but we had a really good time and a lot of chemistry, so I came back. I'm going to have to mail you a couple Dallas Maverick Cuban insults that if it gets heated,

you're like, well, that's why you thought that Dan Pierre contract was a good idea. I literally, I literally, uh, who's the guy they lost? Like, right. Which guy?

We tape in like June and September. Oh, Deandre Jordan. Yes. Yes. Yeah. So I, I dropped that literally right before cameras rolled.

And I'm like, I'm sorry, too soon, too soon. And it just, it always blows up. Like you can see, he and I i fight on twitter that's how i ended up on the show i was but cuban loves it though i mean it's it's not like a mean-spirited thing with him he like he just likes dropping the gloves we're homies we love it but but one of the we've gone at it a

couple times so he's good natured he's a good guy yeah but it's fun i get to make fun of him see like you get to make fun of him for sports stuff i get to make fun of him for sports stuff. I get to make fun of him for bad investments, too. Right, he's had a few. His political stops and starts. By the way, can I make a prediction for your audience? I think he's going to be president of the United States. Mark Cuban. Mark Cuban, I think, will be president of the United States.

In the next, by 2024? I think Hillary Clinton wins this election and probably holds on for two terms. And then I think it's an open field, and I think Mark Cuban runs as a very moderate Republican and wins. So think about it. Donald Trump, one of the things I've learned that's just been wild about my own personal journey and watching Cuban and watching Trump is that the minute you're labeled a billionaire in this country, everyone takes everything you say as Bible. It's just you you you can do no wrong like they just think well that guy's smart he made a bunch of money he must be a genius and it's completely untrue obviously you know a lot of billionaires who are wrong about a lot of things like i love mark cuban

but i think he happens to be wrong more than he's right and that's why we become good friends but you listen to people who support Donald Trump and you see they just eat at the trough of his bullshit. But they they think it's just all inherently true because, look, the guy's a billionaire. He made these businesses. The United States is a country. It should be run like a business. So let's hire a really successful businessman and do it. And I think Cuban has all that. Like. Watch the engagement he has on Twitter, and you'll see people just take what he says as gospel completely. So he's like a benevolent Trump.

That's exactly right. I think he's not an idiot, and he actually does care, and he does read, and he is convincible on some things. Well, he also was a great sports owner. I've got to say, when he came in, people only owned a team one kind of way. And if it was kind of the egomaniac sports owner, it always went the Steinbrenner type of way. And Cuban bought the team and was like, well, why do you do it this way?

Well, why do we do it this way? Well, why don't we have nicer locker rooms? Well, why isn't our plane awesome? Well, why don't we hire more stack guys? And he just kept asking questions, and it became a real competitive advantage for them. And then people ended up just emulating him. I think America loves that guy. I think he's not an idiot.

People take him at his word because he's a billionaire. I think he's got crossover appeal. He's the American dream. I'm putting it right out there right now that Mark Cuban will be president of the United States. Um, and he can use the, uh, Stairmaster while he's giving interviews, which I've always been impressed by. Have you had interactions with Kobe or no? Cause Kobe wants to be Walt Disney. Yeah, I have actually. Um, so a few years ago, Kobe reached out to me through somebody and said he wanted to meet me. And that was weird because I'm not, I grew up in Buffalo, so I don't really care about the NBA. Yeah. Uh, I took your team. Yeah. I mean,

I grew up, I grew up caring about football and hockey, which is why you and I see each other at Kings games. Yeah. But I just couldn't care less about the NBA. I'm sorry to lose all the audience. I haven't already lost to you. But so Kobe reaches out, and I was like, do I take the meeting? And my partner Matt, who grew up in LA, is like, what are you talking about? Like, it's the Pope is asking for a meeting here. You gotta take this meeting.

So literally on the way to the meeting. Joe's excited. He's an LA fan. Are you a super fan? Yeah, Joe, he doesn't know where this story's going, but he's all happy. Look at him. Do you have any tattoos?

Do you have any Kobe-related? Not that bad, Not that bad. Not that bad. So we're in an Uber on the way down. We were meeting in Laguna. And I'm literally looking at his Wikipedia page to be like. Yeah. You're studying that.

I mean, I remember the 81 point game. Yeah. Like I knew he grew up in Italy for a while. I knew he didn't go to college. I knew a few things about this guy. But so we sit down and we're at a bar and this is why he was still rehabbing his ankle or his achilles um and first of all one of the creepiest things i've ever seen ever like i've seen now some certain kinds of fan interactions but

a guy walked up this burly guy and he handed kobe uh this he like reached past the bodyguard and handed him this really fruity drink with umbrellas and stuff. And just said, hey, Kobe, I just want to say this for you, man. I'm a big fan. There's no roofies in it or nothing. Just it's all good. Oh, yeah. I was just like, oh, my God.

That was like the creepiest handoff I've ever seen of a beverage. But so Kobe sat down and just said, look, I'm really interested in startup stuff. I'm really interested in startup stuff i'm really interested in investing i'm really interested in you know being an entrepreneur and and again my partner matt is just like sweating yeah because he can't believe he's in the presence of of greatness like this and i'm like look honestly i see a lot of celebrities as tourists who come through this industry and think they can just kind of cherry pick a couple things and tweet about and it's gonna work out.

I'm a businessman. Yeah, you're a small forward. Actually, one of the ways that Edward Norton and I became actual friends is that guy's brilliant and he's built companies. He's the CEO of a bioenergy company right now. He built CrowdRise with his wife and some other founders. The guy is smart and hustles and works hard, right? But there's a lot of guys and gals who just pass through this business thinking they can

do something. And so I said, look, if you're serious about this, then prove it to me. And so I said, I'm going to send you a bunch of stuff that you should read and a bunch of TED Talks and other videos you should watch. And if you do your homework, then I'll talk to you about investing. And so it was funny because I didn't think he was going to do it. I thought it was kind of a nice way to let him down. He doesn't sleep.

Of course he did it. I didn't know this about him. Yeah, I think he's up 24 hours a day. I had no idea about this. Yeah. So sure enough, for the next few months, my phone never stops buzzing in the middle of the night. It is Kobe reading this article, checking out this tweet, following this guy, diving into this TED Talk,

diving into the Y Combinator demo day stuff. And I'm getting these texts, like literally two or three in the morning. And my wife is like, are you having an affair with Kobe Bryant? Like what is happening here? Like he just at all hours. That would have been an incredible story.

That would have definitely broken some news. But it was just at all hours. And the guy was serious. He was bringing the same obsessive work ethic to learning about startups that he does to training, to rehab, to his thousand makes a day, to everything. I was fascinated by it. So I ended up actually becoming really enthralled by him because this is a very unique personality type that I only kind of see in some of our very best entrepreneurs. Like Travis Klanick at Uber. I don't know if you know this story already, but it's New Year's Day, 2010, I believe.

So Uber was already a thing. Travis is staying at our house up in Truckee. He came up. We always have a New Year's party. And my dad was there. And my dad was there. And my dad says, Travis, let's play Wii Tennis, Nintendo Wii Tennis. And Travis is bleary eyed and hungover than I before. And so without, he's sitting on the couch, my dad is standing up, as they start playing, my dad's taking tennis swings. And Travis is just making these little

tiny chops with the controller. And he's kicking the hell out of my dad my dad's like starting to break his sweat and trying harder and harder and travis keeps winning and then travis does this princess bride thing where he's like i'm sorry mr sack but i gotta just tell you i'm not left-handed and so he starts playing right-handed and my dad never scores a point again and my dad is visibly frustrated like what the hell is going on and at the point my dad's about to blow a stack, Travis says, okay, Mr. Stack, I'm sorry, I've got to show you something. And he uses the little wand, and he moves over to the global leaderboard,

and he is ranked number two in the entire world at Wii Tennis, while also being the CEO of Uber. True story. He is one of the most obsessive and competitive people in the history of anything and i and i saw that in kobe and so i ended up saying hey kobe why don't you now that he's done all his homework i'm like come up to silicon valley i want to show you some companies so i took him to big companies like twitter uh which were a blast and you know all the management team got together and fell over themselves to be in the room with him and it was fun because you get to a level in that game where you're not just good at the game,

but you understand the business around it too. And so we were talking with Adam Bain and Nathan Hubbard and guys up there that you know about the mechanics of the revenue and the rev share deals around those NBA clips and stuff. And there was Kobe right in the middle of that discussion. And then we went and visited small companies like Style Seat, where they're like an Uber for salons, an amazing service, but they were 11 people working out of a one-bedroom apartment, basically illegally. And I was like, look, these are the bookends of how this industry works.

And he was enthralled by it. And he's gone on to make some investments. He's starting some stuff. Kobe Inc. Yeah. Kobe is legit, though. He's just one of those guys that i think you're literally buying kobe stock yeah i don't think he's a pretender about that stuff i don't either i think it takes a little while you know oftentimes your first few investments are just a miscue because you're flattered anyone even wants you to invest or you think you can be more helpful than you are but

uh but i i think he can be great at this you left out one important thing with kobe which you were you were halfway there but with how competitiveness and how important it is for investors he's competitive with magic because they have like who's the greatest laker of all time and both of them like oh no and both of them deep down think they're the greatest laker of all time yeah And now Magic has parlayed his basketball career into this whole lucrative business career. Right. And anytime somebody points to, oh, who's the most successful athlete turned, they always

say Magic first. And Kobe is a competitive psycho. And he's looking at it, it's like five years from now, they're going to say me. They're not going to say Magic. You know what Magic doesn't have that Kobe does? It's China. Right. That guy owns that country. Yes. my god it'll be the point that

i could see him playing like a 20 game season there to just make it even more dangerous for him to be over there like it's just the the crowds are unbelievable so you know it's funny kobe and i um collaborated on something briefly that we were uh we were setting up for him i was like so what should we call it like mamba or whatever and he came back and said no no i want to call it 13 do you know why 13 it's sports related i don't know and this was like two years ago he said can you believe they drafted 12 other motherfuckers before me? Like he still wears that, man. He still wears that. Tom Brady is the same way.

He knows every quarterback that got drafted ahead of him in the 2000 draft. He could just rattle them off. And they're combined yardage compared to his. Oh, yeah. He knows all of them. Like all of them. They're all maniacs. That guy still wears that, man.

That is amazing. That's a good place for us to end because we went way longer than I thought we were going to go, but you can come back right on. We can, we should do one. We should do a three person one with you and one other person that we should hang up on. I don't know.

Maybe we'll get Cuban. That'd be fun. You, me and Cuban. We could argue about stuff. I'll just start fights with you. It's pretty fun. No one,

no one on shark tank has ever been there to keep that guy honest. And so I may or may not be returning next season. I may or may not be making an announcement about that on friday so so this friday shark tank you're gonna do now like yeah i may or may not want to periscope after the i periscope during the episodes that makes disney abc a little bit nervous sometimes that i'm actually like live broadcasting tv and talking over it see that was we'll save that for next time because i really want to know what's going to happen with all this facebook live stuff where like i went to the triple g fight on saturday if i just facebook lived it yeah nobody would have had to have hbo and they could have watched it from where my seat was how is that legal

feels like it would have been value added i mean you should do that deal with hbo not if it's coming on yeah but not if it's coming on 20 seconds before the feed that hbo has because i'm sure they have to send it around right i'm coming ahead of them and without i don't know you remember my really tall buddy who was in montana i don't want to but he said he would have done anything to watch that golden state game with you right the golden state game that was going on while we were there he's like i would do anything to sit down and watch that game with bill simmons just for the gut for the basketball gossip yeah just like but just you periscoping your you know mystery science theater 3000 or whatever but as a value-added service man people would pay for that that's probably where uh i'm guessing that's where broadcast rights are going where you just get to pick your own announcers.

Everyone hates whatever announcers they're stuck with, with the exception of like five people. But if I could watch you shoot the shit and have a couple other buddies there busting balls. The East Coast feed of Shark Tank, I live tweeted, I play ball with everybody else. The West Coast feed, by then we're kind of toasted. Director's cut. Yeah. I basically put it up on a projector and I periscope me and my buddies

talking over the episode. And thousands of people every Friday love the hell out of it. It's just fun. I just bust balls and make fun. Periscope.

Best product that not enough people use. Yeah. I like Periscope. It's just for whatever reason Facebook Live, they figured out how to just make it

more accessible. You're not going to hear any argument from me. I know. All right. Thanks for having me here, man. What's your Twitter handle? I'm SACCA on Twitter, S-A-C-C-A, but I'm C-SACCA on Snapchat. Some other SACCA got there first. Oh, man. The mystery SACCA. So I'm C-S-A-C-C-A on Snapchat. This was fun. Thank you. Yeah, man. Thanks for coming. Thanks for having me around. Appreciate it. Right on. Thanks to Chris SACCA for a great podcast. Just a heads up, we are launching the Ringers NFL show

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