This Week in Startups - Rapid Fire News: FB’s right-wing algo, Tether update, giving Cuba internet, Powell on stable coins & more | E1247

Episode Date: July 16, 2021

News episode, Jason covers CrowdTangle's data headache (01:56), how the White House wants to crack down on social media misinformation (13:34), Florida Gov. DeSantis proposal for providing internet to Cuba (17:17), a $1B fund for creators (21:32), our Tether investigation (25:07) & more!

Okay, we got a huge newsday for you. Facebook is turning off crowd, tangle, a service which lets you see which stories are trending and most engaged on Facebook. And the New York Times has inserted themselves and made themselves part of this story. The White House is very frustrated with Facebook over vaccine information, which they claim is coming from just 12 sources on the platform. Additionally, we talk a little bit today about beaming the internet into Cuba to try and promote democracy there. Plus, Facebook is the last of the party. They are going to dedicate a billion dollars to creators next year. Finally, Tether Investigation continues.

The CTO hasn't responded to coming on this show, but he's gone on some other shows on YouTube with but 500 subscribers, and he's now calling this podcast a clown show at the same time that our Fed chair is saying that cryptocurrency and specifically stable coins need to be regulated. It's a great show. Stick with us. This week in startups is brought to you by Rippling helps thousands of fast-growing startups automate their HR and IT.

From their team's payroll and benefits to devices and apps. See how at rippling.com slash twist. Squarespace. Turn your idea into a new website. Go to Squarespace.com for a free trial. When you're ready to launch, use offer code twist to save

10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. And Twilio runs an amazing program for startups that includes a $500 getting started credit, $3,000 in SendGrid credits, access to webinars made exclusive for startups, and full support via their Twilio Startups team. Sign up now at Twilio Startups.com slash twist. in our first news story of the New York Times, Kevin Ruse, published an article yesterday about Facebook's internal battle over data transparency. Specifically, this article is focusing on post-engagement data, which skews obviously right-leaning on Facebook. And often when you look at the top stories on Facebook, they're from Ben Shapiro and Dan Bongino, who I don't really listen to, but he's a radio show host, and he's far right political commentator.

So you understand what's going on here. Facebook gathers and publishes data via a company called CrowdTangle. And this company, they acquired back in 2016, and it basically tells you what posts on Facebook are getting the most engagement. And it's used mainly by news publishers to track their performance of posts. If you didn't know, news publishers will sometimes post three or four different headlines and they'll test which ones get the most engagement because they are addicted to getting traffic from Twitter and Facebook. In other words, this is a news story, and it gets very meta here, and this is where Kevin

Ruse makes the cardinal sin of making himself the story. And I think that that's the big angle here, is that the New York Times is writing a story about themselves and their relationship with Facebook, which is incredibly complicated because Facebook is also giving millions of dollars to the New York Times, I believe cynically, in an attempt to curry favor with them. But here, as we get into this very deep and weird relationship between the New York Times and Facebook. This service, crowd tangle, was providing this data, and then this journalist decided he would create his own Twitter handle to feature this content. So, Facebook's top 10 is a Twitter handle, and it gleefully publishes daily who is in the top 10 pages in the last 24 hours. So

Here's a tweet example on July 14th. The top performing link posts by U.S. Facebook pages in the last 24 hours are from For America. And Ben Shapiro, Ben Shapiro, Ben Shapiro, Newsmax, Dan, Bongino, et cetera. And this is obviously a very weird situation. You have this service that is run by Facebook, which has a business relationship with the New York Times. We'll get into that in a moment. then this journalist takes it upon themselves to make a essentially a dunking Twitter handle. Now, I'm sure the journalist is going to say like, oh, I'm just sharing information,

but this is an agenda-based Twitter handle. I don't think Kevin Ruse would have created this if it wasn't with the agenda of wanting to show how right-leaning Facebook is. So you have a left-leaning newspaper that most people would say has gone really far left. and then you have this agenda-based creation of a Twitter handle. If I was at The New York Times, I would have fired Kevin for creating this news handle because it feels like activism, or I would have just told him take it down, right, and sanctioned him in some way.

It's like, what are you crazy? Like you're taking this data, you're making this adversarial Twitter handle to kind of make some crazy point about Facebook is right-leaning. That is inserting yourself into the news story. It is the number one rule of being a journalist is to, not insert yourself into the story. And not only did he insert himself into the story, he didn't just tweet from his account, here are the top, you know, news sources on Facebook. He made a dedicated service for it that got really popular. And now you have Facebook having two groups of people

according to sources, and the sources are obviously going to be anonymous in a lot of cases, that there are people inside of Facebook who are pro-transparency, including the former CEO and co-founder Brandon Silverman of this service crowd tangle that was bought by Facebook. And then you have this sort of anti-transparency group, which Ruse calls Team Selective Disclosure, which included the VP of Analytics and Marketing, Alex Schultz, a longtime Facebook leader, who actually started on Chumaut's growth team, according to my notes here. And the Selective Disclosure Team went out.

Even the framing of that by Kevin is, you know, interesting. I do think that it would be great if all this information was public, but this isn't some big controversy here. Facebook skews older, Facebook skews Middle America, and Twitter and Instagram are more coastal elites, and obviously all the, you know, journalists are blue checkmarked on Twitter. So I'm sure the trending stories on Twitter are going to be a little bit more to the left on Facebook a little bit more to the right. So much to do about nothing in a way, but it does speak to

just how lost the New York Times is in their ability to be objective and just cover a story. This is why a lot of people feel the journalists at the New York Times shouldn't be on Twitter because it creates this murky relationship. What is going on here between Facebook and Twitter? And why should the journalist at the New York Times be essentially taunting Facebook by publishing this data day in and day out to try to make some sort of point here? And Brian Boland, who left the company in November of 2020, gave the following quotes. One of the main reasons that I left Facebook is that the most senior leadership in the company does not want to invest in understanding the impact of its core products. And it doesn't want to make the data available to others to do the hard work. and hold them accountable. It's a fair point. You know, if you're Facebook and you give out all this

information and it turns out the service is right-leaning and it's influencing elections, etc., it is going to be problematic. And just like on Twitter, it could be problematic if it's super left-leaning or, you know, when you remove Trump from either or both of those. This is a very weird thing for Kevin Ruse to do. And Ruse said about this every time I tweet when viral, I got grumpy calls from Facebook executives who were embarrassed by the disparity between what they thought Facebook was, a clean, well-lit public square where civility and tolerance rain and the image they saw reflected in the Twitter lists. In September 2020, the Economist published an article. Facebook offers a distorted view of American news where the economists

plotted charts comparing Facebook engagement to website views. And as you can see, Facebook engagement, it trends towards Bright Bart, Fox News. And if you look at the website page, it's a little more balanced. Now, you have to be careful when making inferences here. It could be that Bright Bart and Fox News are covering topics that CNN and MSNBC are not covering. So, if they were to cover stories about, I'm just going to pick an example here, Hunter Biden's artwork being sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars or whatever that story is, you might not actually see MSNBC and CNN covering those. Therefore, when Breitbart and Fox News do cover them, they get 100% of the attention from

them. And let's face it, Breitbart and Fox News are going to write even more sensationalistic headlines, I think, than CNN and MSNBC. Would we think that that's correct? Certainly with Breitbart. I think they're pretty far out there. So a few company quotes from Facebook executives discussing the article in an email thread, to the New York Times.

And this is a quote from the New York Times. John Pennett, Facebook's vice president of global communications, emailed a link to the article. This is the economist article I was just discussing, to a group of executives with the subject line, the trouble with crowd tangled, writing, the economist steps into the Kevin Ruse bandwagon. So here, I guess this thread, this email thread, it's not clear in the New York Times story, was obtained by Kevin Ruse and that they are talking about him framing a narrative with this Twitter handle, this, you know, antagonistic Twitter handle, putting these top trending

sources, which are obviously right-leaning, and saying that now it's influencing and spreading to the economist Nick Clegg of Facebook's Vice President of Global Affairs replied, our own tools are helping journals to consolidate the wrong narrative. Now, it's not clear the wrong narrative. The narrative that Facebook doesn't want out there or an inaccurate narrative. Fidji Simo, the head of Facebook's app at the time, just tapped to lead Instacart, wrote, I really worry that this could be one of the worst narratives for us. Okay, when several executives wanted to publish reach data

instead of engagement, crowd tangles, chief executive replied that crowd tangle, team had already tested a feature to do that and found problems with it. One issue was that false and misleading news stories also rose to the top of those lists, according to Ruse's reporting for the New York Times. So there's a difference between engagement and how many views people get to a story.

And this is, you know, in defense of Kevin Ruse and his kind of meta point or his agenda here. And, you know, listen, I don't think that a journalist at the New York Times should be doing this kind of agenda-based journalism. Maybe if it's on the editorial page. But the one point that is correct here is, sure, it leans right, but also that fake news, misleading news, link baity headlines, they're going to move up. And there's two types of traffic

we're talking about here. There's the raw views. How many people saw something, which is reach data? How many people did it reach? And then there's engagement. Now engagement could be shares, likes, hearts, replies,

depending on which platform you're on. So based on what I'm reading here, the crowd tangled data is based on engagement. But even if you were to use reach, which I guess Facebook executives were hoping was a little more balanced, it would still be problematic to them because fake news goes higher than real news. The new world of remote work is here to stay. So are all of the HR and IT headaches that come with it. Like how do you register your startup with dozens of state tax

agencies? Or how do you comply with all those different local labor laws? Rippling, which I use for my team at Inside, can answer those questions easily for you. They make it easy to manage both local and remote employees and contractors, whether they work from HQ or Timbuktu. When you hire in new states, Rippling can automatically register your startup with each state's tax agency and keep you compliant with local labor laws.

Rippling lets you onboard new hires in 90 seconds. You can instantly set up payroll, benefits, and apps like Slack and GitHub. And you can ship a work laptop with all the software and security they need. Inside loves Rippling because it takes, takes a lot of complexity off our plate so we can focus on more important stuff like sales and hiring and our key business. And now, thanks to Rippling's new PEO option, your employees

can likely access better Fortune 500 level benefits for less than other platforms. So here is your call to action. If you're looking for an easier way to run your startup remotely or just a better way to manage your HR&IT, visit rippling.com slash twist. That's RIP. P-P-L-I-N-G.com slash twist. So the White House is very frustrated with Facebook over-vaccine misinformation, claiming there are 12 sources who are responsible for most of this, and they want to take action against those 12 sources. So here is a one-minute and five-second clip from Jen Saki, and I'll comment on the other side.

So about, I think this was a question asked before, there's about 12 people who are producing 65% of anti-vaccine misinformation on social media platforms. All of them remain active on Facebook, despite some even being banned on other platforms, including Facebook ones that Facebook owns. Third, it's important to take faster action against harmful posts. As you all know, information travels quite quickly on social media platforms. Sometimes it's not accurate, and Facebook needs to move more quickly to remove harmful violative posts, posts that will be within their policies for removal often remain up for days. That's too long.

The information spreads too quickly. Finally, we have proposed they promote quality information sources in their feed algorithm. Facebook has repeatedly shown that they have the levers to promote quality information. We've seen them effectively do this in their algorithm over low quality information, and they've chosen not to use it in this case. And that's certainly an area that would have an impact. So these are certainly the proposals. We engage with them regularly.

certainly understand what our asks are. All right. So this is interesting without knowing exactly what the White House considers misinformation is talking about ivermectin and that Brett Weinstein discussion. Is that misinformation or is that two doctors and scientists with pretty great credentials talking about the possibility that this works? Or is this anti-vax or saying, you know, this is Bill Gates putting microchips in your body? It's incredibly hard. and we are sitting here with the opportunity to have four or five million people vaccinated per day in our amazing country, which is incredibly privileged to have access to unlimited access

to these vaccines where other countries are desperate to get them. And we are having states that are 40 or 50% vaxed and other ones that are 60 and other cities that are 70% vaccinated. And now we have the Delta variant spreading. We went down to 11, 12,000 cases. a day, 30 days ago. Now we're up at 36,000. We dropped down to a week or two ago, I think 150 people, the seven-day average for people dying from COVID, and now we're back up above, I think, 300. And so we're going to the second phase here and misinformation is a big part of it. You've got a full 36% of

Republicans who do not believe in getting the vaccine and say they never will and maybe some portion of them if they were forced to would. So this is an incredibly depressing victory that we could have had against COVID. And now because of the media, because of the libertarian nature of Americans generally and this crazy political battle where getting vaccinated is suddenly makes you a Democrat and not getting vaccinated, makes you a Republican when I thought it would be the opposite since Trump actually did this light speed program and took credit for it. And And obviously Trump and his kids are all vaccinated. So you would think that Republicans would follow them, but that's not what's happening, obviously.

So a complete disaster and social media, their responsibility in all of this is, and the media is paramount. And it's just very confounding how we're ever going to get this right in this country when we should all just be working together. Okay, in other news, Ron DeSantis, governor of Florida, suggests providing internet access to the people of Cuba. Yesterday on July 14th, DeSantis penned a letter to Joe Biden urging the Biden administration to provide internet access to the people of Cuba who are protesting, obviously, against their communist government. Here is his tweet. I urge President Biden to assist in providing internet access to the people of Cuba standing up against communist oppression and demanding a voice after decades of suffering under a cold dictatorship. which is really interesting because on July 11th, I was sitting at home thinking,

you know, people in Cuba do not have broadband access in a major way and they're obviously got their own type of firewall there and it's censored. I wonder, and I'd say here in my tweet, just three days earlier, and I don't know if he saw my tweet or just synchronicity, a lot of people will come to the same conclusion

at the same time, given the same set of facts. It's probably that more than anything. Cuba experts. I understand internet access is censored and expensive in the country, idea. Would the U.S. be beaming free internet into the country be disruptive, supportive of the people? I think it's certainly a possibility from air and water with various technologies just to thought. Obviously, Starlink exists. Obviously, we've had Loon and other, you know, balloons and low aircrafts could beam in and you could beam directly certain technologies. So as of right now, DeSantis is plus 400 to win the 2024 Republican primary, closely trailing Trump, who is plus 300, which is really interesting when you think about it.

Nicky Halley also and Mike Pence are listed in the odds, but that seems like a long shot. So some quotes from the letter, technology exists to provide internet access into Cuba remotely using the innovation of American enterprise and the diverse industries here. But it doesn't explain the specific technologies. I wonder which one would actually work the best

because some of the beaming technology would require you to have a special type of antenna on the other side, like WiMAX and those kind of technologies, I believe, which people are not going to have in their computers, or on their phones. But Wi-Fi is, so what you actually need to do is figure out a way to get Wi-Fi into the country, which has a certain distance. And here is the quote, similar to American efforts to broadcast radio into the Soviet Union during the Cold War in Europe. The federal government has a history of supporting the dissemination of information into Cuba for the Cuban people through radio

and television, through radio and television Marti, located in Miami. In addition to sending information, however, our efforts must include creating a means for the Cuban people to speak to the world. I think we do need, and somebody here can fact check me. What would email me, DM me on Twitter, I'm at Jason or Jason at calicannis.com. Tell me what would be the best way to do this. Is it, you know, low airplanes, beaming, Wi-Fi and how low would they have to be in terms of the balloons that Loon used or aircrafts? Or could it be done with boats? And I don't know how close we can get to the shores there. Obviously, if you could get Starlink satellites into the country, they could receive it that way,

but then that would require somebody to have hardware and become the Wi-Fi router there, which means that person, if they got caught, would be in big trouble, obviously. So it's a really interesting concept, but I don't know what technology actually does this. Antonio Garcia-Martinez said, now there's an interesting idea.

So I think morally and politically, great idea. I don't know the politics of Cuba, and I'm not a super expert on this, But I do think we should be embracing, you know, democracy anywhere there is communism and supporting the people in their fight for freedom. And if the Internet can help that, boy, is that going to be transformative? And I think the entire space race that we're seeing right now from SpaceX to Virgin Galactic and every other company, Blue Origin, getting to space, so many great reasons to do it.

But giving Internet low-cost broadband Internet, to the two or three billion people who don't have access to broadband today and to the billion or two billion that live in very rural areas, this is going to be a game changer. And it's really the whole space race is worth it just for that one potentiality.

Okay, another story came up today. A friend of the pod, Taylor Lorenz, who was on reported that Facebook plans to pay creators $1 billion to use its products. Really interesting. Facebook, four decades, has been very greedy, shared no money with any of the creators. And now what's happened is it's not just YouTube giving money to creators and influencers.

You have other platforms like Snapchat. It's spending a million dollars per day for the past five months to encourage creators to create on it. TikTok launched a $200 million creator fund. And YouTube recently announced it would pay $100 million to creators to use YouTube shorts. It's TikTok competitor. So creators are getting paid on. YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat, the only holdout has been the very greedy, selfish, non-sharing Facebook, and now they're changing that. I think Facebook realizes that creators are looking to make money

and they're going to move to the platforms that pay them the most. So with Facebook making 25 billion a quarter, 100 billion a year, giving 1% to creators, no big deal. If you look at YouTube, they give 55% of the advertising revenue on a video to creators. Now, that's not 100, it's not 55% of all of YouTube's revenue, because some of that is on other videos that maybe aren't sharing revenue. But it is a ton of money is being spent by the other platform. So Facebook is dipping their toes. Smart move.

I think it's going to work for them. People are on Instagram and they want to monetize their celebrity. And I think, you know, this is why. people have left Instagram to go to OnlyFans or Instagram to focus on YouTube or leaving Facebook and Instagram to focus on Snapchat or Substack or Patreon. And now you have Twitter embracing this with their newsletter and super likes and subscriptions. So this is great for content creators and Facebook is late to the party, which is not always the case for them. Interestingly, they're late to the party in sharing money. From websites and online stores to marketing tools and analytics, Squarespace is the all-in-one platform to build a beautiful online presence and run your business.

Blog or publish content, promote your business, announce upcoming events or special projects, and sell products and services of all kinds and more. They also have powerful e-commerce functionality and everything is optimized for mobile right out of the box. So no matter what you're using, an iPad, a surface, an iPhone, an Android phone, it doesn't matter. All these beautiful templates just work. And of course, it's got built in SEO, free and secure hosting, and 24-7 award-winning customer support. We did Remote Demo Day in 2020.

We were suffering through the pandemic. We were confused. How are these startups going to get funded? And I said, you know what? Throw up a Squarespace site. It's a project. Maybe it turns into a business. And boy, did it ever.

We have now funded over a dozen companies, over $14 million in funding. and this all from setting up a simple Squarespace website and reading it. So go to Squarespace.com slash twist for a free trial. Squarespace.com slash twist for a free trial. When you're ready to launch, use the offer code twist and save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. And congratulations for the team going public by direct listing on May 19th. What an amazing journey it's been.

Congratulations again. Okay, let's get back to this amazing episode. All right. U.S. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said, a Fed report on central bank digital currency CBDC would come in early September during a hearing on Wednesday before the U.S. House Committee of Financial Services. Most interestingly, to me and a lot of people who are in the audience here, in response to a question from Republican House member Patrick McHenry, Powell said, the report will outline the benefits and risks of CBDCs as well as cryptocurrencies and stablecoins more broadly. in the hearing, Powell said that stable coins need regulation if they are going to play a major part

within U.S. payment networks. Listen to this 60-second clip, and I'll talk to you on the other side. And so stablecoins certainly have some advantages in terms of a faster payment system and have some of the attributes of CBDC. But there are some risks with stable coins right now. Are there not? There are concerns you have about stable coins? Yeah, I think the issue, stable coins are a lot like money market funds or bank deposits or a narrow bank, depending on the terms of them, that kind of thing, but without the regulation. And I think we have a tradition in this country where, you know, where the public's money is held in what is supposed to be a very safe asset. We have a pretty strong regulatory framework around bank deposits, for example, or money market funds. That doesn't exist, really, for stable coins.

And if they're going to be a significant part of the payments universe, which we don't think crypto assets will be, but stable coins might be, then we need an appropriate regulatory framework, which frankly, we don't have. All right. So there you have it, folks. We've been talking about this tether investigation for a month now here on this podcast. And Jim Kramer's done two segments and Coffee Zill has done a segment. And the Financial Times has been talking about tether.

and they had their New York Attorney General settlement, and they've been banned from working with people residing in New York. Stablecoins are really becoming a risk factor here. And like the U.S. Federal Reserve Chair is saying here, people's money should be safe. And stable coins are supposed to be money. Therefore, it needs to be regulated. It needs to be safe.

And obviously, it is not. and that is why people are really concerned about what is happening with Tether. Also, Powell made an inflammatory comment that is making the rounds in the crypto community right now in which he was speaking about the arguments in favor of a U.S. CBDC, Central Bank Digital Currency. The people in crypto refer to this as Fedcoin, and here is his comment. You wouldn't need stable coins. You wouldn't need cryptocurrencies if you had a digital U.S. currency. I think that's one of the stronger arguments in its favor.

So there you have it, folks. You know, people in his position do not tip their cards inadvertently. They do everything in a very predictable, well-thought-out manner, 99.9% of the time. So there will be a central bank digital currency, and the U.S. believes that it will eliminate the need for cryptocurrency and for stablecoins. That is what the outcome will be for cryptocurrency and stable coins in my mind. And I've said this many times on the program, which then gets me attacked by Laser eyeed people who've, you know, created burner accounts in the last six months on Twitter,

where they will reply, have fun staying poor. Good luck with that. I'm still investing in startups. I think I'll be okay. But the point here is no government is going to give over their financial system to a bunch of randos globally anonymous accounts to a currency that is not in any way managed by a central authority. So what is the likely outcome here?

and we store it in China where they banned mining. Here in the United States, will they ban the mining of Bitcoin? No, I don't think so. But they could put a tax on cryptocurrencies. They could make regulations that holding it require certain conditions. We already have some of those like KYC and anti-money laundering, but the noose is going to tighten in the developed world. And then that's going to leave the people participating in crypto and stable coins

to either get legitimate and add a bunch of exceptions. expense and for the government to try to maintain control of their monetary supply. And I think this is all going to come to a quick resolution. It's been a decade of this. It's now hit scale. People are super concerned in our governments and governments around the world. And they're concerned really for two reasons. One, they don't want to see people get burned, but two, they don't want to lose power. So crypto people have it right. Fed coin and governments cracking down on crypto is because they want to maintain control. Do not be naive.

These governments are not going to give over their sovereignty as expressed through currency to just a random group of pirates on the internet who believe in, you know, a radical libertarian approach to freedom of currency and freedom from the money printing machine at the Fed. That doesn't mean they're right,

but that is just the right. reality. After we invited BitFinext on this week and startup episode one, two, four, three, Tether CTO, uh, tweeted the following. Then he goes like, I don't understand why they don't speak in my clown show. I think he's referring to me. So, Paolo, if you don't want to come on the pod, I understand. Um, I don't understand why you're capitalizing certain letters and leaving some lowercase. And you know my Twitter handle. It's at Jason. Easy to member, five characters. Um, you could have just,

that mentioned me. And, uh, he says, there are plenty of respectable shows where we are planning to discuss. Obviously, we're setting the bar a bit higher than his show. Stu and myself will happily discuss with more serious and professional hosts. And I responded. Oh, okay, so you're not coming on the show. Apparently setting the bar higher means they're going on shows that will give easier

interviews and great headlines. And here's the headline, Tethers, exciting future, an interview with Paulo, CTO, BitFenex on the Coin Republic. A very popular YouTube channel with 576 subscribers. Well done, Paolo. I'm glad that you set the bar so high for somebody with 500 subscribers to their YouTube channel. No offense to the Coin Republic.

I'm sure this is a YouTube channel with great potential. But you can tell from the title, Tether's exciting future. Either they, it's quite possible Tether paid for this interview or in some way is advertising on this person or they have a financial. interest in it, or it's just somebody who is giving them a really easy time, home crowd interview, if you will. It would be the equivalent of me interviewing the founder of one of the companies I invested in. So we continue to invite Tether to come on the program and Jeremy Allaire from their competitor circle, which does USDC, another stable coin, but that is regulated here in the

United States. He's coming on the program, and they just announced that they will be going public. I think we're going to see tethers involvement in crypto, deprecate over time, and they will only be able to operate in unregulated markets with, you know, people who maybe are of a certain profile who need a less regulated currency. In other words, you know, the people who want to be on the up and up and who want to be regulated will pick to use, maybe circle and I don't have any financial interest in it or a regulated coin, a regulated stable coin. And then I think what happens is over time, Tether is for only people who maybe need to be part of the underground and who don't want people to know what's going on with their tokens and how they're moving money around. So Facebook and Amazon are both seeking the recusal of Lena Khan.

this is kind of comical, but I mentioned previously that Amazon was seeking to have her recused because she had written about breaking up Amazon previously and she'd written about antitrust, which is her bona fides for the position as the head of the FTC. So now Facebook is joining this pile on in a formal petition to the FTC. Facebook said, and this is the quote, for the entirety of her professional career, Cher Khan has consistently and very publicly concluded that Facebook is guilty of violating the antitrust laws. When a new commissioner has already drawn factual and legal conclusions and deemed the target a lawbreaker due process requires that individual to recuse herself.

You know, I'm no lawyer, but I understand their point. But I disagree with it. I think that, you know, she has speculated on Amazon and Facebook and how to approach breaking them up and she was hired to do just that. Amazon on June 30th said something similar, given her long track record of detailed pronouncements about Amazon and her repeated proclamations that Amazon has violated the antitrust laws, a reasonable observer would conclude that she no longer can consider the company's

antitrust defenses with an open mind. Of course, again. Of course again. You haven't presented them to her yet. Present them to her and then we'll make that judgment if she is going to be able to take them your defense of your behaviors and she can take them reasonably. But this isn't surprising and I think it's kind of a hell merry pass. I think there's no way they recuse them. Twilio is the cloud communication platform used by Uber, Airbnb, Shopify, and many others.

Not that you need any more names. I mean, think about that Uber, Airbnb, Shopify. It's basically as good as it gets. You may have heard of them in the news back in November of 2020 when they announced their $3.2 billion acquisition of Segment, one of the world's leading customer data platforms. Everybody knows Segment if you're in the industry. Well, Twilio provides you the building blocks to add messaging, voice, and video in your web and mobile applications. They are rooted in startup culture and they are here to help you on that journey. Twilio gives you the power to build communication apps easily so you can spend more time focusing on account your customers. Engage and delight your users while scaling globally all for.

one API powered platform, from SMS to voice to WhatsApp to email, thanks to that SendGrid, acquisition, and founder CEO Jeff Lawson has been on this program multiple times. I think the last time was episode 967 back in 2019. Let's book them again. And here's what you're going to get from Twilio Startup Program. Access to webinars made exclusively for startups and full support via the Twilio Startups team. A $500 getting started credit and $3,000 in SendGrid credits. up now, Twilio Startups.com

slash twist. Twilio, T-W-I-L-I-O-Sartups.com slash twist. So go get the bag right now. $3,500 in credits are waiting there for you to just take them. Twilio startups.com slash twist. Okay, so finally, as we wrap up here, yesterday, Doge Coins, co-creator Jackson, Palmer posted a 10-tweet thread about why he's leaving crypto for good. Palmer was partners with programmer Billy Marcus, and they created Dogecoin in 2013. he donated all his coins subsequently,

and he said that he wanted Dogecoin to draw positive attention to cryptocurrency and to encourage innovation with the technology by making it accessible and appealing to users. But in 2015, Palmer announced that he would take an extended leave of absence from the cryptocurrency community,

calling the community toxic and criticizing it for being white male dominated and marred by buzzword-feld business idea. Some detractors argue that Palmer's anti-crypto because he has an ax to grind because he donated rolls Dogecoin in 2015. Just generally speaking, whenever you own some kind of currency or asset,

keep some idiot insurance, keep 20%, keep 10%. I've had this happen with companies where I sell my position. I always keep a little bit so I have some skin in the game in case it actually works out and you don't have to have these kind of regrets. But in 2018, Palmer said he had returned to the industry

to help educate friends and family members interested in investing in cryptocurrencies and Dogecoin is now valued at around $25 billion. I own some Doge mainly as a joke. But I mean, I think he does make some points here about how cryptocurrency, and I think a lot of the early people in crypto feel like it's been co-opted, and that the people in it are now kind of like the new old guard. Here's just quote directly from his tweet yesterday.

Cryptocurrency is like taking the worst parts of today's capitalist system, corruption, fraud, inequality, and using software to technically limit the use of interventions, audits, regulation, taxation, which serve as protections or safety nets, for the average person. Lose your savings account password, you're a fault.

Fall victim to a scam. You're a fault. Billionaires manipulating markets. Their geniuses is the type of dangerous, free-for-all capitalism. Cryptocurrency was unfortunately architected to facilitate since its inception. But these days, the most modest critique

of cryptocurrency will draw smears from the powerful figures in control of the industry and the ire of retail investors. They've sold on the false promise of one day being a fellow billionaire. Good faith debate is near impossible. brought that up over and over again. This is why I think Jackson has a very valid point. The crypto space has become super toxic. Anybody who questions anything is attacked with a flood

of spam accounts. And I, you've seen me on Twitter maybe take pictures of them and circle the date created. They've almost all been created from December of 2020 or sometime in 2020 till now. and people are creating just hundreds of accounts, maybe thousands, and then replying to any critique, have fun being poor, and attacking the people who make any valid criticism of crypto. This is when you know there's no objectivity and that it's starting to form into a toxic cult. And as we talked about, Bitcoin toxicity is a strategy by a small minority of Bitcoin holders,

but their concept is we must get everybody to adopt Bitcoin. Well, who else wants you to do that? Cults and multi-level marketing schemes. So this is kind of where the crypto industry is at this point in time. And I think it's great that he is questioning it. And I think we will see a new cryptocurrency, a third wave of cryptocurrency come out of this chaos and toxicity, which is a regulated version of crypto and more controls,

more standardization, it'll probably not swing as wildly, either up or down. And will Bitcoin play a part in Ethereum? Of course. I think those are really solid technological projects. Will tether be around? I have a feeling that's a house of cards. That's just a guess. I don't have the exact information on it. But I do think we'll see a lot of the bad actors be removed from the space when the economic incentive to 100 extra money or the ability to manipulate markets goes away. And so the news is tightening, the regulation is coming, and government-based competitors are coming. We're We always knew this would happen. And all that has to happen here is taxation comes.

And then the new people who will adopt cryptocurrency or the cryptocurrencies that are out there today is going to dry up. So if you start seeing people getting audited or being arrested for tax evasion or taxes being put onto crypto, maybe every time you buy a crypto, you pay a crypto tax of 10%. Something like that would make new people. and new entrants into crypto go away. And that's what crypto needs. Crypto needs that next group of cynically bagholders or, you know, adopters.

And I think that spicket of adopters, there's a chance it's turning off because it might be more trouble than it's worth. If people see this level of toxicity and they start seeing taxes and they start seeing regulations, I think we're going to see a major slowdown in crypto. Okay, that's our show for today and we'll see you all tomorrow. Bye-bye.