The Comedy Cellar: Live from the Table - Before Facebook Existed: The TRUE Story of the First Social Network (10M Users in 1997!)

Episode Date: March 19, 2026

Noam Dworman, Dan Naturman and Periel Aschenbrand are joined by social networking pioneer and entrepreneur, Andrew Weinreich. Weinreich is known for launching SixDegrees.com in 1997, which is recognized as one of the first social networking sites. He has been named #175 on the Forbes 250 list of America's Greatest Innovators.

The official podcast of the world famous comedy seller, available wherever you get your podcasts. Dan Natterman here, along with Nome Dwarman, the owner of the comedy seller. Hello, Noam. Hello, Daniel. Perry Al-Ashan Brands sits at the table with us. And we have Andrew Weinrich, serial entrepreneur, angel investor, and the inventor of social media, believe it or not. He is here with us in studio. Thank you, Andrew, for coming with us.

coming to us. By the way, Andrew and I went to the same undergraduate school, University of Pennsylvania. We didn't know each other. We also went to Fort Laude again. And we did know each other, but he doesn't seem to remember me. I don't. I don't know.

We weren't really friends at the time. How could you forget Mr. Natterman? But I have vague, I remember. The only thing I remember about you is, I think you dated a girl named Stacey with Red Here. I know her last name, but I won't say it. Is that correct? Yeah.

Okay. You didn't have red hair. Like curly, frizzy hair. Yeah. It was red, was it not? No, I think it was brown. Well, I remember it as red. But neither case...

That's a funny thing to remember. Yeah, it is odd. But, yeah, we were there together, and neither of us pursued law. Wait, were you friends with her? Yeah. Oh. Yeah, he was friends with her. I haven't seen her.

What'd she say about him? I don't recall her saying one where they go. Oh, not memorable, I guess. But, um, anyway, um, um, anyway, um, um, And then he went on, did you do any law at all? I, two years. I actually tried to start a business out of law school, which did not work. And then I went in-house at Pfizer.

I was a professional daughter. It was the largest antitrust, I think, in history at that time. And Pfizer was being charged with, I think it was price fixing. with the other large pharmaceutical companies. And they hired an army of lawyers. And my job was I was given red dots, yellow dots, and green dots. And we were to, for the purpose of overwhelming the other side with discovery, my job was to go into warehouses and dot files, either red, yellow, or green. So I did that for a year.

How did that overwhelm the discovery? They had so many materials were turned over that it was difficult for the other side to discern what was relevant and what was not. But what was what were the red? I think the better question is, why did I need to go to law school for three years? No, no, I'm curious about it.

Do you want to overwhelm them with materials? So rather than, why wouldn't you put a red dot on everything so they have to try to wait through it all? No, no, the red dots were not relevant. The yellow dots required a lawyer with more experience than me, and the green dots were turned over. and the green dots represented, you could almost imagine it,

like an Indiana Jones style warehouse of material that was turned over. That's what you get at the end of three years for Baltimore. And were they fixing prices? I have no idea. He sounded like Dershow was when he asked him by OJ.

Oh, I have no idea. That's funny that that's what comes to mind from a professional daughter. And then I was general counsel of a technology company. There was actually a PC clone manufacturer in New York. And they were paying so little

no one else was willing to take the job as general counsel. Otherwise, no one gets a job as general counsel a couple years out of law school. And I took that, and a year in, I decided to leave and start my own company. And they're being sued for a patent infringement?

Who's being sued? Why does a PC clone company need a general counsel? a PC Did you say PC clone? Yeah Yeah So a PC clone Like Dell was a PC clone company

Anyone that was not IDF It was a big major one like that You said it paints a little I thought it was a small No it was a small one Yeah I think you're just confusing What the word clone means

Like the I know a clone means So anyone Who was assembling computers Like a chassis And a hard drive Was but that was not Did he talk down to you people

In In I know I know very well PC Club, but usually a small, I mean, ideal PCC. But what would the patent? What I'm saying is that a PC clone company usually would hire, like if it's a small company, they just hire a lawyer when they actually have some legal issues.

Like it's not the kind of people that are sued all the time. No, no, no, but you hire a lawyer also for corporate issues. Yeah. Not just for litigation. Right. So you have contracts and you need an in-house lawyer. So it could be that small. It has to be pretty.

It was significant enough to do a small listing on, a small public listing. And so I left right before the public list. Like I have a pretty, I have a company with five, I don't have general counsel, you have but let's get to the good stuff. Maybe you should. The company you started right after being a general counsel was six degrees. So what the internet was taking off and. This was 99?

No. No, sorry, this was, this would have been 95. No, 95 we graduated. No, we, we graduated 95. Yeah. This was, so this was 95, 96. Okay. And the internet was taking off.

And I mentioned before, I'd been trying to start a business, you know, instead of practicing law while I was in law school. And so I put together a group in the evenings that met for the purpose of coming up with an idea that we could do on the internet. And so we had,

you know, two software engineers and someone in marketing, someone in biz dev and myself with this agreement that we'd all generate ideas. and we had a framework for how we would come up with ideas. And I'll tell you that in a second. And then we would collectively only ideas to the extent we all quit our job at the same time.

So, and the framework was you needed to come up with an idea that could only be done on the web. So someone said, let's build the first sports website. And we said, well, it's a matter of time before Sports Illustrated or ESPN comes into the space. What can we do that couldn't otherwise be done prior to the internet? And we began focusing on user-generated content.

And I came up with the idea, what if we got everyone to commit their Rolodexes to a single database so that not only in the cloud could I see my Rolodex, but that I could see my second degree, not just the people I know, the people who my friends know. And we would call that, you know, your second degree is your first degree squared, you know 400 people. They just know 400 people.

That's 160,000 people barring overlaps. And everybody knows Kevin Bacon. And everyone knows Kevin Bacon. Actually, if you do the math, you would probably know everyone in the world in far less than 6 degrees. Well, I think excluding like people in the Amazon rainforest.

Dan always has to do that. I'm trying to be precise. I don't know that we could get to the Amazon, but maybe somebody that did research there and we could get to him and maybe we took it to the Amazon. So we didn't contemplate that. There's that one island. There's that one island where if you go there, they'll kill you.

Remember that guy went to that island? Yeah. So we probably couldn't. But everybody else, yes. Okay. So I said, let's all quit our jobs. And you probably couldn't get to like Iran. Go ahead.

Go ahead. Actually, you probably could. Now, I mean, now. So I said, let's all quit our jobs. And I was the only one to quit my job. So I quit my job. and I got, I don't remember what it was, seven, eight, nine, ten credit cards

and began building the business. And we wrote the original patent on what a social network was. What underlies, foundationally, what underlies a social network is this idea of a single instance of contacts where you're able to represent, you know, your first degree, and again,

your second degree, and everything is leveraged off that foundational element. And for a while, we starved in the wilderness, we couldn't raise any capital, and then eventually we raised a lot of capital and built what was, became, when we sold it, the world's largest social network. Were you writing the code yourself?

Were you, have a computer background at all? Because you were in law school, so I'm assuming no. Yeah. No, I don't have a computer background. You buried the lead there. You built the largest, world's largest social network? We were the world's largest social network. I'm going to get to them.

Okay, okay. We're going to circle back to that. It's more important, what element of the code I wrote than where we had. But I'm just curious how a guy from law school, you know, becomes a computer guy. I wrote code,

and I wrote our initial reservation program, our initial website, PhP-Miles Q1. You clearly missed the class on coding. You teach yourself. It's not that hard. I didn't do coding. It was very different than today,

you know, when people were vibe coding. We had a large team. We had 50, you know, we were probably 100 people, but we had, you know, half of those people were engineers.

And I'm literate enough to conceptually understand how the coding works. More importantly, you know, the role of a CEO, whether it was then or now, is you really need to be able to conceptualize the product, how it works, what you intended to do, what the functionality is.

And there I was fairly affected. There was nobody, there was no other social network at the time. No, we literally, I mean, quite literally. Well, it was copy serve and things like AOL. That's not a social network. Like, social network, when I take we were the first social network, we literally, like, you can look up patents, and we literally wrote the defining patent

on what a social network was. When we sold the business, the company that we sold it to, ultimately sold the patent to Reed Hoffman and Mark Pinkis, who were the funders behind, some of the original vendors behind Meta, and you can hear them talk about,

you know, their big fear was that it would be enforced. A great interview Reid Hoffman did where someone was asked him, you know, how does this patent compare to the, the element of water because it was literally the defining patent in the space. No, there wasn't anyone before us who conceptualized a social network the way we did. So what was the world's largest social network? Us at the time.

They were the only one. It was called six degrees. And how many members were in? There were probably 10 million people in our user base, depending on how you defined, you know, there were probably, 10 million people in our user base. Just to keep in mind, the denominator is the total number of people on the internet. One of the big challenges we had, and 3.5 million represents a smaller number of that 10 million based on their involvement.

You know, what was relevant at the time. This was at the time of dial-up modems. No. Dial-up modems were, there were some dial-up modems in 95. Oh, absolutely. Dial-up modems were... Yeah, but when we sold in 99, No, people weren't using dial-up motives.

It was crossing the threshold. I remember- I had dial-up in 2001. Absolutely, absolutely. Dial-ups were like, like, it was DSL and dial-ups were like, yeah. But a lot of your users have. There's a more interesting question, which is why you guys were using dial-up in 2001.

I didn't have email. No, not in two, it was a thing. Not in 2001. I was. But in 99, that was exactly the time when the big switch happened. I'll tell you what was interesting. There were a lot of, one question I often get is, you know, why didn't you become Facebook? You know, why didn't you become at the time, you know, the next big social network was Friendster and then MySpace and then Facebook.

And maybe there are a lot of questions and a lot of things maybe we could have done differently. But one of the things that I think is super interesting is how there are the introduction of technological trends that you couldn't possibly anticipate. and I'll give you a great example. When we sold the business, one of the... For 125 meg, by the way, I read that on... One of the questions we got repeatedly from our users was,

I'd love to put a picture associated with my profile. And the way people would ask to do that was, can I mail it to you? And they didn't mean email it to you. They meant, can I put it in an envelope and mail it to you? And we contemplated an assembly line of 100 people that would literally take pictures, digitize them, and then you have to associate it with a user. And what people don't

realize is, you know, shortly 2001, there was the introduction of phones with cameras. And all of a sudden, there were more cameras, digital cameras on phones than there were standalone digital cameras. And it changed the world. It changed how people visualize themselves, how they captured the world, how they memorialized the world, and it changed the nature of social networks. But was the tech there when 6 degrees was in existence, was the tech there to use photos on profiles and, you know. Well, when you say that, so there are two elements to when you say was the tech there. I mean, one question that was brought up before was what's the speed of connectivity and how difficult is it to upload a photo? So you have to think.

Tell me, what year did this start? We launched in 97. Yeah, because I have a very good memory of that period. a time because I was heavily involved in the internet then. I opened a bar in 99 and I wanted to offer free internet and I had to have dial-up and then like I remember this very, very well. And I was on CompuServe. I remember when Copi-Serve first, which was dial-up in like the mid-90s, first allowed, you could even, like it was a big thing in CompuServe to even look at a picture and it could take a few hours to download. So there were a couple, right. So you were like,

I don't mean to interrupt you, but like you were at a very interesting time. Like you're straddling two eras of the internet, kind of. Yes, but there are two problems. One problem is, which is the problem you're reflecting, is if everyone had their photo, how difficult is it for someone to view it? But the much bigger problem was

how many people had digital photos? And the answer to that was, most people didn't have digital photos, which was why they said, but I have a printout of a photo that I got at the local drugstore, can I mail that to you? And so you needed to bridge both of those, right?

The two gaps were one, which you're referring to, which is high-speed bandwidth. But the second gap was how many people had digital photography? And then as soon as they had it on their phone, they had a digital photo, but not necessarily the pipeline to get it anyway. But those things largely, like, so after six degrees, I started six other businesses, and all of them were based on trying to anticipate. Like, one of the businesses I started after that, the business that failed was, in order for there to be Wi-Fi in every place.

like in your comedy seller, you need what's called an operational support system. Something, a software technology on the back end that's able to provision the bandwidth, authenticate users, remunerate the broadband provider. And we said, it's a matter of time before everyone's using Wi-Fi.

What is Wi-Fi? Wi-Fi is unlicensed radio spectrum. And what was, and we could talk about that sort of separate topic. That business, ultimately, we had a team of engineers and it was a, for whatever reason, that business failed. What does this stand for? What, wireless, it's wireless fidelity?

I don't know. Go ahead. But the, what it represents is the radio spectrum is licensed, except a small piece of it. And the way that the FCC regulates that piece of the spectrum is they regulate how much electricity you can use at the back of a broadcast of a router. And, but the result is you can get very high speed,

connectivity. And so the question was, will this be pervasive? Anyway, the point that you raise, the macro point we're talking about is there are larger technological trends than any given business that make that business functionality more exciting. For example, having phones with cameras on them. And then the other example is just high-speed connectivity. And, you know, fast forward to 2008, the introduction of the iPhone, and then there's an entirely new world of technology that's enabled. You couldn't possibly have contemplated

if you were an entrepreneur building something other than something for a desktop system. Although in that interim period, we actually built an application for dumb phones. I have a quick question for Nome, if I could. Yes, sir.

The year is 19... When did you start, six degrees? 95, you said? No, we really... We began in 96. we launched at 97. Okay, it's 1997, though. Yeah. Andrew comes to you.

He comes to comedy cellar. He enjoys the show. He says, oh, you're the owner of the comedy cellar. Actually, it was your father at the time, but he comes to you. He says, I need $500,000 to start this. I had this idea where we all upload, everybody uploads their Rolodex and, you know, and we can all share our contacts, but I need $500,000 from you. Do you do it in 1997?

me yeah 500,000 dollars I didn't have 500 I didn't have 100 thousand dollars on my name and well what about 50,000 I don't think I had 50,000 I got to tell you it was one of I think I would have some I I would have said no I was one of one of my one of the things I look back most fondly at is going out and raising money and I remember starting the process of going around and asking people for money and it wasn't just I didn't just have to explain what six degrees was I had to explain what the internet was. And everyone rejected me. I mean, when I say everyone rejected me,

like it almost became, you know, an enjoyable experience to just hit up rich people, which is really not how you raise money today. Today you raise money to people that have some domain expertise, right, that have capital. But then it was just hit up every rich person. And I must have been rejected well over 100 people. And one guy told me,

this isn't just the dumbest idea I've ever heard. You're the dumbest person I've ever met. And which I thought was great. And I said to him, do you mind if I come back and share with you, you know, my progress? And he said, yes. And so, but I called him a couple months later. Is that person Donald Trump? The person was not Donald Trump.

Okay, go ahead. So, you know, he said, yes, I do mind if you come back. But I came back. anyway, a couple months later, and he still said he thought it was the dumbest idea you'd ever heard. But now he thought I was amusing. And I came back a third time, and I left with the check for $100,000

on the condition that he wouldn't have to speak to me again. And then I showed up the very next day, and I said, you know, you're going to lose your money if I don't raise some more money, so I need you to open up your roll decks, and I need your friends to invest. and ultimately raised money from his friends as well. So something he didn't believe in.

For something he didn't believe in, from, you know, with an entrepreneur, he thought was the dumbest person he'd ever met. Wait, and then what happened? Even when you came back and you'd been so successful. Oh. Well, he had already, he invested, so he got. He made money.

No, but was he. Was he so, I mean, no. No. I had an idea at the time for five degrees. You know. You should have started that. I remember when I heard about... That opportunity is so open to you.

I remember when I heard about Friendster, and I remember thinking, why is that interesting? So I certainly wouldn't have been, you know, receptive to... Well, I would have been receptive. So I was always... So I had a conference... I think I told the story before. In 92, 93, that's what it feels like to me.

You could probably... Anybody could look it up. There was a big article in New York Times about the fact that 10% of the country, something like that, had personal computers. and I called my father and I said, I have to meet with you. Like a formal meeting. I never did that.

I showed him the article. And I said, only 10% of the country has personal computers. And we know it's going to be 100%. We should take every dime we can raise and invest it in Microsoft now. And he said, you're absolutely right. And then we never follow it. I swear to God, we've got on to all the things. but I always understood that the sky was the limit when it came to computer.

Don't you think there are so many things like that today, you look around, and I mean, you can read about stuff in the paper, and you could say, you know, a small universe of people have this, but isn't it obvious that everyone will? Well, the thing is, what's funny about the story, I'm just repeating is that it wasn't just like I said it. I actually called a meeting. It wasn't like just like an anecdote. Like, this was a serious thing.

Yeah. I was very adamant about it. Not a lot of people probably call a formal meeting. things with their father. No. And anyway, so I can imagine, could you imagine? You would not be talking to me.

I would be, but it would be, you know, I'd be talking down to you. Your chair would be hired. Yeah, exactly. You know, well, you've done pretty well with the comedy. Listen, if you live long enough, you always have these close calls with both success and failure. Actually, thank God I didn't do that.

This is just part of living, you know. But that one, you were trying to get me to buy Bitcoin when it was at like $25 or something. I don't know if I was trying to get you. I think I mentioned it to you and said, you might as well. You know, I mean, that's stupid, Dan. You said it was stupid? I still don't understand Bitcoin, but obviously. But we had somebody here years ago on the podcast who wrote a book about Facebook.

And he said that the reason Frenster went under was because they built, they grew too fast and it kept crashing. and that's what Zuckerberg sort of, why Zuckerberg was smarter because he grew Facebook very slowly. I don't know if that's... I don't know. I forgot his name. He wrote a book called the Facebook Revolution

that he was called. Yeah. I mean, one of the things people thought about social networks was that the network effect made them absolutely defensible. In other words, once you built the network, no one would ever want to start from scratch.

And, you know, so there would be... My space. Six degrees. And how would you replace it? that and there would be friends or how would you replace that and we get all the way to Facebook and meanwhile what's what's Zuckerberg's brilliance it really isn't just Facebook it's his acquisitions right like in the absence of acquiring Instagram and WhatsApp yes you'd be looking at a declining property with Facebook I'm not sure about WhatsApp but definitely Instagram right well um I would include

WhatsApp and that maybe because of the technology of WhatsApp is but it's just talking about the usage of WhatsApp is, but Instagram for sure. Like, you know, you look at the traffic of TikTok and Instagram, and then you look at the trajectory of what was happening with Facebook and how it's really, Facebook's what older people use. Like, there are no young people that are engaged in Facebook. I mean, it aren't. So a lot of that, by the way, is anticipating what is the context in which people are going to use these social networks? And that's changed over time. Isn't, like, I messaging and now Google messaging, aren't they? basically doing everything that WhatsApp can do at this point?

So when you say doing everything they can do, you can create groups, you can set, like, what can I do? On WhatsApp? What can I do on WhatsApp that I can't do on the other messaging service? Well, the whole notion of WhatsApp was to defeat the payment of long distance, of long distance carriers of you paying it. For SMS. Not for SMS.

For voice. Like everyone, off a voice. Every single person. But Skype was doing that before WhatsApp. Yes, but, but WhatsApp, Skype never really took off as a downloadable application with your phone. Interesting. And the other big issue was, and there's some workarounds with this with IMessage, I think,

particularly in the last year. But a big issue with the carriers is interoperability. So one of the things that happened in Europe was text messages. and took off well before it did in the United States, because you were absolutely certain that if you were on one carrier and I was on another and you sent a message, I got it. Whereas in the United States,

because we had CDMA, TDMA, GSM, if you were on AT&T, there was no guarantee that me on Verizon would get a text message. That interoperability has been solved. But on my message, the, you know, there is, that took a while or took longer to solve.

And then people don't use, like the whole idea of defeating long-distance payments, which have come down, is really a WhatsApp phenomenon. It's funny, you're jogging memories here because I used to use this service. It was telemessage. I don't remember what it was called.

It was like a SMS hub. And it was right. It was always like, well, did the Verizon people get it? Did the T-Mobile people get it? It was always a... Right. It's like, what the hell? Like, how could this be in the United States of America, you know?

Yeah. They finally did solve it for the most part. For the most part. From time to time, you still get a glitch. Yeah, I'm not sure that's an interoperability glitch, but yes. Yeah. Anyway. So now, why did you, so we never got to the question, like, why did you not try to

take six degrees, why did you sell it when you sold it and not try to make it even bigger? Or you just got an offer you couldn't refuse? Or, you mean, you know, we were not, you know, the word profit wasn't even a word like any of us used. I mean, it was, we were bleeding money. I mean, these companies cost a fortune to run, and they take a very long time to make money. And so, you know, we were always in a situation of we got to raise a fortune. Like, I mean, we, that business raised over $25 million. We would have had to have raised a significantly larger amount to continue going. And so. But what was the source of revenue at that time? Did you have bad advertising? Yeah, advertising.

But it was minuscule revenue, right? Relative to. what people were doing today. It was minuscule, yeah. Relative to your costs. Relative to our costs, yeah. Yeah. We were losing money. I mean, we were losing money. I mean, these businesses take a very, very long time to make money. One of the things that I admire and marvel at with Amazon is just how long they managed,

Bezos stuck with it and managed to stay afloat while they were losing money for 15 years. How long did you lose money for it for a long? More than that. Well, I will say this. They generated a lot of revenue, which was not true for people that were building ad-based businesses. He generated a lot of revenue because he was selling books. The cost of selling those books was more expensive and he was able to monetize for the entire

operation, but the revenue was scaling. And his ambition was so large and was so direct. And he was able to connect the dots for people that, you know, at some point, if you get big enough, it will become profitable. Ironically, by the way, you know that at least half of their earnings come from AWS

and not from... What's AWS? Web Services. Amazon Web Services. Amazon Web Services, right? So Andy Jassy, who's the CEO, who funny enough... Are you saying that without AWS

it's not a profitable business? It is a profitable business, but to put it in context, you know, I'm, the, the entire business, you know, the commerce business does, I don't know what it does now, $400 billion a year, you know, and the margins are, are equivalent to AWS, which is doing a fraction of that, that has like 50% margins. It's like, I mean, it's, it's, it's a much more profitable business, AWS than the commerce business. They're both good businesses. Fascinating. You were talking about Andrew Jassy?

Oh, I went to a sleepway camp. And I was in a bunk with four people. And one of them was him. I've never spoken to him since. Oh, you never spoke to me? Andrew, Andrew Jassy. Yeah. I don't know who that is.

The CEO of Amazon. But then what's Bezos? If he's the CEO, what's Bezos? Bezos is the guy who goes, you know, on these incredible yacht. Why did MySpace collapse in Facebook and Facebook became the, you know, I can't tell you, I don't have a good answer for why, you know, why one collapsed and we moved on to the next. I mean, there's actually a documentary coming out. But I can't tell you why.

It was just better. Facebook was way better than Myspace. Facebook was cleaner. In terms of the crashing issue, I do remember MySpace crashing a lot because people put all kinds of crap on their page. You had to take a picture of yourself, you'd have to take a picture of yourself, sent it to Myspace.

It was like being run half-assed. I have a question. Yeah. How do Facebook and Instagram meta, whatever, get away with having absolutely like zero customer service? Like something goes wrong. You're bombarded with like the most egregious calls to violence, anti-Semitism. I was just going to make a joke. It's going to be anti-Semitism.

I said, no, it's not going to be anti-Semitism. But it was. God damn it. Dwarman, go with your friends. first instinct. And like there's nobody to talk to. I mean, forget that. Your identity gets stolen. They shut down your account. They heard your voice. And like there's nobody to talk to. Like there are people who have like millions of followers. Like do you know anybody at Meadow who can help me recover my account? Like how are they getting away with this? Yeah. It's a good question. It is a good question. Thank you. You know,

it's not just them. It's, um, it's commerce companies too. Companies get away. with what their customers are comfortable with. Google, if you get somebody trashing you in a Google review, and it's an outrageous, absolute slander, legally actionable, et cetera, et cetera, you cannot get anybody on the phone. Do you know what's interesting? You're a willingness to, one of the questions people ask,

you're asking about customer service. Another question people ask is, would we ever get to a place where people would participate where their privacy is compromised? And what these tech companies have realized over time is that for all the vocal people who say we care a lot about privacy, you haven't asked me, by the way, what I think of social media today, but for all the people that care about

say they care about privacy or say they care about customer service or say they care about libel or being slandered, the reality is most people don't. And because most people don't, the tech companies are able to say, this makes good business sense for us to basically

use all this data, initially use this data to target. Now they're using this data to train. Boycott. No, no. Okay, but one second. Part of what makes Amazon so great is that their customer service is I mean, impeccable.

Amazon has completely different. It is, but, I mean, I'll use you as an example. Like part of your, like, you're insane for customer service, right? I'm selling things. But the question you're asking is, what are people willing to tolerate?

If Amazon didn't have great customer service, you would buy the products they're offering somewhere else. That's right. But if Instagram doesn't have great customer service, you're still probably doom scrolling at night. And they know that. They know that. They know.

They're going to show your tits. Right. Only fan. What, um, do they, Could they theoretically get access to people's DMs these companies? Of course. Is that somehow- You don't tick the right box? No, they have that. What do you mean?

I don't even give a shit about my privacy online. I don't know what you're worried about. Just asking. Well, you know, it's an interesting question. If they're somehow locked away. When you say you don't care what people worry about, you care if people read your email? So I care if people read my email. I only care that somebody who knows who I am who could leverage that email to hurt me.

yes, I care about that. And I respect that. So yes. Well, yeah. But I mean, like, in terms of the normal thing, like, they read my email and they gave me an ad that had to, I don't, I don't freak out about that. At some point, of course, I want my privacy. Right. It's like the frog that's in a boiling pot of water.

You don't really notice it. Like, and if I were to tell you initially. But you know, that's actually not true. But go ahead. It does jump out. All right. It's apocryphal, but it's a good analogy. If I were to tell you initially that someone's going to read your email, you would say no way.

And then if I were to tell you, which you know what, maybe they'll just look for keywords and they'll send you ads, you would say, you know what, I think I'm okay with that. And now if Gemini, if Google says to you, you know what, if we read all of your email, all of it, and we train on it and we're able to personalize and we're able to, there are a ton of services that are saying to you, if we can ingest your email and develop a persona on you, we can answer your questions, by the way, just based on your email. So for example, I love that.

Well, so, but would you have loved that if I asked you that question eight years ago when you were writing a private message to your doctor and saying, I have this issue. And now that issue that you shared is going to be. I get it. I don't want it like a Valtrex commercial. I get it. Like if I have an issue, I don't want that.

But in general, Like, you know. But everybody has those issues. I don't have those issues. Are they doing that or they have to ask our permission for us to be able to do what you're saying? So in the, um, the services that are saying, let me ingest all your email. And I can, instead of you querying, you know, chat GPT, you can query your chat GPT. You can use that large language model, that base model.

But you can use that in the context of the specifics of who you are. there are a ton of services that are saying, yeah, opt into that. I opt into, I opted into every one of them. Yeah. You're saying you will opt into every one of them. Absolutely. Yeah. And what I'm saying is that kind of goes back.

Well, actually, what's funny is I'm very, I'm a little more paranoid than you are. I mean, I'm, you know, to me, I think it's an. What are you hiding? You should have started this podcast with that, right? I mean, I'm very intentional about those things. I think the problem is, you know, if you really want to understand, like I think your medical history is a great example. Like, if you really want to understand your own medical history,

what you would do is you would take everything from my chart, right? Which is, you know, here we're in New York. My chart is actually much more worrisome than my email. Meaning, like, I'm amazed that there is a database out there of everybody's private medical records that, the chance is much greater than zero that will be hacked one day. And then everybody can just Google what apparel's STDs. Right.

Forget about what will be hacked. That would be awful. Let's just talk about your behavior. Not surprising, but awful. But let's just talk about your behavior. In New York, you know, my chart, which is on an epic backend. Yeah. and that is for Columbia, NYU, Cornell,

all the medical systems here. With a few clicks, you can download all your medical history. Yep. And you can upload all of that to chat. A scan of my dick is available. And you can upload all of that to chat GPT. And instead of you going to the doctor and saying, hey, by the way, can you talk to me about my blood over 20 years?

You can do that today on your own. And we're moving to... And get a much more reliable answer, by the way. And probably get a much more reliable answer because in order for the doctor to sit there with a bunch of papers and go through your blood, you know, the trending of your, well, actually there's, they do show trending on.

Unless he goes and uses this chap, cheap. Or she. Or she, right. I would never. Come on, let's be realistic. Go ahead. No, so, so you begin to think, you know, does the value outweigh the cost,

which is, yes, once I download it and I upload it, it is in these other systems forever, which goes to your question. again of, you know, what happens when they ignore me from a customer service perspective? And their answer will be, first of all, we won't ignore you. We're going to have AI agents that will seem like they're responding to you, right? And they will do their best to respond to you. But the question for all of these tech companies... It's a huge fail. But the question for all these tech companies is, does the value outweigh

the cost of people on the fringe? And, you know, some people will get lost in the chaos. The thing that is most disturbing is that I happen to have a friend who works at Meta. And like, that's really the only way that anything ever gets fixed. It's disturbing that you have a friend that works there? No, it's disturbing that like that's really the only... It's disturbing you have customer service issues with Instagram. What, like how... You want to see...

Put your fucking photos up and shut up. Oh, shit. You want to see the death to Israel. Oh, let it go. No, it's disgusting. If they said that about any... This is why... You know what? I don't believe in anti-George conspiracy theories,

but this may be why they have no customer service. They just can't stand our fetching. I'm going to show. There are a lot of tech companies where you do have customer service issues that you can't speak to a person. You know, like... I got to tell something. I get, you know, I get, this is the wine talking.

I get complaints from customers on a regular basis. We seek them out. Complaints about the podcast. Godcaster about the comedy. No, no, about the comedy cell. Like someone, someone came up and they weren't funny. Something funny. My drink wasn't right.

You never get complaints about people not being funny. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. I know you get complaints about people that they made fun of a kid dying. We get complaints about people not being funny.

That was a great one. We complains about the climate. Like, we get complaints. Every day I get, some days I get none. But, you know, I get, there's no week that goes out of it. if you were to hold a gun on my head and so listen, I want you to tell me the truth and if you get this wrong, I'm going to shoot you.

Do you detect any ethnic patterns in these complaints? I could not tell you no. Will you stop? And I don't just mean Jewish, by the way. I can't say more than that. But I'll tell you one thing. It's women?

We get very few like waspy complaints. I'll tell you that right now. Like, like it's, and the type of, like, It's like everything we're told is false. Like I, and there's nobody who judges people as individuals more than I do. But the notion that there's no difference between peoples, between cultures, between profiles is such a big lie. It's the biggest lie we all embrace.

You lost me. You all know it's not true. The complaints are because you were Jewish or the complaints are coming from Jews. Both. What the fuck? I'm saying that there, that I can, like, there's certain types of complaints. I didn't want to mention the other. I'm just saying, like,

not even talking about Jews. I'm just saying that... Certain complaints are from certain types of people. Certain ethnic groups are far overrepresented in the number of complaints that I get. And certain groups are far underrepresented. But you don't think...

But you don't think part of that is their familiarity with you? No, no, it has nothing to do it. No, they don't know who is. They don't know they're going to me. Really? Yeah. Wait a second.

You think all people are the same? No, I don't think all people are the same. The fuck is with you. Like, you're a genius and you think all people, what you think are, wait a second. But I, but I,

but I, I do think that there's, people are more comfortable complaining when there's a sense of familiarity with the person. Do you think if you were, have you been a waiter? Have you ever been a waiter? I actually have been a waiter.

And you thought that like, every customer was the same as every other customer. It doesn't matter like, there's no, there's no indicators. I mean, there was a lot. I'll get the same tip from anybody.

There was a lot to complain about when I was away. I'm saying, obviously, different groups tip differently. different groups are, come on. Don't we all live in the same planet? Do you find when you're in Israel that you... Why Israel? No, because I'm asking if you find...

Trying to figure out if this is all about Jews. It's partially about Jews, but Jews are not the only people that we can generalize about. It's not the only people that you're allowed to say it about. We will only talk about Jews, and we will just try to imply other groups. Go ahead. When you're in Israel, do you find... you're able to, you feel less self-conscious about doing something Jewish. Like you might be more apt to return to send back a dish.

Is that a Jewish thing to do? I think so. No, I don't feel that way in Israel. I don't think Israelis do that. I didn't experience any of this when I was a waiter. American thing. Anyway. You know, I have a, first of all, I don't send back dishes.

What am I fucking creep? But, no, in general, as a restaurant, owner, I wish the customer would send back the dish. Like, I don't have that attitude because as the restaurant owner, I'm like, I would so much prefer them to send back the dish so I can fix it, then present them with a check for something they didn't like. Like, why would I want that? That's interesting.

I mean, interesting perspective. But it's so, it's such good logic. Like, why in the hell? No, I don't, I want that customer to pay me $30 for that dish they hated. so they'll never fucking come again. Like, of course, please tell me so I can fix it. Well, I'll make a note of that next time. The next time the salmon tastes a little fissier than I prefer.

You don't fucking pay. Yes, but my feedback is still value. No, of course. You know that I always want to know. The salmon's always excellent, by the way. Listen to me, I really am taking issue with what you're saying about these comments. Your daughter... Who made the honor roll again.

Yes, go ahead. I mean, do you really think that this stuff should go unchecked on social media? Wait, I don't know. You're not on there that much. I know you're on Twitter more than you are on Instagram and you don't take Instagram that seriously and you think it's like a dumb joke and that's fine. But I am telling you that the amount of like calls to actual violence and killing people because they're Jewish is so fucking outrageous.

I think you're pissing in the wind. I do think. Oh, I very well maybe. Yeah, I think that the sum total of all that, I don't want to say it doesn't have an effect. It does have an effect. But I don't think, I think that ship has sailed. I think we're going to have to learn to live in a world

that has all that out there, and we're going to. I couldn't disagree with you more. There's a great. There's a great podcast worth listening to called The Rabbit Hole from the, the, um. Can you come this way into him? From the New York Times. And with the podcast...

You lost me already, but go ahead. Because I said the rabbit hole or the New York Times. But go ahead. Of course they're going to say that, yeah. And this is years ago. But let me just tell you what the podcast was about because it goes directly to this question of whether you can put the genie back in the bottle.

So the topic was... The topic began with, how did YouTube become YouTube? And it traced the origin of QAnon. And what it talked about was that the engineers at YouTube were incentivized and motivated to increase traffic. And so they played with what are the algorithms when you see something that would get you to watch the next video.

And what they quickly found was that people that watched videos that had the slightest inkling of conservatism were more likely to watch if the next video was a little bit more conservative. And the same thing was true on the liberal side. And so the financial motivation for these, for these, for these, for these algorithms was not,

it wasn't so direct as radicalized people, but the consequence of these algorithms was to radicalize people. And that's exactly what happened. It wasn't just YouTube, it's all of these platforms radicalized people dramatically and contributed not in an incidental way to the depolarization of what's going on in this country.

Now the question about anti-Semitism is, why is that propagating so rapidly today on social media? And one of the questions is, because most people are engaged in this habit of doom scrolling, if you find yourself looking at anti-Semitic content or content from Tucker Carlson and Candice Owen, the videos that they will present to you after the initial ones you watch from Tucker Carlson and Candice Owen

will be other content that is similarly inflammatory, and it creates this. More so. Much more so. And it creates this environment of hate. And so if you don't think that the tech companies play a role in propagating that hate. I didn't say that. No, but what you, what you did say was that.

Got to live with it. Was you have to live with this idea that there is hatred. The genie is not going back in the bottle. Candace Owens has the number one podcast on planet Earth in her category. and there's, I don't see any scenario, you're gonna knock her down to number 100 where she should be or whatever, I just think. But of course you will.

Like, of course, the people that are- Let's make a bet. Wait, wait, hold on. Of course, of course, the content that's the most popular today, by the way, it may be more radical, but of course the content that's most popular today, it's not the content that's most popular tomorrow.

That's what comes as you were just saying, about social networks, that the popularity of a social network can morph over time, and that's more intractable than a podcaster. If for no other reason, then her content will get stale, she'll get older, and there will be new people that replace her. And the question is, how do these people become popular?

And in large part, the way they become popular is because of the algorithms of these networks that encourage people that they think could be attracted to the content to continue to watch it. So the idea that the social networks can't play a role in stopping that inflammatory, content. It's absurd. But if, if, if, of course they can play a role in.

Okay. But you have to legislate that because they're trying to make as much money as possible. So they're going to do what you suggested. The only way to stop it would be to legislate against it. So, you know, or to keep reporting these comments. To the customer service that doesn't apply. Well, as what Dan is implying is that it's illegal to legislate it. And that's, that's, that's, that's the roadblock. Well, you know, you know, you know, I don't, I don't, I don't love painting things in a binary fashion. Like you, you either, you know, complain about it or you, you know, or you legislate against it. Like, there are, there will be, there are some economic incentives

to stop this behavior. And so do I think it could be a combination of, like in some countries, you know, social media is outlawed until you're of a certain age, right? In Australia, they just raise the age. Do I think there'll be a combination of how these algorithms optima, you know, are, are written? Do I think if there was transparency in the algorithms. I think if the whole world knew... Which Musk promised, by the way, when he took over Twitter, he promised to make the algorithm public. Yeah. But but but the idea that this, you know, the anti-Semitism actually, you know, by the way, such as anti-Semitism. It's, it's, it's the, you know, I find it offensive.

The, I find the, the racism, the, the, you're a liberal. You know, I'm, I'm, I'm, yeah, I'm, no, I, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm very conservative. No, we do find the, of course the racism is offensive. I don't mean to be flipping. I'm actually making a joke. But, but, but the idea that, you know, there's nothing we can do about it, you know, that's, um, I don't think there's anything we can do. I'm, I'm, I just told you how you could do something about it. No, but Dan made a good point. You have to legislate it. I can do it on their own and legislating it is, is probably not legal. Do you know, it's, well, no, that's not true. It may be legal for only one subgroup, which is children. So you could possibly, you could possibly

raise the age of, of course, we all know how effective these things are, because none of us ever had exposure to marijuana or Playboy magazine when we were kids. But the fact is that, yes, you can legislate for children, but grown-ups, you cannot legislate what they see. I mean, the only thing you can legislate is incitement to violence. But that's what I'm talking about. No, no, no, no. Hold on a second. Specifically. Being granular here is worthwhile because no one is suggesting that you ban Candice Owens. The question is, for someone who's watching a slightly fringe video, what are the circumstances where the next video that automatically appears is Candace Owens? How do you stop that?

So that is a function of an algorithm that is not transparent to us. And the question is, will it be a regulatory change? Or is it possible that there are new social networks that evolve all the time? And is it possible that what we see, by the way, whether it's because someone intentionally develops a social network or through the use of AI, we're able to see these things. Let me put a different way. And it's way like, there's a very low probability.

I don't think I'm being invited back. No, no, of course, of course. It's a very low probability that that is going to change in the modern world. Much more important, I think, is that we need to develop cultural institutions and mores and norms that fight against this stuff. For instance, we need to be teaching our kids at an early age, how to interpret what they see on the internet, how to identify things, how to know what's true and what's not true.

It's not either or. And I think that's cynical. It's not either or. Like, if that's not enough, like I can just tell you, if we were to- Well, let me say, if we were to explore all the consequences of AI unchecked, and by the way, with a lack of transparency. But I just want to make a point.

Yeah. Before all this stuff, the National Inquirer and the Weekly World News always dwarfed the New York Times circulation. There's always been a huge market from this. Before the Internet, we all heard about Richard Gere putting a gerbil in his ass. This is true. And we all believed it until the Internet came. It killed Snobes. The spread of this stuff is very different.

Anti-Semitic conspiracy theories spread like wildfire. before the internet. Not at the rate, by the way, you can examine... In certain countries, it did. Certainly, if we're talking about 1930s, Germany, Austria, many parts of Eastern Europe, that's true.

But you could examine the spread of anti-Semitism over different times. In the 90s, we had the black community talking about the secret relationship between, you know, blacks and Jews and what was this book about the Jewish slave? trade and all kinds of Jews were involved in this guy, Coakley and Chicago, Jews were involved

in creating AIDS to inject into black children. Like these spirits, conspiracy theories all spread. Those weren't the entire black community. Those were isolated incidents and you can't compare. Did I say the entire? I didn't mean to say the entire black community. But the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, you can measure. But these were big things. You can. They spread very quickly without algorithms. You can, but not, not on a scale. It's even comparable. You can measure the number of offensive comments and their virality and their velocity by era. And there's no question that the ADL tracks this. There's no question that what's happening today is at a scale we have not seen since the 1930s. Okay. Okay, let's move on to something else. I have a question. I have a question moving on to something else. Okay, Noam didn't have $50,000 in

1997 to invests. He certainly has it now. Is there anything, is there anything? Now, you're an angel investor. You got a lot of companies you're looking at do. What can, where can noem put his money that you're involved with? Are you, you know, what fucking Jew? Go ahead, go ahead. I'm saying, is there something, you know, that you, that you,

Before we go, I want to read something from Tolstoy, but go ahead. So I'm not sure, you know, I'm not sure I have any advice about what to invest in. Index funds. I can tell you things that I think are coming. Okay. So we have this immense housing shortage in the United States. And one of the reasons we have this immense housing shortage in the United States... All the immigrants.

It's because it's too expensive to build. And so do I think... And the landscape of people that have companies that have built prefabricated modular housing is like a graveyard of companies that have failed. But do I think there will be an inflection point where you will see not, don't think of it as entire houses built inside of factories, but components that are largely assembled like Legos? And do I think at some point we'll see a bend the same way, you know, electric cars seemingly came out of nowhere?

Absolutely. And so there are other areas. Like I think if you were to say like, if you were thinking about the world, I think the way you would think about it is not what companies are exciting. you would think about what verticals are exciting. Where's the world about to dramatically change? Housing it will dramatically change. Quantum computing will dramatically change.

Electric vertical takeoff and landing, you know, autonomous planes will dramatically change. Sex, sex, robots. Oh, yeah. Warfare will dramatically change. Like the next war we fight, you're seeing these autonomous drones. And you can imagine, you know,

how far are we from having 100,000 autonomous subs that are the size of a bathtub in the Taiwan Strait? So this thing, and then I read my Tulsa, this thing about housing is very interesting, and I think you're probably right. So let your car, I have a Tesla. Do you have a Tesla? No.

But largely because, largely because I was so offended by him. Yeah, but he had it before that, before he took Twitter. But I wouldn't trade it for that. I love this car. I have a model. Yeah, I get it. It makes a lot of sense.

If you do a lot of driving, you know, it makes a lot of sense. It's a phenomenal thing. But there was this documentary. I don't even think I actually saw it or saw the whole thing. who killed the electric car. Remember this is like a documentary early 2000?

And, um... Do you know 25% of cars were electric in like 19, early 1900s? Yes, I've heard of the, yeah. So this thing who, so I remember when I first got the Tesla,

I looked at it, I was looking around at it. I think all the technologies which had to be mature all at the same time to make this thing work. LED technology, Wi-Fi technology.

Like, Like, it's so many things that just weren't battery technology. Yeah. But there's so many other things to it. If you just look around. The key there is battery, though, I think. The most significant thing. Yes, maybe, but just with the battery, it still couldn't have worked.

Just these flat screens being cheap. He's right. The initial conceptualization of the Tesla was they would just build a new power train. And then they realized, no, you need to reinvent every aspect of the car in or order for it to work. And the, and the brilliance was, you know, if you, you may need to improve every aspect, 1%, 2%, but if you don't reinvent the entirety of the car, you cannot build, at one point, Tesla, you know, received the highest rating of any car on performance. It just wouldn't have been cost effective. And I, and I, it was, I wish I'd made the list. I, I mean, I began to look at everything

in the car. I said, well, this didn't exist in the 90s. This isn't, this and is. And I realized, well, whatever kind of lesser car that they said who killed electric car, it was never going to sell. People barely want to be really, you know, electric cars now. But what kind of range could they possibly? Like everything that you're saying and more.

So, I forgot what the point was at the right now. But it was just like a perfect storm. And sometimes, oh, the housing thing. So the housing thing, like this is, I think the earlier attempts of what you spoke are probably are analogous to these earlier attempts of electric car. But once all the components are there, what tech are we missing?

Yes, you'll just order a fucking house on Amazon and configure it however you want and a 3D rendering, and they will deliver it. Now, I actually live in a modular house. It's so-so, but it's going to be far beyond. What tech are we missing? Well, I can tell you, you know, when you think about building a house, the design is at the front end and then there's permitting entitlement, right? All of that, AI will condense to a day.

And that's right off the bat, like, we'll condense to a day. And then on the build of the house, you know, just organizing all of the trades, that's another area where AI could condense and make incredibly efficient. But what will happen, what will happen is the entirety of a house breaks down to systems, a structural system, an HVAC system, and all of these, a plumbing system, and all of these systems will be built independently and they'll be interoperable. That's insane. And then you will order the house, and it will,

integrate these interoperable systems. And because you can do the design, which is this lengthy process, you know, that takes a huge amount of time. And then there's the permitting, you know, piece. And you can condense all of that with AI. And then you have systems that will be interoperable. At some point, every failure will turn into one enormous success. The question is whether that happens in the next two years, the next 20.

That's insane. But we could talk about, I mean, that level of progress. will occur in a lot of different spaces. And your question was, where should he invest? You should pick industries that you think are on the cusp of a reinvention. And then instead of trying to pick one company, you would say, I'm going to go all in on that industry. Well, what else besides home building? Well, you know, this war I find in Iran is fascinating. Like the cost, we're having this enormous conversation about whether we should put troops on the ground and the cost of that. And and we think about that in terms of blood and treasure.

But how far are we to the point where you can put troops on the ground that aren't people? And because we know that we have troops in the sky, right? We have drones where if the drone gets shot down, no one dies. And we know we're on the cusp of a huge number of submarines, well, there'll be no people in the submarines.

And we know that there are robots that are being developed that will be the equivalent of a soldier. I mean, that's a phenomenal, like, that raises huge, you know, policy questions for, you know, for future. Well, where are we in robotics in terms of robots being able to replace blue-collar workers? Maybe they can replace lawyers, but can they actually, can they actually do a-

Your question is, how far are we from an apparel factory in Bangladesh that has 10,000 people, and Trump's talking about insuring it, and you bring it onshore, and you got one guy who's turning on the switch in the morning, day and night, and the designs are all performed by AI, and you disintermediate, you've cut out all those people. And I will say one of the crazy things about the tariffs is we don't actually make the robots that could automate that apparel factory. We would need to import them and non-tariff them. So there's a great deal of irony in that. But that, you know, this whole idea, we're on-shoring stuff, but we're tariffing the things we would need to fully onshore it. I can't tell you a number of years, but I can tell you the level

of dislocation that will happen will be stunning, absolutely stunning. How historical is it? And what a lesson in humility. I'm kidding. Yeah, go ahead. Okay, Dan. My sound is getting weird. All right. Hello. Hello. Can you hear me? Yeah, now we got you. I'm going in a now. Yeah, you're going in a now. One, two. One, two. Okay. I think that's good now. Okay. How historical is it? And what a lesson in Humility is it. That at this point, I can have AI, a robot, essentially,

as my lawyer, before I could get a robot waiter in the olive tree. Like we all assumed. We just assumed that we'd have robots doing menial tasks, flipping burn. I don't know that I would have been. We'd all already, like, I really don't know. No, but lean into his point.

Everyone was told, want to have a secure job, learn to program, right? Learn to code. Learn to code. And those are the first jobs that are being eviscerated. But I think that was foreseeable. I think that was foreseeable because computer technology has been advancing Moore's Law. There's no Moore's Law with robots.

First of all, Dan, you know this. It was foreseeable by me because one of our earliest podcasts, how we met Tyler Cowan, is that I wanted to talk about the fact that I think I'd already prefer to be diagnosed by a computer than a doctor. and that was like seven, eight years ago. Every say, all my God. There's a study that shows 100,000 mammograms examined looking for false positives by doctors and compared to AI.

And AI outperforms the day. And my argument was, it could just be an algorithm that in the old days, the doctor was the smartest guy in the town because he had the best memory and he had the books in the back room. But in the end, still you were hostage to whatever he remembered or could find in his book. But a computer, you give it a certain symptoms. And it can give you a distribution of every single thing in the history of the earth that this has been. And you can eliminate it from...

You can eliminate it from... This is really... This is so upsetting. Can we get a fucking AI for this? And you can eliminate it, you know, from most probable to least probable. And it'll never make a mistake. So an AI is only, but has only advanced it beyond anything I conceived of at the time. I'm including photographs now identifying malls,

like really between, and I mean, I have so many experiences with doctors giving me the wrong information. Top doctors. It's insane. But can a robot stitch up a wound? Not so much yet it will be able to, but that's more like a menial task.

I saw a video of a doctor, I think it was at MassGen, using augmented reality to repair a cleft palate of a terribly deformed child, and I think it was Peru, with a local doctor in Peru, was untrained assisting in that. Now, that was augmented reality coupled with, you know, the benefit of a local doctor. But are we that far from robots?

First of all, there are robots that are autonomously performing some procedures. But the question is, is how far are we from performing the most elaborate procedures? I mean, LASIC surgery is essentially robotic, right? It's incredible. If you were to go through industry by industry, it's really incredible. If you got very granular and you said, you know, why is that going to change? It's really incredible the change that we're going to see in the next five years. But I still can't get an AI agent to answer my customers correctly about their fucking reservations.

And I paid the nose for this. And I just read that now they're trying to figure out if, it is ethical to allow people to have sex with their AI, like chatbot girlfriends and boyfriends. How they have sex? It is. No, there's like all.

Her question is whether it's cheating. She's saying, is it cheating for you? No, no, no, perfect entry into my Tolstoy quote. No,

that's not what I was. Can I read about Tolstoy? By the way, before you read about your Tolstoy quote, how far are we from there being pattern recognition as to what's funny? And you having your comedians perform without an audience. And AI will tell them

what type of response they will get. That's interesting. Can we get back to the cheating? I think we're a ways away from that. No, no. It's very good point. I don't need to audition. Don't even send me your tape

until you get a 9.2. That's been happening in pop music for like 20 years. They have an algorithm. Yeah. But it's all, well, I can know the delivery. I mean, I guess.

Don't worry, Dan. You'll be dead and John. I think that, yeah, I think it's, I think we're a ways away from that. Of course you do. Okay. So, Tolstoy, I'm reading a, Tolstoy, go ahead. He's named Paul Johnson's book, The Intellectuals. And he has a little chapter on, you know, famous intellectuals that I read Rousseau.

Oh, what a hack he was. But anyway, and now I'm reading about Tolstoy. And there's two just wonderful. Now, Tolstoy is considered to be the most insightful, like the greatest, writer. This is what he said about, I'll just read it. It's apropos of cheating. Should we, I wish I could do a Russian accent.

Should we permit promiscuous sexual intercourse as many quote liberals wish to do? Impossible. It will be the ruin of family life. To meet the difficulty, the law of development has evolved a golden bridge in the form of the prostitute. Just think of London without its 70,000 prostitutes. What would become of decency and morality?

How would family life survive without them? How many women and girls would remain chaste? No, I believe the prostitute is necessary for the maintenance of the family. What he's saying essentially is that without this outlet of

prostitutes, prostitution, we would lose this cherished institution of families. It's like, it's like, what I want to know is why were you going to, you were talking about this Tolstoy quote 10 minutes ago when we weren't even on the topic. For two of us. And then he also said, he also said, he wrote 1898 when he was 70,

woman is generally stupid. That sounds like Bobby Fisher. Woman is generally stupid. Woman. But the devil lends her brains when she works for him. Then she accomplishes miracles of thinking, far-sightedness, Constancy, in order to do something nasty.

Like, she rises to the occasion when she wants to confound us. Like, this is, and so, like, this prostitution thing, like, imagine a man who gets caught with his wife,

like get a Korean massage bar or something, like, you know, husband gets, you think you're smarter than Tolstoy? Like, who are you to tell me? Anyway, I just think the,

um, this issue of what, what is and isn't cheating is actually, actually going to be very profound. By the way, literally nobody was talking about that. He brought it up. I'm trying to figure out the nexus, too. You brought it up. You said about it, what's cheating?

I should have come in with a quote. Did you say, what is cheating? No. Yes. We were talking about, yeah, we were talking about she's brought up the ethics of sex with a body. And he said, is it cheating? Yeah, he said, is it cheating? Well, I was trying to clarify, I think I was

trying to clarify your question. Was that what you were asking? No, not at all. So why would it be unethical? It saves the family. Because it is this thing now where these people are having like these relationships like romantic quote unquote. Well, why would that be unethical? Unless you consider it cheating.

No. Does the tech companies want to take on this responsibility? Oh, I see. Okay. That was the question. Of what? Of letting people like get into like these like these like, essentially like propagating like pornography right like they're actually chat chit is about to release it

well that's that's what i was reading about that's well in other words letting people become sort of addicted to that could fuck with people's heads if they're falling in love with with uh well and that's already happening but they're they're not they're not having quote unquote sex with these um AI chatbots right now like the technology isn't doing that i would give anything to just be able to live a few hundred years and just see how this all turns out. This is such interesting. Well, you brought up on a previous podcast, you know, that's the one technology that we're not seeing, is vast, is great increases in lifespan.

Yes. We're seeing all these other technologies just exploding, but we're still dying. I don't think that's true. There are a lot of people who think if you live disease-free for another 10 years, you'll make it to, you know, a hundred. Well, people- No, I said we haven't seen it yet. We haven't seen it, of course. Yeah, but you said you need a couple hundred years to get there.

And I'm saying. No, I said I just wish I could, no, I didn't say that. I said, I wish I could live for a few hundred years. Oh. Yeah. What, can we just tease out this Tolstilis? By the way,

are you, we were talking about cheating. Are you, do you have a wife and kids? Well, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on,

hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on, this is my observation. That was interesting to me that was, we're going to end with your family. We're going to end with your family. What's interesting is, is there are a lot of, like,

you know, hold on. No, I'm just, Just hold on one second. I don't want to leave this. Jefferson. Difficult to figure out how these things connect. Jefferson, Adams, I think Madison, they all lived to be quite old.

Maybe you can look at it. 80-ish, 80-plus. And it was interesting to me that so many people hundreds of years ago, hundreds of years ago, lived into their 80s. Basically, what any of us would agree was basically our life expectancy today, despite all the advancements, all the therapies, all everything, people are living about the same length of time if you can get them past the first couple years of life, right?

Well, what do they call them? The blue zones where people are living, you know, to 100. And, no, I do think one of the areas that I think is really exciting is people that are focused on longevity. And I do think there are modifications we're aware of today that you can modify your behavior. I mean, by psoriasis, they can't fucking get rid of it. I do think...

You think that would be an easy one. The heartbreak of psoriasis. I do think... Well, it's obviously going to happen eventually. Eventually, I think they're going to completely crack the code for aging, and they'll figure out why the degrades like a Xerox and then you'll live forever. Really? Unless you have a terrible accident.

I don't think you're going to live forever, but I do think... Why not? You will have an accident eventually. Except for that. I mean, I guess it can... And the meteor will hit a venture. But who wants to live... I mean, would you really want...

I do. I do. I do. But as the prep it or as you are now? Like, would you want to live... As he was 20 years ago. I'm fine with now. Okay, but what about at 93? Would you want to live like as you are Tfu, tu, Tfu, Tfu, Tufu, going to be at 93?

I don't know how I'll be at 93, but as long as I'm still living a gratifying life and enjoying myself, Yes, of course, I'd want to continue that life forever. But as young as, like, younger, the better, right? Yes, but still, that's not, yes, younger the better. I'm totally fine with what I am now. But the point is that cells reproduce and they degrade for whatever reason and the, what do they call the? Calamere is, whatever?

Telomeres, you know, but at some point, they will undo that and they'll make perfect copies or even rewind it. They'll be able to, you know, go roll back the aging. Okay. Well, they need to roll back the aging, right? Because the number of cells you have on your brain is less than what it was. So we do need to, we would need to rewind. But whatever we need to do, they will figure out, it's all possible, and they'll figure out how to do it. And then sky's the limit.

Just be very careful. Can you elaborate on your position on that Tolstoy quote? I'm against it, of course. The problem is, is if we get to a point where you're living 300 years, unless you have an accident, people will be more risk averse because there's more to lose. Now all of a sudden I'm not leaving the house because I don't want to lose out on the 200 years that I could possibly believe.

I mean, that's a real, you know. You live that way now, Dan. That's a real consideration. Well, it'd be more pronounced. But the reason I wanted to ask about his family is because I don't have a wife and kids, but you expect that I'm a comedian, you know, you expect comedians to be mental cases

and have issues of that nature. But you're like a regular person. So I'd imagine you, but I don't know. see a wedding ring, so I don't know. I have a girlfriend. I'm not married, and I don't have kids. Human? Well, it seems unusual to me, and he's been, obviously, a very eligible...

Would you ever married? Have you ever married? No, I've never been married. I mean, you obviously are a very eligible bachelor. You're a very interesting guy, a very accomplished guy. A lot of money. He's got some dough. The women must be coming at you.

I thought the topic here was... Well, that was the topic, yes, was. is the operative word. I think that's interesting. They must be coming at you all over the place. They're coming after me and I got nothing.

On Facebook, I'm getting all this action on Facebook, what's it called Facebook data? Marketplace. No, no. No, I mean, I'm getting a lot of fucking action on that, you know, and...

Well, I wish you would take some of those women up on their offers. I think it would be good for you. And I want to tell you something else. Your skin stuff is all, like, internal anxiety. Probably a lot of it. 100%.

I have a really good dermatitis. I have a really good dermatologist who does energy work who I can. Have you tried crystals? Crystal's work. I'm not kidding. He's amazing. Steve Jobs had a good doctor. Steve Jobs had a good doctor.

Chris pancreatic cancer. He was very good. You're making jokes. Of course. Shut up. It's true that anything skin related is coming from the inside. Yes, except that my kids. have like their eczema at like nine months old.

So that was fucking anxiety. Well, no, not necessarily anxiety, but it could be, no. Let me quote Tolstoy. It could be a reaction to something that they were eating or you're making that face. Look it up. It's in my side of the, my mother had it. I actually had it a little bit about my kids. It's in family.

It runs in families. I'm telling you. Oh, gosh. Well, it's both. It's not both. It's exacerbated by stress like a lot of things are, but it's not caused by stress. You could give someone who doesn't have it all the stress in the world. They will not get eczema.

Yes. It's what they call the, I forgot that the, there's a word for that with the stress and the, you know, anyway. The chicken and the egg. No, it's like the diathesis stress. Something like that. Anyway, whatever. AI will make many breakthroughs, but it will not figure out, Why Perry will believe anything.

She literally, any nonsensical thing, as long as it's in a meme, she will believe. You saw that in a meme, right? No, I have an excellent doctor on the Upper East Side. When you say doctor, what do you mean by that? I mean a board certified dermatologist. And if you have any skin issues, he's incredible. Not a chiropractor. Not a chiropractor.

Anyway, let's say, are we? Yeah, we're done. We're going to wrap it up. What is that? This was, I thought, a very good episode. Thank God we didn't talk about anything that people were interested in, like, Iran or the thing. What is that? We talked about Iran.

We talked about how. Someone's a phone alarm? Yeah, this is a nice outlet for people, huh? Is that your phone? Oh, no, that's my... Alarm? That's my alarm to put money in the meter. Oh.

Oh, well, perfect time. In New York, you grab a ticket for two hours. And you can't do it by phone? And then on your phone, you do the subsequent next two hours. All right. Anyway, see, I think this was a good episode. Thank you, I'm sorry you don't remember Dan. I went to law school too, by the way.

Yeah, but we didn't, like, I think you were a different year and maybe we were different classes. But I just remember Stacey. Did you enjoy law school? No. I liked it very much. Why didn't you like it? Even first year you didn't like? I mean, I think life is about choices and law schools for people that want to be lawyers.

and if you don't want to be a lawyer, you're wasting your time. I liked it. None of us. I don't practice. I don't practice. Yeah. All right. Andrew Weinrich, everybody.

He's on the Forbes 250 greatest living innovators. 250 or 450? 250. 250, greatest living innovators. He made the list. I don't know if he's not in the top 100, but he's still pretty good. Still impressive. 175.

175 is well. And that's based on your work in social networking, I guess, mostly. Mostly, yeah. Okay. Who was the last? Who invented swip? You know, the last person on that list,

who should be way ahead of me, is Taylor Swift. Taylor Swift. She's 250. That's hilarious. Who invented swiping for, right for, if you like them, and left for not? Is there one person that invented that? Because that's a pretty big innovation. Do you know, before, you're talking about Tinder, right?

Yeah, Tinder. Before Tinder, there was a company called Hot or Not. And I think that was Zuckerberg, I think. No, that was, I think his name was, I can't remember his name, James Wong. I can't remember his name. But the, I mean, this idea that nothing's new, Tinder was not the first one to do, you know, I'm interested or I'm not, it happened to be the form factor of left, right was that. I'm really sorry about that alarm.

You know what was amazing before we go, like, we've seen so many innovations now. Like I've been doing word processing since a sophomore in high school. My first printer was a thing that fit over an IBM Selectry keyboard with little fingers, like little buttons and it would type for you. Hung, at least his name. Hung. Hung. Oh, he was, but the first time you could pinch Zoom or, uh, whatever, uh, crop or whatever

we call it. Uh, that was an amazing innovation. That just really hit hard. Like, holy shit, right? for whatever reason. We'd seen so many other things that didn't hit us at heart, but that was huge to me.

Anyway. Okay. Andrew Weinrich, everybody. He doesn't have a book to plug, so we'll just say thank you. Maybe I'll be a right one. Well, thank you for coming. You should probably be right one.

And food half off at the Olive Tree Cafe downstairs if you're interested. You can have it full, full of. Thank you. Enjoyed it. Thank you. I'm sorry. Thank you.

I remember him. No, I remember him.