This Week in Startups - Student loan debate, Zuck copies BeReal, Twitter whistleblower + Blueprint Part 7 | E1543

Episode Date: August 25, 2022

First up, J+M break down the news, incl: Student loan forgiveness (2:30), Zuck copying BeReal (20:21), the Twitter whistleblower's allegations (36:32), and a climate company's Series A! (1:04:49) Then, Jason wraps the show with another edition of The Blueprint! (1:16:43) (0:00) J+M tee up today's segments! (2:30) Student loan forgiveness (16:37) Brave - Download today at https://brave.com/twist to browse faster, search privately and so much more (17:57) "Bailout culture" (20:21) Instagram copies popular social app BeReal (26:38) Harmonic - Get $4000 off at https://harmonic.ai/twist (27:59) Jason explains his "never trust Zuck" take origins, how Apple's approach differs from Meta (35:37) Visa - Learn more about Visa’s online Small Business Hub at Visa.com/smallbusinesshub (36:32) Twitter whistleblower implications, comparing it to last year's "Facebook Files" (1:04:49) Series A: Clarity (1:16:43) Blueprint Part 7: Should you take on student debt to go to college? Is it worth it? Follow Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis Follow Molly: https://twitter.com/mollywood Subscribe to our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkkhmBWfS7pILYIk0izkc3A?sub_confirmation=1

Hey, everybody, hey everybody. It's Wednesday. We made it to the halfway point. Got a big show for you today. I'm going to talk about a lot of topics. I'm going to go close to the third rail, but not grab it. Really, we're playing with fire in all kinds of ways today. For example, we're going to start off the top by talking about college debt forgiveness because we want to.

Yeah. And we have some feelings. And we actually came up with two or three really good ideas. Or I should say Molly came up with two or three good ideas. And then we're going to cover the most loathsome person in tech, Mark Zuckerberg, stealing from Be Real. Is anybody surprised? Is anybody disappointed? No. You know what you're getting into at Zuckerberg. He's just a thief. Speaking of the opposite of having good ideas, we are also going to cover the twiddle, the twiddle. We are also going to cover the Twitter whistleblower and compare it in

terms of impact to the Facebook files and Francis Howgan and just kind of start to maybe internalize the fact that social media is like a national security issue. Yeah, it's really dark. And this is a major breaking story. I think this will be for tech, the story of the year. I'm, I actually think that this is going to have downstream impacts that we are not anticipating. And then, we'll wrap the news with an awesome new series A climate company. Wet your beak. And then it is Wednesday. So Jason's going to wrap up the show with another edition of the blueprint getting tactical. Yes. And coincidentally, I'm talking about whether you should go into debt for coffee. And if so, under what circumstances, then how to actually do that?

What do you know? It's going to be a great show. Stick with us. This Week in Startups is brought to you by, Brave is an internet privacy company on a mission to protect your personal info online. Download Brave today at brave.com slash twist to browse faster, search privately, and so much more. All in a single click. Harmonic.

Need to speed up your growth without speeding up your burn? Harmonic gives investment, sourcing, and sales teams data superpowers. Learn how Andreessen Horowitz, Kraft, Notion, Brex, and many more source better leads and qualify them faster. Get $4,000 off at harmonic.AI slash twist and Visa. Are you a small business owner? Did you know that Visa's online small business hub has tools, discounts, and resources to help you run your business? Learn more at visa.com slash small business hub.

All right, everybody, it's Wednesday. Molly, we made it to the halfway mark. We're going to get this week done. We are going to get this week done, by God. We're going to do it together. I think the crypto roundtable yesterday was awesome. I love it. Those guys are so smart.

It's so interesting. Yeah, I mean, people are dunking on us. I went to the YouTube comments, which, you know, I'm really trying to build this YouTube community. So I ask now, Now, Rachel, you're going to get hazard pay for this. I may get you an express some machine for this. But Rachel, I want you hazard pay.

If this starts to become a hostile environment. Put on your hazmat suit. I got thoughts. With the TWA starts, I want you to look at the comments every morning for but 10 minutes, if possible. I want you to delete anything where they say, Molly is a Karen and then Jake Al's a fat bastard with a receding airline. Once you get through those, because that's about half the comments, once you get through those comments, that I want you to tell Molly and I all clear and then we'll come in.

This should not be a job. It should not be. Well, this is what Facebook people have to do. They literally go through the reporting stuff. Exactly. I mean, I remember years and years ago at seeing a bunch of us actually went, like there was this engagement effort

around YouTube comments, which at the time, I mean, forget it. Right. That was brutal. That's like what the Facebook moderators are doing now. Like the worst stuff you have ever seen. And we just straight up went to our boss and we're like, that's a hostile work environment. Like, you cannot tell us to be in

comments. It is up-halling. Isn't there something legal happening around Facebook moderators or YouTube moderators right now? I think the moderators all get traumatized. It's like being a detective and you're on like, God forbid, like the murder beat or kid murder beat. Yeah. Get insurance. They don't get covered. Which is total BS. It's just horrible. They're like, what's the worst job in the company? Yeah, let's outsource it to people getting paid 12 bucks an hour. And not take care of them when they get PTSD because they're, yeah. This is when you know how horrible Zuckerberg gets. as a human. Like, I literally have met Zuckerberg many times. I'm not saying this to be a jerk or

mean or dunk. And I don't want to create another Palmer lucky situation, but you can judge people by their behavior. I'm a fan of, like, looking at the behavior. I can tell you everything you need to know about Zuckerberg, just based on that. Zuckerberg is a horrible human being because he takes the worst job and he pays people horribly for it and then withholds benefits or does it with some outsource company, like own your own, if you created this detrius and this garbage in the world,

like own it. Just own it. And pay those people well. You know, I mean, come on. Imagine that the worst 10% of every post that you've ever seen.

Now imagine the 1% of that 10% and that's all you have to look at all day. That's like out of clockwork orange when they pin the guy's eyes open and they make them watch like horrible stuff that's happened in the world on video, like, it's going to burn your brain. You know, it's like seeing Game of Thrones.

I finished that first episode. You know, now I'm like, I'm not watching that show. I'm not watching that show. I mean, this is traumatized. I will say. I really felt traumatized after watching it. Exactly. I am not watching that.

And it's been really, anyway, that's a whole separate conversation that we could have with Law and tomorrow, actually. We should have a conversation. Let's pin this because it'd be real interesting to talk about the reaction to that episode online. Absolutely. Before we get into the news, this is his whole, brouhaha about student loans.

I'm curious your take on this. Is it a brouhaha? Is it a kerfuffle? A kerfuffle. It's a kerfuffle happening here. It's a Donny, a Donnybrook, if you will. Yeah, we'll talk a little bit of this on the blueprint later, but did you have student loans? Let me ask you a couple questions.

Did you have student loans? Yes, I did have student loans. Did you pay off your student loans? Eventually. Did it suck? Yep. Okay. Did you?

It ruined my credit. There was a restructuring plan. It was a whole long. It was a nice. It was a nightmare. It was a nightmare in my life for like 10, 15 years. Got it. It sucked, but you worked your way through it.

And you had a professional career, which allowed you to pay this down over some period of arduous time. This was tens of thousands of dollars in loans, I'm guessing. Low tens of thousands, 30, 40, 50, something in that range. Yep. We made like $5 too much to qualify for Pell Grants. So the grant, I mean, I'm interestingly, like, I'm watching this and being like, oh, you mean me.

Yeah. You literally mean like... So I had 10K. And we had no money and it was the only way I could go to school. And the student loan process, by the way, is super predatory and horrible. And the school treated us like crap the whole time because, you know, anyway, I have a lot of feelings. Well, this is what I'm getting at. Yeah.

That's why I'm teeing it up. Yep. So it's predatory. We know that. People have a hard time making these decisions. And school's just too damn expensive. Right. So then I look at, but then I'm looking at what Biden just suggested today, which is people making

$125k or up to $125k, $250k in your household can get $10K for free of their student loans. And I'm like, this seems profoundly unfair to me for the people for two reasons. Number one, there are people who didn't get to go to college. So as hard as it was for you, and it was moderately hard for me. It was hard for me during school because I basically tried to pay it down while I was in school and it was easy afterwards because I worked in IT, which happened to be the best career you could have in the 90s in terms of making money. Fixing laser printers, pretty good beat.

working for Mike Savino putting in networks. I mean, I instantly went to 50, 60 grand and yearly salary at the age of 22, you know, because I was an IT and I was good at it. Anyway, long story short, they want to give 10K to everybody. I know everybody loves free money, but I just thought, this seems profoundly unfair to me. What about the people who didn't go to college? They're not getting 10K. And then if you're making over 100K to get 10K, or 250K in household income, that seems like a pretty, it seems like you could afford it. So like, I don't know, I just felt like maybe if we're going to give this relief, maybe it has to be for people who are making under 75K

or under like half the amount or something. And then I thought, well, what about the people who paid it down, like I did and you did, who didn't get free 10K? And what about the people who didn't get to go to college? Wouldn't it be better to create a bunch of STEM, nursing, trade schools, and give that money there? So where do you fall in this argument?

Because I'm looking at both sides of it. I appreciate that it's predatory. I appreciate that it's overpriced. but then I'm kind of tipping over now to the side of this feels unfair as constructed. Where do you sit, Molly? I mean, honestly, like, one, I don't, I'm not going to compare my experience

to the experience of kids now because for as terrible, stressful, awful, and predatory as it all was, it's 10 times worse for people who are the age now that I was then. Like, college has gotten so much more expensive. The loans have gotten so much worse. You know, like,

if it were me, I would have loved to see the government say, we're going to forgive loans from schools that are, you know, known to be fraudulent for-profit schools. Gotcha. So the predatory ones that get you on those student low, like the GI Bill kind of schools. Yeah, like the ones that have now been found, like I think there's a lawsuit against DeBry and there was some other school and they're just like, these were fraudulent degrees, right? Like they did not have outcomes attached to them that were anywhere and that it came anywhere close to justifying the price. As far as I'm concerned, like, forgive those. I also would have

liked to see the government say any, like, you know, did you read that Ashley Babbitt? Like, this is a very loaded example to bring out, but that's the woman who got shot at the Capitol, right? Yes. Among other things in her life, she had student loans with interest rates of like 25 and 30 percent. What? Yep. So more than a credit card. Yeah. So there are people out here with loans at those rates. And that is a scam. And what I would have loved to see is for the government to say, you know what we're going to do? We're restructuring everybody's loan

to a government guaranteed loan at 3 to 4%. That's okay. I'm behind you on that. There's a perfect solution. A lovely solution. Lovely. However, also, I don't care. Great. Forgive the 10K. Who else gets bailed out in our economy?

I'm sorry, how much, how many billions of my tax pay dollars? The banks and the airlines. And they're just like canceling flights left and right and being like, There's got weather somewhere and it's straight and effective. So as far as I'm concerned, everyday people getting $10,000 of debt forgiven so that they can go on with their lives and contribute productively to the American economy. I don't need to sit here and be like, that's not fair. Like to me, that's just whiny. We're fine. Like, I'm fine. It is okay with me

if these people get a little bit of a break. It's $10,000. Give me a break. I don't care. Like they've been at the mercy of millions of crappy systems that people feel free to bail out all the time, let them have it. Is it buying votes? Yes. Is it buying votes in a grosser way than the tax cut for the rich that the Trump administration puts through? Absolutely not. And cheaper. Much cheaper. The federal deficit this year is going to be the lowest it's been in like over a decade. Like literally they were like, oh, it's going to be the lowest it's been in like 10 years. What is the 10K? This news just came out. And that tax cut like us hundreds of billions of dollars in the country.

I like your, I like your, I like your position. How much, this 10K, I wonder what's the upper bound of this. It's going to be a million people are going to go for this. Five million. It's going to be 10 billion, 50 billion. I wonder what the number is. Yeah. I don't care.

I really love your suggestion of restructuring it. That's what I think we should have done. We should have just restructured that. That would be so much better. Because then it feels more fair, right? So that addresses my issue of fairness. Yeah. And it's like, okay, well, so now the government is paying the loan.

off to the predatory person. They get their money. They eliminate the 25, right, because they're predators. Well, you can't. I mean, people sign, that would be like... Maybe they get paid off minus the interest. Now, they get paid the balance of the loan minus the interest, the predatory lenders. They don't get the interest going forward.

Yeah. So, yes, because you don't want to use the government to interfere with a valid contract. Even if it was a predatory contract, I guess it's valid. You have to go to court for that. We don't want to live in a authoritarian society where they just wave a magic wand and just overturn business stuff. Maybe they get paid back. So they get paid back. I think you really do have to look at the larger benefits of this.

Like we're looking at the fact that, let's say, the housing market is about to tank. And people who are saddled with these huge debt payments can't buy houses, right? There's always going to be, everybody always wants to focus, I think, on the tiny number, the outlier number where it's not fair, where it's like, you're fine and you haven't been paying because you've been waiting for the government to forgive it. Fine. There is always going to be some percentage of stuff you wish wasn't happening. But for the majority of people in these situations, it's going to allow them to put that money back into the economy. And if we're going to a recession, that's great. It might allow them to buy a house and build wealth.

And that's great. Right. Like the broader benefit of this to society, in my opinion, more than outweighs the little niggling concern that somebody might be getting away with something. I like the idea of making it your process or for people who went. I like all three of your suggestions. Number one, if we've identified a predatory school, and just to confirm, because we never want to slander people here who don't deserve it, in 2016, DeVry agreed to pay $100 million to settle a federal trade commission lawsuit over its misleading claims about its graduates' careers and earnings. So when we are saying DeVry is a scam. I mean, I'm not making that up.

That's like. We're not saying DeVry. is a scam. DeVry's saying it's a scam by paying $100 million settlement. You don't pay $100 million settlement in my estimation to the Federal Trade Commission over a lawsuit unless you're guilty as heck. That's a big speeding ticket. It's a big deal. Yeah. It's a big deal. So I think we I agree with you. You start with the DeVries. Then you let everybody digest that. Then you say, okay, predatory loans. Now we have the second program. You let everybody digest that. And then you just see how that goes. I think that would be a much better way to communicate this. All right,

I think we beat this horse. Yeah. I just want to. to bring it up because I like the fact that we have a daily show and have a little banter about something that's in the news. That's not exactly tech, but that relates to life. And we're reading all of it. It's not like we can sit here and pretend that it's not, you know, we aren't just like, it's not like we only care about tech. I am a news junkie. Like, I'm reading it all. I'm taking it in. I was reading Krugman all morning on why it's not going to affect the news. Club it in on a Wednesday. We get to have our stuff here. We don't have to stick to the tech. We can, we can, we can expand the mandate. This is really interesting

your conversation and I really definitely wish that there had been a slightly more creative solution that said like, I'm fine with it. This is not going to break us. I'm like, please stop dropping money from the sky because we're trying to fight the inflation at the same time. The other thing that is making me concerned, this is my other concern is we're starting to train everybody in this country that there's always a bailout, whether you're an airline, a bank, student loan, whatever. There's always a bailout. And then everybody now, I feel, is like, well, they got a bail out. Where's my bail out? Oh, they got a bail out. The farmers got a bail out. Where's my ballot? Who and what average American feels like they get bailed out by anything ever?

That is exactly why we have a popular. You know why we have a populace revolt on our hands? Because Americans are looking around and being like, you know who gets bailed out? Banks and airlines and rich guys and Adam Neumann. He's going to walk away with a billion dollars. Right. The city's the other rich guys, Molly. But you, there is no universe in which, like, the people who voted for Trump and the people who were going to vote for Bernie are the same people. And what they are is pissed off because they never get any help, ever. Well, I think that's, you know, that Ashley Babbitt is like a, I mean, I know it's anecdotal.

But I do think there are people who feel societies rigged against them. Yes. And then once you feel society's rigged against you and you're not part of it, well, then like Q&ON becomes like, okay, well, there's something over here for me. Right. It's like somebody who's like, well, I'm not into this religion, but I met somebody who's got this new religion or this cult. Maybe I'll just be part of that, you know? And like, we want them to feel part of America. All right, everybody, listen, I love Brave.

I've been using Brave for the last couple of months, and it is so much faster that any browser have ever used. And it doesn't have all of those ads and trackers and creepy stuff happening on my computer. They really have three core products built into Brave. the core browser, which is tight, and it has all these great extensions that just were. They have the search engine, and they have a browser native crypto wallet. Braves browser has over 60 million users already and thousands of daily downloads. Plus, all of this is built on Chromium, which is the open source Chrome project. So you're going to feel pretty familiar with it.

All your extensions from Chrome are going to work. But here's the best part. They're going to work like two or three times faster than in Chrome, because they're not going to bog you down with all those ads. And I tell you something, the Chrome extensions are some of the worst offenders in terms of adding a bunch of trackers. You can import your bookmarks, your passwords and settings from Chrome or any other browsers in just one click. So you're going to be off to the races day one. And it doesn't track your website visits, your searches or your clicks. Producer Nick uses it and he loves it.

Rachel uses it. We all love having a browser that's fast. It's truly private and independent. Their search engine is independent. So download Brave today. Brave.com slash twist to browse faster, search privately and so much more. All in a single click. I guarantee you, you, you'll are going to love it. Brave.com slash twist. I just want everybody to stop with the bailouts. And the bailouts that should stop first is things like the airlines. It's so ridiculous that the airlines keep getting bailed out for doing a horrible job. Now, this is like a business topic. In startups, we have amazing founders who we watch not clear market and then have to struggle, make cuts, take no salary. They have to take all this medicine to try to make their

company survive, and most times they don't. And then they got to start over. They get their asses kick. They might have personal debt. They missed an opportunity to go work at Uber or Google and get all these RSUs, whatever. And then, like, you're some rich dudes running airlines. You do a terrible job. You teach your customers like, and you get bailed out.

And it's like, come on. So like, honestly, let them fail so we can then invest in airlines. I'd love to invest in airline. I can't. That would be great. You keep bailing out the dips. Who ran them into the ground. And given all that, I am sorry if I do not have the moral outrage about everyday people paying, you know, whatever they're paying for groceries, not being able to quit their jobs and start businesses because they can't afford their own health care.

Like having, you know, having Black Rock buy up most of the houses on the block so they can't afford them. Like, I don't. And then Atherton doesn't let you build. The rich people in Atherton don't let you build town homes. But so then seriously, we're going to sit here and be like, it's not fair that you've got $10,000 for giving me a break. All right. Listen, you're making me swing from my moderate center to the left now and then I'm going to be swinging to the right. I'm just trying to be moderate center. This is moderate center.

Like, give me, like, let all Americans live a better way. I like our punchups. I like our punchups. I like our punchups. You know what the thing is? I'm always looking for the creative, thoughtful, experience. experiment of moving forward. It's true.

I mean, they should have called us. They should have called us. We would have told them it's, if you just say the loan's not forgiven, it's restructured, people would be like, oh, okay, restructuring it?

Yeah, okay, it costs us $1,000 per loan to restructure them, and people can extend their loans from 10 years to 30 and from 25% to 2%. Great, we have money in the treasury. Who cares?

Everybody gets their money back. Maybe I should have tweeted that. That would have fixed. Yes. Everything. I mean, at POTUS, at POTUS, goes to the

president apparently. Yeah, you're outputist. But speaking of Zuckerberg being a terrible human who... Yes, as we were. As we were. Please don't. I don't want Pomerlucky and Zuckerberg. Stop saying it.

I don't mean he's a terrible human. I mean, it's like a terrible human decision to make to force other humans to watch traumatizing stuff and pay them poorly while you are wake poor. I don't want to make it personal. But... Don't you, though? But like maybe a little bit... Okay, it was only a matter of time.

Okay. So you know how like something cool came into the world in the social media space? Yeah. Yeah. Everybody's been talking about Be Real. It's so fun. You just take the one picture a day. All the kids are using it.

It's amazing. What an innovation. We really should have set a clock. Our only mistake on this show is that we did not set a countdown timer to when Instagram or Facebook would stone cold rip off Be Real. Okay. We started talking about Be Real in 2020. 21, over a year ago, and it launched in late 2019. So let's just set, Be Real becomes real and hits some sort of critical mass in 2021.

Let's say 18 months ago. It became real. Be Real became a real phenomenon 18 months ago. So the clock started 18 months ago. What happened? What has happened is that evidently a developer who reverse engineers apps to find early versions of upcoming updates, discovered that it appears that Instagram is working on what they are calling an internal prototype

of something that they're calling Candid Challenges, a feature inspired by Be Real. Those who participate in Candid Challenges will see notifications pop up randomly throughout the day, asking the user to take a photo of their surroundings through the app, which captures both the front camera and back camera view simultaneously. Amazing. Which is, for those who have not used it yet, exactly what BeReal does. To the letter.

The only difference is that the feature lets users then share the content to their Instagram story rather than to a specialized feed that users can't see unless they post their own Be Real for the day. Isn't, don't you think that at this point, like being an engineer, at Meta, who's not on the Oculus team, right? This is why I really likes working on the meta side, the Metaverse side, is like the crappiest job in the world, because you might have your own ideas. You might be thinking like, oh, I suggested these five features that I think would be really cool. Here's some cool creative stuff we could do at Instagram.

And then they come along, they're like, no, no, no, we're just going to need you to copy, be real. This is why Kevin Sistram left because he felt like Zuckerberg was just using Instagram, which had all kinds of creative innovations. And then he told the team over there, you know what, your innovations are not as important as stealing Evan Spiegel's. And Zuckerberg's greatest skill is his absolute amoral approach to stealing other people's innovations and not caring what anybody thinks about him. This is why I think he's the worst actor in tech. This is why I think he's terrible

for the industry. He brings a lot of heat on the industry. Because if you think about antitrust, like he's he's the guy who bought these two things he's the guy who steals everybody's ideas and it just feels lame anti-competitive and it's an insult to anybody who works for Zuckerberg that he believes the people he hires and makes into millionaires and billionaires are too stupid to come up with their own ideas yeah it's so cutthroat it's so petty it's so lame that i think anybody who goes to work for Zuckerberg should think to themselves am I this petty, lame, and do I have no creative ideas? By working for Zuckerberg, you're saying, Molly, I have no original ideas, I am a drone,

I am a Borg. If you don't know the Star Trek, you know, that was like probably the best of the next generation was the Borg episodes. Resistance is futile. Look it up. Resistance is futile. And Zuckerberg is the Borg. We used to make pictures of him and spread them on the Internet, like Zuckerberg Borg.

for a reason. Yeah. And going to work for Zuckerberg is a moral failing. It's an ethical moral failing for anybody who has any bit of creativity or soul. It's soul-crushing to work for him. That's why the people who work for him or he made billionaires or who are on his early team are not friends with him anymore. They're just, they don't, he doesn't maintain friendships with these people.

He doesn't have the people from WhatsApp and Kevin Sistram and all those people from Instagram. They hate him. They don't. They're not indifferent about Zuckerberg. They literally hate him. Wow. Because he just tells them your ideas are bad.

You need to go and just copy Zuckerberg, Evan Spiegel's ideas, Be Real, whatever comes out in the world. And not only that. Tinder, Snapchat, Twitch, 4Square, Reddit, Periscope, Fortnite, eBay, Signal, be real. And he just says, do it for the next five or ten years because you're not going to get it right every time. It may take two or three times to stick. So he did poke as an app. He did like three or four versions of Snapchat till he kind of got the, um, whatever that format is, stories to work, right?

He got stories to stick. And then he did it to TikTok. So I don't want to make this like a whole. I mean, it's almost a joke at this point. Like it's almost a joke. It's just like, really? Like I just can't imagine. I mean, I guess it'll work until it doesn't work anymore, right?

It works. It'll work. I mean, until people don't work. And until people catch on and stop using it, that'll be something. thing, but it is, it is gross. And what it, what it leads to is people rooting for Facebook to fail, right? Like, you start rooting for Zuck to fail. Like, you're just like, I cannot wait to be here on that day. Right. Like, I would love to see him fail because he's a thief. And so when Congress comes Colin or whoever else comes calling, like, there aren't going to be defenders. Nor should there be.

Nor should there be. I mean, if you act this amoral and unethically, like, let's just call it what it is. It's lame. It's gross. Okay, everybody, I want to tell you, about an amazing new database. I am using at Launch and at Inside to find more companies to invest in in and to find more advertisers for this week in startups and for Inside.com.

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Great job to the harmonic team. It's a beautiful product, by the way. Never trust Zuck. This is why when people, there's a famous clip of me that went viral where I said, they are, Zuckerberg said, hey, I'll meet with any. anybody from White Comedy will do partnerships. I said, this is the craziest thing in the world. I said on this podcast, like in the first year of the pod, never trust Zuck. If you meet with Zuck as a startup, you're very foolish because he's going to steal your ideas. That's all he ever does.

So just don't trust him. And he's not a good partner to anybody. There is not one company out there that has a vibrant partnership with Facebook. Now, you look at Google, there are countless YouTubers who sing YouTube's praises. There are countless people who use Google's ad network on their websites, AdSense, whatever, who love it. There are countless partners using Twitch, you know, or the app stores in Google and Apple, who say, oh my God,

what a gift it is to have this amazing iOS platform, Android platform for me to push my, you know. There are plenty of developers who find Apple, plenty abusive, I will say, but compared to Zuck? But not compared to this, no, not compared to like, you will, right, exactly, you share zero dollars, you will

like steal my idea and heartbeat. I mean, it's just, it's gross. It's gross. It's gross. Like, it's gross. And to see it be so, like, it's not illegal, but to see it be so blatant to see Be Real hit number one on the app store. And then all of a sudden they're testing the exact same thing. It's just like, my God.

It's disgusting. I think just anybody who uses the Facebook apps. Just sad. Just anybody who, you know, finds us offensive, just use the hashtag never trust Zuck. Yeah. Never trust that. And I think that's how the industry should look at it. Don't switch.

It's just gross. It's so gross. gross and this to-do list is hilarious. If you haven't seen it, I think you just read this off. I did, and it's amazing. Just if you're watching live on the video on Spotify, shout out to Spotify video, shout out to YouTube.com slash this weekend. And of course, another podcast place you can search for this week in Startup's video.

But I can pull up the to-do list here, Nick. This is hilarious. Snapchat. Facebook. Workplace by Facebook. Slack. I forgot about that. Workplace by Facebook.

That happened. Yeah. Tinder is Facebook dating. Four Square. Facebook places. Just don't work there. This is my message to everybody. If you want to copy pasta for $500,000 a year, I guess I can't blame you.

But like, I don't want to call a cultural appropriation, but it's creative appropriation. You know, it's like you're just taking creatives in the world and you're just stealing from them. And like, if I put my head down at night, I would be like, can I work there? I be like, what am I doing with my life? It's not improvement, right? Like, we know, we all know that this is what Apple did and has done for years. And Steve Jobs was very famous for saying, like, great artist steel. Like, they would wait for something to get cool in the market, improve upon it, and release it.

Massively improved. Reinvented. And then be like, we invented it, right? Like, they would always take credit for like, oh, what, this is crazy. We would put a camera on the back of the phone. It was like, come on, like these, you know, cheap. But they would improve it. Massively.

Sometimes massively. I mean, consumers would adore. compared to like the MP3 players before it was like the iPad compared to Tab was before. But I mean like when they announced photo messaging and like multimedia messaging had already existed for like a year. You know, I'm just saying there were times when it was like, okay, come on. But what they would, but there was a difference between sort of like proving it in the marketplace and then releasing it at a time that it was ready for consumers with improvements that range from incremental to massive. Yeah. And just like, we're going to steal a shit.

I think it's distinctly different how Apple is. deal. So if you look at Apple, you go down, I'll give an example. Heart rate, right? Like, I'm trying to figure out my heart rate and sleep. The heart rate and the sleep app that comes with Apple is purposefully basic. Yeah. If you want really good heart rate data, if you want really good fitness apps or sleep apps, you go to the app store and you find them. And Apple, in fact, celebrates those app developers, writes articles about them. and points you to... Share's revenue with them.

And they're like, you know what? We'll take 30% for the first year, 15% for subscriptions to the second year. And it's better that we have a thousand flowers bloom in each category than us just still. They have the resources to just buy the top three apps

and make them the Apple Sleep app, right? They don't do that on purpose. And when they do add something to iMessage, like ephemeral messages they added at some point we could disappear the messages or something. It might be like five or ten years after the ecosystem has been able to, you know,

create value from them and they've been commoditized. It would, that would be the example I would choose. And nobody's using the Notes app as but one example over Microsoft Word or Google Docs. Like the Notes app is very basic, right? Like it doesn't let you do multiplayer mode. It sinks, but, you know, not very well. So I think they kind of, I think they ankle their own stuff purposefully to let other people excel. And I think that's the difference.

What's that? Or not get sued. But they understand. But I think you're 100% right. And I don't think it's purely altruistic. It's because it creates a really vibrant ecosystem that benefits Apple, right? So if you want to build, I mean, it's like Balmer, developers, developers, developers. If you want your apps on iOS and everybody does, it's because you get the best rev share in town, even though you give Apple 30%.

And then Apple's like, we get 30% by not killing all of you. off. And there's no, and so what is fatally flawed about the Facebook model compared to what you just described about the Apple model, which I think is 100% true, is that Apple ends up with a vibrant ecosystem that makes it money a lot of different ways. Facebook ends up with everything inside and the inability to focus on anything. So it's like they're trying to, you know, have these Swiss Army knife apps and like copy Be Real and copy dating and copy this and copy that. And like only a few of them are going to hit and they're going to be pulled in lots of different directions and you're going to start to have people who just only want to work on the Metaverse team because it's not fun to copy

other people's apps. And you have no friends or advocates in the world. Like everybody hates Zuckerberg and Facebook. It's the most loathsome company. Not just in tech. I think it's kind of like, if you were to like tell me, which do you think is doing more damage to Cy right now BP oil with their spills and everything or Facebook? I go Facebook. Yeah. And I think the Facebook corporation is causing more human suffering than deep oil. I know it's crazy and I know you got a thing about the climate. I know that's kind of like, I know I'm like, whoa. I kind of know that's in your wheelhouse, so I don't want to do any triggering here, Molly, but.

I don't want you to have to agree with me, but. You know there's climate situations and it kill like hundreds of millions of people. I know it's very real. I know it's very real. I be reeled myself in front of like a bunch of smokestacks just the other day. Just like, this is terrible. I'm going to be real it. That's going to solve the problem.

Anyway, by the way, there's a... Sorry, the part of the country, don't get me wrong, but like... There is a... There is a petition to keep the Diablo nuclear reactor up and running here in California, so if you are... I think they decided to. Yeah, but maybe for like two years or something, it's like, it got like a stay. It's kind of like somebody on death row gets like a two-year stay while we...

So go ahead and type in Diablo into Google Diablo reactor petition and sign that. so that we get moving here. And other countries get it, like Japan is doing more nuclear. Yeah, there's no universe where we can't have nuclear. Are you a small business owner? Did you know that Visa's online small business hub has tools, discounts, and resources to help you run your business? So whether you're a business beginner or an entrepreneurial expert, find the solutions,

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A Network Working for Everyone. Okay, I think the next big story everybody wants us to talk about is in related social news is there was a whistleblower who worked at Twitter. Now, it just ground rules here. Right. If there's any other corporate... Mayday. Yeah, if there's any other corporate news around Twitter, I can't talk about it.

So if you were to Google Calicanus Twitter, like maybe there would be some news stories that would tee you off to probably good idea for me not to talk about any deals that Twitter is pursuing. I tried. But I can talk about the whistleblower. Sure, it's new so I can talk

about the whistleblower and what I think about that. All right. Here's what happened. Twitter's former security chief, Peter Zatko, better known as Mudge, came forward at this exact time in history.

Great. And said that Twitter misled regulators about its security risks. That's actually, I think, the most explosive part of this. There's a lot about the fake accounts and the complaint adds that the platform policy toward fake accounts incentivized, quote, deliberate ignorance by undercounting spam accounts and giving bonuses to execs for increasing users, but not binding bots. Also, and this is a pretty big deal because Twitter, I think, is under

some kind of a consent decree related to how it protects user data. The whistleblower complaint said that Twitter executives ignored multiple security vulnerabilities, including failing to follow basic conventions like safeguarding staff access to the core software, promptly deleting closed accounts and updating security software on company laptops and servers. He served his head of security until January of this year. He left about eight months ago. Apparently, when he was hired, I mean, there's been this kind of like equal and opposite response to this people saying, like, listen, when Jack Dorsey hired him, we were all like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, what? because he's a character in his own right and was reportedly, at least Twitter has responded

and effectively said he was fired for like poor leadership and all kinds of other scenarios. He's absurdly well respected in technology. As a hacker. I don't know. Absurdily well. I mean, he has found some of the, you know, biggest exploits and hacks. He is, you know, top 1% of 1% of respected in computer security.

That's why you would hire him as your head of security. but that doesn't make a good manager or not a jerk, I think is what people then came out and said later. Like, people were like, there were quotes from people saying he's a really vengeful jerk, which is about, which is relevant here. Yeah, I mean, those are words. I think if you look at that, no, it's words by people who. I'm just saying that was the response. I'm not, again, this is not my opinion. That is no, I.

Absolutely. And what I would say is those are words by people who this person is whistleblowing, who are culprud. who are culpable if this stuff is true. So, you know, of course they're going to throw him under the bus and try to discredit him. I'm just saying if this was the week before this leak and you asked 100 people who know who this person is, 100 would say this is one of the most credible people

in security technology. And the only people who would say he's not credible in security technology would be people today who are on the other side of the whistleblowing complaint. Probably fair. To be fair, I don't think any of them are saying he's not credible in technology. No, they might not like him.

He might not be likable, but like, I don't know, we're likable. They're saying he has. This is what they do with every whistleblower. It's exactly. It's just like with every whistleblower and every witness, right? It's like, why is he doing this? Is he doing it because he has an axe to grind? Is he doing it because he's an Elon fanboy?

Like, what is the motivation. That is what people, that's why people are bringing up this question of sort of like character and prior behavior. Again, I don't know him. I did before anybody asks me. Yeah, yeah. Being a whistleblower, I'll just say, he's an incredibly brave, treacherous, and perhaps even like zero-sum thing to do in life. Like the woman, her name will come to me with Instagram, Francis Hogan. Francis Hogan, thank you.

Francis Hogan. Like, did this help her career or would she have been better off taking the bag from Facebook and the next company and the next company that hires her for? a million dollars in stock options a year to just be part of the machine, right? Like, once she does the whistleblowing, like maybe she gets a book deal, but she's not employable by Big Tech after that. Yeah.

He whistleblows, he's not employable by Big Tech after this, I don't think. I mean, maybe there's like select people, like maybe a security company would hire either of them, maybe. But I do think this is like, it's kind of like killing your career in many ways to be a whistleblower. Mm-hmm.

Yeah, I don't know. It's a, it's a, it's a complicated situation. But you also claim that foreign agents worked for Twitter and had access to user information, which we know that there were Saturdays that actually happened, yeah. That actually happened.

So this is the, there's two parts of this that are super explosive. Yes. There is the incentive structure, I think, is really crazy that they were, that the incentive structure was to downplay the bots. And then the second thing is,

oh my god like if they're given if everybody has access to people's DMs or access to everybody's accounts and foreign actors do like that's pretty serious stuff yes especially since again they had already been under scrutiny by federal regulators regulators for how they protected yeah there was a big hack remember like the president's count CNN's account mm-hmm like a lot of people's major accounts and then you think about the damage this is why the FTC was upset I think what if somebody gets into the president's account or CNN's account and they say, a bomb just went off. Well, that's exactly what happened. Somebody had tweeted there was like a bomb had gone off on CNN, maybe it was a CNN account or something. So these kids who hacked the place who got in just

through some, you know, dopey Twitter employee let them in basically somehow, they had, there have been instances where people hacked accounts and then said something that could send the world spiraling. So this is the danger. It's like, if these are, if this is the official communication platform for important people in the world, like heads of state, FBI, CIA, you know, they use the FBI uses this platform. Who don't want to get hacked, yeah. And, you know, let alone, you know, CEOs and venture capitalists and everyday civilians, like, yeah, the damage that can be closed.

I mean, you could cause, right, exactly. Like, considering the reach that that major public figures have on this platform, it's terrifying to think that they had lacked security around user accounts. And I will say that this news broke yesterday, and since then, Twitter has already made a huge change to its organization. They're merging the Health Experience team, which is in charge of clamping down, this is according to Engadget, which is in charge of clamping down on misinformation and harmful content with its service team. And the service team is in charge of reviewing profiles when they're reported and taking down spam accounts. So this new combined group will be called health products and services.

maybe this was already in the works, but the timing there is certainly interesting too. And it sounds like there was an internal memo sent saying, you need to, quote, ruthlessly prioritize this fake account and also security part of these two jobs. Putting aside any corporate stuff going on with the company, the fact that this high of a person leaked, Like Francis Howgan, all due respect, was a researcher at Facebook.

Wasn't in the board meetings. This individual was in the board meetings talking to the board about the spam and security issues. Like, this is a top five employee. Yeah. This is like big time whistleblower. He sent all of these reports. The other thing that's crazy is he sent all this information to the SEC. that's one set of huge problems

like crazy lawsuits for the next five years on who knew what on the board and what did you tell the public and did they trade on that information oh my lord that is like one level of headache okay he also sent it to the FTC which you're under investigation by

or under that that legal consent decree consent decree thank consent degrees happen decree decrees happen when people have messed up big time

and they're kind of on probation. Consider that like corporate probation. And then they also sent it to the Department of Justice. And now everybody on Capitol has this and the Senate Intelligence Committee has it.

Like this is going to have reverberations that are well beyond anything we've seen in tech. Like this is a level of bomb. a nuke that is different than Francis Howgan saying like, hey, these guys knew this was bad. That was a big deal.

I'm saying it, that was a big deal, but this is like the next, this is 10x that. I mean, that was like, okay, they knew that this is bad for- You think this really is? Well, no, come on. I'm just saying that the, there's no SEC investigation over the Francis Hogan leaks. What there's going to be is like a bunch of,

like, what is the ramification of that? Okay, we know Facebook's more low-s, Here you have SEC, like, could be criminal complaints if they didn't disclose this information to shareholders. Like, that's serious stuff. And if they were giving access to spies or otherwise letting dangerous people into the keys of the kingdom, like, I think this kind of gets into like criminal stuff that, you know, or, you know, charges that could mean people are losing their jobs. Did anybody lose their job on the Facebook thing? was there any fallout from the Francis Howgan leaks? I don't know.

I mean, I'm pretty sure that's why that antitrust bill exists. Sure. Like it's a backstop. Right. Like if we see massive changes to tech regulation, it will be because of the, like, I would just, I would say let's like dial it back a little bit. These are explosive claims that will be investigated. I think it is clear that a person who probably should worry about his legacy over time is

Jack Dorsey. Because most of what is being alleged here did occur under his watch, right? It was when he left right around the time Paragagrawal came along that Mudge got fired, and it's possible that it was related to some of the failure to implement some of the things he is now saying should have been implemented. I don't really know. But I think, like, there's no doubt that we're seeing, it's becoming more and more clear the degree to which Twitter has been mismanaged for a very long time. Absolutely. And that's a valid criticism of Japanese.

We have social platforms, as one of our Nodies is pointing out, that we're at the point where social platforms represent national security issues. That's the key. And also tear down society from the inside. There you go. And that like that is probably the thing we may have to reckon with, right, above everything else. But yes, as Nick points out, maybe the answer is you shouldn't have a half-time CEO for a platform

with 200 million plus people. Well, you know, there was some willful refusal to deal with this there. Senator Chuck Grassley, he gave some statements to CNN. Quote, take a tech platform that collects massive amounts of user data, combine it with what appears to be an incredibly weak security infrastructure, infuse it with foreign state actors with an agenda, and you've got a recipe for disaster. The claims I've received from a Twitter whisperer was a serious national security concerns

as well as privacy issues and then must be investigated further. And so that's the piece that I think is the new thing here, national security issues, right? whatever has happened before this, I don't think it's tipped into like, oh, this is a national security. Certainly the TikTok thing, which I've talked about here, until I'm blue in the face and nobody seems to care. Again, I'm not trying to like belabor the comparison, but I do think it's notable that, like, for example, Facebook allowed the January 6th insurrection to be planned on its platform. That's also a national security issue. There's like a whole bunch of layers here. I'm not trying to keep pushing back on you. I'm just saying, like, let's not.

Maybe the one is unrelated to the other. I would even push back. I wouldn't say it's pushback. I would say it's furthering the discussion. Right. Furthering the discussion. Exactly. Like these platforms have, right, totally.

That's the larger point. These platforms have a massive impact. We're totally not ready still to reckon with. You know, we've never had the ability for everybody in the country to be captured and programmed and manipulated to this extent, this quick. this easily. And that's where the hacking comes in, or just willful mismanagement in order to get your bonuses. Like, there's like so many vectors here. And you have to shut off those vectors. So the board, if the board was compensating the management team and aligning their interests with growth, yes, but not with security and not with safety, the board is culpable for that. The management team then is going to say,

well, the board told us we have to get mouse or monthly DAOs up or whatever this is. And so, you know, yeah, we did the bots thing, but that wasn't the primary focus. Focus number one was increased user base. Focus two was, you know, to get revenue up and Focus three was the bots, whatever. Right. You know, this speaks to prioritization and incentive. And that's the problem is like the incentive is completely misaligned here. Exactly.

The incentive should have been, we want to have no bots and have real names, full stop, you know? And actually, what you just said, too, is almost word for word what Francis Hogan said was happening at Facebook, too, that the priority was growth always. Yes, yes. Over everything else, over the health of the platform, the health of the users on the platform. The kids, the children. Like, literally, researchers, women, black women, gay people, right? This is all. Like, you hate to go back to this, but it's like, yeah, we've been telling you this for 10 years.

Well. And it's only when it becomes, like, it's, you know, it's, it just. Spirled out of control and it didn't have to. But at the same time. You know, I understood, on one level, like, you would receive as a female, a different response than I would online. And people hate me. And you're delightful.

So like, I understand that I rub a certain contingent the wrong way. I'm okay with it. And I do get people who are like, you fat, bald, prick. I hate you with all my guts, love mom. whatever it is. Good one. Make sure you eat your vegetables and love mom. I get people disagree with me about things.

Yeah. But then when you join the show, and now I'm in your at replies, or then I'm your Cinderella to clean up things that people are like, you hired a carrot to work with you, and she's that's too liberal. I'm like, okay, on one podcast, I got a crazy right-wing guy,

and now you're telling me on the other podcast, I got a crazy left-wing gal, and I have to like as the moderate like somehow change their people can have their own opinions folks you don't have to attack them for it people think differently we just Molly and I just had a difference of opinion on student loans and we can have a productive discussion about solutions that move forward we can have a difference of opinion about a lot of things I can have difference opinion with Saxx's like a different opinion we could all move forward by just discussing the actual issue at hand and that's what I'm trying to get through to people but

my lord the amount of venom and the the tone of it is different for women oh it's a 100% it's like it's like what you're saying what i'm saying literally is not valid to a certain segment of people it's not valid because i'm the one who said it if you said the same thing it's like that there was that story the other day about that black couple who had their house appraised at 470 000 yes and then they like had a white guy they reapplied took all the pictures down how to white guy give the tour and it uh appraised that 700,000 like that was Whack. Literally, there is stuff that I say. Like, sometimes I hear myself on this podcast. We were joking about this on the signal. Like, I'll say something that's identical to like what Friedberg said independently of Friedberg. Right. And I'm like, I don't get enough credit for being a Friedberg level genius. I'm just saying like, but it literally will not be heard. Well, if you talk to the science voice like this and you say, ha ha, yeah, I got to do that. I got to do the laugh. But like, I remember, I don't know, well over a decade.

ago talking about Twitter on Buzz Out Loud back in the day at CNN being like, you know what I've noticed on Twitter is that like, if you just agree with someone, that's kind of boring content, right? You don't have anything. We don't have any way to engage with them and respond to them if you're just like, yes, great point. That's boring. But if you could disagree, all of a sudden, you have something to say. And you could get this person's attention and you could engage with them. And it was like this proto-realization that that disagreement and conflict would be in engaging and that engagement could serve ads because people would spend a long time on their fighting about stuff.

And YouTube went through this too where it was like, oh, the more extreme your stunt is, thank you, Jake and Paul Logan. Dipsch. Then the more. Dipsch. Those dips sheds have now led to an entire culture. Dillbricks like killing people. I mean, this Dibbrike, like the fact that they let him on the platform doing these

crazy stunts. I know. And some kid got his face shattered. Did you ever see that video of they basically got a crane. and they had it in the war and they're spinning a crane around with somebody at the edge of it. So then the guy's like,

hey, you're going too fast stop so they start to slow the crane down. You can pull this video up, Nick. No. Okay, don't. It doesn't look back. I do not want to see this. So they stop spinning the crane

because, like, hey, this is getting a little too fast and I'm afraid to let go because I'm going to go flying. So he slows it down and of course the inertia makes him whip around like an Indiana Jones whip

and he smashes his face into the crane. Oh, God. Falls off into the water and. could ostensibly have drowned and shatters his face. I guess Dobrook paid him off or something because he never talked about it for years. Oh, he's suing David Dobrook now.

Oh, now he's suing him. Okay, so there was some sort of cover up here. Then David Dobrook takes his model X or somebody takes a model X and David Dobrick puts on his channel and he jumps the steepest street in L.A. Yeah. And that same street, not a year later, somebody rents a Tesla, does the same stupid trick and crashes it and shatters the Tesla. Yeah. I don't know if that kid ever went to deal. Like, and I told Susan Wrencheke, like, what are we doing there?

Yeah. Like, I literally told Susan on Twitter, like, you're encouraging. Somebody's going to get killed. Just take the stunts off. Like, these are crazy stuff. Listen, I'm not like, what's the word? Like, I'm not a square. Like, if somebody wants to do a backflip on skis on a mountain and go to the X games,

I'm like, I'm here for it. People want to MMA fight? I'll go. I'll love to go to an hour. I've never been. I'll love to go to an M.A. Fight. Somebody wants to take me sick courtside.

I'll do it. And I'm not going to stop somebody from doing MMA fighting. But on a public street to do this stuff, if people want to do evil, I watched every evil-conelly stunt when I was a kid, you know,

I was there for it. But if you want to evil-ceneval on somebody's street where they're walking their dog and you kill their dog and the kid and the mom, get the fuck out of your dicky. That's boring now.

We've all seen that. You've got to keep leveling up. I'm being sarcastic, obviously. What I'm saying is that's what happened. I wrote a short story. I was thinking about writing some short stories when I was younger. And I wrote the story and I said, because I loved the running man and some of that kind of stuff.

And I was writing this little short story. I got to find it on one of my old laptops or something. And basically my premise was, society had become so dystopian that Discovery Channel started a competition where people could for a million dollars swim from one platform to another platform where, like, great white sharks fed.

And 10 people would jump across, they would chum the water, and everybody who made it, first person got, you know, $10 million, next person got, $5 million, next person got $1 million, and then whoever died would just be like great television. It's basically like gladiard or, you know, Hunger Games or whatever. So I wrote this thing. And then I'm watching, a Discovery Channel comes by my feed

on one of the social networks. They had a guy in a glass box and made a plexiglass, and a giant 15-foot great white smashes into it. You gotta look this up. It just happened this year, I guess. The Great White didn't see the glass box. Just saw the big fat seal in there, aka human a wetsuit. And this guy almost got taken out.

And like the box shatters, the jaws are closing it. And I just thought, and then there's this is woman who swims with sharks in Hawaii. And she says she's doing conservation. I'm like, we got there. And not only do we get there, these people are doing it for free. They're just doing it for fame. They're not even doing it for the $10 million I proposed. Yeah.

Sweet Jesus. I mean, it's the world gone. You know, we're headed right for like, I'm just saying Squid Games was way too popular. Way too popular. It is literally like we're, I think we're going to get there. Anyway, this whistleblower thing, I think, is going to wind up being the story of 2022. Interesting. I think, you know, when you have somebody this credible, this high up at an organization,

this reminds me as a tipping point, because you thought Francis might have been it, right? but she didn't have like the smoking smoking gun or you know it's like she had like stuff that was like oh yeah I can confirm with you that like Facebook is a soulless organization that'll do anything for growth and money it was totally monstrous right but it was already like we've been known that the Facebook leak was confirming we confirmed what we all knew like right your kids should not be on here this is going to make them feel bad about themselves this is going to create things this is different this is like we're finding out like you know there were bad actors in the network the network wasn't secure

the management team might have, allegedly was screwing with the numbers for profit. Like, this is explosive in a way that is, well, yeah, just, this is crazy. Yeah. When in the last time my top five or ten person in organization whistleblowers, whistleblowers always sold the level, like, Weigard, I don't know if you remember him. If you've never seen the movie The Insider for young people watching this, Russell Crow, I mean, incredible, and this is 60 minutes. of Jeffrey Weigard. He's the guy who did the smoking one.

This feels more on that one. Right. Yeah, totally. But even him, he was a biochemist whistleblower. Vice President of Research and Development of Brown and Williamson worked on the development of reduced harm cigarettes. And in 1996, blew the whistle, I'm reading for the Wikipedia, on tobacco tampering and the company, which was adapted for the 1990 film The Insider, one of my top 10 films of all time. Russell Crow from my top two films

Gladiator playing Waggand Wigin a lot of the modern day whistleblower protections etc. are based on this whistleblowers Mali also can get half of the settlement amount or the fines.

So when there's a huge fine so if there's winds up being a huge fine here is the other thing people don't know about whistleblowers they can get paid like tens of millions of dollars for doing it from the SEC specifically

I believe there's like a bounty for this and there was a top of country on a rail and persecuted for years until they finally run right into the arms of the Russian government. Like it can go lots of waste. Yeah. Well, that was different. Yeah. That wasn't, yeah. I mean, or he worked with the Russians previously. I mean, that's the one I don't get. Like, it's kind of weird that he wound up in Russia. I mean, it's, this is one of the things. It's so

hard to know what's actually happening on, you know, what's actually happening in the world. It is, exactly. And that's, that's, to go all the way back to the beginning, that's why anytime there's a whistleblower, there's a whole series of questions that come up immediately. Why? Why now? Who is this person? What's the motivation? What's the goal? Who put them up to this? If anyone, will that... Chelsea Manning? I don't know. Chelsea Manning, a perfect example. It's like this person had a crisis of conscience, was going through a lot of personal issues at the time. And then that Assange guy who is just horrible. Right. Or Snowden. I mean, who's no, you know, like the easiest explanation for the Snowden situation is

that it was like genuine. He was genuinely motivated. And then the American response was so appalling to him that he ended up like finding safe haven in Russia and being like, maybe you can have some of these secrets. I don't know. We're all over the place now. We're all over the place. Should we talk about startups or do you have a wrap up? No, no. Let's do a startup thing. But I just want to point out these SEC whistleblower program is required to pay awards to eligible whistleblowers who provide original information that leads to successful SE and 4 actions with total monetary sanctions exceeding $1 million. This is just like a law firm's page, I guess, to incentivize you to become a whistleblower.

But there have been some huge ones that have happened. There was a 114 whistleblower award and $110 million. Those are the top two right now. If you click on the 114 one, the Secreasing Exchange Commission today announced an award of over $114 million to a whistleblower whose information and assistance led to a successful. enforcement of SEC related actions. 52 million awarding connection with the SEC case and an approximate is 62 million relating

to actions by another agency. The combined 114 million reward makes the highest award in the program's history and clips is the next highest reward. Wow. And I'm trying to find which case it was. They will never say, yeah.

In some cases they do. Because of confidentiality. Sometimes they do, but in this case they're like, we're not. 676 million to a hundred eight individuals since they created this award in 2012. So just so people know, like, and it says here, I set forth in the Dodd-Frank Act, the SEC protects the confidentiality of whistleblowers and does not disclose information that could reveal the whistleblowers's identity. But they do take pride in, yeah.

I'm counting down to J. Cal saying, if you work at TikTok, you know, it's interesting you bring that out. You can get a million dollars. I think, you know, this is brilliant because the SEC really is thoughtful about these, like how they do it, like keeping people confidential and everything.

Now, I think you can elect to not be confidential, but I think this is an appropriate thing to do to incentivize people because if you are a whistleblower, as I said earlier, you lose your entire career. Now, I don't know that Mudge

is going to get some huge reward here, but I don't know. If the SEC gives a huge fine here, he might get $10 million or $50 million bucks. It seems like the average award is $10,20 million bucks. So maybe that takes the edge off, but you can't really, people are not doing it based on this

but this certainly does take the sting off and if you are inside of TikTok and you know of Russian I'm sorry of Chinese government involvement and you told the SEC and other agencies and you got an award would be pretty fucking dope

and they'd make a movie about you so there's that too I'm not encouraging everybody just saying it may not investment advice but it's not investment advice but my J-trading has been absolutely demolished, which means I think I'm going to buy more. I want to just let everybody know with J-trading.

We're going to do a SPAC-Tacular next week. I am starting my spectacular research. I believe there's a SPAC that's going to go 10X. There has to be. And I want to find it. The pile of SPAC has been so demolished that in there must be a good one. So if you have ideas for just SPAC research, your top three SPAC ideas, top smack idea, send it to me, Jason at calicanus.com or producers at this week

Startups.com. Speaking of investments, there's a big series A announcement today. Oh, okay. A little press release went out. Elizabeth Holmes, the Juicero co-founder, Martin Screlli, who got today's $100 million series A round after getting out of jail? The global environment sensing and data platform, Clarity, closed a $9.6 million series A. What do they do?

They, is the only air quality monitoring solution that provides continuous. real-time local monitoring for at city or district scale. So right now, for example, if you want to monitor air quality in a city, like as the city government or like for all of UCLA or the city of London, for example, I'm naming some actual customers of this company, you have to buy this like monitoring station that's the size of a container ship and it costs $250,000 and you get readings like, you know, one or two times a day. This company makes these small little nodes that can be put all over super easily, and then you pay on an ongoing basis for real-time pollution monitoring. Pollution, of course,

kills hundreds of thousands of people every year, right? It's like a really, really, really dangerous part of the climate crisis. And this is that level of measurement. It's different from like purple air and the consumer ones. It's more like you would do this if you were a city. This is industrial strength. This is industrial strength. You know, it would be great if this startup actually would tell you, like, which direction the pollution was coming from so you could figure out the source. Oh, yeah, totally. I don't see why they couldn't actually. No, they do.

If you scroll down, the clarity wind module lets you know where the air pollution is coming from from a source appointment. So, apportiment. What does that say? Portiment. The clarity apportionment. Apportionment. Okay, there's another word I don't know.

It's a fancy word for blame, I guess. Source apportionment. I like that. So you can be like, you're busted. Oh, you're to apportion who it's to, yeah. Yeah. So this is important. You know, you need to measure.

And if you want to manage it, you got to measure it. And, you know, this is exactly the type of company that I brought you here to invest in. Like, I wish we could have gotten in on this deal. Oh, that's so funny because we did. Yeah, Molly. Molly's going to save the world. This is Molly's second, I think is your second or third deal? Second, this is the second syndicate deal.

Syndicate deal. So we have two. There was some confusion among our syndicate members, which don't worry. We're still. Yeah. There will be more. There are two accelerator companies and two syndicate companies. And this was the first deal that went only to the climate syndicate.

So we launched the syndicate with our first deal and said like, okay, if you are into this, you automatically get added to the climate syndicate. And then we had it, our precious little investors. And this was the first deal they got just for them. And it was just announced. It's so exciting. We got 500 people in the climate syndicate? I think so, yeah.

We got to get the exact number and tell people. It's happening. The syndicate.com slash climate if you give a shit about the planet and you care about children and animals and the future. If you're a coldhearted bastard and you just want to make like a pure return on SaaS software, the syndicate.com slash SaaS. We got you covered either way. Yeah. You could join both. There's something for everyone at lunch.

Something for every. I want to start the syndicate.com slash gambling or vice. And because we're not allowed to with our regular fund because we've got a lot of different LPs with a lot of different concern. We can't do gambling or psychedelics or. or, you know, therapies, but I want to start, hey, just, Nick, please take a memo for Presh. I like this. The syndicate.com slash, let's do it. Gambling or wagering.

What would you call it? Synicate.com slash vice. Syndicate.coms and wagering. I mean, if you call it vice, people are going to be like, click. Sorry. Yeah, vice is good. You like vice. Well, it's, it's the antithesis of the vice clause, right?

So. Okay, let's go with that. I like how it already has like a built-in sort of connection to be sick. Okay. So let's get that up. Let's get that up. somebody's going to argue that that's what you do anyway. But vice is just sexy.

I like it. Seneca.com slash vice. I want that up. Toot sweet. Toot sweet, which means I want to brought up to my room, my suite. Toot sweet. It's French for... To the suite.

To the sweet. Fast as possible for J-Cal. Congratulations, Molly. I like this. If anybody knows of any measurement companies, Molly and I are fascinated by this sector. We have clarity now. Mm-hmm.

We got sale plan. And we got sale plan. So we got two. One, two. Let's get five. So anybody know of a measurement company that's measuring this important stuff. Yeah. And we'd like to meet them.

So any founders in the measurement SaaS, climate space, sustainability writ large, you know, like we can open the aperture here. Yeah. Anything green. But that has a business model. Yeah, this is air pollution, right? This is not like a super one-to-one carbon tonne situation. but pollution is a result of the climate crisis and a contributor to making it worse.

Like, if you can't measure it, you can't manage it, but you also can't invest in it. Like, I believe that these metrics move millions. I'm into this concept, big time. I mean, look at it. If you want to be healthier and you weigh yourself every day,

if you're having a problem with your weight, step one is to step on the scale every day. Now, you're going to eat four donuts with your six-year-olds for no reason at all. and then not want to get on the scale the other day. I'm making up a crazy example, okay? Because Tuesday. I'm just throwing it out there.

And you're going to make a mistake. Or you're going to take a pint of Vietnamese coffee ice cream. And you're going to intend to have three scoops and you're going to polish off the whole pint while watching Game of Throne. Something bad's going to happen. And you're going to make a mistake. So when you make that mistake, you still got to get on the scale so that you understand you made the mistake, you reinforce it.

Well, that's the same thing here. If people want to turn a blind eye, to the cargo ships, well, that's not helping anybody. Let's just at least measure it. And then we could at least have a thoughtful discussion about where to go with it. And when companies try to greenwash you

or say like, oh, we're not polluting. We're not, what are you talking about? Like, we're not releasing massive numbers of particulates into the air. And you can have a sensor that in real time is like, actually, when I measured it compared to the wind, it seemed like it was coming straight from you.

Here's the data. Yes. That's how you get to change. And for, cities like, you know, for cities, if you could have air quality, if a city's goal, if the goal of our governments is to make life for the people better, well, people with asthma, people with kids, pollution, life expectancy, like, you can be certain that's somewhere on the peninsula, maybe 10 places, maybe 10 places in the greater New York City borough area. There are 10

places where there is a leak or pollution coming from somewhere that nobody's aware of, that's giving people cancer or taking a couple of years off their life. Now, we can sit here and pretend it's not happening, but we all know it is. So go to clarity. What's their domain name, clarity.com. Clarity.io. Go to clarity.com. If you're in government and take a look at how affordable this is and what good you could do for your community and run a pilot. I'm not saying you've got to put it on every street corner, but run a pilot and take a lot. And take a look at it. And take a lot. And take a care of your citizens and, hey, if there's somebody who's doing the wrong thing, maybe you give them a fine and you stop them. And you're a hero. Yeah. And you're saving people's lives.

And you get reelected. Okay. So you're, I'm not saying that your existential viability as a candidate or a mayor or a governor depends on this, but voting your ass out if you don't. Just saying. Just saying. Get after it. Anyway, and if you're, they're hiring over there, too. So just to make this, you know, even more real. If you, if you, actually are smart and you're an engineer and you want to do something other than help Zuckerberg steal stuff if you're working on Facebook for Zuckerberg and then you had the opportunity to work for clarity.io in beautiful Berkeley and get some nice bagels and the food scene is great everybody's hiking in the mountains why would you drag your ass to Zuckerberg's you know uh mausoleum

to work in the the castle mines pounding salt with Zuckerberg stealing other people's ideas when you could work and have a career Clarity.io go have a career and have a mission to fix air quality

and fight climate change as opposed to steal other people's ideas for dopey social apps for love of fucking God, people. I mean seriously, don't you sometimes just listen to Jay Calland you just want to be like let's go.

No, I'm just infuriated. Like, can you imagine smart people going to work for Zuckerberg? Instead of going to clarity.io slash careers, clarity.com. Clarity.com. Clarity.com. Listen, if we invest in your company, we're blowing your shit up here. We're blowing your shit up. We're going to fill those open positions.

Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. Boom. Do it. Let's get in there. There's got to be, I mean, they pay well. They got our money.

They got our money. I got our money. So take our money and reduce, I mean, do something good for the planet. Look at this. Pull up the careers page here.

It's absolutely wonderful. I don't want to make this into a commercial. Burnware engineer, boom. Senior customer and channel marketing manager, boom. Support engineer, boom. Let's go. Let's go. And if you don't see a fit,

just join the talent pool, right? Just get in there and just say, hey, I have passion for this. And go ahead and blow them up. If you're a fan of the show, just go ahead and blow them up and say clarity. Dotio is cool a.F. Oh, my God.

It's really happening. Enough. All right. Molly, congrats. Four deals in the first six months. I said two six, but you did four.

I get her going. That's how I get the cowgirl going. I just got the cowgirl going. Look out. I'm just saddled up. Oh, I get to see. You two behind, but you'll make it up

in the second half of the year. Let's do eight. But we need these. We have to hunt now. We're not in passive mode. We're in hunt mode. Yes. I need deals.

Bring. We found another SaaS. How great was the investment? meeting yesterday. I love our investment meeting. This job is so great. Twice a week. We talk for two hours about finding great companies. I mean, it's literally like a masterclass in there of us debating the finer points. I got to do a blueprint. Molly, go find us some more companies. Congratulations. Really just so happy for you finding clarity.io and sale plan. What's sale plans domain? Saleplan.com. Wow. Good job. I even got that cool domain. Yeah. And right up top,

there's a careers button that links to what is a notion page. I'm clear. So go ahead and click on that. You pull up that page. Join the sale plan crew. So here's what you do. You're an engineer. You're a data scientist.

We got two companies for you to apply to. I want you to apply to both. Sale plan and clarity. Cellplan.com. Clarity.io. slash careers. Sailpland.com and careers right up top. Embedded software IoT engineer.

Get to live in Miami, Fort Lauderdale. Go to Barry's boot camp with Keith for boy you got a cloud engineer you got a data scientist what a great life okay do something meaningful with your life quit facebook like nobody's saying don't have a job to the nody that was so mad at us earlier we're saying get a job that means something yeah do something meaningful yeah that's all i'm saying that's all that's all all all all all all all all all all all all all that is it for the news next up jason's back with everybody's new favorite segment so many new favorite segments but this is a great building the blueprint the gun show

there we go let's go with my spinach all right molly go go find some companies get back okay all right everybody it's wednesday and it's time for part seven of a ten part series we started here a mini series if you will on this week in startups it's called the blueprint yes shout out to jz rock is in the building here i'd like to talk about career advice one of the most frequent emails i get is hey can i get some career advice And sometimes you do ask Jason's here, but I thought I would put together just a 10-part series on things they get all the time. And we did one on branding yourself and having a breakout skill.

We did one on when to quit your job, building your network, right? Networking is super important in terms of getting power. Shout out to Jeffrey Pfeiffer at Stanford. Creating or Waiting. We did in episode four, generalists versus specialists, especially in the startup lens, getting ahead of trends and how to spot trends I did. All of these can be found out this vegan startups. dot com slash the blueprint. Now the episodes are embedded in larger episodes of this week and start

up so you might have to jump ahead in the episode. But I think at this week in startups.com slash the blueprint, we created a notion page that'll get you to the playlist and it'll deep link to those moments. Today I want to talk about should you go into debt for college and just should you go to college and what are the alternatives there? Now, the reason this came up is because, as we talked about earlier in today's episode, major news today from the New York Times. President Biden's going to announce today that he's canceling $10,000 in student debt for Americans earning $125,000 or less per year. Let's put aside how we feel about that. Is it fair? Is it unfair? We know that there are specific things about college and higher education in the United

States in the year 2022. That is much different than when I went to school. I went to school in 1988 to 1993. It took me five years at night to graduate from Fordham University with $10,000 in debt on Pell grants. I paid for the rest, and it was about $10,000, $12,000 a year. And just to work, I lived in a $300 a month apartment, literally like the top apartment with low ceilings where you had to duck to move around this little tiny apartment on 10th Avenue in Brooklyn. The administration says they're going to try to get most of this, 90% of it, to households that are in less than 75 a year. So they're trying to do the right thing here.

But there's a reason why this is an important issue for young people today. it's because the average U.S. undergraduate has $37,000 in student loan debt as of October 2021. And then when we look at graduate student loan debt, $91,000 as of October 2021, these are big numbers, folks. And I like to look at these numbers in relation to your first year salary. My belief is that you should be making much more in your salary coming out of school than you have in debt. Why? Well, because you've got to pay tax. on that, 30, 40%, typically. So if you graduate

with $37,000 in debt and you make 50, 40, 50, 60 grand coming out of school, which I think is probably what most people with generic degrees coming out of school, obviously developers might make more. But if you're just, you know, going into sales, business, finance, whatever, yeah, let's say you make 50,

you pay a third of it in taxes, okay, you know, your debt is much more. The average salary in 2022 for college graduates is 55K, according to the National Association of College's employees. Now, there are some people who get really silly degrees that don't entitle them to anything more

than working at Starbucks. Not that there's anything wrong with working at Starbucks, but you can work at Starbucks without a high school diploma, I believe. And if you're getting a $15 an hour job, you're working $2,000 hours a year, which is what the average American works, just about 2,000 hours for a full-time job. You're making $30,000 a year.

Now your debt is way more. So just as a rule of them, you have to be making like twice as much as your debt for it to make sense. So you got that $37,000 in debt. You should have a job paying you $70,000, something in that range, right? $75K because you're going to have to pay this off. And sometimes the interest rates on these things are super predatory. So you don't want to take those variable interest, 15, 20, 25% loans.

Those things are crazy. Now, if it's a Pell Grant or something like that and it's very low, that's a different story, right? If it's the government's giving you a 3% or 4% loan, it's not that bad. So the devil is in the details on these. Only 14.3% of the average graduate student debt is from undergraduate study. Graduate students are a big part of this problem. And the average graduate student debt is 141% higher than the average debt balance among all student borrowers. In other words, people go for graduate degrees.

Now, some graduate degrees, like a lawyer, a doctor, you know, et cetera, an MBA, you know, they might entitle you to a great job. but you also have to remember, like, do you really want that job? And so I think the people who don't do a couple of years of work, either before they go to college, during college, or after their undergrad, they're at a disadvantage because they don't know what career they want. So sometimes people will go be $200,000 in debt for their law, MBA, or medical degrees, and they actually hate the job. And now they're trapped. And they're making $150 a year, $100, $250, whatever it is. in some elite job, but it's less than their debt. And man, they have to pay that debt off over 15 years and they can never buy a house.

Now they're 37 years old and they hate their lives and they never wanted this job. So I want you to pause for a second. And I want you to look at the alternatives. And that's going to be a big part of what we discussed today. You know, the average in-state tuition at a public four-year college is very important for you to know. Public, private, community colleges. If you are a self-driven person, going to a city college, you know, a public college like this as opposed to a private one, if you don't have the means,

can be radically cheaper. If those in-state public four-year colleges are $9,400 a year, you're talking about getting out of your degree for about a quarter of what the average private colleges. Private colleges started like, I think the average 36 or so. And where I went forward and I think I heard it's like up to 70K a year. I don't know if that's true. This is only available to really rich kids or middle class kids or people on scholarships or middle class kids who want to go into severe debt, it's simply not worth it for undergrad. All due respect to my alma mater, I would not advise anybody do that. If you happen to have rich parents, okay, whatever.

Congratulations and being in the lucky sperm club. But for everybody else, it's just dumb. There's no way to get out from under. And what I want you to do is to really think about these numbers. Now, I know when you're 17, 18 years old, you may have been told, hey, you got to go to college. That's just how it is. And then you start thinking about, well, I want to have like a good college.

I know, and then all of a sudden you're putting yourself 100, 200, 300 in debt. What you need to do is forget about what the college is going to cost for a second in that experience. And think about what happens after college. So when you're making that decision, I want you to not think of the first order impact. Okay, I'm going to go to a school. It's going to be like this. My friends are going to be there. Parties are great.

Oh, I'm going to be in Hawaii or Florida or whatever destination I like or I like the sports team. Let's pause all of that. Not that those aren't valid. Your experience, I guess, is valid. I want you to think like an adult. You're 17, 18 years old. I want you to think about when you're 22 and you graduate, what's life going to be like for you then.

And do you want to live under a $500 or $1,000 a month payment for the rest of your life or seemingly the rest of your adult life, your best years? Because you could be so in debt that you hate your life and you can't afford to do the things you want to do just for this four-year experience. And then what would happen if you were debt-free? and you still got to go to school, or your debt was 10K or 20K, and you can easily manage it at a $200, $300 a month payment. That could be a much better life for you. So don't look at the four years.

Look at the 40 years. Think about years 22 to 62, your working years, those prime years. How do you want to live your adult life? And that's what we're not having a discussion with kids. And I think kids are being young adults are being manipulated to think college is this magic wand. It is not. The magic wand is skills and your executive function. Executive function is a fancy word for discipline.

What is your discipline to learn new skills? That's what I want you to think about developing. A person who has high executive function. Executive function, again, a fancy word for your ability to sit down, shut up, and do some goddamn work in this world. That's what executive function is. Can you sit down and shut up and work and learn a new skill? If you've got executive function,

you don't need any of this college. It's a luxury. If you can sit down and teach yourself how to be a video editor, teach yourself social media, teach yourself accounting, teach yourself programming, teach yourself how to be a sales executive,

read books, listen to podcasts, build websites, build small businesses, use no code. If you can go to founder. dot university and show up every week and kick ass founder. dot university, we charge your 700 bucks to come for 12 weeks.

If you come for all 12 weeks, we give you the 700 bucks back. It's basically free if you show up. If you have executive function, you could do anything in life. You just sit down and learn skills. Executive function in skills is what it's about. Now, college should be teaching you that stuff.

But too often college does not give you any skills that the real world needs. They're out of sync. The sink is off, folks. So if it's out of sync and you're going into massive debt, that would be considered a bad strategic decision for you to make. If I told you, hey, give me $100,000, and I'll teach you how to be a developer,

and developers make 150K, you'd be like, okay, that kind of fits J-Cal's rule. It's like the salaries twice as much as the cost. Now, if I told you, you could go to, you know, one of these developer schools for 20K, and the average salary of a developer is 150K,k, you're like, well, that seems like a pretty great deal. But you need to have executive function, don't you? You need to have the ability to sit down, shut up, and learn, and work. Most young people don't have it yet.

Most parents don't prepare their kids to be resilient, to have grit. These are fancy words. grit and resilience are fancy words to be able to buck up and get through hard things. Do you have the ability to sit there and go from chapter one to chapter two to chapter three on your own? Most people need a babysitter. College is like this great giant babysitter and way for you to go from 18 to 22 years old and maybe absorb some knowledge and, you know, you're too old to be at home, but you're too young to be in the workforce. Kind of bullshit when you think about it. What you need is executive functionability at skills and then you don't

even need to go to college. Now, if you're one of those people who has executive function and you can acquire skills, if I told you right now, you could be $200,000 in debt or I could give you $200,000 to invest in yourself over the next four years, would you give the $200,000? If I gave it you up front, I gave you $200,000 in a nice briefcase, $100,000 crisp hundies, you got bricks. Would you take it and hand it to a college and say those people are going to teach you how to, you, how to you're to get more than that 200 back, they're going to give you five times, 10 times that. 40-year career, you make, I don't know, 100,000 a year on average, 200,000 a year on average, you make 4 to 8 million.

Do you think that that college, when you give them the 200,000 is going to return 20 times, 40 times your investment? Do you really? Because to be candid, you could make $50,000 a year working any job and a little bit of overtime, right? You don't even need to go to college for that. So really the delta is that extra 50K, do they actually get you that? Probably not. The skills that they're teaching in most of these degrees is not in sync.

That's why we have this problem to begin with. So they've raised the price to the point of absurdity while not increasing the value of the skills, of the executive function of grit, resiliency, et cetera, to make you able to operate in the real world, let alone if you're going to $100,000 a year of school, which is bonkers. So what are the alternatives for you? I'm not going to tell you not to go to college. I'm going to tell you not to go into debt in college. Debt equals death. Do not go into debt for skills that do not result in a return on investment.

R-O-I. I want you to think about R-O-I. If you're going to go for a degree that does not have a clear path to you making more money and having that degree, then you should not go to debt for it. You're getting a luxury degree. If you're going for philosophy, psychology like I did,

and you're not planning on being a psychologist and going to graduate school for it or a counselor and going for your master's or something, what are you doing? You're wasting money. And the difference when I went was it wasn't that expensive and I didn't go into too much debt and I worked during the day and I went to school at night. So what can you learn on master class on a code? Academy type, one of those code things. What can you learn on YouTube? What could you learn in internships, apprenticeships, or building your own businesses? Think about it for a second. If your cost of living was $1,500 a month, right? It's $18,000 a year. And then you were going to spend $30,000 a year on college, tuition. You're at $50k a year. Okay, well, the $20K of living expenses is static, right?

It's fixed for people going to college or not if you're not living in the house. So you can basically have $30,000 a year to play with. What could you do with $30,000 a year? Right? So let's say you work to get that $1,500 a year, $2,000, I'm sorry, $1,000, $1,000 a month to get yourself, you know, a shared two bad room and you got one of the two bedrooms. You're paying $1,000 for that. You got $500 for your food, $500 for entertainment, whatever it is. I don't know, you got to work, whatever that is, 200 hours, half time to make that, you know, whatever it is.

$20 an hour, pay your taxes, still have money left over. you start doing the math on this. If you're self-directed and you can build businesses and learn, you're going to learn more and get a better deal, but you're going to have to have that executive function. You have to learn to add skills on your own. And that's what this is all about.

So if one of my children, I have three daughters, came to me and said, hey, J-Cal, a-k-a-dad or a nephew or something, I want to build a business. You were going to spend 200K on my college, 50K a year. Any chance? I could get 50K to build the business? I would be like, oh, let's start crying. Okay, great. What's the business? What skills do you have to build it? Let's talk that through. And they take four shots at building four businesses of 50K each. Huh. Let's say all four

fail. Who's going to be more qualified going into year five? Person who got the, I'm not going to pick on people, but philosophy degree, psychology degree I got, English lit, whatever. Who's going to come out in year five and be stronger and more resilient and have a better future? The person who tried four businesses, all four failed, or the person who came out of it here in year five with the English degree. I think we know the answer to that, clearly. You're going to have learned so much running those four businesses. And so that's what I want you to think about when you're making these decisions. Not saying don't go to college.

I'm saying don't go into debt. Unless the debt is a clear path to a win. And the school is teaching you things that gets you to the other side with a higher salary. And you can just look at things that don't take a salary. What jobs could you get?

This is why I think maybe working for a year before you go to college. It's a fine thing to do too. We have a lot of stigmas about this. Oh, you didn't. go directly to college you worked for a year? Oh my God, everybody's heartbroken. Why? Why are we funneling people into a broken education system that's overpriced for 90% of people and putting them into crazy debt when there are so many more options out there? I didn't have YouTube as an option

to learn things. The business world was a closed ecosystem where it was very hard to figure out how to do it. Now all the answers are on YouTube, Cora, this podcast, you know, founder of a university, countless other, you know, online education resources. So grow with Google. This is a career advancement program focused on in-job demands. If you haven't heard of that, go check out, grow with Google. You complete these courses on your own, 10 hours a week. It's incredible. So just give up, as I've said many times.

Watching HBO and Netflix, Hulu, maybe take a course. Maybe get a job and go to school at night. Maybe challenge yourself. I'm going to work four days a week and go to school three days a week. That's what I did, basically. I work five days a week. I went to school at night. Whatever you do, please do not put yourself in debt.

Now, let's talk about Google. They intentionally created these job offers because they know, they want to help society and they want to find people who can fill the in-demand jobs. And they partner with employers for both hiring and upskilling their current workforce. This is the idea. There's not enough employees.

1.5 million job openings with a 66 median salary for the jobs that are in Google's program. Think about that for a second. You could go to Google, right? Let's pull that up here. job-ready skills that will put you to work. We have such a broken education system that grow with Google exists. Learn at your own pace.

No experience necessary. Stand out to employers and a path to on-demand jobs. No experience necessary. There's 1.5 billion jobs. Learn at your own pace, three to six months. Stand out to employers. Make your resume competitive with a credential from Google. 75% of programs, graduates report an improvement in their career within six months of certificate completion.

a path to in-demand jobs. 66K median average salary. Let's just pause for a second. That 66K is higher than the bachelor's degree coming out of the average college, as we talked about earlier. So you can not go into debt, you can do this in under six months.

This is incredible. So these kind of hacks are there. So you have to ask yourself, why are we pushing kids into a broken system and having them ruin their lives for 20, 30, 40 years? The answer is tradition. The answer is, predatory loan companies, predatory schools, and kids don't think. So if you have a child in your

life who's 17 or 18 or 19 years old and they're going to make this decision, you have to do the thinking with them. So if you have a younger sibling or a cousin or a child or a friend, you really have to pause and let them listen to this blueprint two or three times to understand that college is not the only path. And it may have traditionally been the best. But we took a heuristic, we took a rule of thumb, and we let this rule of thumb exist for 20 or 30 years, but we never said, does it still apply? The rule of them, that college is worth it, and college would get you ahead, and higher education was uniformly worth it. That rule broke, because colleges became too expensive. If colleges today, if the average debt was 10 or 20K,

we wouldn't even be doing this blueprint, we would have saved it for another topic. The only reason we're doing this is because people are graduating with 40K, 50K, 100K, 100K in debt. If, again, if it was 10K like I had in those Pell Grants, 9K, I easily paid it off, I was making a 50, 60K coming out of school in IT. Let's make a 50, 60K while in school, in fact, I think. So you had this very easy path to pay that stuff back. That's what I want you to think about. The heuristic, that higher education is always worth it, is no longer true.

therefore you have to question it and you have to make a better decision you cannot rely on the rule of them and in fact the rule of them that i'm going to give you might be more appropriate for you and that rule of them the rule of them is can you learn this skill on your own for free if so do that first if you can learn the skill on your own because of your high executive function, please do that first and then consider college. So I'm just asking you to give it a shot. And you can do it in high school. You can do it while at community college.

But I want you to run a test for yourself, a three to six month test. And if you run this test, the blueprint test, are you able to add a skill for three to six months, add a skill that's in demand in under six months? If you can learn an in demand skill in under six months, you are unstoppable. If you can't, then there's something wrong with you. You're broken in some way that you don't have that motivation. You don't have that executive function yet, and you're going to need to figure out why. I hate to talk to you this candidly, but an adult who is successful in the world can sit down and say to themselves,

I'm going to spend 10, 20 hours a week, I'm going to set a schedule, I'm going to time block this on my schedule, and I'm going to add a skill. Now, six months is a long time. Maybe you want to just set a one-month goal for yourself. I'm going to work for two hours a day, for 30 days in a row, no days off, 60 hours in one month to learn video editing. Or to learn coding or no code. Or to learn Coda and Notion and Zapier to make you happier. You're going to learn some skill that's in demand. Do the 60 day challenge.

Do the six-month challenge. Learn a new skill. And then then evaluate and say to the people, why would I give you $50,000 a year? What are you going to teach me? And how is that after four years going to get me a better? degree, I want you to challenge the college and ask them that. What will you teach me in four years for $200,000 that'll get me a job that pays double $200,000? That's the benchmark, right? I want you to be able to, whatever you invested, make double. If you invested in a code school for $50,000 a year or $25,000 a year,

do you not think you're going to make double that as a developer? I think you are. If you did it for design school, or a growth university, like a growth hacking university, if you spend $10,000 or $20,000, on it. Are you not going to be able to double that in salary? Okay. If the college can't guarantee you that your total spend on what they teach you will get you double, I think you know everything you need to know. It's a luxury product, not a must-have product. It's not a good choice for you as an investment. So please look at this in the lens of ROI and then look to yourself. Do you have executive function. Do you have grit? Do you have resilience? And the ability to use that grit, resilience, and executive function to sit your ass down and shut the hell up and learn a new skill.

The future is about skills, not degrees. If you cannot acquire skills, the degree is only going to set you further behind because all that debt then takes away from your ability because you have to service that debt instead of add new skills. Imagine being debt free and then just working at Starbucks or in an Uber or DoorDash or Apple store. So you got some way to pay your base, you know, living expenses, keeping your burn very low, while adding skills, now you're unstoppable. The unstoppable people in the world are the ones who can constantly add skills. I know what I'm talking about here because I invest in them every day.

The five professional certificates you can earn for free at Google. I don't mean to make this a commercial for Google. There's a hundred other place of this. Digital marketing and e-commerce, okay? Median salary, 51K. Job openings for digital marketing. in e-commerce, 218,000. IT support, where I started my career,

fixing laser printers and getting under desks and changing the cables before Wi-Fi existed. Job openings, $400,000. Median salary, average salary, $52K average-starring salary. Data analytics, $74K,000, salary, $380,000 job openings. Project management,

fancy word for, like, building a tech product, being a PM. Median salary, 73K, job openings, half a million. half a million folks UX design meeting salary 92

job openings almost 100,000 right now this is right now folks I tell you all the time sales project management design coding

building in the world if you can't build anything why do you deserve to get a job if you can't build or service customers the world doesn't need you you're providing no value

but nobody has this discussion when you go to colleges. What do they show you when go to college? They walk you around the campus. They show you the accoutrement. They show you everything but the ROI. Why? Because you're getting suckered. If they really were good at what they did at these fancy, dancy colleges and, you know, the DeVry's and the other hit and run ones, that DeVry paid $100 million fine.

Tells you everything you need to know. I think guilty as charged. When you pay $100 million fine in settlement, I think it's because you're guilty. That's just my personal feeling. I'm sure they admitted no guilt, but my feeling is you don't pay $100 million fine unless you're guilty as F. You, you, listening to my voice right now,

know what I'm saying is true. Google, running this great thing, is telling you the outcome. When you go to college, they show you the quad, they show you Greek life, they show you the cafeteria, the sports center, what is this?

You're joining a private club, or are you getting educated to go out and have a career in the real world? Don't get suckered, folks. Take all those discussions and be a jerk on the tour. Say, hey, tell me about the skills I'm going to learn. What skills will I learn in year one

when I give you 50K? What years will I learn in year two when I give you 50K? Give me year three and year four as well. Tell me the top five skills in 48 months. So I'm going to be here for almost 50 months. Every 10 months, I should get a skill. give me the five skills,

and then let me take those skills and tell me what jobs I qualify for and how many of those jobs are available. That's just what Google did. They told you you can learn all six of these, all five of these in six months each. Okay, five times six is 30. That's half the amount of time you're almost,

that's 60% of the time you're going to be in college. So if it's 60% of the time you're in college, you can come out with five specific skills. You can be a project management, U.X designer, data analytics, IT support, and digital marketing and commerce. You learn all five of those things on Google? For free, basically?

Okay. Okay, what are we talking about here, folks? If you were going to go 100K in debt, you could learn all of these in six months, you can do it in 30 months and have these five things on your resume. This is what's happening in the world, folks. This is the truth.

The ROI of higher education is broken. The truism, the heuristic, the rule of thumb, that college is always worth it, is no longer true. College is, might be worth it at the right price. And I tell you,

it's kind of hard to beat zero or $100 or $500 or $5,000 for a course that gives you a specific skill. Coursera, you know, is the back end that does this, and they have like 5,000 courses over a Coursera. There's a ton of places. All right, listen, I've already talked

for 20 minutes about this. It's something I'm very passionate about. If you're a young person, you've got a young person in your life, just sit there, listen to this once, go do some online research, listen to it the next week, and make a plan.

and then when you go talk to colleges, I want you to evaluate colleges through the same lens you're evaluating these online programs. And then I want you to challenge them and say, hey, why is your program here at this two-year college, four-year college,

better than me going to Google and doing it at home? Tell me. And they might say, well, we have a lab here and you'll have other peer students to work with, and you'll get to, of course,

be part of the social life here and build a network of people who are also going for a U.X degree. Those would be valid reasons. That's what I would. do if I had a college. I'd say, well, when you do the Google thing, you're at home alone. It's kind of lonely, right? If you come here, you're going to be with, we have 500 people in the U.X program, and some of them will be ahead of you, some will be behind you, and you get to work on

projects together and socialize. And of course, you're going to be in the lab for two or three hours a day, and there you're just going to be in front of your screen. So you're going to do projects in the lab, and we're going to teach you much better than Google could ever teach you because we have professors who will be sitting there. And if you have a question, you can ask them, and they'll stay after class and walk you through stuff you don't understand, which Google's not going to do that. That would be a great answer. If they give you that answer,

okay, take that into account. And then you could put that against, well, what if I hired a tutor? Because tutors cost $100, $200 an hour for like a high-end tutor. So if you're going to go $50K in debt, I mean, think about it, folks.

Like $100 an hour tutor, a 500 hours, you get 500 hours of one-on-one instruction? You realize how long that is? If you were doing 10 hours of tutoring a week, I don't know if you could even do 10 hours or tutoring a week. That's a year of one-on-one.

on one, 10-hour tutoring, that's, if you went to school five hours a day, it's two hours a day of one-on-one tutoring. That's when you start to realize, like, the ROI might be broken. You wonder, where, where is that money going to in the colleges? How many administrators do they have? Who's getting paid all this money, right? Where is this money going to, some endowment or whatever? The colleges need to justify their existence, either by lowering prices or providing more value. And then you, as the customer, look at yourself as the customer. You're the customer. And once you have that agency, agency, another fancy word, which means like you make decisions for yourself, you're in control of your destiny. And so what agency means? You have to have agency. You have to be your own advocate. That's what the fancy word agency means. I was like to tell you what these fancy words mean. So take control of your destiny. Don't just put your destiny in the hands of tradition. Don't put your destiny in the hands of, you know, some people who run the college or some people.

heuristic, that college is always a good deal. It's not always a good deal. Make smart decisions and make thoughtful decisions. All right. Here endeth the lesson. Blueprint number seven is in the can and I hope you enjoyed it this week in startups.com slash the blueprint. This week in startups.com slash the blueprint. I would be very helpful for me if you would send this to 10 friends and just say, hey, you know, have your kid watch this when they're 16 or 17 years old. And then email me back or just that, mention me if it has some positive impact on a parent or a kid making this decision or some group and tell me what I got wrong. Jason at calcannis.com for life. We'll see you next time. Bye-bye.