The Joe Rogan Experience - #1795 - Antonio Garcia Martinez

Episode Date: March 23, 2022

Antonio García Martínez is a tech entrepreneur, writer, former Facebook product manager, and author of "Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley."

The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day. So what's up, man? How are you? Thanks for having me, Joe. I'm very excited to be here. It's always interesting to meet somebody that you only know from their tweets. You know, I only know you from your tweets, which I found very interesting, and then I started reading your book or listening to your book where another person reads it. And I've seen some interviews of you. So I thought it'd be fun to have you in there.

Cool. A little chit chat. Great. Thanks for having me, Joe. My pleasure. So you just got back from Ukraine. I know I'm totally throwing a wrench in the agenda. No, we're supposed to talk about cancellation or whatever. But yeah, I, for a bunch of reasons, I just up and went to Poland and Ukraine to see what was going on there. So this was just your own idea to just take a trip? Not totally. One of the gigs I have, I have a gig at a D.C. think tank. And one of my colleagues who's done like real in the field correspondent work before proposed a trip.

And a bunch of people expressed interest. And I'm basically the only one who didn't wimp out and went with them. So it's just you and this one guy. And we had, you know, drivers and fixers and stuff because I don't speak any Slavic languages and you basically need it to sort of navigate that world. And also in a wartime economy, regular transport doesn't work. So you need to get around somehow. And so we did have we tended to have a driver usually. So what is that conversation like? So when someone says, hey, let's go to Ukraine, like what was the goal? Was it just to see it firsthand? Was it to get, is there any information that you can get when you're on the ground that would sort of clarify the situation

for you? Yeah. I mean, we can get into this, but I think the view that you see of Ukraine from the United States, I think is so blinded by both American domestic political priorities and the whole kaleidoscope that is the Twitter experience. I thought you have to go there to see the real thing. And it's history with a capital H in the sort of, you know, Francis Fukuyama sense of, you know, this is a real invasion, the likes of which we haven't seen in Europe in whatever, 70 plus years. And it's just something that I've lived in Europe. I have an EU passport, so I feel a little bit European in that regard. So I think I engage with the story a little bit differently maybe than Americans do. And so I felt I just had to go there and see it for myself.

differently maybe than Americans do. And so I felt I just had to go there and see it for myself. So when you went there, was this idea related at all to business? Oh, no, no, no. So this was just for your own edification? Well, I am doing a story. So there's a publication that I occasionally pitch stories to called Tablets, a Jewish magazine. The Israelis are doing a bunch of stuff on the Polish border to get Jews out. And so there's a whole Jewish angle to the story. And then also just – so I have a sub stack, which I should probably plug, I guess, the pull request. What is it?

The pull request. Pull? P-U-L? Yeah, P-U-L. It's like a nerdy term. Yeah, yeah, yeah, P-U-L. A pull request is like when a coder is actually coding a piece of software. It's like they request that the main code base pull from them and so it's like saying hey

read my shit and like integrate it with your shit oh and so in some sense it's like it started as a similar to my book like so I I've worked in tech for a long time I've had a whole career in the advertising industry I was an early member of Facebook's ads team which is what the book is about which we'll probably get to and the thought was I wanted to give a perspective on tech from the insider perspective rather than the outsider perspective. And from there, it's gone into religion, culture, and then now even geopolitics as my interests kind of meander through the world. So you went there partly to write about it for your sub stack. I mean, the only reason you can justify going, right? Because again, and this is, it's funny, Jay, this is one of the things I almost, if it

hadn't been for this and also this other consideration, I probably would have pushed on to Kiev actually. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, but your producer, like I emailed him from Ukraine and he's like, dude, like I'm here, like it's hard to get out. Like, can we do this during Zoom? And he's like, no, absolutely not. And I briefly considered, I wasn't really going to do it, but I briefly considered just going to Kiev and then pulling the power move of like, I'm in Kiev.

I cannot leave. We have to do it. We would have to do it another time. Yeah, exactly. But I didn't want to run the risk of that. And I wanted to do the show. And so I started hauling ass back. It would be interesting to have you on Zoom with bombs going off in the background though. It would suck if you died on Zoom while we're in the middle of a podcast. It would suck. But I have to say from're in the middle of a podcast. It would suck. But I have to say from the cold-hearted marketing perspective, it would be great for engagement. Not for you. Not for me.

You're going to capitalize on that. So how many days were you over there for? I was there about a week and a half. So I spent a lot of time on the Polish border. So getting to the serious side of the story, which I know we're joking, sort of gala's humor, but it's a very serious story. There's a whole refugee situation going on. So about 10 million Ukrainians the UN has declared are displaced. And that means either internally they've moved around Ukraine or externally they've left.

And so a quarter of the country is basically a refugee at this point. Wow. I know. So how many people is that? It's like day 25 or day 26 of the week. What is the entire population? It's about 40 million. So we're talking about 10 million people that are refugees.

Holy shit. Over 3 million of which have left Ukraine at the last count, which is a big number. Wow. And most of them are crossing the border with Poland, which is the country to the west of it, or Romania or Slovakia, some of the other countries, mostly Poland. And so the trip actually, so I flew into Warsaw. And my first experience of like, this is not normal little Disneyland Europe. You go to the Warsaw train station, which tends to be the terminus for a lot of the

refugees that come across the border. And, you know, it's basically a refugee camp. The upper floor of the train station is taken over by families. And, you know, every family has like a blanket, maybe half the size of this table. And one of the interesting things about the Ukrainian refugee situation is that it's almost all like I'm talking like 80, 90 percent women and children. The Ukrainian government doesn't allow any male from the age of, I think, 18 to 60 to leave. And also many Ukrainian males are just volunteering. They don't want to leave. They want to fight for their country. And so whether you're in the Warsaw train station or whether

you're standing, as I was standing many times at the actual border, watching them walk across, it's literally, you know, a mother in her 20s and 30s with like two or three kids in tow, maybe a cat in a carrier with like a little rolly bag. And that's it. Just picture an unending stream of that walking across the border. They're walking because usually they don't, well, some of them probably did walk to the border, the most desperate ones. They usually don't walk. They take some conveyance, either a train or bus, but getting those through the border is basically impossible. So they literally abandon however they got there and just walk across. How many people are there that are

like you that are observing and just witnessing? There's a good number of journalists, particularly in the western part of Ukraine, which is relatively safe. It wasn't like I was there with bullets flying around me or anything like that. I was joking with friends like, I don't know that this is any more dangerous than walking across San Francisco's Tenderloin, to be honest, in the scheme of things. So it wasn't that dangerous. But there's a lot of journalists in the Western part. There are some journalists who are in the dangerous parts. Isn't Sean Penn there?

Yeah, I think he's been there this entire time. Wild. Yeah. But there's like teams from NPR, New York Times, CNN, who are doing like real war reporting, which I was not doing.

I know a journalist was killed recently. More than one, yeah. There was a guy who, I think a producer who worked for Fox News, and then there was a former New York Times journalist who was killed. And they were on the front line in Kiev, which is indeed very dangerous. And so when you were there, you didn't have a specific goal other than to just kind of get a visual and experience it and sort of see for yourself what was surprising?

So to be clear, I did have a goal. As a side thread to me, I'm converting to Judaism. So there's a Jewish side to my life. And what the Israelis are doing. So Ukraine has something like over 300,000 Jews. And then, you know, the plight of what the Jews are going on there, I think, was one specific intent. But you're right that broadly, I didn't have a specific intent. What surprised me the most? Two things, I would say. One is, again, the scale of it. Like, it's literally millions of people of leaving. And I think, again, coming from the U.S., Europe has reacted to this crisis in a unified, just like all-consuming way that I think obviously you don't see here because we're not next door to it. But if you go to this, again, let me paint you a picture. And I've got a bunch of photos that I'll be posting on my sub stack this week and next week. You go to a borders checkpoint. The Polish police will only let you go so far unless you're actually crossing, which I did eventually. You've got this constant stream of, again, mothers with their only bags and kids. And then you've got basically a refugee camp there of everything from Polish Boy Scouts to Jose Andres, that Spanish chef who

has all these food programs. He has a major presence there. Every stop, there was basically his world food kitchens or whatever it's called, serving up food. And then those who are ill get tended to, and then they have buses going to another larger refugee camp. And then there they try to find rides for them and sort of sort it out. And what's fascinating is that, you know, the Polish state has pretty good state capacities, a lot of firefighters, police, soldiers. But the actual care for refugees, like the food, the chocolate bar the kid gets, is mostly or almost exclusively volunteers and NGOs. And there isn't that much top-down organization. Like you go there and it's like every little NGO or every little tribe that has some refugees that are coming out. Like, for example, the Jehovah's Witnesses are there.

So you walk across and there's somebody holding a sign that says JW.org. They're not proselytizing. I interviewed them. They're not proselytizing. They're just there for other Jehovah's Witnesses that are coming across and hoping to help them. Once again, you've got some Jewish charities that are helping the Jews that are coming across. Everyone – I talked to somebody whose child had cystic fibrosis and they have a foundation and they're helping because a lot of the – you know, people are infirmed. And those are the ones hardest hit by war because you've got a 24-hour train ride.

You've got someone who's ill and needs medical care. How do they get out? That can often be difficult. So I think that's one big surprising thing. And then the other surprising thing was in Ukraine itself. Like I've been in conflict zones before, like the West Bank, North Ireland, the Indian-Pakistani border, places where things are a little bit spicy, but never in a country at war. And I think war in the United States, certainly in my life here, has not been a direct experience. The U.S. has wars.

We're involved in a bunch of conflicts now. Your life and my life don't really change. We don't know what that is. We've never had that experience. Ukraine is having what Clausewitz would call total war. All the resources of the society are motivated towards one goal, which is kicking out the Russian invaders. And that means that everybody in that society is either fighting at the front lines, every male is volunteered, basically, supporting those fighters somehow, trying to source war material and stuff,

which is very difficult to source, is volunteering in some capacity, or is a refugee. Again, a quarter of the population is displaced. And so all of society has one goal in mind, and it's literally fighting the war. There's very little normal commercial activity. And again, I've never experienced that except through history books or films about World War II. Well, I don't think anybody has. Right. It's such a strange time because it's a time where you're seeing history play out in a way that we didn't think was going to happen again. We didn't think there was going to be a country like a large superpower that invades another country

and you're seeing it on 4K cell phone video broadcast from thousands of phones and all these different viral clips that you can view online. It's so surreal. It is. It's unbelievable. I just saw a piece came out that in Kharkov, which is a city in the east, that's I think Ukraine's second largest city. It's been encircled and besieged and shot at for weeks now. Civilians are basically living in the subway, taking shelter, and they've been there for weeks and they're just living in the subway.

are basically living in the subways, taking shelter, and they've been there for weeks, and they're just living in the subway. It's too dangerous to go up top. Or, I mean, the real, if we're rattling off the set of atrocities that are basically happening, there's a city called Mariupol, which is on the Sea of Azov, it's on the coast. And it's strategically important because it's in between two Russian fronts. And the Russians are literally destroying the city. They've shelled a drama theater where people had taken refuge in. They've bombed a maternity hospital. A lot of photos of that came out. People are experiencing hell.

I mean, there's literally dead bodies in the street, and they don't bury them because it's too dangerous to go up top and try to bury them. So they just let them rot on the streets. It is hell on earth that's happening there. And, again, as you said, it's happening. It's the first Twitter war in which you can actually see these videos in real time. And it's not that far away from Europe. No. It's very close. It's happening, you know, it's the first Twitter war in which you can actually see these videos in real time. And it's not that far away from Europe. No, it's very close. It's right there.

I mean, you go from Poland, which I was in a town called Przemyśl, which is a little train junction close to the border. Very cute, very pretty. Had a little craft brewery. You can go there and feel totally within the, like, Euro-American liberal realm of craft beer and normalcy and legal rights. And, you know, you go a few tens of kilometers east and you are living in a very different world. Wow. Yeah. It's so hard to wrap your head around when you're over here.

That's right. Imagine going over there and then coming back here must seem even more surreal. It is. You know, it's funny. over here. Imagine going over there and then coming back here must seem even more surreal. It is. It's funny. Humans can so adjust to things. So I spent a lot of time mostly in Lviv, which is a beautiful little town, western part of Ukraine. It used to be considered the safe city in Ukraine because it was relatively untouched by the war. The night after I left, actually, the airport got hit with cruise missiles. But before then, it was still a fairly open city. There'd be air raid sirens every night. People would tend to ignore them. I got all freaked out the first time. It was like three in the morning. And the hotel actually has a basement. And they actually have little beanbag

chairs and stuff in there for guests to hang out in the basement as the air raid sirens go off. I did it the first time. Then the second time, I'm like, eh, come on. What are the chances? So I just went back to sleep. And again, it sounds crazy, but you just get used to that. And then coming back, it's like, wow, everything. I came back to San Francisco and I went to a little hipster coffee shop and, you know, the little hipster conversations are happening next to me. It's like, and like literally 24 or 48 hours before it was like, it's weird. It's like what is normal now seem weird. It is weird how humans can adjust, right? Yeah. What is normal now seems weird. It is weird how humans can adjust, right?

Like, I didn't go, unfortunately, for the reasons I mentioned. But, like, I understand that in Kyiv, which is much closer to the front lines and is much more in the shit, people have also settled into some sort of routine, right? It's funny. One of the first things I saw when I got to Lviv, and I was still a little freaked out, right, because I was, like, scared to go to Ukraine. Because once you cross that border again, it's like, who knows what's going to happen? I don't speak the language, different currency, transport is broken down. You're just like there with your little backpack in the western edge of a war zone. I get there and there's like a couple making out on the street.

I'm like, oh, look, normal human life continues. It's like, well, life finds a way. I think it was you that I read a quote about. You were talking about Sebastian Junger's book, Tribe, which I loved. It's an amazing book. You were talking about which conflict was it where the people – Sarajevo. Sarajevo, right.

Bosnia-Sarajevo where they missed it. Yeah. And I've talked to guys who've served overseas and they have similar stories where there's something about coming back here. And Hurt Locker kind of touched on that a little bit. It's like there's something about coming back here, and Hurt Locker kind of touched on that a little bit. It's like there's something about those experiences of heightened existence where every day is like legitimate life or death, and then you come back to the dull gray drone of corporate life and traffic,

and they legitimately miss conflict zones. Yeah. It's like that scene in her locker when he goes to buy cereal and he just has a meltdown because he can't deal with what cereal to choose. I know it's weird. I'll paint you another scene.

On Sunday, I was there again, walking around. Life seems normal, but then it gets weird fast. A bunch of high school kids kind of horsing around, you know, Sunday, sunny, like, what are they doing? There's like a pile of dirt. They're filling up sandbags and piling up sandbags around the statues of lions. The lion is a symbol of the city. And so they were like singing patriotic songs. Everyone's doom scrolling telegram to see the

most recent news like, oh, Czech Republic promises more aid in the war against the Russians or whatever. Everyone cheers. And then they go back to like filling sandbags and piling up around these statues. And it's like, man, it's kind of weird to have high school kids who can't join. You can't volunteer. You have to be 18. And so instead they're doing other things like filling sandbags. And it's just, yeah. The strangest part about this is not just that it's all playing out on social media, but it's playing out on social media. And it's in a country that used to be connected to Russia just a few decades ago. They all used to be together in the Soviet Union, you know, 40 years ago or whatever it was, 30 years ago. So it's like to watch this all happen on the news and then to be there live,

what was different about the coverage that you're seeing on mainstream media in the United States versus being there live? Is there any distortions, like clear distortions that we're seeing here? Yeah. And it's funny, coming back, it really pisses me off. I told myself I wouldn't get angry on your show about it because a lot of the Twitter rhetoric around the supposed bioweapons labs or the ghost of Kiev or some of the early memes that happened in the war that were proven to be, like many online memes, not true or exaggerated or whatever. Or like, you know, what would have Trump done or not done or how does Hunter Biden's laptop play into all this? And I know those are terribly important signifiers in the American political conversation. They're completely meaningless on the ground in Ukraine. Nobody cares about bioweapons labs.

No one cares about, people get obsessed about what the State Department did or didn't do in the revolution that happened in 2000, early on in Ukraine. And again, I think one of the luxuries that we have here in the United States, and it is a luxury, and it's good in some sense that we have it, is that we take the outside world and we project it onto our own domestic political neuroses. And we almost think that the outside world is downstream of our domestic political process. And that's just not true. It's true in some cases, right? And certainly the US has impact on the world overseas, but it's just not the case that a lot of the Twitter rhetoric you see

is remotely meaningful. That's at a high level. Another thing I think it missed is like the level, like the surprise that met everybody. And like, I'll admit, I knew very little to nothing about Ukraine before this. It's just not a region of the world that I know much about. I don't speak a Slavic language. I speak other languages and been other parts of the world. So to me, it was very novel to go there. And I have to say, I went there with a good helping of ignorance. But one thing, once I got there, I realized, man, the Ukrainians are super nationalistic. They see this as their national project, right? This to them is like a nationhood birthing moment. They are committed to remaining free

of Russia. And I'm not a military guy. I'm not going to make predictions about the war. I just don't see how the Russians can hold such a country. It's huge, by the way. It's like the size of Texas. And east to west, it's longer because it's kind of a flat country. So it's a big country. I don't think the Russians came with enough guys to actually control most of this country. I think most of the country, it's funny, I was talking to a hacker dude, like a nerd dude who is like denial of service attacking a lot of Russian websites and trying to knock them down. There's a whole cyber war going on, right?

You know, he's just like this nerdy kid who's like on the anonymous chat channels and like doing all this stuff. And he's telling me this whole nerdy walkthrough of how he does it. And at the end, he just looks at me with a steely glance and goes, we will win. My fixer, my translator in Lviv, who young gal, you know, university student studying computer science, like a college student. Right. Very carefree, very charming, very positive. She would end her conversations the same way. We will win. Right. There's a level of commitment there that I think the rest of the world, certainly Putin, has underestimated in terms of the Ukrainians.

So do you think that he thought he was just going to go in there and it was going to be like Crimea? They would sort of roll in and everybody would sort of give up and they would control the state? That seems to be the case, that it was supposed to be a decapitation exercise in which, you know, Kiev isn't that far from the border. I mean, it's a few tens of kilometers. They would just roll in, take out the current government, kill Zelensky or whatever, sideline him, and that would be the end of it. And that is absolutely not what's happening. When you see the trucks rolling in very obviously on these roads, and then you see these guys with missile launchers standing on the sides of the road, shooting at the trucks, you're like, who planned this?

This is a terrible plan. Did you think that they were just going to see the trucks and go, well, we don't want any part of this, let's just get out of here? It seems like a crazy plan. If you're expecting any sort of resistance that seems like suicide, just drive on a very obvious straight path where there's things to hide behind, where people are hiding behind it, launching missiles at armed carriers. I mean, that seems to be the current Ukrainian strategy.

You don't see a lot of counteroffensives. They're not taking back cities because that would require a lot of armor that they don't have. But you see a lot of bloodletting and of basically hitting their supply lines behind the front lines in exactly the way that you're saying. You've got a bunch of trucks coming with fuel and food, and they just annihilate the entire column. They just take out the entire column. I had Mike Baker on, who was a former CIA operative the other day, and he was trying to lay out what he knows about it from a foreign policy perspective, from his years of service. And the way he was laying it out was not pretty.

When he was talking about the possibilities and the options, like how it could possibly play out. What did they think on the ground? Did they have an idea of what could happen or how it could happen? I wouldn't claim to know what the Russians are thinking. I'll say this, though. No, I mean the Ukrainians. How do they think it's going to play out? Do they think there's going to come a point in time where there's enough losses where Russia has to decide to

either escalate to a nuclear option or leave? I think the Ukrainian on the street just thinks that they're going to hold out forever and that the entire nation is unified and they're just not going to give in. I think that's what the thought is. And by the way, who came up with the genius idea? The whole Ukrainian mud thing, by the way, having traipsed around Western Ukraine is real. What is that? So it's actually a Russian name for it that I won't try to pronounce because I'll mispronounce it. But there's actually a Russian name for mud season in Ukraine because it's a very fertile place. It produces an enormous amount of wheat and other crops. And it's just very muddy. And

so when you have the winter thaw, right, the ground is this like completely consuming mud that if you step in it, you're sucked into your ankle. And if you, you might wonder like, why are the Russians on the road? It seems like totally dangerous because they'll get stuck in the mud otherwise, right? Just all these- Oh, Jesus. Yeah, yeah. There's all these videos of like a column of like four T-72s, you know, up to their tank tracks in mud and they just can't get them out because the mud is that thick. And it's going to be mud season for months now, right?

Up until summer, until it dries out. It's a very gray, like at night it gets super fucking cold, but then it heats up during the day and the mud just turns into ooze. And so you can't get off the road, right? So what the fuck are the Russians going to do? I don't know. I read an article that was saying that they need at least a minimum of 500000 people if they really wanted to occupy Ukraine. So they would have to take 500000 people out of Russia and move them to Ukraine to start running things. And you'd have to run everything. You got to run the utilities. You have to run the government. You have to run everything.

And that's more than 2x what they currently are. I think their original strike force was like 200,000 soldiers. So they need a lot more people. I think what they're probably going to do, and again, I'm not a military guy, but they're clearly trying to consolidate in the east and join some of their thrusts on what they already control between Crimea and the Donbass, which has had a separatist movement for a long time. They're obviously trying to coalesce that. And I think they're less obsessed with taking Kiev in which they've made no progress.

I've stared at the map every day now for weeks, and that seems to be what's going on. But like you said, there's always the odd chance they use either chemical or nuclear weapons. I think Biden yesterday publicly said that the Russians are considering chemical weapons. I mean, that could be a propaganda ploy or whatever, but it's in the air. And, yeah. You get a sense, there's a strange sense that the government is about to throw our administration under the bus. I get this weird sense that, like, as more things come out and, you know, more ridiculous Kamala Harris videos where she's saying things that make no sense.

And Biden, the laptops coming out and all this stuff. You almost get this weird sense where they're trying to just recalibrate and come up with a new strategy for running things. The United States. Oh, the United States. Like, I'm looking at how this is all playing. I'm like, there's no clear... When he's saying they're about to use chemical weapons or nuclear weapons, what does that mean? And what happens if that happens? And then you've got Trump saying,

what I would do, I would show them strength and what I would do, they wouldn't fuck around with me. And you're like, this is terrifying. Our whole situation doesn't have any bright paths. There's not like this is what needs to be done, you know, and this is how the Ukrainians can bring about peace. This is how we resolve this thing between Russia and Ukraine. There's no clear path. Yeah, there seems to be no vision there. Internally, what I can say is that the peace, you know, the sort of the conversations that have been happening between the Ukraine and the Russian government is something that's followed a lot. Israel has tried mediating there. And so the fact that Russians are even at the negotiating table, again, I think that the Ukrainians are very pragmatic. They're not foolhardy, but they're definitely thinking, well, we could come to an agreement at the end of this. So that could be one resolution to it. But then you're still next door to some people that killed tens of thousands of civilians over nothing. That's right. And then the old question of does Ukraine join the EU, NATO? I mean, this is a whole separate threat, but I find it interesting that so many in the U.S.

I've got a piece coming out in Barry Weiss's. By the way, she says hi, by the way. I love her. Yeah, I know. She's been on your show at least once, right? A couple times. A couple times, yeah. So I'm doing a piece for her based on a Twitter thread that's coming out tomorrow.

One thing I've, I don't know how much politics you want to talk about, Joe, but one thing I've been disappointed by is that in the right in the United States, right, much like the left, right, historically, really thinks the U.S. can do no good overseas. And at the same time, the U.S. is responsible for everything that happens overseas. Right. And, you know, it could be like metaphorical or literal PTSD about the more recent wars like Iraq and Afghanistan. But the thought that, you know, the U.S. shouldn't get involved at all and literally can have no positive impact on affairs on the ground in Ukraine, I find to be very, very disappointing and disheartening. It's weird that the right wing is the one that's turning kind of anti-U.S. Why do you think that is? Well, I mean, I think some of them, like the New Right. What is the New Right? Well, I hate naming names because I hate getting into these flame wars. But the New Right is like,

I don't know, are you familiar with the National Conservatives or the NatCon conference? People like Sarab Amari, Patrick Deneen. Oh, you know, you should have one of them on your show one of these days. I'm sure they'd be happy to come on. The New You Right, I think, is various things. It's deeply conservative, typically Christian, right? They're super anti-woke, right? Because woke is like what the whole battle is about. And they had a conference last year, the National Conservative Conference that I went to. People like Rod Dreher speak there, again, Sarab Amari, et cetera. They look to a traditionalist mode of thought and they feel that much of modern vocalists, CRT, the pronouns, gender, all that stuff, they think is just, you know, dangerous degeneracy and we need to abandon it. And some of them, and I don't want

to speak for them or pretend to speak for them, But some of them seem to have at least sympathies for Putin's Russia, right? And the fact that he seems to – he's anti-woke in some sense that he stands against much of what they dislike about the liberal West. Well, it's far, far past anti-woke. He's anti-gay, right? I mean it's not just anti-woke. It's like there's a – what they're doing over in Russia is very different. Yeah, right. And the weird thing is even if you are – I'm not like a traditionalist conservative, although I do have an interest in religion.

Even if you did support that, like Russia isn't that, right? Their church attendance rate is lower than ours. Their birth rate is even lower than ours. Their birth rate is even lower than ours. Like all the ills of modernity in terms of like society falling apart and not having kids and all that stuff that the trads are obsessed with. Russia suffers from that as much, if not more than the West. Right. So to what degree is Putin's Russia some sort of counterweight to the West? I don't see it. I think it's a LARP. And it reminds me of I went to Berkeley grad school. Right. And again, I was not exactly your typical Berkeley hippie lefty, right? And a lot of my parents are Cuban exiles who fled Cuba. That's all you need to hear.

As soon as you talk to people that have fled Cuba, those are the most Republican fucking people and most patriotic people in America. That's right. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I was definitely that when I was there, even now to a certain degree. And they go on about Cuban health care and this and that. And they're living in Berkeley in some like hillside home that's worth a million dollars. Right.

And eating in an Alice Waters restaurant. It's like, bro, Plaintoe Van is right there, buddy. If you want to go live in Cuba, off you go. And I would say the same for those who lionize Putin's Russia. It's like, bro, Plaintoe Moscow is right there. But of course, they're not talking about the reality of it. It's a symbol. It's a signifier. It's like all these Hollywood stars that threatened to move to Canada but never did. It's a romantic narrative. It's a symbol. It's a signifier in a domestic – it's like all these Hollywood stars that threatened to move to Canada but never did. It's a romantic narrative. It's a romantic narrative that's just – it's kind of fake. And normally, I'd be like, who cares?

But again, if you realize the level of human catastrophe that's going on in Ukraine, in my opinion, polluting the discourse around that in a country that could impact that, I'm disappointed by it. Well, there's a thing that happens with the right and with the left where they look at whatever position that the opposite is taking, whatever the opposition is taking, and they find some way to justify the opposition of that. It's blind faith in the ideology. And they have these narratives that they all stick to that they know aren't accurate. And to say that the other side has a point about anything is to concede some ground to what they think is the enemy. Right. And it's fucking wild tribalism. And it's so strange to watch play out because it's not, as soon as you withhold information or distort information

because it doesn't suit your narrative, then you're living in fantasy land. Correct. And this is one thing that I've seen from both parties, from the far left and the far right. Right. And it's bizarre to behold because we live in a day where there's unprecedented access to information and yet people are willing to put themselves inside these narrow blinders and adhere to whatever these ideologies subscribe whatever these Ideologies prescribe and whatever they whatever the thing is that you have to say in order to signal to the tribe

That you are one of the absolutists. You're there on board. You're an asset. You're a part of the right team. It's bizarre to see because it's really just an advanced form of tribalism enhanced by echo chambers. Right. And it's anti-tribalism. You have to be against certain things, right? So there's this whole meme about the current thing being Ukraine, because a lot of the people who are part of the kind of liberal Borg that supported CRT or BLM or choose your woke thing that you hate, right, are now flying the Ukrainian flags and being pro-Ukraine. Right. I think it's a little bit of projection. Like, I don't think it's as in your face as a lot of the woke stuff was in the

past. But sure, it is the case that some people have swapped their like other one cause for this cause. But it doesn't matter, man. The Ukrainians are still on the right. Are you actually an independent thinker? Are you really just a contrarian asshole? And I think it turns out a lot of voices were not independent thinkers. They were just contrarian assholes.

And so now they've just contrarian themselves into another position without really thinking about it. And again, like it wouldn't matter if it's just Twitter bullshit, but it's actually like a real war going on. And that's why it pisses me off. Well, there's a weird narrative that, you know, Ukraine is filled with Nazis. Like how many Nazis are over there? I don't know. I do believe that I've read on multiple, in multiple channels that there is some sort of a problem that they have over there with neo-Nazis. But that doesn't mean the whole country is filled with Nazis.

And that doesn't mean it makes sense that Putin entered and invaded. And it also – it's not the reason why he invaded. It's not like he invaded to stop Nazis. He invaded to control another country. Right. It's a little ironic to try to denazify a country whose president and defense minister are both Jewish. Right. Right. It's a little ironic to try to denazify a country whose president and defense minister are both Jewish. Right. Right. But yeah, I mean, the Nazi thing in the eastern part of the country is real.

I mean, it's not an invention. But again, I think it's one of those sub memes in the Ukraine thing that gets played up for internal purposes that isn't terribly impactful on the ground. impactful on the ground. When you see people talking positively about Russia and positively about Putin, and haven't actually been there, how infuriating is that? It drives me nuts. Like I said, it's like debating hippies about Cuba 20 years ago in Berkeley. It's like, dude, you're talking about an invention, like an illusion that you have has nothing to do with reality. That's the weird thing. Both on left and right, the people who actually shit on America the most and think that it's like the shittiest place on Earth

in my opinion are typically the ones that could never live outside of it. Are the ones that literally you cannot imagine anywhere else except the American construct. But that's also one of the beautiful things about America is that it allows people like that to form those illusions. Oh sure. I mean they're free to have whatever dumb opinions they want.

Yeah, because you have the freedom to be stupid. Right. Yes, that's right. You really have the freedom to be delusional. That's right. If you want to have the freedom to be incredibly creative and innovative and be a groundbreaking person in whatever industry you choose to advance in, you also have to have the freedom to just follow stupid ideas to their fucking event horizon.

Yeah. And that's one of the things that makes America kind of cool. Fuck yeah. Fuck yeah. It really does. I mean, as dumb as people, you have to have all of it and you have to have a lot of that stupid fucking thinking and cult-like existences. They have to be there just so you can realize how stupid the rest of us are. I'm going to take some of your French press.

Please, have some. It's good stuff. Dude, your coffee game, Joe, is incredible at this place. Thank you. Between the turmeric latte and this stuff and then French press, it's amazing. Black Rifle Coffee. It's good shit. Oh, is it Black Rifle?

That is, yeah. So, I mean, how much has this changed your thoughts about, I mean, you know, people have, you have priorities in life You have things that you think are important and you have to you have this view of the world and then this breaks out and then You go over there and that seems like one of those things it would be just a complete paradigm shifting moment For someone to experience the horrors of what's actually going on there on the ground. Yeah to experience the horrors of what's actually going on there on the ground. Yeah.

So what is that like when you come back, and how do you sort of integrate that into this? I mean, you're a guy who's been a part of startups and tech, and you're a part of Facebook, and you wrote this crazy book sort of like burning it all down. A little bit. A little bit. A little bit. Exposing it a little bit. Exposing it. Well, maybe not.

That's not even a good way to say it. Maybe just your own perspective about what that experience is like, and it's not entirely flattering. What's it like to like now? I mean, those things seem sort of semi-trivial. That's right. Yeah. In comparison. Right.

All the things we worry about seem trivial. I think I tweet-joked that like Zelensky wished that pronouns were his country's biggest problem or that college swimmers were like the burning issue of the day rather than how to source enough like tourniquets so that his soldiers don't lose their limbs. Yeah, it's weird. I came back and like I know it's weird to say, but getting to your point, I'm glad you cited Sebastian Younger and tribes. I almost missed it because it's so I was like, I almost want to go back. It's funny. I interviewed two people for my step stack. One guy, Andrei Liskovich, who's a former Uber guy.

He's Ukrainian. And he went back when the war started. And as many people are, he's now like a sourcer for the Ukrainian military. Not weapons but everything else basically, night vision goggles, body armor. And he's living in – I won't say where he lives, doesn't matter, a town close to the action. And he's sourcing stuff for the month here. Another friend of mine, actually, former Facebook product manager, another tech startup dude, is in an ambulance crew outside of Kyiv.

Wow. And, you know, he had a very successful startup. He doesn't need to be doing this. And he, you know, it hit him hard, the Ukrainian cause, and he's there. And his life, I mean, he is really risking his life. But that's what he's doing. Wow. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians have gone back to fight.

I mean, think about what it would take, the sense of loyalty and duty and self-sacrifice it would take for you to go back to the war zone. You're already outside. You're going back to fight. There's a thing about the experience of being a person that was a part of the Soviet Union that is transferred down to your progeny. It has to be. There's an experience about the history of Russia, the history of the Soviet Union. If you follow from World War I and World War II, it is a long, long history of horrible conflict.

And they're prepared for it far more than anyone in the United States. If the United States got invaded by Canada, maybe Mexico, I mean, let's just like maybe Mexico is a better. Excuse me, we're invading. Yeah. Yeah. Canada would be very polite about their invading. But if like the cartels controlled Mexico to the point where they said, you know what, we have enough military, we have enough money. We've been selling people fentanyl for so long. We're just going to fucking take over New Mexico and take over nevada and take over arizona

like how much how many people would fight i mean how many people would flee how many people would stand their ground how many how many mayors and how many world boxing champions like the klitschko brothers who are both and lomachenko too is one of the best boxers alive there's there's so many people that are over there that are these prominent public figures that have flak vests on. And they're over there with bulletproof vests and they're fucking armed to the tits and they're fighting. It's a different world. Russia has this long history and the Soviet Union has this long history. All of those countries that were a part of the former Soviet Union have a long history of war, a long history of conflict. And I think that's why a lot of these countries are helping out the Ukrainians, right? Because Russia was the big bully that dominated that part of the world for many decades. And here they are trying to crush another country. Or in Miami, for example, downtown, a lot of the buildings have the Ukrainian flag colors. And it's like, what the hell does Miami have to do with Ukraine? Well, a lot of Cubans whose

company, you know, whose country was behind the Iron Curtain and was kind of crushed behind the Soviet or Russian boot. And they're like, what the hell? I think you're definitely onto something. There's something about people that come have some sort of tragic history to their family, either directly experienced or subconsciously through their family. Like, like we were on there. Like my family's had three sets of passports in three generations. Like there were Spanish immigrants to Cuba. The revolution came. They all fled the United States.

Like this business of like leaving with nothing. Like my father used to lecture me about coming to this country with like literally nothing but three, three things in his pocket. And so I think that marks you, even though I didn't directly experience that, to be clear, I was born in this country. But I think that that marks you in a way. And you understand all we have are like faded photographs of life in Cuba. And a lot of these Ukrainian refugees, they're going to go through that exact same experience.

I'm in the middle of rereading Malcolm Gladwell's book, Outliers. And there's a part of that about conflicts in the South and honor cultures. about conflicts in the South and honor cultures. There's a part about these people that came over from Europe and from the UK that were herders. And there are these herding families and tribes who established these communities in Appalachia and all these sort of mountain areas who murdered each other at a scale. He was talking about there's this one area where there was no more than 15,000 people. They recorded 1,000 homicides. Oh, man.

Like, this is wild shit. And how this mother was saying to this son who was involved in this family feud with this other family, they had been murdering each other back and forth he was screaming in agony and she said shut up and die like a man like your brother did and so the guy closes his mouth and just winds up bleeding out and dying in silence because his mother was screaming at him because she wasn't she was so accustomed to people dying from gunshots that her own son dying in front of her. The real problem was him being a bitch.

Right. Just fucking wild. Right. And Sebastian, I mean, what Sebastian Younger talks about in tribes and in these people that develop these intense bonds with people that they're in conflict with, you know, that these states of humanity that occasionally exist when people are in extreme situations where life and death is a daily experience, it changes everything. It changes the fabric of reality. And when we don't have that, for whatever reason, this is the grossest part about humans.

There's a certain section of society that seeks conflict in the most preposterous ways. And as our societies become softer and softer, we get angry and upset about some of the dumbest things possible, whether it's pronouns or whatever it is that's the current, you know, outrage du jour. We're fucking weird. Like human beings are very weird that we almost exist in our best state when we are in some sort of life or death scenario. Yeah. I don't know if you've read Fukuyama's book, End of History, which is very mischaracterized generally, but he has a final chapter in which he has a quote that I think about that more or less expresses what you're saying, which is, you know, humans will struggle for the sake of struggle. And if, you know, democracy and liberalism won in the previous generation,

then they'll fight against democracy and against liberalism, if nothing else, for the sake of struggle, because they refuse to live in a world in which heroism of some form is impossible. Right. And that was people mischaracterized that book as they thought he predicted some sort of liberal democratic utopia didn't at all. In fact, he warned that we would tend to revert to non liberal and non democratic ways of being just to recapture that feeling. And I do think that there's something about liberal and I mean, like little l liberalism, not like the left of the political spectrum, to be clear. I think there's something about liberalism that needs an illiberal antagonist to keep it in check. It's only when you're fighting against some outside illiberal force that in some sense you can maintain the discipline that it takes. And without that,

it tends to degenerate into fights over pronouns or whatever. Before Ukraine happened, you know, I was talking with a friend of mine about some preposterous woke shit, and he goes, we need a good war. And he was like half joking, and we were chuckling about it. He goes, we need a good war. We need some of these blue-haired people to see fucking rockets flying into schools and go, hey, this is the real conflict. Now we're all united together.

And let's abandon some of this nonsense that we've been fucking squabbling over. Fukuyama says the exact same thing in the last chapter. It would be good for a liberal democracy to have a war every generation. If you look at Israel, for example, they have a lot less of this because they do have these wars every generation. I have a good friend of mine who is my kickboxing coach back in the day. His name is Shuki. Shout out to Shuki. He lives in Israel now.

And he was in America for a while. He's an Israeli. He was coaching at Majiro Gym. It was in, where were we? In the Valley. Tarzana, I think it was. And he, I went to dinner over his house once. And, you know, his wife and his kid are there.

And he's playing bongos and they're cooking. And he's like, everyone's dancing. dancing and i go you're so happy and i go i meet so many israelis that are like so they love to like sing and dance and party it's like a real live version of the zohan you know i go what is it and he goes when you're in israel he goes every day you could die he goes you don't know what's going to happen like pal Palestine and Israel have been this constant conflict. You're surrounded by all these Arab states. And he's like, any day you can die, everybody just party, party, party. When you're alive, you're happy. And I'm like, that's a strange state that seems like we have this yin and yang of life.

Like, we have this yin and yang of life, and it sounds so cliche to say, but without some sort of antagonist, without some sort of problem, some sort of real thing to rise against, people find nonsense to squabble over. Correct. And his thing was like, this is all bullshit. Fucking party, party, party. Like, life and death is the real issue. And his thoughts about Israel was, when you're over there, man, it's real life and real death. And the shit you're dealing with here is traffic.

I hate my job. You know? I hate being fat. You know what I mean? It's like these nonsense problems. Yeah. It's like, God, I wish we were wiser. I wish, but I mean I don't think we're really fully there yet I mean if you wanted to look at the human

race as like a graph of progress there's not that much time from the Vikings to us that's right from killing people axes, from the time when someone showed up on your shore with a boat, it was a fucking disaster. It wasn't like, oh, tourists, they're hopping off the cruise ship. No, it was fucking maniacs. Or call the UN. It's like, no, it's murder and rape is what it is. That's what's on the menu. That's all that's on the menu.

And that's what people did forever. That's all they did. God. Yeah, and here we are with too much food and too much time on our hands yeah I mean that's one of our biggest problems we have too much food people eat too much I know it's crazy that is one of the biggest problem that biggest health problems in our country is obesity which comes directly because of poor food choices and too much food how do we get on diet from Ukraine I don't's it's a conflict thing it's

it's all of like of lack of con like with in an absence of you know idle hands are the devil's playground that's that's a real thing and it's not just simply you know oh like boys who are bored find a way to light buildings on fire that's that's part of it too but it's like there's something about not having a real problem to fight. You need fucking problems. You need conflict. And you either create your own bullshit or you're going to find something out there in the world that pisses you off and it's going to represent what the enemy is because it's ingrained in our DNA. We have this sort of pattern where we seek out opposition. We seek out problems. Yeah. There's a German philosopher named Carl Schmitt who was a Nazi, unfortunately, but

his political theory was that the friend-enemy distinction is the core distinction in human political life and defining what is the friend and what is the enemy. And if we don't understand that or recognize that, in some sense, we're fooling around. It's so strange that we can't get past that. And we have some tools that will allow us to recognize that, but they're not widely distributed. Whether it's psychedelics or whether it's people that recognize physical culture and having a strenuous activity schedule in terms of physical exercise is really important to alleviate anxiety and keep people calm and relaxed.

We were talking about this recently. That's one of the reasons why they invented football. They invented football to give people something to do that was a facsimile of war. Right. Right. Back when the thought was that we would get, in urbanized society, we'd get weak and effeminate. And so we need this sort of- I guess they were right. I guess they were right. Religion could also help, by the way. I think religion could be a factor in life. I think there's definitely a God-shaped hole in the middle of liberalism.

And I think a lot of people – I think there's a conservation of religion. Religion never goes away. Taboos never go away. They just change. And the thought that there's some – I think it was Walter Benjamin – or no, it was William James who defined religion as the thought that there's some overarching order to which human society should converge, right? There's some sort of abstract thick order to the world that we should be sort of building towards. And that just in its coarsest, in the most high level way is religion. And that never goes away, I think, for most humans. You are converting to Judaism. Are you doing this for a relationship? It's funny, I was thinking of wearing a kippah, but I decided not to.

A yarmulke like Ben Shapiro. I would have been like the only other guest that ever did. I'm not that observant, actually. Yeah, so people ask about that. I've got three Jewish kids, and I think religion is kind of like chickenpox. You have to get a case of it when you're a kid. Otherwise, you're going to get this life-threatening case of it later. And so I wanted them to be raised with some sort of religious tradition, particularly

in a society. I think this is particularly bad in San Francisco and like California, which is where I've spent my life for the past 15, 20 years, particularly in a world in which like corporations are the only functional organizations that you see anymore. Like everyone lives, not all over America to be clear, but in some parts live completely atomized and dissociated from any organizing thing other than a company. And I just don't think it's normal. Even though I've spent my entire professional life inside these organizations, I don't think it's normal. And I wanted them to see something else.

And the baby mama to my third kid, who's Jewish, basically said, look, if this kid goes to synagogue, you're taking him, so you convert. And so I called her bluff and I converted. And I think what I figured out now, and I mean, I hope she doesn't see this. She's probably not going to see it. I figured out that their level of religious practice is like the average of zero and me. And so as long as I keep on going up, they're going to be more or less the midpoint. And so now they're like, they went to like Purim. Purim is this kind of very holiday kids holiday that was last weekend.

They actually celebrated that, which is good. And so, yeah. And then aside from that, I think it's intellectually interesting. Judaism is very bookish. To be a Jew is to sit around on a Thursday and discuss dense texts and come up with arguments about what they mean, which to me sounds like a good time. I know it's a little strange, but that's what being a Jew is. So yeah, I kind of signed up for it and it's been interesting. And you just, so you had a relationship with a woman who is Jewish and she raised two different women, two different women, three kids. You got a you got a taste. You have a thing that you like.

You have like a specific type. You know, I don't know if I'd phrase it that way, Joe. But, yeah, you could you could you could. Yeah. You have there's there's what you like. You like Jewish ladies. So when that's the case, if the mother's observant, the children wind up being raised as Jewish. Yeah.

And that's the thing about Jews, that the family raises the children based on the mother's religion. Correct? That's the formal religious definition. Most of the time. Yeah. I have an uncle that converted. Oh, really? My uncle Sal converted to Judaism.

He married a Jewish woman. Yes, married a Jewish woman, raised his children Jewish. And, you know, it was interesting watching him because I was young at the time. I was like, I think I was seven or eight when he was going through this. And so it was interesting to watch. You know, like he had to take classes and go through the whole deal. It's like getting a master's degree. It's ridiculous.

And you talk to the rabbi and then it's like, dude, when do I graduate? He's like, oh, here's another 10 books to read and just keep on going. It was like doing a PhD guy. It was complex. Yeah. Yeah. And so how do you have the time to do that? It seems like it was,

it was kind of my COVID project to be honest. The branch of Judaism I'm in is not totally against using electronics on Shabbat and stuff. Like some, some of the, some of the actual ceremonies are actually live stream. And so you could participate even remotely. Ben Shapiro told me he has to keep the lights on on Friday. Yeah.

So that they're there on Saturday. I'm like, what? Yeah, yeah. That's cheating. It's funny. I've interviewed him. We've talked about this. So he's modern Orthodox.

And what that means is it's kind of like what Trump's son-in-law was. He's, you know, like hardcore, full-on Jewish. But he's, you know, obviously he's integrated with modern society. He's not living in a separate society. But the Shabbat thing, yeah, there's this restriction. And as soon as I mention anything Jewish, there's going to be like a hundred rabbis in my mentions commenting on this, but that's the nature of Judaism. There's a restrictions around lighting a fire on Saturday and electricity has been mapped to the fire restriction. And so you've probably never had this experience. I don't know if you've lived in New York, but if you go to a

hospital in New York after sundown on Friday, you'll get in the elevator and it's like, you push the buttons, they don't do shit. The thing stops at every floor because you can't,

you can use a thing that's been left on that would work even if you did nothing, but you can't make it work. It's really complex. That's not complex. That's ridiculous

because you're using a fucking elevator. Take the goddamn stairs if you're so committed. 10th floor. Okay, well. Take the stairs. People can do it. Well, in Miami, real estate for the lower floor condos is more expensive if it's like a Jewish build because you have to go up the higher stories.

Come on. It's kind of silly. Here's the other thing I would say. When people talk, it's like, what the fuck is this religion thing? They think it's crazy. thing I would say, when people talk about like, what the fuck is this, like this religion thing, they think it's crazy. The one thing that's weird about talking about religion to secular people is that like the model for religion in this country, right, is Christianity typically. Not just Christianity, Protestant Christianity, not just Protestant Christianity, evangelical Protestant

Christianity. Like if you're not a practicing Christian and you've got like Christianity thrust in your face, it's like some televangelist or somebody or somebody wants to ban a book in Texas. And so like somehow that becomes the expression of religion in society. And for obvious reasons, Judaism is very different, right? In Judaism, like the wonky term would be orthopraxic, like a Jew is as a Jew does. So like if you're like Ben Shapiro and you don't fucking flip the light switch on Saturdays and you follow the kosher laws, you do all this, that is being a Jew. Like you don't necessarily need to believe in God or have like a deep faith relationship. There's no Jesus, obviously. Right. And so it's more a practice, a lifestyle and a community more than anything else. And it's less about your personal relationship. Like it just doesn't matter.

I think there's a default setting that people have to adhere to some sort of orthodoxy. Yeah, of course. And I think that's one of the reasons why when you look at highly educated, like tech people, for example, it's a great example. I think there's a reason why they've adhered so strongly to this sort of hardcore version of progressive thinking, which you would call woke, right? It's permeated these atheist communities. And I don't think that's not a mistake. I mean, that seems very clear that human beings have this default setting to follow this scaffolding of morals and ethics and behavior.

And it doesn't necessarily have to make sense like the elevator thing doesn't make sense well neither does a lot of the shit that people on the left adhere to like the the fucking transgender swimmer thing that doesn't make sense like there's reasons why we have males versus females competing but there's this line that people will draw, like, that's a woman. And they'll just say that flat out, hardcore. They start making these distinctions that are based on this rigid ideology rather than based on facts and reality. But they'll say it, and they'll say it from a position where, you know, hey, I'm an atheist. You know, I'm fact-based. I believe in trusting the science, except for some things.

And it's really lack of religion. I think you're picking up on that's exactly right. I mean, I think I've been in Silicon Valley for over a decade now. It's saturated with religion, actually. And, you know, they'll laugh at you trying to keep kosher or whatever, and then they'll go on for six fucking hours about their weird little keto diet or whatever that they're following religiously. You know, it's funny.

I interviewed a Berkeley professor sociologist named Carolyn Chen who wrote a book called Work, Pray, Code. That's kind of a sociological take on this. And she mentions how so many people come to startup life and are formerly religious but then adopt this new religion. And it's very much one of self-actualization, a lot of sort of, you know, white person Buddhism layered on top of it. You know, a lot of LinkedIn posting about hustle porn, about you getting more productive in it. There's, there's deep religiosity there. And hustle porn is a good term. I know. And it, yeah, I hate it. It's what it is. I know. It is hustle porn. It's hustle porn. God, there's so much of that. There's so much of that on Instagram. It's kind of cute.

On Twitter now too. It sucks. I just, if you over post hustle porn, I just so much of that. There's so much of that on Instagram. It's kind of cute. On Twitter now, too. It sucks. Really? If you overpost hustle porn, I just mute you. Yeah, I'm just done with it. Hustle porn is such a weird thing to do. But I guess sometimes I do it here. I guess sometimes I talk about motivation and what's necessary to achieve success.

But I think I do it based on my personal experiences and what I've learned that I think that you could tell people. I think there's a lot of hustle porn that's just like people saying things because they think that it's going to resonate with folks and it's going to get them a lot of likes. And it's going to, you know, like they haven't really done anything. There's a lot of I haven't done anything, but I'm going to show you how to do things, people. Which is a weird part of hustle porn. They're called venture capitalists. That's what they're called. The hustle porn porn community there's so much of that though. God, there's so much of it. Can I ask you a question? Yes, please

People who have done very well in there I asked this question to Marc Andreessen about the web the guy who basically invented the browser and the web as we know it So I'll ask you the same question Did you think this the Joe Rogan experience would get as big as it has? No fucking chance. I still don't believe it. It doesn't make any sense. Because you have over 10 million downloads, which, and I'd love to address this if you want to talk about your show and stuff too, but that's greater viewership than all the big network shows put together, right? You have an enormous audience, but you never thought that would happen when you started this.

I've done nothing to try to promote this show. I mean, really, I've never gone on another show and said, please, please watch my show. I've never taken ads out anywhere. I've never done anything. We've existed like Jamie and I have existed in a strange vacuum while this show has sort of propagated and it's spread its way through the world. And we haven't done anything different. And I haven't done anything different in terms of the way I do it other than get better at it, get better at communicating, get better at listening, get better at, you know, researching topics and asking questions. And, you know,

I think generally it's a skill. I think it doesn't seem like it's a skill because it's something that everybody does. We all have conversations, but there's a skill to having conversations that are pleasing to the ear and that it's similar to a lot of other art forms that once you start sort of unpeeling it, you get a better sense of what it is. And over the many, many, many hours that I've done this, you've a better sense of what it is and over the many many many hours that i've done this you've gotten better at it but i don't understand we've had this conversation too recently why the fuck hasn't anybody else done it like this that doesn't make any sense to me like what i'm doing is not that crazy like why is it so popular i don't i really don't know i genuinely don't know and i it's shocking to me like when

back in the day when we first started when it first started getting big i remember uh me and um i think it was brian redband he goes do you know how many downloads that last episode got and i'm like how many and he's like this 2 million. And there was like this pause in the room. I go, what? I go, 2 million. What the fuck? And we were laughing because we were basically at the time, especially the early days, we would fill this volcano bag up with pot vapor. You know what a volcano is? Do you know what a volcano is? Volcano is this machine, Jamie Shoma volcano. Volcano is a machine for people who think joints are too mild. And it's this preposterous machine that fills up this giant plastic bag with THC mist. And then you pop it off the machine.

Oh, I've done that before. Like the big plastic bag. It's a gray plastic bag. Yeah, I've done that. That's it right there. And then you suck all the fucking THC vapor out of that plastic bag. We would just be obliterated. I'd be in the middle of a conversation, forget exactly what I was talking about.

I had no idea what we were talking about. That was my experience with that, too. I got that out of my mind when I did that. That was what we were doing. And then started having conversations with different people. I had Graham Hancock on, and I was like, this is great. Me and Duncan were talking to Graham Hancock. I'm like, wow, this is amazing.

I can't believe I'm meeting him and we're talking about ancient civilizations and all of his research. And then once it became more popular, people started seeking it out in terms of like, I'd like to be a guest. Like, okay. But it was totally organic. Like the whole thing happened organic. Like there's no way I would have ever said, I know one day this is going to be something that Fox News supports and CNN hates and the world talks about the nonsense ramblings of a comedian slash cage fighting commentator. This is going to real, real fucking cog in the wheel. Like what? No, never. Not a fucking chance. Never thought about it.

You never go further than when you don't know where you're going. Sometimes. But I do have this thing where I'd like to keep doing things and get better at them. I get obsessed with stuff. And in a sense, I've sort of applied a lot of that that I've done to other aspects of my life, whether it's martial arts or comedy, and I've sort of applied that to this thing in some weird way. So it naturally fits within my personality because I've always been curious as to why I think the way I think, why I behave the way I behave, and what I can optimize, what I can make better about who I am and how I make my way through life. And then when that gets applied to this, I sort of just sort of took the same pattern of thinking

about the way I think about all kinds of things and applied it to conversations and applied it to like, why do people think the way they think? Like you, what's it like for you in Ukraine? I'm a genuinely curious person. So when I have these conversations with people, I think that's one thing that does help the listener out, is that they really do understand that I'm not asking you this question because it's my job. Like we could quit right now. We already did an hour.

We could just go home. I'm curious. I'd like to keep talking to you. I enjoy it genuinely. And when I think when someone has a genuine enthusiasm for anything, whether it's making pottery, you know, whatever, you watch a YouTube video about someone who makes hand-blown glass. If someone's really into it, I'm fascinated. I'm fascinated by people that are genuinely into things. Well, I think that's what comes across, Joe. I mean make it look easy but it's um you know I host a small podcast and it's

hard interviewing people and you make it look so seamless and perfect and I think but I don't it's it is easy it's just my personality yeah but I really think that it's just luck I think that's a giant part of it is that my personality just was the right shape to fit into a hole in media. It was just, oh, that fits. But it's just, other than that, I was just the guy who asked annoying questions. If you had me on a radio show, and there was some guy on a radio show, I was always like, well, why do you do this?

What is the thing that entices you to get up in the morning? What's your motivation? What did you want to do when you first started? Those questions are because I want to know why I do what I do. So I'm always interested when I see someone as exceptional or interesting or intelligent. I always want to know what's going on inside your head. Is it similar to mine? I'm trying to build a map of thinking of the world.

When I'm looking at my own life, I'm like, how different am I than this guy? What does he do that maybe is significantly different or better that I can maybe apply to my own way of thinking? I think that honesty comes across, Joe. I think that's part of why your show is successful. Oh, thank you. I think a lot of it's dumb luck, too. We don't want to admit it, but that's part of why your show is successful. Oh, thank you. I think a lot of it's dumb luck, too.

We don't want to admit it, but that's true. Fucking yeah, I could, man. I could easily have been born in Sarajevo. I could have easily been born in the Congo. You know, who you are right now is, there's so many factors that are outside of your control. You know, just your genetics. You know, I came from a creative family. You know, my uncle that I told you converted Judaism, he's an artist. His brother is an artist. You know, there's a lot

of people in my family that are like these very outside the box thinking people. My parents were hippies. So there's a lot of that in my past that sort of helped me think about things as someone who really not willing to subscribe to these patterns of behavior and thinking and just activities that everybody else thought were either significant or mandatory. or mandatory. I was just not interested in that for whatever reason. I felt like there's other ways. These people are miserables. I remember thinking that when I was a kid, looking at people living their lives, doing things they didn't want to do constantly. And I'm like, there's got to be someone out there that's doing what they want to do. Where are those folks? How come I don't know any of them? Then you see them in an interview or you read about them in a book. Like, oh, okay, they exist. You read a biography of someone who sort of navigated their way through the river of life

and avoided the rocks and made their way to the waterfall. Like, okay, so it's possible. How do you do it? Who's that guy? How did he do it? How many people told him no? How many people told him to fuck off? How many people told him he's a loser?

There has to be a lot. How many people told him to fuck off? How many people told him he's a loser? There has to be a lot, you know, and the small percentage of people that do find a way to be happy and do something for a living that they really enjoy doing. To me, that was exciting. Like, OK, there are there are folks out there that are doing something that they they really enjoy. And the difference between that and I think there's really there's a lot of value in doing something you don't like doing. Cause like you,

I had a lot of jobs that I fucking hated when I was a kid. And I think those were really important to me. I think doing construction, I drove limos, I did a lot of shit that I delivered pizzas, did a lot of shit that I didn't enjoy doing. And I think there's something in doing those things that builds up like a muscle of not just of discipline, but of like the ability to find a way to keep going when you don't want to do stuff. And then you can apply that sort of, it's kind of a discipline thing,

but it's just a grind, a grind mentality. Right, right. You can apply that to things you enjoy. Yeah, no, I think that's important. My parents forced me to like do rowing when I was in high school. I was like a little pudgy kid who was very bookish. My mother was a librarian. I was definitely not the athlete type.

Rowing is the ultimate grind. It is the ultimate grind. Because you're doing the same thing over and over again. I know. I know. It's the ultimate grind. And that just really beat the shit out of over again. I know. I know. It's the ultimate grind. And that just really beat the shit out of me. And it was a pretty competitive team.

Like we won state one year and stuff. And it was just like hours a day, six days a week. And it was just like that really made like a man, I guess, out of me in the sense that I went from this, you know, little schlubby, weak, lazy kid to like. Makes sense. If you think about a person who would be like a champion rower or a champion cyclist cyclist maybe even more so because you're doing it on your own like you're doing the same thing everybody else is doing left right left right you're literally attached to a wheel right so it's not like you can be creative in how you optimize the wheel or use your body and some sort

of expressive way that's unique to your personality. No. Left, right, left, right. It's just taking pain. It's just the grind. Yeah. The ultimate grind. And so people that do that, like, have you ever met Lance Armstrong? No. Fascinating character. Interesting guy. Because like, I feel like Lance Armstrong would be fucking competitive at any goddamn thing he did, whether it's his pencils more sharp than yours or, you know what I'm saying? It's like that mindset to just go left, right, left, right, left, right, get across the line quicker than anybody. When you apply it to days and days of riding, like the Tour de France, that's a crazy mindset.

That dude could apply that shit to anything. But in a lot of ways, I bet it probably trips you up because it probably keeps you from being calm you're probably always looking to like fucking get on the bike go you know have you had him on the show yeah yeah i had him on the show i had him on the show after i had jeff novitsky on the show who's one of the guys that helped take him down jeff novitsky also works for you different show though right yeah yes clearly yeah he hates je Stavitsky also works for USADA. Different show, though, right? Yeah, yes, clearly. Yeah, he hates Jeff Stavitsky. Well, first of all, he's got a point in some ways

because the whole goddamn sport was dirty. But what they found in Lance was a poster boy for a dirty sport. Like, if you took away all of his accomplishments and you said, hey, you know, you won the Tour de France, but since, you know, you've admitted that you took performance enhancing drugs and by the way, they never caught him. You know that? They never caught him. So he made his way through this all, but he had teammates that got caught and the teammates ratted him out. And then he had lawsuits against the teammates, and it was very messy business.

But if you took away him being first place and you say, okay, we're going to give first place to the next person who didn't test positive ever for performance-enhancing drugs, you've got to go to 18th place. You're like a number 300. No, really, legitimately. They're all dirty. It's a dirty business business it's like bodybuilding like if you look at the mr olympia guys if they took away steroids there's no one on that mr olympia stage no one you got to go way down the like i mean maybe there's some freak of nature that's like 32nd place or something like that who just eats oats and fucking does squats. But most likely not.

If you want to be like that giant butterball turkey looking ultra vein muscle dude, you have to take steroids. That's what they do. So if you want to pretend that these guys are all taking, you know, fucking creatine and some shit that you could buy in muscle and fitness. Okay. Go ahead. Pretend. Pretend whatever you want but that's not real so if you want to pretend that Lance Armstrong he won toward the fronts

because he was cheating go ahead and pretend because that's not why he won because like Bill Burr has a great bit about it he's like he was the best psycho they're all fucking psychos but he was our psycho he was the best out of all the psychos and they they're all doing drugs. But he was just, with that said, he won while they were all cheating. Maybe he was better funded. Maybe the people that he was involved with are more scientific about their application. But random question. Do you think Jeff Bezos is on steroids? A hundred percent. Oh, really?

A thousand percent. I have no opinion. I really don't know, but I'm just curious. Okay. A thousand percent. Oh, really? I have no opinion. I really don't know, but I'm just curious. A thousand percent. Really? Yes. I don't want to say steroids. He is on hormone replacement therapy, in my opinion, because he gained a significant amount of muscle mass deep into his 40s.

If you look at him now, he looks great. By the way, I take testosterone replacement, so I'm not demonizing it. I don't think it's bad. I think it's wise. If you want your body to perform well, I think you should get regular blood work. You should do it from a very good doctor that understands hormone replacement therapy. You should be very smart about it. You shouldn't take too much of it.

But if you want your body to perform well, it wards off diseases better. It keeps your immune system healthier. The more muscle you have and the stronger your body is, the healthier your body is. I mean to a point and to get to this bodybuilding range where you just look obscene. But what he looks like now is a healthier, way better, way stronger version of what he looked like when he was younger. He's totally ripped. He looks way better than you. He looks great.

He looks great. The idea that that's bad is like, okay, well, what's good? Is it good to get fat? Well, no, you shouldn't say that because you're fat shaming. Okay. You get fat shame, that's bad. But if you muscle shame, that's okay. The guy looks fucking great.

Yeah, he does. Yeah. He's doing something. He's gone totally Miami. The shirts, the women, the Instagram feed. It's incredible. The shirts. See, people use that one image.

That was a disco party. Do you know that? With him with the glasses, with the heart-shaped glasses, with was a disco party. Do you know that? With him with the glasses with the heart-shaped glasses with his bombshell girlfriend. They had a disco-themed party for New Year's. That's why he was wearing that silly shirt. But I like that shirt. I thought he looked pretty good in it, actually.

Well, you're Cuban. It's like, yeah. Get a gold chain, bro. The Rolex, the fucking ridiculous car I can't afford, all that shit. He should wear it all the time. Fuck yeah. all that shit wear tight shirts i think he looks great i love jeff bezos i mean i don't i'm not a fan of some of the things that i hear about working on amazon you know how much of those are true i don't know i haven't i haven't looked deeply into the anti-union practices i haven't looked deeply into the way they force workers to – like there was an article about workers that while the tornado was coming to Kentucky.

Right. They couldn't – yeah. Yeah. They weren't allowed to leave, which to me sounds like fucking insanity. And they died. I mean they – Yeah. That's fucking insanity. If that's true, I don't know if that's true because there's narratives that get distributed after a horrific event that oftentimes aren't accurate because they sell good and it's good clickbait.

I don't know if that's true. It's a hard company in terms of what I've heard about if you're one of those people working on the floor and someone orders a French press and you have like 35 seconds to get that into a box or you have a strike. And you're peeing in like a little bottle because you don't want to take a pee break and that sounds insane. Yeah. But, you know, I mean if you're paid well and you understand that that's the job when you go into it and it's a really competitive environment, it's a good job in terms of like health care and how much compensation you get. I don't know. I don't know.

So I can't comment on the business as a whole. But when I look at billionaires and how I like billionaires to behave, there's two I really love. I love Elon because he's fucking crazy and he lives in a $50,000 house and he has people driving around everywhere. He doesn't own anything. He doesn't own any houses and he's one of the richest men on earth. And then Jeff Bezos who's balling out of control. They have to take a fucking bridge apart because he wants to get his giant yacht through it he makes the yacht so big that they can't get it through a bridge the place where they're building his yacht there's a bridge you have to get out that way to get to the ocean

is this i think it's the netherlands oh. I heard about this. The shipyards, yes. The bridge. So they have to dismantle a bridge to get his yacht. I'm like, the option to dismantle a bridge is not available for very many people. I just think it's hilarious. I think if there's a guy who's a super baller, out of control guy, who used to be a nerdy dude who drove a tiny Honda. Like there's a video of him from 1999 where he's already worth a couple billion dollars and he's driving this Honda around and the interviewer asks him, like, you're worth billions of dollars.

Why are you driving this Honda? He goes, this is a perfectly good car. To go from that to being this, you know, cliche. I love cliches sometimes. I enjoy them. Speaking of Elon, there's a Ukraine connection. I don't know if you know he's shipping all these Starlink units. Yes, I do know that. And it's funny, there's a Ukraine connection. I don't know if you know he's shipping all these Starlink units.

Yes, I do know that. And it's funny. I have a Starlink unit for my house out in the sticks in northern Nevada. And I took my Starlink with me to Ukraine thinking, like, you never know. You might get stuck without Internet if the Russians bomb this or that. I ended up donating it to this fixer dude because his Internet was weak. But he's there. It's a big deal.

Like, the Ukrainians are like, yes, super Elon because they're bringing all these units. Connection to the outside world is a major challenge in a war zone, obviously. Well, the other part is that he's offered to fight Putin. Would you mediate that? Better. I told him that I would. I texted him. I said, dude, I'll facilitate your training.

I'll set up your training. I'll get you the best people. I would establish- Who would you bet on? Without training. I'll get you the best people. I would establish – Who would you bet on? Without training, who would you bet on? Would you bet on Putin or would you – It's hard to say. Elon is much bigger.

He's a big guy. Have you ever met Elon? I've never met him, no. He's about 6'2". He's wide. He's a big person. I don't know how much physical activity he's involved with, but I do know he enjoys martial arts.

He had a match with a sumo player at one point in time. He's crazy. He's a wild dude. But he's so fucking smart that I feel like if you could get him training, he would pick things up very quickly. He would probably have a few moves that he would focus in on and dial them in very quickly and probably get very good. I don't know. We haven't had very many martial arts conversations. So I don't know the full extent of how, because sometimes when people learn some things when they're a kid, those things

surprisingly apply very well as they get older. They don't forget some things. You know, like if you have some jujitsu experience when you're younger and some guy grabs you in a bar, there's certain instinctive things that are going to happen because of your training. I don't know how much he's got of that. But I do know that if he had training, he's younger, he's much bigger. Putin's smaller than me. But he's not a much of judo, supposedly. Oh, he's a black belt in judo. Putin's a legitimate black belt in judo i've watched putin train i've watched videos of him training and i can see the difference between someone who is you know like maybe a casual person with a rudimentary understanding of the and a legitimate black belt he's an absolute legitimate black belt

what is it took away his black belt what is that no? No, they gave him an honorary Taekwondo black belt. Oh, Taekwondo. Yeah. Yeah, it's not. I don't believe he has. That's kind of silly. That's like Bill Cosby getting a PhD and calling himself Dr. Cosby because they gave him an honorary PhD. He was doing that.

Speaking of canceled people. Yeah. Well, that's more than canceled. That's more than canceled. That's some real shit. Yeah. Yeah, I think I'd canceled. That's more than canceled. That's some real shit. It's jail time. Yeah, I think I'd bet on Elon. I really do.

Especially if you gave him time. If you gave him time to train and do it correctly. And I would set him up with the best people. I would set my- Have you made that offer to him? Yes. Yeah, we've had a conversation. We've had a conversation. Yeah, I said I would set him up with all of his training.

He's like, how epic would that be? I'm like, fuck yeah, it'd be epic. Kicking Putin's ass for Ukraine. Yeah. The world is so nuts. That's not – I mean, it doesn't seem likely. But neither did it seem likely we'd be on the verge of World War III three months ago. That's right.

Three months ago, we were worried about vaccines and whether or not you'd have to wear a mask on an airplane. And now we're literally on the verge of a nuclear war. And one of the things that Mike Baker was saying to me was that you're dealing with hypersonic weapons now that can change paths very quickly in the middle of the air. And it's not something like, oh, you see the missile being launched. You see where it's headed. It's headed to San Francisco. It'll be there in 15 minutes or whatever it is. It's not that anymore. Now they're moving faster than the speed of sound and they can take hard angles in the middle of the sky and you can't predict where they're going.

And the Russians used one in Ukraine recently, a couple days ago. Did they really? Yeah. Or so they claimed. They claimed they used a supersonic? Hypersonic. Hypersonic? Yeah.

Wow. That's crazy. That's crazy. That's terrifying. That kind of thing is terrifying. And then you apply a nuclear warhead to something like that, and it's really terrifying. And the thing that he was saying is that we used to have this concept of mutually assured destruction, that we would know that the Russians are launching at us, and we would have a certain amount of time to decide to counterattack,

and then the world would be fucked. He's like, that's not the case anymore. A missile would launch so quickly and would hit us before we had any option to retaliate. And that's something that needs to be understood. Russia launched hypersonic missiles due to a low stockpile, sources say. The leading theory in Western assessments of the hypersonic missile attack is that Russia's number of precision guided munitions are dwindling fast. Why would that be the case? Well, the theory is that their actual internal production of it is very poor. I mean, just recently, the only tank manufacturer in Russia announced that it's stopping production because it can't source components.

So hold on. Go back up there. It says they launched them because it's the only thing that they can get through with absolute certainty. Oh, I see. So they're saying that all of their weapons, they're running out of all kinds of weapons. So they use the hypersonic missile because it's one of the things they know can land. So, um, Russia said that it shot a KH four seven M two K how you say that, Kinzhal? Kinzhal? I don't know. Kinzhal hypersonic missiles at a weapons depot in western Ukraine on Friday, though it remains unclear if it was actually the target. Still, President Joe Biden confirmed Russia's use of the weapons on Monday,

stating that Russia's military launched them. Oh, so this is Biden saying that, because it's the only thing that they can get through with absolute certainty. Eh. Who knows? The fog of propaganda is thick. Yep. Who knows?

But if he really did use that and they showed that it's not just a concept, that it's a real thing that they have and they have access to and they can arm with a nuclear warhead. That's the, my fear is that they launch one nuclear warhead and say, go, okay, now what? You know, because that would be the move. The move would not be launch nuclear warheads at China or rather at the United States. And China does the same thing. We just fucking get blown to smithereens. The move would be one nuclear warhead. Right.

At a Ukrainian city. And go, now what are you going to do? Right. Exactly. You know, and everybody go, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey. You know, if you're in a gang war and one person gets shot, you might be able to have a ceasefire. Like, this was the discussion that Malcolm Gladwell was having in Outliers about these

Appalachian cultures where they were just constantly, you know, the Hatfields and the McCoys, these people that were constantly feuding and killing each other. There were certain times where they had tried to come to the negotiating table and at a certain point too much blood was spilled. That's the worry. My worry is they launch one nuke. Yeah, I mean, yeah. That would be a real challenge to the West, right?

In the West. I mean, that's kind of what we did in World War II, right? That's right. Yeah. Although what people forget there is that the firebombing campaign of Japanese cities caused more death, actually, than the... Although, obviously, nuclear weapons are, from a symbolic perspective, huge. But they were basically incinerating Japanese city after Japanese city, even outside of the nuclear weapon thing. Yeah. But that, again, that was total war. That's when civilizations were going to war with each other and, yeah, destroying them in some sense.

It's wild that humans still participate in that. And you got to wonder, like, how much of that, if we all spoke the exact same language, how much of that, if we all spoke the exact same language, how much of that would be different? It would be very difficult. It's more difficult to demonize people who speak exactly like you do, use the exact same language, have the exact same values. I mean that was the point behind Esperanto, this invented language that got a little bit of traction. The thought was if everyone spoke the same language, it would lead to world peace because it would be better understanding. Is that, you know, that's the Tower of Babel, right?

I think we'd find even more ways to kill each other. You think so? Yes. Yeah. I'm not such an optimist. Well, I mean, look at what's going on in America between the left and the right? I mean, there's some times in the struggle in America, like when Trump was president, that was really concerned that we could conceivably get to a point where people would justify a war against the opposite party. Did you ever feel

like that? There's a lot of civil war talk. And it was weird that a lot of people on the red state side would almost be looking forward to it because, oh, we've got all the guns and we're the tough guys. I'm like societies that have actually gone through real civil wars like Spain or like the Yugoslavia. Nobody comes out. That's not a good idea. It's a crazy. It's a crazy idea. That said, I do wonder when I get in like Silicon Valley, bold prediction mode. Like I think the nation state as we know it, which is a relatively recent invention, by the way. What we call a nation state is a definite post-enlightenment, post-printing press sort of thing. I'm not so bullish on it.

I don't know if we can – not just the U.S., but just broadly, the notion of a nation state. I think the internet demolishes a lot of consensus. And the amount of consensus necessary to keep a nation state in a country of 330 million spanning four time zones is very, very difficult. The problem with the alternative is people are terrified of this concept of a one world government. Yeah. Rightly so. to control its population with social credit scores and just overwhelming surveillance and totalitarian government, we're terrified that that could be applied globally. Yeah. It seems like it could be, especially if you have digital currency that is centralized.

It's like if the government has the ability to veto purchases or decide that your social credit doesn't allow you to do certain things because you've done the wrong thing or you said the wrong thing. Yeah, I mean, those are some of the objections to the sanctions being levied on Russia, right? The West can just like turn you off. Right. Like, what does that mean? That's actually dangerous. Right. I mean, like in the Russian people, are they really responsible for what Putin's doing? It seems like they're under the control of a dictator. What if they don't have access to medicine? What if they don't have access to goods and services and all sorts of things that have nothing to do with them? Yeah. I mean, looking at it from the

Ukrainian perspective, though, they didn't have a choice. I mean, they provoked... There's an unprovoked total war that they've declared, like a real total war that they declared in the Ukraine. And so in some sense, why shouldn't the sanctions be totalizing? Yeah. Well, it's interesting too, the attack on the oligarchs or the sanctioning the oligarchs. That's interesting to me because that's really the first time in our lifetime that we've ever seen some of the richest men in the world terrified to lose everything. Right. With getting their yachts seized. Yeah. Of course, around the world. Getting the jet seized, real estate seized. Fling to Dubai, fling to Israel. Yeah. And like, where are they going to go? And what, how much access to their money will they

have? You know, is it all going away? Can you take it all away? Like, where is it? Who has it? Where is it at? Do they just like log into their Schwab account? Like that level of life is so beyond my understanding that I don't even understand what that would even look like. Right. And like what investments are safe when you're an oligarch fleeing for Turkey or somewhere, wherever you're going to UAE, wherever you're going. Like what do you do? There was a Bramovitz yacht that is outside of Turkey right now that just recently changed its status to waiting for instructions.

So it's kind of moving around, and everybody knows where it is. So you know where this guy is. So what happens? Eventually, does someone come in? Does the Coast Guard come in and take his boat? Who's going to take that thing? Is that what they're going to do? And then what does he do? Well, if it goes into port, it will. It's within 12 miles. Right. Any port? Well, no. I mean, the country would have to want to seize it.

So what if he goes to Dubai? Right. Or what if he just never docks? Right. If he just stays in international waters? Right. And he can just get resuppcks? Right. If he just stays in international waters. Right. And he can just get resupplied from boats that come out to him. Can they get gas to a boat? Oh, yeah. Sure.

That's how they do it? It's expensive, but he could do it. Yeah. Well, he's got a lot of money out here. I mean, the head of this organization called Sea Shepherd. I don't know if you're familiar with him. Yes. Right.

You should have that guy on here. But he used to live at sea because he claimed that he would get extradited because he's considered a pirate in some countries. Whoa. And so he would be 12 miles off at sea all the time. Well, they're always catching people whaling. Right. Yeah. I used to support them. I used to buy their t-shirts. They have cool t-shirts. Yeah. I have a jacket. I have a hoodie. Yeah. They look super cool, right? Yeah. With the trident and the thing. So do you think that that's going to be effective to sanction the oligarchs? And do you think they actually have any legitimate leverage over Putin? Well, over Putin, it seems like it, right?

They've frozen the central bank's reserves overseas, as I understand it. And so their ability to – part of the reason why that tank factory has to shut down is they can't buy parts. How do you – the ruble isn't necessarily worth much. How do you actually go out and buy parts from the West, which they need as inputs? I mean, they're an extraction economy. They sell raw materials. They don't manufacture that much from, and so it seems like those, I mean, it seems like this is really a war between which can last longer, Ukrainian nationalism or the Russian economy, right? It's basically the war that's going on. How do you think it plays out?

If I were a betting man, I think the most likely outcome is some form of stalemate. I don't think the Russians can take Ukraine. I just don't think it's possible. They're not going to, they have it encircled. They can't encircle Kyiv.

They'll take more cities in the East, potentially. Ukrainians will suffer. There'll be tens of thousands of civilian deaths. It'll be a horror show. And they'll have to come to some sort of deal. The Ukrainians have to promise, oh, we're not going to join, pinky swear, we're not going to join NATO for the next 10 years. Zelensky stays in office. They're not going to demilitarize because one of the original requests is the Russians saying you have to get rid of your military. And then the local in-house Russian media will spin it as a Putin victory. And that'll

be that. That's what you think? That's probably the most likely outcome. Did you ever in your wildest dreams think that he was going to invade Ukraine? Oh, no. I don't even know that region of the world very well. I wouldn't even have conjured the thought, oh, yeah, Russia's going to invade. It's interesting how many people switch from being vaccine experts to being foreign policy experts. See, that's something I never do. Shit I don't know about, I don't post about. I don't COVID post. I don't, like I find the media conversation, like the meta conversation about these things interesting, but the thing itself, like an opinion about COVID, you will never get out of it. But it's just fascinating how these people pivoted from one cause to another, like,

and then completely ignored the other cause. Like it's gone. That's gone now. I mean, I think that's a legit criticism. Again, I don't think it invalidates the other cause. Like, it's gone. That's gone now. I mean, I think that's a legit criticism. Again, I don't think it invalidates the Ukrainian cause, but it's true that there's a certain type of person who, like, just switches their little thing that they're obsessed about. No, that's what I'm fascinated by. I mean, it definitely doesn't invalidate the Ukrainian cause. That's one of the most significant causes of our lifetime.

I'm glad we agree. You think that? Okay, interesting. Oh, yeah. I mean, it's terrifying to me. I think about it all the time. I thought about it last night before bed, and I had to meditate to get You think that? Okay. or three? Like, am I prepared? You know, will my family be safe? What do we do? You know, those thoughts, like for whatever reason at nighttime, those are when I have to fight those off the most. I have the same problem. Like the most stressful shit, like right when I'm going to bed, it's like, why the fuck am I thinking about this now? Right, why now? Yeah. It's weird

because I think there's something about when you know you're going to be your most vulnerable because you're literally unconscious that during that time is when you start assessing all the possible risks. That's when you check the locks on the door. You always think that someone's going to come into the house while you're asleep. You don't think someone's going to come in the house while you're awake and it's sunny out. It's like when people smoke marijuana. During the daytime, most of the time, even if you're paranoid, it's not that bad. But if you're paranoid at night, there's something about at night.

Being high at night is fucking scary because the paranoia is accentuated by the natural paranoia that you have from the fact that it's dark out. that you have from the fact that it's dark out. There's a thing that human beings have about the dark that I think is related to being, in our past, being preyed upon by big cats. Like we're worried about things we can't see. We're worried about losing one of our senses. You know, like even in my own fucking yard, if I let my dogs out at night, you know,

and I'm out there with them, I'm like looking around. Like you never know. You never know what's out there. You know, could be some fucking predator that made its way through my fence and it's in my yard. Yeah, it's scary. I am. After this book, this chaos monkeys thing that caused some trouble for me at Apple, I because like I'm a very like ambiguous media personality. I often joke that like I'm not really a narcissist. I just play one on the internet. So I'm forced to do all these shows and highlight my life even though at some level I'm a recluse.

So I bought five acres of these islands off the northwest of Seattle called the San Juan Islands. These gorgeous islands. If you've ever been to them, you should definitely go. I've heard of it. Oh, in the summer, it's paradise on earth. So one of the islands, Orcas Island, I bought a few acres of land, not that many. Just random land. Nothing beautiful or gorgeous or anything. And like started homesteading it, like chopping down trees, laying it out, putting up a teepee, a yurt, solar system, all that

fucking MacGyver shit. And I did that for off and on a couple of years after, after the thing. When I first got there, like, you know, book, the book thing came, came out, was bestseller for a month. It was like a big deal, a lot of media for like a month or two. I'm disgusted by it after a month or two. And so I literally showed up at this place. Like the first advance check, like I bought this land, right? So I show up with like a backpack and like, I guess this is me now. Like I just showed up with a tent and like I'm in the fucking woods and this is it now. And I remember those first couple nights, like you start a fire and the whole thing.

And like the fringes of like what you can see on the fire and the light, it's like, I don't know. Like I had a gun with me. And like this island is not dangerous. Like there's really not much to fear but you're yeah you're there in the sticks and it's like you're alone and were you worried someone was going to target you what do you mean target me because of the book oh no no no no no not really no so you had the gun just dude because you're fucking in the middle of the woods and there's like the cell phone doesn't work there's no contact right side world you just don know. Just in case a pirate shows up on your island?

There's a small meth problem. There's a little bit of that on the island. It's not quite paradise. Meth heads in a bass boat. Come visit you. What kind of problems? Well, tell everybody about your book. What was the premise of your book?

I showed up with a copy of it, Damien. I didn't think of it. It's available where all fine books are sold. The book was called Chaos Monkeys, which I can explain the title if you want me to explain it. But basically, long story short, PhD student, drop out of the PhD, go to work at Wall Street. Wall Street blows up. I come back to tech, right, or back to tech. I never worked in tech, but I'd gone to school in Berkeley, and I'd seen kind of the first tech bubble.

So I was kind of vaguely aware of it. Join tech. Join ad tech. Do my own kind of vaguely aware of it. Join tech. Join ad tech. Do my own startup. Tiny little company, not a big success. Get sold to Twitter. I end up at Facebook a year before the IPO as one of the early members of the ads team. So if you go like browse for shit on the internet and you see that same pair of shoes inside your Instagram feed or whatever,

I created the very first versions, initial, not what's there now, versions of that. So a lot of the, I was the first like product manager for ads targeting. So like how user data gets turned into a successful ads campaign is what I was responsible for in a very formative period in the company's history. And so I was there again, not that terribly long, but it was a lot happened. The company went, grew in size enormously and figured out how to make money. Like I didn't know how to fucking make money. The ads, the ads, as everyone remembers, used to suck. And now everyone's like ads are either creepy or crappy. There's no in between. So I went from crappy to creepy. Um, it was a big team. A lot of people did stuff to make that happen. So the book is about that. Like, how do you start a company? How do you raise money?

The inner workings of Silicon Valley. I went through this famous incubator thing called the white combinator. When you say crappy to creepy, do you mean invasive? Yeah, yeah. In the sense of like, oh, this is totally relevant to like, oh, I was literally just searching for this thing and here's an ad for it. Let me ask you about this because we've talked about this multiple times on the podcast. Sometimes you're having a conversation about something. Oh God, the microphone thing. Is that real?

No. It's not real. No, no. I mean- I don't believe him. Do you believe him? We were just talking about something the other day. I haven't searched for it at all. Okay. And I got an ad for it.

It was something me and you were talking about. What was it? If I remember right, and I couldn't remember, but it was something we were talking about after the show. Six hours later, I'm getting an ad for it. Here's what I'd bet on. One of you two either searched or went to some website. Not only that.

One of us. So if I do, he gets an ad? Yeah. Potentially. Yeah. How? The term of art is called lookalike audiences. What that means is, so some retailer knows that you dump a bunch of money at whatever, REI, Cabela's, pick your favorite retailer, whatever. You two are buds and you interact a lot on whatever social media platform. If I'm Cabela's, say, just to cite an example, I'm like, okay, I know this guy is worth whatever, $2,000 a year.

Get me more people like him. And companies like Facebook or other companies can say, aha, well, guess what? He talks to this dude a lot, who, by the way, whose profile kind of looks like yours. And so you will get targeted for something that you did. Yeah. I get that.

But we have very different online things. I look at sneakers and stuff. He's looking at hunting and whatnot. The thing that came up, I wish I could. Normally I take a screenshot when these things happen because I'll share it with the person. Like look what just popped up on my phone. This was outside of that. This is one of those things I go,

all right, we need to talk about this. But again, I know there's defenses to it, but this was it. Let me address the question. It's funny, there was a Planet Money show about this in which they talked to various people who had this experience to try to figure out how it actually happened. I was a guest on it, but let me address the problem. So let's say Mark Zuckerberg is listening to your conversations and gets a live stream of

your phone all the time. What fraction of the time do you think you're actually mentioning something commercially interesting that would be worth, like, targeting against? Like, how often do you say, hey, I'm flying to Boston next week and I need a flight and a hotel and a taxi? And you say it in some structured way that would be easy. It's pretty rare, right? And the amount of, I mean, think about it. The amount of data, you'd have to, you'd be on a constant phone call basically to Zuck. It would eat up your network like crazy.

And then the fraction of the times versus you just, like, going to fucking kayak and, like like entering Boston and using that data. And so I'm not saying it's technically impossible. And in some future world, who knows, but it would be difficult. And even if you manage to do it, there isn't one of the things, one of the chapters of my book, I understand you're listening to have a chapter called the narcissism of privacy, which comes off maybe more snarky than I mean, but privacy is a right and people have a right to it, obviously. But I think one of the sort of misleading things when you think about companies like Facebook is that like Facebook wants to know the thing that you least want them to know, which is like your personal conversation with your loved one or whatever. When it comes to commercial data that actually helps target ads, there's very little,

very little of what you do or things that you wouldn't think of are what they want, not necessarily what you would like, what you would not want Facebook to know. Right. But what concerns people is the idea that your microphone is picking up keywords that they have accounts with. So whether it's cell phones, tires, whatever it is, then you see an ad for it. It would be more possible in like the smart speaker systems you have at home, for example. Right. That probably wouldn't be so hard to do.

Stuff like that. That probably wouldn't be so hard to do. That makes sense. And so how would they target you for an ad with that? Well, again, if you said something well-structured, that would be easy to tease out. And if that's connected to the same account that's connected to your Gmail or your Google search- Or Amazon.

Or Amazon, then they would show you the ads. Yeah, yeah. So, like, a lot of what happens that's actual targeting is, like, data joining. So, like, getting back to the Cabela's example, like, I understand you're into hunting, so maybe you shop at the local Cabela's or the Bass Pro Shop. They'll have your phone number and email for all the shit you buy online. And what they want to do is, like, find you online and sell you because it's the fucking deer hunting season sale or whatever. And so what they'll do is they'll upload that list of emails to Facebook and say, oh, this is the deer hunting group.

And then they'll show you ads based on your actual buying history. So that sort of thing absolutely does happen. That makes sense. Yeah, that absolutely does. That completely makes sense. So that's the creepy. That's the creepy, yeah. It went from crappy to creepy.

That's creepy. And it pays for the creepy. It went from crappy to creepy. To creepy, yeah. That's creepy. And it pays for the internet. If there's any saving grace to this is that it pays for the services that most people wouldn't be willing to pay for otherwise or wouldn't exist otherwise, for better or worse. What's interesting is that it became one of the most valuable commodities in the world, and people just sort using Gmail or they first started searching for things on Google or using Facebook, they never thought that they were giving up access to something that's insanely valuable that would create not just some of the biggest companies in the world like Facebook and Apple and Google, but also some of the most influential companies that have ever existed. That's right.

There's never been a company that has the kind of input on social policies or on the way the world functions like Facebook. Has there ever been a single individual company that has the kind of influence? To put on my Facebook hat a little bit, I mean, if you go back to the world of electric concite and three TV networks and creating consensus around things like Vietnam or other events, I think there's precedence. It may not have been within one software company in the sort of way that you were talking about,

but was there a media establishment that manufactured consent around certain social issues? I would say yes. Yeah, that's true. But I think the difference is that they were in some way, shape, or form connected to the government, and we don't think that Facebook is. But maybe they are. Well, they respond to, like, warrants and stuff

when it comes to policing online behavior. And I get into that a little bit in the book. Yeah. They definitely, you know, they do a lot of good protecting, like, child molesters and stuff and taking them off of Facebook. And also, I think people have to understand the sheer volume of stuff that goes onto their network

every day, right? So it's managing at scale. Exactly, John. You're obviously a very bright guy who's been very thoughtful about this. But one of the things that's hardest to convey to people who are on the outside looking in is like you open any dashboard at a company like that and every number is in the billions, like billions of posts, billions of people, billions of photos. Like even if they were trying to be like best effort, it would be very difficult to police a lot of what people want them to police.

Like we looked up the data on YouTube about the amount of data, amount of videos that get uploaded to YouTube daily. Oh, did you? Okay. And it's astounding. Right. I forget what the number is. But see what it is. Find out what it is daily.

But it's one of those things where you go, okay, how would you manage that? How many people would you have to hire to watch that? How many people would you have to hire to watch every video that's being uploaded on YouTube every day? You would have to have millions and millions of employees whose sole job is to watch nonsense. Yeah. How you do it, you try scaling it with software. So one of the things I did at Facebook, and I get into in the book a little bit, I was briefly the product manager for

the team that policed ads. So it's a smaller problem, the big problem you're talking about, but people who run ads, there's also an ads creative policy. You can't run ads with naked women and stuff at it, right? And it was not as big as Facebook posts, but it was still a scale problem. What you do is you have a certain set of humans to do the things that only humans can do well, and then you scale their efforts with software. So if the guy tries to upload the exact same ad twice or the exact same video twice, even if he changes the contour slightly or he changes the shading, so it's not literally the same file, you have smart software that actually picks it out and prevents them from doing it. Right.

And so that's how they do it. Because even Facebook and Google can't afford to hire millions of people to review these ads or the videos. But the problem is when you do have humans that do it and then it's subjective. Value judgments. Yeah. Like my friend Kyle Kalinske got banned from Twitter today. And I don't know if you know who he is, but he has a great progressive political talk show, The Kyle Kalinske Show. And he also has another podcast that he does with Crystal Ball.

And, you know, really bright guy, very well-read, open-minded, you know, the whole deal. This is all he writes. He writes, 2015 was seven years ago. And then he has a gif of a guy's head exploding. You know, like, he's just, like, realizing, my God, time has flown. He got banned for that? He got locked out of Twitter. And they're saying that it's,

you know that fake, that image of a fake head blowing up? It's like from a, I think it's from Scanners, the movie Scanners. Okay, yeah. It's so silly. It looks fake.

It's like a guy's head and it explodes. And then, like, his brain. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just the whole head explodes. They said that depicted images of torture or murder or extreme gore. Right. Like what?

That fucking standard head exploding gif that everybody's been using from the beginning of time, that's enough to get you blocked from fucking Twitter now? My view has always been that Facebook and all these companies should not be in the business of actually judging truth for people. And that they're, in my opinion, they're over-policing. And I've written a lot about this after the election in 2016. Eventually it burned me out so much I went back to tech because it just drove me crazy. But I just don't think, you know, there's hate speech standards in the United States, which are pretty narrow relative to other countries' free speech norms. And some people might not like that, but that's the nature of the First Amendment in this country. And I think it's a well-defined standard that has done us very well

for decades. And I don't see why, obviously, legally, the First Amendment doesn't apply to private companies, but at least morally or spiritually, I think it should apply. And that should be the standard, in my opinion. I couldn't agree more. But one of the things that drives me crazy about the left is that so many people on the left seem to want them to take a stand of being the moral police. And they say, well, you know, you are allowing these extremist groups to thrive, and they're recruiting people, and this or that. And so they use it as a justification. But the problem is, once you do justify banning people because of an ideology you don't agree with, it's going to move further and further down the line to the

point where things that you do agree with and you think should be fine are now worthy of getting banned for. And that is happening right now. We're seeing that happen. Yeah. I think people have forgotten that you have to design laws and systems such that imagine your worst enemy were implementing it. Right. And that changes things. Right. That was when the, what was the NDAA, National Defense Authorization Act came into play. And Obama said, you know, it was indefinite detention of people without trials. And Obama was like, well, I'll never use that. Okay. Then don't fucking make it a law. Right. Because what if someone comes along after you and then who comes along after him Trump Trump? Like hey, buddy Like you know like there's a guy who is a critic of Putin that just got sentenced today to I believe

Is a lot yeah nine years. He's already been a funny. Oh, yeah, no money had it. Yeah, it's added to ascendance Yeah, yeah, yeah like that kind of thing like the the bridge between that kind of thing and the NDAA is not that far. Like this ability to criticize someone is very important. And as soon as you restrict that ability or restrict people's ability to communicate or say controversial things or say things that you don't agree with, you're getting close. You're bringing those things together, and it's fucking dangerous. It's really dangerous when you start doing that because it's just – it keeps moving. It doesn't stop. If you don't have an absolute line of free speech, then you decide what should and shouldn't be censored. And as soon as you do that, then it becomes subjective. Then it becomes – you can apply all sorts of logic and reasons why someone who you don't agree with should be removed from the conversation. And you could do so in bad faith.

You could do so because it's going to cost you financially or it's politically uncomfortable, whatever it is. Dude, I think this has made people lose their minds, right? Yes. Like network computers have made people lose their minds. Oh, my God. Phones. The reality is that like freedom of speech, people don't actually want freedom. They say they do, but they don't, right? Like network computers that make people lose their minds. The reality is that like freedom of speech, people don't actually want freedom. They say they do, but they don't, right? Like once their enemy like gets a platform, it like goes out the window. And getting back to

our topic about religion, I think liberalism requires a certain religious belief and certain rights. And we have, our nation is defined by a sacred document that's adjudicated by this like rabbinical court called the Supreme Court. And all our political struggles end up being religious struggles almost because we do have this sort of creed or religious belief in our country. And I think you really have to maintain that civic religion alive to have things like the level of freedom of speech that the Constitution implies. And I think we've lost that civic religion. We've lost that faith in the United States. Yeah, it needs to be something that both sides espouse, that's something that both sides talk about openly and agree to because we are a community. Whether we disagree about certain aspects of our laws and the way we communicate or whatever. That's fine. But we should have some

rigid, rock solid, fundamental principles that we apply to communication and to rights. And if we don't do that, we're just, we're losing our perspective. We're losing the thing that made this country so exceptional, this exercise in,, this exercise in self-government. It's a unique place. And as soon as you start fucking with that and limiting freedom, you see knuckleheads on television say that they think that maybe the First Amendment and the Second Amendment need revision. Like, okay. By who? By you?

By your minds? Right. Your ideology? Yeah. This is why I you? By your minds? Right. Your ideology? Yeah. This is why I love getting back to the Judaism thing. That's what I love about Judaism. Like, you've got the Ten Commandments. You've got this is the Torah.

Like, you have to point to some document and say, we agree on this. This is, like, the metaphysical belief that we all, like, this, we need to have, like, a core moral foundation that nobody disagrees about. And then on top of that, you can layer, you know, thousands of years or in our case, hundreds of years of conversation. But I think we've lost those moral foundations. Like you said, there's people who want to abolish the first and second amendment. When you say that Apple, you've got a lot of trouble with Apple.

What kind of trouble did you get with Apple? Oh God, I hate talking about it because it's like this weird random thing with Apple is so overshadowed every other thing I've done in the world. And it's weird, like the driver who drove me to the airport, he's like, oh, are you like going on Rogan? Because I guess it's the same company or whatever. And it's like, yeah, I think I'm going on because of this thing with Apple. And then he had his deal with Spotify.

He's like, oh, wait, you're the Apple guy. So it's like I've been noticing. Oh, so he knew? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Or she knew. But yeah. She knew. Sorry.

I'm sexist. I assume it's a male driver. So what was the Apple thing? Yeah. OK. So Sorry. I'm sexist. I assume it's a male driver. So what happened? Yeah. Okay. So I did this book thing. I became like a media talking head, wrote for Wired Magazine and other outlets and did the whole media thing, blue check thing. Drove me completely crazy because I don't really think I'm suited to it. I went back to tech. I worked for a big founder's fund company called Branch Metrics, building a new ad platform. That was interesting for a year and a half, two years. And then I went to Apple because Apple is also building an ads platform.

My career, for better or worse, has been turning human eyeballs and data into money in various forms. It's what I do. It's what I know how to do. I know how to create an ad system. There aren't that many people who know how to do that. Apple is creating an ad system. It's not a secret anymore. You'll see ads if you scroll down on your search on your iPhone. And, you know, so I was working at Apple. And, like, you know, in some sense I'm getting a little older. I wasn't doing it at the startup. It's not retirement exactly, but you're working for a big company, right? And, you know, like I changed my LinkedIn to reflect the fact that I worked at Apple, which I did.

And then what happened, which we've now seen in many companies, and I was the first of this at Apple, there was like a slack mob that, you know, kind of conjured itself and objected to the fact that I wrote this book, you know, what, five, six years ago now, that at the time, again, to be clear, was hardly a secret bestseller list, NPR book of the year, Wired book of the year, not to like toot my own horn, but like, it's about as secret as Christmas fucking day at this point, like it's not a secret. They knew about it. Like they, my references, they asked about it. Cause it's's a little unusual to hire a writer in a place that's very discreet like Apple, whatever. And they hired me and whatever. And then, yeah, there was a Slack mob. I can't talk too much about it because a lot of it's under NDA, but I can talk about what's public. Apple management panicked. And as a result of the whole mob thing, they kind of fired me. And that

was the end of that. So when you say a Slack mob, what do you mean by that? So Slack, for those who aren't familiar, it's like this tool that it's almost like a version of like in-house corporate Facebook that you post, there's message threads, it's a collaboration tool. So it's people that work for Apple that disagreed with you being in the company because of chaos monkeys. Right. Which, you know, as I've described, what pisses me off most about it is that in some sense, they, among all the rest of it, they mischaracterized the book because, you know, there's a couple passages in there that are a

little salty, right? It's like, it's a work of literary nonfiction told in the voice of like a Michael Lewis or a Huntress Thompson or a Tom Wolfe. So it's not like a dry business book. It's like, oh, look, a crazy tech guy doing this crazy thing. But it was told in a certain literary voice. And fast forward five years, some of the jokes, yeah, were a little crude and were a little salty. Nothing crazy salty, in my opinion, but whatever. You were trying to be entertaining. I was trying to be entertaining because the book's got to fucking sell. Right. And so, but to be clear, 99.9% of the book is about entrepreneurship, how Silicon Valley works,

the internal culture at these companies, how the ads world works. We talked about targeting. It's about that. It's not about one of the salty jokes is about dating in San Francisco and what's that like. Literally, it's like a one paragraph comment on it that's quoted out of context. I was actually praising the mother of my first kid saying, oh, this woman's amazing, unlike these other women that I went dating with, which is a conversation we've all had. It's like, oh, dating in the city is so hard, whatever. It was that sort of joke, basically. But of course, it misses the context that I'm pro this woman that I'm in love with,

and it's so great that I'm not dating these other women or whatever, right? That was the statement. But they took that out of context and a few other little comments here and there, ignored all the rest of the book, which again, most of it's about life inside Facebook and startups and whatever. It has nothing to do with- And Apple caved? Apple caved. I know. What, two plus trillion dollar company caved. And I think, you know, we can talk about this cancellation thing if you want to, but one of the key aspects of this cancellation mobs, right, or these cancellation coups as I call them, is that the politics are

often deeply unpopular. I think something like 1% or less of Apple employees signed whatever petition it was to fire me. Like nobody – like this mob was a very vocal but small minority inside the company. And, yeah, Apple just freaked out and, you know, this is publicly known, freaked out and fired me like within a day. I wonder what would happen if Apple said fuck off to those people. Is that possible at this point? Do you think they've reached this? Oh, yeah. Well, most of them got, by the way, after the fact, most of them got fired, the leaders of the Slack mob, actually. Really? Yeah. And Apple never reached back out to you? Go, hey, we fucked up.

I can't talk about that. But I mean, about the firing the other employees, that's publicly, that's been reported. That's public. Other companies have shown a lot more moral leadership than Apple has. One example is Coinbase that you're probably familiar with, a crypto company led by Brian Armstrong. And not too long, I guess a year and a half ago, right before the IPO, he basically said, too much politics. Slack mobs are happening. All this bullshit's happening. Look, if you don't like it, we're here to do work. You don't like it, here's a nice little severance package.

Door's over there. 5% of the company took it, and the company's doing fine. And that's the end of that. Right. Well, I think that there's a real thing that people love to do today where they consider themselves an activist. Right. And part of being an activist is if someone says something that you don't agree with, you can get them fired. Right. And it's a weird kind of activism because, you know, it's not it's not necessarily act. It's, you know, it, it's mob mentality. You're deciding that you want someone to suffer because they have an opinion that's different than yours or that they say something that you think is objective. And you can feel good while doing it. You're

literally in a mob, but you can feel a sense of moral righteousness. It is just the greatest moral treat. Well, that is Twitter. I mean, in so many ways. That's a large part of what people like to do that people find gross about Twitter. And I don't get it. I'm just allergic. Like that mob mentality, I just can't do it. I just fucking hate it. It's because you're not a loser.

Right. Because most of those people that do that are truly unexceptional people. That's why they want to do it. And a lot of the people that do that are truly unexceptional people. That's why they want to do it. And a lot of the people that they attack are exceptional. And that's just natural human nature. People that have an inclination to mob up and gang up on people for things like that, generally speaking, they're failures or at least not exceptional. They're not what they would like to be.

They're not anything that's standing out. They're not exceptional. They're not unique outliers where they're really out there kicking ass. That's not the kind of people that do that. It's the kind of people that are, you know, there's a culture today in society. There's a lot of people that think that they deserve more than they're receiving. And they look at other people that are doing really well and for whatever reason they decide that that person doesn't deserve it. And part of it is because they're not, it's not like

you see someone doing well and you go, wow, how the fuck did he make it? Well, whatever. But instead you say, how did he make it? We need to attack him. We need to take him down. And those people are almost entirely losers. Losers, yeah. Yeah, and there's a lot of losers out there. But when you see a loser's text on Twitter, it's the same font.

They use the same language. You don't know their background. You don't know what they're doing in their own life. You see their words. You don't know what's the same font. They use the same language. You don't know their background. You don't know what they're doing in their own life. You see their words. You don't know what's the motivation behind it. And those words carry a similar meaning and a similar impact to a person who's like rational and compassionate. And, you know, it's a weird time when it comes to communication. You know what would solve this?

Bringing back dueling. That's what it would do. Because robbing somebody of their livelihood, I think, is actually a major affront. Like you're literally what I use to feed my kids and pay for housing. You're robbing me of that for some moral crusade. Like you've got to square up and you've got to either face off at 40 paces or go into the ring. Like that's a major affront. And you shouldn't just be able to do that anonymously playing this little video game called Twitter.

Well, it's kind of a verbal assault. It's in some ways it's, it's in a, you're attacking, you are doing something with, I mean, you're doing something with language where you're attacking someone. And it's one thing if you're going after someone, you know, you're exposing a criminal who's like stealing money from people. And you found, you, and you're a journalist, you found this loophole where someone's robbing old ladies out of their retirement fund. But if you're just trying to cancel someone because you don't like the jokes they wrote in a book about tech, about their own life, and you want to get them fired from a job

that has literally nothing to do with that book. Nothing to do with it. Yeah. And there's no actual behavior at this company, which is one thing that I want to clarify. So can you talk about that? Are you in a lawsuit or can you? Yeah.

I can't really talk. No, no need to. No need to. Yeah. It's, what is it like being in those companies? Like whether it's Facebook or, you know, any sort of tech company. For someone on the outside, we look at it and we say, like, how are those fucking places run?

Because it's like I've had a good friend who was a big executive at Google, and now she works at another large tech company. And the way she described it to me, she's like, it is utter madness. It's utter madness. And the lunatics are running the asylum to a certain extent because there's a lot of people, the company that she works for now, there's a lot of people that are inside the company that legitimately are

mentally ill and they consider themselves activists and they have to placate them because it's a certain percentage of the population of the people that work for the company. And they're the loudest and they oftentimes don't get work done. And when confronted, they, they talk about their activism. And she's like, listen, you are here for X amount of hours a day.

This is your fucking job. You're not an activist. And don't think that if you're complaining about other things that this company does, that you doing that is a part of your job because it is not. Yeah, I mean, I think the companies are somewhat to blame because they've done the whole like bring the real self to work thing. Right. And again, what is that?

There's this philosophy among like the HR there that like and if you're being cynical about it, it's engineered to get the most productivity out of you. Like the real the real self to like if you work at some of these companies, particularly again, to answer your question, I think it depends what stage of the company you join. But if you're talking about big companies like Apple, Google, Facebook now, it's a campus. It's a lifestyle. They do your laundry for you. They feed you. They do?

They do your laundry? They can. Yeah, yeah. There's like – Apple does your laundry? I'm not sure about Apple because we were never in office because it was still under COVID. But Facebook had laundry. I'm sure Google does.

Yeah. Whoa. Yeah. It's weird. You join. I mean, it's a strained analogy, but it's kind of like a cult. And there's like a massive amount of corporate culture. Like I described this a lot in Chaos Monkeys. Who said that? Who said that quote that every successful startup is a cult? I think it was Keith Raboy, I think, from Founders

Fund. And the thing is, he's right. He's right. Like Facebook was a cult and I joined it and I was a happy member of it. It was was very powerful everyone sacrificed themselves for the sake of the Facebook Empire and its Emperor did it change your own personal thinking while you were there in the cult oh yeah did you subscribe I just laid oh yeah I totally bled blue I still do do a certain because again it's a formative experience like some of the most impactful professional work I did was there like it or not. Taking Facebook ads from the shitty, stupid little iPad offer ads on the right to literally the thing you just looked at or bought, which I know sounds cringy, whatever, that changed everything.

I was one of many, to be clear. It wasn't just me. But that changed everything about that company and was super impactful inside the industry. How much of an impact did it have when Apple came along and introduced these restrictions? Oh, huge. You're talking about ATT, which is like the ads transparency thing, for those who don't know. If you've got an iPhone, you download an app and suddenly there's this opt-in that Apple is showing you saying, hey, do you want to share your data with these people? That's hugely impactful. What that does is, so why does that matter? So Apple controls this.

They create the hardware and the software and all of it, right? Right. At the end of the day, seen from Apple's point of view, Facebook, as powerful as it seems, is just another app in the App Store, right? Which was always Zuck's fear, which is why he wanted to build a phone. Apple can say, look, Facebook, you don't get to track users as well as you used to. You can't track Joe Rogan down or anonymously your device ID. You can't do that anymore. You only get a certain level of granularity. How much tracking were they able to do before that? Well, I mean, an infinite amount.

They would track you individually. I mean, whether it's worth doing or not is another matter, but they would get the individual device ID from your phone. And so they would know who you are in terms of that phone. What does that entail? Like, again, you know, if you go to Cabela's and buy a thing, then you go to some, you were playing a casual game and they show you an ad, you playing that game and you buying that thing in Cabela's can be individually joined in a very precise way. And if you remove that and say, oh, you can't track Joe Rogan's phone, you're tracking 100,000 people at a throw, then they bucketize you. They put you in a bucket that isn't quite as precise as before. And what that translates into is fewer clicks, fewer sales, like the effective amount of money that either the advertiser makes or the publisher that's

showing the ad makes goes down. Now, is this for the end user, for the person who has the phone? Is it beneficial that they've instituted these policies? Good question. If you get a warm, fuzzy feeling inside, knowing you're not being individually tracked, yes. But other than that, not particularly. But it also doesn't give up the access to your data that's this very valuable commodity for Facebook, right? So here's the tricky thing about data, right?

One of the many misconceptions that I try to address in the book about how Facebook works is it's often not Facebook data that's being used to target you. Because if you think about Facebook, right, it's like you're posting random photos, you're engaging with content. But a lot of your commercial activity, like booking airplane flights, shopping for shit, doesn't happen on Facebook. Facebook doesn't know about that, strictly speaking. So how do they solve that problem that, like, we got to show them fucking shoe ads and Facebook doesn't know shit about what shoes you like? So part of this is what I described in the book and what I helped build in the early stages. There's a way of joining you, Joe Rogan, Facebook you to Cabela's you in some relatively data safe way that lets Cabela's show you an ad for those shoes. Facebook doesn't necessarily know

all the Cabela's shit because Cabela's doesn't want to let Facebook know that shit because they don't trust Facebook. And so a lot of the stuff that's going on isn't like, oh, Facebook knows everything about you. It's like, no, Facebook knows who you are on every device because you tend to use Facebook everywhere. Maybe not you, but other people. And so that means that they can join you very well to all the other commercial activity you do. And you use Facebook a lot. So they have lots of opportunities to maybe show you an ad. That's really Facebook's strength.

But getting back to your original question, how does Apple fuck that up? Well, it fucks it up because it doesn't know who you are on that device at the individual granular level anymore. And so it can't talk to Gabellus and say, oh, that guy who's looking for these weird things, like show them this ad. That can't happen anymore. Is it in any way negative for the person who's the end user? Good question. Because maybe you would want to see those ads because this is something that you're actually interested in purchasing. I mean, in the happy case, but let's face it.

In the happy case. In the happy case. Well, if you're a person who's, you know, you have full control over your urges. You're not a person who's just like, you know, you can't afford something, but you buy it anyway because you're fucking crazy and you saw the ad and you can't help yourself. Because we know that there are people like that out there right so in the best case scenario is it better i would think so but isn't that like what you do as a business i i think the status quo is a lot better than the like stupid punch the monkey ads you used to remember those ads and like display ban i probably don't remember them but like in yahoo.com back in

the day to be like a little moving target and you'd like punch the monkey. Like you can either see that bullshit or you can actually see an ad that maybe has a chance of being relevant in Instagram feed. So, yeah. Do you give anything up to have those relative ads? No. In fact, I mean you gain things, right? Like a lot of services wouldn't exist if they weren't paid for via ads. So, like the reality is if Facebook's ads start sucking more, i.e. the amount of money they make per ads goes down, they're just going to show you via ads. So the reality is if Facebook's ads start sucking more,

i.e. the amount of money they make per ads goes down, they're just going to show you more ads. So do you think that Android phones handle it better because Android phones allow more of those things in? Man, super wonky question. I wasn't expecting this. It's wonky? No, no, no.

It's good. I love talking about it. But the model that Google and Apple have are somewhat different. Apple is a fully, you know, vertically integrated thing. They create literally the chips and the software you're looking at. Google is a little bit different. You can buy Android phones made by all sorts of manufacturers. Their model in general tends to be a little bit more open to third parties. And so there's a whole ads ecosystem in Google where I could fucking fill this wall or whiteboard with all the little boxes, all the little companies that get together to show you a single ad. And so Google is a little

bit better about being more open to the outside. Mind you, they still use monopoly power in various ways, like they're not saints. But Apple has a more closed note approach to it. I mean, that's why they're building an ad system because they want to make money in ads, but they're not going to go the Google route. They're going to build more than likely, I mean, that's why they're building an ad system, because they want to make money in ads, but they're not going to go the Google route. They're going to build, more than likely, I mean, not that I have deep insight into it anymore, but more than likely, they're going to build it themselves, because they have a more closed vision of it. How they think about data privacy, here's another thing. If you want to geek out, one direction Apple's going that's kind of interesting is that a lot of the data for your iPhone is going to live on device. Like, in other words, for the past 20-plus years of

internet, we've had this model where, like, you do shit on a phone, data goes into the cloud, weird shit happens, and you get shown a page or an experience. A lot of that's changing, right? Like, probably most of what you do on a phone is through an app. It's not a browser anymore. It's like the code is running on your phone. You're producing data on that phone.

Like, why shouldn't the computation and all the shit that happens happen on the phone? These phones are actually pretty powerful. Right. And so a lot of things are moving in that direction for a bunch of reasons. One of the reasons actually is privacy. And, you know, Apple and other companies have made public statements about this. It's like, oh, it's more private. Like what's the ultimate opt out? My data is on this phone. You know, I do. I take it and I

throw it into the fucking lake. Their data is gone. Right. While like opt out and deletion when the data is in the cloud and a bunch of third parties have it, you never really know, right? Right. But if you keep the data on the phone, it is better in many ways, right? It also feels creepier, right? One of the things Apple did recently, I don't know if you followed the story, they launched a system to catch what's called CSAM, which is child sexually exploitive material, which is kiddie porn basically,

and they launched a system that would, it's complicated, but would scan photos on your phone basically. Yeah heard about that which is weird right and it's funny because it is that on-device paradigm it's like okay like if you've got the you've got the photos from what i recall they would only scan photos that were gonna that were gonna get synced to icloud anyhow but but but they were doing what's called looking at the hash of the image on your phone. So it was code running on your phone. And people felt very, you know, felt like that was an intrusion and people kind of basically revolted about it.

I'm not sure if they discontinued the program or not, but- Well, the problem is like, what if you have a photo of your son naked in a kiddie pool laughing in your backyard and he's two? Was that kiddie porn? Right. There's a couple of things that could go wrong here, right? How does the false positive, like an innocent person getting- If you get flagged?

Right. One is you've got a photo that just happens. The way it would typically work is there's a database of child exploitive material, and they look for it on your phone. And they do what's called hashing the image. Basically, that means it's like decompose this complicated image into like a simple string that could be easily compared, right? And say like this is the image now.

If you've got an image that happens to map to that, then you could have a collision in that space and it's like, oh, it's kiddie porn, but it's not. Or you just have a random image. The way these images work, like a lot of researchers found like a random image of a dog would actually map to this other thing, right? So there's lots of ways of getting it wrong. And, of course, Apple assured people that they wouldn't get it wrong because of this and that. But it's scary, right? Like getting maligned as being like a kiddie porn guy when it's just like a picture of

your kid or even like a random picture. That is scary. And what's also scary to people is the idea that someone could hack into your device and implant some sort of questionable material. Oh, yeah. Like fucking, I'm in this high school group with people I went to high school with on WhatsApp. And, you know, it's a bunch of fucking bros from Miami. And they post all sorts of stupid shit that I would not normally share or like want on my phone.

But like WhatsApp by default saves those images to iPhoto. And so you can imagine the sort of shit they post. And like it ends up in like my photos real in Apple. It's like, dude, what the fuck? Like don't send me this shit. Like that sort of thing they post. And like it ends up in like my photos real in Apple. It's like, dude, what the fuck? Like don't send me this shit. Like that sort of thing could happen. Yeah. And someone could send you,

I have some really ridiculous friends. They could send you something that's actually illegal. Right. Yeah. It's a problem. The flip side of it, just to take the other side of it, is like, dude,

like there's a lot of fucking kiddie porn. A lot. A lot of child sexual exploitation that you would like someone sent me this article about 108 people that got arrested for child sexual exploitation and four of them were disney employees and my friend was like i can't believe how many fucking pedos are out there and i'm like i bet there's a lot more than we think a lot more yeah it was that little island. I lived on Orcas Island, this idyllic little island.

The guy who ran the bagel shop got arrested in an FBI sting. They were in some either telegram or signal group passing around this sort of material. And the FBI fucking showed up on some island in the Northwest, like arrested dude in the middle of his business. And, you know, I was curious because it's like a local case. So I went and read the federal indictment, which is public record. You can go read it. I would not advise reading it, by the way, because I think part of what they do is they include details, the materials in the indictment to make the person look as guilty as possible. And so they describe the images, which are disgusting, obviously.

I know. It's just it's worse than you can imagine. I wouldn't advise anybody going and seeing it or like even reading about it. It's the most revolting thing you can possibly imagine. It's like, yeah, that motherfucker should go to jail, should absolutely go to jail. So it's a moral tradeting thing you can possibly imagine it's like yeah that motherfucker should go to jail should absolutely go to jail so it's a moral trade-off yeah yeah and there's a very bizarre argument that somehow or another seeing those images keeps people from actually performing acts of violence on children yeah but that is a fucking shifty argument and there's another even shifty argument that cgi versions even shifty argument that CGI versions of child pornography are, should be acceptable because it's like a, you know, a way that they can get it out

of their system or whatever. It's, yeah, it's, it's just fuck that it's real. It's just fuck that that's a real like hidden sort of secret part of our society that there are people out there. Like I have a friend who almost had his child kidnapped the other day. Like someone was trying to lure his kid literally into a van. Dude, that's when the fucking Glock comes out. Oh, my God. It's so scary. It's so scary.

I mean, he was at a park and luckily he pays attention. But what happens if you don't and then the kid's gone and you have no way to find them and they're gone forever like what like how many houses are there to search how many people are there to look at how many how far did they drive with your kid they've got these like tracking watches for kids that you can put on them so you can know where they are christ yeah and that's when the government says all you need is a chip. Just take a chip, and we're going to put a chip in your child,

and we'll find your child everywhere. Man, this went dark pretty fast. Dude, when you start talking about child exploitation, that's some of the scariest shit in our society. The fact that we have this first world, super advanced, the most progressive society on earth essentially you know the the most freedom the most and that there's still without you know our moral foundation our ethics are 21st century like as advanced as we can in terms of the way we feel about people's

rights and that still still there's people out there that want to do that to children. Yeah, it's dark. It's dark. Especially for people like you and I who have them, who have children. Oh, yeah. When you have kids, suddenly – It changes everything. Any aggression or violence towards children literally fills you with the most murderous rage instantly.

My friend Jim Brewer said that best. You know, we were talking once. He said said I now understand murder he goes I never understood murder like why would anybody want to kill somebody but if you want to harm my kid I get murder he goes I understand it and he's a very peaceful guy

it's a part of you know you're always going to have when you have a spectrum of behavior you're always going to have the worst on some end of the spectrum. It's going to be the worst possible scenario of what kind of human exists. Yeah. And that's when someone will step in and say, well, you want that censored, right?

And you go, of course. But isn't that different? Yeah. I mean, I think the free speech standard in the US that like, you know, imminent lawless action, like if you're actually like browsing a crowd to like go kill somebody or do something illegal, that's where the state should step in. There's actual physical harm or crime. And doxing and things along those lines. Yeah. So we were talking about Google phones. How significant is the difference to the end user if you have, say, an Android phone versus a Apple phone in terms of privacy? There is the issue of encryption. iMessages are encrypted,

but someone could hack into your iCloud and gain access to your iMessages. Yeah. Right? Yeah. I mean, from the privacy perspective, I'd probably say Apple is probably a better phone if you're totally paranoid about it. For example, Google still, for most advertisers, makes available that unique device that Dio was talking about. Like they don't have the ATT thing. And so if you're really paranoid about that, Apple's probably, as much as I've had a rough

history with that company. What if you're using something like WhatsApp or Signal or something like that that has- I'm not a crypto expert, but WhatsApp in theory is end-to-end encrypted. That means that literally from your phone to their phone it's encrypted, and even Facebook. They can see the traffic certainly, but they supposedly can't actually read what you're writing and then- And when supposedly is not a good word well I by contrast signal which I use a lot is open source and so the world has looked at the code that in theory at

least is running on the on the phones and so there it's in theory safe in theory in theory in theory yeah yeah I use Signal as well. Oh, do you? Yeah. I just, you know, I never know. You know, Edward Norton, or Edward Norton. That's hilarious. Edward Snowden. Snowden recommended it. So I'm like, okay, I'll listen to that guy. If anybody knows about privacy.

Dude, the reality is my life is so boring that, like, even the FBI was seeing everything. You know what? What would they, like, what would happen? Yeah, but that's an argument my friend used when the NSA was caught spying on people. Like, what are they going to find? I'm like, it's not the case. That's not the point. The point is it's human beings that have access to your data, and they shouldn't.

People shouldn't be allowed to just read your email, especially when it's a national security agency. And they can put you in jail. That's it. And the government, they have guns, put you in jail. Exactly. My prior reason when it comes to, like, somebody trying to sell me shoes, like, I don't give a national security agency. And they can put you in jail. That's it. In the government, they have guns, put you in jail. Exactly. My prior experience when it comes to somebody trying to sell me shoes, I don't give a fuck. Right.

But when it comes to the government, different story. But you have to look at it in perspective. Think about how the Apple employees targeted you for things taken out of context in your book. Yeah. What if someone takes things out of context in your emails and uses that as evidence that you're a piece of shit in a trial where they're trying to convict you and they're trying to sway the jury? That's where it gets sketchy, right?

Yeah, but there's this like truism in startup life that like for most companies, it's not a technical problem that's a problem. It's a human problem. And those problems are actually harder to solve. Technical problems have some solutions. So do you think that the technical solutions to human problems are just prophylactic? I mean, they're helpful. I use Signal and I like it. But at the end of the day, you have to believe in rule of law and honest courts. And that's the real solution to it. One thing you can criticize, I think, tech for is that it's a solutionist mentality that thinks that there's literally a technical solution to everything. And I don't buy that actually.

I think, yeah. You're using an Apple phone. I hate to call you out, but you- I used to be Android, but then it's funny when I was getting the Apple job, I bought a pile of Apple shit as part of my due diligence. And so that's the phone that I bought when I got the offer. Did you think about switching back? No. I mean, I don't hate the company that much. No. No. No.

But, I mean, is it a different experience? Is it a better experience for you in terms of, like, knowing that they don't give you the targeted ads? Like, what's better to you? I like the Android. I think the Pixel phone is a fine phone. I think people who shit on Android phones coming from the iPhone world are like kind of dumb a little bit. Like I think they haven't used a recent phone. They're just different. A lot of what I do is on the Google stack, like

Calendar and Gmail and stuff, which integrates really nicely with Android. A lot of Apple software and services historically, I think haven't been quite as good, although that is changing. So I don't know. I could probably go either way. I think people who like and like oh this sucks it's just like it's just muscle memory they just haven't accustomed to yeah yeah yeah there's certain things about apple phones that i like and certain things about android phones that i like do you use both yeah oh really i have a samsung and i have an iphone i use both yeah there's uh you know the innovations come out quicker on android phones they do actually yeah like i have an android fold one of those ones like if i want to watch a video There's, you know, the innovations come out quicker on Android phones. They do, actually. Yeah.

Like I have an Android Fold. One of those ones. Like if I want to watch a video, it's fucking like a little tablet. Yeah. It's pretty dope, you know. But it's also funny that people get upset when they get a green text. Like, shut the fuck up. Yeah, who gives a fuck?

That's like the stupidest fucking thing to be a snob about. You don't like the color of the text? Oh, God. Guess what? On the Android phone, it doesn't show up that way. It could be all kinds of different colors. It's customizable. And then, again, if you're using Signal, which I like to use Signal anyway. I'd say it's only in the U.S. people still use text.

Like overseas, it's mostly WhatsApp or Signal or whatever else that are actually even use texting. They do that, too, because it's cheaper, right? It's cheaper. Yeah. That's why WhatsApp took off virally overseas because texting could be expensive in these countries and it was essentially free. While in the U.S. they always had like the 300 texts a month. Like it was functionally free and nobody cared about it. So it wasn't that big a deal.

Do you think that privacy and this thing that's going on where Apple is sort of cutting off the stream of ad revenue that used to exist. Do you think that that's going to shape in many ways the future of how cell phones integrate into networks and systems? Huge way. I mean, there's a bunch of reasons for doing it, right? From the vibe that I got in my brief time there, I think people like Tim Cook and senior management care about privacy. It's not just, a bullshit line.

That said, strategically, it totally benefits them, the fact that they have tighter control of the data on that phone that only they make, right? So it happens to line up very nicely. And yeah, I think, I think part of the reason

why I joined, like, why would you join, like, a big, slow company when you're, like, this tech entrepreneur guy or whatever? Google and Apple are going to define that future in mobile, right? And I think people like – or players like Facebook are going to be second fiddle.

They're just going to be apps in their ecosystems. And so, yeah, I think it's going to change the way the – and this business, if this on-device thing takes off, that's going to change the way a lot of things work. How are they going to implement that? It'll just be – It'll be slowly. This child filter thing, right? They will just deploy code that lives on your phone and that the data lives on your phone. And the ad system eventually will probably move in this direction as well, if I'm reading the tea leaves correctly.

And so what that means is when you browse, again, you're shopping for Cabela's shit or whatever on your fucking phone, that data just doesn't leave the phone. And Cabela's targets you on the phone with an ad experience on Apple and your data never left the phone. So how would they know that you're browsing for Cabela's? Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of complicated tricks about it. Like what's called differential privacy, federated learning. There's a lot of little clever hacks because you might ask like, well, but then how do you train models? Like, how do you know, like, how do you train from, like, a million phones to know that, like, a guy who does this should see that ad? Like, how do you collectively learn it?

Because an individual is not going to generate enough data on one phone. There's clever hacks around that that try to collect that information in relatively privacy-safe ways, come up with a model that says, oh, if he's looking for X, show them Y. But then have your data never leave, never really leave the phone and do it that way. It's a very different way of engineering things. Yeah, because I was talking to a friend, and we were discussing privacy and GPS. And they were saying you should never use Waze and never use Google Maps.

You should use Apple because Apple destroys all the data." And I'm like, yeah, but you also don't get as good of an experience. Right, because you want to know where the speed traps are. That's how they know where the speed traps are because everyone reports it. Well, not only that, where the accidents are, what's the best route to get around the traffic. They're far superior. Waze was acquired by Google, but Waze is far superior. And it's so superior that they've set up cops in certain areas in New Jersey where they don't allow people to drive through the neighborhood that don't live there because so many people were routing traffic through there via Waze

that it was causing these traffic jams in these sleepy communities because people figured out you can fucking speed right through this neighborhood. And so people were violating speed limits, And so then they just started implementing cops, you know, and putting these stops where they're like, you can't drive here unless you live here, which is kind of sketchy, because you're supposed to be able to just drive wherever the fuck you want if it's an open neighborhood. Right. Here's one thing I would say about privacy. Here's another thing I think people kind of misperceive. A lot of the privacy zealots are like your buddy there who's like, don't use Waze even though it's convenient.

People think about privacy in these very absolute ways as an absolute right. And I think in reality, people are very smart about it. It's actually a commodity that they trade for other things, right? So you trade some privacy for security, right? Like the Fourth Amendment, like you don't have absolute privacy from the government. If you're dealing drugs, they can kick in the fucking door, assuming they actually have a judge's warrant. And we all kind of collectively agree to that because we think, well, that's an okay compromise. Or we trade some privacy for convenience. It's like, okay, sure, Waze knows where I'm going, but I know where the fucking speed trap is,

and that's pretty cool. Or I posted about this interview, I'm giving up some of my privacy, but in exchange for community, because people will see it and they'll engage with it, whatever. So I think a better way of thinking of privacy is not in absolute terms and like this paranoid thing. It's like, OK, am I getting value for my privacy? Like is what I'm giving up, like is that worth it for what I'm getting? And often it's not true. It's like, no, this just sucks and you're just using your data and like fuck that. But very often it's like, yeah, like I think people are very good at judging that.

I think people are smarter than people think. Do you think most people even consider it? I think it's a small percentage of people that are even paying attention to this shit. So many people are just using stuff. There's probably fewer people talking about it than you would get on Twitter. And there's probably even fewer people who actually know how it works. But I don't know. I don't know.

I don't think people are that dumb. And I think, you know, one of the interesting things about the whole anti-Facebook media cycle from 2016 is that if you were to look at the usage data for Facebook, you wouldn't be able to see where that backlash happened. People didn't actually stop using Facebook. Or they might have stopped using it being locked in and all the rest of it? Did people actually revolt against tech, or is that just an impression in some journalist and some commenter's mind? I think it's mostly the latter, actually. But that impression does have an influence on the stock price, right? Doesn't it? Maybe. I mean, to the extent that it impacts revenue. Well, what caused Meta or Facebook? What caused them? Is it turning it into Meta? Like what caused the stock crash? Because the stock has significantly dropped, right?

I think there was a few things in that earnings release you're talking about, the one last quarter. One of it was that I think growth slowed down, which is the first time in Facebook history. And it's because of this implementation that Apple? Oh, no, I don't think it was that. Privacy? No, no. I think it's just – it's funny. I kind of warn about this in the coda to the chaos monkeys. Facebook has more users than like Christianity, right? Most people on the internet

are on some Facebook property, either Facebook, Instagram, or WhatsApp, right? And so at some point you run out of humans, like you just don't have growth anymore. That is a crazy statement. Facebook has more users than Christianity. Yes. Who the fuck would have ever predicted that 20 years ago? Isn't that wild? How long has Facebook been around? It hasn't even been 20 years.

Founded in the mid-aughts, I think. 2004, 2005. My God. What a crazy statement. So in less than 20 years, something has arisen with more users than Christianity. That's bonkers, man. That really is. It's really crazy when you think about it that way. I think they're pushing 3 billion users. Have you met Zuckerberg? Yep. How is he? I don't know him personally well, to be clear. But the book opens in the meeting where I'm pitching a lot of this crazy targeting stuff in his meeting because he had to approve it because it was a big step.

You know, he's he's he seemed to me very somewhat cold and aloof, but definitely in charge. Like the wimpy dweeby character in like the social network or that movie or whatever. That wasn't the vibe I got from him in the meetings I was in maybe he decided to toughen up after that movie i'll show them dude he's like he's like an alpha male nerd like he's not and he used to have like these challenges for himself like learn chinese or do this or only eat meat that he shot himself like he would have these like nichian quests yeah to like and so i've seen him speak Chinese like in China. Supposedly it's good. Yeah. Yeah. They go crazy because he is good at it. Like, wow. No, he's clearly an exceptional mind. Right. It's it's clear. You know, it's really interesting. But also the burden of responsibility of running a company that is deeply rooted in who knows how many countries it is now. is deeply rooted in who knows how many countries it is now. And so many people, when they buy phones in these other countries,

Facebook is default installed on the operating system. Or WhatsApp. Yeah, wild. And he's only like 38 or something? How old is he? He's a little younger than me, yeah. He's like in his late 30s, yeah. What the fuck, man?

Imagine. Imagine trying to navigate that world and keeping your shit together you'd be cold and aloof too i mean i guess i'd imagine i saw him on lex friedman's podcast and he seemed much more normal in communicating with lex than i think i've ever seen him anything it's more he seemed more comfortable you know i think he freezes up a little bit in public speaking like a lot of his all hands he'd have a weekly all hands. He didn't come across as charismatic. I mean, there's a scene in the book that I mentioned is one chapter,

what got extirpated in Vanity Fair. Remember Google Plus? I know everyone fucking forgot Google Plus, but at one point Google Plus was like a big deal. And it was the first time that like Google, that Facebook faced like an existential crisis from another tech incumbent. Company went fucking bonkers nuts. He gave a speech almost like a Roman senator on the Senate floor,

of like, you know, Google must be destroyed and all this. And it was kind of pretty inspiring, actually. Really? So he can definitely have his moments. Yeah. Google must be destroyed? Well, no, he quoted,

I think it's Cato the Elder, a famous Roman senator, and he would end all his speeches with, Carthage must be destroyed. It was in the context of the Punic Wars. And so he just randomly cited that, and the implication was clear. And just to give you an idea of how crazy Facebook was, like the same day, there was a printing, like a silk screening poster lab in the company.

They literally printed that phrase with like a Roman helmet, and it appeared all over Facebook. And then everyone stole the fucking posters. They're all gone. I had like struggled to find a photo because Vanity Fair wanted a photo of it and I couldn't find it because I didn't manage to steal one of the posters. A friend sent me a photo before it got stolen of the fucking thing. That's how crazy

Facebook was. I know it's laughable. It's a joke. What was his argument for destroying Google Plus? Why did he think it was such a threat? It was a competitive threat, obviously. That's all it was. But it wasn't. It was janky and it sucked. My friend who was working at Google at the time when this was going on, she was telling me, like, oh, this is going to take over. This is going to be amazing.

I go, this is clunky and shitty. This is a terrible experience. The thing is to defeat an existing incumbent, you can't just be, like, 10% or 20% better. You have to be, like, 300% better. Yeah. And it wasn't anywhere near that. It wasn't as good. It wasn't even as good.

But look at the risk, though, right? Google has so many other touch points, Gmail, YouTube, and they were plugging it with a fucking G plus button everywhere. Oh, yeah. Which is basically a monopoly behavior. Like you're using your advantage in one market to take over another market, which is exactly what Microsoft did with the browser. So the threat, the thought was they were going to do that with Facebook. But it's amazing how bad it was. It still didn't work.

And with all that input, all that influence still sucked. Yeah. Kind of shocking yeah at the end of the day for all that struggle like he declared like seven day work weeks like balls out the whole fucking thing end of the day it just died seven day work weeks to kill google plus oh yeah man they would serve meals on the weekend oh christ there's a scene there where i go to like facebook on sunday full parking lot i go to google empty, empty. It's like, oh, okay. I see who's really fucking taking this for real. At the time, again, Facebook is different now, I imagine. But at the time, you know, this wasn't that early. Like I wasn't that early in employees, like 2010 or 11, 11. And it still felt like a startup in the sense that it was hyper motivated. People were like super fucking hardcore, posters on the walls, everyone wearing the same shit.

I mean I almost compared it to Communist Cuba. It's like our great leader, our great system of values, posters on the wall, everyone dressed the same way. What was the dress? I mean my uniform, they had this – I forget who makes it. It might have been like American apparel. It was like this little fleece thing. Some people had hoodies. Some people had like the Facebook branded thing and I would wear like a regular shirt and like pants or whatever.

But you think the people, they definitely tailored their wardrobe to fit in? I think it just became the default. They'd have these things called hackathons where you spend like an all-nighter hacking on shit. And you would get a t-shirt for that. And it was like a badge of honor. And you'd collect them because there'd be one like every month or two. And so people would wear that. You know, it's a lot of swags.

Like I was part of a team. There was like an ads product that had like a logo. Everything had a code name. So there was like an owl on it. So you'd wear like the owl shirt or whatever. I know. There's a phrase from Paul Graham who writes all these blog posts about tech and he runs this thing called White Combinator. And he said, if you brought back Lenin from the grave and brought him onto the campus of a large tech company, right,

and he saw the posters on the wall, the great leaders, the uniforms. He would think that communism had won. That literally this is it. The dream came alive. It's all true. And then of course you would show them like the bank accounts of the various people and like, well, not so fast, Vladimir. It wasn't quite the Soviet Union. But yeah, it was, and obviously it's not like living in Cuba, obviously. Like there's real struggles there that are not at all. Of course. But but it felt definitely felt that way. Is there the distribution of wealth in those companies?

Oh, yeah. What is that like? Excellent point. Yes. The best question, Joe. It's amazing. That's that's that's exactly one of the issues, right? Because the way these companies work, right? Like how early you are in the company defines your wealth and what fraction of the

equity you get. Because the real money is in the equity. The salaries actually aren't that high. I mean, they're healthy, but they're not crazy. It's the equity where you really make the real money, right? And the fraction you get, frankly, of like the cap table, of like the pie, changes by orders of magnitude, like literally within like, and the value of it a year or two of joining. So if I had joined Facebook like two or three years before it would have, it would have changed the entire picture. So what does that mean? Like say we're at Facebook, you're my boss, right? You could even have, you could be my boss and maybe you joined later because you're just a more senior person. You came laterally, right? I'm worth whatever X million, like a shit ton of of money because I've been here since like the very founding.

And I'm doing the same job as you, maybe even a more junior job and I'm worth like a fortune and you're not. So like, what is that conversation like? I go scuba diving in Honduras on the weekend on a private jet and you went and saw a movie in Mountain View and we come back,

hey, so Joe, what'd you do on Monday? And it's like, how's that convo go? Right, because this guy is living in a different world than you. And everyone kind of knows that but you can't talk about it because obviously it's like super corrosive to morale but that that's so if everybody knows it is it publicly discussed is it disclosed like how do they know how much money these other people have they just no you don't know it's not public nobody ever knows but they kind of know that it's a different world i mean there's websites you can go at, like, for big companies, see what the comp levels are so you can sort of get an idea.

But if you're talking about the early stage of a company, and it's so variable, right? Like, I came in what's called an acqui-hire. What that means is, like, they acquire a company, but really they're just buying you. So it's just, like, a nice hiring offer. And the numbers there can vary by a lot. And if you just get hired via like a college fucking recruitment fair, it's totally different. And then again, if, if as time goes on and Facebook shares go from five bucks to 50, suddenly a two X different in stock has a major,

or even more has a major difference. Wow. So is there a bunch of resentment inside the company because of that? Is there a call to adjust? I didn't get that feeling. Again, you don't know necessarily, right? It's a bit of blind man's bluff. There's no way to actually know the pay delta. So I don't think there's a lot of resentment there. I mean, in theory, the reward should vary with the risk, but I'm not sure it's true. Like, to be honest, if I were giving startup advice, joining as an early employee at a startup, I mean, now startup wages are pretty good. So you're not taking such a big financial risk. But to be honest, like the fall off in the upside between like a founder and like a, you know, early employee is massive. It's by orders of magnitude,

potentially. And it's like, you're taking the same fucking risk. It's like day one of the fucking company, right? And like, are you actually going to get filthy rich? If it becomes Google, of course, everybody gets rich in a Google, Facebook scenario. The reality is most companies don't, right? They either fail, most fail, or they have like a middling outcome, like the company sells for a certain amount. It's like, okay, it's a healthy outcome, but it's not like everyone including the fucking dog walker is a millionaire. Like, no, no. That's why it's fascinating when a person like Zuckerberg exists, right?

Where one person does develop a company that does manage to become fucking insanely enormous. Yeah, it's hard for me to imagine what the world looks like through his eyes. Your entire world, I mean, I've seen it through the eyes of founders of smaller companies. And even there, like I've known people who have found nothing Facebook size, but, you know, a few hundred people worth a billion or more. On paper, they're worth maybe 100 million or something. And it's weird. They become like the son of a solar system that revolves around them, right? Everything from their executive assistant to their therapist to the person who walks their dog to all their work life.

They're at the center of this thing. And the whole world revolves around them. And it kind of war warps their perspective and in the case of zuck it must be even more so but it warps perspective for famous people you know like it's like my wife had a conversation with me the other day we were talking about something and i i thanked her for bringing it up and she and because we had like a candid conversation but i go thank you i needed to talk about that i need to hear that from you. And she goes, you know, nobody talks to you, right? What do you mean?

She goes, nobody really talks to you. Like I see how people talk when you're not there. Then I see how people talk when you're around. Like everybody like gets weird when you're around. Right. And I'm like, yeah, I guess. I guess I kind of know that, but I don't know that. I mean, I know it, but that's my life.

You know, that's my life. That's my experience. I have to be aware of it, but I have no reference point. It's like these European folktales where the king dresses as a commoner and goes to talk to his people. You've got to just get a really good disguise and go out there and talk to your bros and see what they say. I should probably get some makeup, like some artificial nose and shit. They can do it.

You saw the werewolf out there. If someone can make something like that, they can artificial nose and shit. Like they can do it. Like you saw the werewolf out there. If someone can make something like that, they can make some wild shit. Are you currently involved in tech now? Or are you just doing your blog and your Substack? What are you up to? Yeah, I've got a few things going on. I wear a few hats. So I've got the Substack deal.

The Substack guys are great. And they gave me like a pro pro deal to take it seriously. It's a full-time thing. And so it's like a book advance. They front you money, and then you drive subs. And that's been interesting. I've got a podcast show on this app called Call-In that's kind of like Clubhouse. Remember Clubhouse, which was like this social audio thing?

I do, because Naval was trying to tell me that it was going to take off. I'm like, you're out of your fucking mind. And it did during COVID. Right. He was saying, I'm so high on this. He was an investor. He was an investor, obviously. I think he wanted me to talk it up as well.

But I got on with Tim Dillon, and we did it after our podcast once, and I was shitting all over it. I was like, this is crazy. He's like, well, it's private. I go, this ain't private. I go, someone's going to fucking put this online. Literally an hour after we did it, it was on YouTube. It's like, come on, man.

This is the fucking internet. I do think there's something to unscripted social audio that's different than a podcast. Sure. Conversations with people. Yes. You just decide randomly, out of nowhere, to have a phone conversation

with Lex Friedman, and you guys both upload it. For sure. Definitely. Yeah. Twitter Spaces does it. There's this app called Call In Back by the Sky, David Sacks. Twitter Spaces still exists? Yeah.

Yeah. If you go to top of Twitter, you should see. So that's a thing, like where people are talking on the phone like that? I didn't know that that was even going on. Yeah. It seems to have a decent amount of engagement. Here's the question. How come no one has figured out an alternative to Twitter?

I mean, I know Getter existed, but then when I got on Getter, one of the first things that I noticed is that Getter imported all of my Twitter followers and tried to pretend I had 9 million followers on Getter. I'm like, how is that? You don't even have 9 million users. How is this part of this shenanigans? Correct. How come no one's figured out another Twitter? How come no one's figured out another Twitter? Because of network effects. All these Twitter alternatives are always some right-wing thing where it's unfettered conversations or whatever.

But it's like, dude, A, I don't think the censorship on Twitter is that bad for most people. That's such that they would actually switch because of that. If you're somebody really on the edge, maybe. And also, you want the opposing side there to make fun of. That creates the spark. That creates the tension. Who wants to sit in a totally right-wing Twitter? I wouldn't want to. No, I don't want to do that. But I also don't like... Do you know what the Babylon Bee is?

Yeah, yeah. Did you see that they got banned from Twitter? Hilarious. They got banned from Twitter for saying, Rachel Levine is the man of the year. Right. I saw that. And they won't even take it down, which I salute them. I mean, that's a fucking ballsy move because they're going to lose their Twitter account because they're saying, you know, like it's true, but it's, it's not true that she's the man of the year. I mean, it's true that it's a biological male, but the fact that they have the balls to say, we're not deleting this, you know, I'm like,

I, I support that, but I don't support them getting banned for that. That's a fucking joke. You can't crack a joke. Web3 solves this. Joke. Decentralized. Decentralization. Do you think that that is something that would be adopted universally by a large amount of

people? We'll see. I mean, in general, I'm kind of pro-Web3. I think it's a fascinating thing, and I hope to actually move into that direction myself. Can you just, for the non- Sure. It's funny. I don't feel like I'm a total crypto.

As you can tell, I don't talk about things that I don't feel I'm a domain expert. I always feel like I'm on thin ice, but I'll do it and possibly run the risk of crypto bro rage. So Web3 is interesting. I'm sure your listeners have heard of like Bitcoin and like maybe Ethereum and stuff. And like that's, those are interesting, like financial applications of it, which is totally valid and cool. But if you can imagine a bigger vision of that, of decentralization, as you're describing, why is it called? One way I get at it, it's like, what is Web3? Like, why is it called Web3? Like, what the fuck is Web2? Like, what is Web1? Right? So Web2 is like everything we know. It's like Facebook, Twitter. It's like these gated platforms in which, you know, if Babylon Bee pisses off the fucking Twitter people, then they just get thrown off the platform.

They don't own anything, right? Right. In many ways, what the Web 3 people want to recreate is Web 1, which we're both old enough and some of your listeners I'm sure are old enough to remember like email, FTP, Telnet, like core protocol, HTTP, like the web, right? These are core protocols that aren't defined by like Facebook or Twitter saying this is the way the world works. Like, no, we agree that this is the – like when you send an email, this is what the actual document needs to look like for you to receive a valid email. And there's no way to kick anybody off email. You can't be – I mean Gmail might say we don't want to give you a Gmail account anymore. But email as such is not shut down for you. You can still send email.

And so Web3 in a trustless environment, like with not people necessarily agreeing in direct ways, coming up with a way to recreate a way to say like, hey, I want to, I own this thing, like an NFT, like a picture of an ape say, I own this thing. And like the world thinks I own this thing. And it's not a function of Sotheby's or an auction house or whatever saying that I own this thing. In theory, that's how it should work. So that's the idea. So you imagine a Web3 version of Twitter, how does it work? You post a fucking thing, it exists in the blockchain, this thing called a blockchain, which is basically a public database that we all agree on, everyone maintains via various mechanisms we have to get into, and that's it. And then I can have, in the same way

that email just works, I have an app that sits on top of it that like reads that and renders it to me in some Twitter like way. But there's no Twitter that can just say Babylon B, you don't exist anymore or Donald Trump get off of Twitter. Right. That's the goal. Interesting. And you think that that's possible to implement large scale, like the whole country adopt it? Like what would it take? Do you think would take some sort of sensor egregious censorship thing? Like that I think Donald Trump being kicked off Twitter was a step in that direction We're so many people were so furious that the idea that you could take a sitting president and remove them from your social media platform

That this could like you needed something along those lines maybe even more egregious Like you said about privacy, I think those aspects to your average person who isn't living on the edge and posting like weird, crazy shit, isn't that convincing? I think for Web3 to take off, and to be clear, my career has not been in like consumer internet. It's been like on the backend, like monetizing the usage. But if I were to bet on this, there has to be something new and cool that Web3 enables that just doesn't exist that's going to drive that adoption. You're not going to convince people to leave Twitter for the new Web3 version of Twitter just because, oh, there's less censorship going on, right? I don't think that it's really top of mind issue for most users.

What's interesting is Twitter still allows pornography, right? Dude, when I search for random names that collide with a porn star's name, I see porn. I don't know if it's legal. I don't think it's allowed. You don't think it's allowed? I mean, it was for a long time, right? Was it? Okay.

Yes. I mean, for a long time. I mean, there's no way they don't know that porn stars are going to post pictures of them fucking. I mean, they just do.

Like, if you follow porn stars and you click on their feed, you see a lot of sex. That seems to be still allowed, but a fake exploding head will get you kicked off. We're still talking about that guy. Yes. Calling Rachel Levine a man will get you kicked off, but you can watch people jizz into each other. That's fine.

Wow. Right? Yeah. Although I think most people probably don't want porn in their Twitter experience, but yeah. Well, some people obviously do, and they must have drawn some line. Right? Yeah. Although I think most people probably don't want porn in their Twitter experience, but yeah. Well, some people obviously do. And they must have drawn some line. I think it was probably during Jack's tenure, because Jack was a very pro-free speech, pro-First

Amendment sort of a guy. And he wanted the option... He was advocating for the option of a Wild West version of Twitter. Right. Where you'd have a Twitter that's censored and moderated, but another Twitter that's just like fucking get crazy. Yeah. And no one else on board was interested in that option, I don't think, or at least not enough to actually get it moving. A lot of what motivates Web3 is that crypto libertarian aspect of tech that just wants to total freedom, the most minimalist The most minimalist thing, which, you know, I think it's powerful. And yeah, I think we should have it.

I think as time goes on, that's going to be more attractive to people, I believe. You think so? Yeah, that's what I would hope. Do you think Gen Z cares about that? I don't give a fuck about Gen Z, but the people who are alive are not just Gen Z. There's a lot of people that aren't Gen Z that are millennials and even Gen X that are aware of the problems and the pitfalls of allowing social media companies to dictate discourse, to decide what's acceptable and not acceptable to say.

Yeah, I agree. You look like you have to pee, do you? No, no, no, totally not. Just checking. Most people, when it gets around three hours, they start squirming. And I always wonder, it starts filling the back of my head like, this guy might have to use the bathroom. I do not have to pee, Joe. Okay, good. But I want to thank you for being here, man.

I really enjoyed our conversation. Cool. And I enjoy your Twitter, too. Do you? Okay. Yes, I do. That's how this started, right? Yes.

Because you followed me. Yeah, yeah. I read your Twitter. You're a very sensible guy. You say a lot of things. And I'm like, guy's got balls. He says things that I agree with. He says, you're smart.

I appreciate that. Thank you, Joe. My pleasure. So tell people your social media and one more time, your sub stack is the pull report. The pull request.com. Pull request. The pull request. There's a link on my Twitter profile. Go to Twitter, Antonio GM is where I'm at on Twitter. I'm on this app called Colin as well. Also pull request. What is Colin? Colin is this clubhouse thing

that I mentioned this is a social app but you can find links to all that stuff on Twitter Twitter is really the place DMs are open you can DM me although we'll see

alright good luck with that we'll see your DMs are not open I take it Joe no fuck no fuck no well I may have to change that but yeah

well thank you very much appreciate your time alright bye everybody Thank you very much. I appreciate your time. Bye, everybody.