The Joe Rogan Experience - #484 - Alexis Ohanian

Episode Date: April 11, 2014

Alexis Ohanian is an internet entrepreneur, activist and investor, best known for co-founding the social news website reddit, helping launch travel search website Hipmunk, and starting social enterprise Breadpig. He also is the author of bestseller "Without Their Permission".

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out! The Joe Rogan Experience Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night! All day! I don't know why we have to have the music, but we do. I like it. We've done it without the music several times. We just get fucking crazy, and we just go, we said, you know, let's do the least produced version of this possible,

with no professionalism attached to it. Anyway. Which would be hard. You guys run a tight ship here. You got to go with your right name, dude. You got to go with it. Ohanian? Yeah, you got to go with that.

Fuck all these silly people that can't say that. Learn how to say that. Ohanian. That's awesome. Well, I mean, my father was born in the States. Both of his parents were part of the generation that came over. So my dad pronounces it Ohanian as well. But I'll tell you this.

I'll tell you what I own. See that first name? Alexis? You never call me Alex. Oh, okay. I like that. You grew up as a little pudgy kid named Alexis, and you learned real quick to own that name.

Oh, that's awesome. Because I was born in 83, and my father named me after a boxer, Alexis Arguello, this Nicaraguan fighter. I know exactly who he is. That's what I was named after. I got to see him fight live. Serious?

Yeah. Yeah, I got to see him fight live a long time ago. Me and my friend Jimmy Lawless, we went down to, I think it was in Lowell, Massachusetts. We saw Alexis Arguello live, and we saw Mickey Ward live before he became famous. I should have brought my father. What am I doing here? Oh, it was awesome. It was awesome.

We were in Lowell. It was fucking great. Lowell, Massachusetts. Which is where Mickey Ward was from, so when doing here? Oh, it was awesome. It was awesome. In Lowell. It was fucking great. Lowell, Massachusetts. Which is where Mickey Rourde was from. So when he went out there, everybody went crazy. Yeah, I got to see him when he was an up-and-coming contender live. But seeing Art Grail, that's... My pop, he showed me his entire closet full of VHS tapes of his fights.

Wow. Which I keep telling him he needs to do something about. Digitize, bitch. But now I just go on YouTube, and I got a quick query, and he had a wonderful mustache, an amazing left jab, and that combination is brutal. Well, Alexis Aguero was awesome. His straight right hand was a work of art. And a gentleman.

Yeah, a really, really good guy. Like a real man, a real man's man. So that was my namesake. He died young, right? He did. Did he die of a suicide? I've talked to Nicaraguans about this, and he got very involved politically

after his fighting days, and there are a lot of people who believe there was more to that story than just suicide. No way, man. That never happens. Nobody ever kills anybody and tries to make it look like a suicide. It's never happened, bro.

It's been snoped. Have you ever snoped it? I love my Snopes. I love Snopes, too. Sn's been snooped. Have you ever snooped it? I love my snoops. I love snoops, too. Snoops end a lot of stupid fucking arguments. I always thought it was snoops. Real quick. This is one of the advantages of the interwebs.

I know what you mean. Isn't it like they're snooping for the facts? No, no. I think it's snoops. I think it's snoops. Yeah. If it was snoops, it would have two O's. You fucking non-English speaking motherfucker.

You could probably check snoops for this, though. If the English language wasn't so goofy and there wasn't any weird exceptions like that, it would be so easy to shit on you right now. But there's a lot of ones that don't make any sense. It's a pretty fucked up language. This is very bizarre. And it's more bizarre when you're working with words like Ohanian. I know, man.

It fits it. That's one of the reasons why you've got to give Schwarzenegger his props. That's a bold goddamn move. The guy owns Schwar've got to give Schwarzenegger his props. That's a bold goddamn move. The guy owns Schwarzenegger. Schwarzenegger. Arnold. And Arnold, too. Arnold is fucking, that's the kid from Different Strokes, you know what I mean?

It's not the manliest, most manly bodybuilder ever. He made it, though. Fuck yeah, he did. See, Arnold, definitely a fighter. I know I'm not. I didn't fulfill my father's prophecy of me being a boxer. Instead, I guess I'm a lover, definitely a fighter. I, I know I'm not, I, I, I didn't fulfill my father's prophecy of me being a boxer instead. I guess I'm a, I'm a lover, not a fighter. Well, you figured your own path out, sir.

Thank goodness. Thank God for computers. You don't have to be a fighter like in the physical form. Obviously you figured out a way to succeed. You figured out some cool shit. For sure. I mean, that's what everybody admired about Alexis Arguello was the same thing that anybody admires about anybody who is involved in the creation of something

cool. And you're involved in the creation of the coolest fucking website on the internet. I certainly like to think so. You're involved in Reddit. Yeah. You can't get a better hub of information. Like when new things,

innovation, a lot of gossipy bullshit. But that's people. That's what we do. It's people. That's what we do as people. We like gossipy bullshit. But that's people. That's what we do. It's people. That's what we do as people. We like to talk shit. But other than that, I mean, the resource,

if anything is going down anywhere in the world at any time, you can pretty much find it at Reddit. And it gets verified, the vote-up system. Like good posts rise to the top. Bad posts fall down. It's such a smart, cool thing. And really the model i think for like online discourse when it comes to like message board type discourse i think you guys are the model you know

we i mean it's it's amazing uh when steve steve hoffman my co-founder and i started this thing we were in a little apartment in medford massachusetts i lived in medford medford we were on 72 i feel bad for whoever lives there now. Can I say that? No, don't say it. Definitely not. People are going to fucking know. I don't want to get in trouble. It's on fucking whatever. What's with the questions?

I'm in Medford. Medford. Yeah, and it was great. We had just graduated from college, just graduated UVA, went up to Boston. We raised $12,000 from Y Combinator which would go on to invest in like Dropbox, Airbnb and Reddit and with 12 grand in the bank

we worked our asses off for three months in that little apartment and built Reddit and it's to be a top 50 website now 150 million people a month

it's crazy it's crazy I love hearing shit like that it's crazy and that's so cool that's the American dream man that is the American dream

100% we were just some nerds with 12 grand in the bank total. We just worked with a couple of laptops, no connections, and, you know. Well, what's the American dream, right? I mean, the American dream where your parents somewhere in their past, either their parents or their parents' parents came over from Armenia. Oh, yeah. For one reason.

They fled the genocide. So what year was this? We're talking about the early 1900s. Yeah, so 1915 was when it got started. If you want to get really real, so my birthday is April 24th, which is the remembrance day of the genocide. Oh, wow.

So I'm half Armenian. On my father's side, I'm full-on Armenian. On my mother's side, I'm full-on German. She actually immigrated. She was fresh off the boat from Deutschland. Wow. So it's a really interesting 20th century. Dude, your DNA has gone through some shit. Yeah. It's, it's, it's about those two.

Yeah. And, uh, and I feel like having, I mean, right there. Yeah. Certainly from the Armenian side, you know, they came out of survival. My mom actually came for love to marry my dad, very romantic. Um, but, but both of them, right. The reality was, um, leaving her life. She was on track to be like a pharmacist in Germany, but coming to the States, she was just an ignorant, like degree-less, uh, immigrant, right. And quote unquote. Um, and so she worked jobs that she had to work just because it was paying the bills. Like she worked as an au pair. She worked in, I'm so incredibly like proud of what she did to leave a life behind a comfortable, great life in Germany to start fresh here. Um, and then obviously my father's family, like, you know, when you grew up with a bunch of Armenians, you know, real quick how lucky you are to have that sort of genetic lottery

of being born here instead of over there. Yeah. I didn't, I was totally ignorant to, uh, the, the, the genocide, um, until, uh, I was interviewing a fighter, Manny Gambirian after one of his fights. I was interviewing a fighter, Manny Gambirian, after one of his fights. And he was dedicating his victory to the victims of the Armenian genocide. And he was trying to bring awareness to it. And I was like, wow.

Good for him. Yeah, he's a very proud Armenian. So I had to look it up and find out what it was all about. But that's one of those ones that you don't hear about too much. Another horrific event in human history. It is certainly really unspoken. And I'm trying to think. I discovered System of a Down because I was listening to 98 Rock back in Maryland. And I heard Serge talking about the genocide.

And I was like, who is on a rock station talking about the Armenian genocide? And I'm like, oh, Armenian rock band. Isn't it crazy how one event like that can make, I mean, it's not that Armenians wouldn't be, have like nationalistic pride or pride of origin before that. But that one event has everybody bonded together so much more. And especially because a lot of folks don't even know about the Armenian genocide. It is, and I was a history major too in school. So I've thought a lot about this. It is. And I was a history major, too, in school. So I've thought a lot about this. And it's partially because it is unrecognized in Turkey and even here in the U.S. on a national level. But it's this it I think it's the fact that it's still this open wound. And it seems it may seem moot. Like, because we're all like, well, hold on. To deny the existence that this thing happened is so incredibly offensive because it's not doing justice to all the people we know.

It's crazy that we're having this conversation because just 17 hours ago, the U.S. Senate committee passed an Armenian genocide resolution. Seriously? Yep. So it's still got to go to the House or did it already? It says, I don't know. I'm wearing some kind of ignorant. But it says 12 got to go to the House or did it already? It says, I don't know how it works. I'm kind of ignorant. But it says 12 senators voted for the resolution. I feel like when I have to pay attention to how the government works as far as senators and congressmen and representatives, I get angry. It hurts.

So I just shut it off. I don't want to know who has to go to who. You know why? Because your system sucks. It's broken. This is such a donkey ass old king system. Maybe when people were riding fucking horses

and hurling bows and arrows at each other. This fucking system's retarded. Yeah. So you make me know who is it? Well, it has to go through the house

and the house passes the senator. The senator must pass muster. The fuck out of here. It's dumb. And it is, it has been so co-opted by money.

And it's frustrating. It is. And I am an optimist. Don't get me wrong. I think the internet, I mean, the reason, in part I wrote the book, the reason I campaigned

against SOPA PIPA was I really believe the internet can be a way for us to get the government that we deserve. I completely agree. It's just, it's a process and there's a lot of shit

to get through. Well, I think what the process really is, is in changing the way people's minds operate. And I think that process, without a doubt, has already begun. I think kids of today, I'm 46 years old, so anyone who's in their 20s, I guess,

I'd be talking about kids of today. They're men, but they're kids. They are so much more advanced than I ever was when I was at that age. Than I was. I was a fucking monkey i knew nothing i knew neighborhood couple books uh you know cnn news every now and then i knew nothing yeah it's uh it's it's amazing and it is i i visited 77 universities on the tour and it

makes me makes me jealous frankly it makes me very hopeful too but you're a part of it man yeah but but look this is like these kids grew up like i i remember getting that modem i had a 33 6 in middle school i remember getting my first pc it was a 486 sx my parents i was lucky enough to get that when i got it in middle school right my parents didn't have a ton of money and they didn't know shit about technology but they knew enough and i got that chance and that has provided everything for me. But there are kids coming up today who by and large

have known this technology from jump and they don't even know what a dial-up sounds like. That's insane. And so they think of knowledge as being something in real time. Like you were saying earlier, we're sort of developing this attitude of like,

oh right, we can go seek out this information. We can squelch gossip on Snopes or we can go learn how to do, we can learn string theory on Khan Academy. But this generation coming up, they just, they take it for granted because they just know, oh, I have a problem or I need to figure something out or I want to create something and share it like the internet. And that's how, that's how all of us got to learn the programming languages that helped us build things like Reddit. But it's helping filmmakers right now. It's helping artists. It's helping photographers, helping comed helping comedians right like think of the wealth of knowledge

that the up-and-coming comic now has to learn from to look to share like yeah the amount of the resource of just finding things to talk about as long as they don't mencia it though can't do that it's horrible that's a verb now um the but the like the amount of internet like uh internet websites internet search engines amount of social media networks, whether it's Facebook or Twitter, just a sheer amount of funny stories that are coming your way as a comic today. Yeah. It's like, if you can't write new material, it's like you're just not paying attention.

Yeah. It's not like the old days. You had to wait for shit to happen. You're living in fucking Pennsylvania and just looking left and low. Come on. I need something to talk about. Now all you do you go online it's like it's constant it's overflowing it kind of sucks though because then the same comics are also looking at the same news story and writing jokes about that that's totally gonna happen that's totally gonna happen without a doubt like uh i was doing something about almond milk. Somebody let me know on the podcast that, what's his face,

Louis Black has a great hunk on soy milk. It's basically the same joke. You find that out because of the internet, too. The good thing is I wouldn't have known that unless that joke could have made it into my arsenal.

I wouldn't have even known that Louis Black had it. Then I would be accused of plagiarism, and I would feel stupid. Can you change almond milk to something else? I don't know. It's not important. It's a tiny part of the bit, but because of the internet, I know all this.

And think about it this way, right? The speed with which you can learn shit, this brings everyone up. It forces us. We see this in tech all the time, just because of the nature of writing code and creating applications, you know competition, this is as efficient as it gets. There's new stuff coming out every day. And it forces you to stay up and to be innovating and to be pushing. And now I think of it as there are so many more,

in this instance, like comics who are connected, who are watching, who are seeing what someone is doing. They're like, all right,, I'm not going to take that joke. But now I just got to, I have to push harder, faster. And on the whole, I think we all benefit because we'll get better jokes. Human beings will benefit. The artistic expression will benefit. The real problem with plagiarism,

whether it's in that or blogs, you see it in blogs a lot. I mean, people still are getting busted for it. Yeah, rightfully so. Yeah, absolutely. But the difference between the mindset is what's really important. Like the guy who's an actual writer,

the guy or the girl who's an actual writer, the girl who's an actual comic, what they're trying to do is figure shit out. And they're trying to find ridiculous points in things and then make funny observations about those points. If you're just copying stuff, then you're not exercising whatever it is that tunes you into those ideas in the first place so that you're lost when you're done. If you get busted stealing jokes and then you have to write your own, you're like,

holy shit, like, I don't even know how to do this. Like, you're like an open miker. That's why you see, like, the guys have been accused of plagiarism. There's this, like, high period in their careers and then this massive drop-off where you look at it and you go,

oh, my God, like, who the fuck is writing this? Like, this isn't funny at all. Like, you went from being this guy with these really funny points to this monkey

with dog shit coming out of your mouth. And what is that from? Which could be the act. Yeah, it's a good act. It's probably better than your jokes. But it's because they never really did it

in the first place. They were just stealing. And that mindset, they seem to be mutually exclusive. Like people who are really creative are almost never the type of person that would even think about plagiarizing. So it's kind of fascinating how it's a,

but something like Reddit exposes that. I found out about this found out about this on twitter but the just social media and just the ability to communicate with people just it's unprecedented and and i you have to i mean in in 05 two of us in a little apartment there's no twitter there's no tumblr facebook is still in colleges it's still in like elite colleges back then it It was a different world. But, and to give credit where it's due, I mean, I really, I do believe we're all standing on the shoulders of giants.

Also not my quote. But like, you know, the message board, right? That's nothing new, right? We had message boards. I ran a message board in college forum, you know, before that. When did they come out? Like what was the first year of the message board?

Ah, well, I mean, really early internet. You've got BBS systems. You've got, I mean, they early internet, you've got BBS systems. You've got, I mean, like the forum Usenet, like basic forum software. Someone creates an account, usually with like a pseudonym, right? They create an account, they post a link, or they have a discussion. This stuff is as old as the internet, as the World Wide Web. What Steve and I got right was we adapted it, modernized it a bit because we'd let people, you know, at large upvote or downvote. And essentially, I mean, I hate to simplify it that much, but Reddit is like

a next generation forum platform. And then what we realized that Dig and all the Dig clones didn't realize was that they were just one front page. We knew if we were going to win, we would have to be a platform for communities. Dig was a platform for a community, right? The front page would only have so much stuff on it. But we knew, you know, Steve and I knew that, yeah, we had a, you know, there were things we were interested in, right? We're interested in technology. We're interested in the Redskins.

We're interested in like just football. Like we might have a certain audience, but what's going to make this work is if anyone who has a particular community or a following, whether you love My Little Pony and want to create a Reddit about that, a subreddit, which there are lots, or you want to create about your favorite team, or you want to create about your favorite TV show, or just about science,

or asking questions about science, Ask Science, amazing sub. All these things exist because we knew this has to be a platform. Just like Twitter is a platform for individuals, this would be a platform for communities. It's just amazing that it's been able to be pulled off the way it is.

The vote up, vote down system is such a brilliant system because you're always going to have noise. You're always going to have people that just want to make noise. You're always going to have people that just want to be twats. And now you can sort of at least without censoring, sort of just push that to the bottom. And it's not perfect. I will argue, and this is all to Steve's credit. It can be co-opted. Yeah. I mean, there is no perfect system. We will argue, and this is all to Steve's credit.

Yeah. I mean, there is no perfect system. We constantly fight against ring voting, all that stuff. But Steve built a really smart system with a really smart hotness algorithm. And by the way, we're open source. So if you want that, go take it. It's there. And I think it is, for what it is, it's one of the best on the web. And I think that's why our content is so good. It used to be, right, we started with just people linking stuff out. The first link on Reddit, fun fact, was a submission I made to the Downing Street memo. Remember that? It was showing this leaked memo during the run-up to the Iraq war, the English government kind of saying like, hey, we're going to drum up some, you know, support here to support America going into this war. And it was my first submission and it was a link to another. Was that the proposed false flag event?

Yes. Well, the notion being, we could pull this thing up. The notion being. What's it called again? Downing Street Memo. Downing Street Memo. And so this was leaked out as basically an indication that the British government really wanted to help drum up support for the war. I don't know how explicit it was.

I don't recall if it was like an explicit, like, I guess they wouldn't call it a false flag thing in the memo, but we're going to do a stunt. Yeah. What if they have like code words? And then the big bad wolf says. But this was the first submission to Reddit, and it wasn't that new at the time, but I was just thinking like, hey,

if this thing actually worked, like what would we want Reddit to be a place to like find and have people link to? And this seemed like the perfect thing, right? The internet enabled some person to put this image of a leaked document online and share to the world, right? Massive printing press. And, uh, but what's crazy is we thought that's how it was going to always be maybe like three years in some user. Cause users are fucking clever, um, linked to a comments page. Like they knew when they hit submit what the link would be, like the number, the random number, well, not quite random, the sequential number we would generate. And so they linked to

it. What they effectively do is create a self post, which is now a feature in the site. But basically Reddit only used to let people link out to other sites. One user hacked it and learned you could just link to itself and create this amazing comment thread. So you wouldn't, you know, when you click on it, when you do an AMA, right, you're not creating something that links somewhere else. You're creating something that just creates a Reddit comment page. And what that user did by hacking the site was show that there was a tremendous value in just saying, Hey, people have a discussion about whatever it is. And today I, I, I believe it's a little less than half of our content is actually linking to Reddit. So it's actually, it's an AMA, or it's an Ask Historians post, or it's just people talking

about shit. It's not even linking to other content on the internet. And we never could have seen that coming. Wow, that's awesome. And it was just the user being creative, basically hacking our site to, you know, that word, we need to take back. Right. We need to take back that word. Take back hack and make it a positive thing. Yeah, you can life hack.

And you see this, right? You can life hack. You can body hack. You can basically find a, understand a system so well that you can find an optimal way to use it to your advantage. That's it. That's hacking. It's not the, like, Angelina Jolie bagging on a keyboard hoodie and like doing evil it can be but it's it's a much more innocuous word yeah

it's it seems to have weird it's it's got a combination of meanings it's like some people use it in a negative way but some people look use it in a positive way like dude i fucking hacked the system yeah like someone someone's saying i hacked the system that Someone saying I hacked the system, that's in a positive way. But, oh, these hackers broke into this website and put dicks in everybody's picture. That's how we look at it. We also have this weird sort of connection to adolescence, like adolescent pranks,

hacking being some sort of an adolescent prankster type behavior, which I don't think is fair either. You know what it is? That's an interesting point. hacking being some sort of an adolescent prankster type behavior, which I don't think is fair either. You know what it is? And that's an interesting point. There's definitely the, there's always been a spirit of, like, pranking in the hacker community. Like, I'm talking, like, OG hackers, like MIT,

Bill Niener earlier, like Steve Wozniak being an example. And I think what's cool is there's that childlike wonder. Like, because I think a lot of that shit usually gets beaten out of us as we get older especially in a lot of traditional industries and whatnot and so I'd like to believe that that can even be an excuse for people to think about stuff a little differently and think about stuff a little more like

let's take things a little less seriously as part of that broader cultural understanding it's cool that there's a prankster type thing rather than an evil, vicious, mean type thing. You know, like when they hack someone and they put a smiley face on their front page instead of, that's kind of funny. I mean, it's kind of funny.

You know, well, now we know that someone can hack into your page. I mean, in a way, it's probably good that you know that that's possible. Yeah. I mean, I don't encourage people to just go hack at anybody's website because it fucks up that person's day. But all in all, overall, you should be lucky that someone's doing that. And that if they're doing it, hopefully they're not stealing your credit card information and doing it maliciously. There's a whole, I mean, we can dig into this. So there's the white hat.

So the white hat hacker is the quintessential like, hey, I found out there's a problem with your website. Right. I'm not going to exploit it. I'm just telling you. Right, right. So you need to fix it or hire me and fix it. But usually just like, and we had, we've had white hat hackers periodically emailing us with exploits on Reddit that have done us a huge service because they told us about this thing. We could, I mean, you can't possibly know every.

No, you can't. You know no you can't you know yeah it's interesting man it's it's the the amount of information that's available now has got it so it's it's so the world is so wired that it's like we're standing in this crazy river of ideas that are just constantly flying by us and And a few people are looking around, poking their head up out of the water and just looking at each other going, holy shit. And the internet is where it all sort of pools together. I mean, that's the channel for it all,

and that's where it all pools together in places like Reddit or places like Twitter. All over. Where you just, you think about how much you know now, how many things you've been exposed to now, how many strange bits of information, all the chaos that was caused by WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden and all this stuff. Where's all this coming from? Well, it's all on the internet. The internet is just boom, boom.

It's like these shots are being fired. These holes are being exploded into the system. holes are being exploded into the system and then you know there's a bunch of scrambling to try to put scaffolding up where the hole wasn't boom another hole gets blown out of the fucking society standards it is weird it is is probably a really scary time to be an incumbent oh yeah but it's a great time to be an upstart it's a great time to be someone who is trying to find a way to get their ideas to the world because there's never been a better time. Yeah, there's never been a better time to be an honest politician. It's a good move.

It would be. And that's just it, right? That brings us, like, God, I hope we get there because we need to. I'm a big fan of the states. I think we can evolve. I really do. It's just going to take a lot. It's just going to take a lot of these old fucks getting out of office.

These people that have been doing it in a sneaky, dirty, underhanded way since the jump. There's fucking people in office that were alive when Kennedy was assassinated. They were in government. They're still involved. I don't think it was supposed to be a career. Pretty sure the founding fathers didn't want it to be a career. It was the exact opposite of that. It was a service.

That's one of the reasons why they wanted to put term limits. They wanted to make sure they don't get too much of a stranglehold on how things operate. Because men just do that. Men are creepy fucks. When we get power, some of us, they get to positions of power like that, they just distort things to their advantage. distort things to their advantage. And then you're stuck with lobbyists, and you're stuck with these Arlen Specter-type dudes who is also involved in the single bullet theory.

He's one of those long-term... Yeah. Really? Yeah. He was the guy who came up with the idea. He was the... That's like when people say, the single bullet theory,

you're looking at it all wrong. Arlen Specter, motherfucker. That guy. He said something. That guy came up with it. That's how goofy that fucking idea was. One bullet went through two people and caused all this fucking damage in their body and barely dented the bullet. The bullet looked beautiful.

Little pieces of bullet in their bodies. Nothing missing from the bullet. Whatever, whatever. This is a magic bullet. This is a single bullet. It was that Arlen Specter guy yeah it was his idea he had to come up with a reason why one bullet had done so much damage people right now that are anti-kennedy conspiracies theorists are going nuts right now possibly even on reddit rogan's such a fucking retard with this

bullet theory but that all came from our inspector that all came from that sort of old school politician. Those guys that had just been around and been a part of the system for just too long. I wonder if it's possible to do, to dig, I mean, I want to, I want to be hopeful enough to think that there is a chance for someone to

get into it for the right reasons and then be able to stay in it for the right reasons. There is. And not get. A lot of them probably mean fuck guys, guys like Arlen Specter. I'm sure probably got into it for all the right reasons. But I think there's certain systems that once you get into, you just look around and you go, oh, fuck.

Like, it's just such a mess, a viper's nest that you're like, what? When you're a young guy, it's like, did you see the movie Wolf of Wall Street? Of course, yeah. I don't know how much of it was a hustle. You know what i mean i mean whenever you have a story and the guy who it's his life it's based on the story it's probably going to make him look a little bit nicer than he was a little bit more innocent in the beginning of the movie but it's that system where you see leonardo di capro he starts out he's a family man

he's a nice guy he drinks water he doesn't want to have anything to do with drugs. And he gets co-opted by the Matthew McConaughey character. And then he becomes a part of this system that's fucked up. And so he's a victim. He becomes someone that you can sort of sympathize with. You know, how much of that is real? Yeah. I definitely, I can only imagine. Because you've got to figure, I mean, why someone who gets into, that whole industry, actually the whole finance industry just blows my mind.

Yeah, it does. Because I really like, I really like making things and doing things, and I just can't even wrap my head around getting into work every day and just hustling like that. Well, it's a crazy way to live. Those guys are maniacs. Yeah. A guy I used to know that I grew up with, he became a stockbroker

and he was a maniac. He was a maniac. And all of a sudden, he's like, bro, we're fucking selling stocks and shit. It's great. It's amazing.

I saw him in a bar wearing a suit with a tie. I'm like, what the fuck are you doing with a suit on? He was an animal, this guy. And all of a sudden,

he was a stockbroker. They're like maniacs, a lot of them. Like wild, crazy, gambling, risking maniacs a lot of them like wild crazy gambling risking maniacs they need to fix i think you if you had a job in a system like that and i'm not equating politicians with with uh these kind of guys with uh stockbrokers but i think what a system that's equally fucked the political system is equally fucked as a financial system you look at the both of them you're like wait wait wait why are you doing it like that what is that a derivative is what is it fuck oh no what did you guys make you're making things up

what did you make yeah you have 100 billion dollars you don't have any money there's no money here at all this is crazy that that system is equally fucked to the political system like wait the wait the fucking hold on a second. The Supreme Court just changed the limits? They just made it so that you can just unload money on politicians? Citizens United, yeah, got a nice little jump site. What? It's crazy. Yeah, so I think equal system, once you incorporate yourself into it,

like a lot of these politicians who probably do go into it with good intentions, I think you find along the way that if you try to buck the system completely you probably get blackballed there's probably going to be a lot of blowback against you by your party by competing parties you're gonna you're gonna be in a tough situation you against the world and that's how they survive they survive by sort of attacking each other like this and then propping up these individual candidates that differ only slightly from each other and all of them supported by the same giant hood of money that comes from corporations. It's crazy. It's a crazy system. So if you're a young guy and you're a senator from Delaware and you decide that you want to make some changes in this world and if you elect me me, I'm going to blah, blah, blah, and blah, blah, blah.

And then you get in there and you're like, oh, fuck. You're making me really optimistic right now, Joe. And I just got off my house a cards bender, which, you know, amazing. I think those systems are inherently corrupting. That's what I'm saying. I just think that younger people have to, it almost has to be like transparency involved in your actions is going to reach such a tipping point that there will be no room for corruption. And once that happens. Different story.

Yeah. And it's got to be on the way there, right? All the forces certainly seem to be on their way. I mean, it's crazy. We still live in an age where these senators and congresspeople are still doing what they're doing on their Twitter direct messages or SMS. You mean sending dick pics, yo? Yeah. But the funny thing is there's this kind of like, okay, at a certain point there'll be mutually assured destruction where like the president is going to have like photos of herself from like a party in high school.

Right. We're going to get to a certain point where everyone's got shit on everyone from all the stuff we did ever, but that's going to take a little while. And in the meantime, I mean, I hope that the thing that still makes me hopeful is coming back to the sort of the finance side of things. Money is the corrupting influence in Washington, one of the biggest. And right now, there are a few people who can put in a lot of money and have a lot of an effect. What I hope the internet can do, and we've started seeing this happen, is in the same way that it's given a voice to people through social media, we can start using small amounts of money and in aggregate start having a really big impact. And we've seen these money bombs before in 08 and in

12, but I feel like the software is going to keep getting better and better with crowdfunding and with these models that are going to really inspire people to want to give to a candidate and know that there's actually going to be accountability, too, with how that's spent and who they are and whatnot. One of the big ones, one of the really big ones that people think is kind of frivolous, especially people who don't smoke marijuana, is the legalization of it. The legalization of marijuana in Washington State and Colorado is fucking gigantic. Those are the impacts that it's had on their economy. It's been so big that everyone's forced to step back and go,

wait a minute, well, okay. Alright, so now we know. It's like sweaty hands rubbing on their pants and a lot of fucking late night meetings and a lot of guys pacing back and forth and a lot of people yelling, John, they're going to smoke pot. They're going to fucking smoke no matter what.

What are we doing here? Let's make some money. We can't fix the street. We can't hire new teachers. And that's right. If that money being used on the war against drugs were being used for more productive things and we did legalize, my goodness.

The war against drugs is a crazy idea. It's a crazy term. It my goodness the war against drugs is such a farce crazy idea it's it's a crazy term it's like the war against breathing you know we figured out drugs it's probably made people better in a million different ways the idea that you got a war against it is and it's just you're calling it drugs you don't make it a distinction the war against negative lethal drugs that are addictive you're not even making any distinctions. It's just a war against drugs. So what, are you going to break into the fucking store and steal all the aspirin at gunpoint? What is this war you're saying?

It's ridiculous. It's preposterous. And I hope, you know, I know D.C.'s, I don't know where D.C.'s are right now. I was on the table. Maryland just decriminalized. Yeah, that's awesome. Which is a step in the right direction.

And I mean, what happens if we get legal weed in the District of Columbia? Now, I know they're not technically a state because that's ridiculous. It'll happen. It has to. But like- It's insane. I see the discrepancy between the federal law and the state laws.

But if you're not having feds knocking down doors in the District of Columbia, I think maybe everyone's in agreement here. And you see so many ex-law enforcement, so many ex-dea people come out in support of legalization because they realize if the goal if we have a common goal here um to actually make our streets safer and actually curb the the criminal element that comes in with this um legalization is the way to do it and make a lot of money and help help a lot of people live better lives because they don't have to be treated like criminals for a drug like marijuana i've never seen a single person that i didn't think was just trolling say that they think that marijuana should stay illegal anyone worth having a conversation with like when i hear ann coulter

say it i'm like this bitch is trolling she's trolling obviously she's too good at it obvious troll is she's got a half a fucking smile while she's doing it. Did you just meme it? You did. I did. That's another cool thing that came out of places like Reddit is memes. Reddit and message boards, these memes. I mean, there are obviously 4chan is still a hub for a lot of that meme creation. I feel like at this point. That's Vhub, right? Yes.

That's where it all began, isn't it? It is. I mean, it is one of the or message boards. That's a classic 4chan, that picture. Yeah. That's a classic 4chan picture. And it's just, it's so interesting because now there are enough, basically, right, 10 years ago, the culture of people who were spending a lot of time communicating on forums online was pretty small. Right. communicating on forums online was pretty small right and now right everyone's taking their selfies like it has reached a point where uh it's nearly a it's so so ubiquitous or so close to it that yeah these these memes these funny interesting image whatever they are can catch hold and

literally millions of people can see i mean it gets a little weird when you see like rick astley in the thanksgiving day parade a couple years ago r Rickrolling everyone. Yes, that was weird. That's a little weird. A little art influencing life in a strange way. Yeah. Yeah, that was weird, man. The Rickroll. It's a strange thing when something just catches on like a virus, like a real disease,

and spreads across, I mean, or an organism, almost like a thing with a lifespan. We, like, I mean, as humans, we are, and I'm not saying plagiarism here, but, like, we are sort of intrinsically copy machines. And that, like, early man, right, sees someone else hunting a little better than him. And he's like, oh, I could use that as a weapon? Dude, this guy, this guy over here, let's all make weapons, right? And we are really good at seeing what someone is doing. That's how we learn.

Yes. And what's so wild is, you know, because of that hyper-connectivity, because of how fast these ideas now spread, right? And we are really good at seeing what someone is doing. That's how we learn. And what's so wild is, you know, because of that hyper-connectivity, because of how fast these ideas now spread, right? These memes, like humans are sort of naturally really good at this, but now we can spread this shit faster than ever before, right? Within hours, within minutes, millions of people can see an interesting photo of a cat or an interesting video or what have you. You know, Alexis, you can't do that on your own. You didn't get there on your own. Yeah, but I think what Obama was trying to say when he was trying to say that you didn't build that,

you didn't make that. He was, you know, about the infrastructure that's required, you know, to build your own small business. Remember, it was that speech that he was so criticized from. There was, that quote was definitely taken out of context. But it was a shit quote. The reality is, he said it very poorly. But it's essentially what we're saying is we all needed someone before us to come up with all these ideas that we all piggyback on.

Shoulders of giants, man. Everybody. Look, dude, I have been incredibly fortunate. I sold my company when I was 23 years old. That was crazy, crazy. Dude, how much coke did you do? Don't lie. I have actually never done coke.

Good for you. Thank God. If you were hanging out with that guy, you would have done coke. You would add too much coke, and I'd ask you that question, and you'd go, whew.

Wow, bad things, man. You'd have weird eyebrow hairs you can't explain. Like, when did that start growing? I hate coke. Oh, man. It's not... I feel like caffeine is enough of a stimulant for me

um that i'm more interested in the stuff that you know calms me down yes chills me out chills me out and that's what i think would change and i think that's that's one of the things that that is changing uh right now in in america because of the fact that the spread of this stuff the the what the spread that's starting out first of of all, information-wise, when people found out the real truth about the LD50 rates, you can't die from it. It's not even possible. And that malarkey document

or film, Reefer Madness. Oh, it's great. It's ridiculous. It's great to watch now. Yeah, fascinating film. It's a straight propaganda. Yeah, that's a fascinating movie. It's fun to watch today.

But there's a lot of people that still believe that it does something negative that it slows you down or it removes motivation i think um people have to realize like the the motivation for motivation in the first place like why why is that so inspiring to you like what is what is motivation you want someone to get off their ass and get a job and get to work? Well, they just have to be excited about something. You know, most likely they're more excited about sitting on the couch than whatever it is they're being exposed to in their life. It doesn't mean that marijuana removes motivation. It means that if you're one of those lazy bitches that doesn't think outside the box and you're stuck in a spot and you're discontent and you like to get high and sit on the couch, you're probably going be like that for the rest of your life but that's okay too it is it is a it's not harming

anyone exactly those are the same people that would drink cough syrup they would drink fucking cough syrup until they you know their liver failed syrup drinking that syrup i mean for real that is the same they're the same people and the idea that it did all the benefits reported by people like i'm not saying you smoke a little weed, but I'm saying you probably smoke a little weed, or me or anyone else who does, that's all discounted. Yeah. And not to mention, I mean, seriously, from a medical standpoint, I mean, you can't fight. Like every day there's another story from another person who's using it to get through chemo or using it to get their app. Like when you see that many people's lives being so positively affected by a

thing that's naturally occurring, like really? I, come on guys. It's all, it's a truly unbelievable story. The fact that it's still around in 2014 is really a truly unbelievable story. Cause if you looked at it logically and factually and said,

could you imagine a culture in which information is sent instantaneously all over the globe to which the answer to virtually any question a person can come up with can be answered on your phone in a matter of seconds, that you truly have the information, the current information of the world at your disposal. Could you imagine there would be one of the most beneficial plants that grows easily, contains essential amino acids, it's very high in protein, it can make you think about things differently, it can make food taste better, it makes sex feel better,

it makes you sleep easier, it removes anxiety, it makes you nicer and kinder. That sounds amazing. You would go, yeah, but it's illegal. And it's a Schedule I drug. And the record screeches. And you're like, wait, but it's illegal. And it's a Schedule I drug. And the record screeches. And you're like, wait, but hold on. This was a major, hemp was a major crop for the 13 colonies.

Yeah. Well, when they figured out the cotton gin, that's when things got a little weirder. Because they used to make clothes with hemp. But before the 1930s, they came up with a thing called a decorticator. And the decorticator was, it was for the first time they could use this giant machine to break down the hemp fiber. Because before they used slavery and then when

slavery was abolished and the cotton gin was invented all along, sort of in the same time frame, the shift went to cotton and away from hemp. It's really kind of fascinating. This is like Wikipedia, man. I know a few things that I've seen in documentaries, but it's a fascinating, fascinating story because

what was really, what shut down marijuana is the crop hemp. That's what shut it down. And that's the main reason why today, like when I was talking about on it, we can't grow our own hemp. We would love to, we would love to pay a farmer to grow hemp for our protein powder. That way we could monitor the soil. We would love to. We would love to pay a farmer to grow hemp for our protein powder. That way we could monitor the soil. We could make sure everything's organic.

We can do all the right steps, but we can't do it. We can't, we literally can't do it in America. Land of the free. But it's, it's totally non-psychoactive. That's what's so stupid. Like it's, it doesn't, that what you're getting when you're getting like a hemp bag or you're

getting hemp protein powder, there's zero THC in there. It's not in there. You cannot smoke. Kids, you cannot smoke a hemp bag or you're getting hemp protein powder, there's zero THC in there. It's not in there. You cannot smoke. Kids, you cannot smoke your hemp bag. Don't try it. Don't do it. But the idea that that somehow or another can be illegal because it's related.

Related to the plant. That's crazy. I mean, that's like a poppy plant. Like you could have a poppy plant. You could eat a poppy seed bagel. We're bananas. It's crazy. And then you know what it is, though?

Poppy seed bagel. We're bananas. It's crazy. And then, you know what it is, though? The real victims of ending the drug war would be all those prisons that would no longer be full of young black men. Aha. You say this, but what if your business is running prisons? Right.

What if your business is prison guards? I mean, that's another thing we found out about lobbies. Someone think of the prison industrial complex. Prison guards lobby against drug legalizations. They do it because they want to stay in office. They want to keep their jobs. And how many lives have to be ruined in the process? It's fucking crazy. It's a vampire system.

It's a horrible vampire system. And it's a system that's brought out of, it's based on these reverberations or these vibrations from the past. It's all like this scramble when people were retarded, when they came over on boats and this is just how they did things. Get him in the clink, throw him in the jail, you fucking scoundrel, you were smoking marijuana or whatever the rule that you broke is. That they realize that they can do it, so they do do it and they throw you in some fucking cage. In 2014, the fact that that's still going on and that people are actually profiting from it, these are more things that the Internet has a huge fucking problem with because the Internet has guys like you.

There's young fellas that are very smart and unconventional and seeing the system and being like, you know what? I don't buy it. I think there's some shit that people I knew growing up that were adults, I knew they were fucking idiots, and I knew they made bad choices. And now I'm looking at the, the repercussions of this everywhere. I'm looking at it.

I'm saying, no, this is dumb. This is, so this is one of the things, especially talking to college students that I love bringing up, which is that, and I'm the first to admit it.

Like I have no fucking clue what I'm doing. 99% of the time, especially when I got started, I still don't know. And I've, I 99% of the time, especially when I got started, I still don't know. And I've come to realize, like, and I've been lucky enough to meet some pretty, like, successful, impressive people. But, like, you dig under the surface, we're all just hacking it. Like, we're all just expertise, experience. Those things all help.

But, like, every one of us is a fallible human. All the conventions and rules and status quo we know were created by other fallible humans. And there's no reason not to look at that and go, huh, does it have to be that way? Or why is it that way? And if the reason why is, well, that's the way it is. Well, that's a terrible reason, you know? And, and when you see the world as being that hackable, so to speak, like you start to realize, all right, well, let's just, let's actually question stuff.

And, and for, you know, I remember I was a freshman at UVA when 9-11 happened. For this generation of millennials coming up, nearly all of us, one of our first really vivid memories of the world was 9-11, this awful tragedy. And then we get into these two wars and then think of all the authority figures we've had in our life since that moment. They've all at one point or another either misled us, sort of deceived us. You've got the financial crisis. You've got the housing bubble, all these conventions. Oh, trust us. We know what we're doing. This is the thing. The American dream is buying a home. Go to college. Take on that student loan debt. Don't worry. There's a job waiting for you. Every single one of these conventions from all these people in power have not held up. And so I think in particular,

millennials look at that very skeptically because we're like, all right, you know what? So the conventional stuff didn't work out for anything. Like we have no choice but to realize, you know what? We're all just hacking it. So let's really – let's dive into the passion. Let's figure out a better way to do something, not settle for the way it's always been. I think you're completely right. And I think, first of all, I'm slightly annoyed by this new statement that I'm first to absorb, millennials.

I know. It's a terrible phrase. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm not buying it. We. I know. It's a terrible phrase. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm not buying it. We can rebrand this. I think we should. I really do.

Because I think there's a divisiveness or there's a separation that comes when you start labeling people by what era they were born in. Fair enough. Fair enough. It's a state of mind more than anything else. Yeah. Yeah, I think so. But I think it's horseshit.

Generation X, Generation Y. Shut the fuck up. It's just humans. This idea of putting things in a label, generalization. The human race is evolving. Watch Father Knows Best and then watch Game of Thrones, okay? Shit's different now. We don't have to come up with names for the generations.

And you're Generation Y. There was fucking Jamie from The Laugh Factory. Tried to tell my friend Todd Parker. Todd Parker's a stand-up comic that I started out with. And Jamie was like, buddy, you have to be Generation X guy. This is what you do. You go on stage and everything, my generation, Generation X think that's going to be your hook. And I remember him trying to explain it to Jamie.

I'm in the background going, don't. No, don't fucking listen to him Did you hear what he told Tony to do? What did he tell Tony? Buddy You must always wear a cowboy hat I was just thinking he would just look like Woody from Toy Story Because he needed a hat

No he was just shopping for hats Jamie The guy who owns Jamie Masada The guy who owns the Laugh Factory, is a sweetheart of a guy. He is a very nice guy. I love him to death. But he's crazy.

And he gives advice to comedians. And he was a comedian at one point in time. He might have been the second or third worst comedian that's ever walked the face of the earth. But as a club owner, he's like one of the best. He's a sweetheart of a guy. He wasn't the worst comedian. He just barely speaks English and he's not funny best. He's a sweetheart of a guy. He wasn't the worst comedian. He just barely speaks English and he's not funny. But he's a sweetheart of a guy.

But his ideas are terrible. And he'll like tell young comedians, he'll like pull you aside, buddy, listen, this is your move. From here on out, you go on stage, you wear superhero costume. With falcons? You don't look like superhero. That's the joke. I want to know, is there a comic

somewhere who actually took his advice? Oh yeah, there's been a bunch. There's probably Caratops. I don't want to name any names

because it's sort of like someone who got tricked by a guy who said he was in the military so they had sex with him and then it turns out he was just a liar and

the girl feels bad. I don't want to shame anybody so I won't say any names. But yeah, there were some comedians for sure. There was definitely

some comedians that listened and changed their Their persona You know And came up with like a plan And it never worked Because once Jammies got you dancing First of all

Oh yeah keep dancing Now I control the dance buddy Puppet strings Buddy you're dancing bad It's not my dance moves are good Mitzi did it also with Carlos Mencia Fuck yeah Yeah Mitzi made

Well I mean I don't know I don't know exactly His moves are good. Mitzi did it also with Carlos Mince. Fuck yeah. Yeah, Mitzi made him. Well, I mean, I don't know. I don't know. I mean, allegedly it was Mitzi's idea, but obviously we're not pals with that dude, so we probably shouldn't tell his life story without checking in with him. He probably doesn't even know it this way. I've learned so much.

Yeah, well, I don't hate the guy. I just hate what he's doing. But there's been a lot of those club owners that come up. The best club owners that come up the best club owners are like wendy from denver who just stands back just you know if you're doing well you're doing well she encourages originality and her clubs have built like a real scene in denver just because of her like if there's one person that like is important for the the entire denver comedy scene this is one lady, Wendy.

Did Mitzi ever give you any advice that you either took or didn't take? You're too dirty. You're too dirty. That's just what she said. You clearly took that advice. You're too sick. What you said was sick. It wasn't funny.

It was sick. I used to have this bit about Anna Nicole Smith's husband. This is the one she always hated. Unfortunately, there's no good versions of it online. I think there's an audio version that's decent. Let's record it now. But it was all about him making her do ugly things before he died, like that she was earning this money

and then everybody's like, oh, she's stealing his money. I'm like, what are you talking about? The guy made a billion dollars from scratch. Don't you think he knows what the fuck is going on? He was onto it. Yeah. So the joke was that he was going out in style with this big fat kentucky fried hooker and he was just i mean it was just this horrendous old man young you know buxom blonde bit that just was so disgusting and mitzi would go it's disgusting it's not funny i'm like but why is

everybody laughing they're fucking idiots. You clearly don't have to. I mean, this is like, hey, it's nice advice, but if people are still laughing and buying drinks, she's going to keep having you. Well, she loved me. She's nice. She's a sweet woman.

She just didn't like, it wasn't her style of comedy. I get it. I get that. And there's some things that I did that she really loved, and she wanted me to keep doing those. And I love those too. But there's shit that I'll do that I, and I always have, because I would laugh at it. And my friends who are comics would laugh at it.

Like, if I know that Stan Hope is in the room, I'll probably ramp something up. Just because I know he's there. I'll, you know, add some extra fucked up shit to it just to get him to laugh. Just something totally inappropriate that I don't's there. I'll, I'll, you know, add some extra fucked up shit to it just to get him to laugh. Just, just something totally inappropriate that I don't even mean, but I'll do it just for stand up. If he's in the room, like we do that to each other.

Comics do that. So when, when a comic is writing a bit, that's like really fucked up, like half of it is just like to make your own jaded sense of comedy, like jolt it, you know, just give a little prod.

Yeah. Just see. Oh man. That's I, I, uh, that is the bar that I like, cause I do a fair bit of public speaking. Right. But, um, I don't have to fucking tell jokes like that standup bar has to be, and I'm not just blowing smoke. Like it's gotta be the hardest like public speaking gig to have to do. It is. And it isn't, but to do it night after night too? Well, that actually makes it easier. Joey Diaz says it best. Joey Diaz,

he goes, this is the easiest, hardest thing you can do. Okay. It's the easiest, hardest thing you can do because if you do it right, it's easy.

If you got it down and not in the beginning, God damn, it takes a long fucking time to not be on shaky legs every time you go on stage. But once you get good enough to where you kind of like,

you understand yourself better so you're not as insecure, you're not as concerned about acceptance, and you can kind of relax and you're more comfortable in your own skin, and then you kind of understand the roots of humor better as you get older, and then you become a comic. So then, boom, you're a comic. And I think from there, it's all just about maintaining. It's about continuing to do it.

And once you do that, it's fairly easy. It's like once you're doing that. But it's like once the train is moving downhill, it's all just about maintaining it's about continuing to do it and once you do that it's fairly easy it's like once you're doing that but it's like once the train is moving downhill it's going well but if the train stops and you got to get it uphill oh you're fucked that's why guys when they take time off something weird happens to comedians when they take like three years off of comedy and then get back in because their their are slim. Those are some dark sets that you watch. You can see the bottom of a man's soul. You can see some shit, man, because they forgot how to do comedy. I mean, they just fucking forgot

how to do comedy. That happens after a couple weeks, though, sometimes. I had two weeks off and I went back on stage. I was like, oh, shit. Why do I feel nervous right now? Well, it's also your intention. I mean, you don't really prepare that much. You don't listen to recordings. Oh, I do so.

I listen to every, I tape every single one of my things. But you listen to them. Oh, yeah. You do? Usually it's on the way to the next gig. I'll listen to the one just did. That's a good way too. But one way that I like is to sit down and listen with a notepad and write down shit

that I shouldn't do anymore or write down shit that's the front end is clunky and it works over here and I'll just keep doing that. There's guys, I'm glad you do that. The guys who don't do that are really silly. It's an important point. I have to do it. As a professional. And I have to write it all down and have to write it out on the note cards and stuff like that. That's a good move too.

As far as memory, that's the best way. Writing things out physically in longhand or I write it out on my galaxy yeah i got this fucking galaxy where is it how dare i left it out there somewhere my the galaxy note threes is big ass well i've got ogre hands so it's perfect i have a note three two um but it is outside yeah um but they are there they have that little note stylus thing. You use the stylus? Yeah, I write all my notes longhand. Damn, old school. So instead of using it like, instead of having a notepad, but I always still have a notepad anyway,

because I still, for whatever reason, I haven't let go of the nipple. But the notes, like written notes on that are almost just as good. Really, it's very sensitive. I'm a stylus skeptic. Are you really? I am. Talk to him real quick. I'll grip the phone. I want to see if you fuck with it, if you like it. just as good yeah it really it's very sensitive i'm a stylist skeptic are you really i am i've never i've talked to him real quick i'll grip the phone i want to see if you fuck with it if you like it i mean i like i've just never i have the note three i just have never like i pulled it out

and i was like i noticed you have the pebble have you tried the yes the gears or whatever the watches i don't want it from samson don't even get me started yes the thing is uh and here's the thing i had the first pebble they're why comb company. I actually was sitting in the room when we interviewed them. I remember their first prototype, and I was so blown away because I was like, here's some friendly Canadians who made a cool watch. All right, talk to my phone. I think it was a Blackberry back then. And then they launched that campaign, and I was like, this is amazeballs, right? $10 million Kickstarter. I pre-ordered mine. And I got my watch watch and I was really impressed. But I was a little, like, I liked it. I didn't love it. I'd be wearing other watches back and forth. Once I got this one though, seriously, like, game over every day. Really? The fatal flaw of that Samsung watch, aside

from it doesn't play with iOS, the fatal flaw is the battery life. It's got a beautiful full color screen. It lasts for maybe a day. I got enough shit to charge every night. I don't want to also have to charge my watch every single night. Or it should have a built-in charging mat or something where you just take it off and throw it on the mat. The new one, the Gear 2, that just is supposedly better.

It looks interesting. Obviously, like I said, I'm buddies with the Pebble guys. So take this with a grain of salt. But in all objectivity, I think it's an amazing software. The OS, Android, obviously, they know what the fuck they're doing. The question is going to be the hardware. I mean, that watch is all just Photoshop right now. If they can make a watch that has a decent battery life that looks that good, okay, all right, I'm perking up. But until I actually see something with a real battery on it, I'm not forgetting.

What about Google Glass? They just announced that Google Glass is going to be available for one day only to anybody that wants it. Of course CNN uses the photo of the most hipster hipster. Yeah, look at his mustache. Sweat this. Look at this. Holy shit.

Yeah, those are all my joke notes. Damn. I love this, though. It's pretty badass, man. But this is really encouraging. There are, I really, I don't know. I want to think, like, I feel like I'm still just as hungry as I was when I got started. And I'm really motivated and inspired.

Like, because I feel like if you want to stay on the top of your game, this is the stuff you have to do. Because as soon as you start getting soft and start getting cock cocky or complacent um man right on that all right all right let's write something cool i'll save it and i'll put it up as a twitter message all right okay it's fascinating because uh it it doesn't it doesn't lack like there's not anything where i'm doing it where i'm like this isn't completely picking up what I'm writing. It picks it up exactly. As long as the stylus is touching the screen, it's perfect. And so for like writing notes, and they're small files, so you can have fucking thousands of these things.

It backs up automatically. I get an email when it backs up. I've literally never taken the stylus out of the phone. Apple, you can suck it. You can suck it, Apple. stylus out of the phone. Apple, you can suck it. You can suck it, Apple. Until you come up with one of those, you can suck it. Jobs used to be very anti-stylus. Fuck, Jobs, you can suck it too.

I'll dig you up and then you can suck it. That's rude. That was rude. There we go, saved. I didn't mean it. If I meant it, it would be horrible. The new information that's coming out about the two new iPhones that come out this year. You know what I heard? I heard

they're going to make you gay. No. No? No. I heard that. Oh, look at that. Oh. It's for the upvotes. For the upvotes. Okay. And I can send this right now. Just throw it up as an Instagram. So that Pebble works with the iPhone and what information is it sent?

Does it send text or just kind of basic stuff? You get notifications. You know, you can mess with your iTunes if you want to advance, et cetera, et cetera. And there's a whole,

I think the long play, and it seems like a smart one, is the App Store model. So Pebble has their App Store and there are tons of different apps. So I can check in on Foursquare from my watch

and I don't have to be that guy who takes out his phone to check in on Foursquare. This is one thing that's whack about Android. When you use the Instagram app, it gives you this weird little... No one's going to be able to see this, but it gives you a weird little window.

Oh, they won't let you... I can't get your whole thing. That's whack as fuck. See, that was a great demo, but see... That's one way that the iPhone has it over this. No, no, that was a great demo, but see. That's one way that the iPhone has it over this. Well, no, no, no. The square ratio size is just an Instagram thing.

You have to use a different program, like, what's it called? Yeah. I've heard. It should be able to just add black space. Yeah. So you should be able to shrink it down. A tip on the iPhone is you turn it sideways, so it's the wrong, you know, like when you have a picture the wrong way. And then you take a screenshot of that so it keeps the black bars on the side.

Whoa, and then you get the black bars. And then you, yeah. Nice pro tip, man. You got to do it gangster. That was a pro tip. Yeah. Pro tip by Brian Redman. If you just crop it so it just says, if you can get four of the upvotes and then the Reddit alien, that'll suffice.

Okay. Let's see if we can do that. I'm looking out for you. No. Also, oh, man. We're going to have to do another one. I have failed you. No, you haven't. No, no. I feel like I'm looking out for you. We're going to have to do another one. I have failed you. No, you haven't. No, I feel like I'm letting everyone down here.

Just do a smaller one. We'll do one more. Google Glass for $1,500. So Google Glass. $1,500 you're going to throw into the trash a week later. You're going to be like, what the fuck is wrong with me? I am very, very skeptical. I don't think it'll hit mainstream adoption.

I think even if they go, I mean, they've got designers now designing glasses. They've got NBA players wearing them. Tap it so it doesn't have that thing. So I am full disclosure, I'm an investor in a Google Glass company. How dare you? But here's the reason why. And they actually just had a bunch of press in the Globe. They are building software specifically for industries.

So, like, they're working with doctors at Beth Israel who can use them to help check in folks, get their records, because they need both their hands free, right? They're working with energy companies so that people out in the field can have real-time data on what's going on at this random oil pump. Like if they got to, you know, check settings or updates, like basically they're targeting specific industries where people need both their hands free. And so it's not the sort of obnoxious, like walking around on the street, ordering a latte from your face. It's like, this is a very specific task where I need both my hands free and this is helpful. And so I think, I think that's where it'll succeed. Kind of like how segues are just for mall cops. I think this will be next level useful.

Oh, God, yes. That's right. Can't forget the tourists. It's going to go blank on you. I still haven't gotten on one yet. You haven't gotten on one? It'll change your life. They're great.

They're really dope. He's just being facetious. That was like one of the things that they were saying about the product before it came out. It was going to change your life. Change cities. Change your life. Change cities. Change your life. Change life as we know it.

The streets around it. Silly bitches. That was the most ridiculous thing ever. You're just standing and moving. How's that changing life? Did you hear about the new R age of cow tipping that's going on in San Francisco and stuff like that? People are flipping those little baby electric small cars. Yeah.

It's called smart car tipping. Yeah, that's rude as fuck. Wow. Imagine if you went outside and you're a girl and you weigh 100 pounds and someone flipped your fucking car. That's a dick move. I also think, so I grew up in the suburbs. I did not see a lot of cows.

I guess from time to time. Can you actually tip a cow? No. They're huge. We've done it before. a lot of cows, I guess from time to time, but can you actually tip a cow? No. Yes, you can. They're huge. No, no, no. We've done it before. Really? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes, we did. From Columbus, Ohio. Me and my friends did it twice.

You've done it, right? Was it like a calf? Was it like one of those veal calves, too? What happens is that when the cows are in the fields, they pretty much lock their legs and sleep standing up a lot of times. That's how I sleep. And so you just go next to them and push them, and they seriously just fall down. But they're so heavy. No, they just tip right over.

Cow tipping's huge in Ohio. I thought this was stuff that suburban kids, like urban lore, because none of us ever hung out with cows. No. If you ever want to go cow tipping, I'll take it. I mean, it's completely rude and evil. I don't think they would really like that. No, they don't like it at all. I wouldn't like it. Did you really go cow tipping, I'll take it. I mean, it's completely rude and evil. I don't think they would really like that. No, they don't like it at all. I wouldn't like it.

Did you really go cow tipping, Brian? Twice. Yeah, twice. Can you find one YouTube video? You actually pushed a cow over? Yeah, me and two of my friends. Okay, and I want it to be one of those, remember those night vision, like the Paris Hilton videos?

I want it to be one of those night vision videos of the cow. All right. Do you have an Instagram? I do. It's one of those night vision videos of the cow. All right. Do you have a, um, an Instagram? I do. It's, it's my name just at Alexis Ohanian or Ohanian.

Okay. That's another thing that's annoying about these things is that they insist on trying to change what you wrote. Like they're like my creative, the ethnic, uh, yeah, they're, um, I not going to take it personally. It's just that they're autocorrect.

It's like really aggressive. And goofy. They're awake? Yeah, well then good luck. They're going to kill you. I see no cows tipped. You got to look at these videos before you put them online, bro. Seriously.

Find something real. You can do that off screen, right? Yeah. I don't know. I just want to make sure. He might have thought he was cow tipping. He's on mushrooms, tripping his balls off. Dude, we tipped cows.

We never left the house, man. What are you talking about? We were in the field. You don't tipped cows. We never left the house, man. What are you talking about? We were in the field. You don't remember? I was there. Oh, yeah, man. I was tipping cows. Yeah, I bet if we Snopes tipping cows.

Like, let's Snopes. Snopes cow tipping. I should have brought my laptop. Also, side note, and I've enjoyed your podcast. I love the real time with the laptops. I wish every show basically had someone in real time just calling out shit. Here we go. Ready?

All right. Let's get this out of the way. Cow tipping, at least as popularly imagined, does not exist. Drunk men do not on any regular basis sneak into cow pastures and put a hard shoulder to a cow taking a standing snooze, thus tipping the poor animal over. shoulder to a cow taking a standing snooze, thus tipping the poor animal over. While in the history of the world, there have surely been a few unlucky cows shoved to their side by boozed-up morons,

we feel confident in saying that this happens at a rate roughly equivalent to the Chicago Cubs winning the World Series. Okay, this is... Cows, like, sit down on their legs and just sit there,

and you can go right up to them and tip them right over. This is from modernfarmer.com. Well, I'm convinced. An article on cow tipping. I've subscribed to Modern Farmer for a decade now, and they have never led me astray. YouTube, the largest clearinghouse of human stupidity the world has ever known, where you can watch hours of kids taking the cinnamon challenge, teens jumping off rooftops onto trampolines, and the explosive results of fireworks set off indoors, fails to deliver one single actual cow tipping video.

All right. Well, we did it as a kid. The one exception is a Russian dash cam video, which shows a semi-truck full of cattle overturning. That's really good. You need to watch it. And cows shaking themselves off and walking away. Cows not giving a fuck. Yeah.

Wow. This is a spectacular dash cam video. So this article is calling bullshit on you, Brian. When I was younger, we would go to these farms in Plains City, Ohio, and they would have tons of cows. And we would break into the cows, smoke weed, and there would be tons of cows, and we would break into the cows, smoke weed, and there would be cows that would just... You'd break into the cows?

No, break into the fence. And there would be cows that would sit there like perched up on their legs, just sitting there sleeping. We would come over and just push them right over. I don't know if that's the cow tipping that you heard everybody doing, like people saying that the cows tip over,

but that's what we used to do because that's what we thought you were supposed to do i don't understand what you just said this cows are standing up right because they stand up when they sleep right no not all the time there's cows that like do they go to their knees like knee thing here i'll show you okay i thought cows always stood up horses always stand up right uh i have no idea i'm like my's telling me horses are the ones. Yeah, horses, I think, always stand up, right? Yeah.

And if they're down, they're hurt. We have the Google. Yeah. But I'm really skeptical of this cow tipping. Sorry. Yeah, the internet disagrees with you. Oh, look at that. That's a...

Sounds like cow rolling. Brown cow sleeping. That's cow rolling. So the cow would be like that, and you would just push it. Yeah, but there would be tons of cows, and it would be night at times, and we would be drunk, and that's what we used to do. Well, technically, that seems to be cow tipping. Yeah. Technically, that's cow tipping.

They're just lying down cows. So you're going to send the email to Snopes saying, well, actually, you are wrong. Well, I have a feeling the problem with calling bullshit, if you didn't grow up in that environment you might truly believe that it is bullshit but then if a guy like Brian actually grew up there and actually pushed over some cows we take this to your fan base they would sit like this and then you just like set go over there and just push them over and they would roll over and wake up and freak out and it would be scary and you would run away now now cow tipping what I think they're saying is not true is actually tipping over a cow that's

completely standing up, maybe. Well, maybe that's what people have in their head, but what it really is is what you're talking about. When we did it, we just did it because we heard people did it. And then we were like, let's do it. There's tons of cows here. Such a Brian Redband move.

I heard other people were doing it, and I'm like, well, they're still alive. Fuck it. Fuck it. So then cow tipping is real. I would say cow tipping is real. Well, yeah, cow rolling. I'm going to call it cow rolling.

Cow rolling? Well, then cow tipping, as in a cow standing up and you pushing it over, that doesn't exist. But that's probably not what cow tipping ever was. Unless they do sleep standing up. Do cows sleep standing up? Okay, we need to go to this. There's tons of pictures of cows doing exactly how... Yeah, but do they also sleep standing up, I should say. Let me just say how much I appreciate you guys getting to the bottom of this.

We need to. Worst case, how far are we from some cows? Not that far. We can get to one in an hour. Okay. Does a cow sleep standing? Common misconception that cows don't lie down. Hmm.

While cows may doze off for a few minutes at a time while standing up, they typically lie down to sleep or simply to rest. Okay. I'm calling bullshit on the people calling bullshit. I think Brian's right. I think Brian is right. He went cow tipping. And that's how you really cow tip.

Because what everybody says is that cows are sleeping and you go up and push them. Well, obviously if that's not true, if they only take a little nap standing up and usually they sleep lying down, then their whole premise sucks because they don't understand what cow tipping is. Cow tipping starts from the knees like jujitsu class. Like if you take wrestling class, you start standing up for the most part. But in a room full of 50 dudes trying to double leg each other

that shit gets really dangerous. So jujitsu classes all start from the knees. So real cow tipping like the idea of it doesn't exist. Because that's like

wrestling style. Everybody starts from their feet. But jujitsu style when you're already on the ground that's real. This is great.

Now whenever I drive past a bunch of cows I'll be thinking about jujitsu. That's what I do. That's the ground, that's real. This is great. Now, whenever I drive past a bunch of cows, I'll be thinking about jujitsu. That's what I do. That's the vision. It's my gift. You should totally sell snopes to go fuck themselves.

What's going on? The craziest thing is that... Or Modern Farmer Incorporated or whatever it is. How scary it was. I just remembered it was... No, because... I'd be scared.

How many times did you do it? How many times did you do it? I remember twice. Only remembers twice. First time scared the fuck out of you, and then you're like, listen, I can do better. I did it wrong. Yeah. And the reason was because we used to hang out at this bridge where we would drink underage.

And it was just like everyone would go to this bridge in the middle of nowhere. And there was all these farms around it. And that's why we'd go there because there was no police. No one could even know you were there so you'd get at bonfires and all this shit like that. So then after you got wasted, everyone kind of just played around

in all the fields and one of the fields was cows and it was pitch black because it was in the middle of the country so it was just stars and you'd see shadows of cows and so you would sneak up going up to these cows.

You didn't have cell phones for lights or anything like that so it was literally just lighters and shit. And you'd just go up and just push it real fast, and it would go, and you'd just run away. And it was the scariest shit ever. Wow. And you'd be stoned.

Exhilarating. Did you ever find mushrooms on those cow patties? Yeah, but back then you just didn't think about that. I didn't get into mushrooms until I was in college. Well, Duncan went to school in Asheville, North Carolina. And when I went up there, I understand Duncan so much more after visiting Asheville because it's just a hippie mecca. And they were getting, and there's apparently the mushroom flora or whatever it is, the spores are so healthy up there because it rains a lot. And there's so many of them that they had to start giving the cows some sort of an anti-fungal

diet to kill the mushrooms because so many kids are harvesting meanwhile probably makes the kids sick because a few mushrooms probably grow on some poor poison psilocybin i mean you want to talk about missing the fucking point right poisoning cow shit so that the most beautiful thing that god ever created can't grow there you fucking dummies but he said that they would constantly go there and just pluck them off and just eat them they were everywhere and just trip balls the whole town is so psychedelic like partially because of that the whole town is like it's a asheville north carolina is a trippy fucking place i feel like i need to visit now you got got to visit. It's awesome.

It's really cool. Everybody's walking around. They have a main area where bars and restaurants are, and people are just walking around. Everybody's walking around. It's like a small town that exists in a giant world, but they're modern. So I fucked up.

I shouldn't have told you guys about it. I think we're going to go visit Asheville. But I kind of understand Duncan way more now after going to this town. It's like, oh, I see. Like, you were spawned in one of the most awesome environments on Earth. Like, this place is fucking sweet. What did

they call it when they went out on that expedition, I wonder? They didn't call it cow tipping. No, do you want to go, like, shroom harvesting? Yeah, some kind of thing. Let's go get shrooms, man That shit's so dangerous Because I remember even as a kid Just going up and eating berries

Because I was like Oh, look, berries And I would just start kicking berries Fuck Wow You know, and then like You find out later That's ambitious, man

Dude, you were one of those kids That a hundred years ago You would never survive Yeah There's no way You would have been dead Before you were 10 Ooh, fire

Berries Yeah, but And what's that, honeysuckle shit? Like, I used to eat a lot of never survived. There's no way. You would have been dead before you were 10. Ooh, fire. And what's that, honeysuckle shit? I used to eat a lot of plant, because there was nothing to do. Was that purple stuff where you'd pull it out and just suck on it? There was nothing to do. Yeah, so we'd just eat grass. Yeah, I would eat a few things. You know what I found out

that tastes good, actually, is dandelions. Like dandelion greens. Huh. Make salads out of dandelion greens. My grandmother used to make them. And I went over to the house once and she had this dandelion salad. And I was like, what is that?

And I was like, that's dandelions? And they were like, it's really good for you. It's edible too. And my uncle telling me it was good for me, I think is what convinced me. But then I found out that it's like a common vegetable that a lot of people eat dandelion greens.

You can make tea? Am I crazy? Make tea out of it? I believe you can. Yeah. But it's like a common vegetable that a lot of people eat dandelion roots. You can make tea? Am I crazy? Make tea out of it? I believe you can, yeah. But it's actually good like as a salad. It's a good tasting green and pretty fucking good for you too. What's not to like? I don't know how we got onto this subject.

Dandelion business. I don't know how we got onto the dandelion subject. We've covered a lot of green on this. Yeah, a lot of plants. A lot of green. That's good. Very eco-friendly. It makes the world go round, my friend.

Yeah. And you know what else makes the world go round? People know what the fuck they're talking about. That's why this cow tipping thing, it's really pissing me off. Because I believe Brian. We've got to change it. I think cow tipping is some real shit. And I think this is something.

It starts here. There's smart car tipping. Smart car tipping has hit Columbus. Smart car tipping has hit Columbus, Ohio. Wow. That's so stupid. It's so rude. It's totally rude. It's easy to do, I bet, though. Wow. That's so stupid. It's so rude. It's totally rude.

It's easy to do, I bet, though. Yeah. I bet like three or four guys could probably push one of those things over pretty easy. How much do they weigh? Can't be more than like 1,500 pounds, right? I don't know. I still flinch whenever I watch the YouTube videos of the crash tests and those things because they are more resilient than you'd expect, but I would not want to be in one at a top speed.

I wouldn't want to be in anything in a top speed. There's a guy who used to fight in the UFC, Matt Grice, and he got rear-ended. Someone was going like 60 miles an hour, and his car was parked, and he didn't even get hit by anything just the impact of the car he had a brain surgery and they to remove a plate on the top of his head off of this one see this one yeah and then put and then connect it back on it ended his UFC career it's you know the guy would been had been in like all these crazy fights like really action-packed wars and a car accident took him up and he's sitting in a parked car. Yep. Boom.

You see that thing? Oh, my God. Oh, yeah. It does actually stay in actually some kind of weird chunk. Wow, that's incredible. It looks pretty good, actually. Look at that. Yeah, you're still dead. Not.

Maybe you, bitch. Maybe I'll be fine, bro. Walk away from it. Yeah, I'll walk away from that shit. Joe Rogan walks away from stuff like that. And I'll jerk off on the car. Man, I saw a bad Mini Cooper crash the other day. It freaked me out.

They're small, man. They're small. I mean, no matter what, they're small. Just that thing that happened on the highway is like everybody's worst nightmare. The FedEx truck crashed into a school bus filled with high school kids. Oh, yeah. What did this happen? Horrible.

Northern California yesterday. Was it Northern California? North? Mid-California somewhere? But it was on the 5, which is kind of a sketchy freeway. And apparently it's just a giant collision. Nine people dead. Like one of those horrible fire situations.

I am firmly in the self-driving car camp. I am ready. The Google car? Well, or any. I mean, there's a company coming up right now. There are a few people working on this. But I'm just ready for robots. I mean, look, 90.

That's a new meme, bro. I'm ready for robots. I'm ready for the robots until they enslave us. But 95% of our flights are robot. I mean, obviously, there are fewer things to hit in the sky. But we trust robots with a lot. And when it comes to the self-driving cars, I've gotten to ride in one for a minute.

And we're getting there. But there's so many senseless deaths, so much senseless bullshit that happens because of human error behind the wheel of a fucking thing that weighs a lot. That's totally true. But will you long for freedom? One of the things that I've been thinking about

when we were talking about it, you're saying, oh, I wish I was... I'm jealous jealous these kids that are born today i don't buy it because i i'm very i think that i'm very very fortunate to have been born in a time where the internet didn't exist to grow to be a young man without it and then experience it once i've kind of when i understand myself and the world a little bit better and got to see two different worlds, get to see the world pre-internet and got to see the world post-internet. The people that are growing up just post-internet, like there's a certain something we're all

going to miss. We're all going to miss just getting on a motorcycle and driving on the highway because eventually that's going to be illegal. It's going to be illegal to be in a fast car. It's going to be illegal to do anything that propels you on your own. I mean, but if you look at like what's going on with technology, if you look at like the idea of self-driving cars, at a certain point in time,

what's the justification for letting someone drive their own car if their ratio of crashes is even 10% higher? I mean, as long as, okay, here's the thing. Humans are infinitely resourceful. Like, I think, I imagine it looking like cruise control for a while, where like the self-driving, you'll still be sitting there, you'll be chilling, but like, it's in cruise control.

And then at any point, you can just hit the brake or start driving. Dickheads would just start doing that and weaving in and out of traffic, and you'd be right back to the 101 again. It'd be the same fucking animal over and over again. I mean, well... Come on, bro.

There would be bits of that, but it's still not as bad as, like, if it's 1% of the people doing it, which I think would still be pretty high, but, like, then you still have 99% of them being efficient robot cars. I think, without this sounding too, you know, into the future,

the hope is, though, humans are resourceful. Even if you had it mandated where every car was just, it only knew how to self-drive, someone would hack it. Someone would figure out a way to get a wheel on there. I sense a class war. Oh, well, that's a whole other story, but it's coming. The highway flooded with these self-driving cars and other people standing up while they're driving their Continental Convertible, screaming at the top of their lungs. At the robots. Fuck the robots! People taking lawnm their lungs at the robot fuck the robots

people taking lawnmowers on the highway fuck the robots tractors yeah while anything with four wheels and while there's a robot the whole the whole thing is bizarre it's gonna happen i mean the the technology that's invaded our lives so far or become a part of our lives so far it's not stopping anytime soon and and i will say this i am am, I think, so yeah, I got to, I mean, I knew a little bit of the pre-internet world and I'm still jealous, but I will have, you know, I'll have my own transition, right? This is all a process, right? The generation coming up will take the internet for granted. They'll have that. But like, there is inevitably going to be something else that displaces them and blows their minds. Maybe it's like the Gattaca baby situation.

Um, I think we're already at a point now where we can better understand, uh, human DNA. It's the point where it's like, all right, it's not unreasonable to imagine a world where like, Hey, if you don't want this genetic disorder, like we can make sure your kid doesn't have that. Most people would probably be like, yeah, man. And then you don't want to be the first guy to say yeah to that. No. But you can, I mean, this is all pretty reasonable here.

And you imagine, okay, well, let's say that happens. Then it's like, all right, well, we've gotten rid of like, okay, Parkinson's, whatever. Like everyone, most people are pretty happy about that. But then it's like, well, if you can do that, do you want your kid to have blue eyes? Like, we can do that too. It's just real easy.

Do you want a blue eye? And then you very quickly start seeing the Gattaca scenario start playing out. And these are going to be really interesting and serious ethical questions we'll be asking ourselves in terms of like, I mean, I generally, I'm on the side where I'd be very happy if a lot of genetic disorders were, technology was able to remove those things from happening. But at what point does it start crossing the line of us tampering too much and deciding, you know, I don't think there's a line. I think that's what we're here for. I really do. I think the idea of us slowing down innovation for some reason, like, cause we're crossing a line that we invented ourselves. It's ridiculous. I think there's a pattern. And I think if you look at that pattern, the pattern is constant exponential growth of

technology and innovation. And it's a thing that human beings are thirsty for. We're freaking out about the Galaxy S5 came out today. Woo! You know, I mean, I was at Radio Shack yesterday getting some headphones. There's fucking people that work there. There's still Radio Shacks? There's Radio Shack.

I don't know if Radio Shack's a sponsor, guys, but I'm sorry. Elitist! What if a man wants to make his own ham radio? We can order the parts online. How are they open? They had customers. But the bottom line is I was there because I needed to get a headphone for my cell phone.

And I go, when is that? Because I knew it was out sometime this week. I go, when is that Galaxy S5 out? Is it out today or tomorrow? And this guy, first thing I was done, I'm going to get it before you do. Really? Yeah, like, ooh, burn. Wow.

That's the thing. Everybody wants to have it first. Given there's a bad name. Up to 1,100 stores. Oh, Radio Shack. I got my first job was at CompUSA. I was not sad about seeing them close, though. I was a 13, 14-year-old pudgy kid

who was demoing video games. And, well, it was mostly, like, computer hardware in the middle of a CompUSA. For, like, every 30 minutes, I'd have to get on the headset microphone with the big TV behind me, demo, like, MadLens, like, language learning software. And I'd have the same routine for, like, 15 minutes every 30 minutes. And, like, literally no one would be watching. And here I am, i am this like teenager going through puberty oh and i've got people people would walk up to me and be like no one's listening kid just stop no one's listening and it's like well i don't blame you for hating me but it was

great because it got all of my public speaking fears out of the way uh because i spent two years being ignored uh every every 30 minutes yeah that seems like a really good way, actually. It was great. I was getting paid for it. The company I technically worked for was called Sidea, S-I-D-E-A, but they were one of the casualties of the tech boom.

That seems like a really good idea to, like, if you wanted to alleviate your fear, put yourself in one of the most uncomfortable situations and get numb to it. Dude, yes. And people ask me, oh, well, you know, because tech,

there are some very good public speakers in tech, but the common stereotype is that they're not. And so a lot of people ask, oh, how'd you get good at this? And I'd say, because I did a ton. My first job was getting paid to just do it while going through puberty. That is fucking fascinating, man. So if you want to get good at it, just do it 10,000 hours, right? Just get up, get awkward, get in front of people and embarrass yourself. That's fascinating. That job probably really played a pivotal role in your life. Dude, real talk, I have the card. I still have the business card from Carlos, who's the guy who hired me at Saidiya,

because he was the first guy who gave me a shot. I wonder if he's... Yeah, Carlos from Saidiya, if you're watching. That's incredible, man. You created this monster. Yeah, that's an important thing, man. Sometimes things will happen to you when you're young, when you think it's just a shit job,

but it really is some weird life lesson. Dude, I always tell people, fuck getting an MBA. I got a job doing public speaking as a teenager, being embarrassed routinely. And then my next job was in the service industry, and I waited tables and cooked at Pizza Hut. And seriously, that will teach you the,

so much about entrepreneurship, right? Cause at the end of the day, you're on the front lines for, I mean, your pay is coming from that tip and it's a matter of, of balancing, you know, satisfying the customer.

Customer is not always right, but almost always right. And, uh, and just, and, and dealing with it and solving problems with other humans. And if you can make,

if you can bridge that gap of like empathy, uh, and just, and, and dealing with it and solving problems with other humans. And if you can make, if you can bridge that gap of like empathy, man, I tell you that every single day as an entrepreneur, every single day. Absolutely. And, and also I think the shitty jobs that you have when you're growing up inspire you to not want to have shitty jobs. Yes. I worked with my friend, Jimmy, my pal, Jimmy Lawless. I worked with him for like two weeks one summer. He, he was a carpenter and I was like, uh, and I was like, he graduated a year ahead of me, and he had like always had his eyes on doing carpentry.

I was just looking for like a labor gig for the summer. But within two weeks, I don't even think I lasted two weeks. It was fucking brutal. We were building a Knights of columbus wheelchair ramp so knights of columbus hall so the entire day every day was spent carrying bags of cement and pressure treated lumber which is this huge wheelchair ramp so just bag after bag of cement just carrying these fucking bags boom carrying these logs boom that was the whole day and by the end of the day you were dead yeah you couldn't do anything see and i wouldn't i wouldn't last i wouldn't last

three hours i lasted like two weeks but i used to think about it forever i would think about that gig and i'd be like that's what it's like when you're doing something that you don't want to be doing it's unbelievably difficult that's the life and that would like motivate me to get things done if i never had that gig i probably wouldn't know how hard a job can suck yeah i really wouldn't know that's the truth man that's what that should be i don't know if there's like but that is that is top flight advice for any especially because look i know those of us supposed to get into tech it's a hot industry right now right there's more money than ever going into it making a lot of people rich. There are a lot of kids coming out of college who

want to be the next Zuck, or the next whoever. They want to be the next billionaire. Did you really call him Zuck? Zuck. Do you call him Zuck because you know him? Zucko Bag. I've met him once or twice, but we're not friends.

I'm not saying that we're not. I live in New York. I'm not saying that we're not. I live in New York. I'm not in the Silicon Valley world. I dabble, but I just visit. Right, I hear you. That's probably the best way to be. Because then you would start talking like one of those West Coast techies. Yes.

Over-enunciating. So that's the problem. I think for a lot, think i i'm just getting a sense and i'm generalizing here but i think a lot of the kids right now who are trying to get into that um maybe never had that job maybe never had that bit of perspective right that i think has helped me a ton tremendous i think it's obviously helped lots of people over many many centuries to just understand get a bit of sense i mean even i i mean i know i live in a bubble now i as much as i wish i didn't i know, to some extent live in a bubble, but I still

try to keep that perspective as best I can, which is hard, but, um, it's the fact, and look, what you're talking about that skilled labor, like speaking of things like with the robots, skilled labor is something that still like when robots can do that, they will enslave us. Yeah. So it's a, those jobs are what I'm trying to say is are going to be really, they're fundamental already, but they're only going to continue to be important because humans have to do them and they are shitty hard work, but we don't have enough people. I know Mike Rowe has a really good campaign actually for getting more young people interested in the trades because there's a huge demand for

welders for carbon for all for all these people because we don't have a generation coming up now that knows how to do this stuff i mean i can barely put together ikea furniture myself and i'm lucky because i'm good with like a laptop but um it's a real need and it's hard to fucking work well not only that i mean doing carpent like building a house, is really kind of fun. I mean, building a house is very rewarding. If you're a guy that has developed, like I grew up, my stepdad was an architect. And so I grew up around a lot of work developers and a lot of construction guys. I got to see the pride that they take when they've completed a job and built a building that they designed.

They all work together on this. It's a cool thing. It's a cool thing to see and watch and you know the fact that that's sort of like a dwindling part of you know what kids are looking to do in tomorrow's age it's kind of sad it's a problem it is a problem but it's kind of sad i mean there's always going to be people that appreciate it though there's always going to be someone that builds an awesome log house that's in demand. Cabin porn. I think that's actually a website. Don't say it out loud unless you're affiliated. No, but like, and I hope, actually, I don't know.

I can't remember what Mike Rowe's organization is called, but it's trying to push for that. And I took a mirror. I am the guy who's also telling people, like, learn how to code. If you want the superpower for this century, it's learning how to code. That takes a lot of time. Jamie and I were talking about that yesterday. Too much work. Sorry. Well, then to code. That takes a lot of time. Jamie and I were talking about that yesterday. Too much work. Sorry.

Well, then. I don't got a lot of time. I guess you're not going to be Mark Zuckerberg, Joe. Yeah, I'm not. I'm not going to be a Zuck. I'm not coding. It's not happening. Also, if someone else did what I did,

it would be a harrowing experience. They wouldn't enjoy it. And if I did what they did, it's a difference chugs for different folks, my friend. They wouldn't enjoy it. And if I did what they did, difference chugs for different folks, my friend. Yeah, yes, indeed. Oh, yeah. When you look at the future,

when you see what's happened just in the short amount of time that Reddit's been around, you see what happens in the time of your first computer when you were on, were you on AOL? I was a little late. It was an ISP called AEROLS. Oh, you had a regular ISP. Yeah, 33.6, so I was a little late. It was an ISP called Aeros. Oh, you had a regular ISP. 33.6, so I was a little late in the game. Oh, really late.

That was my first moment. I had a 14.4. Whoa. 14.4. Where is that? 14.4. I remember 56k blew my fucking mind. This can't be real. It's crazy.

And then there was like dual line 56k, so you could get like two 56ks together and share bandwidth. Insanity. Insanity. All the stuff you could download so much faster. But when you look at that and you look at the future, do you think the future is going to be in some sort of like an implant or some smaller and smaller device that lets you interface with the web? I hope it's not too invasive.

I mean, there's already they're right they're already people living that kind of cyborg lifestyle now we've seen the transhuman community like it's you know the the basic level is just quantified self and like having a thing that counts your steps but like or google glass but you know there are next level it's always like that but their next level i mean there really is a transhuman community of people who have you know cybernetic eyes who have um you know of people who have cybernetic eyes who have replaced. Wait a minute. Do they really have cybernetic eyes?

Really? There's a filmmaker, a Canadian filmmaker, actually, who's got, he lost an eye in a shooting accident, replaced it. And as a filmmaker, it actually, at least he argues, helped him with his craft. Wow. But there are people who have lost limbs. Wow. But there are, you know, people who have lost limbs. One of the things that actually really intrigued me about the world is that, you know, you have people who have lost limbs, for instance, or are born without them.

And replacement limb technology basically hasn't changed at all. Like, it's the same Civil War, Revolutionary War replacement up until very, very recently. It's basically just like, here's a stick. And there's been so much innovation on the last couple of decades to help with limb replacement, right? Where you can actually move digits on fingers based on impulses from your armpit. You obviously, there's the Blade Runner

and to see the improvements on feet where you can actually run faster on these artificial limbs than on the real ones. Like it's, there are people who are living through this right now because of how they were, because of whether they were born this way or some injury that happened. But you're also seeing people who are deciding to enhance themselves through this technology.

This bionic eye thing is freaking me the fuck out. This is apparently, I don't think they have a completely bionic eye but they have chips that they've installed in eyes yeah he's i you had the filmmakers yeah i can't remember the name uh they figured out a way i'm sorry i don't think it's a totally fake eye i think what unless it's a totally different story is that live science yeah what does it say robot madness human becomes eyeball rob spence a one-eyed filmmaker holds up a prosthetic eye in the camera he hopes to fit he can fit inside and i don't know how that all that article is but i this is oh from 2009 never mind but um but he's been doing a lot of work in

this area and meeting a bunch of you know fellow cyborgs all over the world talking about this. And there's a transhuman subreddit. If you go to r slash transhuman, there's an entire community of people, hundreds of thousands, who are talking about all of this. Here's the article about him that's really recent from March 21st. And it says colorblind. It says color in the English way of pronouncing. This is why we had that revolution. Colorblind artist becomes world's first iBorg.

An artist is born literally colorblind, is able to hear different colors through an iBorg antenna that he has now had implanted into the back of his head. Whoa. Just for colors. Just for colors. He's just colorblind. He's not even blind. 31-year-old Nir Harbison. Just for colors. Just for colors. He's just colorblind. He's not even blind.

31-year-old Nir Harbison. This guy really wants to see colors. From Cam... How will he know if he's seeing them if he doesn't... never seen them before? How will he know what the fuck that is?

Maybe he thinks it's colors and you're like, can I borrow your eyes? Bitch, you don't see color. Fucking shitty-ass eyes back. It's like people who were trying to convince you that the first droids Were good

Dude it's just like an iPhone Okay let me Let me try and make a text message Why does it Why does it vibrate When I touch You can't touch this Piece of shit out of here

It worked until you touched it Blackberry With the fucking Push button screen Click click click Do you remember that I had a Blackberry For a minute

In like 2005 2006 But I That was Well they were not bad at the time they were great but there was a blackberry attempted an iphone like device oh no do you remember that no oh it was deaf yeah blackberry touch or something like that something like that i think that's exactly what it was oh poor black member was dog shit too soon guys too soon remember when picture messaging had that number and you had to go to a website and then type in the number just to see like a very small photo yeah tiny ass little thing yeah so this guy's um i mean he's crazy as fuck because

he can see and so just to get colors okay no wait there's there's an antenna but this is the artist colorblind artist or there's another guy there's a there's a there's it's just a filmmaker who just lost an eye. Oh. See, all this is happening. All this is to say, I think we are, we're approaching a point where these technologies, basically the internet, have a much more seamless interaction with us. But we still got a little while. Still got, still got a little bit.

Yeah. But whatever. Enjoy this moment. Because when it hits, it's going to be so fucking weird when when the singularity does take place which i personally think is going to be some sort of an artificial creation whether whether it's uh artificial intelligence or a network that can think for itself a sentient network yeah one of those things is going to happen and it's going to be a motherfucker man it's going to be a it's going to be a complete flipping of the board table yeah no it's i what i like about kurzweil and the

whole singularity push is they they are optimistic uh futurists there are definitely a lot of futurists who are just gonna they're real downers um but the kurzweil one is a pretty uh pretty positive one and dude who wouldn't i mean, the crazy thing is right. If we have enough processing power, all right. Okay. If life is just perception, right. A little thing that goes again, not a scientist. Um, but it's things that fire that make us feel like we're perceiving this world or that sandwich or that beer or whatever. Like if you have enough processing power to reproduce the human brain, uh, how can we actually tell the difference? I mean, if at the end of the day, it's doing all the all the same things right that's that we're just perceiving a world uh it really starts the

question like consciousness and humanity and all kinds of really big awesome things absolutely what is humanity and is it just the standards that we've accepted because this is what we're accustomed to and this is our culture and so we just we don't want to change things or in the face of some overwhelming intelligent life that we've created ourselves that literally becomes gods around us we're gonna have some weird decisions to make as to what should we keep fucking these guys are way better than us and they come out of cans and they could enslave us once i mean this is this is getting real now i don't want to worry you guys too much about Skynet. Don't worry about it. Scare the shit out of us. No, I don't have answers to this stuff.

I've got a front row seat, and it's been fascinating. That's one of the things. So Y Combinator was the seat stage VC firm that first invested in me and Steve nine years ago. And I work as a sort of advisor and ambassador for them these days, but like the companies that come through there, like, I mean, yeah, me and Steve got through with Reddit, but like, if we had applied today, we would just been laughed at. What do you mean? If we'd applied today with what we did nine years ago, we would have been laughed out of the room because the, the applications, the quality, the richness,

how much they've created and how far they've come is so much further along. And so we are, you know, this, you know, companies like Airbnb and Dropbox, for instance, also went through Y Combinator, um, multi-billion dollar companies that started the same way we did just a couple of founders and pizza and working. And, um, and we're seeing companies now that are doing like, there's a self-driving car company went through through the last batch. There are a couple of engineers who have outfitted their Audi with a self-driving thing. It looks like the thing on top of the police car. It looks like one of those things. And it's just all the sensors.

And they can do highway driving in this Audi. You can actually, like, sit in this thing while it drives. And it's a self-driving car that three engineers have been hacking on for the last six months. Like, it's just, you can just drop your jaw and be like, holy shit, like, this is a wild future that is being created right before our eyes by, you know, people just like me.

And things like the Google Glass, which I think is just a step along the way. The gap has to be bridged. I mean, it's not going to be bridged in one instant application that's an injection of nanoparticles into your body that allows you to interface your retina and your visual cortex with the World Wide Web as distributed through government Wi-Fi. I mean, that's probably 100 years from now or whatever it is, 10 years from now. Who knows how things get crazy? Probably tomorrow.

Probably next week. But the Google Glass is the bridge. I mean, it has to be. There's got to be a Google Glass, and there's got to be a Google contact lens, and then there's got to be something else. And it's going to happen just like we went from the brick phone. They were in the rap videos, and everybody was balling.

They had that big-ass brick phone. Yeah, bitch, I'm talking to you, and you ain't nowhere near me. Saved by the bell. Yeah. Zach Morris phone. Yeah. Or the ones'm talking to you, and you ain't nowhere near me. Saved by the bell. Yeah. Zach Morris phone. Or the ones that were in the suitcase. That was another cool invention. With a cord.

It was a corded phone in a suitcase. Hello, I'm walking down the street on the phone. That's how important I am. And people would get real angry and uppity when they would see those. They didn't like it. People get upset. I could see that. They didn't like it. People get upset. I could see that. They didn't like it.

Look at this fucking asshole with his fucking phone coming out of his suitcase. You should be using your phone for your home. Why don't you go get a job? Get a fucking job, you homo. Walking around with your phone. But now it's so small. I mean, they're sliding into pockets, and you open them up, and they fucking show you the world.

And I think no one who had one of those stupid brick phones ever saw that coming. No. No, definitely not. And that's a bridge that's been gapped in my lifetime through my memory. Decades. Yeah. And I'm 100% aware of when it happened. I had a cell phone in 1989.

I had a cell phone in my car. Wait, like a car phone? Yeah. I had a cell phone in 1989. I had a cell phone in my car. Wait, like a car phone? Yeah, I had a car phone. Wait, would it, how would that work? Cigarette lighter? It was stuck into the car. It was installed in the car itself. It had buttons right there. Well, it was a girl that I

was dating. I wound up buying the car from her. Her parents bought her a car, but she got a standard, like a stick shift. She hated it. She hated driving a standard. And so, uh, I was dating her at the time. So I wound up taking the car and then eventually paying her for it. But it was like, she installed this car phone. Would you make, would you make it, would you make a habit of taking calls from it no no no you can't it was stupid stupid expensive and it was like right after it all happened like we started

breaking up so it was like she couldn't even drive the car so i was driving the car then i was sending her money for it was the whole thing was a disaster okay so the lesson learned is never buy a car with a car phone yeah well no at the time it was ridiculous thing to have but it was pretty crazy i don't remember why she wanted to get her, why we wound up getting a phone. No one needed it at the time. There was only like a few people that I even knew that I'd ever seen one at the time.

There was a guy named Jackie Flynn. Do you know who Jackie Flynn is? Jackie Flynn's a comic. He's been in a bunch of the Farrelly Brothers movies. Very funny guy. He was the first guy that I ever saw that had a car phone. I was like, this is the craziest fucking thing ever. This guy can just call people. Anytime he wants, but it's stupid expensive

and it wouldn't work everywhere. It would like, you would drive down the street. It wasn't like now, like it's odd to get shitty service. Then it was fairly standard. Like most of the time you got shit service. If you're driving, uh, you're constantly going in and out of services. You'd pull over to the side of the road and just wait or you keep driving until you're constantly going in and out of services, you'd pull over to the side of the road and just wait. Or you'd keep driving until you got good enough service, then immediately pull over. Yeah, that was a big one.

And start making a call. Yeah, especially if it's an important call. You can't go over the – to this day, you can't go over Laurel Canyon if you've got something to say. I see. You can't trust it. For sure. With everybody's phone, there's going to be a bump in the road.

I'm still learning about this whole LA thing. The 405. Don't fuck around the 405. When you come over that hill, when you're going into the valley, if you're coming from Santa Monica and you're going over that hill, prepare for death. There's no cell phone coverage when you go over that hump. I don't know why they can't fix that.

You know it's there. It's the 21st century. Not only that, they're building a 19-lane highway up there. I mean, the highway is fucking enormous. It's the biggest highway you've ever seen in your life and i don't know how many lanes it is it's insane they're so big i i grew up in boston and the first time i came to california i went to um uh bellflower i took a ride down to bellflower which is uh um down uh down the 405 and to the 91 but i couldn't believe how big the highway was. I couldn't believe it.

I was driving. I was like, this is insane. The amount of concrete. Because all those old Boston highways were all like four lanes, two up, two back. That's it. These things were giant, like multiple lanes, five, six, seven lanes on each side. See, you guys know what you're doing here with the car thing. No, there's just too many people.

And that's why self-driving cars will change everything. I'm telling you, is there going to ever be, there is purportedly, I'm a New York guy now, so I love my public transportation. Do you guys, is that? It's non-existent. It's not happening. It's not existent. Isn't there supposed to be a bus in some places?

I've done it. It depends where you want to go. I live in Burbank, and so there's like right in North Hollywood, there's a station. You can take it, pretty much drop your Burbank, and so right in North Hollywood, there's a station. You can pretty much drop your car off and go right to the Staples Center. So if there was an event at the Staples Center, you just go in and out. But other than that, the problem is they don't have it in Santa Monica. They don't have it in the beach towns, and it's just not as cool.

It's not good. The system also, the city is so spread out. Like California is so spread out. And people are not really into the idea of being in a car with a bunch of other people. Everybody's so self-important out here and so non-integrated. It's one of the things that I, one of the things I was thinking of when I was starting to raise my kids. thinking of when uh i was starting to uh raise my kids i was thinking maybe my kids would probably do better if they lived somewhere like new york where they kind of had to interface with people all the time on a regular basis a bunch of different strangers all the time whereas like

california where everybody's like we go from one box into another box and occasionally we see people that step out of their boxes and then they go in their boxes and we all go our separate way whereas in new york everybody's sort of meshing. Bumping in. Boston, too. Yeah. Less in Boston. Would you ever move back east?

No, not to. It's too cold. Wow. It's too ridiculous. Wow, you're just- Wrong kind of cold. Okay. That wet cold.

Yeah. Colorado dry cold, I like. Yeah. That wet cold is ridiculous. See, I was born and raised on the East Coast, man. I don't know if I could ever give it up. Oh, that's so ridiculous. I lived in San Francisco for two minutes.

If it fell into the ocean, you'd still stay alive. I'd stay. Oh, well. You'd figure out a way. I'd find a way. Yeah. That's what I'm saying. Yeah, all right.

But I just never, I don't know. And there's so much, obviously, there's so much in tech going on in San Francisco. And actually, LA's tech scene, not too shabby. Not too shabby. Is it really? Well, Snapchat's the one everyone talks about right now. That's all dick pics. Fueled by vaginas and tits.

Tinder is huge. Tinder is LA as well. I hate Snapchat. What do you think about Snapchat? It pisses me off. I tried using it for a minute, but I just don't. Does it get to a point that just like every kind of technology, you get to a certain age that you start not getting it?

Oh, maybe that's actually definitely what it is. That's what it is. Because at the college store, every that's actually, that's definitely what it is. Yeah. That's what it is. Because at the college store, every kid's Snapchatting all the things. Every girl I know is Snapchatting. Yeah, people like it. Whatever.

I don't get it. It's fine. People look for fun shit to do on their phone. You know, and if something comes along, it gives you a time limit on a picture. Woo, there's my asshole. Woo. You know, you motherfucker, you took a screenshot.

Let me know. It's sitting close to home, Joe. It doesn't have to. First of all, people are so stupid. All you have to do is take a picture of the fucking screen with a camera. That's really meta. It's so dumb. You don't really need to snapshot it.

Nothing goes away anymore. You can't send it to someone and hope it goes away. First rule, assume if it is digital, it is everywhere. And then the second rule is assume if there's a photo of you online somewhere, someone has photoshopped a dick in your mouth. And now even more with this new heartbleed exploit that's going on that the government made, I mean, a hacker made. Oh, that's good.

That's what I was going to ask you. I forgot. I forgot. What percentage of people on Reddit are government disinformation agents that are designed to interrupt conversations and turn the tide on climate control? Let's say if you go to Reddit, what, the climate control arguments? Actually, one of the subs, I don't remember, because every subreddit is its own forum, its own community with its own moderators. One of them actually banned climate deniers.

Like, they basically said, we're not going to. And then, you know, what typically happens is, this is like any WordPress blog deciding, hey, we're no longer going to post stories about blah. So if people really want it, they go and create a new subreddit

and they're like, fuck you guys, we're creating real politics or really real politics or whatever it is. So it's a robust enough system that, like, new things rise. So they'll ban climate deniers

from one forum, but the climate deniers can open up their own forum as well. Basically, creating a subreddit is really like creating a WordPress blog, but you're part of a much larger network. And so every subreddit has its own moderation team, like Snoop, for instance, is a moderator

of our trees. That's ridiculous. Snoop moderates? Yeah. That's dope. He's active, quite active. It is dope. That's about as dope as it gets, right?

It's pretty spectacular. But like people can create these sort of forms, these communities, and run them as they see fit. And if people don't like it, they create another one. Dude, that's amazing. But on the whole, we work really, really, really hard to mitigate sort of ring voting and cheating to try to goose up stories or goose down

don'ts. I mean, I'm sure, you know, as soon as Reddit became as, you know, 200, whatever million people, as soon as it became as large as it was, or at some point it tipped over and people realized it is in our best interest to be here. Now there are always there, the social media douchebags who, you know, are upvoting all their garbage marketing content. But I'm sure I'd be naive to say that there weren't states trying to help encourage and some content and discourage others. But we, like I said, we work really hard. Nothing, there's no perfect system. But I'm sure people are trying, but the vast majority of people are just regular people. Yeah, I agree with you. I think there's always going to be someone who tries to do that, but

you're dealing with the numbers of humans are so great. It would be really difficult for someone to subvert that system as like a clandestine group trying to intercept ideas and throw disinformation into them. There's just so many really smart people out there that can

see through bullshit and that will post contradicting information and show what's wrong with this and then spend a lot of time to make you look stupid. Those guys are good at it, man. There's some fucking awesome discussions, whether it's on

Reddit or I have a message board that's been around since 1998. You're an OG, man. You know exactly. In this form, as a V bullet message board that's been around since 1998 you're an og man yeah you know exactly in this form as a like a v bulletin it's been around since 2001 right now you know um and it's not the best system though it's a good system it's easy to go back and read you know but it's not the best system as far as like getting the best stuff to rise to the top. It's like the Reddit system of vote-ups and vote-downs. That's like, it seems to be like a really good way of eradicating shitty ideas

or at least non-unanimous opinions or opinions that unanimously voted against. Do you guys know, check out our Joe Rogan. I wonder, I imagine there's an active Joe Rogan site. There's Joe Rogan Experiences, which I always run on. And then there's Joe Rogan Experience,

which is pretty good. There's, I think, 21,000 people that do it. Oh, snap. And so subscribers, those are like Twitter followers, right? So subscribers are about maybe a tenth of the actual actual people looking because only about a 10th will be subscribed. So there's probably about 200,000. Uh, it's almost a quarter million. Now, how do you keep someone from like, say if someone was, uh, on Reddit and they were

posting something about an ex-girlfriend or being rude about information or photos, how do you stop that stuff from happening? Well, I mean, it depends on the situation, right? Like Reddit as a platform, like Twitter, doesn't actually – actually, no, Twitter does host. Sorry. So Reddit does not host content. So we – well, I guess we host text, but we don't host images or video.

So oftentimes those things will be on YouTube or Imgur, and that's, we're kind of like a traffic sign or like a map to it. Um, but we can't do anything about the actual content. Um, and in the event of, you know, content that's posted, the generally accepted rule is if it is legal, then we will let it stand. And that has been, you know, it, every, like I said, every subreddit gets moderated. So most, the vast majority of them are moderated such that like garbage content like that, like on your forum, you wouldn't want a bunch of garbage content

floating up like that that wasn't adding any value. And so you have the opportunity to, you know, as a moderator, ban it. But as a general platform, the thinking is if it is legal, we're okay with it. Even if, you know, in some instances it is distasteful, the vast, like I said, the vast majority of the content is just harmless or good. It's also, I feel like a lot of the distasteful stuff that people are getting really upset about, I think that it's one of those things that the human race is just going to have to go through. It's like a phase or a stage in this integration with information that we're

going through there's still anonymity and the anonymity is something that people cherish they cherish their quote-unquote privacy and their rights to privacy and they have all these ideas about it but that's that's going to be like saying you don't want to see people anymore it's really what it's going to be like i reserve the right to not see people okay well if you go in the woods and go deep deep deep deep deep in the woods where there's no people you cannot see people however if you want to be in cities you're going to have to see people fuck and that's sort of what's going to happen when it comes to people being assholes online yeah it's it's not going to be as simple as you're hiding behind a duck talk 69 you know that's your name and you're

distributing all sorts of nasty evil shit and then what did you think about here's a good example that one guy that he he was on reddit and he was like apparently he was very rude and put a lot of nasty shit on they found out who he was and he got fired from his job and it turned out like this is a guy he's got a family and he had to support them and now he's like been publicly shamed what was your feeling on that um well which part like you know what the the price you pay for uh freedom or for the freedom to post stuff is to take have to take responsibility for it as a content creator. And, uh, you know, it's like at the end of the day, you know, you create the soapbox. So like we created a kind

of soapbox or a printing press or a hammer, right? Like any kind of tool. And so at the end of the day, we're not responsible for what like ultimately someone does with a hammer or a printing press, the vast majority of which is good sometimes cannot be. And, you know, he, he essentially paid the price for that. Um, and it's, it's frustrating because on the whole, the vast majority of people who pick up that hammer are like any random Twitter user or any random, any random person, like just being reasonable, normal people. And some of them aren't. And, you know, it's, uh, it's, it's a matter of saying, you know what, we, we want to have this be that open platform. We, there's no, fundamentally, there's no way to stop or police

every single thing that gets done in real time. Um, we make our best effort. And when on occasion, there are things that are illegal while we do what we need to do but um well apparently this guy was a real douchebag online just as a real asshole and rude and so people sort of justified that he could be taken down because of that but in his defense and it's sketchy defense um what i would say is that you, if the precedent's been set and the precedent is anonymity and there's some people that get a charge out of using that anonymity to poke at people and be rude and nasty and they get some weird sort of sick charge out of it. Okay. Yes, they definitely are causing discomfort.

Yes, they are definitely probably quote unquote cyber harassing, but that precedent of anonymity is very strange because once we've established sort of what we think is going to be the standard reaction to these things, people are going to get upset. They're going to ban screen names, but what they're not going to do is find out who you are and then go to your employer and expose all your shit. And once that does happen, it's like, whoa, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. I thought we were playing a game. Like he might have gotten out of hand, but he probably thought at least part of it was him playing this game that was afforded to him by anonymity and probably what we understand

the laws to be. I think the real, so one of the things that has is generally accepted is this idea of, um, not the challenges. So this is, this is pseudonymity that he had a pseudonym. He, he did not, or, or any one of us who goes online to use a pseudonym still has some kind of a persona online. And they probably use that account elsewhere. account elsewhere they they do or maybe they don't um but there's some acceptance in this new world that like all of one can find out almost anything about sort of publicly available stuff about us with enough searching with enough sleuthing about phone calls with enough tenacity right every investigative journalist been doing this forever

but like there is this challenge that like there there is no, there is no easy answer for this because ultimately there is going to be right. That's going to show up as a website. It's going to show up as blobby blahs, real identity.com. And some really determined person is going to create that thing. That's going to out whatever it is. And there aren't very clear laws around this just because it hasn't really it i mean there's no precedent for it and uh and so for the time being it becomes you know try as much as possible to discourage this idea of like quote-unquote doxing um but there's no why they call it doxing uh i actually don't know the etymology of it but like to find the documents around i presume i don't actually know

yeah um and that's the kind of phrase for it but uh but it's a matter of figuring that out and i'm not i i i think we are still as a society figuring that out um because it but we like trolls in a way like people like funny trolls like i i i'd like some trolls on my message board i've got some people on my message board that've got some people on my message board that are just hilarious there are and it's so tough to draw that distinction because i know what you're talking about it's a it's a kind of a game they're playing yeah and the kind of a game is they're trying to piss people off and they're they're trying to get people to argue with them and sometimes they'll argue both sides you know they're just they're having fun yeah and

they might do it and some people take it real deep just like i was saying that if stanhope was in the room and i was on stage talking shit i might say something extra fucked up just to make him laugh right i think they do that with each other as well and i'm not saying that it's all innocent but i am saying that if you do look at it all honestly and objectively you've got to leave room for the entertainment value of people fucking with people on the internet because there's something to it yeah and there is look and there is a there's a there's a precedent for this right in meat space like hecklers for instance right like there is meat space yeah as opposed to cyberspace like like there's a precedent for this

and and i think there is in in one thing i should stress is that just having a real identity does not stop people from being assholes on the Internet. Facebook is a perfect example, right? You can have your photo, your full name. And trust me, we've all seen those screenshots. Maybe we've even seen them on our friends' posts. But, like, people say some awful, offensive, horrible stuff on Facebook with their name next to it. They say some unbelievably dumb shit, too.

So having a real id will not stop people from being obnoxious or stupid or you know whatever adjective well i don't think it'll stop them but what it will do is open them up for the consequences of such behavior that they may have been unaware of and that's what the interaction that the internet provides to the average douche wad from 20 years ago never experienced you're not going to experience if you if you're just one of those guys that has some fucking racist thing that you spout out in your neighborhood and nobody calls you on it you know maybe because you're big or maybe because you're important maybe it's because of the neighborhood but if you put that shit on your facebook page

and someone takes a photo of it and then puts it on reddit boom shalak lock boom it's coming at you son yeah fucking thousands of people you never met calling you a cunt saying they know where you live saying they're gonna find you and smack the shit out of you saying they're gonna shit in your mouth and hold it that's really specific well it's people who can get specific um but then of course they get in trouble for violence and threats because that becomes non-anonymous as well. That's why you should make a real value on karma points. So then people wouldn't be dicks and they could actually get something. How could you have a real value?

What would they exchange it for? U.S. dollars? I don't know. Make it an exchange for Bitcoins or angels and demons. What do you think about Bitcoin? Do you feel like Bitcoin is like a... Well, no. What do you feel?

I'm actually an investor in a couple of Bitcoin stocks. I know it! So I'm pretty... You's pretty one of them i'm pretty bullish i'm not like i'm not like this is going to i'm not at the like 10 level where this is like end of governments end of states like we are living in it like but i am i am i think i'm most interested in the fact that these like basically transferring units of value has been really hard and needlessly expensive for too long because banks make a lot of like i think i taking out i think bank of america charges me 25 to do an overnight wire and it's like come on guys it's ones and zeros you don't need there's not a bunch of guys in the factory floor being like we got to get this wire to

denmark tomorrow like right it's absurd and And so much of the financial system has a lot of revenue tied into moving ones and zeros. Cryptocurrency, whether it's Bitcoin or whether it's Dogecoin or whether it's whatever coin, is going to be... Really? Of course there is.

How's the Kardashian coin? I don't know how to talk about it on this podcast. All right. Oh, Kim. Pride of the Armenian people. Well, listen, you can't deny the ass. That is undeniable. The whole thing's a mess, but hey, what are you going to do? Yeah.

It's part of what makes us fun. I think part of what makes people fun is our folly. I think if we were all beautiful and perfect and Dalai Lama-esque, come on, man, a bunch of people wearing orange everywhere and no one's getting their dick sucked.

It would be ridiculous. It would be boring. That does not sound like fun at all. Exactly. There'd be no freakness. And people like that, wrong or right,

they provide that extra ha-ha, that extra stupidity to life that makes the flavor. It's just like a hint of basil in the stew

that just makes the whole thing. You can get by without the basil in the stew that just makes the whole thing. You can get by without the basil, but... It just adds something to it. Yeah, the ridiculous fucking dance that we... A lot of notes are involved in this ridiculous dance. All of it together is beautiful, though.

Wow, the symphony of life. Symphony of life. Bittersweet as it may be. Kim Kardashian. But yes, bullish on cryptocurrencies. I think it's going to be real interesting. Do you know Andreas Antonopoulos? I feel like I should know that.

You should. He is the Jesus of Bitcoin. He will be on the podcast again on the 22nd. And he said he's been preparing for you, Brian. Are you a skeptic? Brian threw some surprise curveballs at him. I did? No.

Not really. You were slightly. I mean, Brian's skeptical about Bitcoin more than I am. The weird thing is that I don't like how your IP address is public anytime you make it. They say it's not. It is, though. But apparently, I don't know. But according to them, they say there's ways that it's not. They say it's not. It is, though. But apparently, I don't know. But according to them, they say there's ways that it's not.

Does that make sense? Let's find out right now. And then immediately after he gave me some Bitcoins, some other person just gave me some Bitcoins. I'm like, all right, so somebody's now stalking me because I got some Bitcoins. But they're giving you, oh. You know what I mean?

Where did this person just immediately come? But they're just giving you money. Is this guy just tracking every number? Don't be a pussy. Guy's trying to give you some money. And then with the tracking of the IP address, I feel like that there's just some weird, there's something going on that I don't know about,

and I don't like it. Like the IP address thing freaks me out. All right, here it says, doing so might leak the fact that you are using Bitcoin Fog, but no other details. Okay, so there's ways around it. Bitcoin Fog is a way around it, apparently.

Yeah, sure. There's a way around it. Yeah, for the highest level anonymity, you need Tor. You will need Tor. Tor is an open source open source anonymization network.

For a short overview, the Tor browser bundle. So now the only people that know what you're doing is this company that's anonymous. Hey, the government. No, no, Tor's legit. Tor's legit. You say so, but when the fucking Tor train comes crashing off the fucking train and into the woods, where are you going to be? I'll tell you where you're going to be.

You're going to be selling books. Here is. Without Their Permission by Alexis Hohanian. What's the name of it? Oh, thank you. Yeah, there's no title on the cover, just the symbols, man. Nice. Without Their Permission.

But Real Talk. Is this the name of the book, Without Their Permission? Yeah. Oh, yeah. The Real Talk, though, there is. Are you going to be real right now? Oh, yeah. yeah the uh the real talk though you know there is you're gonna be real right now oh yeah you keep it in real this technology tour is amazeballs uh it is the thing when you hear about chinese dissidents who are looking at tiananmen square massacre photos right even though there's the great firewall it's because of tour whoa and this is i mean it's been

it's been like it is it it really is one of those pure forms of, so it's open source software, right? So you can take a look at the source anytime for, you know, not only improving it, but also just sort of promoting that transparency. But it's the thing that lets us actually get through any of the states that want to try their hardest. I mean, China's spent a lot of money and a lot of time and a lot of smart people trying to keep the internet down. But thanks to the Tor and resourceful humans, they lose. That's pretty fucking badass. I love hearing shit like that. That's such an interesting thing when something comes along that just is built by people smarter than the oppressors.

And not a business. It's an open source project. It's like a bunch of people got their leg. I think software is best explained as, well, maybe not best, but I like explaining it as like Legos. And so a bunch of people through the internet with like pseudonyms who maybe never even met each other in real life brought together their digital Lego kits to build something cool that no one had built before that now lets anyone, like I said, open, uh, openly surf the internet in spite of like some of the most powerful and repressive states in the world what did you think when that um older japanese gentleman who they credited with creating bitcoin but apparently maybe didn't and they really hounded this fucking guy and waited outside his house and knocked on his door and this is scary stuff it seemed it seemed like some rather excessive journalism to say the least well not just excessive, but incorrect harassment. But have they not?

I know they responded by saying, we're sticking to the story. I don't know if they've since backed off of it. Well, of course. Why not stick to the story? It's just some poor little man that you can fucking harass. Even if he did encrypt it or whatever, figure it out, code it,

if he did create Bitcoin, or was one of the people who created Bitcoin, you have no right to hound him like that. And he made it very clear he didn't want any attention. He doesn't want anything. And you're standing outside of his house, ringing his doorbell, sticking cameras in his face. Fuck you, man.

You can't do that. There's proper channels. You send a letter or an email. Would you like to be interviewed? If not, leave him the fuck alone. Another story. Yeah, what did the guy do that's so awful? The guy came up with some sort of an algorithm to make an alternative currency. to be interviewed. If not, leave him the fuck alone. Find another story. Yeah, what did the guy do that's so awful?

The guy came up with some sort of an algorithm to make an alternative currency. So you think that you're okay to stick a fucking camera in his face and broadcast his image, without his permission, to the whole fucking world? And now that they're not sure whether or not they're correct or not. That's awkward.

God damn, it's awkward. It seems like that guy should be getting paid. What was his name? Satoshi. Well, his... That's awkward. God damn, it's awkward. It seems like that guy should be getting paid. What was his name? Satoshi. Well, his, I don't remember what his actual name was. That was a pseudonym. Yeah.

Fucking, it's scary shit, man. So you can mask the thing. That's good. But the thing that freaked me out, though, was how in private, sort of, I guess, somebody gave me some bitcoins just to show me how to do it. And then later that night, I just got. He was a public. And then so did JamBan. Free money.

I know, but that freaks me out. It's like, why are people just sending me money now that don't even know who I am based on my IP address? They have a vested interest in you joining. Like, it's the kind of system that gets more valuable as more people join it and do business on it and i mean just like you know dollars right i mean dollars are a store that's valued all over most parts of the world because people are cool doing business in it uh so similar idea so like because it's still at the four uh everyone who's into this is pretty bullish on it and they want want as many other people that they can get on. I mean, what's crazy? Well, all you have to do is have people involved

that want it to work. Legitimize it. And it will work. Yeah. It's just going to take time. And it's been, the challenge for Bitcoin is now, is this going to be something people are going to be buying stuff in online?

So like Overstock made headlines. They partnered with Coinbase, which is one of those companies I backed, by accepting Bitcoin. And like, you know, processing non-trivial amounts of money, people buying furniture in Bitcoin online. Tiger Direct.

Tiger Direct doing it. Are you guys taking Bitcoin donations? No, we don't take donations. Nope, there's no beggar. Only you two. Well, I don't want people to know my IP address. I don't take any donations. Is it safe to put your Bitcoin IP address out to accept Bitcoins?

Meaning, like, I was thinking about doing it, but then I was like, wait. So then I have people are like, no, you don't want to put your number out publicly. Not your encrypted. Well, there is one you definitely do not want to share publicly. Right. But you can generate. So if you use Coinbase, you use something else. You can generate a key that's free to distribute that people will use to give you a currency.

Yeah. It's very confusing for like that because I think I almost put out my bad key out to everybody. There was a. So then people can just take your bitcoins. They take the value that's stored. Yeah, like that Mt. Gox shit. I mean, that is one of the most hilarious stories of all time. The fact that it's all magic, the gathering, online exchange.

And then from there, it becomes one of the biggest Bitcoin exchanges on the Internet. It's totally not coded correctly. And people are just sticking knife holes into the bottom of the bag. It's stealing blood to the point where hundreds of millions of dollars in Bitcoin is missing. Yeah, kind of a cluster. Who stole all that money? Do you know? You know what?

I'm not allowed to tell you guys. Just dig, guys. There's plenty. There's already plenty of internet speculation. Well, it's weird because it seems like you should be able to track them. It seems like you should be able to know where they are. It seems like that's just another step that's missing from this equation that would make money all the more...

I mean, it would really make it all the more tangible if you could track it, if you know where it was. I mean, you have... I actually don't know the specifics of the Mt. Gox heist, but generally speaking, any one of those transactions is a part of the public record. Like it's that much, I mean, you don't know a lot about it. So they just didn't know or they didn't pay attention while it was going on? No, I don't actually know the specifics of it.

I think the general consensus online was it was some kind of an inside job as part of a... Inside job, that motherfucker. I don't know. He looks like he might be the inside jobby type. Shifty looking fuck. Where's my Bitcoins? Yeah,

the, uh, but, but here's the thing. After all of those, you know, there have been a number of quote unquote crashes, um,

and, and Bitcoin continues to persevere, continues to expand. I mean, it's, it, and, and ultimately it may not be Bitcoin.

It may be another cryptocurrency. And I mean, it's, and ultimately, it may not be Bitcoin. It may be another cryptocurrency. And I mean, Dogecoin is an amazing community. They sponsored a NASCAR at Talladega. Really? They got the Olympic, or they got the Jamaican

bobsled team to the Olympics at Sochi. True story. Really? Yeah, they did a big fundraiser on CrowdTilt, raised like 30 grand Didn't they have a movie?

Yeah, the original. To the fucking Olympics. How about you pitch in, Disney? You fucks. Jesus, Disney. Come on. Boy, that was like a big thing for a while. Everybody was making fun of the Jamaican bobsled team,

how hilarious it was. Then it just lost its novelty until Dogecoin came along. Until Dogecoin resurrected it all. That's interesting. So you're more bullish on Dogecoin than Bitcoin? You know, I'm excited about cryptocurrency as a whole. I think Bitcoin certainly come the farthest in terms of mainstream. Like there are random subways in Pennsylvania taking Dogecoins for your $5 foot long.

Really? But Doge is this satire that people are actually taking seriously. Like it's very clearly a joke that everyone's in on. But in that spirit, lots of people are like, yeah, look, it's taking the piss out of cryptocurrency. And like, that's kind of funny. And its mascot is a Shiba Inu. And yeah, why not? And it's bizarrely gotten momentum in part on the heels of this tipping system.

So like forever and a day, people have pitched micro tips. Like Flatter was one. There's another one called TipJoy where it was like if you're a blogger, you're a podcaster, one of your users can come on and be like, that was cool. Here's five cents. And that was really the idea. Saw a lot of pitches for this. None of them took off for a variety of reasons. idea. Saw a lot of pitches for this. None of them took off for a variety of reasons. What Dogecoin has been able to do, and it exists on Reddit, it exists on Twitter, is developers have created

these tip bots so that if you say something cool on Reddit, you just type in a comment with this particular syntax and it'll tell me, oh, look, Joe Rogan just tipped me 5,000 Dogecoins. Now, that's actually not a lot of USD, but it feels like, hey, it's 5,000 things. What is this? Let me go collect it. And weirdly enough, it has gotten a lot of momentum. And so there are Twitter bots where people are routinely tipping each other in Doge. Well, that's a nice sentiment. It is.

I like the idea behind it. And it's all this farce of to the moon, which is the ultimate ambition of Dogecoin people. It was originally a Bitcoin thing that has really been embraced ambition of Dogecoin people. It was originally a Bitcoin thing that has really been embraced by the Dogecoin community. And I met, God, I met people all over the country. We were at University of Central Florida and some students came up on stage with a giant Dogecoin. It wasn't a check, but like equivalent of what it looked like one to present to me because they really wanted me on board with Dogecoin. I guess that makes me a Sheba.

Shebna. Wow. I have a dog that's half Sheba, you know. There you go. See? Oh, wow. When the Dogecoin community finds out about this, Joe, big deal. This is going to be exciting.

It's a huge deal. He's half bulldog, though. He's a mess. Poor little guy. A bull Sheb? What was your name? I don't know. I'm going to call him.

Nice dog. He's a sweetie. He little guy. Bull Sheeb? I don't recall him. Nice dog. He's a sweetie. He's very friendly. You guys don't have a photo? He's got arthritis. Of my dog? No. I don't put pictures of my dogs up online. You're using Instagram all wrong, man. I got a photo of my cat like every 10 photos. Well, I put your picture up.

That's not going to get you. Oh, that'll get you a few upvotes. Maybe two. Something? I don't care. Whatever your drawing. That's not going to get you. Oh, that'll get you a few upvotes. Maybe two. Something? I don't care. Whatever it works. Whatever it gets. When you look at the potential that places like Reddit and these information sort of distribution networks have,

does it kind of freak you out that you're a part of that? Like you're a part of one of the biggest ones. Like as far as... It wakes me up a little bit, just because I still think of it as a project. My buddy and I just graduated from college. Like, we were eating pizza. How many employees do you guys have now?

Reddit's up to 40. I'm on the board now, so I don't know for sure. So you're outside, chilling, collecting fat checks. It's not quite. Driving around, grabbing your balls everywhere. It is like you were a fly on my wall, Joe. I know how you think. I can tell guys like you.

You got a certain look about you. One of them ball-grabbing, smiling dudes. Just driving down the street. It's like you're in my head, man. Does it feel weird to be a part of it? Do you feel like an obligation in any way? weird to be a part of it do you feel like an obligation um in any way i mean i think the biggest obligation i felt was during uh was it two years ago the so these sopa pippa bills these two awful bills are going to break the internet what what got me at the time i was working on another

startup called hit monk a travel search website and and then the sopa pippa thing happened and all my friends were like please explain to people who don't know what sopa pipa is please um the stop online piracy act and the protect ip act and the first is a house bill the second was a senate bill um uh the entertainment industry basically spent almost 100 million dollars lobbying for these two bills to curb piracy that was the intent and that's what they said except the lobbyists who wrote these bills were the, like it was, the bills were embarrassing in terms of how broad and overreach. It was like a sledgehammer for what they said was a scalpel. And it would have really fucked up the internet. It would have made Reddit impossible for me and Steve to start. It would have made all user generated content, uh, particularly, uh, difficult to, to have, like, it would have really, really

screwed things up. And I got involved because everyone in D.C. who knew better than me about politics said these two bills were inevitable. And then I was like, well, that's going to really screw things up. So I borrowed a tie from my dad and I started going and lobbying

and like meeting with senators and representatives and telling them, look, I'm an entrepreneur. I lived this amazing entrepreneurial life thanks to the open internet. And if you pass either of these bills, my story never would happen. And, and so many others just like it never would have. And you're really screwing up one of the most viable technologies we have. And a long story short, we won. And, and I say we, and I mean hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people who called in, like melted the phone lines. Um, the website, like 3000 websites went dark on January 18th, um, protesting this. And it was,

it was amazing. I'd never been a part of something like that. That was so successful. Those bills became toxic for anyone. All the, all these senators representatives just ran away from them almost overnight. And, uh, and we haven't totally won because there's still lots of things that are hurting the internet, but that's where I feel responsibility. I feel responsible because I know how much this has benefited me. And I get to see, like I said, I'm on the front lines as an investor these days. I get to see the kids who are doing even cooler things. We're going to do even bigger and better things. And I don't want to lose that. I don't want to miss out on so much innovation because we fuck it up because it's, it's partly in debt. Like it's partly that I feel

indebted, but it's partly because I just want better stuff. I want better music and I want better, I want better politics. I want better technology. And the internet is a gateway for that. Do you think the internet is safe? Do you think it's passed through that? No, definitely not. What could be done? I mean, how do you stop this tide? All right. So first and foremost, so net neutrality took a huge blow. And let me say this. Like, I'm fond of saying the world isn't flat.

Sorry, Tom Freeman, but the World Wide Web is. And what that means is I can start a website with my buddy. We have no connections. We just have, like, an internet connection and some laptops. And we can build something that nine years later we'll have more traffic than the New York Times or CNN. And that works because all, all bits are created equal. You can get to my brand new website, reddit.com, you know, nine years ago, just as easily as newyorktimes.com. And you get to decide, do I want to go to Reddit or do I want to go to New York Times? It's just as easy to get to.

We are now in a position where cable companies, because they basically have oligopolies, right? There's only a handful of them, want to break this. They don't want the internet to be flat. They want it to look like your cable. They want you to have a basic package, right? Where you get Bing search for free because they've made a deal with Microsoft. If you want Google, it's the next to $10 a month, but it's a really good search engine. So you'll pay for it, right? But then if you want Joe Six it's the next to $10 a month, but it's a really good search engine, so you'll pay for it, right? But then if you want Joe Sixpack's new search engine, well, that's going to be an extra $50, but you probably don't want that anyway. And so now the entrepreneur, the upstart, the nobodies in the apartment have a much smaller percentage of the market because they're not part of the default internet package anymore, right?

So it would be like trying to start your own cable company. Yeah. Good luck. Yeah, good luck. Rather than just getting a YouTube channel and starting to broadcast and so what used to be a flat internet will become hierarchical and we'll like you'll have that cable bill or you'll have that internet bill looking just like your cable bill and it's it breaks the foundation of what makes the internet work all bits being equal and we're at a point now where judges in

the federal courts recently ruled it pretty much much cable companies can have their way now. And at this point, my buddy at The Verge, now he's at Vox, but wrote an article called The Internet is Fucked. And Neil, I really nailed it with this. And he basically had a nice little call to arms that was like, listen, at this point, call the FCC. I know it seems ridiculous. had a nice little call to arms that was like, listen, at this point, call the FCC. I know it seems ridiculous. Um, call the FCC and let them know they need to give this thing teeth because the internet is a utility. Like it is like electricity. Uh, it is the kind of thing where we all know we need it. We couldn't imagine a world without it. And every one of us should have

the same open flat internet, no matter what. And, and we're at an interesting time because there was a time in america when you know kids in new york were playing by radios with electricity and kids in the south were still using candles like this we've seen this disparity before but um we we we can change it we just have to make sure the internet becomes a utility that we know the last thing we want is the internet only to be available in its fullest form to people that pay for the premium subscription rate. That's bullshit. That's insanity. Yeah. Yeah, it is insanity.

And it's anti-innovation. I mean, and anybody that would want that is just trying to control innovation. Absolutely. You're just trying to control information. Do you think, is there a way to stop that at this point in time? I mean, mean realistically seriously call the fcc you can read the article if you're not totally convinced he goes in i mean it's like 30 pages but worth reading um but really that's that's a big part of it another part of it is

is frankly having representatives in office who understand and will fight for our internet rights and there aren't a lot of them there are maybe like six or eight now there's not a lot. And, um, I mean, we talked earlier about our uplifting discussion with the future of politics and politicians, but like, that's, that's where we're at right now. Unfortunately, that's what it comes down to. And then you have to call the FCC. That's the only way to sort of get something to happen. And, and call, I mean, having, here's, here's the other thing I hope can come out of this, right? The first political thing I ever got involved with was SOPA PIPA. And that was a dangerous thing for a lot of us to get involved with because it worked out so well.

Like we actually did the thing democracy was supposed to do, which is let a bunch of informed citizens take action, phone calls, petitions, letters, all that stuff, and change people's minds in the face of millions of dollars in lobbying. And we did it. And it was a great high, especially for like a first foray into politics. But the fact is there are many more of those fights that we need to keep fighting. And like, I want, I hope a more connected, I hope a more connected citizen feels entitled to this kind of stuff.

I hope we feel entitled to more transparency from our government. I hope we feel entitled to like, like to pick on Kim. Like we can look on Kim's Instagram right now and see what she's having for breakfast or what she had for lunch. And that's ridiculous.

That's absurd. But it's accessible to millions of people right now 24-7. I want that same level of accountability for the people who represent me in government, for my government. And there's no reason why we can't get it. We just need to be asking for it. Yeah, but not necessarily seeing their lunch.

But yeah, seeing the bills that they're working on and what's going on at any given moment. We just need to be asking for it. Yeah, but not necessarily seeing their lunch. Yeah. But, yeah, seeing the bills that they're working on and what's going on at any given moment. Probably having, they should have 24-hour cameras on them. Fuck it. Fuck it. Let me read your email, bitch. I can't edit your email, but I can read them. They get to read ours.

They already read them. It's only fair. It's only fair. Tell me about Aaron Schwartz. Wow. Wow. So he was in the same round of Y Combinator that Steve and I were. He was working on a startup called Infogami. We didn't talk a lot then, but maybe six months after, his company pretty much folded. His co-founder went back to Denmark.

And Paul Graham, who organized Y Combinator, was like, hey, Steve, Alexis, you guys need more developers. Why don't you work with Aaron? And we acquired his company. He moved in with us. We worked together for a little bit. Um, we, gosh, a few, not long thereafter got acquired. Um, once we got acquired, it was clear Aaron was not, not really that into it, and he left. And we stayed in touch for a little bit thereafter, but not long. And then he got really into politics, really started getting involved in a lot of that great work for the open Internet. We shared a lot of common friends. And, you know, he did some very unfairly punished things.

Like he, the entire thing, he broke into a storeroom in MIT, downloaded using MIT's credentials, a bunch of these documents, research papers, JSTOR. Like these are academic articles. Downloaded a bunch of them. And put them online. He didn't actually put them online, um, but he did download them and there was presumed intent, but none of that, that was all presumed. And, uh, the state or the prosecutor there in Boston came down so incredibly and unjustly hard on him. Uh, the charges they were levying. I mean, I, I don't know much more than what probably most people have read a few of the articles know. But he was looking at some very, very, very long, serious jail time for this. It was one of those very clear the punishment did not fit the crime situations.

They wanted to make an example of him. And he very tragically took his own life. Rather than risk going to jail, was he prosecuted? What does that mean? Did they go through and charge him? Yeah. I mean, did he get found guilty? Oh, no.

This is, I don't know enough about the legal stuff of it. I understand. He was being investigated. His friends, his family were being subpoenaed and questioned. And these papers that he put, were they available? Could you get those? Yes, if. They weren't secret?

No. What it is, this is one of those really unjust things. There's a lot of research that's done, like federal research, for instance, that's funded with our taxpayer dollars that end up getting locked up in these academic journals

that you have to pay a subscription for. So in this case, MIT had paid the subscription for it. It's a non-trivial amount. And he was able, anyone on the MIT network, anyone at probably any major university network or anyone who wanted to pay could view these research documents.

He argued that, you know what, this is content we paid for, right? This research was funded by our tax dollars. Why should I have to pay a subscription to some random company who has the monopoly on access to this content? Right. And that is what that is what they charge them with. And I mean, I'm much sorry. Well, that is that those are the grounds on which he was charged. So it was a felony because he was breaking and entering into the system.

I mean, I think I'm not certain, but i'm sure that's what the argument is so um and then there were some really egregious uh like the there are there have been a handful of developers or hackers that have been sort of made examples of by the government where you have these instances of doing things that were not like like i said the severity the punishment did not even come close to the actual crime Especially in this instance where like I said, this was not actually distributed He was just downloading them which again he could do within the network But it was technically breaking the I don't know the love a license I guess

Store but I guess okay and one of these not even like a random outside guy like he had access to those files Yeah, the universe I mean any university student did. And I think the most egregious, well, one of, okay, there are a lot of egregious things, but the company JSTOR had actually settled up with him. They had actually said, you know what? We understand. Like, okay, it's cool.

We don't want you to press charges. So like they actually told the government, don't press charges. And they continued. So is that like a prosecutor that just wants to get a win is that what that is that is that is what it looked like yeah yeah uh that's bone chilling and that takes us back to what we were talking about earlier about private prisons and about people making sure that there's jobs for wardens and prison guards and they're making sure that certain drug laws stay illegal or stay on the books god yeah it's the same thing people profiting off for other folks the idea of someone just wanting to win when they're a prosecutor just

getting a case and wanting to close it and make an example there's pressure on you to close that case and if you don't you set a precedent yeah if the guy gets off then the precedent has been set so it becomes a competitive environment yeah motherfucker and some young guy's life is on the line it's uh and i and i understand i understand the role i i mean like i understand the role of laws and i understand the role of a justice system and and when you see things like that that seem to fall that seem to go so far astray from the intent from the point of having a justice system is really important but to have it be so just fucked up like that is um is sad is very very sad yeah it's um it's another symptom of this mad, mad civilization that we're a part of. Like the good things and the bad things, they all come together.

And law as it is and things, these really rigid ideas of what's legal and illegal, what the punishment can and can't be. Those things are so goddamn archaic. Mandatory minimums. Mandatory minimums are fucking archaic. I mean, it's one thing if it's violent crime. I understand that entirely.

I understand when you're making a victim out of someone or you're stealing things from them with violence, I get that. But something like this, where the guy's just,

it's information, what's he doing with this information? Is he going to take down the government? No, no, no. He's going to let people learn. Okay, hold the fuck up.

Yeah. Can someone in the room stand up and be like, hey, guys. You want to put this guy in a cage? Does this make sense? You've got a super genius who has some incredibly strong morals and ethics when it comes to information. And to him, he feels, and you've got a guy who's at the cutting edge of technology, one of the guys who helped invent RSS feeds. He's at the cutting edge of the distribution of information,

and he finds this to be a toxic flaw in the system. He wants it, whether he's right or wrong, you don't have to put them in a fucking cage. Like this is the idea that this is the right thing to do. It's just,

it's shocking. It's like, it's like inquisition style shocking. It's like the same thing as any of the other ridiculous archaic things that we don't do anymore. Fucked, man. And hopefully we can learn from this. I know, you know, Aaron's law was a bill.

I don't know where it got in the house. But I hope, I mean, this is, look, right, like, the thing that gives me hope is that the system is, like, it is like code and that you can update it. You can do a source revision. You can update this. We can make amendments. We can change things if we find that they are wrong. And Aaron's Law is a way to hopefully do that. But you've got to get a bunch of people who don't understand the internet to agree on something.

Well, what's incredibly ironic is the solution is Reddit. Have court cases decided through Reddit. Whoa. It's perfect. There's not whoa because the alternative is Reddit. Have court cases decided through Reddit. Whoa. It's perfect. There's not whoa, because the alternative is whoa. The fact that we're using this archaic system of a judge who fucking has a mallet and slams it on a piece of wood. What are you doing, asshole?

You got a mallet? Get the fuck out of here with you. Why don't you have a fucking bow and arrow, too, and shoot a flaming arrow through the sky to let us know that the games have begun and a guy next to you has a conch shell and put your powdered wigs on you fucking assholes get the fuck out of here with a mallet you can't keep using a mallet stupid bang bang bang get the fuck out of here with that stupid archaic nonsense reddit's the answer no more judges get them out. Court of Reddit.

Subreddits. Karma point. Subreddits. Subreddits agriculture. Should we be able to grow hemp? Yes. Boom. We're done. We're done here. Scrape that one up. On to the next one. Should this guy go to jail because he distributes information that was freely available to college

students? No. Okay, we're good. Let him out. What's next? But you would run into the problem if there would be somebody that had like a stutter or something like that or if the joke turned on them, then everyone would vote

just because of the wrong reason, you know, how the internet is. What? Meaning, like, what if there was somebody that had a court case and they were being voted on Reddit

and the guy had, you know, maybe had a stutter or talked like he was gay or something like that, how that could turn and unfairly vote for the wrong reason on the internet. See, that's where the vote-ups and vote-downs come into play. Most people wouldn't do it. I am going to be the first to say

I am not proposing we throw out our justice system in favor of Reddit. I am. I'll be the first to say I am. I'll throw out the justice system in favor of Reddit. I think it's a better idea. I think, look, there certainly should be experts in all areas, whether it's experts on the environment and uninfluenced experts, experts that have no tie to the political machine, experts who have no aspirations.

Not only that, preclude them from having any sort of position of power or any sort of gigantic job inside a corporation. Like what we're seeing, did you see the movie Inside Job? Did you ever see that? Wait, I feel like I did. It was on the Financial Crisis, fascinating documentary. Oh, no. No, really good stuff. All right, Netflix.

Let me pull it up. Yeah, you want to watch it. But one of the interesting things about it was how they highlighted how these people that made economic policy these professors they recommended these positions that you know we we apply to our economy then they would go on and get these huge jobs afterwards and make fucking millions of dollars what an interesting coincidence oh it's so gross it's one of the grossest things ever it's a really good documentary it's from 2010 2010, and it's by a guy named Charles Ferguson. And what's interesting is this Charles Ferguson guy is, I believe he's the guy that's doing all of the questions. I shouldn't say that because I'm not really sure,

but whoever the guy is that's the narrator, you don't see him always questioning people, but while he's questioning people, he's so knowledgeable about how the system actually works that he catches these these like mathematicians and these economics experts being really arrogant and then he faces them with the truth and you see them scramble and start to sweat and i should have never agreed to this interview like you see them realize you're good what you're gonna do with this and you see them like fall apart and panic and they fall into this like really sort of uh aggressive state it's it's quite fascinating it's really good and it just shows you like that it's it's a mess reddit it up fix it

vote up vote down solving problems i think we are dude we're solving good about it i feel good about this conversation i think we should end here before it gets bad. As long as we just remember, there's going to be a mascot, right? We're going to keep the Reddit alien going. I like that. That's a great mascot. It's cute. Yes.

Sweet. It doesn't look mean. Have you ever thought about, and this is probably what happened to Dig and a couple other similar sites, just redesigning the whole thing. And fucking it all up. As there have been some. We thought about fucking it up. Do we want to fuck everything up?

No, I mean, but what if it was just an option, almost like you can go in your settings and go, oh, new style. I'll take the modern look. Have you ever thought about it at all? We've definitely thought about modernizing it. Part of it's just inertia. You're dealing with growth all the time.

You're dealing with all this other stuff. It's like, oh, do we want to rethink how the front page looks? There have been small improvements. We just added trending subreddits, which are pretty damn cool, to try to help people realize that there are these thousands of different communities they should dive into. But I wouldn't expect any big changes for the reasons we were just joking about. Yeah, there's no need.

I mean, it's a content distribution network. I mean, you're essentially allowing people to really cleanly, easily find something they're interested in in a text form and then go there. It's the best way. Make it light. Keep it light. I mean, look, it's not like there was some minimal vision. Like, when we graduated from college, Steve and I just sucked at HTML and CSS. This was the first real web app we'd ever made.

We'd made websites, but never a fully featured web app. And we just weren't very good. That's actually cool. That was my fault. That shitty font we used for Dana, I was like, oh, this would be a great font for us to use.

Did you originally buy the domain? Were you the first one? Yes, sir. What was it originally purchased for? Oh, it was unused. $9.99 on Dreamhouse. What was the domain? Were you the first one? Yes, sir. What was it originally purchased for? Oh, it was unused. Just... $9.99 on Dreamhouse. Where'd you get the name?

Oh, I was in the library, UVA, Alderman Library, wahoo wah. And I was trying to come up with something that involved the word read. And I was like, Reddit. Like, I read it on Reddit.

And then I tried different ways of spelling it, and R-E-D-D-I-T worked because no one had it. And I also registered R-E-D-I-T-T, but then I asked my friend Melissa, I was like, which one of these makes more sense for a bastardization of Reddit? And she

was like, I'll go with the two Ds, idiot. That's great, man. Well, listen, what you guys did was nothing short of a cultural revolution, I think, in my opinion. I think it's one of the key components today online as far as an asset to distribute information,

to spread cool shit, and to let people have intelligent discussions about it in a really rational way of filtering out the fuckheads. It's pretty genius stuff, man. Well, thank you. Thank God you're here. I am happy we could do it, because I'll tell you, man, we were just trying to live like college students for as long as we could.

Your book is, without their permission, is it available in audio? Did you do an audible version of it? Yeah, I did an audible. Did you get to talk? It was great. Did they actually do it? Yeah, they did. Oh, they encouraged me.

That's beautiful. Oh, that's so good. It was for the Bane impression. Once they knew I could do a Bane impression. What's your Bane impression? I mean, it's so good. It was for the Bane impression. Once they knew I could do a Bane impression. What's your Bane impression? I mean, I... Come here. Go ahead.

It doesn't matter what you think of my Bane impression. No? It's not bad. I know impression humor is like the lowest form of humor. No, it's not the lowest form. I don't believe in that, man. I think you got an impression. It's hilarious.

It's fucking hilarious. People are so pretentious when it comes to that. Can we add a laugh track? Nope. No. We already had a laugh track. He was laughing. It's fucking hilarious. People are so pretentious when it comes to that. Can we add a laugh track? Nope. No. We already had a laugh track. He was laughing. That's the laugh track.

Okay, so without their permission, and audible.com, do you have an audio version, a real version, Amazon, sell it everywhere? We got Dead Trees. We got e-book. Oh, yeah.

E-book, Dead Trees, everything. Mm-hmm. And how would your grandfather say it? Ohanian. Ohanian. Alexis Ohanian. And props for keeping the name Alexis. Good for you, man. Fuck the haters Ohanian. Ohanian. Alexis Ohanian. And props for keeping the name Alexis. Good for you, man.

Fuck the haters. Hell yeah. Let them rot. All right, ladies and gentlemen, that's it. That's a wrap. Anything else to tell people? No, thank you for having me, man. Thanks for being on.

It's been an honor. Reddit.com, R-E-D-D-I-T. Go get on it, bitches. And Onnit.com, our sponsor. Thanks to Onnit. Use the code word ROGAN. Save 10% off any and all supplements. Thanks also to LegalZoom

dot com. Use the code word ROGAN at checkout and save yourself some money. Brian Redman, where you at? Next week, we'll be going on the road with Desquad with Tony Hinchcliffe and Tiffany Haddish. We're going to be in Portland, Oregon, April 18th at the Funhouse, April 19th, Seattle at the Highline,

and April 20th, 420 show at the Edgewater Casino. And also, if you go back, you can listen to Pointless No. 4. We actually had you on a Death Squad show back in the day. Boom. Sherlock Lock Boom. Alright. We'll be, this Friday night,

we'll be at the Ice House. Tonight. Yeah, tonight. That's tonight. A couple tickets left. Who else is there with us? We got Tony Hinchcliffe, Christina Pajitsky, Jesus Christ, what a show. Justin Martindale. What a show!

Nick Yusuf. What a show! Dave Taylor. Oh, what a show! And there's only 80 people in the room. It's a fucking amazing little venue at the Ice House. The oldest comedy club in the country,

ladies and gentlemen. It's been a comedy club since the 1960s. I believe 1961 or something like that. Anyway, we'll be there. Don't get too weird with us, though. Thanks to everybody else and a lot of fucking good shit coming up. Next week, I got Amy Schumer's coming in again.

I got a lot of stuff happening. You also got the new Twitter profile, and I'm so jealous. Why, is it hard to get? Yeah, it's only been slowly released to a few people. Oh, well, did I get lucky? Yeah. Look at that. You got the Facebook now.

Wait a minute. Maybe somebody loves me, Brian. Might not be lucky. Maybe somebody loves me. Why you got to hate? All right. We somebody loves me. Why you got to hate? All right. We love you guys, even if you get a whack-ass Twitter profile. Nothing but love for you.

Big kisses and hugs all around. All right. We'll see you guys next week. Take care. Big kiss. Bye. Bye. Ugh!