TRASHFUTURE - Hello, Neumann

Episode Date: August 24, 2022

This week, we’re discussing the new Adam Neumann (of WeWork shame) and Marc Andreessen housing startup (details are light). We also talk a bit about Tesla’s $15k DLC for your car, and a lot of riffs about homophobic truck owner memes in the United States. Hope you enjoy! If you’re looking for a UK strike fund to donate to, here’s one we’ve supported: https://www.rmt.org.uk/about/national-dispute-fund/ If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes, early releases of free episodes, and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture *MILO ALERT* Here are links to see Milo’s upcoming standup shows: https://www.miloedwards.co.uk/live-shows *AUSTRALIA ALERT* We are going to tour Australia in November, and there are tickets available for shows in Sydney: https://musicboozeco.oztix.com.au/outlet/event/3213de46-cef7-49c4-abcb-c9bdf4bcb61f and Brisbane https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/trashfuture-live-in-brisbane-additional-show-tickets-396915263237 and Canberra: https://au.patronbase.com/_StreetTheatre/Productions/TFLP/Performances *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum)

Mr. Anderson. It's weird as shit. All the agents, Smiths are all just like fisting each other. Yeah, the guy betrays them because he's like, I know my brain is just sending a signal that this cum isn't real. You know, it's just telling me it's delicious. There is no nuts. Wait, what Cypher would say is,

well, here's the deal. You plug me back into the sex plant. Exactly. And I want to be someone important. Like you're with a fucking huge hog. I want to be the piss guy. You make me Sven or the piss guy. I'm looking forward to the kill James Bond made for sure. I'll say that.

What is it? Resipitulate all of these jokes. Would it be essentially what we're saying? Some of it's you're looking for, you're not looking for an answer. You're actually looking for the question. It's the question that drives us. There is no cum.

What is? So you want to go back to your life or do you want to find out how deep my asshole goes? You think that's cum you're trying to... Please leave this in. Okay. All right. I think you know what you should do. Just keep the bits of this that we recorded

and just make it... I know comfort. Hello, everyone, and welcome to the free episode of TF. It's the free one. The free one. And thank you also to my slightly detuned stereo shock jock radio hosts, Nathan Milo. It's the free one.

And thank you also to my slightly detuned stereo shock jock radio hosts, Nathan Milo. It's the free one. You're listening to the free one. Morning radio host, but it's like slightly too low. Like you're listening to bad and the gun. It's like when you're listening to Riley and the cum goes low.

Yeah. That's right. Yes. The cum isn't real. Milo, it's not. Imagine the cum. What are you talking about? Cum isn't real. It hasn't been real for years.

Wait, et cetera. Anyway, it's TF. I'm back after a long vacation. And clearly I have forgotten how to... Clearly I've forgotten how to take control of the show. You've been on a beach reading like the Financial Times just very thoroughly. And you've forgotten that while you've been gone,

we've just been going, yeah, cum? Yeah. Actually, Riley, Riley didn't really go on holiday. He died in a gay sex accident and we replaced him like Avril Lavigne. That's why this knee, Riley, doesn't feel quite right. I was going to say that kind of opens a lot of parentheses about Avril Lavigne.

Wait, Milo, can you just look? I have a lot of stuff. Just putting up a big this site has worked X days without a lost time accident sign on like a bedroom door. I mean, while you've been gone, Riley, while you've been sitting on the beach of Lake Ontario, you know, drinking fucking... Canada's best pour over filter Japanese coffee,

reading the Financial Times. Reading the Financial Times on the beach is probably the funniest gag I can think of for you on vacation, to be honest. Well, we've been on an odyssey. We found two separate instances of Canada basically monetizing the rot in Britain is very funny. We talked about on the episodes while you were gone,

the studio computer completely broke and I had to fix it and basically just just fully fucking hit my head against a wall for about two weeks straight. So... Weird how it took that to fix the computer. Right. Well, what's really funny, the most annoying part about it

is that after all of these crises, it genuinely was solved by me unplugging a cable and plugging it back in. I lost my goddamn mind. That's what Avril Lavigne was trying to do. And then that led to the gay sex accident. Exactly. So they had to get a new Avril Lavigne from the movies.

Yeah. The thing is, she wasn't trying to have gay sex. She was just trying to charge herself. Oh, good. I mean... I can't hold it together for that punchline anymore. This is... The show is doing...

The show has ruined Dan Nainin for me. Which is... There is no skater boy. So what was the story? So is it a theory that Avril Lavigne is dead and that she's been replaced by like a replica? Yeah. It's a popular conspiracy theory that Avril Lavigne died

and was replaced with like the record label was like she's making us too much money. Yeah. Because like Avril Lavigne had some staying power when you think about it. Basically, the record company breathed a sigh of relief because every girl from Canada looks like that. That's absolutely true.

My mother and grandmother, for example, both wore ties. But I've looked... Well, I was out on holiday enjoying my Niagara Rieslings on the shore of Lake Ontario. I have re-centred and I am ready to once again bring up...

You sat in a vineyard and you meditated on the works of like Adam Tooze. Yeah, that's correct. You were rotating like a Tooze in your mind for a while and you've achieved a sort of like high estate. And Adam Tooze, the man who invented sharing a cigarette. And I've got some... I've got some sort of various kinds of things

that I usually talk and think about. We're going to revisit our old friend, not Adam Tooze, who's writing I enjoy, but Adam Newman, an old friend of ours from the WeWork era. But first I want to revisit another old friend, a Mr. David Courtney, OBE, One Big Ego. Well, Dave Courtney announced on his Twitter

the other day that him and his friend Bren are driving over to Ukraine to drop off some aid, I believe, and generally help out. They are bringing cans to the boys. A van full of, like, Heineken is going to Ukraine where it will be...

This man, they call him Courtney. He is coming with the large detachment of flat-nosed geese. Well, my theory is that... Because remember at the very beginning of this whole thing when Liz Truss was like, I encourage you all to go over there and fight. And then Russia was like,

we're going to raise our nuclear alertness level. She's so cool. Yeah, she's great. Look, a girl boss bringing the world to its knees. But later it was then clarified it is illegal to go over to Ukraine with the purposes of fighting. That's this weird sort of like

wanting to have your cake and eat it, right? So I read BBC article that was like this heroic Yorkshireman who went to Ukraine to fight in the International Brigades. And then at the end of that story, which is very positive, in italics it was like, oh, by the way, the Home Office says that if you go to Ukraine,

you could be prosecuted for terrorism on your return. So basically what happened is, I wonder if he just saw the emphasis, no, this is illegal and then immediately started putting together a pun for it. The first time he heard of Ukraine was in the context of it being a crime to go there and fight.

So it's about crime here. How come I've never heard of this place before? Dave Courtney has a big sticker book with sort of like every crime on the statute books and every common law crime. I was thinking Dave Courtney travels everywhere with an old-timey suitcase and it just has stickers of all of his crimes

back to it like a 1950s tourist. Yeah, I mean, I'm just imagining Dave Courtney showing up like you said with his battalion of geezers and like, Mr. Courtney, we have reviewed your files and have determined you are not racist enough. I saw a documentary about the Yakuza in Japan and it's like this aging Yakuza guy who has basically been kicked out of his clan

and he's not even doing crimes anymore but he kind of wants to trade off of the image of such and when the big tsunami and earthquake hit Japan, he and one of his flat-nosed geezers literally get a van, fill it with cans of a Sahi Superdry and drive it to a refugee centre to like hand out cans and at that moment I knew I had seen Japanese Dave Courtney until each nation is granted a Dave Courtney

and so we have to assume that much the same thing is going on here. Dave Courtney. I wanted to just note that a friend of the show Dave Courtney continues to engage in antics. Yeah, we'll be linking his GoFundMe in the show now. That's basically like the international brigades. Yeah, that's right. The international brigands.

But he also claimed to have beat up police on their way to like break up the miners' strike. Yeah, Comrade Courtney. All of Dave Courtney's sort of like political interventions have a distinctly left character. You have to say that for him. I think really what... Look, I think he's more of an agent of chaos,

but I do have some more stuff going on, which is... How do you think I got these noses? Which is specifically that... Remember how every two years since about 2011, Tesla's self-driving capability is supposed to have been sort of fully activated, turned on and robotaxis, right? Yeah, any day now. And that was the thing that was going to make Uber profitable

as well and a bunch of other things. Yes, correct. Well, I wanted to sort of also highlight that... Look, innovation is costly, right? It's not free. Freedom isn't free, firstly. And then the freedom to not steer your car is also not free and getting less free.

Because... Because basically the way that full self-driving... It works as it doesn't, but the way that it's purported to work is that your car comes able to do it. Got it, perfect. Thank you. You think that's cum? Yeah, the car comes. The car arrives.

A car comes. The car arrives and you are sort of technically able to do it, but it requires a software update, more or less, that costs money that happens over the air. So it's built with the capability to do it, just it's locked from doing it. Oh, it's car DLC, okay. Yeah, essentially. It's car DLC.

And so the price of the... You know, the only map your old self-driving car comes with is Verdansk. Yeah. The price is now going to be $15,000 US as of September 5th. It's largest price hike ever, which now, officially... I've realized something here, right? You can pay Tesla for this today, if you wanted, right? In advance of a product that has not been developed,

has been pushed back many times, and in all likelihood, will never exist, but you can pre-order it. Correct. Yeah. Yeah, you can pre-order it. This seems legitimate to me. Oh, can't wait for my pre-order of Magic Beans to arrive. Any day now.

Magic Beans keep getting more expensive, which means they keep getting better. I don't think that you can pre-order a condo in Neon yet, but you can actually pre-order the self-driving AI for Tesla. The thing is, Neon is perfect for self-driving, because it's just one straight line. That's true. It's probably the only place Tesla will work.

Milo, it's also supposed to be incredibly walkable, which I think sort of undoes a lot of that good straight line work in terms of self-driving ability. So the thing is, right, you have to pay that money. You'd only get a thing that's in beta, not fully released, and so you never really get the robotaxi experience that's been promised. But the other thing is, just by paying all that money,

you don't necessarily even get the beta. You need to have your driving constantly monitored and scored by Tesla, and then to that point, you get a safety score. And then if your safety score is high enough, then one day full self-driving is delivered to you like a little treat. Oh, fun.

I'm just recalling some comments when car bros were trying to roast each other on forums a long time ago and just imagining, like, when you're getting scored by Tesla, they're saying, like, we have determined an error in your driving technique. Your profile is registered as male, but you drive like a woman for a homosexual. You did not take bisexual on the forum,

and yet you cannot drive. This was actually, I remember, guys were doing this. They were so mad at fanboys for the Subaru WRX and Preza, and so they were getting on the forums and being like, the perfect car for women and homosexual men. And like, it was just as, like, obviously deeply, like, if you think internet homophobia is bad now, like 20 years ago, it was much worse.

But anyway, it's just... Oh, here's the thing. There's, like, at least 30 states in the U.S. where, like, most of the culture is guys kissing each other on the mouth so they can get a third guy to take a photo of it and then caption it like, Ford truck drivers, right? No.

That's right. We're just doing this as an internet bit. I mean, and if the guy with the camera then wants to join in... Yeah, sort of settling down into, like, a loving marriage with another guy who also owns a GMC. Yeah, like 18th generation screenshot, terribly iPhone-native fucking edited text onto a cartoon, like, of sperm cells swimming,

and it's like, gee, I can't wait to be a baby. He says, you idiot, we're gonna be dodge truck drivers. I mean, it is genuinely interesting the extent to which every single one of the big giants that were promised to change the economy forever and revolutionize human society forever have sputtered in some very specifically funny way. Like Netflix, you know, it's just their share price dropped

and when it was revealed how many people quit Netflix, okay, that's basic. Facebook turning itself into this shittiest video game on Sega Dreamcast, that is a lot funnier because it's like this is the level of infinity money, you know, billionaire delusion that produces cyber trucks and other fucked up stupid, you know, Tesla, SpaceX ideas,

but Mark Zuckerberg's specific vision of that is so weirdly parochial and specific. But yeah, with Tesla, it genuinely seems as though it's just the things that were promised are gonna fail no matter what. Uber, if I understand correctly, is either basically insolvent or really jacking up prices. Every single one of them, well, they're still around,

but the idea that this is the future manifest, not really seeing it, it doesn't feel like that. Even the people who are the hardest defenders of the vision don't really seem to have the energy anymore. Like, it's just not the same, like there's not the same vigor as there was in sort of instances. You think it's gonna be like after a religious revival,

we're gonna have like a sort of a burned over country of like people who got scammed on Tesla and Uber and everything else, who are just like sort of jaded, former startup guys who just become nihilists? I mean, if you wanna think about not just the fans. Sorry, I'm doing this and I'm also looking at memes of guys being gay with each other

on different trucks. That's the essence of this program. We're swimming inside the owner of a Chevy S10. Guys loving each other and living together for like 12 plus years and making a link later-style movie about it so they can post it online with the caption, guys with a dodge round. But I think like the question right is,

I don't know where the burned over country is gonna be, right? Because now all of the, if you think about like what the burned over country that sort of gave rise to a lot of the sort of 19th century religious revivalist movements, including but not limited to the Mormon church as well. A lot of that was specifically about like the place-based extractive industries of like upstate New York

and New England and stuff, right? And a lot of those either failing, commerce moving like into the cities and so on and so on. But there was a specific, you could look and you could see the country, the burned over country of the sort of post 1990s is like everything that wasn't a major city. The question is like did that spawn a religious revival

or did that sort of spawn something much like a stranger, right? Did that spawn a kind of nihilism? Or did it spawn a kind of easy ground for reaction? We're saying sort of two things here. Thing number one, a guy is gonna find some golden plates buried in a hill. They're gonna tell him how to start a good startup. Thing number two,

just seeing a thing here that says dodge stands for dick on dick gay entertainment. I wish it did. I wish it did. So I think the question is, right? The actual place in which a lot of these companies exist, these American cities that have had, they're largely like had their home values

sort of rocketed up by the tech industry or real estate speculation, right? A lot of those gigantic salaries that were supporting that are starting to go away. I think it's an open question as to like what happens to those people who are the assistant, second assistant lead Imagineer at Tesla.

Nate was looking at me like I thought of another acronym. I'm just thinking, I was just gonna say Alice, that aren't you considering that? That is the least racist American car odor joke back when it might ever hurt. Yeah, for sure. I think that should be the episode title, frankly. But what's gonna happen to like the people

whose jobs are mostly recording TikToks about how cool their job is, you know? I go to the office, I get the free kombucha. I work two hours and then I go, you know, buy some overpriced food kind of thing. Well, people are disaffected. The time was this was a gay sex town

and my father was working. Everyone in this town was having gay sex. But now since they closed down the Dodge plant, it's been assured. I think the interesting questions, right? With regard to what you're talking about is, you know, where is all of that belief going to go? Because I think, you know, beyond just being

a circus impresario, he is Musk himself and the sort of the economy that he represents that sort of has slowly and then very quickly started to fall apart. That also served as the place where a lot of belief was put. And I have no idea what's gonna happen when it eventually fails

and that belief has to go somewhere else. But I also think, think about the thing that sort of worsened the burn, accelerated the demise of the most recent burned over country of most of the sort of bits outside of major cities in like the US and UK and stuff. And you sort of be like, well, the people who were, the kinds of people who would now have the roles

where they were posting on it about how they, you know, have four meetings and then have lunchables or whatever. Like a lot of those people were fine, right? It wasn't that proletarianization came for like the least productive. It came for the, in fact, many cases, the most productive just like,

it meant a lot of the most, say, least white-collar, class-wise. Yeah, it came for the guys who are having gay sex with each other instead of the people who are like monitoring and supervising and directing that gay sex. Yeah, exactly. Like Avril Lavigne. Well, he had so many titles into the machinery.

What's weird though is, you know, I know that we're going to talk about Adam Newman, the ex of WeWork. And it's interesting because this reminded me of something like when I talk about, we talk about WeWork and similar sort of tech, bull market, kind of peak, zero interest, free money startups.

You know, I was, the thing about WeWork that always really strikes me is that they had like the WeWork Fest or some kind of WeWork camp and it was sort of like, you know, basically like, let's have vibes about work, but also make it like a festival. Very, very strange, strange thing. And like, you know, it attracted enough devotees that I think the sentiment was sincere.

And it reminded me of, there was a, have you guys ever heard of the brand name Saturn for cars? Oh yeah, of course. Riley might know them. Saturn was a General Motors imprint. I think they started it in the 80s and it finally went, got discontinued in 2010. But they were famous for making sort of like,

shitty cars by and large. Like they were, they were, they were very, very down market. They weren't good. But in 94, I think, they, I remember they had this commercial. It was sort of featuring the fact that they had like a Saturn owners Jamboree to like have a big fucking, like camp get together where everyone came out

and drove their Saturn out like in like Tennessee or someplace. Saturn owners Jamboree. Well, the only thing they're interested in is Uranus. Fucking God. I've just, I've just perfectly sort of diverted Milo's brain onto like homophobic American car owner memes. That's right. My new interest.

Yeah, I mean, it's, the point I'm making though is that, that is now kind of seen as an absurd curio. And I do wonder if, you know, 20 odd years from now, 30 odd years from now, because I mean, you're getting on 30 years from when the Jamboree commercial happened. And the real event happened.

If things like we work, things like Tesla, you know, Tesla Musk fandom. Tesla's going to do a million things like this. Right, right. But like that, it's going to be seen in the same sort of like, wow, that's a weird blip. And it's the hardest thing to imagine is that anyone could be so worked up about their car brand that they decided to go

spend time on vacation going to like a car brand owners convention. Unless of course they're Dodge truck owners and it's a huge fucking open air orgy for guys, only for guys who are not allowed. But they're actually all doing it to make a point about the Ford guys who are all doing it to make a point about the GM guys.

Yeah, exactly. It's like a homophobic Arabaros, except the Arabaros is like two guys suck each other's dicks. Yeah, so you'd be like, dude, you're so gay. It's like the straightest thing you can do is to like suck another dude's dick as a man in order to call a third man gay. I mean, that's just like, that's,

mate, you just know everything about the 2004 Internet. It really is a wellspring of knowledge. Well, I mean, I was just also going to say too that I mean, like, let me be honest, I was like, if you've ever been around soldiers from any military, like in the U.S. Army, we had a, our guys would have a thing called gay chicken, which basically like is what it says on the tin.

It's whoever flinches first loses the game. And it's like, how far are you willing to go? Zizek has a joke about this, about the Yugoslav army too, where he's like, yeah, it was an intensely homophobic institution. We also said instead of like, good morning or hello, we said, oh, suck a dick. Just homo-sociality. It's a powerful thing.

Shuck your dick. Say things of that nature. Actually, we said it was a schmock-yosh. It's great. Yeah, yeah. I mean, okay. Like I don't want to derail the episode talking about the different ways in which, you know,

soldiers will say things like, yep, time to suck today's dick and be like, also I'm straight. But suffice it to say. I don't own a dodge truck. Exactly. This is actually the ancient Romans model of sexuality as well. It's not gay for the one who owns the Ford. You can only have sex.

You can only have sex with a Dodge Ram owner if you still got a car payment. But once he's paid it off, it's against the law to fuck him. Well, it's how he learns how to drive better. But, right, I think that the thing that always sort of, you know, diverts me about Tesla and is the symbol, the symbol for which it has become so much about belief and no one has managed to harness the zero interest rate

economy to create a kind of pseudo-religion around himself than Adam Newman. And Adam Newman is, of course. Back. He's back. He's back. And not that he ever left. We're not calling it a comeback.

He has unfortunately been here for years because after the sort of titanic failure of WeWork, I mean, we sort of, in the epilogue to our WeWork episodes, we sort of addressed that, yeah, Adam Newman is just set for life now. He's a billionaire. He's fine. He made a shitload of money off of the idea of do not buy,

but lease a shitload of office space, put some cucumber water in there, and then profit, we hope, also incidentally starting kind of a cult. Yes, starting kind of by accident sort of a cult. And also really much of the money coming from, for example, investors. It's a large salary as you pay yourself

or trademarking We as a brand and then selling it back to your own firm for $6 million investor money. We know and love the sort of like branches out into a shit that doesn't make any sense, but is insanely evil, like education or whatever. Of course. It's a classic of the genre.

It's sort of our bread and butter. And that's why we're following Adam. Indeed. And so he now has a what's called a family office. So basically a lot of the times if you're... Basically, yeah, exactly. You can't take outside money. You still operate as a hedge fund

and basically everything stays the same, but you cannot have institutional investors or rather you can't have outside investors who aren't either family or within a specifically defined group. You can't take outside investment money. Yeah, exactly. Basically, the worst thing you can do is

be a rich guy who still makes millions and millions and millions of dollars a year. You just can't do it with other people's money. I wouldn't say millions and millions. Hundreds of millions. Yeah, exactly. Family office. If you followed the show Billions,

that's typically one of the things when someone gets really hemmed up in the hedge fund world is they're sort of like, well, part of your plea agreement is you're going to immediately convert your firm to a family office like that. You aren't kicked out of the game so much as you're just no longer allowed to take.

Yeah, you have to do a prestige. Basically, what you're doing is you're still playing the sport, the exhibition games. You're no longer allowed to win the ring. Yeah, you're allowed to do like sick dunks, but it doesn't really count. You get to be a Harlem Globetrotter. Yeah, pretty much.

The SEC is the Washington Generals. They've allowed him to set up a family office on the proviso that he invests heavily in dick on dick gay entertainment. So, this is a few sort of pieces here. The federal government has ordered you to become gay. Exactly.

This is actually what happened to me. This is actually a corporate restructuring. You need to close down your imprint and you will now operate under the label of GMC Motors, also known as gay man's choice. You just know all of them. No, I just made that one up, but I mean, I just try to turn on

the specifically American part of my reign and imagine GMC, that's an easy acronym. How do you make that homophobic? So, basically, right? He has slowly been rebuilding his empire through this family office. That means no more Masayoshi-san, but he's realized he kind of is the Masayoshi-san now

for his own business. Because he made so much money off of this, he can just like bankroll shit himself. Indeed. So, this is from the FT in March. This is a profile of his family office and we're going to see some things raised here that we're going to see in another thing

we're going to talk about in a sec, which is the decision by a certain very prominent venture capitalist to invest in one of his very strange ideas. So, this is from the FT. Most poor smotoms of we work under Newman have concluded the quest for hypergrowth was his undoing, but if he has learned a lesson about going more slowly, his slide deck in front of me does not necessarily

betray it. The family office is still pursuing venture investments with massive value creation potential. However, he still has learned many lessons. This puts Newman himself in the position soft banks Masayoshi-san occupied when he was still running WeWork. I asked Newman how that experience

informs how he operates now. This is a quote from Newman. This is so interesting. I've only shared this internally, so it almost feels weird to say it out loud, but I believe that experience, remember, the experience of being the world's least competent landlord that still managed

to make billions of dollars out of it. This experience that is allowing me to end the team to now be venture investors, it's actually taking the successes, but even more interestingly, the lessons in the last 10 years and implementing them. My losses was lessons. And implementing them to every situation that we see.

And so, keep that in mind, right? He has learned all of the lessons. This is literally sort of like, it's very close to something that we saw with Uber that we've talked about before, where Uber was like, we brought in a new guy, we brought in Derek Ozrashahi,

and he's going to fix everything because he's like serious and business minded, and he's like, you know, not going to like piss money out of the window. This except it's the same guy. It's literally the same guy. It's the same guy, but now he's watching some COVID-19 videos.

Yeah, exactly. He's like learned a lot. He's grown as a person, and I think he's going to demonstrate real maturity. And it's fully just the same guy. Interestingly, Alice, I don't actually have this in the notes, but I remember it from the articles.

I've just brought it up again. The article does take a moment to highlight that Newman is no longer dressing like a doofus. I was about to say, I would respect this more if he had done a sort of like Count Olaf style disguise. If he had been like, no, I'm not Adam Newman.

I'm Adam Newman's cousin, who has a moustache, and that makes me a different person. I'm Adam Moldman. Yeah, exactly. Gary Oldman's brother. If he had been Madame Moldman, he'd been like wearing sort of like pantomime drag,

100%. I'm on board investing all my money. My family office is investing all my all the money in our family made by my brother, Gary Oldman. The Hollywood actor. Yeah. But so,

but instead of that, what he's done is he's started wearing shoes that lace up now. So it says, T-shirts emblazoned with motivational slogans that Adam usually favors. He's not wearing. He has chosen a sober gray shirt instead,

featureless, but he's worked out how to work a button. This is what humility has taught him, has taught him to work the button of a shirt. That's right. So, so he's dressing normal now, and he talks about how like, he's learned here to be an investor.

He says, on a video call a year ago, he was advising a founder to take a new strategic direction, but the entrepreneur wouldn't heed it. Hear it, rather. The call got heated, quote, and suddenly I see myself, I slow down and I breathe,

and I say to the entrepreneur, thank you, because now I see how it feels to be on the investor side. And I say to him, you know what, I think many times I made the right decisions, but there were times where I could have listened better. The reason I'm giving you this advice

is because I think it's best for you, not for any personal need for myself. So please take a second and hear what I'm saying and learn from my lesson. I should have listened more, and this is an opportunity for you to listen. So also being just the world's most annoying, self-satisfied guy.

He's ultimately right, he says, I think what's beautiful about the new story, the thing he's doing now, is that it's a progression and a consequence of the old story, where he cartoonishly failed at being a landlord. I don't know if it's a model, but a thought that guided me,

is that if we take everything that happened as a lesson, we celebrate the great, we learn from whatever it is we can learn from, and apply it as we move forward into the future, then that's extremely beneficial. It's a bad thing that we sort of make it possible for you to have infinity money, infinity times it seems,

providing you're able to demonstrate like, relentless psychopathic confidence. That's the only way this works. If this man ever stops believing in himself, it's over, but he never will, because he's exactly the kind of person that we've selected for this stuff, and it's someone who will never, ever have any self-doubt whatsoever.

And we'll just think, oh, this is my next, you know, I had my golden age, now it's my Silver Age, sort of comic book era. Because the one thing that's interesting, right, and this is sort of the setup for what comes next, is how he's the only way that they're able to, if you do WeWork, and you're 2% more normal, right?

Maybe, I don't know, let's say you do WeWork, then you hit your head, and then you become normal. You will never, ever, ever be able to do anything again, because you will realize how insanely bad WeWork went. It's not even... Yeah, and it's kind of like, it's like a tightrope walker thing, too. Like, you look down, and you see how much money is involved in this,

and like, how much real estate, and how much like, economic activity is tied up, and you're done bullshit. Then you're gonna fall off the thing, because it's like, unsustainable to anyone, except the kind of person who is just like, looking steadily at the other side, and just walking straight across like an absolute moron.

And I think like, it takes that kind of, again, like, near religious, or in this case, religious leader devotion, to the idea that you have a particular, unique destiny. It's just that all of the religious words, I mean, if you listen to sort of what Adam is talking about, or Newman is talking about, rather, it's a kind of...

It is a... He sees himself as a sort of prophet of we, initially, but now as a kind of, you know, like a kind of Christian saint, right? Who is going to be, you know, by preaching to the two other entrepreneurs to show them the way, but also how he went through his tribulations, so that he may... Also that he could come to his ultimate destiny,

which is to be, in this case, a slightly better investor. It's a little bit of a parallel, I think, with Kathy Wood, who basically says, God told me where to allocate assets. It just so happens that I've been doing that in an environment where everything is going up, especially insane speculations. It's this same sort of replacement of... It's a specific, like, religious doctrine with the idea of infinite growth forever and the replacement of religious language

with the sort of vague talk of, like, self-improvement and business speak. To come back to revival and stuff, you have to do that to be sort of an evangelist in that sense, too. Like, no one was doing, like, tent revivals going, well, I think maybe we should consider that, you know, we have to think about this. No, you have to start with an immediate lie and then just sort of, like, double and triple down on it forever

until either it runs out or you end up in Utah. And so I think that's sort of where we want to get to. Okay, well, what is it that he's doing? Yeah, we want to get to Utah. So what is it, in fact, that he is doing? What are these... He's doing landlord stuff again, but this time, humbly.

Yeah, well, this time, number one, he's actually purchased the units that he's going to be renting out. So I... Oh, so he has learned. He has actually learned one very important lesson. Someone explained to him what a landlord was and he learned from that and he took that forward. Oh, you mean those guys aren't renting the place?

Someone else. Yeah, what he was last time was a kind of, like, sublet lord. So he's got two... He's got these firms, right? Flow is the big one, right? And so Flow has recently attracted $350 million, not as an investment at a much higher valuation from Andreessen Horowitz.

Andreessen also is a guy we've talked about quite a bit, right? Yeah, Mark Andreessen is a classic guy. Well, I think that it's... I've been sort of looking for the new soft bank. I thought it was going to be Tiger Global for a while, but, like, they just invested in potato futures. That's not a soft bank thing to do. That's very practical.

And I've realized he's been sitting in front of me the whole time. We've been reading a lot from Andreessen Horowitz's blog and stuff, but I've realized what it takes to invest in Adam Newman and an Adam Newman cinematic universe company, which is you need to... You need to yourself be a combination of very rich and have a very strange point you're trying to prove with all of the investments that you're making.

Yeah, you need to be a believer, but not necessarily a believer in the same way that, like, any of these startup guys, including Newman is, in something that's, like, orthogonal, something that's, like, slightly sort of off to... Like, something tangential to them. And I think it's the other... Like, that's what Peter Thiel was, like, fucking superpowers

besides a shitload of money is. Yeah, I'm not actually a fascist. Probably I'm, like, some kind of secret third thing that is sort of 90% fascist and 10%, like, weird monarchist. But in this case, right, the thing that both Mark Andreessen and Masayoshi Saan had in common is that they are true believing utopians, because that's, in the sort of, in the tech sense,

it's just Mark Andreessen is a little bit more friendly with Peter Thiel than Masayoshi Saan was. And so, you know, Mark Andreessen also is, like, investing much more sort of bullish about crypto than Saan was. It made it more central to his thing, because a big part of, like, being a big crypto guy is that you have a sort of innate understanding that all of these institutions are fundamentally compromised

because they're not free enough or we have to, and you're basically more of an Ann Cap than Masayoshi Saan ever was. So, Mark Andreessen, this is his blog post about investing in flow. He also, his company invested in another Newman property called Flow Carbon, which we'll talk about if we have time. So, investing in flow, Mark Andreessen says,

our nation has a housing crisis. Again, we are going to solve this by judging up some flats. We are going to make it worse. We are going to make it worse. Hey, that's something. Because, I mean, it's, if you think about it, it's like, our nation has a housing crisis, well, in this case, the US has a housing crisis,

so does the UK. And you want to wonder, okay, well, what's the solution to this housing crisis that's been caused by gigantic institutional investors, or at least in no small part, caused by gigantic institutional investors buying every single family home? Is it vibes?

Well, it's that, but also another gigantic institutional investor buying up every single other family home. I would say also that this is a relatively recent phenomenon in the US, like the UK is ahead of the curve in terms of this thing being a problem. And in the UK, it's less to do with the fact that, you know, it's less common to have like a private equity investor investing in a real estate investment trust

that's buying up single family homes, but the idea of like a housing shortage exacerbated by the fact that it's almost impossible to build new housing stock without it being insanely overpriced. The quality of new bill took quite poor. And, you know, like there's just a bottleneck of supply. Like the UK was ahead of the curve on that. In the US, if this was a problem,

or a significant problem around big cities as the sort of like internet economy picked up, like obviously the Bay Area is a huge one, but this was a problem in Boston, in New York, in Chicago. Chicago is not as bad, but it's getting there. Los Angeles, Seattle now, all of these cities, but like it's become a problem everywhere. Like I can recall, you know, 10 years ago

when you could get like a one bedroom condo in Atlanta, like in the city of Atlanta, like downtown practically, in like an area that would be considered desirable for like $110,000. That's not the case anymore. I can recall when you could get like a single family detached home in Raleigh, North Carolina for like $150,000. Now it's like $600,000.

Like it's shocking how much more expensive it's gotten everywhere. Like it used to be, okay, blue state, big city, tech economy, et cetera. It wasn't that way everywhere. It's gotten so unbelievably bad. Like I've got a friend who's basically getting priced out of St. Louis.

Like if you know anything about America, I mean obviously it's a suburb of St. Louis. It's not city at St. Louis, but like fuck me. Like the idea that that's happening, that like the Bay Area slash Boston Metro area kind of problem of housing costs is happening in St. Louis, in Raleigh, in Durham, North Carolina. Like that, the idea of that happening is insane.

But this is a phenomenon in the last 10 years, certainly I'd say in the last five years. Well, I mean, there's, I'm being glib when I sort of talk about the massive institutional investors. That's a big part of what's driven it in the last few years. But ultimately, it goes back to the same thing that's at the root of more or less everything else, which is that if money is free,

then asset prices inflate forever. And the people who have the most assets, have the most access to the most money to get more assets. And so if you've, and if you heavily financialized housing, and that's sort of the main store of wealth for a lot of people, and also mortgages don't cost very much, then it just means that more people can, more people can keep turning over those houses.

But because that's the model of where everyone's retirement is, the prices basically just need to keep going up. And so what the, and so the idea of this, of the, your house price rising is what secures your, it's what secures the investment of your life or whatever, that model of society. It requires the house prices to go up forever, which means that interest rates have to stay at nothing forever

so that wages don't have to go up so that people can keep obviously buying these houses, right? So what's happened is that we essentially have gone crashing through that particular contradiction, once interest rates started going up, because one of the, one of the very wobbly legs of that triad went away, that tripod rather, went away. And so-

Wait a minute, are you suggesting that house prices can't just increase forever? Indeed. And so again, this is, so even just like that, that digression, right, is going to sort of like bear that in mind, and also Newman talking about all the lessons he learned when we look at one of what Mark Andreessen has written about, about investing in flow to solve the housing crisis, right?

Because if you are a tech utopian who's really into cryptocurrency, then you don't want to hear that explanation of the housing crisis, that the problem is the financialization. You want to hear that the problem is the regulation and that if only we had the right sets of regulations, the market would just sort of sort itself out without having to look at anything like ownership. The problem is insufficient freedom.

Well, that's why you need that kind of belief to do this, is you have to be resistant to any sort of like developments in economics. Correct. So in our nation, Mark Andreessen writes, has a housing crisis. The demographic trends driving America's housing market are impossible to ignore.

Our country is creating households faster than we're building houses. So, you know, he's a yimby, except at one point, they were going to develop a multifamily home in his county, and he opposed its construction, but never mind. Structural shortages in available homes for sale push housing prices higher, while young people are staying single for longer and increasingly concentrating in highly desirable urban centers. These factors put enormous pressure on rent in the nation's most dynamic cities,

starkly revealing the troubling realities of both sides of our housing market's two models. He then describes the models. The first one is just, you know, you own a house near your current employer if you can find it. If you can afford that house and once you buy it, you're now stuck, you can't move blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That's talking about, you know, owning a house.

The second model is one that I think reveals a little bit more of the big ideology cube, which he says, you rent an apartment, but it's a soulless experience. Do you even meet your neighbors, much less have any friends in your complex? Does it feel like home? Wait a second, wait a second. Okay, so I get what he's doing here, because this is from the blog post about why he's invested

in Newman's new thing, right? He's suggesting that Newman's thing is going to end or at least combat alienation and loneliness. Well, that's just like we worked it. Yeah, of course, because I became such close friends with everyone at the WeWork that I worked at. Yeah, absolutely. And so, essentially what the post goes on to say.

You know, our eyes met across the cucumber water kind of thing. It says, are you proud to bring friends and family to visit or hesitant? And you can pay rent for decades and still own zero equity. Nothing. There's a reason the federal government started subsidizing home mortgages. Someone who was bought into where he lives cares more about where he lives. Without this, apartments don't generate any bond between person and place. Without community, no bond between person to person.

So, life was not alienating at all until we started living in apartments and getting those Sriracha tacos and going to Craft Beer and eating the bugs and living in the pod, basically. Of course. We must return to a prelapsarian time before buildings were allowed to get above five or so stories. Seems to be the Andreessen point of view. He says, for many of these people, the increased screen time of working remotely.

Because the thing is, right? Like, he has identified, you know, it's not a difficult thing to do. He has identified a real problem, which is a lot of people's apartments are shit. My apartment is shit. I wouldn't want to have people over. Part of the reason why is because I don't own it. It's like, it's my landlords. My landlord is, you know, fine, whatever.

But the solution to that is a new, like, a new, more sort of cult-like landlord. What if you loved your landlord and that was your social bond? Because if I own it, then I would have to live in a society. Yeah, which you don't want. It would be better in, like, many, many ways, but I would have to live in a society. So if you were in the Brian Jonestown house, yeah. I like these fuckers better when they were trying to get me to move into their weird sex compounds. You know, instead of being like, I guess they kind of are still.

Yeah, the dog's truck dealership. Yeah. I mean, I would just say too that, like, it's funny because something that's relevant for British listeners, American listeners know this, is that public housing in America is almost impossible to build, both because of zoning considerations and in some states, laws basically making it almost illegal or functionally illegal because it requires this incredible burden in a sort of referendum-style vote that makes it, you cannot do it. Whereas in Britain, we have social housing, obviously, both Tory and Labour hate it,

but they, we do have it, they are building more of it in small amounts. I live in the borough of Southwark. The waitlist is like, there's like 13,000 people on the waitlist. You can't even get on the waitlist until you can prove you've lived in Southwark borough for at least five years. And like, a lot of it is in very poor shape. I'd love to live in social housing just because I'd love to fucking pay rent to not a goddamn corporate landlord or a person who's a landlord, but it's almost impossible to get. And it's also means tested.

So that like at this point, I mean, you know, good on me, I'm doing well financially, but like, I wouldn't be able to get it. But like, I would love, I would fucking love to not have to pay money to a landlord and not be obligated to be like, if you want a place where you don't feel like you're a mark, you're obligated to buy. What if you felt like a mark, but there was a ping-pong table? Okay, well, tell me more about this ping-pong table. I mean, that could alter the calculus just a little bit. The next thing I want to say, though, is that like the concept of social housing, like being good, like there's plenty of, there are plenty of countries in the world that have done social housing where like,

it is an alternative to this notion that the, you know, the only way to not be a mark or to live, you know, a life of zero control in any way over your life whatsoever is to buy a place. But also, right? A lot of previous iterations of social housing back when we were building actual social housing did also have stuff like community centers attached. It had daycares attached. It had libraries. It had things you could do to go see people you lived near.

And so the idea that this is somehow a, again, we don't know the specifics of Flow's business model, but by implication, we sort of, we can sort of suss out what it is by sort of, you know, what Andreessen is saying and what Adam Newman has done, which is he's spent over a billion dollars buying 3,000 residential units in like Fort Lauderdale in Miami. Condos. Condos were like totally empty, but with a ping-pong table. Yeah. But the idea, even like, that shit's going to be underwater in like a swimming club.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, ping-pong balls float, so do ping-pong bats. You know, this is the sense of, and the ping-pong table, that's a community thing. If we get enough ping-pong tables, if we get enough ping-pong tables in the condo, we can like refloat it above the flood. And so what you've got to understand is, you know, a good landlord might give you a ping-pong table, but a really great landlord gives you a ping-pong show. No.

That's not vulnerable to climate change. You can always remember the ping-pong show when you're ankle deep in water. So this is what Andreessen continues to write. My partner, Catherine Boyle, has written about this alienation, and I think she's right. And then he cites two articles written by his partner, Catherine Boyle. The first one entitled, Can Zoom Save the American Family? And Can Starlink Save the American Mother? What is this, Mad Libs?

Oh, can they? He's being generated by an AI. Apparently they can. So here's what he says about flow. Adam is a visionary leader who revolutionized the second largest asset class in the world, commercial real estate, by bringing community to an industry in which neither existed before. Revolutionized is an interesting word. See, he revolutionized commercial real estate by forgetting to buy any of the real estate.

He revolutionized his investor's money into it not being there anymore. Adam and the story of WeWork have been exhaustively chronicled, but for all the energy put into covering the story, it's often underappreciated that only one person is fundamentally redesigned the office experience and let a paradigm-changing global economy in the process. Adam Newman. Again, how do you redesign the office experience? A lot of people don't work in offices now.

The people that do... How do you redesign the office experience? There used to be three martinis at lunch. None of this is new. Ping Pong Show. What's interesting about this is that this completely ignores the idea that there are sectors of the economy where people don't work in white-collar offices. Maybe that's table stakes, but it just feels as though when these things are talked about regardless of...

When they say, this is bad because X is happening or Y doesn't happen anymore, it makes you realize that to them, you are basically a moorlock unless you work in a job like they do. Those whole sectors of the economy, a larger percentage of the economy than white-collar service work or things along those lines, that doesn't exist. Why should we be talking about what these people want? What if there was an air hockey table? They should do open-cast mining like it's a wee work.

There's an air hockey table, there's bean bags. Exactly. You could have an air hockey table. Doing my little mining TikToks being like, yes, I get in, I get the free kombucha, I play some ping pong, do a bit of lead mining, come back out. Grizzled Australians in Calgurli taking a lift deep into the center of the earth and just going, oh, the fucking cucumber ward is on point today.

The Sophie's choice of American housing policy is you can either live in the cult timeshare from Andreessen Horowitz, or you can live in Vienna-style social housing, but you have to drive a Ford truck. That's right. Yeah, looking at my landlord as he's firing ping pong balls out of his assholes to welcome me to the neighborhood and just going, what does this guy drive a Dodge? It's 21 ping pong balls salute as you get your keys to your little pod.

That's what they should do when the queen eventually died. So we think it is natural. Every landlord in Britain. We think it is natural for his first venture since wee work, Adam and his colleagues build the future of living with the theme of connecting people through transforming their physical spaces and building communities where people spend most of their time, the home. Residential real estate is ready for this change.

Shelter is one of our most basic needs. Thank you, Mark. In a world where limited access to home ownership continues to be a driving force behind inequality and anxiety, giving renters the sense of security, community and genuine ownership has transformative power in our society. So note this. We did not say ownership. We said a sense of ownership.

Webster's defines putting a gun in your mouth as what you do if you find out that you've recently been given a Ford truck. I can't think of what a good homophobic Ford backered him would be. All I can think of is like fans of rubbing dicks or something like that. But that feels like that's too gay for like the homophobic Facebook post. Yeah, they wouldn't think of it. Fans of rubbing dicks is quite good though. I would this Fratage comma or rubbing dicks is more of like a definition.

When you care for people at their home and provide them with a sense of physical and financial security, again, a sense of financial security. Fucking old raggedy butts. I love to be lulled into a sense of financial security. Not a false one. Just it's a sense of it. This is a off topic, but I just imagine Riley getting added to like American hometown Facebook meme group sorts, all the homophobic truck memes.

And he started to be like, Mansard roof owners be like, and no one fucking gets the joke. Come on. They do be like that only through a seismic shift in the way that industry relationships are structured and the mechanisms through which value is delivered. Can we hope to address the underlying problems of the current system and build the solution to which I say, yes, that is absolutely true.

Just probably, I think not in the way that you necessarily want doing this requires combining community driven experience centric service with the latest technology in a way that has never been done before to create a system where renters receive the benefits of owners. This means rethinking the entire value chain from the way buildings are purchased and owned to the way residents interact with their buildings to the way value is distributed amongst stakeholders. And given the fragmented nature of the ecosystem today, we can only hope to

accomplish this by bringing every aspect of the living experience together. So this is very opaque, right? Obviously it's supposed to be opaque. He's creating hype around an investment because he wants other people to come in and invest in a thing. He invested in it and make money. That's why any of them do anything. That's why any venture capitalist writes anything that they write.

But thinking about, well, what's Newman likely to try to actually do? I mean, I don't know if he's actually going to do it. Probably ruin one of Jerry Seinfeld's schemes again. Yeah, absolutely. Can I ask a question? Go ahead. Because I have been listening, but my brain has been fucking overdrive trying to come up with.

Yeah, I just tried to take out the whole fucking drive real big. For example, Toyota could be tearing open your oil twink asshole. Probably a little more detailed than most of those guys want to get into. It's sort of more about the teller than the toll. What is the novelty of this business model? What is the business model? I can't quite figure out throughout this preamble. So what they're doing.

So that's the thing, right? It is not known specifically what it is, but I think we can kind of suss it out, right? Because we work said much the same thing about working, right? We are going to give people a sense of ownership and community because they can customize their space and they're going to be hanging out and going to camp together. But it's going to be activities. Really, what happened is they had a place where you could rent a kind of subsidized desk because they were trying to gain share.

And there was beer and ping pong and activities and stuff. Yeah. The value proposition of WeWork in its fundamental state where it made sense as a business model was that if you weren't yet at the point where you wanted to sign on to a commercial lease, especially in like a high cost of renting, doing business area, that it was an option to do like short-term leases, individual leases, small things. Okay. Everything else I got to answer was just fully dumping money into a volcano

to see if it stops the volcano level of like tech economy stuff. I understand that proposition of like a business that wants a business office space but isn't yet in a position to take out a long-term lease, especially in map markets like New York, where it's insane. There's a huge amount up front. Like that makes sense. That genuinely makes sense even if it sucks. But the rest of it nuts.

So like what is this just we live? Is this just like reorienting towards commercial real or residential real estate? So I have a number of theories about what it is because no one actually knows for sure yet. There's been some writing about this actually from one writer, Cyrus Faviar, who has basically said that Flo's mission seems oddly similar to a startup that Newman invested in, but they wouldn't let him take a controlling share called Alfred, which if for fans of Mad Magazine, you will find that very amusing that Alfred Newman is now X Newman or Alfred E. Newman.

Also, can I just say, have you ever seen what Mark Andreessen looks like? He looks awesome. Like Mark Andreessen, I guess in a way like even if it wasn't his name attached, even if it wasn't all of the backstory of all of his tie-ins with all the things he's done, the production of Peter Teal, all these things. He just and I don't want my body looks like Humpty Dum. He looks like the villain in a Flash Gordon movie. He looks like his name is like, like, I don't know fucking.

This MF looking like some horses and men trying to put his head back together. That's what he looks like. Yeah, exactly. Like a villain in an off brand Flash Gordon thing named like Divorce Sado the Dastardly or something like that. This is like a third string game of Thrones character from The Shit Isles. Emphatically wearing a prosthesis finger or whatever his name is, meet the thumb. He has a pointy head and he's bald. It's so weird.

He has the pointiest head I think I've ever seen in my life. That's why he looks like Humpty Dumpty because he's got a pointed head like an egg. Which means he doesn't look like a Flash Gordon villain. He looks like a Sonic the Hedgehog villain. So look. So there's this company Alfred that sort of has a relatively similar value proposition. But which basically says it's an app based personal assistant for renters. And so that's been one of the theories, right?

Which is basically a much scaled up version of Alfred which basically is a way of sort of like saving like sweets of lifestyle. Services and tech enabled amenities for renters, right? Like you can host a yoga and meditation thing in your building, right? You can have a moving concierge or pet care or whatever. It's basically like trying to connect your neighbors in an apartment building together so that they can have more community but also have some concierge services, right? That's basically what Alfred is. And that seems to be kind of what Flow is promising. Now, and again.

I'm calling the concierge to having pieced together my big egg head. Which is once again broken upon the floor. I do find it funny that you can only do like anti-bellum Southern gentlemen voice. It's just my favorite one to do. Or Valley Girl. You can't do any other American accent. It's very funny. Yeah, those are the only two types of American. Yeah.

It wouldn't be as fun if I'm like I'm calling the concierge to having put together my egg head, which is fractured upon the door. Actually, what would be fun for that is the noir detective. At which point I called the concierge and asked him up to my room to help me piece together the pieces of my head, which had shattered on the door frame. The concierge arrived, whereupon I noticed that he had egg on his shoe. Curious. A little bit, a little bit like a sort of Nathan G. Robinson 1940s version of Andrew. It was then I became aware my sparkling water had gone flat. I feel like I was like, I didn't realize I was reading a detective story narrated by Polly Walnuts.

That's right. All right, P. Anyway, right. So it's, think about it. So this is one of the theories. Personally, I think I'm looking at what what Andreessen is writing when he talks about one of the things that Alfred doesn't do, right? Is it does not involve itself in the finances or ownership side? And if I want to think about, OK, well, what does it mark Andreessen love? He loves crypto.

He's insanely into crypto. He dove Andreessen Horowitz headfirst into crypto. And like there's a whole crypto vertical. They write about it all the time. They release white papers. It's crazy. And the other thing is if you look at Adam Newman, one of other of Adam Newman's recent businesses, Flow Carbon, where he's trying to solve the problem of carbon offsets with a blockchain, right? Sounds like a great idea.

It's a great idea. Just like trying to, I think I don't know this for sure. This is purely my sense from having done this for a while and thinking I've got a pretty good feeling for Mark Andreessen and Adam Newman. I suspect that flow, the residential rental startup thing, because you don't want, if you buy all those houses, this is zero sum game, right? You want your renters to pay. You don't want to give them a piece of your house, right? You don't want to give them a piece of your company. So you can't give them something actually valuable.

I think there's going to be a blockchain element in flow and you're going to get like flow credits that you're going to accumulate and you can use those to like, I don't know, vote on the building color. I don't know if it's like greatly misunderstanding blockchain as a general concept versus just specifically Bitcoin to make jokes about the fact that, to me, this sounds like, hey, we don't have any water to drop from this helicopter to put out a wildfire, but we do have this huge tanker of isopropyl alcohol. Because the idea of carbon offsets related to the blockchain, when you think about how energy intensive blockchain stuff is, at least specifically for Bitcoin, that seems insane to me. Yeah. Is that a correct assumption? It kind of depends on what blockchain you're working on. Remember, whenever someone says blockchain, what you really mean is... Listen, guys, we have an eco-friendly blockchain.

We just have a lot of child slaves with abacuses. That's right, but I'm working it all out by hand. So to take a step back for a sec, a blockchain really is just an append-only database. You cannot take anything out of it as distributed over more than one computer, right? And then those computers, and they come to a consensus on the entries of a ledger, then that is appended to the database and then it can never be altered. That's basically what it is. You can run that in lots of different ways. It is less efficient than any other way of keeping information.

No question there. Maybe you're running a few computers where one would do. It's not necessarily as crazy as Bitcoin where you have these racks of servers basically just burning energy. There's no good reason to have it, or I've never seen a good reason to have it. It's not all as bad as Bitcoin. But also, generally speaking... It's all as useless as Bitcoin. Yeah, it is at best useless.

You can buy drugs with Bitcoin. But nevertheless, it is at best useless. It is frequently very harmful. It's funny that the kid in the meme with the sword that studying the blade was actually more useful to society than studying the blockchain. And he specified he had done both, but in a way it's the least likely outcome there. But being a master swordsman might be useful to society. Absolutely. I suspect that flow...

This is based on nothing, just my understanding of the way that these businesses like to do things. The flow carbon business, which I actually want to take a few minutes to talk about. I know we're running long. I suspect that what will happen is that you can... It'll be almost like a DAO, right? A distributed autonomous organization where you'll be able... We're flow, we own the houses, but then there's the flow foundation, which manages this distributed autonomous organization,

which gives people ownership of the coins based on their contributions to whatever they do for the community. Like, oh, we host a ping-pong night, you get five flow coins or whatever. And then you can sell those or you can use them to do whatever. I suspect it's going to be like a monopoly money thing, because just to account for the fact that they seem to be doing something pretty similar to this Alfred company, but also they're talking about a sense of financial improvement or whatever. Nothing gives you better sense of financial improvement than watching a number go up. Well, you forget that you can't do much with it.

Flow carbon is a funny one. So, carbon offsets have a huge problem in general. So, there are standards for trading carbon offsets where it's like, if I buy a forest and don't cut it down, then I can say that's worth about this many units of a carbon offset which equals one ton of released carbon. So, if I buy a forest that's in danger of being cut down and I say I'm not going to cut it down,

I'm going to sell the financial benefit I get for not cutting this forest down to let someone else pull oil out of the ground. And so, then for every ton of carbon that is released from that oil being pulled out of the ground and burned, I've saved a ton of carbon by preserving a forest or whatever. Now, this is, I think the whole notion of carbon pricing like this, where it's just kind of these individual mandates that you can create and just going and speculatively doing stuff and then you just sort of get yourself accredited by a central body as basically saying,

yes, you have not released this much carbon, right? I think it's completely an insane idea. And the main problem with carbon offsets like this is it's very hard to know whether you actually prevented carbon from being released into the atmosphere. It's hard to know if the forest you bought really was in danger of being cut down, but also that everything you do by virtue of you doing it also creates, it also facilitates the release of some carbon, right? So you can...

Yeah, because you have to pay like all of the various sort of like middleman economic activity of doing the offsets. Would you say that just a straight carbon tax would be better because it's just on the release and not on the hypothetical prevention of release? That, I don't necessarily have an opinion on that. All I know is that with carbon offsets, the way it works is that you've essentially... I think carbon offsets in this case are a lot like Bitcoin, where you're trying to solve a political and material problem by just adding more transactions to the whole process,

hoping that by just sort of adding an additional transaction, you can kind of create a chain reaction that really stops the thing you're looking to stop or starts the thing you're looking to start, right? By saying, oh, we can't get people cooperating to make... We can't get people cooperating to make the dude movie by buying a book from the 1960s and forgetting how IP works, but maybe if we add a cryptocurrency dimension, then everyone will just be incentivized automatically to do the same thing

without requiring political organization, for example, right? Carbon credits, especially done this way, are kind of like that, where you're saying, well, just by adding another step, we're going to add another transaction, and we're going to hope that that kind of has a bunch of knock-on effects, so we don't really have to do much... You don't have to do politically the difficult thing, which is either don't take the oil out of the ground

or genuinely really pay a taking the oil out of the ground amount of money to countries like Congo in order to not take it out of the ground, right? That's sort of the only kind of two options that you have. With carbon offsets, what we're doing is we're kind of hoping that the market will just sort of do that, and I'll give you a hint, it hasn't. Maybe it will get better on its own. Maybe it will get better on its own or with this small nudge, and Flow Carbon has created goddess nature tokens.

They say they operated the intersection of carbon and technology to protect the Earth's natural carbon sinks and scale quality carbon reduction removal projects, and what they've said, rather than all that stuff that I said earlier, the issues with carbon credits, they said we realized that the key impediment to scaling carbon solutions is the opaque over-the-counter market for carbon credits. We set out to bring carbon credits onto the blockchain

to create democratized access, price transparency, immutable tracking of credits as they change hands, and incentivize high impact climate change mitigation projects. So basically, it's now in everyone's hands together to prevent climate change, but without any kind of political organization, just by buying the goddess nature tokens, so that the value of them can be pushed up and then, yeah. Yeah, you just have to become a better class of consumer.

Yeah, and so you have to buy the monopoly money that's associated with the lowering carbon. Andreessen also invested in this, by the way. Adam Newman's not in control of it, but he's invested in it as has Andreessen, and it's sort of clearly related to this sort of the whole sort of theme. And so they'll say, look, there's a project developer, right? And what will happen is that they'll take on a project by a project developer,

like a conservation or reforestation, have it quantified by a third party, so they say, okay, this is worth how many tons of carbon. And then they will essentially tokenize that thing, and then it's going to be tradable. And so right now, for example, they are trying to use a bunch of their cryptocurrency to do what I said about Congo, right?

Buy a piece of land in Congo, and then don't take oil out of it, thereby allowing you to trade the carbon credits you get from it. However, unfortunately, the other issue with carbon credits is in many cases, but taking out the oil and selling it is still more financially viable. And so at best, you have a bunch of people expressing a kind of blockchain-based ambition to not take the oil out of the ground. And at worst, what you're doing is you're actually taking a bunch of stuff,

where it's like, yeah, we preserved a forest that we don't know if it was under threat, and then using that with a bunch of steps in the market between it, a bunch of transactions between that and taking the oil out of the ground to actually facilitate the taking of oil out of the ground. It seems like this is not really going to accomplish anything besides make erstwhile, serious, seeming people have to say, goddess nature tokens. Yes, correct.

Which is funny, but it's also kind of grim when you think about, you know, the amount of money being dumped in something this patently stupid that could just go to anything. Yeah, for example. Truly is the getting-your-dick-suck.com of environmental, you know, saviorism. Oh, the site where you buy a Ford. And this money could have been used into, like, you know, it could have been funded into the Institute for the Advanced Study of Homophobic Truck Memes,

any number of things. Yeah, all of it would have been put to better use in that sense. Could have gone to podcasts, could have gone to us, you know. We're not serving that useful a societal function, but a better- I also note that it is time, well over time, in fact, for us to be done. So we'll see you on the bonus episode in a couple of days, which I think I'm, is from a time where I was on vacation or I'd just gotten back from vacation.

So you won't see me, but then you'll see me again in a free episode next week or if you're in Edinburgh in a few days for our unfortunately now sold-out show. Well, fortunately for us, unfortunately, for those of you in Scotland without tickets. Yeah, unfortunately sold-out, which means we are going to have to entertain a round. This is coming out midnight on Wednesday. And what I was going to say is just FYI, if you're interested in tickets for Australia, there's a second night added in Brisbane that are still tickets available. Melbourne is sold out, Sydney is still available, and Canberra is now available.

There's a link in the show notes, and I will share it on our Twitter account as well. So if you are in Australia and you want to see us in November, there are ways to do that. Is right. Anyway, we will see you then, Milo. Anything you want to remind people of? Keep coming to the show. It's the last, it's the last like week now.

The show is, you know, it's good. Yeah. Lots of people have come and seen it. Anyway, bye everybody. Bye. Bye. Bye.