This Week in Startups - Sundar Pichai, tech crash, crypto, journalism and more with CNBC's Deirdre Bosa | E1458

Episode Date: May 13, 2022

Deirdre Bosa from CNBC’s Tech Check joins to talk about a wide variety of topics (2:20), including her interview with Sundar Pichai, journalism (12:54), the crashing public markets, crypto (44:58), Twitter iterations (1:06:12) and so much more! (00:00) Jason and Molly tee up today’s show (02:20) Jason and Molly chat with Deirdre Bosa of CNBC (11:38) LinkedIn - Post your first job for free at https://linkedIn.com/twist (12:54) Jason, Molly, and Deirdre talk about reporting, journalism, private and public markets (21:12) Cyvatar - Get your first 2 months free at https://cyvatar.ai/twist (22:28) More on tech journalism: asking tough questions (35:30) Swag.com - Visit https://swag.com/twist and use code TWIST for 10% off your order! (36:42) Uber as a super app? (43:30) Instacart filing for an IPO (44:58) Is this the go-to-zero moment for crypto? (1:06:12) Discussing the open version of Twitter FOLLOW Deirdre: https://twitter.com/dee_bosa FOLLOW Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis FOLLOW Molly: https://twitter.com/mollywood

Hey, everybody, it is Thursday. Welcome to this weekend startups. We have an awesome show for you today, sincerely. So good. It's great. It's Thursday. You know what? We're coming down the mountain.

We're sliding into the weekend. And Debo from CNBC's Tech Check is here. Full contact. Deirdreboza is here. And we talk about a wide variety of topics. This is Debo in long form. You don't get her in long form. And she crushed it.

Dude, it is absolutely fantastic. We talked about her interview with Sundar Pichai, which she did like in the hour before she came on our show. The crash in the public markets, crypto, free speech and moderating social media. It is a really wide-ranging conversation and she can hang. It was great. She's a good hang. And you know what? I really enjoyed when we talked about the tech press and coverage and media and how she prepares for interviews, how you prepare for interviews and how we all look at that.

And the standoff between the tech press and, you know, the people who are building. technology in the world. It is a great, I wouldn't even call an interview. It's like a roundtable. It's just tossing the ball around, chewing the fat. We got to have her on more. CNBC, look out. Look out. She's good on podcast. We're coming for Debo. We're coming for Debo. It's going to be a great, going to be a great show. Stay with us. This week in Startups is brought to you by LinkedIn Talent Solutions. A business is only as strong as its people, and every hire matters. Go to LinkedIn.com. slash twist and get a $50 credit toward your first job post.

Scivatar. Implementing cybersecurity for your startup can feel overwhelming and expensive, but it doesn't have to be that way. Scivatar is startup friendly, fully managed, all-inclusive cybersecurity subscriptions. Twist listeners get their first two months free at scivatar.AI slash twist. and swag.com. Swag.com is the best place to buy, customize, and distribute custom gifts and promotional products.

They work with some of the best brands like Yeti, the North Face, Embermugs, and more. Visit swag.com slash twist and use code twist for 10% off your order. All right, everybody. So everybody knows Deirdre is the host or co-host of TechChack. which used to be called Squawk Alley. At some point, they did a refresh.

And it seems like you became the co-host It Girl on the show. That was like you're coming out coronation, I take it? Because before that, were you a contributor? How did that all go for you? I was a reporter. So I focused on certain parts of tech, tech broadly, and then really dived in on certain companies now

as a co-host of Tech Check, kind of do it all. Got it. And John Ford, of course. and producing probably and yeah, if I know our type. Giving Jason a hard time mostly. Giving Jason a hard time. Well, I think it's something to discuss here because people were like, whoa, what did you do, Deirdrude?

Like, you come on to CNBC and she's just like on you. And we had a little on-air thing. We'll throw the clip in here where I was like, hey, Deidjer, if you're going to ask me the question, you've got to let me answer. So we had a little, like, a little chippy moment. But it was all in good fun. You know, what's very unique about this company and this moment in time is we have a generation, really two, millennials.

and Gen Z who are growing up with a level of financial literacy that is greater than any. Hold on. Let me finish Deirdre. Let me finish. The issue here is this group of people is, I do think, correct me if I'm wrong, when you became co-host, I think you did take the approach of, I'm going to be hard hitting. Was that an intentional thing? Did CNBC say, hey, you know what? We want to be a little more hard hitting on the show. Maybe people perceive the show as being, you know, a little too, I don't know, cordial or is that just something you wanted to do? Well, I want, so everything I do comes back to the audience, right? What did they want to hear? And I think that they want to hear answers to the questions that are asked. I try to ask questions with them in mind. What do they want to know? What do they

need to know here? So, you know, as you guys both know, Molly and Jason, CEO's speak and CEO speak. Sometimes they come on with talking points. But, you know, I really feel like people can go to the earnings call or they can go to the annual meeting to hear CEOs speak or guests. When they come on tech check, I want them to answer a question. And so, Jason, all in good fun. And I do too because I know that you can take it as well. And I love hearing your point of view also. So I want to get to it.

But that is really how I approach interviews is I'm not there to please the guest or the CEO or the analyst, whoever it is. I'm there to get the answer for the audience. And sometimes that can come off as, what did you call me, full contact, both of us. Well, I mean, that is the origin of you coming in the show because I was like, Term of respect from Jason. Debo is a little full contact.

And little did you know, I played hockey for 20 years. I know. I don't shy away from that. She's like, get on set. We were like having this DM. She's like, get on center ice. I played hockey. I was like, I'm not getting at center ice with you.

Let's go. Jason, Molly, what about you? Any skating skills or hockey skills or sports? Oh, God. No, no. Volleyball, though, the spike. Oh. Yeah.

It's not an ongoing contact situation for me. me, it's more a murderous spike right at the end. Since I have two lady journalists here in tech, I'm curious for both of you. Do you get... To accomplish professionals? Oh, okay.

Two extremely accomplished professionals, in fact. I see where you're going. No, I, um, do you feel, uh, people, maybe, uh, either guests or the audience hold you to different standards? And is that in your mind when you're like, hey, listen, I, you know, I need to bring it at a different level. Maybe I don't get the same credit. as you know Carl does or J-GAL does or whatever for both of you

Molly I like how you ask it as do we feel as opposed to is that the actual reality which it is yeah yeah yeah I mean that's yeah it is it is people come on the show I don't know if you notice people come on the show and they say hey Jason yeah and I'm like more accomplished person over here over here right here row podcasting Hall of Fame is why I'm a huge fan of Molly too because She gets straight at it. She doesn't mince words. But absolutely.

You should see my Twitter feed, Jason. People are constantly telling me that I'm interrupting or nagging or something, which you never really see the same for a man, right? A woman sounds shrill when you're asking a hard question or you're labeled aggressive instead of assertive. So there certainly is that double standard. But I think that you just, you have to, what I think I always have to be fair and then I'm okay with it. As long as I think I'm being fair and giving, you know, good questions, not gotcha questions.

And I'm willing to take it. So speaking of which and CEO speak and trying to puncture CEO speak, we were watching you this morning on Tech Check do your damnedest with one of the toughest CEOs there is to have a fun conversation with. Sundar Pichaya, say that with all respect, right? Like mad business skills clearly. Yeah. But a tough one.

Let's be honest. He's CEO. Ambien. I mean, I can say that, but I mean, he really is a hard one to get something out of. How do you approach that? I totally agree. He is so calm and collected compared to, especially some of the other big techs. But think about the moment that we are in right now. The markets are going crazy. Apple was down 5% yesterday. It's down again today. Some of the stocks are off 80% they're high. So do we need a Sundarpecheye? Yes. This was the perfect, perfect, perfect moment for him to come on.

I thought that he portrayed clarity and consistency, and that is exactly what the market needs right now. You know, I felt I was there to cover I.O. And there were some really interesting announcements in terms of future devices, in terms of artificial intelligence, language processing, the really technical stuff that he really cares about. But I think, you know, my job in that situation was to bring his sense of calm to the broader markets. as we sat down, the NASDAQ just finished down another 3%. So, you know, I had to ask them, what are you doing in this moment? Why or why isn't Alphabet protected?

And I think my main takeaway is that there are some companies in this moment who are really going to rise to the occasion. They're going to be able to continue to invest for the long term. And while Alphabet will face its fair share of challenges, they're one of them. Yeah, super interesting answer I thought he had to that sort of broader question of like, what are you going to do in a downturn? Everybody, you know, we've been talking on this show about, the lemming effect of layoffs and the contagion of the panic.

And Sundar just sat there and looked you in the eye and said, we're going to hire 12,000 people. We're going to invest insane amounts of money into our company, invest into the downturn unlike. They're going to zag while everybody zigs and loses their head, it seems like. Yeah. Jason, what did you think? I mean,

I thought that was like probably the best part of the interview that came out of the interview because Facebook has a hiring freeze. Uber. I thought that was, by the way, great scoop on Sunday night. We talked about it on Monday. The, you know, Dara is very sober. Listen, you know, we, people want a growth. Then they want profitability.

Now they want free cash flow. No more like EBITA, Mulligans or adjusted EBITA. Let's just throw them, you know, a bunch of cash, right? And so I thought that was particularly interesting and gave me a little hope for the economy that somebody who had been through it. You have to remember, Google's been around a while. Facebook hasn't. So Google's been through the dot-com bust and the Great Recession.

Facebook's been through the Great Recession. And so, you know, he's got the scar tissue as an executive, and he's seen this movie before. If you have the cash reserves, the right thing to do would be to take talent off the market and to ignore the stock market knowing you have a money printing machine. If there's any machine that is immune or, you know, to the market swings in general, variations and recessions, it's the money printing machine of Google search. And Google has, what, 160 billion in cash and cash equivalence, right? But at the same time, you know, one thing he said, I was trying to get him to talk about some

of the rivals, like, why can you hire 12,000 people when Meta has to do a hiring freeze when other companies are going to have to lay off? And he says we're diversified business. That is true, and they're shifting. But we do have to remember that Alphabet, the majority of its revenue is still advertising, right? And advertising can be sort of this canary in the cool mind. We saw that with YouTube. People kind of freaked out last quarter because growth was slower. So it's not that they're immune. It's that they're most immune and resilient. He's sort of had a good, yeah, he's more resilient.

And that cloud business, though, to your point, that cloud business still is playing a distant third, right? But behind Microsoft and Amazon and is not yet profitable. Is that right? that's why they're losing about a billion dollars a quarter but right a billion dollars a quarter it's like pocket change for that especially when this is sort of a secular strategy like the pie is going to increase Google will get there um there'll be a player they already are a player versus questions around some of the other smaller guys so you know and i ask ruth poor at the cfo about that almost every time i talk to her you're still losing money what does that mean really doesn't mean anything to them because it's only a billion dollars yeah our people, and there has never been a better time to grow your business. And LinkedIn Jobs is here

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profile. Did you ever see that where it says hiring and it's in purple? Well, you want to have that on your profile so people know you're hiring. So here's your call to action. LinkedIn jobs helps you find candidates you want to talk to and they help you do it faster. Did you know, know that every week, nearly 40 million job seekers visit LinkedIn? Yeah, they do. And you can post your job for free. That's LinkedIn.com slash twist to post your job for free. Terms and conditions do apply because they're giving you something for free. Well, I mean, and this is the challenge, I think, of what you do every day versus what we do every day, right? Like, we're talking about private markets. We've got this luxury of, hey, a 10-year arc. And then when you're a public

company, you have analysts, you have a daily or you know, a five-day-a-week check-in on your stock for whatever number of hours. And it just changes how you have to communicate. One of the great features of the private market right now is, I'm not pulling up a portfolio of 300 private companies and crying. I mean, I pull up my portfolio of 12 public companies. And I'm like, ah, but I'm not. We invest when companies are worth $5 to $25 million, generally speaking.

That's our sweet spot. You can't really lose when you're investing that early in a company because one, you know, company makes up for a lot. Now, if you are a Sundar, you've got to communicate to the market when everybody's panicking and scared. You have to have a lot of forage to it. I think Bezos had that where he's like, listen, you guys could say whatever you want. The stock price can go wherever it wants. This is what we're doing. We are building for scale. We want to grow. And people didn't believe him for a long time. And I think Sundar has now got that moment where I think

he should just ignore the markets and ignore the stock price and maybe lose $10 billion a year instead of $4 billion on the cloud computing. Because if you're at bronze, what's silverworth? we know what gold is worth. I mean, the Amazon Web Services business is tremendous. You did dive into the Elon situation and free speech. I thought this was one that you could have gone an hour with him. I guess they gave you 20 minutes or 30 minutes.

What do they give you? 15. It's ridiculous. See, this is, I hate that. That's not cool. I would have, yeah,

see, this is where your producers and like CNBC has to say, listen, if you need to sit with us for 45 minutes, if you don't sit with us for 45 minutes, then we're going to tell your story. through your competitors. Like, somebody,

the Trump producers got to be like a little more hardcore. Okay, well, let me play the other side of this. I, especially with Sundar Pichai, I would have loved an hour, five hours with him for sure. I would have even just like 15 more minutes to talk about the really interesting stuff. They announced at I.O. We had to get right to the point, you know? Like, I just met Sundar for the first time.

And I was like, I know you don't want to talk about your stock price, but this is what our audience cares about right now. So we've got to get into it. I will also say, though, that I've done a 10-minute interview with the Canadian Prime Minister and got a lot across. So you do it. There's such, so much preparation put into 10 or 15 minutes with that in mind that it's never going to be enough time.

And that, I guess, would be like one of the biggest challenges about doing TV versus live TV. Love TV. Love to do longer form. But at CNBC, you know what you're getting. You're getting in, you're getting out. And you're not doing your job. Like, I'm not doing my job as the interview if I can't do it in 15 minutes.

It's fry, but I wouldn't love. What's frustrating is like there's so much more you want to do, and then someone will come after you later and be like, I can't believe you didn't ask about this. And you're like, you feel free to do a 15-minute interview with a CEO who operates like 77 different businesses. And you want to ask about at least six of like, totally.

It barely gives you, no, I think the audience really likes to hear. There's something that's great for you to come on and talk about it because people are like, it's so frustrating. that you can't ask the follow-up question about, you know, specific instances of freedom of speech and censorship, you know, an issue there, which Molly's made some very good points about, like, you know, is it really censorship or is this just like a private company? But I thought that what came out of that was very interesting is that Google has one worldview when it comes to search. The law. If it's illegal, let us know, but we are indexing the world's information. And that was made by Google and that was made by Sergey and Larry's philosophy, right?

That's if you want to take something down, you know, go to the law. And we're going to disclose like what legal letters we get. We're going to be happy transparency report. Now, you go to something like YouTube, a community site, slightly different than a search engine because they're not making the content there. They're hosting it. So it's a little bit different. And they're monetizing it.

So they're acting quasi like a publisher, right? They're promoting stuff. they're hosting stuff. And, you know, there's a lot of interesting cases there like people do dangerous stunts and they do hidden camera stuff. Is it illegal? In some cases, but in most cases, no. Should they be hosting that stuff? And then having young people, you know, as but one example, David Dobrick, you know, doing that crazy jump with his Model X,

then some other kid decided to rent a Model S and do the same street jump and crashed his car. Could have killed, like, you know, a poor family that was walking their dog or something. And I've talked to Susan about this and like, you really, you really got to get this under control. So I'm like, oh, am I for censorship? Yeah. Because I'm like, you're really more like a broadcast or like a network. Discovery, you know, or CNBC wouldn't show that stuff or they would really contextualize. So I was curious what your thoughts were on that's something that came out of your discussion, that they do one thing on YouTube and another distinctly different thing on Google search.

It is a great point. And you could tell that he spends a lot of time thinking about this. So there was something at the very end. I'm not sure how many people picked up on this, but finally I asked him about open sourcing a social media platform. Is that the answer? That is what Elon Musk. And even Jack Dorsey have talked about doing so that the responsibility is no longer on the CEO.

You cannot call them a publisher if it's open source because you're letting the audience decide. And I asked him, does that help or does it amplify the problems? And he didn't give a lot. But if you read between the lines, which we always have to do, he said, it's interesting. and I'm glad that's being discussed. What CEO wouldn't love that to be discussed, right? Because it takes the responsibility off of their shoulders. And the idea of open sourcing, right?

You just leave it up to the people who are looking at the content and coding essentially the site, right? So I don't know. I don't know how far that is off. You probably Jason and Molly have a better view of that. What do you think, Molly? Well, I think it's really interesting because YouTube for so long has escaped all of this scrutiny.

right? And YouTube has been employing an algorithm for engagement that has encouraged really dangerous stunts for years. They've had advertiser boycotts over, you know, advertisers who don't want to be put next to terrorist content. And somehow YouTube has managed to sort of like walk this line where they take some stuff down. They leave a lot of stuff up. Yeah. And they never. They demonetize. They de monetize. I mean, honestly, I think in a way, it feels to me like YouTube has figured it out the best because they're like, yeah, what we do is. we take away your reach and your incentive to make money with this stuff. But that took a long time and nobody's yelling at them about free speech. That's totally what Senator Pachai would say. He says sort of the advertiser, the business model works because, as you said, Molly, advertisers don't want to be next to dangerous or controversial content. But I don't know. I also kind of think that YouTube, Google, gets a free pass.

How much of that has to do with what we talked about at the very beginning of this conversation, Sunder Pachai is the most calm, collected. You can say boring. They go to Congress. Everyone wants to jump on Jack Dorsey, Bezos, even Tim Cook. And, you know, you feel kind of bad, you know, taking that same tone with Senator Pachai, because he's such an intellectual, such a technologist that I just, do you think that's fair?

Do you think they're kind of under the radar? I do a little bit. Oh, I think they have done, yeah, to be clear, like, I have done many, many interviews with scholars who are like, here is exactly how people get radicalized via YouTube, right? I mean, I watch, I sit over my son's shoulder. Like, my son is 15 years old. He is into, like, music and cars. And it takes five to seven minutes flat before it's like, would you like to see this video

about how much women suck? Like, wow. It's not that women suck, money. Jordan Peterson. You know, Jordan Peterson. There's a generation of men who don't know how to interrupt. with women and you know, I have my heartbecks for them. That's my, that's my joint impression.

Thank you, Jason. I'm having your impressions. We're so good, Jason. Amazing. I can't remember you more often. So meta. Here's a problem, a lot of startups face. They need cybersecurity, but they don't have the staff to implement it or manage it.

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you can cancel at any time because they're confident you're going to get great great service and value out of scivatore and they're going to get you up and running in less than 60 days so you can use cyvatars premium version right now at no cost but if you want to upgrade you can get the first two months free at saivatar.a i.i slash twist that's c y-v-a-r-a-i-slash-twist for two months free so it is you know, the algorithm I think is a big part of this. I do think that there is something that Larry and Sergey did very specifically. They fired themselves. This was a strategic.

I know this because I know them. They did something very strategic. They put themselves as chairman, you know, board members. They don't go to the office. And they're like, I can't get dragged to Washington or in front of, you know, whoever in parliament and whatever European country, EU, because I don't work there. I am a shareholder.

If you drag me up there, I'm going to say, I don't know. Because I have not been to the office. My key card doesn't work. Like, they literally can take that kind of position. And you know what? It's a true position. They don't know. They've delegated.

Is that calculated? 100%. 100%. They do not want to get dragged there. It's much easier to go for a walk with Sundar and say, this is what we want. And who does Sundar serve at the behest of the board? Who controls that?

the board, Larry and Sergey. But then Sundar is like, I'm the CEO of Alphabet. I don't know. And Susan Wojiki never gets called to Congress. I mean, it just is fascinating. She will. Yeah. I mean, she will.

I mean, I think that was in a way why they made her CEO was so that you could bifurcate these two things. I know this sounds like a crazy conspiracy or chess board, but it is a chess board. You do have to think these things through. I think the thing that's a good strategy. It's a corporate strategy. It's a really good corporate strategy. I mean, this is where Zuck.

I always thought the right movement. for Zuck was to make himself executive chairperson and then put Cheryl in charge of Facebook and that collection and then put some wonky person in charge of META and then he could pull strings from his kiteboard in

Kauai or wherever he is on Lake Tahoe, you know, because that guy needs to stop talking. He needs to stop. It is challenging. Talking about CEO interviews. When is the last time Zuck sat down with a journalist?

Yeah. Yeah, no, I mean, he will, I mean, he's got a very, he's, he's taking a much smarter route, uh, perhaps sinister, but, you think that's smarter? Well, going on Lex Friedman and Tim Ferriss and Joe, and I don't know if he did Joe Roggan, but he did Lex Friedman. And did he do Tim Ferriss was probably? Like he did. You know, like, those folks are so excited about the access. You know, I mean, this is one of the critiques of Karas Swisher, um, is access journalism. Uh, and I don't know that it's, uh, fair exactly, but if you run a conference, that costs $7,000 or $8,000 and you need to get Elon or back

in the day Steve Jobs, maybe you don't want to totally piss them off and lose access to them, but you have power. And so there's this very delicate balance of, man, if I lose Steve Jobs or Bill Gates, you know, and I'm, you know, what does Carras Fisher make and Walt when they were doing that if at a million or $2 million each probably? And so that's like a real business. And if you get big all stars there, it prints money. Trust me, I'm in that business. I know. Those businesses won't last, right? Because you're not getting like true answers, true content. You're not doing it for the right reasons. Molly, I'm interested in your experience. No, no, they will last. They have. They will and they have. You don't need to get the answers. You just need to get the star. You just need

the access. But Molly, I wonder like from your experience as a journalist, I do find that if you ask tough questions, but they're fair, CEOs and guests will come back. They'll kind of, they may not love the question, but they appreciate it. You know, and I think in the end, it makes them look good, but it makes them look more credible if they can sit there and be asked it. So it took me, I would say, like a long time to figure that out. Jason, especially when you called me, you know, full contact Boza, right? Some people don't want to be interviewed by someone who works out.

But I will say, like, the best people do want that kind of interview because it helps their credibility in the long run. Yeah, I 100% agree. I think, and you, the audience feels that they can respect you both in a scenario like that. You can tell and I don't like I don't think it is good for a journalist in the long term to sort of say like yeah, it's cool. I'll have Mark Zuckerberg on and I will agree to only talk about the metaverse. When it's in the middle of the whistleblower scandal. That's not good for either of them. Like it says Mark Zuckerberg is afraid to talk about the real

stuff and this journalist agreed to this like dirty little deal where they're like, I'll just talk about the stuff that they want to make money on in the future and ignore. or everything else, everybody loses. Let me give you an example of that where I turned down an interview, actually. I still wish I had got it, but I couldn't compromise. Jack Dorsey a few years ago granted us an interview on Square. And the condition was no questions on Twitter, not a single one. I said, you know, I'm genuinely more interested in Square than Twitter,

but I can't not ask a question. I can't do my job. And so we never did it. And that was the last time I was offered that interview. Yeah. So, I mean, people don't know this, but it is definitely, it comes into the calculus. And so I think, you know, if you're running events and it is, you know, it is a business, right? Like, so if you're a journalist, that's one thing. But if you're the business owner, and so it does change. So the business owner is going to think differently. And I think, you know, if you, again, to Kara Swisher, she's a business owner. Like she is a freelancer for the New York Times. She owns the event business. she gets a percentage of the, you know, profits of it. So that would be slightly different, right? And you do have a little bit of calculus.

And then some people are just like, you know what? I'm going to opt out and just go direct. So I'm curious how the go direct movement or what you think of that. Because I don't know if it's an or, but I do know, you know, with the reach we have, as one example, we have the Allent Summit this Monday, Tuesday, this Monday and Tuesday, while the press wanted to come. And a lot of the speakers were like, I don't know if I can be as honest

and whatever. I was like, well, you know, we have more reach than any tech podcast or most, any business or tech podcast. So we hit 26 in the rankings last week. This show's number 5, six, seven in the rankings in tech. So we don't need press there. So I was like, you know, let's just try releasing to the feed and the press can just get it all at the same time,

but no press at the event. And so, what is good to know. I'll be like, well, it was just also a fair thing because the thing is sold out and then, you know, 100 press and 50 of them super credible and 50 of them maybe less want to go. And it's just not room. And it also makes the speakers less honest. So I just made, I didn't make. It wasn't my call to me.

It was kind of a vote by besties. See, that is a problem that you just said that, Jason. Less honest. But they're not held accountable. Okay. We're going to ask hard questions. You know that. I mean.

Okay. Well, I don't know what your business model is based on. You are climbing the, and let me first say. that I love your podcast, both of them. You're doing such a wonderful job of going direct. I like to hear these long-form conversations where traditional media may not necessarily have the space or time for

because that business model is different. But let me give you the example of a Coinbase, okay? Brian Armstrong made this big thing when he was building the company. He doesn't want to talk to mainstream or traditional media because he doesn't think that they're going to tell his story. So he went out and told it himself.

Now, Coinbase is in a world of pain, right? We've seen that stock price decline, decline. They're getting looped in with all the other crypto companies. Maybe they're the Google of crypto. I don't know. Maybe they're held to a better standard. But no one really knows that. Like our audience doesn't know because he never talks to us.

Where is he getting that credibility? I think over the long run, you need to build a relationship with media. The media that you trust, no one wants a gotcha interview. But that's like what I spent all my time doing. is getting to know our guests, our CEO, so that they know they're going to get a fair shake. And that helps them in the long term, right? Like, if Brian Armstrong could say, listen, I want to come on CNBC to just tell my story, tell why we're different than some of the other crypto companies,

why Bitcoin's implosion or the stable coin implosion isn't going to sink us, but he hasn't built that relationship. So does he have the same credibility? And it's very short-sighted. And to you, Jason, I would say, you should be held accountable for the all-in summit. Why not? Just why not? Why not?

It's going to be accountable because we're going to release all the files. I mean, people will be able to listen to them. But how does your audience know that the right questions are being asked? I mean, how do they know? Would it be number 26 in the rankings? It's going to be weren't asking the right questions, I guess would be the way I would say. It definitely would be because everybody loves a problem. But that doesn't mean it's worth that today.

I'm saying if you want. No, I mean, Brian Armstrong is a good case because we had him on the podcast a couple weeks ago. And I asked them very tough questions about Tether. And, you know, we asked them. Yeah, so we asked some pretty tough questions. I think there's something going on in media. You know, and listen, we're all tech journalists. And maybe Molly and I a little bit longer than you, Deirder,

we were part of the very campy, cordial moment where in the early 2000s, certainly in the 90s when I started coming up and watching Esther Dyson and some of those folks. And I think, Molly, you caught some of this too. it was almost like the press and the tech industry and the venture capitals were all on the same team. It was very, very cordial and it was all just very geeky. Then as tech became more prominent, you know, there was like more fallout. And obviously I think Facebook and Uber and that like really contentious time period where companies were behaving badly or the impact was really huge. I think it's kind of made a lot of tech leaders say, yeah, I'll go direct.

I'll opt out, which is kind of sad for me because I was a former journalist. I don't know what you think, Molly, about this standoff because I think that's what we're dancing around here is. Some folks are just like, I just don't want to deal with the press anymore. I don't feel like they're treating me fairly, link baiting headlines, whatever. And then they're like, and I can go direct. So I'll just go direct. What do you think, Molly, about this?

I agree. I think we are in a standoff and it's a standoff that occurred because there was increased scrutiny, right? There was an increase in questions about accountability and business model and the do dot com crash wiped out a lot of portfolios. And all of a sudden, people were like, wait, this is an industry that can do real damage. We should start asking more questions. Privacy was becoming a bigger, bigger deal.

Yeah. So when you have a response on the tech side, on the business side to say, okay, our strategy then is like, we don't like this. So we're going to say less. And I think Uber, you know, respectfully, like kicked off that vibe. Yeah. Among these big tech companies. what happens is then the narrative about the tech store companies gets more and more and more distorted

because none of them are out there telling journalists of the truth. And then as a result... Or just talking to them. Just talking to them. They're not talking to them. They have no relationship. When's the last time you saw a Travis interview? And so we're left to exactly.

What do people even know about? What do people even know about Cloud Citchens? He's not just a ghost kitchen. He's a ghost. Basically. He opted out completely. And as a result, though, the only way for journalists to construct a narrative about businesses that have a massive impact on the world.

That is why we are doing this work. I just reverted to the we. Because is from like what they say on Twitter, right? Or whatever clues we can get. And so it's like, look, in the absence of any other information, I just have to go on what I see. And then this tech CEO is like, that's totally inaccurate and unfair. And it's like, well, that tell me.

Yeah. Right. And so with the tech, I mean, I'm interested in your position on this as like you got to experience. Like, I think, I'm not sure when you started as a report. but I would perceive it like, you know, in the 2010 time period. Am I right? I was in Asia. Well, that's a whole other story, but I started as a journalist in China where access is very different.

Wow. Be careful. Yeah. I think it's better to be in America at this point. Wow. You've been followed by way worse people than Emil. Oh, yeah. I have been for it.

I mean, actually, when I came to San Francisco, that was the point where I was like, whoa, why isn't anybody talking to me? I came here, 2016, as Uber was imploding, nobody would talk to me, right? They said, you could be tech reporter. So I came here and I'm like, I'm ready. I'm ready to be the tech reporter except that nobody will talk to me. Which was good because you build your reputation and it took me so many years, right? You asked me, you're kind of like, what were you doing before you were anchor of tech check?

I was building those relationships and building that reputation that when you come on and talk to me, I'm not looking for a headline. I'm looking to tell your story in a nuanced way over the long term because you are either a public company or you're going to be a public company. So you need someone who understands us. To Molly's point, who will understand your narrative so that investors, our huge audience will believe you. If you go direct, people know that they're being fed something. Even if they don't know what it is, they know that there's some other incentive at work, I think. If you like delighted customers and employees with amazing swag, well then swag.com is the place for you.

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I'm hoping the balance can come back. I think it is coming back. I will say. No, I think it is. Yeah. I feel like we're working through the issue because there was a moment in time where I would, the only calls I got were like bad news calls. And like, especially from the New York.

York Times. It was just like, you know, or even CNBC, you know, and I understand it, because I'm associated with like saying Uber. They were like, come on and talk about Uber. Come on. I'm like, listen, you have me on to talk about something else. You know, I don't want to be the proxy for Uber. And, you know, in fairness, the producers, they were like, okay, let's, let's take these, you know, next two hits off from Uber. And let's talk about some other topics, you know, like, because and then it's when you're, when you're the subject and the only thing you hear is bad news, bad news, problem, problem, problem. You're like, okay, well, this isn't worth my time.

I think that's what a lot of them are like is. I would rather tell my story. Is the problem, the question, or is the problem Uber? Because I know you and I are based on this, and I just don't know that there's been really good news on Uber for like as long as I've been here. Right. Well, actually, I think it's pretty great news now. I mean, the focus level has been great and doubling revenue.

And like, it's trading for one point X times. It's, it's, it's, uh, revenue. So I disagree with another time. for that conversation. We could do a whole hour on it. But, you know, I think at the end of the day, profit is a real metric. And it's going to be a money printing. It will be a money printing machine just like Uber or just like Google or Facebook, you know, and Amazon. They're just going to turn the dial. And that's what people are. I most thing. What I like about Uber is it's transparency. They know that they haven't done a good job in telling the story to the market.

So they're being transparent. I think that Dara is very good. I love a CEO who will come on TV when his stock is down. like 20% shows a lot of confidence. Great communicator, yeah. The story, though, I still have not bought in. I do not. The goal post changed. Yeah, I mean, time will tell. I think these super apps have proven themselves in, you know, Asia.

Come on. Yeah. Well, you know, it's interesting. I was using Uber to get to my hotel in Miami here. And then it was like, I need to get some, you know, bottles of water for my hotel room and some food. And then, you know, we're hitting Uber eats while I'm on the way to my home. hotel. And so this idea that groceries, food, travel, and then experiences hotels, you know, and if you look at his background, where did he come from? He knows how to book hotels.

He knows how to book flights. He knows, and then they got the taxis. So I know, but all you're talking about is a business model to book. You're not talking about a business model that's innovative or doing something disruptive. Um, well, I think taking out friction and making people's lives easier with this stuff is pretty innovative. And having it all... Is that worth $100 billion? I think it's going to be worth... I think it could be worth the trillion if you put Expedia with travel with food.

Yes, I think it could be a trillion in our company, actually. I would argue that more than Expedia, he's probably going for Wii chat. Like, and Uber is nowhere near WeChat yet. Nobody is in America. Nobody is anywhere near that level of super app. And frankly, our regulators might never let them get there. You know the dark horse in the super app world? But if they could, it'd be amazing.

Do you know. Snap. I actually think Snap is closest to being a super app than any, then I can't really think of anyone else. But you've got their own sort of app ecosystem within the app. You can go through different things. So I actually think app is, I mean, Snap is closest,

but I'm with you, Molly. Nowhere is even close to a WeChat. You can't like book your doctor's appointment. How do everything. You're supposed to have your whole life in the app if it's really a super app. Yeah. I think if all of a sudden you woke up one day and you could send money in Uber to another person, You know, you can split bills now.

And when you were in a new city, it said, hey, do you want to see a show tonight? And it said, hey, do you want one of these premium reservations like Open Table does? You start to see those things show up and I think you will. But I see what Deirdre's saying, though, about community. That all is still ultimately booking. That's just sort of like logistics, which there's probably a lot of money and a lot of big to be taken in logistics. But what you can also build is community and chat and interaction and sharing, then your Wii chat. like maybe an Uber bought Snap.

I don't know if anybody saw that. Well, if you are also, if you look at what you love. Or Snap on Uber. Or Snap on Uber. I think it would have to go your way around, right? I think Twitter is on the way going there if you along gets it. I mean, you may have seen he wanted to put payments into Twitter and, you know, according to the leaked documents.

Again, I have no information. But he did, there was this leaked document that said, hey, here is, what if you had payments, right? And so if Twitter users, send each other money. Kind of neat, right? Oh my gosh, you want to be in the fintech space? I mean, this is a space that's just crumbling because so many companies,

so much money got into it. And they all want to be what you're talking about, the one-stop shop for everything financial services. And now they're all just getting crushed because they have users. I mean, like even like a soapy, which has been pretty good at cross-selling. Brutal. I just got it. I just did a super follow for the first time.

I don't know if you guys have seen that, but somebody who I like was He was an NBA analyst worldwide wobb. He's just a commenter. And he's floated around between different people. And he had super follow there. And I just saw it when I was on the flight. And I was like, oh, I love that guy. I want to support him.

Oh, $2.99 a month. I'll just give him $2.99 a month. So he does more tweets because I appreciate him. So like Patreon being built into Twitter, I think Elon might pull that string. And it could be very interesting. I would love to see Uber by Twitter. And that would be pretty great. And you'd have all those accounts, right?

and just people being able to at mention. Imagine I said, you know, at, you know, D underscore Bosa, you know, $10. Or I said at Amnesty International, $10, hashtag Ukraine. And I knew that my $10 donation went to the Ukraine fund by Amnesty International. And Amnesty said just, hey, at mention us and put. But why would Uber help Twitter do that? Shouldn't they buy a fintech company like a Venmo or a square cash? When you're good at making apps and you have over $100 million or $300 million or $400 million credit cards,

whatever it is. Sometimes you can just build these things yourself pretty quick. They built eats. They built the grocery business. They bought Drizley. So sometimes you buy something. I think they bought Drizley for the licenses more than anything, like the regulatory stuff. But I don't know if you've ordered alcohol on either GoPuff or Uber. It's a pretty compelling experience as well. And I think they'll get into weed. There's no doubt in my mind. Uber will buy a cannabis company and deliver weed as well. I don't know how far we want to go into things. but I use Instacart a lot more,

which has a lot of the same things for rides. Love Instagram. But they've been able to take so much market share. We'll see. It's interesting how the space, the gig economy space as a whole, I'm so curious how this will shake up, especially now with Instacart filing confidentially.

For an IPO, yeah, news today, actually, which did surprise me, sort of. I mean, I guess Instacart probably used IPO now or never. That is a good point, because I think the IPO window could slam shut during the recession, But I think them... I already thought it was closed. Exactly.

I was shocked. Locked, shut. What are they thinking? Either they have extremely good financials to show that the market is going to be like, wow, you're the best of these gay economy companies. They do have an interesting... Or a low-valuizing business, right, which they already marked down. But do they also need a lot?

I think it would be crazy. Some people have said that they just desperately need the cash. I'm not sure I buy that. Because if you're going out in this market to find cash, you're going to be very disappointed. It has to be the latter. I think it shows some confidence, maybe they're CFO, right? Nick Gianni from Goldman Sachs. He did the IPOs there.

So there's something that he's seeing that's telling him now might be the moment to go public, which is just crazy to most people looking at the markets right now. And Grindr, Grindr is going to smack. I mean, that's a money printing machine too. Grinder at least is a recession-proof business in some ways. Like I might be countercyclical. If you're depressed and it's a recession, you might want to hook up more. Exactly.

Yeah, I don't, I'm not. hearing good rumors about Instacart. I'm not sure that that S-1 is going to. Spacks don't instill a lot of confidence, but an IPO might. I think the IPO, yeah, so. Well, as long as we're talking about the crash, do you have time to talk to us a little bit about crypto? Is this like the go-to-zero moment?

Oh, my goodness. Are you asking me? Uh-huh. Are you allowed to have an opinion? Or do CNBC say, don't have an opinion, just report the facts? CNBC, okay, and you're like, did someone tell you to be full contact, but no, no one tells me. No one tells dear that.

They do tell. New York Times just told their reporters get off Twitter and stop having so many opinions, right? So the media companies are trying to. I heard anything like that. But for example, when I come talk to you, I get a clear and say, okay, can I go on a podcast? Is that okay? And they don't tell me anything what to say. They just see if it's aligned.

And I do to the earlier conversation, too, going direct, I do love different parts of that. I love that I'm able to come on to your podcast and have a longer conversation that we can't necessarily have. You're good on a pod. You're better on your pod. You're better on a pod. CNBC is going to regret this. You're going to start getting some podcast offers. Bill's Simmons is looking for a tech podcast, I understand. So with crypto, I've been, what's the word? I'm not, I'm a skeptic, right? Because we, for good reason, there are so many scams in this place. But do I believe in the underlying technology? Yes, I have made that very clear. I put my son's birthday and Christmas

this money into Bitcoin and Ether, don't tell him right now. But, you know, I do believe over the long run, I don't know what it's going to look like, but I do think that this technology is extremely important. So no, I do not think it's going to go to zero. Is it going to look completely different? Good chance of that. Are there a ton of scams in the space? Yes, Jason, you and I have been extremely skeptical of Tether, the stable point.

Does that mean the whole system is broken? maybe right now, but will it always be? No, I still believe in the long term. I don't think it's going to zero. Speaking of Tether, they depegged. I don't know if I like that word. They unpegged? What's the word here?

They missed the peg? I like depegged. Okay. You didn't sound like a choice. They did not choose to depegged. It was depagged by the law. I like that. Yes.

Yes, it was not in their control. So they went down. I was like, I was like three in the morning because I was on Pacific coast time and I'm here on the East Coast. I'm like up at 3 in the morning and everybody's like, hey, Jake Al, you've been waiting for this. It's 94 cents and that's like, whoa, that's, it has happened, but it's rare. And then they were, did some announcement that they were moving stuff from one chain to another. And that's after Luna and US, USDT. No, UST, UST, UST, which is Terra as opposed to USDT, UST, T just collapsed and Luna collapsed and we covered

that, obviously. Lost the peg, thanks to your audience. Lost the peg. Thanks. Lost the peg. Got smart. It's kind of like not, it's like your boats out there and it's connected to a mooring and like you disconnected, you lost a mooring and you're lost your anchor.

It's kind of like losing the anger. The boat is not used to depag. The window. Depegged it. Let's be clear here. Yes. It became untethered from the peg. Oh, hello.

Even more confused. I think what's going on here, I've got to be honest, is I, I think, you know, as the tide goes out, and we were talking about like Lake Tahoe and some lakes because of the drought are like, Lake Mead is going down Deirdre. And they're like, oh, yeah, we found a body in a barrel from 1980. We can close that case. And the sheriff's like, yep, happens every time, you know. There's going to be more. When it recedes, we found all the bodies.

And like, you know, that's what's going to happen right now. And if they don't have the reserves and people are redeeming. Well, okay, I think there's an important distinction to make here. So if there's, this is a horrible analogy, if there's a body at the bottom of Blake, that's U.S.T. Right? That is going to be the algorithmic stable coins. Is it going to be Tether and some of the other ones that are backed by commercial paper,

even though we may not know what that is? I'm not so certain that Tether is going to go to zero. I mean, we don't know what's backing it. We don't know what kind of commercial paper. But my guess is that as it went from zero to 20 to 60 to $80 billion in market cap, they're probably cleaning up the back end, don't you think? That was my thesis. Let's make a

fail in the, if it was a scam or a Ponzi, you know, who knows if it is, the, the, AG in New York seems to think it is. Canada ban them.

So you start having these regulators banning it and having concerns. That's rare. Then the CEO and CFO, like not doing television, you got one person to come on. But the founders, two of them, yeah,

but the CTO and the CFO, I think, who are weird cats, and they were really nervous when you interviewed them, congratulations on that get. But the two founders and the CEO are offshore somewhere and they won't come there. At a certain point, you have to look at the cumulative evidence and say to yourself,

this is distinctly different than Jeremy Aller in the United States being regulated, doing his own proactive, essentially like showing you the books and saying, we will not hold commercial paper. And they were so squirrely with you. And you asked them about Chinese paper. And it's like, it's really hard for us as journalists or, commentators to say something's a scam, but I can say, these six things cumulatively do not look good. Well, and that's why it's so important for these CEOs to sit down for interviews with journalists,

because when you have all of that, seriously, when you have all of that smoke and you're trying to sort of like figure out, is this real? And then you see an interview and you see a human interaction in which the human on the other end of the hard questions is like, eh, uh, uh, you would swirming on that interview. I don't which one was a seat here. Tell us about that. Tell us how you got it and what your impression was. And then what is your... So how'd you get it, the impression of it, you're like in the moment,

because I thought you did a great job, by the way. And then number three, how do you, as a journalist, at a prestigious, the most prestigious, you know, finance network? How do you balance, like, smoke, fire, you know, all this stuff? But you can't come out and be as maybe as candid as I can. You have a little bit of a different benchmark. I think. So tell us how you...

I'm very careful. I wouldn't say, I try to be candid, but I'm very careful because I know what we say on CNBC. That's why we don't cover like penny stocks, right?

Because you could say something about them and actually move them. So we just have to be really careful. People are trading on information that we're uncovering or bringing with Tether, Jason. It's funny because it actually happened. One weekend, you were tweeting about Tether.

And I was thinking, what's Jason going on about? And I think I said something to you Like come on CNBC And I spent the whole weekend, Jason, reading up, talking to people. I was very nervous, actually, ahead of this interview

because it's a really complicated thing. It took me a really long time to understand how it even works what a stable coin is. I had to talk to so many different people and just go and say, I just don't get this thing. Like, what is it? what is it backed by?

How do we not know how much commercial paper could there be in the world that if it's this big no one knows who they are. Once I started asking those questions, it seemed very obvious that like, what is this thing?

When I spoke to you, it was funny, I like to give you some debate, Jason. Yes, well, good in it. You were like, this thing's a scam and I said, well, who cares? Who's using it? You know, crypto-native that just need it as a tool.

And they liked that line of questioning because I kind of stuck up for saying, like, why does it actually matter? It didn't actually. So they thought that I was, you know, a good person to give an interview to. And I didn't. I didn't try to do anything different. I just wanted I said, here's all the questions I have. I'm not trying to get you.

I just, can you answer them? And then they were answering them. And I said, why aren't you answering these questions? Why did you come on here if you're not going to answer a question? And then they started to get very uncomfortable. The whole conversation was right. Sweating. Yeah.

And I still, I mean, I don't have. I don't have a bad relationship at all with the tethered people. I welcome them on all the time. I don't think I asked anything that was unfair. I just asked them for information that should be really obvious. Right? They shouldn't have a tough time. Yesterday, yeah.

Yesterday I gave the example of Bethany McLean at Fortune, who asked at an Enron shareholder meeting, like, how do you guys make money? Right? And it was that question and the piece that she wrote after where she was like, turns out no one can answer that question that led to the unraveling. Like, it is 100% our job. to ask those fundamentals, like even up to and including, why is this so complicated? And it's not our job to sound smart, right?

Sometimes, Molly, it's the simplest questions that reveal the most. Yeah. How do you make money? How do you make money? Why aren't you profitable? Can you be profitable? Like, these are very basic questions. And I think there is something happening in crypto, but Molly and I talked about it on

the show just, I don't know, it was yesterday the day before, where if something is so complex that the person who made it can't explain it to you. as a journalist, a finance journalist on CNBC, Molly from Marketplace, New York Times, and CNET, Jason Gallaghanes, investor in 300 companies. Like, we know what we're talking about. We're amongst the most in the no people. And you can't explain to us how the algorithmic,

because I had Doquan on from Luna. I took like three shots of like, can you explain this to me? And I couldn't get it. And I'm starting to think, am I an idiot? it. Is this crypto stuff? And you know what? I said to myself, no.

This is exactly what happened with the default swaps and the mortgage back securities in 2008. They were too complex as a way of obscuring and obscuring the drift. And so I think that when a crypto project is so complex that it can't be explained, I think everybody's alarm bells should go off. things in the world are not that complex. And when they are made to be that complex and the person can't explain them to you, I think that that is a potential sign

that something's not right. It could be that something is super complex, but generally it's a red flag for me. Can I give a counter argument here, though? Sure, please do. Yes, that's why you're here. There is so much in the crypto world that I can't understand. And I'm happy to admit that. And what I'm told by some very smart people

who I do trust in the industry, like a Sean McGuire at Sequoia, right? He has a pretty good view. And I asked him, I said, people are investing in crypto. They don't understand how the technology behind it works. Does that mean that they shouldn't be investing? Like, you look at someone buying a share of Apple, right? They understand demand for iPhones.

They understand the product. And he had a good point. He said, think about the internet when it was being built. You couldn't know the average person didn't understand it. It didn't mean that it was useless or it wasn't a real business. It was, you can't understand all the technology. behind it, we still use it. It is still, you know, a big thing today. So it is really hard to figure out when you have to sort of trust in the technology. We're not engineers that like you said,

we're journalists. But you're also right. And those simple questions, you can kind of get to the core. If you can't answer the very simple ones, it's probably. I would say there's a, there's a difference between the base layer of technology and the mechanism, right? Like, I don't need to understand the code behind the internet. I don't need to understand how TCPI works and I don't need to understand all of the layers. But what I do need someone to be able to say is it connects computer so you can share information. Right? And like, well, that was exactly what I was going to say, Molly. Yeah. Yeah. When you talk to Doquan and he can't say, oh, well, what happens is I invented Luna. I tied it to Terra. As long as Luna has some value,

Terra can be worth a dollar. If that goes away, it won't be. If you can't say that. And then there's this anchor thing. What? Right. And then then the. And then there's this anchor thing where we're loaning, or you're giving us some Bitcoin to stake it. Define staking. Oh, you're giving 19.5% an interest. Who's giving the interest? Where does that money come from? Because that's venture returns. Stock market returns 7% of VCs return 20% every year. How do you, who took the loan and who's giving that money? And they can't explain it. And it is complex. You know, Web3 is a collection of like 10 different technology. You could talk about encryption. You could talk about blockchain. You can talk about distributed technology.

There's so many pieces to it, of course. But Bezos doesn't have to explain to you TCIP and your web browser and, you know, HTML to explain, you one click, you buy a book, it comes to your door. And I think a lot of these crypto folks use the technology as a way of obscurifying the grip. And we'll see when the tide goes out, what reality is. They're using the enthusiasm, right? I mean, crypto has just been this mainstream thing, whereas when Terry used to came out, everyone was like, A lot of people were like, hold on a second. An algorithmic stable coin, like, no.

All you need to do is read like Matt Levine's newsletter, right? That breaks it down. It's like in the sphere of scammy things, this is extremely, extremely scummy. But there's other people out there who may not be interested. They just want to get in on this crypto gold rush. And those are the people, all three of us, are trying to ask questions for, right? Make it as simple as possible so that they don't buy and they need. know that there's different levels of internet companies or crypto companies.

Well, no one wants to be the person who says, including Doquan, and this is what's so interesting about crypto in general is, again, there's the underlying technology, and then there's the part that is literally enabled, like you just said so well, by enthusiasm, by community. And so at the heart of that is, if no one believes that Luna is real, oh, it's definitely not, it goes to zero. The end, right? He doesn't want to say that. He doesn't want to have to come on a podcast and be like, yeah, the truth is,

Luna only exists because I made it up. And so as a stake in Terra, it will only work if you believe me. Yes. Like money in the real world. Very risky thing to say. But that's like financial instruments, too. Let's be fair. That is actually how financial instruments work as well.

If the market believes you, then this will go on forever. I mean, it's only a Ponzi scheme until they actually create something, right? And Jason, you operate in the startup world. So you know that as well. I mean, you're giving money based on dreams. they have a certain amount of time to achieve that. Yeah. So in fact, they should just say it.

Like, it would be more, it would be more interesting, honest. They just said it. And they were like, we believe there's enough enthusiasm and excitement in this community cares. And then we can create a whole new transformative financial tool, but it relies on all of you. Well, Sam Bankman-Fried talks in those terms. And I think that's why he is one of the most credible people in crypto. And a lot of people point, care and listen to what he says, because I do think he's more

willing to talk in those terms, more candid, more honest. The challenge for me with crypto is, you know, if you look at what we, what was created in Silicon Valley long before I got here and long before I started investing 12 years ago, 11 years ago, there was this milestone-based investment system. You convince a couple of angels about your dream, friends and family, they give you 100K, they give you $250K,000. You build some sort of prototype. You're like, hey, isn't this interesting?

You know, I'm Tony Fidel. Here's like a nest. kind of thermostat thing I'm building up in Tahoe, it almost works. And then they give you more money, right? And you get the $2 million check or the million dollar check. Then you get the product to market. You get 100 customers. They give you the $20 million check.

What is really inspiring, interesting, and broken about crypto is they're like, oh, you have this dream. Great. Let's give you $100 million to pursue it. And then let's tell everybody in the world that this is the dream. Here's the white paper. And everybody can participate in it. And you're like, that's breaking securities law.

You're knowingly doing that. People are not buying this for token for utility. None of them are using it in any utility way. They are all buying it based on pure speculation, hoping it goes to the moon. So you're breaking securities law. Somebody got $100 million and put it in Panama in some foundation that nobody knows the board members of. And when you break the milestone-based system, what you're doing is saying, you know, what, we're going to give a 12-year-old the keys to a Mack truck.

like what the fuck do you think is going to happen? Like you get your driver's license at 15 or your permit. You can drive during the day with a parent next to you. You can go within X number of miles of your house. Like there's all kinds of controls on this. And I think there are controls in our economy and securities law for a reason. You don't want to have a 12-year-old behind a Mack truck or flying, you know, a 747. You know, you learn you get your license.

You pilot a small plane. You get a bigger plane. you go certified you get tested we need regulation here and i think that's what's going to happen this next year so much money's going to be lost so much pain horribly people are going to commit suicide because they lost their fortune so much suffering is going to happen that regulator is going to be like stable coins you want to make your own currency which countries do no no more of the stable coin nonsense and you got to audit and you can be this size and you need to have insurance and you need to act like a bank enough of them is chugina play by the rules and i'd

I think that's what the SEC is failing. They have to play by the rules. There's a rule set here for a fucking reason. Play by the rules. Everybody. The crypto world, I'm sorry, Jason, the crypto world will argue that who's policing traditional finance, right? We talk about money laundering and scans.

And they don't be right about that too. Yes. Lots of things are true. I understand what they're saying. Regulators don't necessarily do a good job policing the existing system. And the crypto companies would argue that they want in. because they also, again, there's different degrees of this, right? There is Terra, USDA, there is tether, there is circle.

And I think they welcome, at least the better ones, welcome regulation so that at least they have that stamp of approval. Stuff's going to get through, of course, like a judgment. I hate this argument that like everybody else is committing crimes, so why don't we get rid of the cops in the justice system? It's like, well, okay, not fair either. I feel like the crypto people are not sincere in this. They're like, oh, you know, why should the government get to decide?

It's like because people deserve some level of protection. You know, because maybe it's more efficient. I'm Canadian, as you know. Jason, Molly, maybe you don't know. I have to transfer money from Canada to the U.S. on occasion. Why does this take me two days? Why do I have to pay a big fee to a bank? It's been five years of this and it just continues to, I continue to be flabbergasted

over how inefficient and terrible the system is, yes, crypto does promise to solve that if the regulators could get their act to other, or whatever, if the banks want to do it fine, but that is the technological promise that I do think is worth something. Yes, I agree with you. That is super valuable.

That's the promise. If you strip it down to the simplicity of that, and then you try to understand Jack Dorsey saying, like, Bitcoin could bring about world peace, it's because there will, And there could in fact be a truly equitable access to currency. Yeah. Which is the exact same argument as communism, right?

And once you get people and their motivations and their greed and their ability to manipulate existing, you know, new technology to their own advantage, then you have to put into place rules and you have to create centralization because at scale, as soon as humans come in, that whole dream falls apart. Yeah. It is about access. Molly, bang on. I like that.

Yeah, I mean, I do like, I mean, I bought Bitcoin on that promise. We're thinking about people in not developed countries that need this way more than any of any of other.

Reparations and people who are unbanked but have mobile phones. Like there is, I mean, that is the promise that I put my own teeny amount of money into Bitcoin on. Because it's like that is true.

truly transformative. But what happened is became too good of a store of value and then everything got financialized around it. We created all these sketchy financial tools around it. I agree with that. Those poor truckers, those poor Nazi truckers in Canada couldn't get through big quote. Wow.

Wow. That was just a little poke. Sorry. She's from Canada. You're triggered by it. I had no choice but to go there. No choice. He had no choice. Well, no, there are pros and cons to all of this. Like you think about the freedom of money and you know, no KYC and no fees and then the fluidity of it and, you know, if there are some that

are anonymous and you really have to think this experiment through. It goes back to the censorship one in the open, which I wanted to double click on before, the open version of Twitter, the open version of Facebook. Okay, now you got an open version. Okay. Now Alex Jones is torturing the poor parents of the, you know, the kids in, remind me of the Sandy Hook. Sandy Hook kids. These poor parents, right? And okay, now it's a decentralized version. He says even more outrageous stuff. That's a false flag and these parents' kids aren't dead and they're actors.

And there's nobody to stop them because there's no centralization. And it trends even more. And these crazy people are like, I need to give Alex Jones money because he's saving America from the Pizza Gate, you know, Clinton and all this aliens and stuff like that. And it's like, okay, now nobody can stop this maniac. and who does he go after after the Sandy Hook parents? And then who has people on their doorstep

because now he's got, he's trending on the decentralized social network that nobody controls. But hold on, hold on. If you don't let this guy speak, we're going really deep now. If you don't let this guy speak, people are going to think

there's some conspiracy. At least the craziness is out there on display, right? If you don't see that at all, and I think this is probably like Elon Musk's argument, right? You build it up. You're not actually creating any discussion.

It's like the whole question of should Donald Trump be back aloud on Twitter, right? There may be a part of the population that thinks it's being hidden from them. There's a conspiracy that is hiding what he's saying from them. 70 million people probably believe that, Deirdre. Right. So it's better to have that craziness on display and let people make up their minds. I don't know. I'm not saying, I think, one way or the other.

It's a challenge of our era. Yeah. It's the problem with a, I think Alex Jones is just such a great example. Molly and I talk about him all the time because if you take the legal approach, like breaking the law, you know,

he is now being sued into oblivion, but that took seven or eight years. On a private company, in a private company, whether it's YouTube or Twitter or Facebook, you can say, you know what? Not for me.

I'm the CEO. I own this. I just don't want to be party to somebody saying something so offensive and hurtful to parents going through the most painful any human can suffer the death of a child. And I just choose not to have that on my platform.

And, you know, I choose not to let people send anonymous money to this person. Whereas with President Trump, you know, it's like, well, some number of people voted for him. You know, he hasn't been convicted of January 6th yet. Maybe he'll get sanctioned for it. It's a really difficult, I call it like the modern trolley car problem. Everybody's aware of the trolley car problem where it's like these great philosophical problems. I like something in between what happened and the open

anybody can do whatever they want which is... Now you're sounding like a tech CEO Jason. I know. I like the time-based ones. It's philosophical. They want somewhere in the middle, but then that ends up being no policy at all. This is why it's so hard and this is why it's so polarizing because you cannot have that middle ground at some point. You're going to have to make those tough decisions. I know I like time-based.

The reason you can't... The reason you can't have that middle ground is because what it leads to to is effectively the long history of no rules that allowed for algorithmic amplification that started to financially incentivize more and more and more extreme speech so that you got to a point where you had, you know, we all act like Trump came along before these platforms were toxic and had a moderation problem. They had it all along and they had it because they were trying to find this middle ground, but also make money by amplifying certain kinds of speech and allowing for the monetization of that speech.

And so then once you got to the point where it was like, oh my God, this guy is tearing down to my, he's like literally he personally responsible. His account is responsible for like at one point 80% of the misinformation that was on the web coming from this one account because of this attempt to have this middle ground the whole time. Like you can't, I just don't think you can have this argument without the context of all of the kind

of failures of moderation that happened that got us to. the Trump nuclear bomb. What are the things, Deirdre, that you would improve? Because I think this is where, like, we all talk about, okay, chaos and, you know, just anything goes, we probably don't want that. Secret people putting their thumbs on things and shadow banning people. I think a lot of people would agree, like, we don't want that. So on a practical basis, two or three things you would do, I think we just go around the horn, to make it feel or to trend it towards, you know, what's good for society and what you think is good for society. Do you have like two or three suggestions?

Honestly, no, this is too hard of a question for me. This is not my job. I do not know because you say you want one thing and then you give up another. I really feel for the people that have to do this, from the CEOs to the regulators, I do not know what the answer is. The question of free speech is an age-old question. I do not know because, and I'm not even prepared to say one thing that I want. Like I said, you may give up something else down the road.

Personally, though, I do like to see everything. So I don't know, but again, you bring up the example of Sandy Hook. Do I want parents to have to relive trauma? Absolutely not. Will I give up some of my views? What I see for that parent? Yes. But I don't know.

How do you decide that on an individual basis? Yeah. I think, I mean, I think you raised the key point, which is that it's really hard. And anybody who thinks it's easy, including, you know, Elon? Including the elephant in the room, Elon? I don't think he thinks it's easy. He doesn't think it's easy. He thinks it's complex, but I think he thinks there's something.

different to be done. I have actually a couple of feelings on it. I think the first step is to stop talking about the polarized views of this and to just start going full transparency case by case and that would at least give us a framework. So with Trump or with Sandy Hook, we never got to see what was happening. I would like to have a log file of all the actions taken. If you look at what what Facebook did a really interesting thing. They, after the, after the advertising thing, there was an advertising thing. They said, here's the Facebook ad manager. So there's a thing called Facebook ad library.

And you can see every ad. So they just played it transparent. I'd like to see every account that was, and I'd like all the academics to have access to it, every account that was turned off, every action that was taken categorized, and just let those academics or individuals say, hey, here's the moderation actions going on. and here's how the decisions were made. Let's have a discussion about it. I think that would be a good first step.

That does also assume that there was decision, right? Like, we also don't, I don't think we should safely assume there was moderation decisions happening all along, right? Like, one of the big knocks on Trump was that he had violated the terms of service over and over and over. And it wasn't until the 37th really egregious time that Twitter was like, okay, we have a rule now. And our rule is if you're newsworthy, we don't, right?

Like, you can't really be transparent about a system if that system doesn't exist. Yeah. I agree. And that's why it should be transparent because then you'd say, okay, you're not even making a decision here. There's no decision being made. And then in some cases, people are like, you know, I don't know if Ivermectin works or not. And they're ban their account.

And you're like, I didn't say I'm pro or not. I just said, I don't know. And like people had their accounts banned for just saying the word avrimectin. And it's like, okay, that doesn't work either. In terms of that transparency, we know that this is an extremely difficult, delicate topic. I don't think Zuckerberg is doing himself any favors by not talking about it, right? I mean, I asked Sender Pachai, what does free speech on the internet mean? He gave a very nuanced, careful answer, but that's helpful.

How are you thinking about it, right? You don't need to have the answers. No one expects you to have the answers or say that you don't have free speech, but how are you thinking about it? And I think that Zuckerberg is putting his back against a wall by never talking about it, because on everything he does, you don't understand where it comes from. Yeah. Yeah. There is a, if you guys haven't seen it, there is transparency report.govorg.com.

And, you know, this, you know, this kind of exists in the world already for search. They just need to copy what's being done already for Google search, where they just like, here's the dangerous sites. Here's why we took them out of the index. Here's what governments are asking us. Here's the subpoenas we get. And they did that. So when they take stuff down, the government can't be like, take this down. without sending them a notice.

They're like, send us the notice. We're going to share the notice unless it's, I guess there's a fin record or something where you can have like things taken down or data requests without tipping your cards because that would tell the criminal like you're going after them. Anyway, listen, over an hour with Deirdre, she usually gets 50.

So great. So great. With the Beau. This is fun. This is the best. Your good long form. CMPC is got to give Deidre a little. raise here because

you need your own show Bill Simmons and a bunch of other podcast networks now know that Debo is good in long form. You're good in long form. I'm just happy to talk to the two of you. Molly, an absolute pleasure. What a delight.

Let's hang out. Jaycal, are we friends? Are we friends? I think you're great. I'm just joking. Of course. You know, I love you. We're besties. I think we're besties after this. We are. So anyways, we'll see you on tech check soon.

Yes, I'll come on soon. Give you a hard time. Just kidding. I love it. I love it. Let's go on. Let's do it. I want to talk about Uber.

I want to come on and talk about like this tipping point for Uber. So maybe after all in Summit, I'll come on and we'll talk about the chances of and profitability in the Uber, maybe, you know, share the super app conversation we had here, which I think is a super interesting one that people aren't talking about. Thank you both so much for having me. Thank you. Thanks, Deird. Make sure you upload that audio file for us.

Cheers. Take care. Bye.