This Week in Startups - E1132: News! Jack Dorsey vs. Ted Cruz, Google’s antitrust lawsuit, Expensify email, Amazon deep dive & much more with Acquired’s Ben Gilbert & David Rosenthal

Episode Date: October 30, 2020

Check out Acquired: https://www.acquired.fm FOLLOW Ben: https://twitter.com/gilbert FOLLOW David: https://twitter.com/djrosent FOLLOW Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis

This week in startups is brought to you by Silicon Valley Bank. For over 35 years, Silicon Valley Bank has helped thousands of tech and life science companies plan for the future. Learn more at SVB.com slash next. Silicon Valley Bank, built for what's next. Founders, you're owed over $50,000 by the IRS. Main Street gets it back for you in 20 minutes. Get back your cash at Mainstreet. US slash twist. And our crowd helps you invest early in pre-IPO companies alongside professional VCs.

If you're interested in investing, you can join our crowd for free at OUR-C-R-C-O-WD.com slash twist. Hey, everybody, welcome to this week in startups. I'm your host, Jason Kalakana, and back on the pod. That's right, the acquired F-R-O-D-F-E-D-R-E-S-W-D-E. FM boys are here. David Rosenthal and Ben Gilbert. Welcome back to the podcast.

After two very strong appearances in 2020, the audience loves when you come do the news roundtable, boys. How are we doing? Very strong. I've always wanted to be very strong in the eyes of Jason Calacana, so I appreciate that. How are you boys holding up in, with the dual anxiety of a surging pandemic right now?

Cases are going way up. Thankfully, debts are saying, We can talk a little bit about that. Maybe we can take the win on that. I'm not sure. And we're recording this four days, five days out from the election. How are you boys holding up? I haven't heard about that.

Yeah. You know, trying to avoid doom scrolling, limit the news intake, except when preparing for your show in case, you know, we have to dip into politics. But now, you know, hopefully we get things resolved in a reasonable amount of time, and there's not massive international chaos for our, extended, protracted time period. Okay, I think I know how you're voting, Ben. David, how are you holding up?

Are you in the Captain Chaos Camp or are you in the Let's Go to Boring Old Joe camp? Definitely not in the Captain Chaos camp. But I will say, you know, I, until yesterday, actually still, I, about a month ago, deleted Twitter, deleted New York Times, deleted Wall Street Journal off all my devices. just go to them in the browsers because I was like, I need some mental sanity here. But then preparing for your show, get back on. Yeah, and it was an eventful, it's a bit eventful, I think, in terms of this election again.

And that teased right into our first story. Obviously, we haven't talked since the New York Post, Hunter Biden's stories were banned on Twitter. A move that Jack said was a mistake. And was also a very weird. feeling. I don't know if you had that feeling when you tried to tweet it and got that message, hey, you can't tweet this. I specifically was like, oh, I want to see if I can tweet it. I was like, I'm testing to see if I can tweet this. Did you actually do that and see the message that like,

you're not allowed to tweet this? No. I did not. I have gotten the surprising thing, though, where I go to retweet something in the last week and it instead does the quote tweet, you why? You're like, whoa, did I hit the wrong button? And you're like, oh, no, they're literally just not letting you retweet anything without thinking about it. That was, I thought my Twitter client was broken or something, and then it was happening on mobile and desktop. And I was like, did they make a U.S. change here? And then I found out it about it afterwards.

But for people who are not obsessive about Twitter, what this basically means is instead of hitting retweet and just retweeting another person, it lets you do the quote retweet, which is it says, hey, here's an empty box. Say what you want about this tweet. And then if you hit retweet a second time, which they do not explain to you,

It actually does a retweet, correct? Oh, you can still blank retweet. Yeah, you can, but you have to basically send an empty quote tweet. And I love the spirit behind this. I'm very curious. I'm sure there's product managers watching like a hawk, but I'm very curious if it's having the behavior that they sort of intended it to of, you know, slowing the spread of, you know, information.

I had a weird experience. I was like, this is weird. When this company was explained to me, they were a bunch of libertarian free speech, people and they were like, as they would describe themselves, like the free speech party of the free speech party. Yeah, the free speech swing of the free speech party. Yeah, it was like the, and now my how things have changed. I mean, Jack is all of a sudden super woke and Zuckerberg as well, uh, all want to reinterpret

section 230 of the communication decency act and the communications decency act, if you don't know, essentially says, you know, Twitter or Facebook or a blog. blogging platform like Medium or Blogger. These are kind of like paper. You don't blame the paper company because you wrote with a pen and paper something on it. That is outrageous and ridiculous. But here we are. People are blaming the paper companies because, let's face it, these things spread a lot

faster than paper. I'm actually curious, back in the, did Section 230 ever come up for you back in the weblogs days? You know, what came up more in those days was fair use and content. People were kind of stuck on copyright more than, you know, who's responsible as a publisher. And people would say like, oh, you wrote a summary of that story, therefore you're stealing it. And I was like, do you understand fair use? Like if I comment on Walt Ma – if Engadgett comments on Walt Mosberg's review, the Wall Street Journal was kind of starting to feel like Engadget was stealing it.

And then the Wall Street Journal of the New York Times in reaction to Gawker or Engadget or whichever blog it was wouldn't link back. And so we got into these holy wars just about the link back. And they refused to mention our name and they refused to link back. And I would, as the publisher, because Peter was writing it, I would ride them so hard on Twitter, on Facebook, on my blog. Here are five examples of this journalist, this journalist and this journalist. taking our story and refusing to link to it, here are the five examples of us linking to them today.

And then we started saying, you know what, we're just going to stop linking to you. And then that's when, because when we started to get more traffic and we became a traffic, then people started to give each other credit. But I was the bulldog in that, in that they would send me out to just attack every journalist by name. You know, this journalist at the New York Times refuses to link to engage it. And here they are. And I would just study them like a hawk. here's their five, the last five stories.

These four originated from blog posts, and they credited no blogs. And people would be very embarrassed. And then I would email it to, you know, Martin Dieselholz or whoever at the New York Times. And I'd be like, I'm going to keep calling you guys out. You look really stupid. And then they finally were like, oh, God, enough of this. Amazing. Then there was the era for a while where, like, they did actually credit people, but they

wouldn't link to them. And that was just stupid. It was like, okay, you're acknowledging that they got the scoop, but like, here you are trying not to like let traffic leave your website. And it feels like we're kind of past that now. If someone's, you know, reporting on someone else's scoop, they'll link to the article. But that felt like the like broken adolescent years of... It was even more insincere than that.

It wasn't even about the traffic. You know what it was really about for them? Ego in some capacity, I'm sure. No, it was even beyond traffic at ego. It was about SEO. They literally did not want the SEO of these new blogs because SEO was how you drove traffic pride or social. Yep.

So they desperately did not want the New York Times to link to engage it with the because they knew they had domain authority. They had the domain authority over us. And so whether it was the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times or any other New York Post, Daily News, whoever, they were under strict orders. Then we would watch them and they would put no follow tags on us. So they'd link to us and some of them would put no follow, which means you're linking to it, but you're telling the search engines do not give credit.

to this. And New York Times had like a page rank of 10 and we had a page rank of two. And so it was always really like a really gnarly kind of debate. But now we're up to something which is even crazier. I think in my mind, what do you guys stand on 230? Are the platforms in your mind, David, responsible for the New York Times publishing a story? Did you think they should have blocked the New York Times story about Hunter Biden? Or the post.

Definitely not a New York Times story. Definitely not New York Times. That would have been hilarious. New York Post, like they would never have blocked the New York Times, right? I mean, let's be honest. Well, there's a, I mean, the crazy thing here is like, God, this is such a can of worms. Like the, I mean, to specifically answer your question, I think no, they shouldn't have for a bunch of reasons, but one of which just simply being the Streisand effect, right? Like the-

It was a practical reason to not do it. Yeah, like the facts, the Streisand effect being the, what was it? It was that Barbara Streisand's Malibu Mansion, had like coastal erosion going on and she tried to hide the photo and prevent it from being published and that just made it more of a thing. Like this just made a non-story, a huge story. Yeah. So that would be a practical reason not to do it if you were actually trying to not put attention towards it. But Ben, even if it was stolen material and a publication that's been around as the New York Post, but that is right leaning, should a platform then choose to link to it or not?

Well, so now this is great. This is, we're getting into what Jack's sort of proposed solutions were in the hearings. And one of the things, at least the sentiment that he echoed and that Mark Zuckerberg echoed were, hey, it would be great to have like clear guidelines around what we're supposed to do with 230 when you have objectionable content. And objectionable can mean lots of things, but let's just zoom in on the most obvious example, like outright hate speech. And you have something that's either.

you know, yeah, like the most aggressive form of trolling. The platforms today, under some circumstances, take that down. And no one's sort of arguing like, well, if they take that down, then they've voided 230 and now they're going to be regulated as a media publication. It's like, well, they're taking down something that's like the filth of the internet. So like I'm glad they're doing that. But this is a thing that they're taking into their own hands and it's not laid out in 230 or anywhere else. Like, here's the types of things that you should take down.

here's the types of things that in order to remain neutral, you should leave up. And so the issue that we have right now is that this 1996, you know, law or small piece of a law, that allows the parties to the Facebooks and Twitters and, you know, I'm not totally sure why Sundar was in there. And we were having a conversation about YouTube in the same. It makes sense. But it didn't seem like he was sort of a. the same level as the other two in the grilling. But in order to retain this status where 230 has this carve out for us not to be responsible

for the content published on our platform, it would be nice to update it and give us some guidance on what we should and should not take down. So I, you know, let's throw to this clip here of Jack responding. And I thought this was a very interesting one where he talks a little bit about the algorithms and how the algorithms are making editorial decision, and that kind of breaks 2.30. And here is just 30 seconds of Jack, and we'll come back after this

and a commercial break for some feedback. And finally, much of the content people see today is determined by algorithms, with very little visibility into how they choose what they show. We took a first step in making this more transparent by building a button to turn off our home timeline algorithms, It's a good start, but we're inspired by the market approach suggested by Dr. Stephen Wolfram before this committee in June 2019.

Enabling people to choose algorithms created by third parties to rank and filter their content is an incredibly energizing idea that's in reach. All right, that was a really interesting idea when we get back. I'll ask David and Ben to give me their feedback on Bring Your Own algorithm, B.I.O.A. And when we get back on This Week in Startups, This weekend startups is brought to you by Silicon Valley Bank. What's next? What if? Are we ready? Now what? These are the questions that can keep founders up at night and no one understands this quite like Silicon Valley Bank. For over 35 years, Silicon Valley Bank has helped thousands of high growth companies by providing scalable financial solutions along with insights and expertise that many other banks just can't, from health care to hardware, software to information, infrastructure, Silicon Valley Bank works with companies across the innovation landscape at all stages of the journey, anticipating their needs even before they do. And by providing access to

insights and in-depth reports, SVB can help you make more informed decisions and assist in turning your great idea into a great business, which could be why 50% of US-based venture-back tech and life science companies bank with SVB. your business be next? Learn more at SVB.com slash next. Silicon Valley Bank, built for what's next. Welcome back to this week and startup. It's our news roundtable. You just heard Jack talking about B.Y.O.A. Bring your own algorithm to the party. What a great idea. From Wolfram, Alphram, Fame, mathematician, search engine.

Mathematica. Thank you. What do you guys think right off the bat of B-Y-O-A? Oh, man. So to me, this is the corner of the thing that, like, tech nerds love to be like, oh, that's a great solution for the problem, but the general public will never adopt. Like, the general public, I don't have no analytics on this, but I guarantee you the people who are clicking the button to switch back and forth between home and latest on Twitter is, like sub-5%, probably sub-1%, and it's like the people who are listening to this.

and if they added an ability to... Right, but like if they added an ability to modularly load in your own, you know, dot TW Algo or something, that's like a new file format that lets you, you know, pick how you want your fee to be sort of... Like, this is a browser extension in 2005 type market. Yeah. What do you think, David?

I have a slightly different take on that. Actually, well, Ben, I think you're right. Like, I think nobody... This is like a product idea that's half baked. But it was interesting. We're going to talk about this in a minute. We just had former Twitter CEO, DeCostolo, unacquired. One of the insights that came from that, from him in that episode that I hadn't realized,

like Twitter knows what's going on, right? Like, they know that Facebook and now Facebook and Instagram and WhatsApp are the juggernaut and they're the number two player. Like, their Avis, Facebook is hurts. So like, what do you do when you're Avis? You do different stuff. like you're constantly trying to change the game. This is why they did Periscope.

This is why they did Vine. This is why they did Twitter music. Like all this stuff. And this is a classic example, right, of if Twitter were to actually do, like, Facebook is never, never going to change, never going to let users change the algorithm. Like that is their golden goose. Like, and so if Twitter is willing to change this, they're just trying to do stuff that like Facebook can't respond to.

I think this could be interesting as well in terms of if you think about the browser wars or search engine wars, both of those things. The government did step in, depending on the region you're in. Obviously in the U.S., we had the Microsoft case with Explorer, their browser, versus Netscape, and they said, hey, you can't really bundle this stuff. And part of the settlement was, hey, you get to pick your browser. And then I think in Europe now, they're sort of saying, hey, when the browser loads, pick your search engine. And that might be a really easy way for this Google action that just came out with Apple. An easy way to parse that, which is a is, hey, you know, you load your browser. Anytime you load a new browser, even if Google's

paid some carriage fee or whatever, it just presents you every year or every new install with, pick your search engine and it has the top six search engines there and you pick one of them, duck, dot, go, bang, whatever, Yahoo. This could become like you, you load up your Twitter, you load up and it says, do you want, which algorithm do you want? Do you want the Google algorithm? Because you could take the Google algorithm and put it on Twitter. Yeah. That could be really interesting to have a Google and Bing algorithm that indexes those services. Well, Twitter has this history, too, of third parties, right?

Like, there was always, that was, that was, that was a, it was also a bane of their existence for a long time. But yeah, they've always had this, uh, you know, ethos that like people can build on top of or into Twitter. Yeah. This was an interesting moment, I think. I want to get your guys take on Ted Cruz, who I'm no fan of. I'll be totally honest. I find him to be a blowhard and just like most politicians, just incredibly annoying to even listen to.

But boy, you don't want to be on the other side of this guy because sometimes he does get it right. And I thought he was putting up a pretty good, a couple of swings at Jack. Let's listen to this and come back in a minute after Ted. Hits hard at Jack. Mr. Dorsey, does Twitter have the ability to influence elections? No.

You don't believe Twitter has any ability to influence elections. No, we are one part of a spectrum of communication channels that people have. So you're testified to this committee right now that Twitter, when it silences people, when it censors people, when it blocks political speech, that has no impact on elections? People have choice of other communication channels with which... Not if they don't hear information. If you don't think you have the power to influence elections, Why do you block anything? Well, we have policies that are focused on making sure that more voices on the platform are possible. We see a lot of abuse and harassment, which ends up silencing people and having them leave from the platform.

Mr. Dorsey, who the hell elected you and put you in charge of what the media are allowed to report and what the American people are allowed to hear? and why do you persist in behaving as a democratic super PAC silencing views to the contrary of your political beliefs? Let's give Mr. Dorsey a few seconds to answer that, and then we'll have to conclude this segment. Well, we're not doing that, and this is why I opened this hearing with calls for more transparency. We realize we need to earn trust more. we realize that more accountability is needed to show our intentions and to show the outcomes. Thank you, Senator. So I hear the concerns and acknowledge them, but we want to fix it with more transparency.

All right. So what's your guys take on that one? I mean, this is the mix up. This is the battle of who has the better 2020 beard. Yeah. Yeah, can we talk about those beards for a minute? I mean, it does require a pause. You know, Jack's got such a strong beard game now.

he's like Zizi top territory for sure. Yeah, remember Brian Wilson, the Giants Reliever back in like the 2010 World Series? Yeah, I mean, this is hitting a level of pandemic supremacy that was rarely been seen in the beard game. I mean, this is more than like mustache, what are they called like the facial hair, November or something? Yeah, yeah, Movember. Movember. This is like, this is, he's not even up to November. I mean, this is October and he's already coming.

until November like this. All right. I apologize for getting us on to this. Yeah. I'm giving you both an off ramp here. And I'm apologizing. Who wins this slug fest here? So look, like, they're both wrong.

Like, it's ludicrous to take the statement at face value that no, we can't impact elections. Like, a hundred percent you can. And that's what you're worried about and what we're worried about. And why you're, you know, like, that's why we're here. And the other thing is like, you can see that set up coming a moment. mile away. It's like, literally.

You could see Ted Cruz like rehearsing with his friends and family, like that line about who elected you. And I, you know, it's just such a, I, it's kind of like a sork in script at this point, you know.

Totally. And I wish I could credit it. The sovereign state of Mississippi will not withstand. I mean, I felt like I was in the insider or something. Yeah. I mean, I forget who had this take.

It may have been Nilai Patel at the verge. But the, The point that I think is really interesting here is the strategy is create these clips and these sound bites of you hitting Jack, you being Ted Cruz, and then distributing them on Jack's platform. It's this crazy irony of the whole situation of like you're trying to earn the love from your base for doing this to this guy who created the way that you communicate to your base. It's wild. Yes. That is like an inception type moment. AOC also incredibly good at this at this point of, you know, setting people up for these, you know, tweet clips.

Yeah. The clip game. It's basically politics is coming up to these like these hearings and how strong is your clip game. So I think we all agree that these platforms actually impact elections, which is why they're having this and why the Russians interfering and creating bot farms is a whole issue. So Jack loses that part of it. But then Jack kind of turns out and says, hey, listen, we're just, we're here to we're here to help. We want to make a transparent. We're asking you for solutions. Did this Kung Fu move and flipping the energy here work, David, or not? Where does it not even matter? I mean, I think from like a politics standpoint, it just depends what your goal is. Like, no, I like, I don't think it landed well in the moment here. But I mean, it's, I think it gets back to what. the goal is. Like, the goal here is, is clips for Ted Cruz. Like, I think the real question is, like, what, what could consequences of all of this be for the platforms? Um, interestingly, I think,

you know, kind of along the lines I was saying earlier about Twitter trying to be orthogonal here. Um, any consequences are probably good for Twitter, I think. Like, uh, anything that we can, as long as it also weakens Facebook. And then, opens up seams for Twitter. On the other hand, if it just creates more opportunity for regulatory capture for Facebook, which actually thinking about it now, that's probably the more likely outcome here, then that could be bad. So, yeah, I don't know.

I like the way they're saying, hey, what is your suggestion? Please, you give us clarity. You all are so smart. Go ahead. I mean, I think everybody can agree what happens when another person threatens somebody or uses violence or hate speech or doxes. Like these are low-hanging fruit. Super easy to say, we kick that person off our platform, just like somebody came into

our restaurant and took a leak in the corner. We're going to kick him out of the restaurant. There's no discussion here. But somebody comes in and says, hey, you know what? I have stolen material or I'm reporting on stolen material about Hunter Biden, which apparently like the information is correct. And then the question is, how did they acquire this information? and then that leads to a whole other can of worms,

which is, is the New York Post not, and I sound like I'm red-pilled here, but I don't believe in censorship, is the New York Post not allowed to do investigative journalism in the way the Washington Post is? Well, here's another, lowbrow. Or here's another way to phrase that question is, and yours is loaded and mine's going to be loaded too.

If you don't have the editor, the managing editor, or whatever the title is, at the newspaper doing their job, is it Twitter's responsibility to do the job of the editor? Like, should... I like that framing.

What if, what if, not the New York Post, but any other publication just turns into a loosely edited a whole bunch of bundled substacks. And then that brand becomes very popular.

And so people trust it. And then people are putting out their own basically unedited, you know, journalist, here's something, obtains source, and then straight to the public, if the editor is abdicating

their responsibility, at what point is it the responsibility of the platform to do that in our in our republic? And like, that's the thorny issue. There's a value chain here of information to synthesizing it into content, editing content, and then doing

distribution. And as long as all of the actors before distribution are doing the job as they have for the last few hundred years in our society, then it shouldn't be an issue. However, there's lots of business incentives to not do those jobs exactly to the same level of rigor that we used to. And therefore, it's putting pressure on the platforms to play that role in society. I think it's just an amazing point, Ben. You're basically saying, you know, the post is going to be like, hey, we'll just publish this and then, yeah, you guys amplify it. And we get the benefit.

We get the page use. Everybody wins. The incentives are so many. disaligned in terms of truthiness. Like if we want to get to the truth, really link baiting and amplification on these platforms is just a wicked combination. And listen, it takes two to tango. The publications and the platforms are in cahoots to do link baiting to capture our attention, which is why poor David had to delete Twitter off of his phone because his anxiety was going off the charts when we get back.

Expensify CEO is doing the reverse. Yeah, this is a callback. It's classic. You guys can use that on the pod. pro. It's a pro. You know, it's just professionalism. When you guys gets with when 1,000, when 1,000 episodes you have recorded, you tell you, do, I've been doing Yonah for my daughter. Sorry, everybody. Oh, that's so great. Expensifies CEO, jumped the fence. He's absolutely left the property. He is gone rogue and he's doing a reverse coin base. He is telling everybody on his platform,

all 10 million customers, Republican, Democrat, independent, or otherwise, that they need to vote for Biden. We'll get some conversation started about this wild move when we get back on this weekend startups. If you're a founder, the IRS, owes you some serious cash. But the only thing stopping you from claiming your cash is the single most detrimental thing to business productivity. You know what that is? Paperwork.

That's where Main Street comes in. they are experts at getting you the biggest possible slice of the billions the IRS sets aside each year to encourage and support startups. It only takes 20 minutes. They grab all the data directly from your payroll system, and they save startups an average of $51,000 in just the first month. Plus, they'll keep fighting for you after you onboard, qualifying you against hundreds of tax credits every month for freight.

And Main Street only gets paid when you do. Sandbox VR got $82,000. Italic got back $124,000. Lofty AI started using Main Street three months ago, and they've been getting back $3,200 a month. Just think how you could redeploy that capital. It's really that simple. You onboard, you wait, and then you get cash.

Sometimes things that sound too good to be true can still be good and also true. They're trusted and backed by the best in solid, Silicon Valley, product hunts Ryan Hoover, friend of the show, shrug capital gradient, Ron Comway's SV Angel, they're the real deal. And here is your call to action. Twist listeners will get 25% off their fees for a life. Go to mainstreet.

us slash twist. Mainstreet. US slash twist for more details and a priority onboarding with a Main Street team member. Thanks again to Main Street for supporting independent media like this week in startups. Let's get back to this amazing. episode. All right, Ben Rosenthal. And, sorry, David, and Ben are with us. David and Ben are with us. All right. They do

Acquire.fm. Go there and get the LP show. It costs like a hundred-day-year. They should probably charge a thau. It's an easy Benjamin for you all to friendly reminder that we do have a free show. It is the main thing. We also have this $100 thing that's great. But like, the $100 thing is just the nuts. I mean, the free show is great, too. But, I mean, I'm just trying to get you guys some money here. I mean, I'm looking at your apartments.

And I'm seeing that there's, like, not much going on in the background there, David. We need to put some art workup or something. Ben, I mean, it looks like IKEA catalog. It's the Buy David Art Fund. Buy David some art fund. I don't know. What's going on with that plant in the background? Did you get that specifically for your Zoom game, Ben?

I am in an Airbnb, and that was here. when I got here, but much appreciated as a Zoom background. Yes, it's really, the Zoom game is looking good. All right, this is crazy. We just get over the whole craziness of Brian Armstrong saying, hey, when you come to work, let's do work and not talk about politics all day long inside of our Slack channels email because it's too divisive. It's a distraction.

And of course, people had some strong feels about that because people feel. like we live in a unique moment in time, and you cannot separate these two things. Well, hold my beer because Expensify CEO emailed all 10 million customers, and I know somebody, producer Nick, who hasn't been using Expensify for a long time. So he was like a dead customer on their list, and he got the email where he goes over why everybody needs to vote for Biden, which is. insane in terms of building a business. If I was a shareholder in this company, I would lose my, if I was on the board of this company, I would lose my mind because, oh my God, I represent other

people's, you know, shares and money. And this is going to mute our returns. You're going to lose 40% of the customers. That's the question. Is this altruism or sort of what he perceives altruism, or is it a genius business decision? My favorite line from the entire email is where he says, Expensified depends on a functioning society and economy. Not many expense reports get filed during a civil war. And his whole argument that we need Biden in office in order to protect our democracy to not spiral into civil war.

And is kind of like, it just depends how much you. buy it. But if you're a shareholder, you're kind of like, um, maybe. Okay. Hold on a second. Wait, wait. Let me, let me, let me, let me, let me, the second level of that is you got to assume that most Expensify customers are pretty left leaning. And the question is, did he make more sort of friends forever out of this than he did create churn? Probably. So Ben's cynical take, David, is Republicans are not tech savvy, therefore they wouldn't use a leading cutting edge product like expensive because they're lunites.

Well done, Ben. You just lost a third of your acquired FM subscribers. Where am I going to buy my artwork now? I didn't say any of that, Jason. That's kind of what you insinuated, Ben. You said they're left-leading. This is good, this is good television here. But anyway, putting that piece aside, Ben's own, you know, biases, it could, it could double

the number of people because now people who didn't know what Expensify was, now all of a sudden they're the most talked about company for the week. I was thinking of the same thing. Like, this is expense reporting software for God's sakes. I mean, like, these are the types of companies that advertise in airports. Why do they advertise in airports? because how the hell else are they going to get in front of customers? Like, when are you thinking about expense report software?

This is genius. Like, two months from now, nobody's going to remember this. People don't even remember the Coinbase thing anymore, and that was two weeks ago. But they are going to have like, oh, yeah, Expensify. I've heard of them. As a shareholder in the company, if you were on the board of the company, and this happened, what would be your reaction, David? Ooh, I'm going to make sure we got some D&O insurance.

Yes. Yes. this could result in a shareholder lawsuit. You just pissed off whatever percentage of Trump loyalists there are. I mean, he is the president of the United States. Even if the Russians gave him, you know, a third of his votes, you know, or whatever, there's still some group of people who you're going to lose as customers in related news, breaking news.

The Tide Pods department has just sent an email to 78 million people. They would like you to remember to vote yes on Prop 22. So Tide Pods for Prop 22 just happened. That's a joke. Tide Pots have not taken a position yet on Prop 22. Jason, it's not in the notes here. I don't know. But I mean, it's like, do we really need Exfify to take a position on the presidential election?

I mean, this is Trump derrick. Well, so here's the reality, though. So this is what I think is really interesting about the situation. The reality is if I'm on the board of Expensify, I can't do anything because David has built his company in a way that he controls the company. Like I guarantee super voting shares. Yeah. Yeah.

So they've raised what I think about $28 million in VC total. They did an $11 million Series A pretty early on. Then they did some growth money later. But they've been cash flow positive for a long time. I'm sure he definitely, I'm assuming here, but I'm assuming he definitely has majority equity control or majority board control, likely has majority equity control. likely has majority equity control. So it's just kind of nothing.

You can do what he wants. David Rosenthal walking pitch book. Well, I mean, if this could also screw up future hiring of employees. Well, it's going to create a monoculture for sure. Like, no doubt. I mean, and I do think, Jason, to your earlier point, like, I don't think this was like a strategic, nefarious. I think, like, this is just truly what he believes. And I was, I'm willing to bet that somewhere along the line, there's sanity checks with big shareholders, like, hey, I'm

going to do this. How do you feel about this? Here's why I feel strongly. Like, I don't think he caught his board off guard with this. Guarantee, I disagree. I guarantee he went rogue on this one. This is a Trump. This is total Trump derangement syndrome. This is TDS at the highest level. And again, I'm not red-pilled. I hate Trump. I'm voting 16 times for Biden. Explain Trump. I had 16 ballots I found. You're just, you're so triggered by Trump that you'll, you'll go do.

I think this is like a 2 a.m. Trump Draming syndrome type post. This person has been doom scrolling. And this is just crazy behavior. I have to say. Because if he wrote it as a blog post, or a medium post on his account, it would not be a problem, right?

Right. But the fact that he used the emailing customer information owned by, and those relationships owned by the company. Yeah. I mean, especially, you go one level deeper like I mean if Nick had opted out

is this like a violation of the can spam act you know are for sure going to be some lawsuits on this yeah whether they go anywhere I don't know did it did it influence any voters like that's the who no is an undecided voter in this election like who got that email and was like oh great points I think the only undecided voters I'll be honest from what I can gather

are the people who voted for Trump last time and we're casting a, I want to burn it down kind of vote. Like, let's burn death system down. You know, like kind of Ross Perrault voters, like third party. Like, we all know somebody who was like, yeah, I hate all politicians. I want the non-politician in there. And then they saw what happened when you vote for a burn it down candidate and the building is on fire.

And you're like, hmm, maybe burning it all down is not the best approach. Maybe we shouldn't light a fire when we get back talking about lighting, fires, y'all had my friend Dick Costello, the famous Dixie on Twitter at Dixie, who got into a little bit of a kerfuffle where in response to the original Brian Armstrong Coinbase saying, leave your politics at home post, he wrote Dick Costello, former CEO of Twitter, me first capitalists, I think that's us, who think you can separate society from business, are going to be the first people lined up against the wall and shot in the revolution. I'll happily provide video commentary.

You got him to respond to this on Acquire.fm. We'll play the clip when we get back from this quick break. Do you wish you were in on some of the best performing IPOs of 2019 and 2020? I bet you do. Well, with our crowd accredited investors have access to invest directly, easily, and most importantly, early. Our crowd investors have benefited. from companies going public like Beyond Meat or being bought by companies like Intel, Nike, Microsoft, and Oracle.

Our crowd's investment professionals leverage their extensive networks to review some of the most promising private companies and startups in the world. As you review deals, you'll have access to our crowd's investor relations team who you can access directly to talk about your personal investment goals. Our crowd's investment team has already invested hundreds of millions of in over 200 companies with dozens of exits. Accredited investors can participate in single company deals for as little as $10,000 or one of our crowd's funds for as little as $50,000. So here's your call to action.

Today, you can join our crowd's investment in Saibra, an AI-related platform that uncovers online disinformation and deepfakes. Wow, what a great idea. As disinformation becomes increasingly threatening to glorify, global brands, media, and governments, Saibra, that's spelled C-Y-A-B-R-A, reports that it's uniquely positioned to serve this potential $6.1 billion market.

You can get in early on Saibra and other unique opportunities at our crowd.com slash twist. That's right, our crowd, O-U-R-C-O-W-D, dot com slash twist. If you're interested in investing, you need to join R-Crowd. Once again, our crowd.

R-Crowd.com slash twist. All right, welcome back. Great job, boys, on getting Dick Costello on the pod. He was on Acquired, what episode number? Did you guys number them? It was the last episode, right? It is season seven, episode five. Okay.

So Dick, people don't know, was formerly a comedian. And he's a really, you know, he's got a big heart that kid. Really, really. And he, basically, you got him on the pod. and one of you brought up the tweet. Whose idea was it to bring up the tweet? Did you guys have that in the show notes? Was that premeditated or was that ad-libbed?

Oh, it was definitely in the show notes. Yeah. Yeah. And for the record, the reason we had him on the show is, you know, obviously Dick, former CEO Twitter, we have made it 120 episodes or something without telling the Twitter story, and it just felt like the right time to do it. So the reason, we were all lined up months before this,

and then, of course, he had that tweet in, you know, then we emailed him and said, hey, do you want to talk about this in a medium that affords a little bit of long form and room to explain yourself rather than Twitter, which, as we all know, has very little room for nuance. Yeah. So, Stephen Sinovsky from Andreessen Horowitz, responded. That's one way to settle with Jessica Rehman and avoid the messiness of open dialogue. So he came in for his dunk. But here it is.

Dick Costello unacquired. This is going to be a two-minute clip. We'll come back and talk about it on the other side. So, Dick, speaking of content and moderation on Twitter and taking down tweets, you recently took one down of your own volition. Tell us about that and what were you thinking? Boy, did that go sideways. Holy smokes. First of all, I should know better you'd think than to use sarcasm on the platform. But I was making a sarcastic response to Parker and Jason Calcanus in this whole back and forth about the Brian Armstrong's post about separating the mission of the company from social activism and social cause. I think Parker made some comment about, I'm not going to remember his exact response to Jason, but it was something like, look, if you really want to go do that stuff, you go to a nonprofit. And so I just fired off this sarcastic response.

I was also like doing four other things that day and getting ready to entertain a bunch of friends the following day. So I fired off this sarcastic response. I was like, I'm just going to cause an argument. I don't need to deal with this right now. I'm just going to not pay attention to Twitter for a little while. Boy, was that a bad decision. I should have used the pitchfork analogy.

and then the headlines would have been Costello insights farmers to revolt. What I was trying to do that went horribly wrong was just make the observation that, look, if you think you can separate the social contract from the economic contract in society, then don't be surprised when the pitchforks come out. That went wrong quickly. A bunch of people were like, you should explain it. You get back on there and explain it. I'm like, how do you explain sarcasm?

That seems like a bad idea. So I just kind of left it up there and like, ah, people will settle down. And then I'm laughing. because I started getting these violent threats on my Instagram pictures of tomatoes in my house in Napa Valley and people were like, I hope these tomatoes burn in the fire. And how about if I line you up in front of those apples and shoot? I was like, wow, wow, this is really bad. Finally, the next day was like, all right, I just take the whole thing down. But man, what a mistake that was. Whoops. All right. So there you have it. He does the Miacopa. He basically takes ownership of it.

and yeah, he took the tweet down. Is it the right move to take the tweet down? I think so. I mean, he was, you know, in the clip he was talking about, you know, he started getting death threats and all this. It's just like, you know, you don't need any of that. Yes. Yeah, they were like, I'm going to burn down your tomato farm at your Napa house.

That was probably the tame version of what he was getting. Yeah, that is the weird part about this moment in time on Twitter, which he, of course, was a CEO of now he's an investor, he's got a fund. We've invested in a couple deals together, which is great. Would you have taken it down, Ben? Is that the right move taking the post? I think so. You know, I think you try and put up as, I think the common move here is you put up another tweet and say, hey, I tweeted something I regretted earlier. I apologize for it. Like, obviously you can't actually take a tweet down. It's on the internet forever. There's screenshots, whatever it is. But like, I think that's the way you signal, like, I don't still stand by this. It was, yeah, I mean, I think he is a comedian. People don't know that. He's obviously, the tweet is dripping with sarcasm. I read it and I was like, ha-ha. But of course, the right is like,

here's what the former CEO of Twitter says, and they weaponized it, and then boom, it's all of a sudden out of control, right? And now we've got a huge... And I do think, I mean, obviously... So I agree, deleting the tweet. We got the trifecta here. Hatrick, we all agree.

the tweet and post something else. It is a useful point to make that he made. I will say, like, I remember reading that and being like, ooh, that's some language. But, and you know, my first response was not, oh, that must be sarcasm. I was like, whoa, that's strong language. But the point is a very interesting one, which is like the way our society is heading, can you really draw this line and say that our political lives and our social lives

and our activism lies, don't come into the workplace at all. And our companies do not have, like, neither, these two things shall not mix in the way that they sort of existed in the 50s. And, you know, frankly, I think when you have companies that are deeply involved in the fabric of society or maybe even the fabric of future monetary policy, like you look at Twitter with society, coinbase with monetary policy, like, these are inherently political organizations because they are foundational to civics. I think it's a very fair point that he was making that I'm not sure you can actually separate these things. And by saying, hey, sorry,

we're only here to make money. Like, we're in an era right now where companies are shifting to a multi-stakeholder mindset, not a purely shareholder mindset. So you are out of the, you're not in the expense of I camp of like, we have. have to pick aside, but you're also not in the Brian Armstrong to, hey, we're not having this discussion at work. Work is work. Politics, religion, societal issues are outside of work. I think whether we like it or not, businesses are on a one-way ticket to you have to have something you stand for in the world. And you have to represent your community and your employees and your customers as well as your investors. And you can't purely and literally only think

but you wouldn't include religion in that. So somebody coming to work and saying, hey, I want you all to convert. I just found out about this new religion, nexium or Christianity or whatever. We all got to convert to nexium. We're all getting branded with the Expensify logo. No go on that.

So religion, no. We all agree no religion at work. But then politics, social issues, social justice, yes. or there's just no choice but to do that. I'm putting this out here because this is the counter I hear from people who don't want it at work. And it's not necessarily my positioning. But I do think Tom Cruise was wrong

to set up a Scientology tent on a Spielberg film like he did on World of Worlds because that's disrespectful to Spielberg. And if you're Tom Cruise, you should have a little more respect for Spielberg, period. I don't know if you guys remember that story? No, I don't remember that. So, yeah, Tom Cruise, it was in the Mike Ovid's book, who is Mike Ovid's.

And he's like, he told David Miscarage, like, we just don't want Tom to talk. We're aligned in our interests. Just please don't have Tom talk about Scientology ever. And then Tom's like, hold my beer. And he opens a tent at the world, the world's, wow. Free stress test. For people to come in and to do auditing and get an introduction to it. And Spielberg and him never worked again together.

And Spielberg was really. upset about it. Reportedly. I think you hit on the thing on an upset there. That's what I was thinking. No, I don't think a company should. I don't think Expensify should be emailing their customers about a political thing. For what it's worth, I agree with that.

I would make that clear. But what about David? You know, internally having a Slack channel where people are talking about Black Lives Matter or Trump's behavior or immigration or whatever it is, that's not an acutely related to our startup SaaS software. And I think the thing that to me was so tone deaf about the coin base thing was like, your employees are upset about this. Like it is causing the mental anguish, you know.

And that is something that I think as an organization you do have to make room for and address. Like I certainly would not want to run any kind of organization where it's like, no, like Republicans aren't welcome here or anything. like that. Like, that seems terrible. Like, they should be. But also, like, people are really upset. You know, you got to, like, they're, you got to take care of your people, right? Like, that's, that's kind of the how I think about this. I think that's a pretty good observation. If your people are suffering for whatever reason, whether it's police brutality or it was an immigration issue, or it was people, schools being closed, whatever it is. It could be wildfires in Napa, right? It could be

whatever your employees are dealing with. Like, it's still your problem because your people are hurting. Yes. And then there is some merit in your mind, David, or not of, hey, we do need to talk about this stuff, but we can't have it become a distraction at work or become the entirety of what we do at work, correct? Like, so there is some limit to how much distraction there can be. Totally.

I think it's like, of course, like, you need to. talk about it, you need to make space for it. It's super important. If it becomes for a certain number of people or a lot of people within your organization, that is 100% all they're doing all day. Well, then they should go work for a nonprofit that advocates for that cost. That is the line to me. Like, you know, you still got to do your job and the company has to do the thing. But you are also, like, it extends to the life of your people. You got to make room for that. If it becomes takes over, then it's like, well, no, you probably shouldn't work here. Do you have a middle ground here, Ben?

I'm, like, just not an idealist on many things. To me, there's this pragmatic middle, and you can kind of feel out what it is and feel what's right. Like, Brian Armstrong's point about, we have to maintain our focus on our mission, that's a great point. But in putting this incredibly idealistic stake in the ground, I think you actually create way more distraction

than if you had not done a medium post, maybe not even done in all hands email, putting the stake in the ground, and just taken some small steps in the organization, especially with the people who feel the most strongly about it. I think it's possible to have values as a firm and have people who do things in their spare time at work, outside their responsibilities, or maybe even hire people whose jobs are CSR or ESG or whatever the thing is. There's also employee resource groups are literally like the best practices way to do this. Totally. And I just say there's just a much more pragmatic way to do it.

I think, Ben, it's very insightful, the pragmatism here. I have a simple rule about this that my companies and that I advise people who are dealing with this issue in their companies that I've invested in, which is electronic communication is the beginning and the end of this problem. These discussions are so charged, they cannot happen on Slack or HipChat or whatever you use for your corporate communications, and they cannot happen on email. Because all empathy is removed. and then there's no end to any chat discussion. Everybody knows this.

It's not like in some chat flame war. Somebody says, that's a reasonable point you've made. I'm going to give us some thought and let's get back to work. Nobody ever does that. Everybody's just going to post five more links to stories and statistics and keep fighting for their side. So if you're listening to this, my best practices, if you want to discuss these issues, we will set up an all-hands meeting for those people who want to.

want to go to it and we'll let everybody opt into that discussion. And I'll host it as the CEO of the company. We'll set up a Zoom call if you need to or we can do it. We could all go to dinner or lunch. And we'll have a lunch in or a coffee. And if you want to go for lunch or coffee with your teammates and have a discussion about this issue, save the whales or politics or anything in between, by all means, look each other in the eyes and have that conversation face to face with empathy and

with respect, but not on social media. This is why I tell you that random channel on Slack is a goddamn unmitigated disaster. Whoever put that as a default is, I mean, I think the Joker put that in there. And I'm not talking like, you know, I'm talking Heath Ledger Joker. Like a chaos agent. That is a chaos agent. The first thing you should do is, can you even delete random? Can you delete the random room?

Get that goddamn random room off your Slack right now because it is a disaster. Speaking of getting ahead of their skis and, you know, a tweet that might need to be deleted, here was mine from the week, and I don't know if you saw it, but I've been getting into it with the Bernie Bros. Let me see if you think I should delete this tweet, okay? It's a new segment on the show, Ben, David. Should Jason delete this tweet? Here we go.

This is a tweet from October 24th at 11 a.m. I don't know. What day of the week is that? I don't even know. That would have been Sunday? Saturday, something like that? All right, yes. It's a weekend tweet.

This is your standard weekend tweet. J-Cal having a cup of coffee in the backyard. And it just came to me. It just came to me. Gig economy jobs are a free market safety net that catches people before the taxpayer funded safety net, which is pretty awesome when you think about it. Now, this has been quote retweeted 493 times when compared to just straight up retweet. tweets, which were 57.

Is that getting ratioed? And that would be called a ratio. I don't know how many comments I've had here. But oh my lord, did I, if you need to find where the, if you need to make a list of Bernie bros or AOC advocates for her next campaign, just get the people from this list. You're good. You don't even need to use any analytic software. I've been a total aside of question.

I've actually been dying to ask you since we're deep on the acquired side on Twitter history right now. Were you one of the original featured accounts to follow? No. Famously, I offered a quarter million dollars to be on the list. Oh, wow. Oh, this is a great story. My friend had started the company.

They didn't want me or Scoble. Ev, yeah. And they didn't want me on the list because I was a little bit too controversial. And in the early days, we kind of used Twitter like a chat room more than, you know, like a Noval, here is a vaulted post that we will all. Setting up my Twitter. Yeah, I'm just setting up my Twitter kind of like, and you would just be like, hey, how are you up to? And you would just go back and forth.

It was a public chat room. And in fact, it was SMS based. So when they came out with that list, they were looking for a business model. And nobody thought advertising on social networks would work because it was kind of intrusive to put an ad between a conversation. It was like, that's stupid. Like, it's never going to work. And actually, if you look at the clickthroughs, it doesn't actually work that well.

compared to like search clicks, which are much more effective. But in aggregate, because people spend so much time there, it does work. Putting that aside, I said, you know, Ev, I think the suggested user list, you should sell those slots. Or you should have nine and then sell the 10th as a, you know, promoted one. He's like, God, that's an interesting idea. I was like, okay, hold on. I'm going to write a blog post.

And I said, I'll offer $250,000 to be on there because I think you'll get a million people. It would be $0.25 a person. And if I can monetize... It would have a deal of a lifetime. It would have been a deal of a lifetime. And so Kara Swisher got on and this is kind of... Yeah, Chris Saka. I feel like I...

Kevin Rose was an investor. Kevin Rose was an investor and we were all kind of friends. And they weren't very high frequency Twitter. So they wanted people who were like, you know, not high frequency, but who were, you know, mini celebrities back in the day. This was the Web 2.0 celebrity time period, 2008, 2004 to 8. Anyway, long story short, I wasn't on that. But that was also a way they kind of had influence over journalists.

because the journalists who did get on there, like some tech crunch riders, Kara Swisher, I think was on it. O'Malley was on it. You know, you're going to have a pretty good view of Twitter if they got you your first million followers. That would be literally like handing,

I mean, I'm not pointing out, Kara Swisher here, because she didn't ask for it, but that would be like giving a journalist a million dollars. I mean, those... Straight up. That was probably worth well more than a million dollars to be on that list.

Okay, yeah. I mean, if you, you probably double a triple your salary. So over 10 years, you're probably making an extra half million dollars years. It's probably worth $5 million. It was probably like Twitter. I mean, it depends if you're then investing that in Uber or not. Like some people are going to put that in the savings account and some people are going to invest in Uber. That's a fair point.

It's a fair point. Anyway, so that was the idea. You paid that money. You might not have had the money to put in the trap. Wait, let me pull a Calacana. So speaking of Uber, the gig economy. Yes. Let's bring it back.

Let's bring it back. Thank you, Ben, for hosting. Now Ben's become the host. Look at you, Ben. What do we think of this tweet? Should Jake Hal delete the tweet? No way I would have ever tweeted this. Okay.

I can't imagine this passing my filter. This seems so interesting in the abstract. This passes the sniff test of, it's a weekend, I'm reflecting on the world. I have these sort of interesting pattern-matching mental models. I'm thinking about businesses. I'm thinking about our country, our economy, our tax structure. And you're like, oh, in a way, these things are like,

kind of similar. And then there's like a different test that should happen before you tweet it. That's like, as this practically applies to many, many, many, most of the people that have these jobs, would they in any way look at it this way or would this just be pissing them all off? And I feel you did not do that second part. Okay. So you're saying it's got a little bit of a Paul Graham kind of feel to it is what I'm getting.

It's got a little PG kind of. Paul Gramish, what do you say, David? Should J-Cal delete the tweet or leave it up? Ooh, now. Everybody's favorite kid show, delete the tweet. What was your intention in tweeting it? Was it to get a lot of response or to put the thought out there? I was putting the thought out there that there needs to be a,

there didn't used to be a level of, let's call it, on-demand work where anybody who needed money could just make money right now. like something acute happens. I don't know. My car gets a flat. Bad example. But, you know, my spouse loses her job or his job. I need to make up a $300 gap.

We have a car. I'm just going to work, you know, whatever, number of hours to make up that gap. It's amazing that that efficiency with no friction exists in the world. Therefore, what those people would have done is they would have went to their friends and asked for a loan. They would have tapped their credit cards. couldn't do either of those things. Well, guess what? Now they're going payday loan. Payday loan. Maybe they have to sell something or eventually maybe welfare or unemployment or some social safety net, right? So in a way, my thinking was this is like this little pressure cooker or this little

thing that didn't exist before that for quick money, you can get this frictionless job. Whereas getting a job typically meant waiting until Monday, putting out resumes, knocking on doors. and the onboarding of getting a job is measured typically in weeks, maybe months. Well, right, plus you have to apply. I mean, that's another thing, too. Like, you might not get the job. Whereas with Uber and like, like, yeah, you might not get it. But like high likelihood you'll get it.

So that was my spirit of this, David, to answer your question. Okay. So, well, I think it's a new feature of society. And the implied, my implied message was, if this didn't exist, then people are going right to that other safety net, right? So there's like a little safety net on top of the safety net. And that's kind of cool that this exists. Yep.

I totally agree with you on that, by the way. So, which is separate from Prop 22 if we want to get into that. But anyway, I think that you leave it up then. You still like, you thought that. You clearly still believe that. Why would you take it down? Hmm. No, just because of the ratioing.

Yeah. I'm trying to reflect on like why this, because clearly this, this is deeply upsetting to a lot of people. And I think it's because the assumption is that there is a high liquidity in our jobs marketplace. So it's really easy to have a great job. And if that falls away, then you dip in and you drive Uber for a little bit, and then you pop right back out of it. And you can go and get that other great job again.

And I think that that doesn't exist, especially when you become, There's this great line that's like, it's so much more expensive to be poor than it is to be rich. And it's like once you get at or near zero, it becomes so damn expensive just to live your life that like you're trapped forever. And I think that, I mean, it's also coming from the wrong person. Like the guy who got rich off Uber saying this has obviously got a horse in the race. Therefore, yeah. But, you know, there were a lot of FJsons in the responses. here and you look like a store brand Kevin Spacey,

ouch. Jason, I'm curious. Consolidated wanker energy here. Do you, when stuff like, because this is not the first time something like this has sort of happened in your life. Like, a Donnybrook? Does it make you want to not do that anymore?

Or does it make you want to be like, I'm going to be myself and like, I don't care? Yeah, pretty much the opposite, actually. That's, I think, one of the major flaws in this operating system and or features is that. Good for Twitter. It's driving traffic. It's kind of like, it's kind of still my opinion. I wouldn't delete the tweet. I think the tweet stands. The tweet stands. It is a safety net. And I think y'all are going to be, by y'all, I mean socialists and Bernie bros, you get rid of those jobs. You're going to see a lot more people who are going to be on the dole. They're going to be tapping, you know, taxpayer resources. Be careful because those jobs also drove the wages

up at other places. Because people could go to the gig economy, that made shift work like Walmart, Target, Starbucks, all those places had to raise their wages to compete against the flexibility. So more options equals more competition, equals better pay, equals better opportunity. I mean, Amazon has had to raise their prices. Apple has had to raise their wages in their warehouses and stores because of this. And so this is just basically. I mean, we had pre-pandemic, we had record low unemployment. Do you think the gig economy was not the driver of that? Of course it was.

It was like one of the major drivers. There are studies that are crazy. I mean, whether you even cut these studies, you know, in half, but that like the gig economy is 20% of American workforce now. Like, cut that by a quarter, by three quarters. It's still enormous. Yeah. I mean, this is the weird thing that's going to,

I think if, you know, whether Prop 22, passes or not, I don't think it affects Uber stock price. Either way, it goes up is my belief, because it just cements their lead. I've said this many times before. Yeah, funny thing about regulation on incumbents. Yeah, like, now people have to work a specific shift, and they have to wear an Uber uniform, and you can't work for Lyft or DoorDash or whatever. That's the big issue, right? Is the multi-homing on the supply? You're going to, if you're full-time, you can be exclusive you can't work for a competitor so I don't know

but wait you were going to say David you're you vote yes or no on 22 Prop 22 I'm not in California. I debated really no I am in California down in San Francisco I really

debated a lot because I actually believe the same thing that we were just talking about that like I think these I think the gig economy is really important to the economy I ultimately voted know though.

Because, not because I think AB5 is the right solution, but the, I felt like Prop 22 was just too much of an overreach on the, what was it, seven, eights of the legislature required to overturn it. Like, if they left that out, I would have, I would have voted yes, but I was just like, come on. That's like, that's too much. What about you, Ben? Are you pro 22 and letting people have options? or do you want to take away the option and make people go full-time?

There's a little framing there, of course. As you just framed it, I want people to have options. I'm honestly not up to speed enough as a Washington resident. Basically, it makes everybody be full-time and you treat them as such. And, you know, it's just going to, yeah,

it's going to be an interesting one. Okay, the DOJ back on October 20th, they filed a little bit of a lawsuit there against Google. Google, allegedly, I mean, we kind of know this, has paid Apple between like $8, $12 billion a year to be the default search engine. These deals have existed forever. This is how the Mozilla Foundation, the nonprofit foundation, broke all records for a nonprofit in terms of generating revenue,

and the IRS didn't even know how to handle that. They had to do like some really crazy, that's a whole other story. This is like the mid-2000s. This is like 05, 0607 when they're... Yes. Yeah. They basically, the Mozilla browser, which was the sort of open source version, of Netscape just became the default browser and they just started printing money because Google bought was paying them for all those searches. Apple did look at making a search engine. I can tell you that because I was building a search engine and Steve Jobs looked at Mahalo.com. Oh, that's right. I can break that news right now. Oh. We got to cut over to acquired right now. I basically, I knew Steve. I emailed him and he looked at it and I'll just leave it at that.

And I wrote back in 2015 after Apple announced Spotlight, I said Apple is launching a search engine to destroy Google. And I said, Tim Cook is suggesting a better path for Apple users. Apple will give you the ability to search for free as in ad free and data collection free. Talk about prescient. And in fact, the power move would be for Apple to buy Duck, Duck Go and use their excellent web search to backfill underneath the one box because Apple was doing clever things when you searched on your desktop. If you search for weather, it would give you weather. If your result is in the app store, and now we're seeing that on mobile phones.

So according to the financial time, Apple has quietly increased its efforts to develop its own search technology on iPhones. Obviously, it will search your documents. Obviously, it will search the weather. It does a local search. You've probably seen that if you search for In-N-Out Burger. It doesn't give you Googles in-and-out Burger results. It gives you their burger results. And so...

Which, by the way, this already ships in MacO. and iOS is just a sort of silent background thing. And the easiest way to tell is when you open up Safari and you type searching something and you start searching something and it says Siri suggested result, it's because Apple already has a web crawler and they have a, I mean, they have a map of the web and they use that to figure out. Yeah. So they're slowly intercepting, which means maybe they would eventually take this away

from Google. And I think this is a bit of a standoff that Eric Schmidt and Steve Jobs when he was alive were involved in when, according to Steve Jobs, Eric Schmidt stabbed him in the back and basically did Android, right? That was like their big breakup. But this seems to be an absolutely ridiculous DOJ filing. This is of all the things you could go after Google for and Apple for, the default search engine deal is the easiest one to unwind. It feels totally political to me. what did you think when you saw this big like Google's in hot water because they have a deal with Apple? This has been hiding in plain sight forever.

This is a publicly announced, you know, small part of Google's revenue. Who cares? A few thoughts. I mean, the first one is, oh my gosh, the very first thing that I saw was DOJ and Google. I was like, it's finally happening. Like Google is going to have its Microsoft moment, just like everyone else. You start reading into this and you're like, all right, wake me up when it's over. like this is a show pony here.

But I think it's actually very interesting to understand the deal between Apple and Google. And I think that David and I were pretty well prepped for it because we did this top 10 acquisitions of all time episode. And all nine of the 10 were revenue creative where, you know, the companies combined and then made a crap ton of money like Facebook bought Instagram and then made a crap ton of money. Hold on. Maybe I actually guessed these. Hold on. Ooh, what do you think? You won't get two.

you definitely not get number two. Hold on, hold on, no, no, don't be so sure. Well, Microsoft bought PowerPoint back in the day. I believe they bought Excel. No, just PowerPoint. Just PowerPoint. So that was an interesting one, but I don't know if that would be on your list. Clearly applied semantics that Google bought and YouTube Google bought.

YouTube's on the list. Yeah. Android's on the list. So YouTube, Android, I don't know if we put applied semantics, but that's what created AdWords, which are the ads that are on other sites, but maybe you left that one off. We did. Well, it was Overture that Yahoo bought, which really inspired everybody. Yes.

Oh, that was on your list? It was not on the list, because it was weird what all happened. And then you obviously have Instagram WhatsApp. So there's four right there. WhatsApp was an honorable mention. Oh, an honorable mention. Okay. Because it was speculative.

It was very speculative. That's true. You wouldn't put Oculus on that list because nothing's happened there. Is there anything that Apple has ever bought that's been a revenue drive? let's think that through here. Well, they made one enormous acquisition that has to be on there. You have to squint to call it a revenue driver,

but it's the most important thing they've ever done. Really? What is it? They bought next. Oh, well played, gentlemen. Well played. Yeah, that was an acquis, that was an aqua hire because they did buy Siri, but Siri's garbage.

I mean, the fact that Siri is still so shitty is just unbelievable. Oh, wow, that's a great pull. And then we had, I think these were honorable mentions, but we had P.A. Semi and Authentech, which is Apple Silicon. Uh-huh. Huh. All right.

Well done. Who else was on the list? Anybody else? So the big one you missed, which is the number two, which shook David and I both, is double-click. Oh, yeah, double-click by Google, of course. Yeah. They bought that for $3.4 billion.

I think it was $3 billion. And it's got to have made. made, it's got to have made over 100 billion. We estimate $122 billion of value, or $120 something. A couple of billion a year for a decade, yeah. Double Click was the original Silicon Alley company. That's right. I interviewed them for Silicon Alley Reporter in the first issue

when they were at a company called Poppy Tyson. Poppy Tyson was an ad agency, and Kevin Ryan and Kevin O'Connor were building Double Click inside of the Poppy Tyson office. Oh, no way. because they wanted to be next to an advertiser. So Poppy Tyson gave them advertising space. And there were five of them and I went to visit them. And they were like, we're going to build this thing to serve the ads.

And I'm like, what do you mean ads? And they're like, you know the banners that are on hotwired? Imagine if one company served them. I'm like, but why would they need you to do that this on their servers? It makes no sense. I'm like, oh, well, we can do average. I was like, that's bullshit. Get the fuck out of here.

What are you talking about? That is nonsense. So this Google one is not the one we were expecting, right? David. What were you expecting from this? Real quick, the others you mean? Booking.com. Oh, yes.

No, that's a good one. ESPN. I was going to say, so there's two media companies. What do you think the other one is other than ESPN? Oh, it's got to be Marvel, of course. Yeah, Marvel. Yeah, that's a no-brander.

Marvel has 20 films that have done over a billion dollars each. I had Marvel franchise. That doesn't count merchandise. It's got to be 50 billion. That's $5 billion to $50, right? I think we said ESPN's better, but like Marvel's the second best. Well, let's sit around a lot longer. That's for sure.

Yeah. Right. So you're talking about that's a 30-year story. Yep. We determine the, absolute dollar return to Disney on the Marvel pickup was 16.3 billion as evaluated by Disney's market cap in March, and we did the episode. And I think they spent $4 billion on it. I was just going by 20 movies times roughly a billion each. You know, it's got to be.

And then, I mean, we're not even looking forward. Like those movies, just that one, those three phases, those 20 movies are going to generate as much in the future as they've generated already through Disney plus. This episode, though, it highlighted so much for us just the power of tech business models. Because, like, take Marvel. Amazing. Incredible company. It costs so much to make those movies.

Instagram doesn't pay a dime for the content on their network. Yeah. It's a fair point. Yeah. I mean, you don't have to pay for the content. Robert Downey Jr. is getting paid 50 million a movie, right? 100 million a movie. Just to show up for like six minutes.

He's got like 12 lines. Totally. So, so, okay. So I'm going to weave us back here. So the only one of these that was not revenue creative is Android. And the reason it makes the list, right, is, and it generates some revenue. Like it generates actually a really nice amount of revenue from the Play Store now. But the reason that it creates so much value for Google, even though it's not a huge revenue driver, is because of all the money they don't have to pay Apple if iOS was the only mobile.

operating system. And this, like, I think this is like new news to a lot of people that's like, oh my God, there's $9 billion that flows out every year from Google to line Apple's pockets in order to cut this deal. And when you really look at like why they built Android at all, it was a hedge. Like, why Google is like, we need an operating system here so that we don't owe our traffic acquisition costs to someone else. And there's, there's, um, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, a, uh, uh, a, uh, uh, a, uh, uh, uh, a, uh, uh,

of interesting philosophical point here where Apple really likes to be on their soapbox about privacy, about we don't do this dirty advertising based on user information. Yeah, we just wash the money. We just wash it. What is it? What percent of their profits? They got a fence. Right.

Like they don't have to, exactly. They don't have to be involved in that at all, but they mint money from it. Yeah. They just get one check a year instead of like a million advertisers giving them $90,000 each. They just get one advertiser. to give them $9 billion. And absent this lawsuit, it wasn't going to be disclosed.

It's not like it's in their quarterly earnings of like, oh, we have this huge revenue stream. Like it's just done. Yeah. Yeah, it's done. They announced like every five years, they're doing it for another five years. It comes up.

But, you know, the scope of it and how it works, what the kickers are, you know. But I've got an easy solution for this one, which is it's going to end at a certain point in time. So what if they said, this is what I would do if I was Apple. I would say searches are now an auction in Safari.

And so you can pay by search. You just pick. You want 10 cents of search or 50 cents of search. Anybody can buy them. And every time you use the search box, it just gives you a random one. That's one crazy solution. But the easier one is...

And Google probably still pays them just as much money because Google... Because they're going to be able to pay the most. They're going to pay the market-bearing price and there will have been choice involved in the selection. But there's free market, right? So that's a brilliant solution. Okay, we solved it.

It's a free market. Well, he's an even better free market. If you want to be the default search engine, we list five of them, and the consumer picks which five, and we charge all five. All five pay us per search, 10 cents a search for,

and if you want to be on the list, you can put yourself there. And then if you want to stop, you can take yourself off the list at any time. So you can just go into your interface, Yahoo, duck, go, or whatever competitor. So if Bing wants to make a push and lose a billion dollars a year on search, they can just buy out all the searches, right?

Just make it a free market, which is what Google does with its ads. I think because Google has the best LTV per user, they would always be the highest bidder. Unless that's how it would play out. Somebody like Amazon decided they want to F with them. Yeah, it's interesting. That would be interesting is you get information about the type of search before you bid on it. If it's a product search, then Amazon.

Or you just say, you know, Amazon's just like, you know what? We're going to put the app. We're going to take A9. They had their own search engine project. That's right. We're going to put A9 up on this thing. And we're just going to screw with, you know, Google. We'll just bid on it because, you know, I don't know if you saw today.

But I think they're doing 20 billion in advertising or something crazy at Amazon. Amazon earnings. making a lot of money for... Crazy. It's bonkers. Yeah, David, do you want to drop some Amazon earnings nuggets? I'm such an Amazon fanboy, but like...

Go ahead. I mean, we'll wrap on that. I mean, we got so much... We could do a two-hour show here, and we're almost there. We get so much content. Just give us the Amazon one. It's so juicy. It's so much juice.

It's crazy. I mean, this company generated $96 billion of revenue last quarter. Wait, I'm sorry. Last year? No, last quarter. Last quarter. And that's up 30, I think 37% percent annual growth on a $96 billion.

It's a 25-year-old company and their revenue growth rate is what, David? 30. Like, Facebook's revenue growth rate was what, like 11% or something like that? It makes no sense. That is bonkers. It's bonkers. Amazon generated, like, I saw that they started really highlighting their free cash flow. So they generated in the last 12 months 30 billion dollars of free cash flow.

What are they going to do with it? While growing 40%. The Bezos is like top five allocators of all, capital allocators of all time. He is allocating it all back into the business. Of course. What is he? But what's left?

I mean, what can you buy for $30 billion? I mean. Prime Air, video, tons of AWS investment. They're hiring 100,000 people by like the end of the year. Did it say they hired 250,000 people last quarter? Yeah, something like that. It's insane. Here's a pro tip for Bezos.

being the richest guy on the planet is a bad, bad moniker. Let me tell you, that is not what you want to be. You want to be the thousandth richest person or the 12,000th. That's a great place to live. You don't want to be number one. What he should do is he should just raise the minimum wage for the factory workers to $25 an hour. I'm dead serious right now. And listen, I know I'm a free market guy.

I think this would be the power free market move is to just take whatever the minimum wage is and go 50% above it. And I'm talking about the local ones as well. So the $15 becomes, you know, whatever, $25, 30. Just jump the fence and pay those folks a ridiculous amount of money or give them bonuses that net them out to that amount. And that would make him look so incredible. I don't know if you guys know the story around Home Depot.

Oh, such a great story. Yeah, they used to pay the associates like a crazy amount of money. They got, you know, the people were making $50, $60, $70,000. $1,000 a year for being associates. And then there was a real career path where people who were associates wound up being the managers of stores. And the associates were, I mean, I don't know if you remember the early days of Home Depot, but they were super helpful people.

And they kept great people. This would be an amazing move on Amazon's part to just be menschie and, you know, add five bucks to the minimum wage. And then that takes the, that would give him the high ground. When he gets his ass dragged in there, he'd be like, well, Apple pays $15. And I pay $25 an hour. So it's interesting. They're,

people to look at. If you read the earnings release, he's trying to do this without actually doing this, which is such a Bezos move. They talk about how they were leaders in going to 15 bucks an hour, which I think is about, for sure they were. Yeah.

And how like Target and Best Buy have responded and, you know. But he took their RSUs away because the unionization stuff was happening. He's like, okay. You got, oh, yeah, oh, you want me to go from 11 to 15? That's fine. RSU's off the table. Boop. You want to be union?

Great. We'll take those RSUs. Now you don't own shares. I mean, that was a little hardcore move. Not to mention Amazon was probably the best investment you could make at that time to today. I mean, this is why union leaders and this kind of mentality of I don't want to be an owner. And it's us versus them is the wrong mentality to take in terms of having equity. You always want to get the equity.

I mean, guys, 10 years ago, Amazon was a $30 stock. it's a $3,500 stock now. It's bonkers. Oh, did you guys see that Ryan Smith bought the Utah Jazz? Oh, it's so great. So great for me. Now, I've got Cuban, Chimoth. What do you mean I've got?

What does that mean? These are my friends. I can go to a game. I can get tickets. This is, I can go to Boston with Grossback. I can go. Ted Leonces, the Wizards. When this is going to be a thing again,

you've got to take us to get some floor seats. We need to go to games. I have sat on the floor in my life six times now. And multiple playoff games and one NBA final versus the Raptors. That was pretty good worst for the Raptors. I have paid $0.0 for my floor seats to date. Does anyone ever actually pay for floor seats? Like the people sitting in them?

100% like the people who like Spike Lee complains about how much he has to pay for garden floor seats. Oh man. I went to, have you, have you been to the suites at the, at the new Chase Center? I took a tour after a game and saw some of the suites, but, yeah, they're pretty, the bunker suites and that kind of stuff. I got to go to FRB suite right before the pandemic. Oh my gosh. It's such an incredible idea. You put the sweets under the chairs.

floor level in the tunnel. Oh, it's so great. Yeah. So for people who don't understand, you cannot see the game, except on TV is from those bunker suites, correct? Yep. But the whole wall of the suite is a giant TV. Right. And when you can leave the suite and go sit in chairs and watch the game.

So you're in the first four rows or something like that. Yeah, you're not on the floor, but there's a little doorway and you go into your little private cave and you got like a man cave. and it's amazing. And then what I understand, because they were trying to sell me one of these, and I was like, how much? I mean, I was like, I'm rich.

That's crazy. No. Like, I can invest in 10 more Uber. Not the sweet owner. It was pretty crazy the amount they wanted for that. And I was thinking about it. And they said, well, here's the great part. You have access to the suite all the time.

You can go to your suite and use it for meetings. So, Ben, like, we could tape the pod in the suite. We could go to the suite any time. It's a business expense. Yeah, you can use it as your office basically. You have the key to your suite. You can go use it and take meetings. So if you want a first client... And it's not just basketball games. It's all the concerts there.

It's how you get... You're bought out for the whole thing. If cold play is playing, Ben, we could all go. Work from there from the day. Taped two or three pods. You know, do an acquired FM LP show. God, I hope our brand is not like we're going to a cold play pot. Well, whatever. I mean, the girls love. The girls love the coal play. You know what I'm saying.

You bring the ladies, whatever. I'm not going to call play. But, you know, I mean, I like the scientist. Amazon would rank where in terms of GDP if it was a country, boys? Here we go. Not comparable. Can we not do this? This is like the biggest fallacy.

Like enterprise value does not equal. Wait, are we talking revenue or revenue would equate? No, we're doing enterprise value. This is apples and oranges. Okay. What's the market? What's the market? of like a country then.

Like how would you value America? Like can you do the sum of future GDP cash flows in order to compute the... Well, I mean, that's basically what we do with our debt, right? Like, what is our debt ratio to our GDP now? Is it 1.5 or something? I actually don't know. Yeah, it was very reasonable for a long time. U.S. GDP to debt ratio.

Here we go. Let's take a look. Which that's useful because that's effectively revenue. to debt. Right. It's not earnings, right? But GDP, the United States gross, the United States ratio in March 2020 was 82% up from 79%. So we're almost up to 100. Which country has the highest debt to GDP ratio? This is an easy one. You should know about it because they had some financial issues famously in the 80s and 90s and giving it away. No, Japan. Japan. Japan. The national debt is more than twice the amount of the annual gross domestic product, more than $9 trillion.

But we will get there. I mean, I think that's what's going to happen to the United States is we'll be 1.5 or something, which, you know, how do you even know if that's, I don't think people in the world know if that's good or bad. Wait, Nick, while we're talking about this, can you look up basically where Amazon's revenue would have it fit in the GDP charts rather than its market cap? Because I think that's an interesting. It still be pretty damn high.

Yeah. Still be pretty high. David, what was there a revenue? Yeah, run rate there at 400 billion. So this past quarter, it was basically 100 billion. We're heading into Q4. So GDP, let's see, so whose GDP is probably around 400 billion a year.

So who's got a GDP in that 400 billion range? Let's see. GDP of 400 billion, 399 is Ireland. I was going to guess some sizable European countries would be. Ireland's small. But above Israel. Yeah. Offsea, overseas cash flows is actually the country in which they're comparable in size

to. But, you know, in a short period of time, you know, they could get to a billion and a trillion. Ireland's not growing at 40% a year. That's what's just so insane about this. They're growing 40% a year out of $400 billion revenue run rate. There are late stage private startups. that would love to grow at 40% per year. And here we are a quarter century into Amazon's existence.

Well, and then you have to ask yourself, if you're the government, do you want to ankle this? Do you want to Tanya Harding, Jeff Bezos? Like, literally, that's what our government wants to do. They want to run up with a pipe and smack Tanya Harding style, the kneecap of Amazon.

Why would you kneecap Amazon? if they're not doing anything that any of us can feel is anti-competitive. What's anti-competitive about what they're doing? Charging $4 for a lightning cable when Apple is charging us 20, and they don't let any third-party cables in their store. It sounds a lot more anti-competitive of me. Let's start with Apple.

Yeah, totally. What is the number one thing that Amazon is doing that's anti-competitive? Well, and all of Amazon's businesses are in a hyper-competitive markets, e-commerce, web hosting, video. Like, these are hyper-competitive markets. Groceries? Yeah. With Whole Foods?

I mean, to me, the grayest area is competing with the sellers on their platform. Would you rather they take the sellers off of Amazon? Is that a solution here? Well, yeah, and that's interesting. That's the opposite that they've been going. Like, every year they've been, Jeff Braggs in the annual shareholder letter about how much the third-party sellers are starting to kick their ass in terms of the amount that they transact on. Checkmate.

On the platform. Yep. Yeah. I mean, it's literally checkmate. It would be like Apple allowing multiple app stores on their platform. That's the equivalent. Right. Whereas Amazon's happy to do that.

Google and Apple are not allowing third-party app stores now, right? Yeah. I mean, the only thing that Amazon really has to look out for is if it's ever perceived that they're charging a lot of money for something. after they competed away the competition. And frankly, like, that's just not in their DNA. They're a retailer. They're used to retail margins.

They're not one of these, you know, 80% gross margin software companies. Like, they're used to competing in these low market or low margin businesses. And would that even work? Like, would it work for them to say, like, we're going to put every, you know, every maker of televisions out of business or every maker of lightning cables out of business or USBC cables. out of business and then we're going to triple the price. Really, consumers would go for that? No. No. And so they don't want to do that, though. That's not the game they're playing. No. I mean, the only business line they have where you could potentially run this as a strategy is AWS, but they've proved for the last 15 years, that's like they just keep lowering prices,

not raising prices. There is one potential solution here. I think if we were going to rewrite the loss. This is the only one I think is interesting. You guys know about. about SK Telecom and Korea in South Korea? I know about the SKT e-sports team that they sponsor, but I know a little bit about SKTEL. The reason why SK Telecom has got all these investment arms

and they're like investing money around the world and apps and everything and have a venture arm is because they're capped at 70% I believe ownership. So ownership cap, let's see. So there is some SK, they

can only have a certain percentage of market share. And so there's some market share cap that they can't have more than, which then means they have to look for other businesses. Right. It's like how all the local TV stations, like once you bought a TV in every market in the 70s, you had to start buying newspapers and other stuff because you couldn't buy any more local affiliate TV stations.

Correct. And so that was my understanding of that. Somebody who is from Korea can correct me if that's no longer correct. But I remember they invested. my friend Sky Dayton's Helio company, which he was making smart handsets before. I was a customer back in the day. Okay.

That thing was awesome. You remember he came out with like the most sophisticated handsets from Korea in the United States for Helio maybe three years before the iPhone came out. Yep. Yep. And he just crushed it and then got crushed, right? It's like really like he has that thing. The kind of oval one that flipped out and like it was like that closest thing to an iPhone

before an iPhone. You could, they were ones that flipped open in a circle. I mean, they were gorgeous and like celebrities had them and they really were, you know, super compelling. But the reason was SK Telecom just backed up the brinkstruck and gave him hundreds of millions of dollars to do that because they had all this funny money sitting around. So if you capped Amazon at 70% of, you know, book sales or whatever, then they'd have to say, you know what? We have to have other competitors exist. I don't know how that gets enforced. Bezos takes the 30 billion in free cash flow every year.

reinvest it back into growing all of his businesses. If he couldn't do that, that would be an issue. What do you think about forcing them to spin out AWS or spin something out? Why? Like, people float this, but like, what's to be gained from that? They'll find something new to invest the free cash flow into. Yeah. And I don't think, it's not like they're bundling AWS with retail products in a way that

creates lock-in and is anti-competitive. Who's the most anti-competitive? If we say Amazon's the least, Facebook, Google, or Apple, are the other three. We'll end on this. Of those three, if you had to rank them in terms of anti-competitiveness or who'd you go after first, that's an easy one. Who do we go after first? It's not Amazon.

Amazon's last in my book. Totally. Who is first? Is it Facebook, Google, or Apple? So what are we optimizing for? Is this, which standard of anti-compet, like, is it the consumer welfare standard? Are we- Let's go for limiting competition. Okay.

Because on consumer harm, I don't know that any of these companies are harming consumers. I think that one's thrown out the window. These companies are too sophisticated and too customer-centric to harm computer. Can you name any harm coming from Apple, except for the high prices? I mean, you could go to Android and pay half. The biggest one to our previous conversation is Google. Like that's the only one where I could make the case that Google has a 90% market share in search. And innovation is stifled because of that.

Okay. I like it. What do you think, Ben? It's really hard. I mean, listen, we're in the industry. We're capital allocators and we have podcasts about technology. And we struggle with this question. How on earth is Ted Cruz and Lindsay Graham and all these other dipshit's going to figure this on?

Like, they've got a bunch of kids. Oh, they're brilliant. They're just a different kind of brilliant. Yeah, sinister brilliant. They're like brilliant in like a boiler room political, you know, what was that Kevin Spacey show? Oh, uh, on Netflix. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

House of cards. Yeah, they're house of cards brilliant, right? Like that kind of brilliant is what they are. But we can't even figure out how to police these companies because there is no consumer harm. Am I really being harmed by, I'm in the. Apple ecosystem on my phone and my iPad, but on my desktop, I'm Chrome OS and I'm Windows. And when there's a problem, it's like, oh, I message is the one, I would say to me,

the most frustrating anti-competitive thing in my life is IMessage. That's it. And the Apple store, the app store. Apple's building it with the ecosystem. I'm going to go Apple. I'm going to go Apple too. And the biggest reason is I think that the market for smartphones is distinct from all of the things that they are leveraging their position in the U.S. smartphone market to extend into.

And they don't, they shouldn't be allowed to keep me from playing Fortnite or from, you know, paying for a digital service that I want to pay to in the way that I want to pay or that person wants to offer it to me because they're a leader in the smartphone market. Like that's the one that seems the clearest to me in terms of extending and leveraging what actions that I agree, the actions that Apple is taking are the most anti-competitive. I think Google's position, though, regardless of whatever they do. I agree with you, David. They have the most monopolistic position in terms of percentage, but users don't care

because it works. Like, what's not working? What if they've broken, right? All they've done is broken Yelp and, like, they've just been sure. Well, but there's nobody driving them to be better is the issue. Like, you don't care because it works, but, like, you don't know. how good it could be, whereas when smartphones and iOS and Android are driving each other. Yeah.

So it's an abstract argument. They have the market share. And we're imagining that there could be a better competitor. But we can't even vocalize or conceptualize what that is. But with Apple, there's very specific things they're doing that are anti-competitive and sharp outload, not letting me gel break my phone and have whatever software I want on is anti-competitive. That is restricting consumer choice.

Eye messages like restricting computer choice, I think. And making people pay the tax to get on the iPhone through the app stores feels anti-competitive. I mean, that's the most I can say about the entire industry, I think. Yeah, I would sum it up with just because you have the dominant market share in smartphone sales in the U.S., it shouldn't mean that you get to skim off the top of all software sold. all, not like some, like all software sold that is usable on that device. And the most like,

the place where that's the biggest gut punch to me is this is the primary way that we interface with the world now, especially during COVID, like, but just the way the world is trending. It's not like the smartphone's like a little ancillary thing in our lives. So sure, you can have your own little store there. That is the way that we get to the world. And so just because you own that pinch point, it does not feel right that you get the cut on anything I can access in the world through that. I 100% agree with you. And I think that their excuse that you can go through the web browser is just lame and stupid.

Because everybody knows a browser does not. I mean, listen, I do it all the time. When I buy a book, an audiobook, I open up audible in Chrome. Well, they did the special deal with Amazon. So now you don't even have to do that anymore, which just goes to show you've been from You can buy in the Audible app? I don't know. Certainly on Kindle and Prime Video.

I don't know about Audible, but I think so. So that just shows even more how ridiculous it is. It's like, oh, yeah, everybody else. We'll do this special deal with Amazon. Like, that just shows that much power. Apple's like, we don't do special deals, except with Google and Amazon. Yeah. Okay.

So now you're just being liars. Okay, everybody listened to Acquire.fm. If you got a Hyundai, give the boys a Hyundai. Let's upgrade that Airbnb. Let's put some goddamn art on David's wall. and any good investments, boys, any good investments, any plugs? Any companies you want to plug that you invested in that you're super bullish about? They always love that when you get them some downloads.

Any companies you invested in? Go ahead. I'm an angel investor in that actually we've had on the LP show on Acquired Mystery in Seattle. This is like my favorite COVID pivot. These guys were like a algorithmic date night. Like you tell mystery like, oh, I want to go on a date night this night. I was working great, but then the COVID, obviously. So now they are, like for remote teams, for companies, like teams in Apple, Amazon, whatever,

they take care of all your culture events. So it used to be like HR would give a team like, hey, you're a 12 person product team. Here's a credit card, go out to a bar, have fun. Yes. You can't do that on Zoom. So these guys take it all over. They have amazing events that they plan for you. It's going great.

You know, we were considering them, I think, for the accelerator recently, and this is a great pivot. I'm looking at it right now. And look at this. You can send a box to everybody in your company. It's something engaging, three to five hours of entertainment. You do date night. You can do your family.

You can do a birthday or an anniversary. What a great pivot. If you are suffering from anxiety, depression, and doom scrolling, David, I'm not saying you are. I'm not saying I'm not. I'm not saying I'm not in the same exact. I'm doom scrolling like you're doom scrolling at 3 a.m. And you can do something else. Like get this huge hit here.

Wow, really good. Family box too. Entertainment for the whole family. I love this. Curate my life. Give me something to do in the pandemic. They've got this guy. Wonderful.

Harry Mack. He's a freestyle rapper based out LA. And he's like, like, he'll be like, give me some words, like just something, concepts, whatever. And like you just like give him like six random things. and then like he just, this dude is amazing. So he's on the platform. So like rather than doing a crappy Zoom event for your team, like he'll do the thing.

Wow. This is so cool. I'm looking at the corporate gifting and that is a huge win for them. So try mystery.com slash four dash business. Use the promo code twist for 50% off. They don't have a promo code. No, no, no. Okay, Ben.

What do you got? You got a company you want to give a quick plug to, something you invested in? you love. Yeah. They're all your children, you love them equally, but go ahead and give one more love

than the other kids. For sure. And, you know, I do a lot of B2B stuff, but for the sort of more consumer world, well, first of all, I'll just second. The mystery team is awesome.

They're a great Seattle-based company and good plug by David. I want to give a shout out to Boundless. It's an immigration company. They're making it easier to immigrate. They actually just bought their largest competitor, and so they now offer tons of different types of visas. So no matter how you're immigrating to the U.S.,

or potentially future other countries in the future. They're just the sort of sane way that you would expect to go through a process in our modern web-based age. Look at this. Marriage green card, 950, flat rate. Oh, yes. Citizenship, 395, flat rate. Flat rate pricing, amazing.

Go everybody right now to boundless, B-O-U-N-D-L-E-S-S dot com. Use the promo code Twist. to bring in three relatives for free to the United States and get your green cards. Three green cards free right now at bountains.com slash twist. No, you're not going to get green cards people, but go to Bowness and check it out.

What stage of the end? Is there an opportunity for me to throw a little cash in these companies? What's going on, boys? Ben, what's the story? The Series A, Series Boundless? Where are they? There could be. They've raised a few rounds.

Foundry group just invested a little bit more. So they're sort of post series of series. Yes. Oh, very. nice. Bradfeld's coming on the pod soon, I think. Oh, awesome. He was on early on in the early days, but I always insisted everybody be in person and he's like, well, I'm a recluse. Like, I'm either in Alaska or in Boulder, and I was like, well, I'm not going to Alaska and I'm in Boulder once every five years.

But now that we're Zoom, here we go. All right, listen, boys, this has been great. Everybody go to Acquired FM, boundless, and trymystery.com. Did you get that right? Try mystery. Okay. We'll see you all next time. Bye-bye.