This Week in Startups - Tech reactions to Roe vs. Wade leak + $UBER, $LYFT and $ABNB earnings | E1451

Episode Date: May 5, 2022

First Jason and Molly discuss the way tech is impacted by the leaked Supreme Court Roe vs. Wade decision (2:20). Then they break down the differences between a Lyft and Uber’s Q1 (52:18). To wrap, we discuss AirBnB’s strong quarter and upcoming big announcement (1:03:48). 00:00 Jason and Molly intro today’s show 02:20 Catching everyone up on the history of Roe v. Wade 11:01 Odoo - Get your first app free and a $1000 credit at https://odoo.com/twist 12:06 When has a federal right been taking away before in the US? 14:45 Tech’s reaction to Roe v. Wade being overturned 20:02 iTrust Capital - Visit https://itrust.capital/twist to create your Crypto IRA today 21:10 How much should companies engage in these conversations? 33:22 Coda - The All-in-one doc for teams, get a $1,000 credit at https://coda.io/twist 34:39 Talking about what the reaction will be to Roe v. Wade being overturned 50:10 A little win in the Climate Syndicate 52:18 Tech earnings: Uber & Lyft 1:03:48 Tech earnings: AirBnB 1:11:33 Chairman Powell raised the fed’s rate by 50 basis points (biggest rate hike in 2 decades) FOLLOW Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis FOLLOW Molly: https://twitter.com/mollywood

Okay, everybody, it is a big Wednesday show today. We needed a day to breathe and now we're getting into it. Okay, so we knew there would be a lot of ramifications now that we know the Roe v. Wade document that was leaked is obviously real and who knows what type of version it is. The fallout has started and big tech and business is going to be severely impacted by that. everybody from Amazon to Google are currently responding to this and we're going to break it down and as well as some serious privacy concerns with data brokers tracking who's actually going and selling data on who's going to abortion clinics. Yep. And then don't worry, there's a little bit of a tech chaser, which is earnings news,

earnings from Uber, Lyft and Airbnb. It is so interesting. This was actually I mean, it's a shame about all this other news that's so emotionally devastated because it was a fascinating earnings season. Fascinating. Erding the day. Airbnb, Uber, crushing it, Lyft, getting crushed. We're going to talk about network effects and how network effects compound to the winners and costs then hit the losers. And it's pretty dramatic. It's going to be a great show.

Stick with us. This week in startups is brought to you by Odu. Odu is a fully customized. and fully integrated suite of business apps that lets you build and scale your stack as you build and scale your business. Your first app is free forever, and right now, Odu is offering $1,000 off your first implementation pack at Odu.com slash twist. That's O-D-O-O-O-O-com slash twist. I trust capital. Did you know that you can invest in crypto through your retirement account and start?

still get the same tax advantages as a traditional IRA. Visit iTrust.competal slash twist to start investing today. And CODA. Coda's the all-in-one dock for teams. If you've got a stack of niche workflow tools, or if you're buried in docs and spreadsheets, Cota's the dock that brings it all together. Startups can get a $1,000 credit at coda.io slash twist. All right, everybody, welcome to Wednesday.

Yes, you made it too. the third day of the week. Here we are. We're climbing. We're almost at the summit, Molly. And we can start. This week has been a month. It has been.

And for the ladies in the audience, we are going to talk about it. There is obviously a lot of business and tech response to the leak of the Supreme Court statement on Roe v. Wade. Potentially, the leak's been. confirm, but Molly, why don't you just catch everybody up in the audience, maybe if like me,

maybe they don't even know the history of Roe v. Wade as much as maybe they need to. Because we just all thought this was settled and we didn't need to know every detail. And now we find ourselves kind of needing to understand this a little bit better because what we took for granted, we can apparently no longer do for granted. Yeah. So on Monday night, and yes, we're talking about this Wednesday because we sort of needed a day to digest and see what the fallout. was going to be from this leaked. What it was was a leaked draft on Monday night, Politico published, a leaked draft of a potential

Supreme Court decision to overrule Roe versus Wade. This is the decision that passed in 1973. So since 1973, abortion has been legal at the federal level. It has been a constitutional right for the women of America. this obviously has been a battle the whole time, and this leaked draft suggests that the Supreme Court is in fact poised as soon as June or July to undo that federal precedent. Now, as a result, if that draft becomes a formal decision, there are 13 U.S. states that have what are known as trigger laws on the books. Like, should this, you know, that basically say if abortion ever becomes, if this, if this,

decision is overturned, Roe v. Wade, then it will immediately become illegal in this state to some extent. Actually, when I was growing up Montana had a trigger a lot like this related to the federal speed limit. Montana was such a don't tread on me state that they had written into the books that should the federal speed limit ever be lifted, there would immediately be no speed limit in Montana. And I bring this up because I was working for the Associated Press then and one of my jobs was to call the sheriff's office every night and get the fatality. traffic fatality reports. And this was like maybe a year after this happened.

And so I would call, it would give me the fatality reports, which just went up and up and up and up day after day after day. And it was always like out of staters coming to Montana and speeding through like the Audubon and bring this up because should these laws go into effect in these 13 states? And there are about 28 other U.S. states that are poised to in some way restrict or outlaw. 28 total U.S. states poised to restrict or otherwise outlaw abortion. you can expect adverse effects, including women dying from, you know, efforts at illegal abortion.

Anyway, since this leak has come out, obviously there has been a massive uproar on social media and in the real world. There have been protests in front of the Supreme Court. Last night, there were protests in Los Angeles that were getting very scary in terms of like DHS crackdown on protesters. Yeah, I mean, and to be clear, you know, it took a day or two to just. made sure this was real. Right. And the courts did make a statement about like, hey, they're going to investigate the leak and everything like that.

And now, and I think it's always good with this breaking news because it broke Monday night very late. Yep. I think it may have been after midnight. It was like late on the way. Yeah, exactly. It was like nine or ten Pacific. Right.

So, you know, it does take a day or two to grok this, but it does seem like tech and business overall. Definitely. you know, tech business is business, uh, is now going to become a big part of the story. Uh, because, yeah, if you're a company and you've got employees in various states, um, you want to protect your employees' ability to choose now. And Tim Urban actually shared, um, a pretty good graphic of like what's going on here because I think people maybe don't, you know, it's kind of a moving, Tim Urban, Tim Urban is from wait, but while he's actually doing a

keynote at, he's the number one TED Talk on YouTube. Oh, okay. And number three TED Talk ever. He does Wait But Why, which is a really like great, you know, metrics type site. And if you pull this up, you know, you can explain exactly what's going to happen here. And it's pretty devastating. This infographic was, you know, like, I think really good. The current situation, we have federal protection.

All women can have an abortion. Okay, yes, we get that. Now, there'll be no federal protection. And to Molly's point, we're going to see various groups of women in the United States have different rights when it comes to getting an abortion. There'll be some women in states where abortion remains legal. Like, I think New York, California, some of these places actually have those triggers like you were talking about.

Opposite triggers, basically, yeah. Reverse triggers. Like, hey, our trigger is going to be, it's going to be in our Constitution, right? So I think people are going to start. And that is, I think, the argument, the Supreme Court, if this is document is correct, is trying to make that this should be a state issue. So federalism versus states' rights has, for a long time, has been a big, debate, you know, and this one felt like it was settled as a federal kind of situation, but

you're going to have the second group of people. So there'll be women in some states where abortion is illegal and they're going to have, if they have the means, and they're going to just travel to another state for the procedure. And then you have the third group of women. They're going to be in states where abortion is illegal and they don't have the means to travel and they're not going to be able to get an abortion. And, and, and, you're not going to be able to get an abortion. And they're going to maybe seek out abortions that are dangerous and illegal. And this is going to be, we're going to have a lot of women dying. And it's really truly scary and dystopian. It's also, and this graphic points out that what is not on the table so far is a federal ban on

abortion. Not quite to handmaiden's tail. Not quite to handmaid's tail. However, so there are a couple let's start with the tech industry response to this. And then we can talk about sort of the potential downstream effects of this draft opinion, at least as written and what it could mean. And then also what it means for this. Yeah, go ahead. Oh, I was going to say, and maybe it would be good for you to just show that the overwhelming,

this chart also in the yellow bar chart on the bottom left. Yeah. Makes it super clear. Bring this back. Yep. Yeah. 70%. This is as of August 19 from Pew Service,

which are, I think, consider kind of the gold standard. Surveys are not perfect. But when surveys are overwhelming, you kind of get it. Right. Like, this is unchanged. Americans are against an overtone of Roevy Wade and have been for 30 years. Like, this is like a rug pull of rug pulls, you know. This is, I mean, I keep calling it this.

The majority of Americans do not want this. Right. To be clear. This is a minority rule theocracy. Right. Like, that is what this law is about. There's no policy reason for this whatsoever. This is like a minority of Americans who, for religious reasons, object to this procedure and are willing to force women to give birth against their will or jail them if they don't.

Like, let's be super clear about what we're talking. And this is, I don't know that I can remember in any democracy, but certainly in America the last time. Like, these are rights that women have had for 50 years. this is not a like, this is not a denial of rights the way that gay marriage was for a long time or an infringement or a speech moderation or whatever. This is a literal removal of rights that have been guaranteed for two generations now. That is a remarkable situation. And that's why you're seeing, I think, so much of response. Even though this was expected based on the judges that were appointed, it was 100%.

Like if you were a woman in America in 2016, you have been waiting for this moment to come. and everybody told you you were overreacting and you were like, you just wait. Yeah, I mean, here we are. And I think to the folks who predicted it would happen, you got it right. And for the folks who gave the benefit of the doubt, you got suckered straight up. Listen, when you start scaling quickly, your company needs to be run professionally. And Odo is the software that helps you maintain control of your fast running business. Odo suite of business apps let you run your entire company on one platform.

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I think you got rug pulled. I think you got duped. And listen, I, nobody is saying they want more abortions to happen in the world. And I understand people can debate when life happens. And, you know, that's all true.

I think just for the purposes of our discussion here, the majority of people want something in the country and a minority doesn't. It's healthcare. Right. It's, you know. Health care. Yes. And so I guess, you know, I would say, yeah, probably we do not want to delve into at what week should abortion be allowed, you know, an important discussion to be sure for scientists and other people to have.

But for our purposes, it's not the point, right? Not the point here, yeah. The point is the removal of rights and the trickle-down effect that is likely to I mean, literally, and I just want to keep saying this, it is taking a right away. That is a big deal. And I think it gets really real when you start actually taking people's rights away. When did that happen? When did that happen?

Has that happened in our lifetime? So I was trying to, I was trying to like do a little historical research because I was like, has this ever happened that a democracy has just like reverse? Like put the truck in reverse. Yeah. And the last time. Tell me, I couldn't find this either. And I listened to all the talking hands and they couldn't come up with it either.

So I think that the last time it happened that I could find might actually be in America after Reconstruction, interestingly. So like after the Civil War, there were federal troops in the South to ensure equality, basically, right? So then there was this sort of that. There was a brief period during Reconstruction when like black people were participating in the economy at a high level, holding public office, boating. And all that time, there were federal troops in the South. effectively like making sure that that happened. And then they left. And then it all went sideways, right?

You had Jim Crow laws come into effect. You had things like the Tulsa massacre where an entire wealthy part of Tulsa was just like wiped out in literal air raids by private civilians. And then you essentially had a return to segregation in the South. That's the only time I can think of us just going like backwards in time. So now it would be a good time to look at tech's reaction to this. And I think this is going to be, I think, very analogous to what Putin just experienced, which is a large portion of companies are going to proactively,

there can be no pressure needed to be applied here. Or a little pressure will be need to apply, be applied because I think tech wants to do the right thing here. I think there's a lot of women working in key positions at these companies. And I think a lot of people have daughters, mothers, sisters, and female friends. And so Amazon is going to, and they came out with this instantly. Amazon is going to reimburse U.S. employees who travel for abortions and other treatments. I guess they put the other treatments in there so that it's not just for this one thing, but it covers a couple things.

So that, to me, that seemed to me to be, you know, be. they're doing it for abortions specifically. And Amazon, but they wanted to not make it specifically for abortions. So they came out. Immediate. That was immediate. This came out early on Tuesday.

So good on Amazon. So just think about that as a statement. Yeah. I mean, they were right there. Like very immediately in the morning. And then since then, we've seen Yelp's chief diversity officer,

Miriam Warren, rolled out a similar policy. Actually, in mid-Aprilp had already rolled that out because Texas increased abortion restrictions with that law that, That by the way, and this is notable when we get to our data privacy conversation, Texas's law means anybody who aids and abets, they say, in an abortion, can be held civilly liable and suit. So as women across America start to spin up an abortion underground railroad,

there is a whole question of liability that's introduced by that Texas law, which lots of other states are trying to copy. Uber and Lyft, when those laws came out, had pledged at the time to cover drivers, legal expenses if they are caught up in Texas and evidently Oklahoma's provision on abetting abortions. Like Apple, Match Group, Bumble have said they'll cover employee expenses for out-of-state abortions. This is pretty big-boggling. It's a health care corporate issue and it's going to be really hard to stay out of it. And then yesterday, Vice, Motherboard, Vise's motherboard, published an investigative piece where they purchased aggregated user data from a data.

broker, SafeGraph, which is selling location data on the open market, including that of people who visit abortion clinics. And now if we find ourselves, this is a big if, sort of, but if we find ourselves in the situation in six months where up to 28 U.S. states have outlawed abortion, then the question of data, privacy, and operational security is going to be a big one. Right. A big one. Well, because, yeah, there's 23 states that could ban it. And there's other states that will restrict it, I think. 13 will ban up to 28 total will restrict in some way. I'm just trying to get educated on this.

So, you know, I think. It's not best. It's, yeah, you know, this is one or two steps away from the next shoe dropping. So, yeah, if they want to take a stance where, like, you help somebody get an abortion as an Uber driver, a doctor, a nurse, a counselor, a psychologist, a priest, or, you know, a parent. A parent, like all of a sudden you're getting arrested? Like, this is a crazy dystopian vision here. But you could subpoena phone data and you could subpoena, like, this broker selling it.

Okay, that's just seems like, open market. Just go buy it. They classify Planned Parenthood as a brand that can be tracked. Well, and here, important to note, you're not getting the person's email address in their name. You're getting a cookie that could you could put an ad against them. So it's, I would think, anonymized data, it's just location data, so you can make a group on an ad network and then show them an ad. But that also means that data could exist, not anonymized in some database somewhere. Obviously, there's all kinds of ways to track people.

So this is probably anonymized data, but you can still reach that user, which means, You know, there's all kinds of ways to track who went to an abortion clinic and then who did searches for abortion. So now is Google going to have people's search histories track? I mean, this is going to get to a pretty crazy outcome here. But I think now we're going to start to see states that embrace this are perhaps going to lose business. And I think people are going to start voting with their pocketbooks. and so this idea, oh, you know, Florida, Texas, great open states, great places to build businesses, etc., you know, I think you're going to start to see some folks question. Maybe I don't move to Austin.

Maybe I don't move to Miami. Maybe I don't want to support those. Maybe I don't want to open an office there. And so this is a level of, you know, second and third stream, downstream effects that are going to create even more chaos and division in this kind of. Yeah. If you're listening to this podcast, you'll probably already have some exposure to crypto. Well, did you know you can now invest in crypto through your retirement account? That's right.

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And I know that there is a debate on, for example, another show that you do, about how much companies should engage in these conversations with their employees. But the fact is, it's unavoidable, right? Especially at a point like this, where we're literally changing the, legal fabric under which this country has operated for 50 years. And it's health care and it's fundamental. And it's like these bands that, you know, don't take into account whether the pregnancy could kill the mother, whether it's rape or incest. Like, there's no universe in which you're going to be able to separate this from your business. And we are going to increasingly fracture,

especially by the way, like as this opinion has written now, and we talked a little bit about this, I think, in the live stream yesterday. As it's written now, it has essentially. essentially undoes the 14th Amendment right to privacy. Like the way that Alito wrote this draft opinion effectively says if the rights were not written into the Constitution by the slave-owning white guys, then they don't qualify for protection. He literally is like, this is not a deeply rooted tradition of rights. And that could then apply to, you know, their legal scholars all over Twitter saying, the next thing that's coming is gay marriage.

The next thing that's coming is the right to contraception. But the thing that comes after that is business as being able to do whatever you want because it's about a right to privacy. Yeah. I mean, this is the, you know, again, back to the minority of people dictating for the majority of people. What happens makes this a qualitatively and quantitatively very different than I want to talk about Trump at work.

I want to talk about immigration at work. I want to talk about BLM at work. You know, those are, I'm not going to say niche issues. In some cases, they might be. Like some immigration issues might be niche. It might only matter to some small percentage of people. This is, you know, healthcare, fundamental right issue. I think people are going to look at it very differently.

I don't see how you avoid this discussion at work. If people are going to make a decision to even come to work at a company, you know, based on this, it's, this is going to be super challenging. Again, healthcare is attached to employment in our country. So that's a really good point of how does a company. There's no way not to address it. There's no way. I mean, this is literally taking, like, this is like you, I'm trying to think of the corollary,

but in terms of removing a guaranteed right, it's, it's just stunning. It's unprecedented. And it probably, like a lot of other shoes could and will drop after that because it's basically like somebody on somebody put it, you know, this is a way to undo anything that you find distasteful. Yeah. I mean, and, you know, to the all-in discussion with Brian Armstrong, which I think was two episodes ago, you know, Brian famously said, listen, we're here to do one mission at Coinbase.

You can talk about political issues if you want with your coworkers, just not on the corporate slack, do a separate meeting, start your own signal group, whatever's your jam. You can go talk about it, but at work, we're not going to talk about this stuff anymore, and you can opt in or opt out to being at an organization that's politically active or not. I think that's fine, right? the private companies and if it gets everybody more focused, fine. I think that's fine, except that I don't want to hear praise from that from people who are like, we're for unrestricted free speech.

I think those are intellectually contradictory positions. Like, you cannot say that you have to have an absolute right to free speech on a platform run by a private company, but then unabashedly praise the guy who shut down all the free speech at his company because what it sounds like is that the speech you don't want to hear is the stuff about black people and trans people. So I think, Sorry. Okay.

I'm radicalized by this situation. But that's what I was shouting back in my earphones. Intelligent people, I like you to have a voice and explain your position, Molly, actually. Yeah. Because I think those are contradictory. I could see it be contrary. I could see. I understand that.

I think it's a reasonable argument. I think the counter argument would be. We're not restricting your speech to this. You know, you can have that speech. Just not while we're working. So during the eight hours we're paying everybody, we don't want to have these discussions, whether it's, you know, who should be the mayor, the president, BLM, immigration, Ukraine. We just want that off the table for the eight hours we're working.

When we're off the clock, by all means, go ahead and do it. So I think that would be their counter argument. Sure. But it does seem. But I don't think that's any different from me saying, I don't want to be bombarded by disinformation or harassment on Twitter. Could you please moderate that? It's a company. Right.

One's a public platform. And the response is, it's my choice to work at Coinbase or it's my choice to be at Twitter, right? Like, both of the, they're effectively the same argument. And what it starts to sound like is there's just some speech we like and some speech we know. I think there could be cases where that is the truth, where like a free speech discussion at work might be like encouraged. And a discussion about BLM or immigration might not be or Ukraine. So, yeah, I think people could be selective. I think what they did at Coinbase was to say, just no, nothing but financial economic freedom.

And I'll take him on his word that that was the intent. But, you know, I'm trying to be as open as I can to everybody's position, you know, at this point in my life. So, even when I look at this and I'm like, should it be a federal decision or a state's decision? It's like, okay, I get your argument. The states have power in the United States or whatever. but this has been for 50 years of federal issues. So why would we do this now? Right.

I get it. Maybe 50 years ago, that could have been a fine discussion. But for 50 years, we did it this way. Like, a lot's changed in 50 years. Like, you really think this is the right way to execute on this? I do not think that this is the right way to execute on this. So I think we're going to look back on this as a real tipping point. It does feel like a moment in time, I agree.

I really do. I think because the thing it's the, it's like, you know, to your point, it felt so hypothetical and not possible. And you did have, you know, you did have Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett assuring Susan Collins that, you know, it was settled law. And. Yep. And I think that what we're going to now face is the potential coming true of these predictions and who's acting in good faith and who isn't. I think that, you know, I applaud and respect the, the, the, the, the, the, willingness and the desire to take things at face value and engage in these conversations, honestly. But I also feel like only one side is doing that.

Like, I don't hear any minds getting changed on the other side, you know? And I'm like, yeah, at some point. Yeah. Pretty cynical what just happened, I think. Like, for these people who were elected to, you know, basically put out there that they felt it was settled and that for it potentially to flip, like, listen, a lot of cards that are going to turn over between then and now. And we, I think the leak is also on the table, technically, how did the,

leak happen. So I have a lot of questions about how does a document inside the Supreme Court leave the Supreme Court? I know this is a geeky IT thing, but shouldn't they be on a closed network where documents can't leave and there's cameras everywhere and everybody logs into their computer with a very specific login that's tracked and every behavior is tracked. So if somebody exported this document, like how does a document leave the building? at the Supreme Court, who is in charge of IT? I'm only, I know. I mean, this is so easy to solve.

I'm only smiling because I, of the small familiarity I have with federal IT budgets, which are basically like zero. I mean, they're literally working on like one, like Windows 95 up in here in the federal government, but also like, probably they just walked out with it or took pictures of the documents. They operate on a lot of paper. I know. These, I mean, now they're.

going to, I think the way the Supreme Court is going to have to work is when you come in there, like, the building is a skiff in and of itself, you know, these rooms where you can't bring devices in, like, nobody should be allowed into the Supreme Court to bring their phones, devices, laptops, the computers in there, stay in there, the documents never leave there. If you work on the documents, you're in there, the document, there's no floppyness, there's no thumb drives, no documents are allowed to leave any of the machines there. Um, because here is the document now does this document look like it was printed and then exported to a PDF? I don't know if any forensic has been done. But it's obviously an inside job. Like this wasn't like a justice left it on

a subway. You know, like sometimes that happens. Like there was a famously some NBA coach left their playbook during a Nick series like in a cab. And then somebody found the playbook and was like, should I give this to the opposing coach? This, was this scanned? So they somebody, this feels like somebody got a printed copy and then scanned it. I don't know. The forensic. forensics on this, but... Yeah. What is interesting, though, is that there isn't that existing OPSEC in the security, in the Supreme Court,

because there hasn't ever needed to be. Got it. Right? Like, I think this is, this is not unprecedented. There have been leaks about decisions before, but it is very, very, very unusual and a huge deal because there has been set traditionally, like, this is a tipping point in a lot of ways. One is the potential erosion of a lot of rights that this

could be just the start of. But two is like, you know, I think a lot of us have felt cynical about the direction of the Supreme Court. You know, five of the sitting justices were appointed by presidents who did not win the popular vote. Like, it's been increasingly a minority rule unelected body. Yeah. And Congress has been so dysfunctional that we've outsourced our lawmaking to this unelected body that is made up mostly of people who were placed by presidents who didn't win the popular vote.

So like problems. but this is like the end of that institution. This is like you could still believe if you had ever wanted to be a lawyer. Like I thought about going to law school. My dad's a judge. You could still believe for a really long time that the sheer importance of the work that happened at the Supreme Court was itself sacred. That being there was moderating because you really understood the law and you opened yourself to every argument.

I spent my whole life believing in the Supreme Court. It just felt like they would do the right thing. and now it feels like they will not do the right thing. I think this is where, you know, the reaction to this is, you know, and maybe it's a good thing, you know, like maybe the fact that we now question the WHO, like, who's paying their budget exactly? Okay, who China's paying part of the budget? Maybe they don't want to embarrass China.

Okay, like we need to just reexamine every group and figure out, are they trustworthy or not? And, you know, is the Supreme Court trustworthy or not? Is the New York Times trust? Every institution, Harvard, just pick something that, you looked at and said, I believe in this. It's Harvard. I believe in it's the Supreme Court.

I believe in it's the World Health Organization. Okay. There are humans running organizations. Humans are imperfect. We should, you know, definitely, I'm not saying don't trust anybody, but you certainly would want to trust and verify that this is a sound establishment. It just doesn't feel that way now. It's sad.

Because you're going against the majority of Americans. Yes. And that is troubling. Brown versus the Board of Education, like the desegregation rulings, the civil rights rulings also went through, went against a majority of Americans. Yeah.

So there's that. But I think the fact that there was this leak and the fact that these judges seem to have been placed in some cases specifically for this purpose does suggest that there's a lack of faith internally. And whoever leaked this, like they've lost the faith, right? in the sanctity and the reasonableness of this organization. And that's sort of, that's a hard thing.

Because it felt like this was like the last bastion. If you're a startup, you know you have to save where you can. I'm talking time, money, bandwidth. That's why we love Coda. Cota is the one doc to rule them all. In Cota, your text and tables can live together in the same document. All your valuable data, plans, objectives, and strategies in one place. nothing gets lost or out of sync, and your team is literally on the same page.

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right now. It's at this week in startups.com slash investor updates. And it's so important for you to keep your investors updated. And sometimes you don't know what to put in there. So you need a great template. So we made you one. And it's free. Join the productivity revolution and sign up for Coda today. Just head to coda.io slash twist and sign up and get a thousand dollars in credits. So generous. That's CODA.io slash twist to get $1,000 off. It's such a, such a terrible decision, and I think we talked about this on the live stream yesterday, but it's such a, but not in the episode, because we did a little preamble about our initial reactions to it. One of the reasons, possibly, to subscribe to subscribe to YouTube.com slash this weekend and click the subscribe alert button is because we'll talk a little more freely on the live stream before we do a formal episode, uh, sometimes. The reaction to the Republican Party based on this is going to be so brutal to them. Like, this is like they, the dog chased the car. And now, Now the dog has got a mouthful offender. And it's like, oh, now I'm being dragged by a car down the road and I'm biting metal.

This is not comfortable. Like, what if I done? It's like, you shouldn't have caught the car. Yeah. Not a good strategic move. Like, you won, what did you win here, Republicans? Okay, you stack the deck. You flip Roeville Wade.

Now 50% of the voting, I mean, I don't know what the percentage of women who vote versus men, I think it's slightly more women to vote. So, I mean, this is going to be disastrous. I think it is. I mean, this is a very moderate, exactly. Like, this is a moderate, this is a center to center right country. We do not elect radicals to national office very often. The house is its own clown show.

And let's be clear, right? Like, it's so, these states are so gerrymandered. Like, they have constructed such a ridiculous house. I mean, the fact that, like, a Marjorie Taylor Green is in no danger of losing her seat. None. Tells you everything you need to know about gerrymandering in these states. But we don't, but like, if the Republican Party just continues to put forward more and more and more conspiracy theory spouting, election denying, rights taking away candidates, like, go for it.

Go for it, party. Go crazy. I mean, and I said this to all into Sacks. You know, we had these discussions. I was like, because he does not believe it should have been overturned. He was very clear about that. Like, I think the people in the Republican Party who would like to win and would like to see a more purple kind of thing happen, maybe pull over some moderates to the Republican Party.

Like that effort, which was really working well, I think for Republicans saying like, hey, less tax, okay, don't hate billionaires. Like there was this whole Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders moment, what they, I guess they call Democratic Socialists, is what they call themselves. I think a Democratic Socialist. Elizabeth Warren does not. Bernie does. Okay.

So, but I think people put them into that bucket. where it's not socialism, but socialist Democrats, I think that turned off a lot of moderates, and myself included. Not that I'm running into the, I consider myself an independent, to be clear, but I think a lot of people were kind of like, oh yeah, Texas is kind of cool.

Miami's kind of cool. Yeah, Descent is kind of cool. Like, oh yeah, maybe this is like, maybe the left is, now this is like the right going super crazy. So now it's like even more, we need a third party of rational actors to just go after the purple model.

majority in this country where like, just leave it alone. Like, there's bigger things for us to work on, oh, my Lord, this is going to be a distraction for the next number of years. A generation. We're literally putting the country into a civil war over this. Yeah. I mean, this will break us as a country. Like, it already has, right?

Mission accomplished seeds of division sowers. Like, mission accomplished Putin. I mean, honestly. Putin's behind me, yeah, I mean, the chaos agents are at work. The chaos agents are at work and they have succeeded because we will not, as a country, we will be an ungovernable clown show for a minimum of a generation. Because who's coming together over this? You're just going to decamp to your little states and live in your silos and never the twain

shall meet. And the agents of division will keep going. We already have this with gun rights. I mean, if you look at gun rights and how they're executed at a state-by-state level, you know, in New York, you can't have a gun. and in Austin, I was at dinner and somebody pulled up their shirt and had a Glock in their waist

at dinner with me. In Ohio now, you don't even have to have a license. You can open, carry any weapon with no license. Sure, fine. Go crazy. So this is, I think, now you're going to have to when you decide what state you live in here as an American. You're going to have to take out like a,

make a pro con list. Like Mom always said, pros and cons. You put some pros and cons over here. It's going to be like, pro. Yeah, low taxes. Han, everybody's carrying a gun. Pro, you know, like low taxes. And if your kid is gay, they probably won't be able to get married in that state in a couple more amounts or years.

Pro low housing costs. Han, your gay kid is going to potentially be beat up, ostracized, or murdered. Pro. Right. Low taxes. I'm super glad. Like, I am super glad to hear you say this because all the conversations about Miami and Austin, I'm like, wow, it must be really nice to be able to ignore everything about the political. environment in that state.

I have a challenge. For business. I have a challenge to that. I am encouraging people to go to Austin. I'm going to encourage people to go to Miami and Florida because I think the influx of Democrats there is going to turn those states purple. And I think that's why Beto did so well. And like it's conceivable a Democrat could be the governor of Texas.

So I kind of like it. I like Democrats going. there. I understand like it's also like you're voting with your dollar literally to pay taxes in that state and to participate and live there. So you're voting with your time, your money, your very existence geographically at least. You know, this is a big. Yeah. Stacey Abrams has made this argument about Georgia too. Like don't pull your businesses out of these states. Don't move away from them. Like stay and try to make change from the inside. And I think there's a lot of value to that. That is very true. It's the argument we constantly have about China. Do you engage

with China like Apple, Tesla and others are doing. And that has made them dependent on us, made us dependent on them, that interdependency in the engagement argument means change will happen in that country. And Apple can say, listen, our factory workers are jumping off the building. We need to have people on the ground. We want to have a certain level of rights for factory workers. And Tim Cook visits those factories, took it seriously. I don't know if you remember, like, it was 10 years ago. It was a huge story. Five or 10 years ago. It's a big story of like suicides at Apple factory specifically. So to Tim Cook's mind,

hey, listen, we're there, we're on the ground. It's a different country. They have different sets of rights. But hey, people aren't killing themselves. We know they have a good standard of living. The middle class is growing. And if you look at the poverty chart, which I think I sent to our group chat,

I think, and actually I tweeted it. You know, the iPhone and Amazon and the engagement of the West in China has reduced abject, like serious poverty in the world dramatically. Hundreds of millions of people are no longer in the bucket of like severely poor in the world because of iPhones and Amazon basics.

Does it mean that Wuhan, does it mean that the Uyghurs are still not being tortured, right? So you have to keep these two things in your head. They're running a concentration camp and a slave labor and three or four hundred million people have come out of poverty. Okay. Like on a moral basis, I'm no philosophy major here,

but I don't know how to resolve that. I just know that for me personally, couldn't engage with China for that reason. But I can understand people have a different opinion. Yeah. And the logical conclusion of that, too, is that businesses, if businesses can make change on that level and do an overall good, then they will have to engage politically as well. And that Disney and Apple will have to take into account their future, you know, employee bases and say, yeah, we actually, we are a company that will stand up for human rights. We are a company that will say abortion is health care. And if you need to get one in another state, then where you live,

we will pay for that. Like, there isn't any universe in which companies, especially since Citizens United, gives them the same rights as people in our democracy, then there's no universe in which they get to sit this out and say, sorry, it's just work. And look at this chart, Molly. I think just since I brought it up anyway.

Yeah, you look at extreme poverty, extreme poverty, which I am not sure of the definition, but it was living under a certain number of dollars a day, I think is how they said it. And you just look at South Asia, East Asia and Pacific, just absolutely plummeting. over the last couple of decades and obviously sub-Sahara

Africa not plummeting, right? But now factories are moving there. The Chinese are actually building factories. I mean, I'm thinking about this like... China's taken over Africa. Yeah, so okay, now, you're less than $1.90 a day, I guess, is the new definition. It used to be under a dollar a day. Obviously, it's a moving target. But if you're listening, what you see is like, you know, a billion people coming out of poverty.

And that's what globalization did. So there are some, heart truths here, that people, and some tolerance for ambiguity and some cognitive dissonance all occurring when you look at the metrics, globalization, and engaging dictatorships, and engaging authoritarian regimes, quite paradoxically, has resulted in less suffering. Absolutely full stop. Yeah. So now you have to ask yourself, if we didn't engage, what would it look like?

Would there have been more change? would there been a civil war. I mean, these were all, we talked about alternative history the other day too. This is that. And my love of it, this is that.

Like, so if I made the decision to not engage China because of the human rights stuff, maybe I keep 400, 500 million people in poverty longer. Right. Now, maybe they then have a civil war and then the whole country flips.

You, nobody is, you have to be humble enough to realize nobody has the answer here. No. But we should be studying it and talking about it. There's short term and long term thinking about this too.

right? Suffer. Well, about the suffering and also the effects. Like, one of the big criticisms. Explain that to the audience, because you and I were talking about this privately. I think it's kind of an interesting topic. We're talking about this privately. There's, I mean, there's it as a concept generally, right?

Short-term thinking versus long-term thinking. Long-term globalization lifts all boats. 100%. That was always the sort of like Obama doctrine and he got a lot of. Clinton. And a big part of the Trump populist and Clinton before that. And a big part of the Republican and a. American and Trump populist backlash to that is because in the short term, some boats sink.

Those boats are in, you know, manufacturing areas in the United States or all of the areas that have been economically devastated as a result of globalization. So if you're along- Our factories went to Japan. Our factories went to China. They went to Mexico. Mexico. And they took our jobs, as I say, on South Park, right? And we did lose factory jobs. And we did lose factory jobs because there are short-term impact. to long-term thinking. And so it's like all about sort of managed. And I think that big knock on Obama is that he was such a like up here thinker about globalism, just like long-term, this is better for the world. And what is better for the world is better for the United States. There's

long-term global security when more and more people come out of poverty because people fight over scarcity. Yep. And the perception of scarcity. Yeah. I mean, it's if if you don't know how are you going to feed your family next month, next week, today, tonight? Like, it's a different, those are all very different levels of fear, right? And Americans who feel fear of, Americans are not feeling, putting aside all the statistics that people can make up of this, like, and it was kind of a bogus one that they don't have $400 kind of situation. Some of those things have been debunked because those were surveys, not actual reality in some

cases. We actually did that survey that came from Marketplace. It did. Oh, God. Well, I mean, it was a survey, right? So we can explain that. It was a survey. So there were plenty of people who said, yes, in an emergency, I couldn't come up with $200 or $400. There's real scarcity in America. Right. And then there is perceived and planted and propagandized scarcity. Right. And that one became the fear of the other coming to take your job. But that $200, I think, they perceived they couldn't come up with it in some cases. Some cases, people had $1,000 on their credit card, so they could. Right. Right. Or they could have asked a family. So anyway, mission accomplished deciding a really good discussion. Right, like there is either real scarcity or there's perceived scarcity

and as a result, there is conflict. The idea that an American would starve in 2022 to death is quite farcical. I mean, maybe not children because children, you can be malnourished and that kind of something. I know, careful, like that's how I don't know, life's getting careful.

You could be malnourished. You could be unbursed and food insecure. Food insecure. Now, food insecure is different. different than starving to death in Africa because you literally cannot find 500 calories. True. Food insecure here might be defined as eating bad food might be defined as 1,500 calories a day, not 2,000. Whereas in Africa, it could be, I didn't eat for three days, you know.

I'm sustaining myself on 500 calories. There are people in the world sustaining themselves on much less than the 2,000 galleries. So this is where, like, politics and people with agendas, like, I just love. when I actually have the metrics in front of me. It's like, how many calories do people have to eat? And there are some countries where people have 1,200 or 1,400 calories a day to eat. Yeah. And that's truly like, okay, how do we get them more calories?

We should really talk about that. So let's see, as many as 6% on end declining of Americans have very low food security. I don't even know what that means, but. Well, very low food security, food insecurity. So, yeah, we'd have to find the definitions of very low. A very low food. Anyway, yes. There is legitimately hunger in America.

There are also plenty of people with plenty of junk food and cable and whatever who believe. There's no famine in America. We're not having a famine here. Right. But there are plenty of people who believe that some other is coming to take what they have. Sure. And that is the root of like a lot of the conflict that we're seeing today. And so the question is, how do you manage both?

How do you like deal with the long term? without sacrificing people in the short term. So that's the conversation we were having right now. It's like if you're only goal. And can you do both? And can you do both? And if you're a good politician, you got to just say stuff. Yeah. You have to figure out how to do some version of both.

You have to. Well, and I think, you know, looking to the government to solve all problems, obviously you'll be quite disappointed because these are people generally speaking of low moral character who only care about staying in office and are grifters in many cases. Yeah. So I have very low respect for and love of politicians, generally speaking. Like ever since I met some of the top politicians who are like, tell me what your positions are so I can to support them. Like literally one of the highest profile politicians in the world said that to me.

But they wanted to understand. Tell me your position so they can support them? Literally said it that way. And I was like, what if my, I just thought to myself, like, what if I, my position is like horrible? It was really weird the way it was phrased to me. But, you know, it's terrifying. I mean, we don't even have time to get into like money and politics and Derrymandering, blah, blah, blah. Like, there are a million things that are happening here.

The first company you did in the climate syndicate is doing one little short-term thing. Yeah. Just one little device solving one little problem that could be the start of, you know, and could, could, could change forever, one of the biggest polluting sources in the world. Exactly. But it all starts with a little sensor and a little bit of software with a half dozen people, you know, somewhere in an office grinding it out. And so that's one of the great things.

We can solve, you know, solving a small problem that, you know, a lot of people are having could reduce a lot of suffering. It's true. You know, if everybody was 10% happier right now, like if you could come up with a device that made the entire world 1% happier, in aggregate, that's a lot more happiness. Yeah,

it's, yes, totally. I have a friend actually who says over and over, not to derail us because we should talk about earnings, but I have a friend to ourselves this episode. Well, I have a friend actually who says that one of the most dangerous principles

enshrined in the creation of America is the, um, part of the Declaration of Independence says the pursuit of happiness. Mm. Because it's, if you think you have an inalienable right to the pursuit of happiness, then anything that makes you unhappy is in your way. And it becomes this like Asimov's third law thing.

You know how like the third law says the robots have to protect humans at all costs. So then the robots eventually figure out that the only way to protect humans is to off humans because they're constantly killing themselves. So like if you think you have an undeniable, inalienable right to happiness, then everybody around you is basically a threat to that. And it just becomes this like destructive like zero some game. Like, if I'm happy, you're unhappy. It's just really interesting. The rest of the Declaration of Independence and everything. It's a very interesting philosophy bomb.

But yes, the rest of it is good. Well, the rest of it is also to protect you from infringing on everybody. So if my view of happiness is you don't get to have a gun or you don't get to practice your religion, sorry. We don't get to have abortions. Sorry. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Full circle here.

All right. Let's go to tech earnings. Because it was a tale of two cities in the Uber and. and lift race. Luckily, I bet on the right horse. I was going to say, damn. Like, sometimes you're like... But what a 24-hour period.

It's been. My lord, it's like a roller coaster. I have never seen two companies diverged like this, not since Google and Yahoo. Good one. Yeah, good pull. It was a pretty good divergence. I'm trying to think of another divergence.

I guess Mac and Apple back... I was going to say way back. Apple and Microsoft. Apple and Microsoft when Apple went out of, was about to go out of business and go bankrupt, and Microsoft was printing money. So let's break down what happened here. Lyft and Uber reported their quarterly earnings.

We're going to do them Tuesday and Wednesday at the market close, I guess, for both. And then Uber moved up their earnings. I've never seen that happen from tonight, Wednesday, to early this morning, crack a dawn, before the sun came up. Explain what happened with Lyft first, because Lyft everybody knows is a fraction of the size of Uber and doesn't have the Eats business and isn't as global. So let's break down that. And as a result, earnings were, let me put a gentle. Absolutely. Oof.

Lift reported Q1 results. Let's start with the like okay news. Yeah, this is great news, actually. This is great news, actually. We should all hope for 44% year over year growth. Lyft reported revenue of $875 million in the quarter, almost a billion dollars, made that quarter. That was up 44% as I said year over year.

However, it was paired with a net loss of $196.9 million. They're shrinking 53% year over year. And the active riders, this is almost like shades of Netflix here, active riders were 17.8 million missing expectations by about 200,000 riders. Not a massive miss, but still. Sales and marketing was Lyft's fastest growing cost. That was up 61% year over year suggesting that two things. One, Lyft is very desperate to advertise to people and get new customers.

And also, a key part of that is driver retention costs. Keeping the drivers on the platform. I guess they mix that into the marketing promotion costs. I guess so. Paying for the drivers and doing advertising and spiffs, spiffs being basically payoffs to get you to drive for them. So bonuses, join and get 500 bucks.

And as a result, I guess their stock went down 30% or something to something huge. This is what happens in a network effect business, folks. You know, and I guess we should tell the Uber side of the story, but when you have a network-sized business, what can very quickly happen is the network that wins gets into an accelerating spiral of growth and profitability.

And then the one that's losing, and I'm not just saying this because I happen to pick the right team and I'm dunking or anything. I've dunked enough over the last decade. But this is just a great business lesson. Uber reported their Q1 results. Let's go through that. And then we'll talk about what's happening to the two businesses in terms of drivers, I suspect. Yeah. And let's talk about the moving earnings up. So what happened after this Lyft report was that their stock, I mean, their stock started tanking like crazy. It was such a disaster. This was a great tweet. Connorsen wrote, Uber's pulling out the old We're Not Lehman move up the earnings announcement playbook, which I feel like we should explain a little bit. Much like Netflix's

missed caused the whole streaming industry, right, to suffer massive stock losses. As soon as Lyft's stock started tanking, Uber probably was like, oh crap, this is what I'm assuming. And I'm, I guess I'm, I think I'm right. That Uber was like, we. We have to hurry up and report our earnings so that people don't think that this entire industry is a done. It's not the sector. It's not the sector. It's just them.

Wow. And we're doing fine. Uber's doing fine. And to if you, back to network effects, which is what this really is about for founders who are listening, network effects become compounding and they become more and more vicious, you know, to the person who doesn't have the network effect and the gains just start accumulating. We saw this with Facebook and what they did to MySpace, you know, or Microsoft at the time with sales of Windows PCs versus Macs back in the day. Or the iPhone versus Nokia

and Motorola would be another one where the network effects, and then the network effects of Android also sort of solidified that. But Uber reported Q1 results of 6.85 billion of revenue up 136%. That's more than double. Seven times slips revenue? Yeah, that's always been the case that they were a magnitude bigger.

Yeah. Now, they had a loss because of declines in Grab Aurora and DEDY stakes. Remember, Grab went public and I think Brad Gersoner, a friend of the pods, you know, was a SPAC, that.

Aurora is their self-driving spin-out and D-D, which was then moved to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange when Xi Jinping decided no more embracing the West stock markets, or the stock markets of the West, I should say. So that was $5.3 billion of their net loss. In other words, marking that stuck down has nothing to do with the core business. That's a really big order of magnitude of loss compared to lifts, but okay.

Well, no, but you have to understand. It has nothing to do with the core business, which doubled. It has to do with their stakes in. So, you know, if Zoo owned a piece of Peloton or actually the better analogy, would be Amazon owning the Rivian piece. Like Amazon writing down the Rivian investment is like, does that have anything to do with Amazon?

It's nothing to do with Amazon, right? Exactly. Yeah. It's a lot. It's a lot because the DD piece was worth, I think, 10 billion and it got probably cut 30, 40, 50%, 50%. That's what I'm guessing.

That is, but just all DD. And then in terms of their fundamentals, monthly active platform consumers were up, $115 million. That's up 17% year over year, down 3% quarter over quarter, over quarter, those are total users between the Eats business and the rides business. And then in terms of that all important piece, drivers, the key to the whole freaking thing,

quote, our driver base is at a post-pandemic high and more engaged on Uber than on other platforms. Right. So what's really happening here to explain it again is if Lyft is losing drivers to Uber Eats, Uber, DoorDash, and Amazon, I think has freelance drivers too, if they're losing people to, you know, that business, they've got to spend more to get drivers on the platform, which means they're less profitable and they're running out of money. And if they don't have as many drivers, then the wait times are going up. If the wait times are going up, people are picking Uber. If they're picking Uber, the drivers who are not locked into any platform, remember,

they usually have two phones rocking at the same time and they're switching, or they have one phone and they're switching between apps. So because they're independent contractors, you know, back to that whole like, do people get to choose how they work? They can choose. Yeah. They get to choose. They have the freedom to choose. They can, they'll look at the rides coming in and say, well, I have to wait 20 minutes for a ride, you know, pick a geo.

If I got to wait 20 minutes for a ride for Lyft, that's 20 minutes of not getting paid. If I have to write 10 minutes for Uber, I'm just going to, the liquidity of the marketplace. So quidity means like how fast it moves. Yeah. A buyer and a seller. A seller of a ride, a buyer of a ride. If that liquidity is vibrant, a more briber on Uber than Lyft, all the users and drivers, supply and demand, move. Oh, that's like the debt spiral.

They're in at Lyft. I think they have to get sold now. I think Postmates has to buy them. Somebody has to buy them. You're probably right. Well, because here's what I think is actually the super genius move. The super genius part of this that Uber most likely did not even see coming when they invested in Eats. which was smart because food delivery makes sense,

is that if I'm a driver, I would much rather, in general, but specifically during a deadly pandemic, drive food around than people. And so I bet, and I'm sure they don't break it out, but I bet that part of the reason that driving is up on Uber overall is that even if people aren't taking cars, and they're probably taking them more,

they're clearly taking them more now because the pandemic is receding and whatnot, but if you can be driving food around, you're not worried about your safety as much as when you're driving people around. So there's just something very appealing, I bet, as a driver, about a platform that just lets you drive, you know, Chinese food around. Well, not only did you nail it. I saw Dara at the worst game the other night.

We talked, and I asked them how the business was going, it's great, you know, and I said, as you reach it, yeah, it's doing great. And, you know, we got drivers on both platforms doing both, you know. And so that's obviously a big focus of what they're doing. So said another way, you might come onto the platform, Molly, and only want to deliver food. You don't want somebody in your car. Then, well, if you're in the app and it offers you an airport job and it pays $70 and there's no Uber Eats jobs right now, hey, you might take one or two.

Yeah. You might try it. I think that's what's happening. I think the Uber Eats people are becoming livery drivers as well, ride sharing drivers as well. So you get two swings at the bat. Because that unease might be receding. They're like, okay, I feel better about this now. I can make a lot of money.

Right. It's like a gateway drug. Once you're in for food, you're probably in for people. And it's the pandemic's over. We're now in an endemic. So I think we just have to start using the word endemic. So like let's just take the win. The pandemic's over.

It's an endemic now, at least here in America. I mean, China with the zero COVID policy might be radically different. But it's an endemic here. People are not wearing masks. Uber drivers don't have to wear masks. People aren't wear masks on flights. And, you know, putting aside people who are immunocompromised. the country is acting as if this is an endemic now.

And that's the guidance everybody's been given. So let's just start using the word endemic. And people probably do feel safer overall. But also, it's just a competitive advantage for Uber to have had this option the whole time. And Lyft never built that out, right? They were all in on rides. And so your suggestion that a postmates who owns, boy, doesn't Uber own postmates? Who could buy Lyft?

DoorDash. I guess DoorDash could buy Lyft possibly. I don't know that they would need to. It would be worth it for them. So that's the problem is like anybody who's an up and coming there, the, you might be buying into a business that is receding and then it drags your strong business down. So that's the challenge. If you were to buy it, you would have to be investing in it. So it would have to be someone like Amazon who had a thesis on how to like really invest in the business because the business is trending down.

You might need to go in there and do layoffs, shut down cities, and then be prepared to invest a couple of billion dollars a year in losses to. catch up to Uber, right? So it would be like, oh yeah, Yahoo's got value as a business. Do we try to catch up to Google? It's like, it's not going to happen. Right. And then people did try to invest in the Nokia's and the, you know, Motorola's and the, you know, other smart app phone makers. And it just didn't work. BlackBerry comes to mind, right? Like, remember BlackBerry was like going to try to do a revival and over and over. They tried like four or five times. It didn't work, right? I went to so many sad Blackberry events. Like, now we have this square phone. Like, like, oh, God, you guys are killing me. Yeah. I mean, I wish I had.

I had, I wish I had a keyboard phone, man. I loved it. I loved my trio. I had my trio 350. So good. So good. Let's talk about Airbnb where earnings are interesting, but there's so much more interesting afoot. We have prediction time.

Yeah. So, okay, so first of all, Airbnb crushed it. Reported earnings for Q1 yesterday on Tuesday. Beat expectations on revenue, gross booking value, and nights booked. Boom, boom, boom. revenue was $1.5 billion up 70% year over year, 80% over 2019, which is not a shock, the 2019 part. So they have 1.5 and Uber had 6.8.

Yeah. Just to give it the scale of the business. Yeah. Okay. Wait, Uber had wasn't 6.8 at the loss? No, no, no, yeah. 6.8 billion was their top line revenue. Yeah.

6.8 was the top line revenue. Airbnb, wow. That's an interesting. Just pointing it out. Comparison. I have, I don't own Airbnb. be I do own an Uber show. To be fair.

Like, hmm. And actually, they both had pretty rough years. But again, Uber had freaking food delivery. That like, that little decision, which was not little, was it saved the whole ship. Talk about a path dependency question. If they didn't have that. Anti-fragile is the term you're looking for. That is the term I'm looking for.

You're so smart. Yeah. No, I mean, it's anti-fragile. It's totally true. In chaotic times, does your business do better? And it turned out if it rains and people don't. want to go out, they Uber-Eat. Yeah.

And if it's beautiful out and they want to have a couple drinks and sit outside and enjoy some ramen and have some sake or some beers, they take an Uber. Or they take an Uber, right, totally. Or if they're lazy and tired and they've got a family and everybody's whining and they don't want to get in the car, they take Doer-Reed. So it's like you can't lose. You can't lose. Yeah.

Well, anyway, Airbnb also could not lose. Nights and experiences booked were 102.1 million up 59% year-over-year, up 26% over 2019. gross booking value was $17.2 billion. That's up 67%. Net loss was $19 million basically break-even. And then, and Brian Chesky had a really interesting thread. Before you go to that thread, I think just the quality of the revenue here and not having any competitors is now just to thread this to two stories together, network effects. Yeah.

The network effect of Airbnb does have a competitor. it's called VRBO, I guess, and then there's home away. I guess. And yeah, and then there's hotels in the world. And then there's hotels are starting. I start with Bonvoy, which is the married and I have a lot of points on Bonvoy. They have like a million points. Bonvoy is now doing like their own getaways.

So they are including inventory. When you search, I don't know if you notice that, like you can rent a home. So you search for a hotel in Palm Springs. And I guess Bonvoy, that group of hotels now also has some. inventory of their own that is Airbnb like. Interesting. But they don't have a, there's no lift to Uber, there's no DoorDash to Uber Eats, analogy here.

100%. Which means I think that they can be more profitable now as opposed to Uber, which will, or DoorDash, which that war has to settle down. And the other thing that is it, you know, again, with the pandemic effect, the other thing that's so interesting about Airbnb. And a lot of this thread was about rebooting the business. I mean, they took such swift. of action with the layoffs.

And full disclosure, my ex-husband was laid off from Airbnb, like right after the pandemic started. Couldn't it worked out better. They were incredible. They gave them six months or something like that. I don't know, something like that.

I mean, they gave them unbelievable severance. Brian Chesky was out there like, hey, does anyone want to hire these people? Yep. And then because the name recognition of Airbnb, it was so good. And these people were laid off through no fault of their own. Everybody, I mean, he had a new job like,

as soon as he wanted one. basically it was not it was they really really took care of the people that they laid off they also acted incredibly quickly like okay get to it i mean it was just like a phenomenal leadership exercise the layoffs um i found a website that just tracks layoffs that flyoff layoffs that FYI i don't know i've never heard of this but i just had searched for it and i was looking at this at the beginning of the pandemic according to this website you know they laid off 1,900 employees 25%, which back in May 7th, 2020, just two years ago, almost exactly, to the day, they laid off 1,900 employees, 25%.

That's a major one in four people. It was huge. Minimum was 14 weeks of base pay and 12 months of health insurance. And they let them keep their Apple laptops. Yeah. And remember this, and again, this was like seeing the writing on the wall. That was, if you remember, remember, like March 11th is essentially when everything shut down in the U.S.

And by May, Airbnb was like, all hands on deck, pulled the fire alarm, laid off 25% of the staff, completely rebooted the business, and then ended up, you know, in something I think no one saw coming, enabling the future of remote work. No big. And so this is brilliant. I don't know if we talked about it on a previous show, but my take on it was, you know, If you're going to talk the talk, you've got to walk the walk. They're telling people to do staycations and to be nomads and to live their best life and enjoy and leverage remote work. Well, how do you do that?

You put your house on Airbnb because there's no way to swap houses you were talking about before in our private chat. Kind of hard to swap houses. So what do you do? You put your house on the market. You rent it. You get the money. And then you go find a house that you want to rent in Palm Springs. for two months and you let somebody rent yours for two months and you hope it works out.

See, you're stealing my prediction. House swap is actually my prediction because Brian Tuske, well, he teased that there was going to be some massive change. His last tweet said on May 11th, we'll introduce the biggest change to Airbnb in a decade. The only hint that he gave in the, so then he was like, check our letter to investors for like a hint. And the hint said that there would be a completely new way to search. which caused us to wonder, well, okay,

are you going to be able to search for office space? Are you going to be able to lease? Maybe they become like a landlord. And then I was like, do they have house swap? Because that would be amazing. I would love a house swap. There used to be house swaps on Craigslist was a category. So Airbnb was kind of born out of the couch surfing movement on Craigslist,

where people would and house swap on Craigslist. And I've seen it with groups of friends of mine where they're like, hey, I'm going to be gone for the month of August. Does anybody want my house for August? And people kind of do that. And then I rented a, I rented this like really beautiful house in Spain, uh, on the top of the hill.

And the guy, I was talking to the guy and he's like, you know, I want to come to America. Would you give me your house for a month? And I'll take your house for a month. And I was like, that's actually not bad. Uh, not a bad idea. Yeah. I guess there's home exchange, which is a community.

Oh, yeah. There's sort of lots of this. Has anybody used homeexchange.com? Let us know. I'm curious if that works. Also, shout out to Peter Notabom in the chat who said, We B&B, which really made me laugh a lot. We B&B and B.

We, RIVA, yes. We B&B. We B and B, B, B, B and B. B. B and B. B. Yes, yes, Rifka. Oh, my God. Big exchange in a decade.

I had a new name should buy home exchange and make it, we exchange, we home. We be. We, we, and B. We, we, and B. Oh, that's not right. I wish I said that out loud. Rachel, you tricked me.

That's the crossover nobody asked for. You tricked me. That's the crossover. And breaking news while we're here, Chairman Powell has, as predicted, raised the Fed's rate by 50 basis points, half a percentage point is what basis points mean. One basis point. I'm sorry. A hundred basis points equals 1%. So when they say 50 basis points, what they're saying is half of a percent.

So one-two-hundredth in this case of a dollar. dollar. Yep. The biggest hike in two decades. Yeah. So they're really, and this was expected. It was. And so I don't know what the market reaction here is.

But that means NASDAQ is probably going to be down a little bit or it kind of expected it. So maybe. I can't believe they wouldn't have prices in. Everybody knew it was going to happen. You would think it would be priced in. Yeah. It might actually be trading ahead. You know, it might trade ahead because.

because people like, okay, that's confirmed, and we got that out of the way. So QQQQ, which is an index of, an index fund for the, basically, tech stocks is up 0.64 basis points. So you can look at QQQQ as an indicator or the overall NASDAQ. Dow features are up. DAF features are up. SMP features are up.

NASDAQ features are up, yeah. Yeah, basically. They knew this is coming and they're just relieved. It wasn't 75. Like, they just were like, okay, okay. Okay. You did what you said you were going to do. We're cool. Well, I mean, there is an argument like bouncing along the bottom of the stock market. You know, it stocks off in some case, tech stocks off 40, 50, 60, 70 percent.

There will be a buying opportunity at some point. And so at some point, you know, these stocks will look really good. You know, looking at a stock like Uber, if I had a, if I didn't already have such a big position, I'm not giving financial advice here. When you see a company growing like this and starting to hit basically break-even profitability, Airbnb falling into that bucket again. This is kind of like, I think, their Amazon moment where people will start to perceive these companies differently.

People are like, Amazon can never make money. Amazon's printing money. You know, Facebook will never figure out mobile advertising or mobile. And the stock was like down at $15. Remember that? It was trading below the IPO price. And then all of a sudden, boom, and ricocheted back. And they were like, oh, they figured it out.

It's like, oh, really smart people with a business with the majority of the market share, figured out how to make the rides a little bit more expensive or figured out how to make them, you know, they really didn't think Zuck would figure out how to make a mobile app.

I mean, come on. Of course, he's going to figure it out at some point. It's true. It took a year. I mean, yeah, it was close. Well, I mean, he basically outsourced it and they were making React.

They weren't making native apps. So, I mean, a React app is fine if you're like Jay Crew or something, but if your whole business and the whole experience is in the app, you probably need to, to get that right with the native app. So I, did we cover everything today?

I believe that we did and we are well over an hour. Thanks for hanging with us and our politics talk, notice and audience. It's not going to be every day. It's not going to be every day, but it's super, super important. And I, for one, I'm grateful that we can have an honest conversation about it.

Yeah. And listen, if reasonable people will disagree and the part of the idea is to have a great conversation and learn from each other and be more informed. That's right. And so. And unreasonable people will have their own states to live here. And unreasonable people will be screaming and blocking each other on Twitter. And then here we are just trying to have a reasonable conversation.

Here we are. Just trying to just. Trying to understand the world. Understand the world a little bit more. Jinks. Buy me a Coke. Like buy me one of the new coax that Elon's working on. I want to have one of those new Coca-Cola so we can really take on the show with enthusiasm.

Not that all of my references are about Saturday Night Live, but there's a very funny Kelly Ripa one where she's like a little bit of crack cocaine, like, talks about what's in her shampoo. Oh, really? That's pretty good, actually. Yeah. It's just a little bit of like, keep it going. Just, you know, I believe the world is trending towards justice and positivity.

But there'll be bumps in the road and setback. So this two shall pass. Progress is not a straight line. You just like to say, you dumb mofos, hell have no fury. You had it all. You could have been,

you could have no fury. You could have kept winning and winning and winning. And all you had to do was be the party of small business and low taxes. Winning, you could have won for. I mean, who's against that? Yeah, help business and keep taxes low, balance the budget, but no. No.

You had to go in a time machine and literally tell a bunch of, of women who are now in positions of power and you can't push them around like you used to be able to in the 50s and men like we keep saying women but like oh yeah I'm pissed off I have to do the Howard Stern thing today Howard Stern was like if men got pregnant there would be an abortion clinic on every corner give you like Starbucks be like freaking Starbucks absolutely don't even Vente yeah come on in we'll give you omega mocha and by all means coming to, you know, we'll have a consultation in the back room here and figure out what you need and we'll get you whatever you need. Yeah, it would be seamless. This is such utter

bullshit and it has to stop and that's my personal position. Turning point. I believe this is a turning point. Yeah. It is a sad, sad turn of events. But women are not going to take this standing down and neither other men who support them, myself included. So I don't know what the action item is going to be for us, Molly. You know, and this pod is, you know, not here to like take positions but be personally like tell me what i'm supposed to do here to help like yeah voting donations whatever it needs to happen here i'm all in so uh you know somebody tell me where to write a check like am i am i writing a check to plan parenthood is there you got to go more local i got a list for you i mean we got to do something here like there are local organizers

who are organizing to politically fight this or just to help women organizing to help women also to politically fight this. There are a couple like really interesting, again, not to derail us, but there are a couple really interesting laws that have been proposed in some of these states that are like, oh, okay, well, if you're going to outlaw abortion, then there has to be a corresponding statute that provides for the care of this child for the child's entire life. So pay for the child. Pay for the child. Take care of the kid. Okay. You tell me if you really care. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. All right, everybody. A great show. We'll see you tomorrow. Bye bye.

Bye-bye.