The Pomp Podcast - #557: Joshua Browder on Automating Consumer Rights

Episode Date: May 17, 2021

Joshua Browder is the co-founder and CEO of DoNotPay, the world's first robot lawyer. He fundamentally believes in using the internet to empower the average consumer to defend their rights.  In this conversation, we discuss DoNotPay’s product development, company growth, Robinhood of the Internet, regulatory pushback, credit dispute letters, HOA products, photo ninja, and angel investing. ======================= Choice is a new self-directed IRA product that I'm really excited about. If you are listening to this, you are likely part of the 7.1 million bitcoin owners who have retirement accounts with dollars in them, but not bitcoin. I was in that situation too. Now you can actually buy real Bitcoin in your retirement account. I'm talking about owning your private keys and using tax-advantaged dollars to do it too. Absolute game changer. https://www.retirewithchoice.com/pomp ======================= Gemini is a regulated cryptocurrency exchange, wallet, and custodian that makes it simple and secure to buy bitcoin, ether, and other cryptocurrencies: https://www.gemini.com/ =======================

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Now let's kick this thing off. Joshua Browder is the co-founder and CEO of DoNotPay, the world's first robot lawyer. He fundamentally believes in using the internet to empower the average consumer to defend their rights. In this conversation, we discuss DoNotPay's product development, company growth, being the Robin Hood of the internet, any regulatory pushback, credit dispute letters, HOA products, photo ninja, and angel investing. I really enjoyed this conversation with Joshua, and I think you will as well. Before we get into this episode though, I want to quickly talk about

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All right, let's get this episode with Joshua. I hope you enjoy this one. Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investment. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion.

This podcast is for informational purposes only. One quick technical note before we begin. For the first 30 seconds, Pomp's audio does not sound good, but after 30 seconds, it gets fixed and sounds great the rest of the episode all right guys bang bang I've got Joshua here with me in person in Miami if you're not in Miami where are you really you're doing this man thank you for having me he came in with the swag on too with the nice white sweatshirt it's way too hot for Miami but I should still do shameless promotion even if I'm hot for it it's all right I wear a sweatshirt in here it's a little chilly so it's fine um let's just get started uh how do you like

miami let's just start there i love it it's like the land of the free and i'm not just saying that everyone here is um i was at a coffee shop and uh the barista was like what do you do and i was like i work in tech and she's like oh you work in tech that's great but in san francisco you get a very different attitude to that what is the attitude in san francisco just like dirty looks wear a mask that sort of thing yeah i i laughed and uh when i saw i think it was jason calcanis tweeted the other day and he said uh he got yelled in san francisco for not wearing a mask and in austin texas he got yelled at for wearing a mask and i was like i don't know you know like if that's a good thing or a bad thing but it very much highlights the difference of the attitudes uh

in terms of like individual sovereignty and their relationship with government and rules in those two places right yeah miami's neutral no one gets upset with you either way i tend to think that's the right way to think about it um all right do not pay is one of these companies where i feel like everyone loves what you guys are doing uh let's just start with like your background where did you grow up uh you've got an incredible story and your family's been involved in a whole bunch of crazy stuff uh before you started the company so maybe just walk us through like your life before you started the company so um i was a high school student in england and um it was my dream to come to silicon valley i taught myself to code using like stanford youtube videos and i thought

if i can get there to this place it's a dream come true and so i got into stanford and moved there six years ago now. And when I went there, it lived up to my expectations. I was in the center of Silicon Valley, and it really changed my life and allowed me to start Do Not Pay. Why do you say that it lived up to your expectations? What were the expectations? And then what were the parts of Stanford and Silicon Valley that you were like, wow, this is like the place I want to be? I think America is the land of opportunity. The most successful company in the UK is maybe Deliveroo. But the most successful company in the US is Stripe. I'd much rather be closer to

Stripe than Deliveroo and lots of the VCs and my friends starting companies have the same attitude. Yeah. And so when you get there, did you know you want to start a company? Was it more so just, I want to be in the technology industry? Like what was your thought process going into Stanford and then the first couple of months or years that you're there? I always knew I wanted to tinker with projects as an engineer, but I fell into my company, do not pay by accident by getting all these parking tickets. We'll get to the parking tickets in a second. You told me the story before It's absurd. Growing up though, your dad went to Russia and had this ridiculous kind of experience where basically he's an American in a foreign country, really understood how to invest capital

and compound that capital at a very aggressive pace, but it's Russia. And there's all kinds of crazy stuff that goes on there from a political standpoint, from a safety standpoint. And his experience ends up being written into a book, Red Notice, Bill Browder, for those that don't know. And what is your kind of like understanding of this as you're growing up? Do you know what's going on? Are you kind of sheltered from a lot of this? Like just what was it as a young kid first? It was very scary. I think the scariest aspect was when my father devoted everything to fight the Russians. And it's one thing to go after, like maybe like government bureaucrats will have legal problems, but it's another thing to go after the mafia. And so lots of scary things

happened. He was deported. His lawyer was murdered. And it really taught me to be fearless in life. It puts everything in perspective. When something minor happens, I just think it could be a lot worse. Yeah. And so when I read the book, I didn't know you. I obviously didn't know him. The thing that I took away from it was just like, you hear these stories of Eastern Europe or Russia or you know wherever around the world you're like it can't really be that bad it was really that bad right when you read the story it's insane uh why do you think your dad actually like drew the line in the sand is having to go devote my life essentially to go and fight this and obviously the miniski act and a whole bunch of stuff that has come out of it um has been kind of the the

fruits of that labor but what kind of drove that decision i think for him when um and i can't speak for him. But when his lawyer was murdered, he felt like he was a part of that. And so he wants to get justice for the lawyer. The lawyer gave his life for justice. And so the least he could do was give his life for justice for the lawyer. Yeah. And so for you, now that you're older and you kind of look back to that time, is there anything that you kind of take away now that maybe you didn't appreciate it at the time or didn't really understand that was happening? I think just how unjust the world can be. I think in Silicon Valley or even in the uk um people can tell themselves the world is so great it's so great out there but there are

some really bad people and some really bad things going on yeah so that brings me to my favorite question always uh it's cheating when i talk to a technologist but technology net positive or net negative for the world strong net positive i i feel like anyone who says that it's probably in san francisco still which is ironic that it's a net negative yeah i i mean i it's uh when i worked at facebook people would always bring this up right like facebook is like you know ruining the world and it's like well hold on a second like sure of course there's negative impacts when you connect a bunch of humans but it's more so you're probably just allowing humans to be humans uh but look at all of the positive impact right people can stay in touch with their families they can

share photos they can learn things they can communicate like all of this is a net positive and so the negative side effects of technology seem to be very very minuscule compared to the positive aspects i think technology is um being used for some very negative things but in aggregate it's very positive. And that's what I see with Do Not Pay. We're trying to bring the positive aspects of technology to the legal system. It's already being used in the negative aspects like algorithmic sentencing and things. We want to give that power to the consumer. Yeah. And so when you think of like the negative aspects, is that mostly like big technology companies? Is it like nefarious or malicious actors? Or do you think a lot of it's just

people are trying to use technology and then there's negative side effects that they maybe didn't intend uh or didn't realize when they started i think um it's a weapon and um the the weapons in life immediately go to the rich and powerful big corporations and then over time trickle down to consumers and so i think it's just being used by the people that want to use it negatively at the moment yeah uh you start do not pay and it all starts with parking tickets on stanford's campus from my understanding uh tell us that story of why were you getting so parking tickets well everyone drives on the other side of the road here and i was a terrible driver and um i would not have time to scratch a permit because i was going to class or park perfectly in

the bay and what i learned is um in stanford but all but more so in san francisco the government issues tickets not necessarily to punish people i'm a very unsympathetic and terrible driver but sometimes to raise money um and i couldn't afford to pay the tickets they're like a hundred dollars a piece. And so I had to become an expert getting out of them. And there was this rumor among my friends that I was the parking ticket guy. And so all of a sudden, they all started asking me for my help as well. And I was spending maybe two hours a day on Microsoft Word back then, copying and pasting documents for my friends. And I thought, what am I doing with my life? Why isn't this automated? And more so, why do you have to pay a lawyer 50% of the cost of the

ticket um if you don't have the time to research for hours in the night like i do so i created the first version of do not pay just for fun really to impress my friends and we went from one case on day one myself um to about a dozen cases on day two all my friends who i now no longer had to waste time on microsoft word for um to 30 000 cases on day three because one of my friends um was a blogger at the huffington post and she wrote about it and it went internationally viral because it turns out everyone in the world hates parking tickets. And so did it work on like every college campus? Did it work for any city or how did it work on day one? On day one, it worked for all of the UK and Stanford. So no, it didn't. People were just submitting cases and it wouldn't actually

work for them. And so I thought I have to expand this thing really quickly. Like 30,000 people are showing up and I can't help them. Exactly. They're going to turn their anger and madness on me rather than on the people giving the parking ticket. Yeah, and I had like 12 followers on Twitter at the time. I had never gone viral or been contacted by anyone. And all of a sudden, I was getting like 300 angry emails a day saying like, by the way, can you help me with my Comcast dispute as well?

Really? And so after the parking ticket kind of, I don't know, dispute, right, platform or product, what did you build next? I really used all these emails to go after corporations. So I started with airlines. And then the next big product after that was helping people sue Equifax for the big data breach. And so all you're doing is you're basically creating almost a form to some degree, right?

And it automates, hey, enter in your information around you specifically, whether it's your name, your claim number, whatever it is. And then you guys would do everything from generate demand letters or kind of dispute letters all the way to actually file things for folks. And so as you're doing this, it seems like you're almost like just listening to customers. They tell you, hey, I have a problem. You guys write some software. okay now we can solve that you now have 200 of these yes at what point are you like hey this isn't like me impressing my friends anymore like this is going to be a company like when does that kind of hit you i think about a year in i um one of the vc partners on sandhill road actually used

do not pay successfully and he convinced me to make it into a company and so i did the standard road show pitching to lots of vc firms and i was lucky andreessen horowitz believed in me and invested a million to get it off the ground. Okay. And do they have to like convince you, like, did you not want to start a company and they had to like convince you to do it? Or what is that first conversation like? I believe companies are the way that things get done in the world. And so I knew I wanted to start a company, but at the same time, I didn't have any business model. I was just like, I love this product. I hate the government. I want to build a product to fight the government. I didn't know how I would charge people or what would the

business model be yeah and so as you're starting to raise the money uh what are like the funny conversations like right does every investor immediately get in there it's like yes this is amazing or are there people who are just like dude what are you talking about this is crazy and you know i'm not funding a parking ticket dispute company yeah that was like 90 of the conversations but at that point i it was still parking tickets but i had the vision of expanding to other areas And I was lucky they believed in that. Yeah. And so when you raised capital, what do you do next?

Do you go hire a bunch of people? Do you just sit on the cash? What did you guys do? We rented the house Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook in and was super lean and just stayed there for months on end creating more bots. So we did the airlines, we did Equifax, landlord tenant disputes. And over time, we had enough bots that eventually we could charge a subscription. All right.

Why Mark Zuckerberg's first Facebook house? So is there like some element of specifically seeking that house out? Was it some kind of like message to the world? Why that house? It was great marketing because every other day a bus of people would come and we could just give them do not pay app invites. What? And the landlord was a relic of a different era.

And so he didn't really use Zillow or know how much the house was worth. So we actually got a great deal on it. And we didn't actually find it as Mark Zuckerberg's house. we just found it as a cheap house and later found out when we're signing the lease that we got a good deal really yes and so would people show up on like tours or like how are they showing up yeah they show up on tours because everyone comes from around the world to see this house that we were just living in it's really not a very nice house yeah and so then you guys would have like flyers or how would you like hand out the invites yeah so usually they wouldn't expect

to be let in um but we would say come on in however you have to put your email down to enter the house ah that's smart yeah and then would you guys like give like a tour inside the house or just like let them wander yeah we'd have to waste some time with the tour and come up with some story right here let me tell you what mark did in the living room exactly that's right we're just trying to get emails for our initial uses what's the craziest story you think you guys made up about the house i mean we didn't make anything up but we're like this is mark's bed and it probably was mark's bed but still all right so i've seen you describe do not pay as a compound startup this whole idea of it kind of continues to grow accelerate build on top of itself just

where does that terminology come from like how do you think about a startup uh kind of going from idea to a compound startup and what does that take being a compound startup kind of um goes against all the typical advice it's more popular now but when we started it wasn't very popular the typical advice is focus on one small thing and grow from there. The problem with do not pay is that the average driver, unless you're a bad driver like me, only gets a parking ticket once a year. So they would forget about the service every time they use it and you'd have to reacquire the customer and all this stuff. So I knew for do not pay to be successful, I'd have to help a consumer every month. And luckily there are many disputes that a consumer has. People are being ripped off

left, right, and center, but one has to build that. So I actually spent four years building out the infrastructure to generate these letters, send it off to the right place before I felt comfortable even charging people. Yeah. And so when you think through kind of the product today, is it just automated lawyers essentially? Or like, how do you describe it to people? I like to think of it as the general counsel for the consumer. I don't tell consumers that because no one knows what a general counsel is, but a robot lawyer, general counsel, and they're sitting on their shoulders

watching their back. So when Comcast send a $1,000 debt collection letter, they can come to do not pay and have some recourse to fight back. So there's a lot of similarities between your dad going and kind of seeking justice, right? And then you basically going up against these corporations, going up against local governments

who are fundraising through parking tickets, et cetera. You've been called the Robin Hood of the internet, which is just one a badass name to be called undeserved maybe in 20 years but like is there an element of uh we're using technology to kind of fight back against the system or is that just kind of happenstance people like to spin that story no i really dislike authority and just love to live free which is why i think miami aligns with the do not pay values um the legal system is very protectionist um to be a lawyer you have to get the stamp of approval from a bar association. And if you're representing a consumer and you're not a lawyer, you can even spend time

in prison. So they're very protective because they like to keep their $1,800 average fee for the top 50 law firms. Yeah. And so as you build this, is there a way that you guys measure impact or dollars or the severity of the problem when you say, hey, we've got 200 products today. We're going to add the 201st one. How do you evaluate what's the next thing you go do? By the end of this year, we're looking to save around $100 million in aggregate for consumers. A lot of our products save people time, like canceling subscriptions as well. Yeah. And so when you evaluate that new product, right, let's say you have three different options to choose from. What's the framework you use to say, like, we should launch this one before the

other two? So we have three rules for ourselves. The first is it has to be truly mass market, 50 million Americans plus. Everyone gets robocalls, for example. And that precludes a lot of ideas like startup tax credits. That's not something we would ever do. The second rule is it has to be fully automated. We've built tools to phone up the DMV and do all the clicking. So automated is a big scope for us, but we can't have an army of people typing out these letters. And then the that is it has to be related to consumer rights yeah and so when you think about kind of doing this i think a lot of people look and say hey it's you know joshua the do not pay team and the consumer versus the man right and it's very much uh kind of taking back rights uh using technology

to uh to do this but also in many cases you're actually just reducing friction you're reducing barrier to uh things that people have a right to so for example the pandemic relief right there was all kinds of programs created. There was all sorts of money or services that were available to folks. One, they may not know, or two, it may just suck to go and apply. And so you guys, it sounds like, created a whole bunch of products that could help them do that. Talk a little bit just about the pandemic and those types of products. Yeah. So at the height of the pandemic, we were at about 20% unemployment. And so all of the state unemployment systems built maybe during the 1960s completely crashed. And people were really upset by that.

And so what Do Not Pay did is we found a workaround. It turns out that the US mail is the API for the government. And although they had all these online systems, you could still send in the paper form. So we built a bot to fill in the form for unemployment benefits in all 50 states and mailed it in automatically with an API. So when you do that, like I go online, right? I basically type in my information. What happens from there until a physical piece of paper is mailed? um it will go through the questions and explain the questions to you because sometimes you don't even know you're giving up rights by saying yes or no to these questions um and once it does that it generates all the paperwork in under 30 seconds and mails it off to the right place got it and so basically it almost like takes the answer from a digital form it then like prints out a piece of paper that has it and then you just have a human who grabs that piece of paper puts it into an envelope and mails it or do you even outsource that uh there are apis now to do that it's a

great time to be alive yeah that's wild right so basically you don't even have to deal with the physical mail you're literally just hitting an api and some other company or product is taking care of actually printing this piece of paper putting in an envelope and mailing it yeah we don't go outside we're just coding okay yeah you don't go outside at all no but just metaphorically well you know you're if you're in miami it's nice to go outside here right um when you think about how many people use these services for the pandemic related stuff like how does that compare in popularity to your other products that weren't pandemic related um at the time it was a few hundred thousand now it's died down and the as the world is opening up

all the typical bureaucracy is increasing again so dmv bureaucracy all of that yep uh you're pushing back against government and institutional type overreach uh i'm assuming that they don't like you i'm also assuming that they don't just sit there and take it on the chin yeah so what is the pushback from either the credit companies that you guys are kind of pushing back against, you know, the Comcast of the world, the local governments, any of the tax organizations, etc. Like just what, what's kind of the pushback that you're receiving? It's an arms race. So they try and block do not pay from interacting with their systems completely. So for example, one product we have is called the free trial credit card.

It's a credit card, you can sign up for any free trial, and it does it's not linked to you. it's not even linked to your bank account um and netflix blocked our entire card network from that so we have to switch it um and keep innovating to stop them but we're more motivated than them so i'm not too worried about it so you have a product where i can go i can use this it's essentially a virtual card right and then i can use that virtual card to sign up for a free trial on netflix and if i forget to cancel it at the end of the free trial i basically can't get charged because it was never tied to yeah me not taking the risk okay and so i'm assuming then at the end of the free trial if they try to come back you guys are canceling it being able to dispute it

or whatever right yes and so they hate us yeah so you can take a lot of risk mitigation efforts uh when they figure out what you're doing they try to block you and then it's literally a cat and mouse game of can you figure another way in yeah and we see this with the government too then blocking our IPs. So we've built this workaround where when someone uses the Do Not Pay app, the appeal is submitted from their IP address on the phone. So it's like very decentralized. So they have to block all the IPs, not just one Do Not Pay IP. So really what you're doing here is you're essentially spending all day long figuring out not only one, how to build the automated systems and what products to build, but then

you're also building this like almost anti-establishment decentralized technology stack that allows you guys to continue to do this without having a single point of failure that that's exactly right i feel like i have the best job in the world i didn't know it's actually a real job to be doing that uh when i say that they must not like you uh maybe i underestimated they must really fucking hate you they really do have they ever sent you like cease and desist letters or like like what's like the worst thing that's ever happened in terms of the pushback we've certainly got lots of cease and desist letters um we have a bot that lets us know whenever someone signs up with a dot gov address and we get like three a day it's very interesting

everyone is signing up from the government across the u.s and they want to see how it works or they want to use the service to get out of a parking ticket or something both but they're trying to scope it out and what do you do if they sign up from a dot gov address we leave them alone but we watch them very carefully in some way now they're on your turf right and so you you can pay attention there is some positive though when we launched in los angeles npr asked the head of the los angeles parking ticket bureau what he thought of do not pay and he said i actually love it because people write such gibberish and their parking ticket appeals at least when it comes from do not pay it's standardized and that's better spin than i even i could have come up with

yeah so really what they're saying is like look if people are going to write in then we'd rather it all be standardized and we know what it says it has the information that we need whatever versus we have to read a bunch of handwriting or whatever. Yeah, I think bureaucracy holds us all back, even the government. Yeah, so in some weird way, even though you're fighting them by giving them a standardized letter

or information or whatever, you can actually make them better at their job and just make it a more efficient process between the dispute and the government or the credit agency or whatever. Yeah, and we're very humble. We know that in New York City, they make a billion dollars a year from tickets.

And so even if we're appealing a few million dollars a year from new york we're just a drop in the water so we're actually saving them their biggest cost base which is dealing with these appeals yeah how bad is the government bureaucracy i it's it's really really bad even worse than most people say so for example um the federal government only stopped using floppy disks entirely in 2016 floppy disks so and i'm assuming that the switching cost for them to go from floppy disks to whatever technology they're using now was not minuscule right like you see these bills you see the budgets that they have for like stupid stuff yeah uh i think in one of the pandemic uh relief bills there was 25 million

dollars in the bill for cleaning supplies of the capitol building which by the way i don't know how big it is i don't know how much the cleaning supplies should cost but that just seems like 25 million dollars is not one gonna last forever right so like what is that for a year or two of cleaning supplies and it just seems like a lot yeah um there's a really big scandal the tsa was trying to make an app that said should passengers go left or right just randomly whether they should go left or right it cost 1.4 million dollars to just point an arrow in either direction in a random format and why did it cost so much they have these contractors that take advantage of the situation and are so entrenched with lobbyists and things like that and procurement processes

that they get the contract is that a do not pay a potential product in the future is the tsa's left or right app that you could just go and help them out and buy some goodwill with them it seems like they wouldn't like us very much do that are they scared that you may you may start confusing people on purpose to cause mass chaos in the tsa line yeah all the amex colors can go right i love it uh when you think about the company over the next like three five ten years What does this become? Is it just literally almost an army of like robot lawyers and you just continue to knock out product after product feature? And eventually you can kind of eat into the everyday life, right? In terms of just every single thing you interface, do not pay as a solution if you have a problem, or is there some other vision? that's exactly right but with the caveat that do you shouldn't even have to know what do not pay is it should just be um hey we've got you 500 in your bank account today so right now people come

to do not pay with a problem um we want to make it so that do not pay just comes with the solution that you didn't even know about and is this a purely subscription play where you just are going to continue to say hey pay us one you know price point and then you're going to get all of these like army of robots that are on your side forever just constantly working for you yeah i think it's best that we work for our customers yeah uh are there corporations or any types of you know products or things that you can do with non like retail or consumer uh type customers or is it just continue to serve the individual people and everything else is a distraction i think as long as it helps 50 million people it doesn't matter who they are so we've got small business products

finance products so we're looking to be more sophisticated but it has to impact everyone yeah what is like a small business product example responding to dmca takedown requests a lot of websites get harassed with these requests and do not pay can just deal with them yeah deal for them for you what about patents anything in the patent space you guys have looked at that seems like the the patent trolls are having a field day these days it's not something we can do i you probably have to go into court um and also patents are being unwinded in the u.s as we speak yes uh what Is it the vaccines they're saying that they're going to take away all the patents or like kind of like D teeth them, I guess, so that now people can as a first step. Do we think that's a good idea?

I think whenever you have inconsistency where some rules are being applied differently, I've seen firsthand how that can go snowball in the wrong direction. So I think that maybe the mission could be good, but treating things inconsistently is never a good idea in the legal system. Yeah. It feels like we got a crash course in that over the last 12 months of local, state, and federal governments picking and choosing when to implement certain rules and actually enforce them or not. And the other part I think that we learned is there's a very big difference between law on the books or rules in the book and then actually enforcing them. And it feels like what you guys really do is you essentially are looking at what are the actual rules on the book versus how are they being enforced. And there's some exploitation that

you can do there in the name of the consumer to basically fight back. Right. That's right. And how much of the products that you guys build is pure technicality based? Like, hey, we just know that if you do, you know, send a letter, ask for this and, you know, I don't know, pay 20 bucks, then you get out of the parking ticket that was $300 versus it's more so, you know, actually the merit of the case, right? Where it's like the individual details really matter. We are strongly focused on the law. So there have been companies in the past, I call them loophole companies, where they automate credit card policies, for example. The problem is that the big companies only offer these loopholes because they think no one will use them. All of a sudden, AI comes along and automates the price protection on your credit card, and the credit card company says, we're losing too much money, we're going to stop this overnight. And so do not pays entirely US laws. admittedly there are some areas where if you're sending this long note to united's legal department they're probably so scared that they rule in your favor but at least it's based in law rather than just some loophole yeah and so really it's just a sustainability play right it allows you to build products that aren't going to disappear overnight yes got it uh global launch uh or global markets

i want to ask people for questions that seems to be like one of the big areas that and android so i don't know just all ios and desktop right now or what's the platforms everyone always says complains about android but do not pay.com works perfectly on all devices and so do you have a ios app as well or we do okay do you have an android app no no but the website works so just like the mobile web yes and it's really good all right so android users go opinion yeah go use the mobile web and you should be okay and you can add it to your home screen as well oh so it's basically like an app it's just like a diy app right like just do it yourself put on your home page my thesis is i want to rely on as few gatekeepers as possible i accidentally relied on apple in the

past and i've had my issues with them i'm not looking to expand to more gatekeepers what were the issues and why do you say accidentally uh relied on them well as a naive like stanford former stanford student i thought an app is great but then i launched on the app store and um it was good for a few years and one day apple said we want 30 and also you have too many your app is too app store like um and so you have 30 days and so on election night they actually removed us and only when there was public uproar and we changed it a bit did they have changed their mind and they wanted 30 of the subscription yes but there was a point in time where they didn't take 30 that's right and they just change their policies every day it's worse than the government at least the

government is transparent and um there are different judges but if there's one corporation they act in their own interests uh is it a monopoly a hundred percent i'm following the epic games that's my one regret about leaving the bay area i'd probably go to one take a day off and go to the trial with tim sweeney do you think they're gonna win i i think that um 50 50 the law is not so strong it should be made stronger but it's so egregious some of these emails what apple are doing like we will crush the competition in emails that um something's going to happen it is pretty crazy i haven't paid a ton of attention but the things that i've read i think on both sides frankly right it's like whoa this is way worse than we thought both in terms of uh the egregious

and kind of the overreach of the app store and the fees and all stuff yeah uh but then also like what some of the companies are doing right where they explicitly know that it's against the app to our rules but they're trying to do it to intentionally kind of elicit the response and all of that uh but the other thing that i think was the most surprising out of everything i read was there's this uh belief that hey we always charge the same thing to every app and then you find out like well actually that's not true because there are some applications that are allowed to whether it's trials percentages user payment processors within their applications and i think that like my takeaway from all of it is like hey we all kind of knew you were doing this so just

don't say that you're not doing it right like if you just said hey look by the way yeah if you're fucking amazon like you get to use your payment processor inside the app if you're not amazon you don't get to do that people won't like it but they'll just be like okay like i'm not amazon right instead when you're like oh everyone has to play by the same rules and then it comes out that you're not doing that that's what it seems like it's almost like you're uh it's somebody once told me uh the crime's not the worst part is the cover-up like that feels like in this case that's true yeah and in the amazon example they they covered it up by saying oh no they didn't get special deal that was part of the premium video subscription program which they invented just

to cover up this is a real real story uh what about global markets uh you're in the u.s and the uk what other markets are you in and are there certain markets that you're thinking about going to that you're not in today i think do not pay will work anywhere that has a rule of law so canada south africa europe with that said though the u.s is stuck in the 1980s so we have too much work here before we expand more why do you say it's stuck in the 1980s um several courts still require you to fax documents we have a list of 40 different products coming up this year just in the u.s so our work is cut out for us do can i make a product suggestion which means that it'll probably be stupid but you'll uh no we'll do it next week okay so uh i got married last year yeah and my

wife went to change her name and there i think there are companies where you can like mail your documents in right and try to change all this uh it's a nightmare but the thing that blew my mind was in some states you have to get it written into the newspaper in order to have it recognized as a legal name change and i literally when i got told this i was like excuse me like i didn't even know some newspaper still existed let alone that the law requires you to write your name in the newspaper yeah well you'll be happy to know that we are actually doing that uh in the next few weeks we're on it we know where if when you launch it you know that people are like wow that is the fastest product development cycle in the world what are products that people have suggested

that you're like man we really want to do that but there's some sort of obstacle between you know where you are today and being able to actually do it i think divorce is the biggest one interesting so a majority of americans have negative net worth and so when they want to do an uncontested divorce there's no assets to split it should be very simple with that said it still cost $3,000 around on average. And so where's that cost coming from? Filing $1,000 in filing fees, $2,000 to hire a lawyer to make sure you fill out the paperwork, right? And do not pay can't do that because there's lots of human involvement built into the system. And there will be one day when people will have their AirPods on and do not pay as

whispering into their AirPods, but not yet. So I'm assuming that you get blowback if you say, hey we want to automate divorce yeah people are like oh you shouldn't let you know do that that shouldn't be easy there should be a lot of friction whatever how do you just think about you know in these situations where there's going to be blowback whether it's right or wrong just around if you automate something and make it easier of course more people are going to do it is that just uh hey let the free market decide if they want to do this or not or like what's the thought process you use to kind of think through that yeah so we have this product sue corporations at the press of a button and that sounds very dangerous because um people could abuse it but

But what I've noticed over the past six years working on Do Not Pay is the crazies already know how to abuse the system. If it really takes them downloading an app or going on a website, signing up, paying for a subscription and going through this long flow, they're probably not crazy in the first place. And so we've had very little. I mean, I think we've banned about a dozen users over the past six years. So very little abuse. What were the banned users doing? Like 1,000 cases. we have systems in place that if it gets too much yeah it's like trying to sue 1000 corporations

yeah i only i do you have an example or do you remember what they were trying to sue for i'm not sure i i should talk about it for legal reasons but okay so it sounds like it was pretty ridiculous yeah uh one of the new products that you have is an hoa product which i think anyone who is anywhere remotely near an hoa hates it right everyone uh what does the product do and kind of how did that come about i lived in a hoa in san francisco um three do not pay employees hate their hoas everyone i've spoken to hates their hoas and there are all these rights that people have regarding this so they can't just um find you uh without any like uh kind of recourse uh so do not pay gives you that recourse stops them from finding you um you can complain have

reviews see documents because it's very secretive sometimes they hold these secret meetings and they're like oh yeah we find you one thousand dollars uh the building that i live in uh here in miami literally they have a board i don't know who's on the board nobody knows who's on the board and when people want to move into the building you have to apply and like in the application process they're literally like well it could take one day or 14 yeah right and you just like okay this whole thing's rigged somehow like i don't know how right because i don't even know who it is i don't know what the process is but they basically get a packet and they make the decision and i have this theory that is actually just one person right who's making all the decisions and

it's like the person who owns the building or something yeah has to change yeah so uh how many what percentage of the products you guys build are internally thought of and it's just like a personal pain point or an employee versus external like whether it's customers writing in asking for something or just like you talk to a friend and they give you an idea i say they combine together So the customers come up with the general problem, like I hate robocallers. And then we use our internal hacks to solve that problem. So with robocallers, the biggest challenge is knowing who they are. You can actually sue robocallers for up to 1.5k per call, but they hide behind these

spoof numbers and they don't give you their real name. So one of the things I personally did was I realized you can track them down by giving them a credit card number. and when the declined transaction hits you find out the business name phone number and address through the payment network and then sue them and then sue them so we've built a honey trap credit card for that product for example so the problem came from our users but the solution came from do not pay internally so right now i can go on do not pay i can basically come up with a credit card i can answer a robocall i give them the credit card number yeah they try to charge the

number now all of a sudden i know who it is and then you send them the demand letter and go through the suing process and do people get money for this yeah up to 1.5k per call and what's these robo callers are really scared of a class action lawsuit and so they will actually settle quickly they settle on the highest percentage out of anything even more than like a security deposit really yeah how much money do you think do not pay customers have gotten from suing the robo callers with this honeypot credit card so it does take some time so maybe like 400k so far that's a lot yeah not compared to our other products but the people that do it love it there's this one guy it's his full-time job he just answers the phone seriously and he like bought

a like new roof for his house with all the money he's made from this and he just answers all the robocallers give him the fake number yeah and then he's ready to rock and rolls with it yeah wow i literally get the spam risk you know on the iphone yeah five six times a day i'm gonna sign up for the product and i'm literally gonna do it and then i'm gonna have you come back and we're gonna talk about whether i got my 1.5k or not okay if i can go in after these people uh i'll give you free subscription no no i want to pay i want to pay because uh i want to document the process photo ninja is one of my favorites just because i was telling you before i feel like some of the products you guys have are proactive and people don't even know that it's a problem so explain

what photo ninja does and kind of what the problem you guys solved there was so we're fighting facial recognition and stalking okay what photo ninja does is it will take any photo of you um like that one and make it so that it's undetectable to facial recognition and reverse image search but it won't change the look of the photo so your friend will still say it looks the same but it will look completely different with this adversarial ai changing the details and practically why this is important is if someone wants to sign up online maybe for a dating app um a stalker can go in reverse image search and find out their true identity so it protects privacy and it also stops data from being sold especially with these apple privacy changes over the past few weeks

you now can't identify devices as easily so the data brokers are going to other techniques like facial recognition to find out who you are yeah and how did this product come up um the same this is something that i've done myself uh and i've thought about and i thought why doesn't everyone have access to this and so then you're just like let's just productize yeah what do you do during your free time like do you just sit and think of like how do i push back against something like what do you spend your free time doing just like uh fighting back these companies i'm the type person to wait on hold for like four hours for twelve dollars really it's about the principle and having winning you know yeah so so this is very much like there's an element of can i figure

it out and when you figure it out then you give it to everyone and you're kind of you know the virtual middle finger to the institution yeah i want to scale myself because not everyone is as passionate about these issues or they don't have the time to do it and so technology is great for that so like let's take photo ninja hoa uh parking ticket like how long does it take you guys to build one of these parking ticket uh took about three weeks to build but we've gotten the product development time if we know exactly what we're going to do to about four days really so you can basically that's how you're able to build 200 plus products it's just you can very quickly knock these out yeah like one a week okay and how big is the team working on this it's just 13 people

just 13 people who are not only building but also managing 200 plus features or products right uh and then how much of that is customer service versus actual like product development we have two full-time customer service 24 7 we're very we always respond very quickly and then everyone else is engineering and that's it that's literally it it's very simple we don't have sales it's all self-service uh what about like a business person or are you the business person um in terms of uh like partnerships i i don't think it works i think it's better to just be on the side of the consumer so we don't do any biz dev and then managing the actual business itself it's all you yeah and we have an accounting firm and all that yeah yeah okay uh how much money have you raised

total 16.6 million and we're profitable now okay uh and what's like the long-term thing here do you want to like just build it forever and never sell do you want to take it public do you not know what's kind of thought process i think everyone in america can benefit from do not pay from we unfortunately we have homeless people using our product because they get parking tickets in their cars we have crypto investors using our product and everyone in between and so i want to take it public and have everyone in america and one day the world using it yeah i literally think you're gonna do that so that's pretty cool uh you mentioned crypto i know that you've been tweeting a bunch saying that uh crypto investors are getting ripped off i think i saw irs crypto

exchanges like you i mean you pretty much laid it all out pretty clearly uh what what's the problem first that you see with a lot because a lot of people watching that uh are crypto investors so where are they getting ripped off whether they know it or not so three main areas which i'm sure you're very familiar with this space so freezing of funds this like if you make a mistake on the form or they just get suspicious they'll freeze millions or hundreds of thousands of dollars and we will get that unfrozen for you. How quickly? Much more quickly than if you're talking

to the customer service department. Okay. The second is hacked funds. So we're building a tracing product and what the tracing product will do is it will force any exchange, we'll send it to every single exchange. If they have an address where it is,

they have to freeze it and they have a responsibility to check. We found a law that says that. Okay. And then finally, any sort of ICO or misrepresentation, getting your money back. Fascinating. And so basically, that's just like the equivalent of a class action. But basically, hey, I gave you money.

This was illegal. Give me my money back. Yes. Do you fear that the crypto exchanges and others will be similar, like the credit companies and the cable companies, and they won't like you as well? Or do you feel like this is actually welcomed from them? They're definitely not going to like it. But my expression in life is the squeaky wheel gets the grease.

the majority of people do not send these things into the legal department. And so when it gets sent to the legal department, it's a much more expedited process. Got it. So basically what you're doing is you are making it a better experience for the user. And usually it's the organization that's doing something that they shouldn't be doing. That's right. Got it. So there's almost like a, in some crazy way, like a check and balance in the system. That's right. Right. Fighting fire with fire. Yeah. And you just happen to have the legal letter, which most people don't understand how to do that, but you guys understand. Yeah. Okay. uh when you think of crypto is this it seems very aligned in terms of the ethos that you guys have

right the decentralized infrastructure kind of the pushing back against the institutions and the system yeah uh you know all the digital kind of automation like it just feels like you guys are so well lined up to really go serve that is that a single product line or is that something that'll become a bigger part like how do you just think about uh a whole new industry in terms of what's going on there is that something that you say hey where i'm gonna go put somebody in charge of like Like go win in crypto and build crypto products? Or is it just, nope, we have 200 plus products and like this is just one of many others?

No, we really want to double down. I, as an engineer, I see like the law as code and like society's operating system and crypto is the perfect complement to that. How do you think about the fact that a lot of the products you have send legal letters, right? But in crypto and decentralized products or decentralized systems,

there's nobody to like receive it, right? There's no address to send it to. Like, how do you get around that? I think rather than convincing a guy to help you appeal your parking, like in the city to approve the appeal, you can convince the public. And the public is much more reasonable than an entrenched bureaucrat. Okay, explain that further. So an ideal world would be legal disputes are decided by a group of decentralized people. And if you can convince them rather than someone with an interest to deny the appeal,

then of course it's more advantageous got it and so basically if you can somehow get your case or your dispute out into the public uh in front of some decentralized group of people almost like a jury right to some degree uh and do it in an automated quick efficient low cost way then that would be the ideal outcome uh from a process standpoint and then basically based on the merit of each case you'd get this the kind of end result of the conclusion yeah and there is a legal framework to assign decisions to crypto in the same way that these big corporations require arbitration with this arbitrator you can require that the token holders decide everything in your life i enjoy talking to you because it's what you're doing from a professional standpoint the

crypto ethos yeah miami etc like there's a lot of these layers that are laid on top of each other it's actually very similar right and i think that the way that like miami politics and and uh kind of south florida and the um leaning towards more freedom rather than less the ability for people to think for themselves and kind of uh operate their life and make decisions for themselves but also be responsible and accountable for the decisions they make uh is very much aligned with the geography the industries right and the work that you do where does that come from like like why do you think that that's the stuff that you're drawn towards i i think um i'm drawn to it because it's the better approach.

You're not allowed to say that. You're not allowed to say that. It's objectively the better approach. Anyone who disagrees, they can go kick rocks. I think that it's not even about punishing people or fairness. I think that the approach in some other areas is anti-innovation. There are products that Do Not Pay does, like paying people's DMV fees where we just pay.

You don't have to send a check. Do Not Pay, you pay Do Not Pay, and we pay and don't charge anything more. In San Francisco, you can't do that because San Francisco says money's flowing through you. You have to pay 0.5% to us, not even on profit, on revenue. It's called a new gross receipts tax. I don't know. So literally, because you're a company that is processing a payment, even though you make no money, they say, you make no money, but we as a city, we're going to make money.

We'll make 0.5% just for you to be here. And it's not 0.5% of the San Francisco tickets. is 0.5% of everywhere. Even if we were operating in Cape Town, South Africa, we'd have to pay 0.5% to San Francisco. So if a user in Cape Town, South Africa wants to basically pay a parking ticket in Cape Town, South Africa, San Francisco believes that they have a right to 0.5% of that transaction. That's right. And this was the last move for us. I was trying to justify being in San Francisco, but when we got this big tax bill from 2020 for gross receipts, i was like okay enough is enough that's fucking nuts it really is are you gonna pay it well uh

we're discussing that i think to be honest reluctantly i will pay it but we'll never give them a single dollar again yeah i mean that's like to me i've heard some pretty egregious things these cities do that may be up there as one of the most egregious things yeah and it's not just do not pay anything related to fintech has these problems so it holds back innovation And so Stripe being based in San Francisco, around San Francisco, wherever their headquarters is, do they have to do a similar thing where they have to pay 0.5% to the city of San Francisco for every single transaction that they process? So there are exemptions for credit card companies. So if you're truly an incumbent industry, like maybe they've come up with an exemption, but even Stripe has moved out of San Francisco to Daly City or somewhere because of this tax. really so they basically they levy a tax which they think is going to lead to more revenue but what it's done instead is it's driven one of the most valuable private technology companies in the

world out of their city drove you out of the city i can't begin to imagine how many other companies have left the city all because of this stupid tax yeah and fair enough on profits but revenue is ridiculous and it is only increasing agreed i think that's i think that's the egregious part. It's not so much that there is a tax, it's that the tax is on gross revenue, not on any profit. And therefore, they want to get paid even if you don't make money. Yeah. And the question we ask is, what do we get in return? And the only thing we get in return is restrictions. Last year, we couldn't open our business because of COVID restrictions where Miami is completely open. So not only is it not a net positive, it's actually a net negative. Agreed. Are you guys

going to go back into like a central office or are you remote? I'm a big believer in in-person work, especially for these product driven companies. Why? There's a magic that happens when we're all like trying to figure out how to stop the robo coolers and you can't really replicate that remote. Some functions can be remote, but not everything. So it almost feels like you got like a little pirate ship going here and you need to all be together to like really kind of the small group take on the big organization. Yeah. And several of my team members are in miami and they're thrilled they'll get a raise from the taxes as well so yeah they basically get an implicit right like this is amazing to do not pay and now they're going to

go outside so it's even better well we're working on that uh we can't wear sweatshirts outside only in only in the building okay that's good to know um let's talk about investing i know that you started to do a lot of investing um why are you interested in investing kind of how did this come up? I am unlucky to have lots of smart friends from Stanford and also the Thiel Fellowship. And it would be irrational not to invest in them because they asked me for that my help. There may be like four years behind where I was with Do Not Pay. And so I want to help them and as friends. And when I see them succeed, I've had a few cases where I've helped a lot and I didn't invest. And I'm like, why didn't I invest? So I want to have a financial incentive to help them.

You don't have to give an example, but do you have an example of like, Hey, this is the type of, uh, kind of access or like special, um, you know, uh, advantage that you have? Is there like one thing that you can be like, Oh, you know, this was a friend, here's how I met them. And then here's kind of what happened. um yeah so i i really like to find companies before they hit the circuit if you're finding them after they hit the circuit then it's just too competitive or too high a price so one example is my friend marcus from stanford he started a computer chip ai company called luminous computing it's a truly amazing company and i invested in the first round and now it's um they've raised over 100 million got it from bill gates and others and so when you find this person really you're finding them as a friend right and you get to know them and it feels like in that situation like you almost know them better than any other investor will because it's literally your friend

that you know it's not so much you're meeting them for the first time as they pitch you a company yeah i like to think of this as creating my own deal flow sometimes i convince them to start the company in the first place and then i'll buy i'll pay your incorporation just let me invest tomorrow before it gets too hot so uh i've done this once or twice yeah always the best deals yeah like i don't understand why it isn't focused on more because it's hard maybe because like you literally have to go meet a bunch of people and then they have not certain companies whatever but by far some of the best deals are either you convince them to raise capital start the business uh take it more seriously whatever and i don't know why though i haven't figured out like what's the

psychological uh or kind of repeatable pattern there because it just feels like each one is so different right there's there's such wild cards but maybe that is the pattern right is that they don't fit the normal narrative or they're not looking to start a business i i think is a really great business model because sometimes even three weeks later a big firm comes in and and then they do all the work absolutely yeah uh when you're doing this are there specific focuses that you have or are you just investing in the person anything promising based on the person i've done uh sass hardware whatever environment what's the craziest thing you've done um it's uh still in stealth okay yeah uh can you say what industry or space it is like is it something that people

would expect oh that's weird i know it's ai consumer okay got it um when you think about what's happening in the investing world especially in the earliest stages i think you and i see eye to eye on a lot of things in terms of like these individual gps or uh kind of investors being able to move faster being able to go earlier uh being able to build a very different relationship with the founder and also being able to provide different type of help uh it feels like that's the future, right? It definitely is. I think it's commonly said that we're seeing power shift to individuals. And it makes sense. When I was a founder pitching my pre-seed round, there would be these big committees of people and they take weeks to decide. I have unilateral decision-making

authority on a phone call. And if I think it's promising, I can invest there and then and be much more helpful per dollar invested as well. So my perspective is top five, maybe top 10 venture funds. They're protected. They're great. They've built great reputations. The reason why they have great reputations is because they've been doing this a very long time at the highest level. And so whether it's Benchmark, Sequoia, Andries, whoever, name your firm, they've been able to kind of repeatedly compound money very aggressively, be helpful to founders and build that reputation. Once you get outside of the top 10, is everyone else screwed? Like is every tier two and below firm just screwed i think it will be uh commoditized outside of that so okay and so

when you say commoditized like it literally is just capital and therefore when a founder picks it's not necessarily the picking between differentiation of the partner or the firm that's exactly it's just you're taking the money yeah and that's the opportunity for the individual gps to step in and say hey i've got some sort of differentiation that all the commoditized tier two and below don't have and therefore take my money versus theirs yeah and the differentiation can be pre-investment or post-investment like pre-investment maybe an easier process or things like that okay and then post-investment what do you see the biggest differentiations being um some firms uh the differentiation is we leave you alone we don't destroy the company like tiger

global i think that and others um do a lot of media they help with recruiting and a16z model yeah do you think that uh these later stage firms that are deploying literally billions and billions of dollars and then like hey we're going to leave you alone yeah is that a sustainable strategy is that attractive as a founder do you want like you personally do you want investors more involved less involved like how do you just think through uh who you would take money from because i'm assuming that goes a lot that feeds into how you think about yourself as an investor i honestly i'm such an easy i'm very easygoing so i don't mind either approach i think that everyone will do well at the moment because I've seen firsthand just how backwards the government and society is

and technology is creating massive new opportunities. And so although we might be overvalued in the short term, in the long term, we're undervalued. In the short term, we're overvalued potentially. But in the long term, we're drastically undervalued. And is that just technology in general or is that venture capital investing? How do you think about breaking that down? like vc investing because anything below like 10 billion is probably worthwhile really yeah why because the world is so stuck that these new companies are changing everything um i come from a suburb in england and everything is so backwards there they could really use some of these companies

and it really creates a lot of value one of the things i keep thinking about is uh when my parents we're kids everyone wanted to be a millionaire yeah now it feels like everyone wants to be a billionaire right it used to be that everyone to build a billion dollar company now it almost feels like the goalposts have moved there to 10 billion or 100 billion right like getting to a billion it's not easy but it happens way more often than it used to happen and so some of that may be just a macroeconomic you know inflationary type stuff uh but some of it also is like people are just understanding the value of some of these companies so it feels like the there's been a shift in terms of a $250 million valuation doesn't seem as high as it once felt, right?

Like it's kind of on the path to go there. How do you see the dynamics as you're building a company as a tech entrepreneur? Like how do you see the various dynamics around valuations and amount of capital you raise, all that stuff changing? I think it's really to do with the competition between all the firms. Maybe five years ago when I was just starting Do Not Pay, there were very much fewer venture firms. So the collusion would be higher. I'm not saying there was any, but there was more collusion. But now everyone is so worried. Even as a solo GP, there are like dozens and dozens of solo GPs. So I know that I have to commit quickly if I want to invest. Does that make the investors better investors or worse investors, like all the

pressure and competition? I think efficiency is always a good thing. Got it. So even if you're having to make decisions faster over the long run that should make you a better investor yes yeah because it weeds out the people more quickly i always remind people that uh warren buffett has this quote where he's like you know even if i'm doing a multi-billion dollar deal i basically know within the first five minutes of the phone call whether we're going to do it or not yeah and i think that scares the hell out of people right because they want the uh safety and the confidence of we did the work right we went we looked at all the numbers like all this stuff uh and so to me there's a balance right like yes of course you gotta do diligence you gotta do some work as you

get later later in stage of a business but there is this element of just like if you're investing in people you very quickly kind of have a feeling like yes this person is smart this person is going to be persistent this person is likely to have a higher probability of success versus not yeah i often know very quickly and i also know the reverse i know if someone will invest within five minutes even if they don't tell me really yeah why like how do you know is it just an intuition feeling i i think it's a mutual mutual feeling for sure yeah so it's uh just hey they're not as excited as they should be i'm not as excited so therefore this isn't gonna work exactly yeah do you ever preempt telling them no like will you ever talk to an investor and they'd be like

now you know what i don't think this is a fit i think so because it's very intense sometimes yeah intense in what like you have to open yourself up like intellectual property wise so it might not be worth it if you don't think that yeah so you just hey this doesn't make sense all right what's been the biggest surprise over the last 12 months for you personally i thought covid meant the death of startups and businesses and tech companies or it would be very difficult but the opposite is true tech has thrived and i didn't see that coming why do you think uh it's thrived is there like something that you can point at or is it just simply everyone went home and the only way to actually communicate and do business and stuff was through technology i think that um there

are lots of these rules that the government and courts and um institutions made that were anti-technology like lots of courts said that you have to uh come into the courtroom but then all of a sudden they were forced to accept technology like zoom court hearings even on the supreme court um so that has moved things forward and across many industries yeah uh and i'm assuming you saw massive uptick in usage or things like parking tickets because people aren't driving anymore during that time there was a loss in terms of usage we saw a huge uptick the biggest was cancellations gyms were refusing to cancel people which i thought was unjust gyms airlines like all of these folks and and to some degree you feel for them right you're like hey look we get that

you're under pressure but at the same time you're basically keeping people's money you're stealing from them yeah right like you're not giving them a service and you're trying to keep the money uh we get that you're in pain but that doesn't mean that you should pass that pain on to the consumer that's exactly right businesses passing it on yeah uh it felt a little bit like that is what people are trying to do with canceling student debt, canceling rent, like all this stuff. It's not so much you solve the problem. You just simply pass it on to somebody else and somebody that you think can handle it, but most likely can't. Yeah. Yeah. Will you guys do anything in kind of the student loan space or have you done anything there before? These loan contracts

are the most predatory. They can't even be discharged in bankruptcy. So there are actually very few laws that protect people from getting rid of their student debt and hopefully that changes yeah so it's just really really hard to kind of get around yeah uh it feels like that's intentional yes it is there's huge regulatory capture yeah um are you bullish on the united states from a regulation and kind of legal on government standpoint or are you pretty bearish compared to the rest of the world i hate to say this but i'm actually very bearish i have three free citizenships. And I don't know how long it will last. I think I'm with you. Like, it just feels like we're heading in the wrong direction on a macro basis for the country. It can be reversed,

right? Hopefully it will be. I think that there's a lot of people working on important work to do that. But it does feel like we've kind of lost the plot in many ways. Yeah. And I think lawmakers just don't understand what they're regulating. There are these Zoom hearings where the lawmakers don't understand technology at all. So I think we need like a technical oath of office as well. Anyone who's a lawmaker should be required to like understand the iPhone.

Can we put you in charge of that? I don't think they'll have me. You're on the not friends list. Yeah. I got three questions for you before we wrap up. First one is what's the most important book you've ever read? That's a great question. um what's the next question while i think about that uh second question is your sleep schedule

so our friends are ready to sleep they gave me this bed that uh is thermoregulated i can put it really cold sleep okay you got do you have one by it okay in san francisco i swear by it as well i sleep like eight nine hours how how did your sleep change once you started using eight sleep i'll say that way i didn't realize like just how cool i need the bed but it's changed my life it's like the most important thing you spend more time sleeping than anything else completely agree what temperature do you put on i'm uh i'm minus five when i go to sleep and it goes to minus six which i didn't realize was actually way colder than most people do it i think around that all right yeah uh there's somebody who i know who was pretty well known investor and he said the first

night he got it he was like he didn't know what he's doing he just put it minus 10 he woke up the next day it cold for like 40 48 hours yeah so i was like i didn't do that but i i do like it very cold uh third question is aliens are you a believer or non-believer um i would say i am that's a great question i believe in aliens yeah i've looked into the family palette paradox a lot and it makes sense why why do you believe in them like what like what is the thing that drives you i'm with you right i think they're out there i don't think that we've seen them i don't think that we're going to see them like it's more of like they're probably out there too far away for us to actually come in contact but what's the thing that you point to you like this is like the

the biggest data point or the biggest thing that makes me have belief i'm a engineer and a geek and just probabilistically it's a certainty i mean the universe is so big um of course there'll be a replicant of earth somewhere yeah that's generally the way that i think about it uh book you have one yeah i would say trust me i'm lying um i don't know if you've read ryan holiday it's a very good book and it's taught me about all the deception that big companies uh kind of go to do do you study the deception so that then you can like almost like in a judo move use it against them i don't know perhaps i wouldn't say it's the most important i'd have to think about that but it's certainly a good book yeah that's that's a great answer uh you get to ask me one question

to finish up what do you have for me um what does the world look like in 10 years i think it looks a lot like it does now unfortunately like i think we make a lot of progress right but at the same time many of the things that are true today are still true then unfortunately right and so what i mean by unfortunately is there's the bill gates quote we overestimate what we can do in one year underestimate what we can do in 10 so i do think that uh we're likely undervaluing technology progress you know uh the improvement make the world safer wealthier you know all that kind of healthier all that stuff at the same time uh i still think that there will be incumbents yeah i still think that there will be startups i still think there will be innovation and i still think

there'll be plenty of people fighting the innovation like you know like all the structural things will remain the same they may look different there may be different players but uh the world if you go all the way back to literally the ancient roman times is very similar to how it was today it just happens that you know now we have super phones and then we didn't right yeah um and so i'm one of these people who tries to separate out like uh kind of the, the micro, uh, progress and movement from just like the macro situation. And it feels like, uh, even if we were to move to, let's say, you know, the, the most outrageous thing some people could think of is like Bitcoin as a global reserve currency. Yeah. Okay. We would still

have incumbent firms, right? We would still have startup, like, like you still have a lot of the same structural things. Yeah. Yeah. You still have to pay rent, right? Like you just may use a different currency to do it. Right. I still need food to eat. Right. We're still going to be trying to, you know, go accomplish certain things. And so, um, I like to say all the time that like I'm agnostic on a macro basis just because like we have no control over that and we're unlikely to change it uh but on a micro basis i'm very very bullish because i think that the technology will improve people will actually get better lives over time and so it's you know it's kind of this weird thing of just don't focus on the macro stuff and just focus on the micro stuff and that ends up

being where uh where all the progress gets made yeah i agree with that incremental changes exactly uh how can people go find you on the internet or find more about do not pay um it's do not pay.com or i'm jay browder on twitter all right uh and are we gonna get more miami tweets out of you i think i'm we need a do not pay bot that is a miami like marketing machine i think people don't like it so i don't want to upset anyone i like to be like political you know just keep oh you like switzerland yeah all right well people gotta go follow you on twitter then yeah all right do not pay.com thanks so much for doing this thank you Thank you.