This Week in Startups - Rapid Fire News: Facebook “cleans up their house,” Tyga takes on OnlyFans, Jack Ma vs. CCP | E1270

Episode Date: August 24, 2021

In this news episode Jason covers Facebook finally revealing their Q1 transparency report after they originally shelved the report for PR purposes (2:08), Tyga deleting his OnlyFans account and announcing he will launch a competing platform (23:59), the WSJ's coverage of where Jack Ma is now (36:19) & more!

Okay, everybody, it's an awesome news show for you today. I am well rested. I got a lot of energy and I got a lot to say about today's news story. It's my last day in Italy, a 21 day, Italy vacation, the longest vacation of my life. I had to work the last week, but I have been writing every day. The new book is coming out better than I ever could have imagined. I got well over 9,000 words done. I've got the chapter list to work on when I get back. I was cranking 1,000,000 words a day. Typically a nonfiction book is 60,000 words. So, you know, I'm getting there, folks. Okay, in today's news, Facebook was caught cleaning up their algorithm reports from Q1 and Q2. The rapper Tyga deleted his only fans account, which was printing money,

and he's starting his own platform. Also, we received a DM from a sex worker who listened to Friday's show and the only fan segment, so I'm going to respond to their comments. And the Wall Street Journal released an article detailing more about Jack Ma's whereabouts and his big fight with the dictators and authoritarian in the Chinese Communist Party. Okay, let's get to the show. This week in startups is brought to you by Pipe, SaaS companies, this is for you. Pipe helps you unlock your recurring revenue as upfront capital. Sign up in minutes and start trading on Pipe for free for 12 months at Pipe.com. slash twist. 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, CROWD.com slash twist. And, and Broker's Startup Insurance Program helps startup secure the most important types of insurance at a lower cost and with less hassle, save up to 20% off of traditional insurance atembroker.com slash twist. And while you're there, get an extra 10% off using offer code twist. Okay, on Saturday night, Facebook acknowledged that an anti-vax post was the most popular post on the platform in Q1 of 2021. That's right. Facebook is spreading anti-vax news on their platform at scale. And it's worth digging into this because it is a very complicated issue because Facebook isn't the person actually sharing this. It's us. Consumers are choosing to share and amplify anti-vax posts. And of course, Facebook is the platform allowing that. So the grand debate will continue. Should Facebook be editing the posts of their members or should they be a common carrier? Should they be like the phone and they just allow people?

to talk on the phone. Obviously, I think we all know that it's much different than just using the phone because here, something can trend and a lot of people can see it on each other. So last Wednesday, and this story is a little complicated, but I think it's worth us going over. Last Wednesday, Facebook released their first ever content transparency report, which covered the second quarter of 2021. It's important to get the quarter straight here. Second quarter, obviously, April, May, June, first quarter, January, February, March, four quarters in the year, three months in each. So you might remember that we covered Facebook. Facebook's internal transparency battle on episode 1247 of the speaking start us back in July. This was the story in which the New York Times, Kevin Ruse inserted himself into the story by creating the Facebook top 10 Twitter handle using data from CrowdTangle, which is a company that Facebook bought. And it's a social media monitoring tool that just tells you what's popular on the platform. and the sort of negative take on that on Twitter, which is kind of left-leaning, was that Facebook is right-leaning. Big shocker, Facebook is something that people all across the United States use,

and it's kind of right-leading. Twitter is something that elites in coastal cities, in democratic places, and journalists are addicted to, and it leans left. There's no shocker here. I think we all understand that these two platforms have a position, just like Fox News, and MSNBC might have a lot of,

a leaning, correct? I think we all agree on that. Now, Facebook's transparency report is including widely viewed post as a section. And this featured the top 20 most viewed posts over the three-month period from April to June of 2021. The list included a bulldog puppy meme, which is in my wheelhouse, and I'm all for a post from Joe Biden, and was mostly filled with response-bating posts like what is something you will never eat no matter how hungry you get. Let me think about that. I think that you really can't objectively answer this until you're starving on a raft in the middle of the ocean. But, you know, that's a great viral query that people will respond to.

And we all understand how the signal works on Facebook. Anything that increases the time you spend on Facebook or on YouTube will get shown more. And that is the nature of these algorithms. The nature of the algorithms being built is take all the signal you can find, a like, a click, maybe you're scrolling on your phone, maybe forwarding to a friend, writing a comment, any of those variables, those behaviors, those actions, those engagements, those were all words we use in the industry, those engagements are signal that they should show that post to more people. If you show it to more people or different groups of people and it keeps growing,

then you keep showing it to similarly minded people. which creates the classic echo chamber. This is why if you watch YouTube and you start at an Eric Weinstein or a Brett Weinstein, you might go to a Ben Shapiro, which might lead you previously to a Milo Yenopoulos or, you know, those other weirdos on the far, far right? And they call that this sort of intellectual dark web spiral, right? And you could have it happen.

I've had it happen with aviation videos. I started watching aviation videos because I like planes. and then I started watching ones of planes crashing, and then all of a sudden, my entire feed on YouTube is a dystopian mess of pilots calling the towers before their planes crash. We'll put that aside, but that is the nature of algorithms. And in fact, the people who write these algorithms

are not picking aside. They're not picking a side. They're picking winning as a business. How do you win as a business? You get more eyeballs for a longer period of time. This means if something is shocking or outrageous and more people comment on it, then you show it more.

Well, misinformation, arguably, is going to draw a bigger response than just plain old information. If you said, hey, the Journal of New England medicine or whatever, or, you know, this doctor said the following things about the COVID vaccine, that might not draw a response. But if you said Bill Gates is putting a microchip in your body, yada, yada, this might actually draw a bigger response, which then the algorithm, which is very clever at extending your time on site, but very stupid when it comes to helping society. Again, the algorithm is not optimized for making society better. It's optimized for making Facebook more money. And that is the key problem. And by the way, it's only a key problem if the person running the company doesn't care about society or cares about making money more than society. And let's face it, that is the nature of Mark Zuckerberg. He has always cared more about growing Facebook and his own pocketbook than he has about society, period. End of story. Feel free to add mention me. I'm taking a Twitter break anyway.

Oddly, the top 20 posts only included one in which COVID was mentioned. So this was weird. Journalists have got their hooks into it. They're looking at this transparency report and they're wondering what's going on. It could be that maybe Facebook is starting to pay attention and maybe deselect stuff from being shared, right? the mind wanders when you don't have information. And when you get some information, it creates more questions sometimes than answer.

So this is a very interesting moment. But this was the Q2 report, which then led everybody to say, hey, wait, where is the Q1 report? Now, once you leave something out, when you make a sin of omission, journalists are really good at this. I know I've been talking the last couple of episodes

about where journalists don't have a lot of information and maybe they don't do a good job and they're doing clickbaiting and they've got their own interest to get subscribers or to get advertisers. Well, this is where actually journalists can do a great job.

When something's missing, they'll notice it, right? They're like detectives when they're at their best. And something's missing. They're going to ask that question. So on Friday, the New York Times reported

that Facebook had a transparency report prepared for Q1, but decided to not release it for fear of looking bad. Aha. So why? Well, here's the quote from the New York Times.

the most viewed link was a news article with the headline suggesting that the coronavirus vaccine was at fault for the death of a Florida doctor. The article in question was published by the Chicago Tribune with the headline. A healthy doctor died two weeks after getting a COVID-19 vaccine. CDC is investigating why. And this is the kind of headline that we've all been seeing where the fear mongering amongst the press and the way the press presents information is completely you know, at worst, they're doing it to get, the most cynical version of why publishers are writing these headlines

is fear mongering to keep you tuned in to CNN. Breaking news, breaking news, breaking news, everybody's dying of COVID. And then they never tell you exactly what's happening. You'll hear that pediatric ICUs are full, but they never tell you how many people are in a pediatric ICU, right? They never tell you the denominator. They never tell you the numbers.

They tell you it's surging. They tell you it's breaking and, you know, all the stuff. They don't really want to give you the numbers because the numbers actually might be, well, there were four pediatric beds and now there's five. And that fifth child was put in their regular ICU and it's not a problem. So when the news is playing these kind of games, they lose trust. And so here you have it. Facebook has this headline with the Chicago Tribune, which I think is a kind of, you know, of crazy anecdotal story, one doctor and the CDC is investigating why. You really don't want to

print a headline like that. One could argue that the Chicago Tribune is doing a bad job by putting a headline like that, and people have, which is it's fearmongering, it's done to get clicks. If a healthy doctor died two weeks after getting the COVID-19 vaccine, they should put how? Was he hit by a bus? Was she, you know, somebody who had an allergic reaction to it? What are the details here? And the CDC investigating, that, doesn't really mean anything. Maybe they're investigating all people who died after a vaccine shot. I want to welcome Harry Hurst. You know him as the co-CEO and co-founder of the company Pipe. You've been on Twitter over the past year. You've probably heard me and my besties, a number of which got their beaks wet,

talking about all the excitement around Pipe and their fundraising and the product they're bringing to market. I thought I'd have Harry come on and explain it to y'all. Harry, welcome to the program. Thank you, Jason. What kind of vetting do you do on the companies and what size company is it best for? So the beauty of being a trading platform is that we can serve as companies of all shapes and sizes. You know, we've got companies that are just getting started out, have 100,000 in ARR, all the way up to publicly traded companies on the platform with hundreds of millions in ARR and every company in between. So there's, you know, a different offering in terms of trading limit size and bid price for each company's stage. In terms of vetting, the way that we work with the companies, that when you sign up to the pipe,

you connect your bank account, your accounting system, and your payment processor. And within 24 hours, the next business morning, we're going to give you your trading limit, the amount that you're able to trade at any one time, and the bid price, the amount of cents on the dollar that the capital markets are willing to pay for the annualized value of your revenue streams. All right. Thanks again, Harry, for coming on the pod and explaining that with pipe.com, there is no debt, no loans. And most importantly to me, as an angel investor, no dilution.

If you sign up at pipe.com slash twist, they'll eliminate all your trading fees for one full year. What a generous offer. Pipe.com slash twist so you can save up to tens of thousands of dollars. Happy piping, everybody. So Facebook critics have accused them of COVID misinformation on the platform, and this would support that theory. And it takes two to tango, or in this case, three. You have the public sharing, a fear-mongering link that maybe they shouldn't. You have the Chicago Tribune, maybe writing a headline that is fear-mongering.

and inaccurate that scares more people, and then Facebook building a platform that whips it into a frenzy. Everybody is that fault. The Tribune article has since been amended and was most recently updated in April. Here is the new update at the top of the article. Update, two weeks after getting a COVID-19 vaccine, a Miami doctor died from a condition that causes internal bleeding. Although it developed suddenly, a medical examiner's report said there isn't enough evidence to rule out or confirm the vaccine was a contributing factor. Okay, just like I said, you probably shouldn't have printed the headline to begin with. It's fear-mongering. And if you know people are resistant to get in the vaccine, printing it in a headline like that and scaring people, it might not be the most thoughtful thing to do. You might want to think it through and maybe use a little judgment as a journalist, as a publication, as a publisher, as whoever who wrote the headline. And as we know, in a lot of cases, the journalist themselves doesn't write the headlines, some social media, or somebody who's really good. at getting clicks rights.

And also from the New York Times. And here's the quote. The report also showed that a Facebook page from the Epoch Times, an anti-China newspaper that spreads right-wing conspiracy theories, was the 19th most popular page on the platform for the first three months of 2021. And this is where Facebook is super weird.

These like Epoch Times headlines and these weird publications that you've never heard about, they've been around for a short period of time. They kind of have gotten a lot of play on Facebook because they play fast and lose. with the headlines, et cetera. Not that the Chicago Tribune is doing much better. So the New York Times got this information

by obtaining leaked emails sent by Facebook executives, they say. According to the article, Facebook executives debated whether releasing the Q1 report would be a PR problem for the company. Duh, obviously it is. The CMO Alex Schultz initially wanted to release it, but eventually wound up agreeing to shelve the report.

This shows you how insincere the executives at Facebook are. They literally are thinking about themselves and the PR for the company and the share price, as opposed to what's in the best interests of society and this important discussion. And just like you shouldn't expect the journalists out there to be acting in your best interest, I wouldn't expect Facebook to act in your best interest. You need to act in your best interest. You need to be an independent critical thinker.

Hopefully this podcast helps you do that. So all of this is very interesting because Facebook released their Q2 report last week. VP of Integrity Guy Rose and said the social network had undertaken a long journey to be by far the most transparent platform on the internet, according to the New York Times. I think that's patently false. Twitter is public. The data is public. Twitter would be the most transparent platform on the

internet, perhaps Reddit, with all their voting being public and comments being public. I think that's an actually factually incorrect statement by Guy Rosen. After the article dropped on Friday, Facebook faced a bunch of online criticism, obviously from journalists as well. So on Saturday night, they decided to release a PDF of their Q1

transparency report via Dropbox. interesting choice, which was unavailable at the time of this recording. Who knows why it could be there overwhelmed by people clicking it. On Saturday, Facebook's head of comms, Andy Stone posted a thread, and man, it's got to be tough to have that job. On Twitter, describing the difficulties of defining misinformation and what he thinks Facebook is guilty of. Here are the most important tweets from that thread.

Here's the quote, we've been getting criticism for holding an internal report until it was more favorable for us and then releasing it. Getting criticism isn't unfair. Getting criticism isn't unfair. okay. This is word salad. But it's worth taking a closer look and making note of some of the components of the story. That's more weasel words. You can tell this person's a comms person because they talk like a weasel. Andy Stone on Twitter continued news outlets wrote about the South Florida doctor that died. Okay, correct statement. When the coroner released a cause of death, the Chicago Tribune appended an update to its original story. New York Times did not. Would it have been right to remove the time story because it was COVID misinfo? That's a great question. You know, at what point should Facebook be taking stuff down and interfering with the news process? I think the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune would tell Facebook or, or, you know, Twitter or any social platform, like, let us do our jobs.

Andy Stone continued on Twitter saying, of course not. No one is actually suggesting this and neither am I. But it does illustrate just how difficult it is to defied misinformation. He also added, we're guilty of cleaning up our house a bit before we invited company. we've been criticized for that. And again, that's not unfair. So he uses a metaphor here, which is a key part of trying to persuade you to feel a certain way about the company and the job they're doing, cleaning up their house before we invited a company. Obviously, everybody wants to have a tidy house before you invite people over. But that is a way to try and convince you to not be critical of Facebook. Really, the problem with Facebook is this algorithm and their perverse desire to increase time on site by any means necessary and not really being thoughtful about how their algorithm works. Why does the algorithm need to have these things spread? Why don't they just put a cap?

No news story can spread crazily or stories can only spread within your friend circle times two or something. They could throttle all of this, which of course would throttle maybe the time on site, which they can't do because they have quarterly reports to hit, and Zuckerberg would never do it because he wants to keep the stock price high. We're cleaning up our house is a reference to not publishing the Q1 results because they didn't look good, obviously. Again, he's just using a metaphor to try to be convincing he's a comms person. He knows the power of metaphors. You're being manipulated by those metaphors.

I'm just unpacking it for you. And meanwhile, the Q2 results look better as most of the top posts are memes and response bait, you know, those asking a question like, oh, what are your three favorite movies or whatever? Or what food is the most disgusting? OMG. And that might be a great solution for Facebook here. If they want to have a pragmatic solution for staying out of the fray here, maybe they just keep politics and news stories out of the top most shared stories. They keep them throttled to friends of a friend or maybe two hops away and not let them trend in some huge way on their system. You know, is any of this sketchy by

Facebook? Everything Facebook does is sketchy. Like, that's their MO. They care about growth above all else. And really, I think at this point, I think Zuckerberg should resign as a CEO of Facebook and let Cheryl Sandberg take it over and let her make the decisions. And I think she would make more thoughtful decisions than he does. Or let somebody else take over and let somebody who isn't as tied with their net worth to the fate of Facebook run the company and do a better job. It's time for management to turn over at Facebook. That's my honest belief. There's other things Zuckerberg could go do with his life in the same way Bezos or Bill Gates have and he's young, he should go spend his fortune doing other things, whether it's philanthropy or building other businesses or buying

other business or being a capital allocator or playing with Oculus or spin out Oculus and make it a new company, whatever. Facebook is also facing scrutiny, obviously, from the Biden administration. You remember in July, Biden said the platforms like Facebook are killing people due to the amount of vaccine information, which is, let's be honest, a true statement. And it's not that Facebook's killing them. It's that people are conspiracy theorists. They want to believe this stuff. There's a certain number of people out there who will fall for these conspiracy theories. I think they're inclined to believe them because sometimes they do turn out to be correct. Sometimes the difference between a conspiracy theory and the truth is time going by. And I know Biden, you know, I think

pull back on that, but, you know, he's not wrong. I think the bigger picture here is it's time for Zuckerberg to go. And I think he should go right now. Put some of it. somebody in place, put Cheryl in to be the CEO for now. Maybe she's interim. Maybe she stays forever. And that would be just a much better look for Facebook. And he should just give himself a promotion to chairman of the board. According to the Washington Post, White House officials have alleged that many Americans are reluctant to take the coronavirus vaccine in part because of false or misleading information they have read on social media services, including Facebook. Sure. And Americans didn't get exposed to this information at scale. So it is a real problem. My belief is that these

platforms need to look at the algorithms and make decisions that are in the best interest of society, not their own growth. That is the core. They're going to have to give up some growth for an algorithm that maybe doesn't optimize blindly for growth. If you optimize blindly for growth, people are going to go to dark places. The darker and the more perverse and the more conspiracy theory, you know, this content gets, the more people will tune in. And that's just, the sad part of an algorithm combined with the worst of human nature. We want to aspire to consume better content, to be our, you know, and to aspire to work towards our better angels, not the dark crevices of humanity.

And really, the algorithms do not care. And the people who built the algorithms do not care, apparently. So where does this end up? I think this is why society is tired of Facebook. This is why they're not going to be allowed to grow. is why they're going to get kicked out of other countries. And then on the margins, I think people, you know, I talk to a lot of young people who are extremely talented and they don't want to be associated with Facebook.

They don't want to work for the company. And many of the people who've worked for the company who have I talked to said they felt a great sense of relief when they left because they didn't want to be part of doing something negative for society. If you work at Facebook, you're working on the Ed Network, go work on some education startup, go work on a space startup, go work on a, you know, carbon sequestering. you know, startup, go do something world positive. Working for Facebook is not world positive.

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Just go to O-U-R-C-O-W-D. dot com slash twist. O-U-R-C-O-W-D dot com slash twist to open your free account. Okay, everybody, rapper Taiga, spelled T-Y-G-A, kind of pronounced like Tiger, but Taiga, deleted his only fans account I saw on Instagram and

started his own platform, My Star, with two WIs. Just as I said, what happened? Remember on Friday show when I mentioned that the top only fan creators should just leave the platform and start their own, well, they could do that and just cut the fees. Apparently, Taiga is a fan of the show. Here's my clip from Friday. If the service can't do it correctly, shut it down. And then the people who are the top performers on this service should just make their own. It's not hard to replicate the service, to be totally honest. The top 100 people should just leave and make their own only fans, take back that 20%. So they have it, folks.

Once again, you heard the future here just a little bit earlier. And you know what? I can predict the future to a certain extent on this podcast because I talk to founders all the time. And sometimes you might wonder, wow, how did Jason now that? A lot of times the reason I nailed this because other founders are calling me saying, hey, J-Cal, I want to start a competitor to that, and then I present it to you as a prediction when in fact, it's confidential information I have. So just know that sometimes when I make a prediction here, it's because behind the scenes, I have a little bit of extra information.

The founders who are likely to start the things might tell me. So sometimes that is what's happening. Shortly after I recorded on Friday, Taiga tweeted the following, just to lead to my only fan, starting my own platform, My Star, more futuristic, better quality, and only a 10% fee, obviously cut it in half. Creators will also be able to make content of their choice. I think he's alluding to adult entertainment as opposed to still pictures, i.e. port. And apparently apply now to be the first to get an invite. He says, my star's 10% cut is half of what only fans takes. So when a founder trips and a company trips, that's an opportunity for other people to just roll right over them. And you know what? TIGA is one of the top people on

OnlyFans, I understand. So he's got a good shot of doing that. The TIGA brand, I think, is going to be bigger. more attractive to both entertainers on these platforms and to the audience. So congratulations to him on building, I think, what will be a billion dollar company, not my cup of tea. I'm not going to invest in it. But if you have the ability to invest in it, I'm pretty certain this will become a very good investment. The new platform will launch in October. Coincidentally, that's when only fans will start banning explicit conduct.

If you remember, they're fine with explicit content, but not conduct. In other words, you can be naked, but you can't be naked and having sex. He has over 23 million followers on Instagram, and I've been saying over and over again, the top Instagram creators or TikTok creators should leave and make their own. Apparently, here is an example of that happening, albeit on the adult side. According to My Star's announcement, quote, creators will have the ability to sell NFTs on the Ethereum blockchain. What a brilliant idea. One of Ones, one of 50s, just, I mean, every piece.

that an only fan's creator creates could also go up in value and be sold. Wow. I mean, you get the membership fees and you get a little bit of that NFT pixie dust. Great, great vision. After the OnlyFans news broke last week, competitive platforms have tried to take advantage of the opportunity and capture some of the fleeing adult creators just for fans. It's a similarly adult-themed platform I told by my researchers here,

and they released the following statement on August 19th. The adult industry is sadly used to companies cutting their teeth on the adult market and then abandoning them once they reach critical mass. Just 4. DotFans was founded and built by and for sex workers and its staff is 100% comprised of sex workers and people who have been in the porn industry for many, many years. We are a porn site that will never change and we just have no interest in mainstreaming in quotes. JustFord.Fans is number two in traffic to only fans and we are well poised to make sure adult content creators are not abandoned. We welcome them all to our website. We believe we have the most innovative platform out there and are constantly evolving to meet the needs of our community. We welcome everyone to check us out. Just for Fans followed up the statement with tips and tools for how users

can migrate large amounts of content and data from one platform to another. And it appears they've got a lot of traction with migrating creators and users, according to my research team, as they've been tweeting about server migrations and apologizing for crashes over the past couple of days. Note, just for fans takes 30% of creator revenue, which is 10% higher than OnlyFans and 20% higher than TIGA's new platform, MyStar. So I'm sure they will change that. According to the TOS,

just for fans, it's a pretty unique referral model for top accounts. Here's the quote, select members are allowed to make model referrals, signing up new models to the system via a special link we provide. They will earn 5% of a model's net earnings on subscriptions only for at least one year

with the likely potential of the time period being extended, but we reserve the right to evaluate the program after one year. Payments are made on the first of every month for the previous month. Chargebacks will be debited accordingly. So this is interesting. They're creating a multi-level marketing adult entertainment industry program, also known as an affiliate program. If this was, you know, then they got 1% of every model that they brought in the system's

referrals to the system. It would be a full-blown Mary Kay Cosmetics. And as always, we're seeing massive innovation from the adult entertainment industry. Maybe this will all come to podcasting at some point. Instead of listening to this podcast, you'll all have to pay, and then I'll turn you guys into podcast or to take some of your money. Not likely to happen. We're doing very well with the advertising sold out. I think we're sold out through November, and we just went to five days a week.

So the podcast is doing great. In fact, we're hiring another producer. If you're thinking of getting into podcasting or you've been in podcasting, we're going to hire our fourth producer. So there'll be seven people on the team, not counting myself. This podcast is doing really well. Regarding our only fan segment on Friday, we actually had a sex worker reach out to us via DM after listening to the segment. As I knew they would, and they are very thoughtful about these issues, and obviously

they're experiencing the firsthand. And they shared an interesting perspective. I'll read it to you now. I thank you for the effort in trying to address sex workers respectfully. There was a lot of nuance and key actors missed and misinformation, which causes further harm to sex workers because of the attacks on adults. platforms by legislation such as Fasta Sesta, which I'm not aware of, adult platforms have had to enforce an insane level of security of moderation.

So let's explain this. Fasta is Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act. Sesta is Stop Enabling Sex Traffers Act. Both bills were signed into laws by Trump in 2018. They create an exception to Section 230, which is the law that allows you to be a common carrier. You're not responsible for what your users post. Like on Facebook and Twitter, they're not responsible if you say something. slanderous, etc.

Which holds web publishers liable if third parties are found to be posting ads for prostitution on their platforms according to 2018 breakdown by Vox. Fosta Sesta was intended to protect sex workers online, but it seems like now its regulatory burden is forcing them to move offline, which obviously is much more dangerous.

Let's get back to this sex workers' DM to our podcast handle TWA startups. Content moderators on adult platforms is tighter than every other social media site. I believe that, actually. Only fans requires ID 2257 and a credit card to join, and it's behind a paywall. Unlike Facebook or Instagram, who wait to take action. The report on the BBC are also incredibly flawed and pushed by the same groups. That's interesting. 2257 is a reporting requirement for legal sex workers that keeps record of their ages. This is

intended to fight against child sex work. Back to the DMs. This is a full-blown moral panic that's being weaponized sex workers are literally dying because of these campaigns. I would think because they would be then going to sex work IRL in real life as opposed to digital, which has obviously a lot more safety and comfort and ease than doing it in the real world, which is really dangerous. Regarding crypto, particularly in the U.S., a lot of sex workers, regardless of if they actually are working or not, have lost their bank accounts. PayPal has closed accounts and seized funds. We don't have access to basic resources to utilize crypto. That's not even speaking to the nightmare.

It is to implement crypto for micro-transactions. So it's an interesting perspective, and I appreciate it. I think the point is that even with 2257 and, you know, driver's licenses and all that, the people who are good actors are going to do all that and the bad actors are going to be able to route around that. And so how do they route around it? They could have one person who registers as a sex worker, and then, you know, have a person who looks in a similar, then use that account, et cetera. So there's going to be a lot of cat and mouse.

So while I appreciate the thoughts here, I do think that it is, there is a lot of potential abuse here. And we have to think about the geographical border. So while I absolutely appreciate the sex worker's opinion here about the moral panic, the fact is a child sex work is legal or not punished. in the same way it is here in the United States and other countries, or it's more acceptable. I'm not an expert on it, so I actually don't know the exact laws. But you do have a global internet, and I think when you add sex work to the global internet, that can cause these unintended consequences.

So we're probably in agreement on that. I would think actually the sex worker who DM does would agree with that. The international thing is a particularly challenging one and bad actors. I would be very interested in their perspective on those two. So what is the solution, you know, for good actors in the sex worker community? I guess they have to do very intense KYC and I think they have to think about, you know, some constant verification and the fact that there are an international nature to this. But there are no easy answers. There's always going to be abuse in systems and abuse, you know, of credit cards, you know, leads to people losing money.

an abuse in this industry leads to children, sadly, being abused. And so the stakes are higher here. So, of course, the KYC should be much higher than with finance. We'll agree to disagree on that. And I don't think it's a moral panic. I think it's more the nature of an international global system with a lot of bad actors in it and probably very little policing. And the person who's running this platform might have a, you know, they might have, not the highest moral or ethics or ability to police it or they may not want to police it to the level they should. And their past seems a little sketchy. So it's complicated, I guess is what we'll agree on. Okay, let's take another story. Every startup needs business insurance and you should

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disappearance in China. Here is the quote at the top of the article, technological disruption. One seen as a useful prod for China to catch up with the West has been recast as a threat to the ruling Communist Party. In other words, as we've talked about on the All In Podcast and here on this week in startups, China was leveraging entrepreneurship and capitalism and startups to create wealth, prosperity, jobs, and be competitive with the Democratic West. However, those leaders have become so powerful that they threatened the Communist Party, essentially the dictators in China. Jack Ma, the billionaire co-founder of Alibaba and founder of its spin-out ant group. didn't agree with this and acted more like an American tech entrepreneur than a Chinese citizen

and basically challenged authority and challenged the thinking in China as if he was Bezos or Bill Gates or any number of outspoken entrepreneurs here in America. Quoting from the Wall Street Journal, Xi Jinping, China's most powerful leader in decades, is rewriting the rules of business for the world's second largest economy. Okay, so according to the Wall Street Journal, Jack Ma, and I'm just quoting here from the Wall Street Journal, had lost an appreciation for the risks of falling out of step. He tuned out warnings for years, according to people close with Jack Ma.

In other words, he didn't really think that he was operating in an authoritarian country, a communist country. The warning signs were there. He ignored them. He basically lost an appreciation for the risks, and he went rogue. So Jack Ma disappeared for almost three months starting in November of 2020 after criticizing the Chinese banking regulators for hampering innovation. And one of the number one things about the Chinese culture and the Communist Party's goals is to have harmony. And if you're criticizing them in their rules, that is going to lead to discord and it is not going to lead to harmony.

So after Ma's comments, the CCP blocked Ant Group's $35 billion IPO. which would have been the largest IPO ever. In the following months, Ann Group has since been forced to restructure and lost over half its value after Fidelity cut its implied valuation from $300 billion to $144 billion, according to Business Insider.

China's most booming company was about to set a world record IPO. Think about that. And the CCP shut it down due to what any American would consider a like criticism. This is an important moment for everybody to consider

how lucky we are to be Americans and to live in a democratic free society. Literally, you could spend your life decades, building an amazing company, be at the finish line on the one-yard line, and then be disappeared and have your company taken from you and your IPO basically halted. So they basically say in the Wall Street Journal that now Jack Ma is playing golf, according to people familiar with the matter and reading Taoist text. So here's another quote from that Wall Street Journal article. he hired a teacher to learn oil painting, starting out with images of birds and flowers,

and then shifting to an abstract style according to these people and photos of his artwork viewed by the Wall Street Journal. Okay, this is absolutely bonkers. He is not oil painting. He is not golfing. He's under house arrest. He's being reeducated. I am almost certain. This is probably something that was, you know, made up.

Or maybe he is doing this. and they told him you're taking up oil painting in golf. And if we see you speaking out against the Chinese Communist Party again, you're going to go to jail. It's that simple. If you'll put three million Uyghurs in jail simply for being Muslim and torture them and make them pick cotton in the fields, I don't think you're going to have much sympathy for a billionaire.

So a Beijing official quoted in the Wall Street Journal believes that Jack Ma should have been more focused on, quote, giving back to the party instead of. of just focusing on his own interest. Again, tall poppy syndrome in China, it's about the society, it's about harmony. It is not about your individual achievement, which is the definition of capitalism. Capitalism is a brutal competition and whoever wins gets lauded as the victor and whoever loses gets to start again and maybe fight the battle again. But we like to celebrate the winners, and we like to have winners and losers. We like to have equal opportunity. Capitalism is a beautiful system. It's got some margins on the edges. I talk about that in my new book, which I've been writing

while I'm here in Italy, and the book will be coming out next year, and I think you're going to really enjoy it. Some of the topics I cover in it. The article also notes that there are a lot of claims rather than fact supporting what Jack Ma is actually up to now and what happened before the disappearance. Quote, Mr. Ma's spokesperson said details about Mr. Ma's activities reported by the journal weren't based on facts, but rather on unsubstantiated opinions and or third-hand observations and didn't comment further. Okay, let's pause for a second. Why would somebody say he was oil painting in golf? Jack Ma could say that, the CCP could say that, somebody who's trying to make peace between the two parties could be saying that. This is a total mess. And the bigger picture here is

China leveraged capitalism to build this amazing system. And then Xi Jinping, looked at it and said, you know what, I'm in charge. And if I don't stop these entrepreneurs now, capitalism is such a powerful force. China's going to turn into a democracy. That was the road they were on. And now, Xi Jinping has taken all the capitalists out of the running. Just like other countries, whether it was Putin in Russia or MBS in Saudi Arabia, authoritarian's do not want competition from high-profile entrepreneurs. Basically, communism and dictatorships are not compatible long-term with capitalism because we've learned that the world loves capitalism.

They love entrepreneurs. They love innovation. Whether you're a person in China, in Saudi Arabia, Russia, America, or in the UK, wherever you are, seeing somebody build something and come from nothing is so intoxicating that it could actually topple a dictator and a communist party. That is what this experiment has proven. We just ran one of the most important experiments in the history of humanity. Who is going to win? Capitalism and democracy, that pairing, or authoritarianism and capitalism. Guess what?

Authoritarianism, dictatorships, communist parties plus capitalism doesn't work. We have now proven it in three places. Russia, China, and Saudi Arabia, the Great Kingdom. Experiment is over. No more capitalism in those places.

All of those are now owned by the state. America and the West wins again. We've won again, and we must, and I don't want to make this a political show because it's not, but I do care very deeply about human rights, and I think if the United States and the West does not stand for human rights and democracy, who will? Who's left? We must make it a priority in the West, Germany, France, America, Canada, Mexico, and also Japan, South Korea, and Australia,

we must India make a block of countries that care about human rights and holds the line. from keeping China, Russia, and Saudi Arabia from spreading authoritarianism and communism to the rest of the free world. I'm going to leave it at that. I'm not going to talk about the situation in Afghanistan, but protecting human rights is critically important. And this story is about human rights and individual exceptionalism being thwarted. If you are hearing my voice right now, you are in all likelihood in a democracy in the West. And you need to think deeply about your position because we get to vote,

we're lucky enough to vote, we need to vote for leaders who are willing to fight for humanity and for humanity to be free and for human rights to be respected on a global basis. And if you're listening to this in a communist country, we support you. And we hope that you could fight the good fight

and that you will have a revolution in your country, just like we had in ours, and that you will win that revolution. And you know what? Sometimes you don't win, but the fight is worth it. Because being free is what it's all about. At the end of the day,

what are we if we're not free as humans? End of speech. Okay, the Wall Street Journal also reported that Jack Ma had tried to go back to Beijing to resolve the issue, but he's been unsuccessful so far. Okay. It's understandable that Jack Ma is trying,

but the third, fact is, Jack Ma represents, you know, the tip of the iceberg in capitalism in entrepreneurship. And there is no way that Xi Jinping is going to allow Jack Ma to become the most loved celebrity in China. Jack Ma is the equivalent of Bezos or Elon Musk or Zuckerberg. Pick the entrepreneur. Maybe not Zuckerberg. It's not very well loved here.

But pick the loved entrepreneur. They know that people love entrepreneurs more than they love politicians. And he's not going to win that fight, period. End of story. Okay, just a little button at the end, which is a personal comment. And I'm taking this from Preet Bihar's amazing podcast. Stay tuned with Preet. And he does a little button with his personal opinion at the end of the podcast sometimes.

And so I'm going to just give you my personal opinion, as is my rights. It's my podcast. And yes, this has to do with getting vaccinated. The FDA has approved the Pfizer vaccine. Here is the quote. Today, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the first COVID-19 vaccine. The vaccine has been known as the Pfizer-Bio and Tech COVID-19 vaccine and will now be marketed as Comer Nati, terrible name, for the prevention of COVID-19 disease and individuals 16 years

of age and older. The vaccine also continues to be available under Emergency Use Authorization, EUA, including for individuals 12 to 15 years of age and the administration of a third dose in certain immunocompromised individuals. So this is great news. I know many of you were looking at the vaccine, especially the Pfizer one, which essentially ensures you're not going to die from COVID. You might get COVID.

You might have a breakthrough case, as my friend David Sachs did from the All-In podcast. but the number of people dying who have had the Pfizer vaccine is extraordinarily low. I mean, we're talking 25, 50, 100 to 1, depending on the community. And this data is obviously a moving target, but I did see that in the New York Times. So that is the point of a vaccine is so you don't die. Your life is absolutely important. It's important not only to you, but to your friends, your family. and in fact, humanity, we all have a part to play as part of this human species.

And it's just not worth the risk to not get vaccinated. You have to come to your own conclusion, yes, but this is a major milestone. It is no longer emergency use. It has been approved. And it's logical that it's been approved because if you're taking the vaccine now, you are taking it, I think, in month 9, 10, or 11 compared to your friends and family, your countrymen and country women and people around the world. There have been over a billion people who've gotten vaccinated.

The Pfizer vaccine has been used by hundreds of millions, if not billions. So if you were waiting for it to come off of emergency use, this is a great moment for you to consider making your own risk assessment, doing your own thoughtful research across many different sources of information. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is one of them. And, you know, there's a lot riding on them making this officially approved and not emergency use. There's a lot riding on it, right? They have a lot of skin in the game.

People can get in a lot of trouble if they approve something that's dangerous. So I think this is a really big moment for those of you who are waiting to see, hmm, it's a new experimental vaccine. Okay. If you got the measles vaccine, if you got other vaccines as a kid, I think now that it's been approved, I would say it's reasonable to think of it. like getting your chickenpox vaccine. No big deal.

Okay, go get it. That's my best advice. You have to make your own decision and I respect your process. And now you have a great piece of new information to help you make a decision and help us end this ridiculous pandemic, which has just been absolutely psychologically, economically, emotionally, spiritually, parentally, educationally, brutal for so many people,

not to mention, you know, people dying. So, you know, take this new piece of information, and I would like you

to think about it deeply, okay? I'm not making the decision for you. I'm not telling you to do it. Um, I want to tell you to do it, but I want you

to know I respect your decision-making process. It's no longer emergency use. It is approved. It's a big moment, folks. Give it some thought. Okay.

Great episode. Talk to you tomorrow.