SPEAKER_00: Hey, everybody. Hey, everybody. It's Wednesday, we made it to the halfway point. Got a big show for you today. I'm gonna talk about a lot of topics. I'm gonna go close to the third rail, but not grab it.

SPEAKER_02: Really, we're playing with fire in all kinds of ways today. For example, we're gonna start off the top by talking about college debt forgiveness, because we want to.

SPEAKER_05: Yeah, and we have we have some feelings. And we actually came up with two or three really good ideas, or I should say Molly came up with two or three good ideas. And then we're gonna

SPEAKER_08: cover the most loathsome person in tech, Mark Zuckerberg, stealing from be real. Is anybody surprised? Is anybody

SPEAKER_10: disappointed? No, you know what you're getting into it, Zuckerberg. He's just a thief.

Jason Calacanis: Speaking of the opposite of having good ideas, we are also going to cover the twiddle that the twiddle, we are also going to cover the Twitter whistleblower and compare it in terms of

SPEAKER_16: impact to the Facebook files and Francis Haugen and just kind of start to maybe internalize the fact that social media is like a national security issue.

SPEAKER_18: Yeah, it's really dark. And this is a major breaking story. I think this will be for tech the story of the year. I'm I actually think that this is going to have downstream impacts that we are not anticipating and then wrap the

SPEAKER_19: news with an awesome new series a climate company.

SPEAKER_12: Wet your beak. And then it is Wednesday. So Jason's gonna wrap up the show with another edition of the blueprint getting tactical.

SPEAKER_22: Yes. And coincidentally, I'm talking about whether you should go

SPEAKER_23: into debt for college and if so under what circumstances and how to actually do that. What do you know? It's gonna be a great

SPEAKER_25: show. Stick with us. This week in startups is brought to you by brave is an internet privacy company on a mission to protect your personal info online. Download brave today at brave.com slash twist to browse faster search privately and so much more all in a single click harmonic need to speed up your growth without speeding up your burn. Harmonic gives investment sourcing and sales teams data superpowers. Learn how Andreessen Horowitz, Kraft, Notion, Brex and many more source better leads and qualify them faster. Get $4,000 off at harmonic.ai slash twist and Visa. Are you a small business owner? Did you know that Visa's online small business hub has tools, discounts and resources to help you run your business? Learn more at Visa.com slash small business hub.

SPEAKER_28: All right, everybody. It's Wednesday. Molly, we made it to the halfway mark. We're gonna get this week done. We aren't gonna get this week done by God. We're gonna do it together. The I think the crypto

SPEAKER_12: roundtable yesterday was awesome. I love it. Those guys are so smart. It's so interesting. Yeah, I mean,

SPEAKER_32: people are dunking on us. I went to the YouTube comments, which you know, I'm really trying to build

SPEAKER_33: this YouTube community. So I asked now, Rachel, you're gonna get hazard pay for this. I may get you an espresso machine for this. But Rachel, I want you to hazard pay. If this starts to become a hostile

SPEAKER_36: environment, because put on your hazmat suit. I got that with the TWI startups, I want you to look at

SPEAKER_37: the comments every morning for but 10 minutes, if possible, once you delete anything where they say,

SPEAKER_08: Molly is a Karen, and then J. Cal's a fat bastard. With a receding hairline. Once you get through those,

SPEAKER_40: the who's because that's about half the comments. Once you get through those comments. Then I want

SPEAKER_28: you to tell Molly and I all clear. And then we'll come in. This should not be a job. Well, this is

SPEAKER_43: what Facebook people have to do. They literally have to do the reporting stuff. Exactly. I mean,

SPEAKER_12: I remember like years and years ago, I've seen that a bunch of us actually went like there was this engagement effort around YouTube comments, which at the time, I mean, forget it, right? Like that was brutal worst. That's like what Facebook moderators are doing now like the worst stuff you have ever seen. And we just straight up went to our boss and we're like, that's a hostile work

SPEAKER_49: environment. Like you cannot tell us to be in those comments. It is Yeah. So isn't there

SPEAKER_50: something legal happening around Facebook moderators or YouTube moderators? I think the

SPEAKER_54: moderators all get traumatized. It's like being a detective and you're on like, God forbid, like

SPEAKER_55: the murder beat or the kid murder beat. Yeah, get insurance. They don't get covered,

SPEAKER_28: which is total BS. It's just horrible. They're like, what's the worst job in the

SPEAKER_54: company? Yeah, let's outsource it to people getting paid 12 bucks an hour, right? And

SPEAKER_59: then not take care of them when they get PTSD because they're Yeah, this is when you know

SPEAKER_61: how horrible Zuckerberg is as a human. Like I literally have met Zuckerberg many times. I'm not saying this to be a jerk or mean or dunk. And I don't want to create another Palmer

SPEAKER_54: lucky situation. But you can judge people by their behavior. I'm a fan of like looking at

SPEAKER_64: the behavior. I can tell you everything you need to know about Zuckerberg. Just based on

SPEAKER_54: that. Zuckerberg is a horrible human being because he takes the worst job and he pays people horribly

SPEAKER_08: for it and then withholds benefits or does it with some outsource company like own your own. If you created this detrius and this garbage in the world, like own it, just own it and pay those people well. You know, I mean, come on. Imagine that the worst 10% of every post that you've ever seen. Now imagine the 1% of that 10%. And that's all you have to look at all day. That's like out of Clockwork

SPEAKER_40: Orange when they pin the guy's eyes open, and they make them watch like horrible stuff that's happened in the world on video. Like it's gonna burn your brain. You know, it's like seeing Game of Thrones. I finished that first episode. You know, now I'm like, I'm not watching. I'm gonna watch the second

SPEAKER_69: episode. I'm not watching that show. I mean, this is traumatized. I really felt traumatized.

SPEAKER_12: Exactly. I am not watching that. And it's been really anyway, that's a whole separate conversation that we could have with lawn tomorrow. Actually, we should have a conversation. Let's pin this because it'd be real interesting to talk about the reaction to that episode online. Absolutely. Before we get

SPEAKER_71: the news. This is whole a brouhaha about student loans. I'm curious your take on the brouhaha is

SPEAKER_73: a kerfuffle kerfuffle kerfuffle kerfuffle happening here. It's a Donnie, a Donnie Brook, if you will.

SPEAKER_22: Yeah, we'll talk a little bit of this on the blueprint later. But did you have student loans? Let me ask you a couple questions. Did you have students? I did have you pay off your student

SPEAKER_82: loans? Eventually. Did it suck? Yep. Okay. Did you it ruined my credit? There was a restructuring plan. It was a whole long it was a night it was a nightmare. It was a nightmare in my life

SPEAKER_86: for like 10 15 years. Got it. It sucked. But you worked your way through it. And you had a

SPEAKER_08: professional career which allowed you to pay this down over some period of arduous time. This was 10s of 1000s of dollars in loans, I'm guessing low 10s of 1000 30 40 50 something in that range.

SPEAKER_12: Yep, we made like $5 too much to qualify for Pell grants. So the grant pro I mean, I'm like, interestingly, like I'm watching this and being like, Oh, you mean me? Yeah. You literally mean like, so I had 10k money and it was the only way I could go to school and the student loan process, by the way is super predatory and horrible and the school treated us like like crap the whole time because you know, so it is a lot of feelings. Well, this is what I'm

SPEAKER_54: getting at. Yeah, that's why I'm teeing it up. Yep. So it's predatory. We know that people have a hard

SPEAKER_99: time making these decisions and schools just too damn expensive. Right. So then I look at but then I'm looking at what Biden just suggested today, which is people making 125k or up to 125k 250k in your house looking at 10k for free of their student loans. And I'm like, this seems profoundly unfair to me for the people for two reasons. Number one, there are people who didn't get to go to college.

SPEAKER_08: So as hard as it was for you, and it was moderately hard for me, it was hard for me during school, because I basically tried to pay it down while I was in school. And it was easy afterwards,

SPEAKER_104: because I worked in IT, which happened to be the best career you could have in the 90s, in terms of making money. Yeah, fixing laser printers pretty good beat working for Mike Savino putting in networks. I mean, I instantly went to 50 60 grand and yearly salary at the age of 22,

SPEAKER_34: you know, because I was an IT and I was good at it. Yeah. Anyway, long story short, they want to give 10k to everybody. I know everybody loves free money. But I just thought, this seems profoundly unfair to me. What about the people who didn't go to college? They're not getting 10k. And then if you're making over 100k to get 10k, or 250k in household income, that seems like a pretty it seems like you could afford it. So like, I don't know,

SPEAKER_40: I just felt like maybe if we're gonna give this relief, maybe it has to be for people who are making under 75k or under like half the amount or something. And then I thought, well, what about the

SPEAKER_08: people who paid it down? Like I did and you did? Who didn't get free free 10k? And what about the people who didn't get to go to college? Wouldn't it be better to create a bunch of STEM, nursing, trade schools and give that money there? So where do you fall in this argument? Because I'm looking at both sides of it. I appreciate that it's predatory. I appreciate that it's overpriced. But then I'm kind of tipping over now to the side of this feels unfair as constructed. Where do you sit Molly?

SPEAKER_12: Yeah, I mean, honestly, like one, I don't I'm not going to compare my experience to the experience of kids now because for as terrible, stressful, awful, and predatory as it all was, it's 10 times worse for people who are the age now that I was then, like, it's college has gotten so much more expensive. So much worse, you know, like, what, if it were me, I would have loved to see the government say, we're going to forgive loans from schools that are, you know, known to be fraudulent

SPEAKER_18: for profit schools. And so the predatory ones that get you on those student low, like the GI Bill

SPEAKER_12: kind of schools? Yeah, the ones that have now been found, like, I think there's a lawsuit against DeVry, and there was some other school and they're just like, these were fraudulent degrees, right? Like they did not have outcomes attached to them that were anywhere and that came anywhere close to justifying the price. As far as I'm concerned, like, forgive those. I also would have liked to see the government say any like, you know, did you read that? Ashley Babbitt, like, this is a very loaded example to bring up. But that's the woman who got shot at the Capitol, right? Yes. Among other things in her life, she had student loans with interest rates of like 25 and 30%. What? Yep.

Jason Calacanis: So like more than a credit card? Yeah. So there are people out here with loans at those rates. And that is a scam. And what I would have loved to see is for the government to say, you know what we're going to do? We're restructuring everybody's loan to a government guaranteed loan at three to 4%. That's okay. I'm behind you on that. There's a perfect solution. A lovely solution. Lovely. I do not. However, also, I don't care.

SPEAKER_12: Great. Forgive the 10K. Who else gets bailed out in our economy? What? I'm sorry. How much? How many billions of my taxpayer dollars? The banks, the airlines. The banks, the airlines. And they're just like canceling flights left and right and being like, there's bad weather somewhere.

Jason Calacanis: I didn't believe in that. I wanted the airlines to fail. So as far as I'm concerned, everyday people getting $10,000 of debt forgiven so that they can go on with their lives and contribute productively to the American economy. I don't need to sit here and

SPEAKER_12: be like, that's not fear. Like to me, that's just whiny. We're fine. Like I'm fine. It is okay with me if these people get a little bit of a break. It's $10,000. Give them a break. I don't care. Like they've been at the mercy of millions of crappy systems that people feel free to bail out all the time. Let them have it. Is it buying votes? Yes. Is it buying votes in a grosser way than the tax cut for the rich that the Trump administration puts through? Probably similar. Absolutely not. And cheaper, much cheaper. I wonder how much this year is going to be the lowest it's been in like over a decade. Like literally they were like, oh, it's going to be the lowest it's been in like 10 years. What is the 10k? This news just came out and that tax cut like cost us hundreds of billions of dollars as a country. I like your, I like your, I like your position.

SPEAKER_22: How many, this 10k, I wonder what's the upper bound of this? Is it going to be a million people are going to go for this 5 million. It's going to be 10 billion, 50 billion. I wonder what the number

SPEAKER_40: is. Yeah. I don't care. I really love your suggestion of restructuring it. That's what I think we should have done. We should have just restructured. That would be so much better because

SPEAKER_08: then it feels more fair, right? So the, that addresses my issue of fairness. Yeah. And it's like, okay, well, so now the government is paying the loan off to the predatory person. They get their money.

SPEAKER_150: They eliminate the 25, right? Because they're predators like, well, you can't, I mean, people sign,

SPEAKER_120: that would be like, maybe they get paid off minus the interest. They get paid the balance of the loan minus the interest. They get paid the balance of the loan. They don't get the interest going

SPEAKER_08: forward. Yeah. So yes, because you don't want to use the government to interfere with a valid contract. Even if it was a predatory contract, I guess it's valid. You have to go to court for

SPEAKER_104: that. We don't want to live in an authoritarian society where they just wave a magic wand and just

SPEAKER_82: overturn business. So maybe they get paid back. But like, so they get paid back. I think you really do have to look at the larger benefits of this. Like we're looking at the fact that, let's say,

SPEAKER_12: the housing market is about to tank and people who are saddled with these huge debt payments can't buy houses, right? There's always going to be, everybody always wants to focus, I think, on the tiny number, the outlier number that where it's not fair, where it's like, you're fine. And you haven't been paying because you've been waiting for the government to forgive it. Fine. There's always going to be some percentage of stuff you wish wasn't happening. But for the majority of people in these in these situations, it's going to allow them to put that money back into the economy. And if we're going into a recession, that's great, it might allow them to buy a house and build wealth. And that's great, right? Like the benefit, the broader benefit of this to society, in my opinion, more than outweighs the like, little niggling concern that somebody might be getting away with

SPEAKER_165: something. I like the idea of making it your process, or for people who went, I like all three of your suggestions. Number one, if we've identified a predatory school, and just to confirm, because we never want to slander people here who don't deserve it. In 2016, DeVry agreed to pay $100 million to settle a Federal Trade Commission lawsuit over its misleading claims about its graduates careers and earnings. So when we are saying DeVry is a scam, we're not saying DeVry is a scam. DeVry is saying

SPEAKER_54: it's a scam by paying $100 million settlement. You don't pay $100 million settlement, in my estimation, to the Federal Trade Commission over a lawsuit, unless you're guilty as heck. That's a big speeding ticket. It's a big deal. Yeah, it's a big deal. So I think we start I agree with you start with the DeVry's. Then you let everybody digest that. Then you say, okay, predatory loans. Now we have

SPEAKER_08: the second program, you let everybody adjust that. And then you just see how that goes. I think that would be a much better way to communicate this. Alright, I think we beat this horse. Yeah, I just

SPEAKER_00: wanted to bring it up because I like the fact that we have a daily show and have a little banter

SPEAKER_32: about something that's in the news. That's not exactly tech, but that relates to and we're

SPEAKER_12: writing all of it. It's not like we can sit here pretend that it's not you know, we aren't just like, it's not like we only care about tech. I am a news junkie. Like I'm at all I'm taking it in. I was reading Krugman all morning on why it's Molly J. Cal with the news. And you know,

SPEAKER_162: that it out of Wednesday, we get to have our stuff here. We don't have to stick to the tech.

SPEAKER_12: We can we can we can expand your interest in your conversation. And I really definitely wish that there had been a slightly more creative solution that said like, I'm fine with it. This

SPEAKER_05: is not gonna this is not gonna break us. I'm like, please stop dropping money from the sky, because we're trying to fight the inflation at the same time. The other thing that is making

SPEAKER_165: me much money. This is my other concern is we're starting to train everybody in this country,

SPEAKER_61: that there's always a bailout, whether you're an airline, a bank, student loan, whatever, there's always a bailout. And then everybody now I feel is like, well, they got a bailout. Where's my

SPEAKER_121: bailout? Oh, they got a bailout. The farmers got a bailout. Where's my bailout? Who and what am what average American feels like they get bailed out by anything? Wow. That is exactly why we have a

Jason Calacanis: popular you know why we have a populist revolt on our hands because Americans are looking around and being like, you know, who gets bailed out banks and airlines and rich guys and and Adam Newman with a billion dollars, right? Sadie's the other rich guy. But you there is no universe in

SPEAKER_121: which like the people who voted for Trump and the people who were gonna vote for Bernie are the same people and what they are is pissed off because they never get any help ever. Well, I think that's,

SPEAKER_104: you know, bringing up that Ashley Babbitt is like a I mean, I know it's anecdotal, but I do think

SPEAKER_08: there are people who feel societies rigged against them. Yes. And then once you feel society is rigged against you, and you're not part of it. Well, then like q anon becomes like, okay, well, there's something over here for me. It's like somebody who's like, Well, I'm not into this religion. But I met somebody who's got this new religion. Or this like cult, I mean, I'll just be part of that, you know, and like, we want them to feel part of America. All right, everybody. Listen, I love brave. I've been

SPEAKER_37: using brave for the last couple of months. And it is so much faster than any browser I've ever used. And it doesn't have all of those ads and trackers and creepy stuff happening on my computer. They really have three core products built into brave, the core browser, which is tight, and it has all

SPEAKER_08: these great extensions that just work. They have the search engine, and they have a browser native crypto wallet. Braves browser has over 60 million users already, and 1000s of daily downloads. Plus,

SPEAKER_37: all this is built on Chromium, which is the open source Chrome project. So you're going to feel pretty familiar with it, all your extensions from Chrome are going to work. But here's the best part, they're gonna work like two or three times faster than in Chrome, because they're not going to bog you down with all those ads. And I tell you something, the Chrome extensions are some of the worst offenders in terms of adding a bunch of trackers, you can import your bookmarks, your passwords and settings from Chrome or any other browsers in just one click. So you're going to be off to the races day one, and it doesn't track your website visits your searches or your clicks. Producer Nick uses it, and he loves it. Rachel uses it. We all love having a browser that's fast. It's truly private and independent. Their search engine is independent. So download brave today brave.com slash twist to browse faster search privately and so much more all in a single click I guarantee you you are going to

SPEAKER_08: love it brave.com slash twist. I just want everybody to stop with the bailouts and

SPEAKER_40: the bailouts that you start stop first is things like the airlines. It's so ridiculous that the airlines keep getting bailed out for doing a horrible job. Now this is like a business topic.

SPEAKER_08: In startups, we have amazing founders who we watched not clear market and then have to struggle,

SPEAKER_40: make cuts, take no salary, they have to take all this medicine to try to make their company survive. And most times they don't. And then they got to start over, they get their asses kicked, they might have

SPEAKER_08: personal debt, they missed an opportunity to go work at Uber or Google and get all these, you know,

SPEAKER_34: RSUs, whatever. And then like, you're some rich dudes running airlines, you do a terrible job, you teach your customers like, and you get bailed out. And it's like, Come on, come on, like,

SPEAKER_23: honestly, let them fail. So we can then invest in airlines. I'd love to invest in an airline. That would be great. You keep bailing out the dips who ran them into the ground.

SPEAKER_195: And given all that, I am sorry if I do not have the moral outrage about everyday people paying,

SPEAKER_12: you know, whatever they're paying for groceries, not being able to quit their jobs and start businesses because they can't afford their own health care. Like having, you know, having Blackrock buy up most of the houses on the block, so they can't afford them. Like, I don't

SPEAKER_199: And then Atherton doesn't let you build the rich people in Atherton don't let you build townhomes.

SPEAKER_121: But so then seriously, we're gonna sit here and be like, it's not fair that you got $10,000

SPEAKER_203: forgiven. Give me a break. All right, listen, we're we're we're you're making me swing from my moderate center to the left now and then I'm gonna be swinging to the right center.

SPEAKER_35: This is moderate center. Like give me like, let I like our Americans live about our punch ups.

SPEAKER_102: I like our punch ups. You know what the thing is, I'm always looking for the creative, thoughtful experiment of moving forward. It's true. I mean, they should have called us.

SPEAKER_54: They should have called us, we would have told them. It's if you just say the loans not forgiven, it's restructured, people would be like, Oh, okay, restructuring it. Yeah, okay. It costs us $1,000

SPEAKER_32: per loan to restructure them. And people can extend their loans from 10 years to 30. And from 25% to 2%.

SPEAKER_08: Great. We have money in the Treasury. Who cares? Everybody?

SPEAKER_211: I should have tweeted that and that would have fixed. Yes, everything. I mean,

SPEAKER_213: I had tweeted it.

SPEAKER_08: POTUS goes to the president apparently. But speaking of Zuckerberg being a terrible human who yes, as we were, please don't. I don't want Palmer Luckey and Zuckerberg.

SPEAKER_37: I don't mean he's a terrible human. I mean, it's like a terrible human decision to make to force

SPEAKER_32: other humans to watch traumatizing stuff and pay them poorly while you're wake poor. I don't want to make it personal. But don't you though? But like maybe a little bit? Okay, it was only a matter

SPEAKER_12: of time. Okay, so you know how like something cool came into the world in the social media space? Yeah, yeah. Everybody's been talking about be real. It's so fun. You just take the one picture a day. All the kids are using it. It's amazing. What an innovation. We really should have set a clock. Our only mistake on the show is that we did not set a countdown timer

SPEAKER_223: to when Instagram or Facebook would stone cold rip off be real. Okay. Because we started talking

SPEAKER_165: about be real in 2021. Over a year ago, and it launched in late 2019. So let's just set be real real becomes real and hit some sort of critical mass in 2021. Let's say 18 months ago. It became real be real became a real phenomenon 18 months ago. So the clock started 18 months ago, what happened?

SPEAKER_227: What has happened is that evidently a developer who reverse engineers apps to find early versions of

SPEAKER_12: upcoming updates discovered that it appears that Instagram is working on what they are calling an an internal prototype of something that they're calling candid challenges a feature inspired by be real. Those who participate in candid challenges will see notifications pop up randomly throughout

Jason Calacanis: the day asking the user to take a photo of their surroundings through the app, which captures both the

SPEAKER_12: front camera and back camera view simultaneously amazing, which is for those who have not used it yet. Exactly what be real does to the letter. The only difference is that the feature lets users then share the content to their Instagram story rather than to a specialized feed that users can't see unless they post their own be real for the day. Isn't don't you think that at this point, like being an engineer at meta? Not on the Oculus team, right? This is why I really likes working on the meta side, the metaverse side is like the crappiest job in the world because you might have your own ideas, you might be thinking like, Oh, I suggested these five features that I think would be really cool. Here's some cool creative stuff we could do at Instagram. And then they come along, they're like,

SPEAKER_233: no, no, no, we're just gonna need you to copy. Be real. Um, this is why Kevin Systrom left because he

SPEAKER_54: felt like Zuckerberg was just using Instagram, which had all kinds of creative innovations. And then he told the team over there, you know what your innovations are not as important as stealing Evan Spiegel's and Zuckerberg's greatest skill is his absolute amoral approach to stealing other people's innovations and not caring what anybody thinks about him. This is why I think he's the worst actor in tech. This is why I think he's terrible for the industry. He brings a lot of heat on the industry. Uh, because if you think about antitrust, like he's, he's the guy who bought these two things. He's the guy who steals everybody's ideas and it just feels lame, anti-competitive. And it's an insult to anybody who works for Zuckerberg that he believes the people he hires and makes into millionaires and billionaires are too stupid to come up with their own ideas. Yeah. It's so cutthroat. It's so petty. It's so lame that I think anybody who goes to work for Zuckerberg should think to themselves. Am I

SPEAKER_08: this petty lame? And do I have no creative ideas by working for Zuckerberg? You're saying Molly, I have no original ideas. I am a drone. I am a Borg. If you don't know the Star Trek, you know, that was like probably the best of the next generation was

SPEAKER_40: the Borg episodes. Resistance is futile. Look it up. Resistance is futile. And Zuckerberg is the Borg. We used to make pictures of him and spread them on the internet like Zuckerberg Borg for a reason.

SPEAKER_08: Yeah. And going to work for Zuckerberg is a moral failing. It's an ethical moral failing for anybody who has any bit of creativity or soul. It's soul crushing to work for him. That's why the people who work for him or he made billionaires or who are on his early team are not friends with him anymore. They're just, they don't, he doesn't maintain friendships with these people. He doesn't have the people from WhatsApp and Kevin Systrom and all those people from Instagram. They hate him. Yeah. They don't, they're not indifferent about Zuckerberg. They literally hate him. Wow. Because he just tells them your ideas are bad. You need to go and just copy Zuckerberg, Evan Spiegel's ideas, be real, whatever comes out in the world. And not only that.

SPEAKER_35: Tinder, Snapchat, Twitch, Foursquare, Reddit, Periscope, Fortnite, eBay, Signal, be real.

SPEAKER_08: And he just says do it, do it for the next five or 10 years because you're not going to get it right every time. It may take two or three times to stick. So he did poke as an app. He did like three or four versions of Snapchat till he kind of got the, um, whatever that format is stories to work,

SPEAKER_28: right? He got stories to stick and then he did it to TikTok. So I don't want to make this like a whole, I mean, it's almost a joke at this point. Like, it's almost a joke. It's just like,

SPEAKER_12: really? Like, I just can't imagine. I mean, I guess it'll work until it doesn't work anymore. Right. It works. It'll work. I mean, until people don't work and until people catch on and stop using it, that'll be something, but it is, it is gross. And it what it what it leads to is people rooting for Facebook to fail, right? Like you start rooting for Zuck to fail. Like, you're just like, I cannot wait to see him here on that day. Right? Like, I would love to see him

SPEAKER_195: fail because he's a thief. And so when Congress comes calling or whoever else comes calling,

SPEAKER_250: like, there aren't going to be defenders. Nor should there be nor should there be. I mean,

SPEAKER_235: if you act this a moral and unethically, like, let's just call it what it is. It's lame. It's

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SPEAKER_99: and for inside.com and our associates here at launch are using it to source new companies for us to do meetings with. And it's called harmonic. H A R M O N I C dot AI slash twist is the URL you're going to use. We have been using it. And I have to tell you, I'm blown away because you can do all these incredible filters. You can search on a founder's background, you can search their previous companies, their exits, previous raises, and you can track metrics like maybe the headcount growth, maybe LinkedIn Twitter growth. If you thought your best customers, your best investments came in the seed stage, you can search just there. But if you thought, hey, you know, I need series B companies and greater, I can search just there. Maybe you need people with under 50 employees, maybe you need companies with over 500, all of that slicing and dicing you can do with this

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SPEAKER_54: product, by the way, never trust Zuck. This is why when people was a famous clip of me that went viral where I said, they are Zuckerberg said, Hey, I'll meet with anybody from why comedy will do

SPEAKER_228: partnerships. I said this is the craziest thing in the world. I said on this podcast, like in the first year of the pod, never trust Zuck. If you meet with Zuck as a startup, you're very foolish because he's going to steal your ideas. That's all he ever does. So just don't trust him. And he's, he's not a good partner to anybody. There is not one company out there that has a vibrant partnership with with Facebook. Now you look at Google, there are countless YouTubers who sing YouTube's praises. There are countless people who use Google's ad network on their websites, AdSense, whatever,

SPEAKER_54: who love it. There are countless partners for using Twitch, you know, or the app stores in Google

SPEAKER_32: and Apple, who say, Oh, my God, what a gift it is to have this amazing iOS platform, Android

SPEAKER_16: platform for me to put my push my you know, there are plenty of developers who find Apple plenty abusive,

SPEAKER_258: I will say, but compared to Zuck, but not shares $0 compared to like, you will write exactly you share

SPEAKER_12: $0, you will like steal my idea in a heartbeat. I mean, it's just gross. It's just total gross. Like it's gross. And to see it to see it be so like, it's not illegal. But to see it be so blatant to see be real hit number one on the app store. And then all of a sudden, they're testing the exact same thing is just like, my God, it's disgusting.

SPEAKER_08: I think just anybody who uses the Facebook ad, just anybody who, you know, finds this offensive, just use the hashtag never trust Zuck. Yeah, never trust that. And I think that's how the

SPEAKER_104: industry should look at it. Don't just gross. It's so gross. And this to do list is hilarious.

SPEAKER_59: If you haven't seen it, I think you just read this off. I did. And it's amazing. Just if you're watching live on the video on Spotify, shout out to Spotify video, shout out to youtube.com slash this weekend. And of course, in other podcast players, you can search for this weekend startups video, but go ahead and pull up the to do list here, Nick. This is hilarious. Snapchat, Facebook stories, Twitch,

SPEAKER_269: Facebook, workplace by Facebook, Slack, Tinder.

SPEAKER_268: I forgot about that workplace by Facebook that happened. Yeah.

SPEAKER_12: Tinder is Facebook dating four square Facebook places. Just don't work there. This is my message to everybody. If you want to copy pasta for $500,000 a year, I guess I can't blame you. But like,

SPEAKER_59: I don't want to call it cultural appropriation, but it's creative appropriation. You know, it's like, you're just taking creatives in the world and you're just stealing with from them.

SPEAKER_184: And like, I, if I put my head down at night, I would be like, can I work there? I'd be like, what am I doing with my life?

SPEAKER_12: It's not improvement, right? Like, we know, we all know that this is what Apple did and has done for years. And Steve Jobs was very famous for saying like, great artists steal. Like, they would wait for something to get cool in the market, improve upon it, and massively improve reinvented. And then be like, we invented it, right? Like, they would always take credit for like, Oh, what? This is crazy. We'll put a camera on the back of the phone. It was like, come on, like these, you know, cheap, but they would improve it massively, sometimes massively.

SPEAKER_28: And I mean, consumers are the odd compared to like the MP3 players before it was

SPEAKER_12: like, the iPad compared to tablets before,

SPEAKER_282: but I mean, like when they announced

SPEAKER_12: photo messaging and like multimedia messaging had already existed for like a year, you know, I'm just saying there were times when it was like, Okay, come on. But what they would, but there was a difference between sort of like proving it in the marketplace, and then releasing it at a time that it was ready for consumers with improvements that range from incremental to massive. Yeah. And just like, we're gonna steal the shit.

SPEAKER_08: I think it's distinctly different how Apple is. So if you look at Apple, you go down, I'll give an example, heart rate, right? Like, I'm trying to figure out my heart rate and sleep. The heart rate and the sleep app that comes with Apple is purposefully basic. Yeah. If you want really good heart rate data, if you want really good fitness apps, or sleep apps, you go to the app store and you find them. And Apple, in fact, celebrates those app developers, writes articles about them, and points to revenue with them and shares revenue. And they're like, you know what, we'll take 30% for the first year 15% for subscriptions the second year. And it's better that we have 1000 flowers bloom in each category than us just still, they have the resources to just buy the top three apps, and make them the Apple sleep app, right? They don't do that on purpose. And when they do add something to iMessage, like ephemeral messages, they added at some point, we could disappear the messages or something, it might be like five or 10 years after the ecosystem has been able to, you know, create value from them, and they've been commoditized, it would, that would be the example I would choose. And nobody's using the notes app as but one example over Microsoft Word or Google Docs, like the notes app is very basic, right? Like it doesn't let you do multiplayer mode, it syncs, but you know, not very well. And so I think they kind of,

SPEAKER_104: I think they ankle their own stuff purposefully to let other people excel. And I think that's the difference. What's that?

SPEAKER_297: Or not get sued.

SPEAKER_296: Well, I mean, I mean,

SPEAKER_12: but I think you're I mean, you're 100% right. And I don't think it's purely altruistic. It's because it creates a really vibrant ecosystem that benefits Apple, right? So if you want to build, I mean, it's like Balmer developers, developers, developers, if you want your apps on iOS, and everybody does, it's because you get the best rev share in town, even though you give Apple 30%. And then Apple's like, we get 30% by not killing all of you off. And there's no and so what is fatally flawed about the Facebook model compared to what you just described about the Apple model, which I think is 100% true, is that Apple ends up with a vibrant ecosystem that makes it money a lot of different ways. Facebook ends up with everything inside and the inability to focus on anything. So it's like, they're trying to, you know, have these Swiss army knife apps and like copy, be real and copy dating and copy this and copy that and like, only a few of them are going to hit. And they're going to be pulled in lots of different directions. And you're going to start to have people who just only want to work on the metaverse team because it's not fun to copy other people's apps.

SPEAKER_301: And you have no friends or advocates in the world. Like everybody hates Zuckerberg and Facebook,

SPEAKER_59: it's the most loathsome company, not just in tech, I think it's kind of like, if you were to like,

SPEAKER_32: tell me which do you think is doing more damage to sire and BP oil with their spills and everything or Facebook, I go Facebook. Yeah, you know, I think the Facebook corporations causing more human suffering than BP oil. I know, it's crazy. And I know you got a thing about the climate.

SPEAKER_99: I know that's kind of like, I know I'm like, Whoa, I kind of know that's in your wheelhouse. So I don't want to do any triggering here, Molly. But I don't want you to have to agree with me.

SPEAKER_305: But you know, there's climate situations and until kill like hundreds.

SPEAKER_21: I know it's very real. I know it's very real. I be reeled myself in front of like a bunch of

SPEAKER_165: smokestacks just the other day. Like this is terrible. I'm gonna be real it. That's gonna solve

SPEAKER_308: the problem. Anyway, I mean, there's a by the way, there's a part of the country, don't get me wrong.

SPEAKER_59: But like, there is a there is a petition to keep the Diablo nuclear reactor up and running here in

SPEAKER_08: California. So if you decided to, yeah, but maybe for like two years or something. It's like it got like a stay. It's kind of like somebody on death row gets like a two year stay while we keep it. So

SPEAKER_32: go ahead and type in Diablo into Google Diablo reactor petition and sign that so that we get moving

SPEAKER_08: here. And other countries get it like Japan is doing more nuclear. Yeah, there's no universe

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SPEAKER_08: Okay, I think the next big story everybody wants us to talk about Oh, yeah, is in related social news is there was a whistleblower who worked at Twitter. Now just ground rules here. Right? There's any other

SPEAKER_87: corporate mayday. Yeah, if there's any other corporate news around Twitter, I can't talk about it.

SPEAKER_104: Uh, so if you were to Google Calacanis Twitter, like maybe there would be some news stories that

SPEAKER_08: would tee you off to probably good idea for me not to talk about any deals that I was pursuing.

SPEAKER_248: I tried. Okay, but I can talk about the whistleblower. Sure, it's news. I can talk about the whistleblower

SPEAKER_12: and what I think about that. All right. Uh, here's what happened. Twitter's former security chief Peter Zatko better known as Mudge came forward at this exact time in history. Great. And said that Twitter misled regulators about its security risks. That's actually I think the most explosive part of this. There's a lot about the fake accounts and the complaint ads that the platform policy platform policy toward fake accounts incentivized, quote, deliberate ignorance by undercounting spam accounts and giving bonuses to exacts for increasing users but not binding bots. Also, and this is a pretty big deal because Twitter I think is under some kind of a consent decree related to how it protects user data. The whistleblower complaint said that Twitter executives ignored multiple security vulnerabilities, including failing to follow basic conventions, like safeguarding staff access to the core software, promptly deleting closed accounts and updating security software on company laptops and servers. He served as head of security until January of this year. He left about eight months ago, apparently when he was hired. I mean, there's been this kind of like equal and opposite response to this people saying like, listen, when Jack Dorsey hired or hired him, we were all like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, what? Because he's a character in his own right and was reportedly at least Twitter has responded and effectively said he was fired for like, poor leadership and

SPEAKER_330: all kinds of absurdly well respected in technology. As I don't know, absolutely. Well, I mean, he is he

SPEAKER_52: has found some of the, you know, biggest exploits and hacks. He is, yeah, you know, top 1% of 1% of

SPEAKER_165: respected in computer security. That's why you would hire him as your head of security doesn't that

SPEAKER_12: doesn't make that's my job manager or not a jerk, I think is what people then came out and said later, like people were like, there were credibility is not vengeful jerk, which is that which is relevant

SPEAKER_182: here. Um, yeah, I mean, those are words. I think if you look at that, no, I it's words by people who

SPEAKER_284: I'm just saying that was the response. I'm not. Again, this is not my opinion. That is no response.

SPEAKER_228: Absolutely. And what I would say is those are words by people who this person is whistleblowing, who are culpable if this stuff is true. So, you know, of course, they're going to throw him under the

SPEAKER_08: bus and try to discredit. I'm just saying if this was the week before this leak, and you asked 100

SPEAKER_340: people who know who this person is 100 would say this is one of the most credible people in security technology. And the only people who would say he's not credible in security technology would be people today who are on the other side of the whistleblowing complaint. Probably fair. I don't

SPEAKER_342: think to be fair. I don't think any of them are saying he's not credible in technology. No, they might

SPEAKER_184: not like him. He might not be likable. But like, I don't know where likable.

SPEAKER_12: They're saying this is what they do with every whistleblower. It's exactly it's just like with every whistleblower and every witness, right? It's like, why is he doing this? Is he doing it because he has an axe to grind? Is he doing it because he's an Elon fanboy? Like, what is the motivation? That is what people that's why people are bringing up this question of sort of like, sure character and prior behavior. Again, I don't know him. I did before anybody asked me.

SPEAKER_146: Yeah, yeah. Being a whistleblower. Thankless. I'll just say

SPEAKER_08: he's an incredibly brave, treacherous, and perhaps even like zero sum thing to do in life. Like,

SPEAKER_32: the woman, um, her name will come to me with Instagram. Francis Haugen. Francis Haugen. Thank

SPEAKER_349: you. Francis Haugen. Like, did this help her career? Or would she have been better off

SPEAKER_08: taking the bag from Facebook and the next company and the next company that hires her for a million dollars in stock options a year to just be part of the machine, right? Like, once she does the whistleblowing, like maybe she gets a book deal, but she's not employable by big tech after that. Yeah. He whistleblows. He's not employable by big tech after this, I don't think. I mean, maybe there's like select people, like maybe a security company would hire either of them, maybe. But I do think this is like, it's kind of like killing your career in many ways to be a

SPEAKER_357: whistleblower. Mm hmm. Yeah, I don't know. It's a, it's a, it's a complicated situation.

SPEAKER_33: But he also claimed that foreign agents worked for Twitter and had access to user information,

SPEAKER_08: which we know that actually happened. So this is the, there's two parts of this that are super explosive. The yes, there is the incentive structure, I think is really crazy that they were, that the incentive structure was to downplay the bots. And then the second thing is, oh my God, like if they're give, if everybody has access to people's DMS or access to everybody's accounts and

SPEAKER_33: foreign actors do like that's pretty serious stuff. Yes, especially since again, they had already been

SPEAKER_16: under scrutiny by federal regulators regulators for how they protected. Yeah, there was a big

SPEAKER_54: hack information. There was like the president's account, CNN's account, like a lot of people's major accounts. And then you think about the damage. This is why the FTC was upset, I think. What if somebody gets into the president's account, or CNN's account, and they say, a bomb just went off? Well, that's exactly what happened. Somebody had tweeted, there was like a bomb had gone off on CN, maybe it was a CNN account or something. So these kids who hacked the place,

SPEAKER_59: who got in just through some, you know, dopey Twitter employee, let them in basically somehow. They had, there have been instances where people hacked accounts and then said something that could

SPEAKER_08: send the world spiraling. So this is the danger is like, if these are, if this is the official communication platform for important people in the world, like heads of state, FBI, CIA, you know,

SPEAKER_96: they use the FBI uses this platform, who don't want to get hacked. Yeah.

SPEAKER_100: And, you know, let alone, you know, CEOs and venture capitalists and everyday civilians, like, yeah, damage that can be. I mean, you could cause right, exactly. Like,

SPEAKER_12: considering the reach that, that major public figures have on this platform, it's terrifying to think that they had left lax security around user accounts, it and I will say that the, this news broke yesterday. And since then, Twitter has already made a huge change to its organization, they're merging the health experience team, which is in charge of clamping downs, according to Engadget, which is in charging of charge of clamping down on misinformation and harmful content with its service team. And the service team is in charge of reviewing profiles when they're reported and taking down spam accounts. So this new combined group will be called health products and services. Maybe this was already in the works. But the timing there is certainly interesting too. And, and it sounds like there was an internal memo sent, saying you need to quote, ruthlessly prioritize

SPEAKER_342: this fake account, and also security, part of these two jobs.

SPEAKER_165: Putting aside any, putting aside any corporate stuff going on with the company, the fact that this high of a person leaked, like Francis Haugen, all due respect,

SPEAKER_54: was a researcher at Facebook, wasn't in the board meetings. This individual was in the board meetings talking to the board about the spam and security issues. Like this is a top five employee. Yeah, this is like, big time whistleblower. He sent all of these reports. This is the other thing that's crazy, is he sent all this information to the SEC. That's one set of huge problems like crazy lawsuits for the next five years on who knew what on the board. You know, and what did you tell the public? And did they trade on that information? Oh, my Lord, that is like one level of headache. Okay.

SPEAKER_28: He also sent it to the FTC, which are under investigation by, or under that, that legal and degree, a consent degree. Thank you. Consent degrees happen, decree, decree,

SPEAKER_54: decrees happen when people have messed up big time. And they're kind of on probation,

SPEAKER_08: consider that like corporate probation. And then

SPEAKER_34: they also sent it to the Department of Justice. Mm hmm. And now everybody on Capitol has this, and the Senate Intelligence Committee has it like, this is going to have reverberations that are well beyond. Yeah, anything we've seen in tech, like this is a level of bomb,

SPEAKER_08: a nuke. That is different than Francis Haugen saying like, hey, these guys knew this was bad. That was a big deal. I was I'm saying it that was a big deal. But this is like,

SPEAKER_34: the next this is 10x that I mean, that was like, okay, they knew that this is bad for us.

SPEAKER_28: Well, no, come on. I'm just saying that the ex there's no SEC investigation over the

SPEAKER_08: Francis Haugen leaks. What there's going to be is like, a bunch of like, what is the ramification of that? Okay, we know Facebook's more loathsome. Here you have SEC, like could be criminal complaints, if they didn't disclose this information to shareholders, like that's serious stuff. And if they were giving access to spies or otherwise letting dangerous people into the keys of the kingdom. Like, I think this kind of gets into like criminal stuff that, you know, or, you know, charges that could mean people are losing their jobs. Did anybody lose their job on the

SPEAKER_33: Facebook thing? Was there any fallout from the Francis Haugen leaks? I don't know.

SPEAKER_12: I mean, I'm pretty sure that's why that antitrust bill exists. Sure. So it's a backstop, right? Like, if we see massive changes to tech regulation, it will be because of the like, I would just, I would say, let's like dial it back a little bit. These are explosive claims that will be investigated. I think it is clear that a person who probably should worry about his legacy over time is Jack Dorsey. Because most of what is being alleged here did occur under his watch, right? It was when he left and right around the time Parag Agrawal came along that Mudge got fired. And it's possible that it was related to some of the failure to implement some of the things he is now saying should have been implemented. I don't really know. But I think like, there's no doubt that we're seeing. It's becoming more and more clear, the degree to which Twitter has been

SPEAKER_396: mismanaged for a very long time. Absolutely. And I mean, that's a valid criticism of

SPEAKER_12: Jack have social platforms, as one of our notice is pointing out that we're at the point where social platforms represent national security issues. That's the key. And also tear down society from the inside. There you go. And that like that is probably the thing we may have to reckon with right above everything else. But yes, as Nick points out, maybe the answer is you shouldn't have a halftime CEO for a platform with 200 million plus people. Well, you know, there was some willful

SPEAKER_235: refusal to deal with this there. Senator Chuck Grassley, he gave some statements to CNN quote, take a tech platform that collects massive amounts of user data, combine it with what appears to be an

SPEAKER_256: incredibly weak security infrastructure infuse it with foreign state actors with an agenda, and you've got a recipe for disaster. The claims I've received from a Twitter whistleblower is a serious national

SPEAKER_59: security concerns as well as privacy issues and then must be investigated further. And so that's the piece that I think is the new thing here national security issues, right? Whatever has happened

SPEAKER_165: before this, I don't think it's tipped into like, Oh, this is a national security. It's certainly the tick tock thing, which I've talked about here, till I'm blue in the face, and nobody seems to care.

SPEAKER_284: Again, I'm not trying to like belabor the comparison. But I do think it's notable that like, for example, Facebook allowed the January 6 insurrection to be planned on its platform.

SPEAKER_02: That's also a national security issue. There's like a whole bunch of layers here. I'm not trying to keep pushing back on you. I'm just saying like, let's not maybe I would even push back,

SPEAKER_190: I wouldn't say it's pushback is it's furthering the discussion, right?

SPEAKER_02: Furthering the discussion. Exactly. Like these platforms have Matt, right? Totally. That's the larger point. These platforms have a massive impact. We're totally not ready still to reckon with.

SPEAKER_412: It's you know, we've never had the ability for everybody in the country to be captured

SPEAKER_08: and programmed and manipulated to this extent this quickly this easily. And and that's where the hacking comes in, or just willful mismanagement in order to get your bonuses. Like, there's like so many vectors here. And you have to shut off this vector. So the board, if the board was compensating the management team and aligning their interests with growth, yes, but not with security, and not with safety, the board is culpable for that the management team that is going to say, Oh, well, the board told us we have to get mouse or monthly DAOs up or whatever this is. And so you know, yeah, we did the bots thing. But that wasn't the primary focus. Focus number one was increased user base. Focus two was, you know, to get revenue up and focus three was the bots, whatever, right, you know, this speaks to prioritization and incentive. And that's the problem is like the incentive is completely misaligned here. The incentive should have been, we want to have no bots and have real names,

SPEAKER_342: full stop, you know, and like, And actually, what you just said to is almost word for word, what Francis Haugen said was

SPEAKER_12: happening at Facebook to that the priority was growth always. Yes. Yes. Over everything else over the health of the platform, the health of the users on the platform, and the kids, the children,

SPEAKER_284: like, literally, researchers, women, black women, gay people, right? This is like, you hate to go back

SPEAKER_12: to this. But it's like, yeah, we've been telling you this for 10 years. Well, and it's only when it becomes like, it's, you know, it's it just, I mean, I don't control, and it didn't have to,

SPEAKER_54: but canaries in the coal mine, I had no idea, you know, I understood on one level, like you would receive as a female a different response, than I would online, and people hate me, and you're

SPEAKER_99: delightful. So like, I understand that I rub a certain contingent the wrong way, I'm okay with it.

SPEAKER_54: And I do get people who are like, you fat, bald, prick, I hate you with all my guts, love mom, you know, whatever it is. Make sure you eat your vegetables, love mom. I get people disagree with me about things. But then when you join the show, and now I'm in your

SPEAKER_165: at replies, or then I'm your Cinderella to clean up things that people are like, you hired a carrot to work with you. And she's that's too liberal. I'm like, Okay, on one podcast, I got a crazy

SPEAKER_61: right wing guy. And now you're telling me on the other podcast, I got a crazy left wing gal. And I have to like, as the moderate, like somehow change. People can have their own opinions, folks.

SPEAKER_54: You don't have to attack them for it. People think differently. We just Molly and I just had a difference of opinion on student loans. And we can have a productive discussion about solutions that move forward. We can have a difference of opinion about a lot of things I can have difference of opinion with sacks like there's a problem. We could all move forward by just discussing the actual issue at hand. And that's what I'm trying to get through to people. But my Lord, the amount of venom and the tone of it is different for women.

SPEAKER_110: Oh, it's 100%. It's like, it's just like what you're saying, what I'm saying literally is not valid

SPEAKER_12: to a certain segment of people. It's not valid, because I'm the one who said it. If you said the same thing. It's like that. There was that story the other day about that black couple who had their house appraised at $470,000. And then they like had a white guy, they reapplied, took all the pictures down, had a white guy give the tour and it appraised at $700,000. Like that was whack. Literally, there is stuff that I say, like sometimes I hear myself on this podcast, we were joking about this on the signal, like I'll say something that's identical to like what Friedberg said, independently of Friedberg, right? And I'm like, I don't get enough credit for being a Friedberg level genius. I'm just saying like, but it literally will not be heard.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Well, if you talk to the science voice like this,

SPEAKER_12: actually, I gotta do the laugh. But like, I remember, I don't know, well over a decade ago, talking about Twitter on Buzz Out Loud, back in the day at CNET and being like, you know what I've noticed on Twitter is that like, if you just agree with someone that's kind of boring content, right? You don't have anything, we don't have any way to engage with them and respond to them if you're just like, Yes, great point. But if you could disagree, all of a sudden, you have something to say, and you could get this person's attention and you could engage with them. And it was like this proto realization that that disagreement and conflict would be engaging. And that engagement could serve ads because people would spend a long time on there fighting about stuff. And YouTube went through this to where it was like, Oh, the more extreme your stunt is, thank you, Jake and Paul Logan, dips, then the more dips, those dips have now led to an entire culture bricks, like killing

SPEAKER_165: people. I mean, this dips, dough brick, like the fact that they let him on the platform doing these crazy stunts. I know. And some kid got his face shattered. Did you ever see that video of they basically got a crane, and they had it in the war, and they're spinning a crane around with somebody at the edge of it. Oh, so then the guy's like, Hey, you're going too fast, stop. So they start to slow the crane down. You can pull this video up, Nick. No. Okay, don't. It doesn't look

SPEAKER_54: that bad. I do not want to see this. No, they stop spinning the crane because because like, hey, this is getting a little too fast. And I'm afraid to let go because I'm gonna go flying. So he slows

SPEAKER_08: it down. And of course, the inertia makes him whip around like a Indiana Jones whip. And he smashes his face into the crane. Oh, God falls off into the water and could ostensibly have drowned and shatters his face. I guess Dobrik paid him off or something because he never talked about David Dobrik now. Oh, now he's suing him. Okay, so there was some sort of cover up here, then David Dobrik takes his Model X. Or somebody takes a Model X and David Dobrik puts on his channel and he jumps the steepest street in LA. Yeah. And that same street, not a year later, somebody rents a Tesla,

SPEAKER_37: does the same stupid trick and crashes it and shatters the Tesla. Yeah, I don't know if that kid

SPEAKER_445: ever went to do like, and I, I have a friend who's like, what are we doing here? Yeah.

SPEAKER_34: But no, I literally what are Susan on Twitter like you're encouraging, somebody's gonna get killed.

SPEAKER_446: Just take the stunts off. Like, these, these are crazy. Listen, I'm, I'm not like, um, what's the

SPEAKER_34: word? Like, I'm not a square. Like if somebody wants to do a backflip on skis on a mountain and go to the X Games, I'm like, I'm, I'm here for it. People want an MMA fight? I'll go. I'd love to

SPEAKER_278: go to an, I've never been, I'd love to go to an MMA fight. You, if somebody wants to take me sick

SPEAKER_34: courtside, I'll do it. And I'm not gonna stop somebody from doing MMA fighting. But on a public street to do this stuff, if people want to do evil, I watched every evil Keneally stunt when I was a kid, you know, I was there for it. But if you want to evil Keneval on somebody's street, where they're

SPEAKER_379: walking their dog and you kill their dog and the kid and the mom, I mean, get the out of here.

SPEAKER_12: That's boring now. We've all seen that you gotta you gotta keep leveling up. I'm being sarcastic. Obviously, what I'm saying is, that's what happened. I wrote a short story. I was thinking

SPEAKER_59: about like writing some short stories when I was younger. And I wrote the story. And I said, because I love the running man and some of that kind of stuff. And I was writing this like little short story, I got to find it on my one of my old laptops or something. And basically, my premise

SPEAKER_54: was society become just so dystopian that Discovery Channel started a competition where people could for a million dollars swim from one platform to another platform, where like, great white sharks fed. Mm hmm. And 10 people would jump across, they would chum the water. And you know, everybody who made it per first person got, you know, $10 million. Next person got $5 million. Next person got

SPEAKER_228: $1 million. And then whoever died would just be like great television is basically like gladiator,

SPEAKER_99: you know, Hunger Games or whatever. So I wrote this thing. And then I'm watching

SPEAKER_34: a discovery channel comes by my feed on one of the social networks. They had a guy in a glass box, and made a plexiglass, and a giant 15 foot great white smashes into it, you got to look this up just happened this year, I guess the great white didn't see the glass box, just saw the big fat seal in there, aka human wetsuit. And this guy almost got taken out. And like, the box shatters, the jaws are closing it. And I just thought, and then this is woman who swims with sharks in Hawaii, and she says she's doing conservation. I'm like, we got there. And not only do we get there, these people

SPEAKER_32: are doing it for free. They're just doing it for fame. They're not even doing it for the $10 million

SPEAKER_82: I proposed. Yeah, sweet Jesus. Where is the world gone? You know, we're headed right for like, I'm just saying squid games is way too popular. Way too popular. It is literally like, yeah, we're

SPEAKER_08: I think we're gonna get there. Anyway, this whistleblower thing, I think, is going to wind up being the story of 2022. Interesting. I think, you know, when you have somebody this credible, this high up at an organization, this reminds me as a tipping point, because you thought Francis might have been it right. But she didn't have like the smoking, smoking gun. Or, you know, it's like she had like, stuff that was like, Oh, yeah, I can confirm with you that like,

SPEAKER_28: Facebook is a soulless organization that'll do anything for growth and money. It was totally monstrous. Right. But it was already like, we've been known that

SPEAKER_08: the Facebook leak was confirming. We confirmed what we all knew, like, right, your kids should not be on here. This is going to make them feel bad about themselves. This is going to create things. This is different. This is like, we're finding out like, you know, there were bad actors in the network, the network wasn't secure, that the management team might have allegedly was screwing

SPEAKER_104: with the numbers for profit. Like this is explosive in a way. That is. Well, yeah, just

SPEAKER_10: this is crazy. Yeah. But when the last time a top five or 10 person in an organization whistle blew,

SPEAKER_165: whistleblowers are always so low level, like we guard. I don't know if you remember him. If you've never seen the movie, the insider for young people watching this, Russell Crowe, I mean, incredible. And this is 60 minutes of Jeffrey Weigart. He's the guy who did the smoking one. This feels more on that.

SPEAKER_467: Right. Yeah, totally.

SPEAKER_165: But even him, he was a biochemist, whistleblower, vice president of research and development at

SPEAKER_59: Brown and Williamson, worked on the development of reduced harm cigarettes. And in 1996 blew the whistle, I'm reading for the Wikipedia, on tobacco tampering in the company. It was adapted for the 1990

SPEAKER_08: film, the insider, one of my top 10 films of all time. Russell Crowe, from my top two films, gladiator playing, why got wagon wagon, a lot of the modern day whistleblower protections, etc, are based on this that, you know, whistleblowers, Molly also can get half of the settlement amount

SPEAKER_22: or the fines. So when there's a huge fine, so there's winds up being a huge fine here. This is the other thing people don't know about whistleblowers, they can get paid like

SPEAKER_104: 10s of millions of dollars for doing it for by the for the SEC specifically, I believe, right, there's like a bounty for this. And there was a or they can run out of the country on a rail

SPEAKER_16: and persecuted for years until they finally run right into the arms of the Russian government,

SPEAKER_59: like it can go lots of ways. Yeah, well, that was different. Yeah, that wasn't. Yeah, I mean, or he worked with the Russians previously. I mean, that's the one I don't get. Like, it's kind of weird that he wound up in Russia. I mean, it's one of the things it's so hard to

SPEAKER_88: know what's actually happening on, you know, what's actually happening in the world.

SPEAKER_12: It is exactly. And that's, that's to go all the way back to the beginning. That's why anytime there's a whistleblower there, there's a whole series of questions that come up immediately. Why? Why now? Who is this person? What's the motivation? What's the goal? Who put them up to this? If anyone

SPEAKER_49: will the Chelsea Manning? I don't know. Chelsea Manning, perfect example. It's like,

SPEAKER_104: this person had a crisis of conscience was going through a lot of personal issues at the time. And

SPEAKER_12: then that Assange guy who is just horrible, right? Or Snowden. I mean, who snow, you know, like, the easiest explanation for the Snowden situation is that it was like, genuine, he was genuinely motivated. And then the American response was so appalling to him that he ended up like, finding safe haven in Russia and being like, maybe you can have some of these secrets. I don't know. We're all over the place. Now we're all over the place. Should we talk about startups? Or do you have a wrap up?

SPEAKER_104: No, no, let's do a startup thing. But I just want to point out these SEC whistleblower program

SPEAKER_08: is required to pay awards to eligible whistleblowers who provide original information that leads to successful SEC for actions with total monetary sanctions exceeding 1 million. This is just like a law firm's page, I guess, to incentivize you to become a whistleblower. But there have been some huge ones that have happened. There was 114 whistleblower award and 110 million. Those are the top two right now. If you click on the 114 one, the Securities and Exchange Commission today announced an award of over 114 million to a whistleblower, whose information and assistance led to successful enforcement of SEC-related actions. 52 million award in connection with the SEC case and an approximate is 62 million relating to actions by another agency. The combined 114 million reward makes the highest award in the program's history. Eclipses the next highest award. Wow. And I'm trying to find which case

SPEAKER_484: it was. They've awarded 600. They will never say. Yeah. Well, in some cases they do. Sometimes they do,

SPEAKER_235: but in this case they're like, we're not. 676 million to 108 individuals since they created this

SPEAKER_256: award in 2012. So just so people know, like, and it says here, as set forth in the Dodd-Frank Act, the SEC protects the confidentiality of whistleblowers and does not disclose information that could

SPEAKER_250: reveal the whistleblower's identity. But they do take pride in, yeah. I'm counting down to

SPEAKER_49: Jake Hal saying, if you work at TikTok, you know, it's interesting you bring that up. You could get a

SPEAKER_421: million dollars. I think, you know, this is brilliant because the SEC really is thoughtful about

SPEAKER_54: these, like how they do it, like keeping people confidential and everything. Now, I think you can

SPEAKER_165: elect to not be confidential, but I think this is an appropriate thing to do to incentivize people because if you are a whistleblower, as I said earlier, you lose your entire career. Now, I don't know that Mudge is going to get some huge reward here, but I don't know if the SEC gives a huge fine

SPEAKER_59: here. He might get right 10 million or 50 million bucks. It seems like the average award is 10 20 million bucks. So maybe that takes the edge off. But you can't really, people are not doing it based

SPEAKER_08: on this. But this certainly does take the sting off. And if you are inside of TikTok, and you know, of Russian, I'm sorry, of Chinese government involvement. And you told the SEC and other

SPEAKER_59: agencies and you got an award, would be pretty dope. And they'd make a movie about you. So there's that

SPEAKER_491: too. I'm not encouraging everybody. This is not investment advice. It's not investment advice,

SPEAKER_08: but my J trading has been absolutely demolished, which means I think I'm going to buy more. I want to just let everybody know with J trading, we're going to do a SPAC-tacular next week. I am starting my spectacular research. I believe there's a SPAC that's going to go 10x. There has to be. And I want to find it because the pile of SPAC has been so demolished that in there must be a good one. So if you have ideas for just SPAC research, your top three SPAC ideas, top SPAC idea, send it to me

SPEAKER_10: Jason at Calacanis.com or producers at thisweekinstartups.com. Speaking of investments,

SPEAKER_263: there's a big Series A announcement today. Oh, okay. A little press release went out.

SPEAKER_165: Elizabeth Holmes, the Juicyero co-founder, Martin Shkreli, who got, who got today's $100 million Series A round after getting out of jail. The Global Environment Sensing and Data

SPEAKER_12: Platform Clarity closed a $9.6 million Series A. What do they do? They is the only air quality monitoring solution that provides continuous real-time local monitoring for at city or district scale. So right now, for example, if you want to monitor air quality in a city, like as the city government or like for all of UCLA or the city of London, for example, I'm naming some actual customers of this company. You have to buy this like monitoring station that's the size of a container ship and it costs $250,000 and you get readings like, you know, one or two times a day. This company makes these small little nodes that can be put all over super easily and then you pay on an ongoing basis for real-time pollution monitoring. Pollution, of course, kills hundreds of thousands of people every year, right? It's like a really, really, really dangerous part of the climate crisis. And this is that level of measurement. It's different from like purple air

SPEAKER_16: and the consumer ones. It's more like you would do this if you were a city.

SPEAKER_81: This is industrial strength. This is industrial strength.

SPEAKER_80: You know, it'd be great if this startup actually would tell you like which direction

SPEAKER_102: the pollution was coming from so you could figure out the source. Oh, yeah, totally. I don't see why they couldn't actually. No, they do.

SPEAKER_501: I don't see why over time.

SPEAKER_502: If you scroll down, the clarity wind module lets you know where the air pollution is coming from from a source of appointment. So, apportiment, what does that say?

SPEAKER_81: The clarity apportionment. Apportionment. Okay, that's another word I don't know. It's a fancy word for blame, I guess.

SPEAKER_36: Source apportionment. I like that. So you can be like, you're busted. Oh, you're gonna portion who it's to. Yeah.

SPEAKER_08: Yeah. So this is important. You know, you need to measure and if you want to manage it, you got to measure it. And yeah, you know, this is exactly the type of company that I brought you here to invest in. Like, I wish we could have gotten in on this deal.

SPEAKER_509: Oh, that's so funny because we did.

SPEAKER_510: Yeah, Molly. Molly's gonna save the world. This is Molly's second. I think this is the second or third deal.

SPEAKER_16: Second. This is the second syndicate deal. Syndicate deal. So we have two, there was some confusion among our syndicate members, which don't worry, we're still. Yeah, there will be more.

SPEAKER_12: There were two accelerator companies and two syndicate companies. And this was this was the first deal that went only to the climate syndicate. So we launched the syndicate with our first deal and said like, Okay, if you are into this, you automatically get added to the climate syndicate. And then we then we had it, our precious little investors. And this was the first deal they got

SPEAKER_515: just for them. And it was just about 500. We have 500 people in the climate syndicate.

SPEAKER_32: I think so. Yeah, so we got to get the exact number and tell people it's happening.

SPEAKER_08: The syndicate.com slash climate if you get it about the planet and you care about children and animals and the future. If you're a cold hearted bastard, you just want to make like a pure return on SAS software, the syndicate.com slash SAS we got you covered either way. Yeah, you could join both. We there's something for everyone at launch something forever. I want to start the syndicate.com slash gambling or vice. And because we're not allowed to with our regular fund because we've got a lot of different LPs with a lot of different concern. We can't do gambling or psychedelics or, you know, therapies, but I want to start. Hey, just Nick, please take a memo for pressure. I like the syndicate.com slash do it gambling or wagering. What would you call it?

SPEAKER_80: The syndicate.com slash vice syndicate.com some wagering. I mean, if you call it vice,

SPEAKER_518: people are going to be like, click. Sorry. Yeah, vice is good. You like vice.

SPEAKER_520: Well, it's it's it's the antithesis of the vice clause, right? So okay, let's go with that. Okay, I like how it already has like a built in sort of connection to VC. Okay, so let's get that out.

SPEAKER_508: Somebody's gonna argue that that's what you do anyway. No, no, no. But vice is just sexy.

SPEAKER_421: I like it syndicate.com slash vice. I want that up to tweet, to tweet, which means I want to brought up to my room my sweet to tweet. It's French for to the sweet to the sweet to the sweet fast as possible for jacal. Congratulations, Molly,

SPEAKER_165: I like this. If anybody knows of any measurement companies, I'm we Molly and I are fascinated by this sector. We have clarity now.

SPEAKER_96: We got sale plan. And we got sale plan. So we got to one to let's let's get five. So

SPEAKER_165: anybody know of a measurement company that's measuring this important stuff? Yeah, and we'd like to meet them. So any founders in the measurement SAS climate space, sustainability writ large, you know, like we can open the aperture here. Yeah,

SPEAKER_12: anything green, but that's air pollution, right? This is not like a super one to one carbon ton situation. But pollution is a result of the climate crisis and a contributor to making it worse. Like if you if you can't measure it, you can't manage it. But you also can't invest in

SPEAKER_49: it. Like I believe that these metrics move millions. I'm into this concept big time.

SPEAKER_100: 11. I mean, look at it. If you want to be healthier. And you weigh yourself every day,

SPEAKER_165: if you're having a problem with your weight, step one is to step on the scale every day. Now you're going to eat four donuts with your six year olds for no reason at all. And then not want to get on the

SPEAKER_61: scale the other day. I'm making up a crazy example. Okay. Because Tuesday, I'm just throwing it out there. And you're going to make a mistake. Or you're going to take a pint of Vietnamese coffee ice cream. And you're going to intend to have three scoops and you're going to polish off the whole

SPEAKER_165: pint while watching Game of Thrones something bad is going to happen. And you're going to make a mistake. So when you make that mistake, you still got to get on the scale, so that you understand you made the mistake you reinforce it. Well, this is the same thing here. If people want to turn a blind eye to the, you know, cargo ships. Well, that's not helping anybody. Let's just at least measure it.

SPEAKER_81: And then we can at least have a thoughtful discussion about where to go with it.

SPEAKER_16: If and when companies try to greenwash you or say like, Oh, we're not polluting, and we're not what are you talking about? Like, we're not, you know, releasing massive numbers of particulates into the air, and you can have a sensor that in real time is like, actually, when I

SPEAKER_12: measured it compared to the wind, it seemed like it was coming straight from you. Here's the data. Yes, that's how you get to change. And for cities like all of this stuff, you know, for cities,

SPEAKER_54: if you could have air quality, you know, if a city's goal, if the goal of our governments is to make life for the people better. Well, people with asthma, people with kids, pollution,

SPEAKER_08: life expectancy, like, you can be certain that somewhere on the peninsula, maybe 10 places, maybe 10 places in the greater New York City borough area, there are 10 places where there is a leak or

SPEAKER_34: pollution coming from somewhere that nobody's aware of. That's giving people cancer or taking a couple years off their life. Now we can sit here and pretend it's not happening. But we all know it is.

SPEAKER_08: So go to clarity. What's their domain name clarity dot clarity.io. Go to clarity.io. If you're in government and take a look at how affordable this is, and what good you could do for your community and run a pilot, I'm not saying you got to put it on every street corner, but run a pilot and take care of your citizens. And hey, if there's somebody

SPEAKER_34: who's doing the wrong thing, maybe you give them a fine and you stop them. And you're a hero. Yeah. And you're saving people's lives and you get reelected. Okay, so you're I'm not saying that your

SPEAKER_08: existential viability as a candidate or a mayor or a governor depends on this, but you're voting your ass out if you don't just say no, just say get after it. Anyway, and if you're they're hiring over there too. So just to make this, you know, even more real, if you actually are smart, and you're an engineer, and you want to do something other than help Zuckerberg steal stuff, if you're working on Facebook, for Zuckerberg, and then you had the opportunity to work for clarity.io in beautiful Berkeley, and get some nice bagels and the food scene is great. Everybody's hiking in the mountains. Why would you drag your ass for Zuckerberg's,

SPEAKER_156: you know, mausoleum to work in the the the the Kessel mines pounding salt with Zuckerberg stealing other people's ideas when you could work and have a career at clarity.io. Go have a career and have a mission to fix air quality and fight climate change as opposed to steal other people's ideas for dopey social apps. For the love of God, people. I mean,

SPEAKER_305: seriously, don't know you sometimes just listen to Jake Allen, you just want to be like,

SPEAKER_99: let's go. No, I'm just infuriated. Like, can you imagine smart people going to work for Zuckerberg instead of going to clarity.io slash careers? Clarity.io slash careers. Clarity.io

SPEAKER_19: slash careers. Listen, if we invest in your company, we're blowing your up here. We're blowing your up. We're going to fill those open positions. Let's go. Firmware engineer. Boom. Do it.

SPEAKER_552: Let's get in there. There's got to be, I mean, they pay well. They got our money. They got our money. They got our money. So take our money and reduce. I mean,

SPEAKER_510: do something good for the planet. Look at this. Pull up the careers page here. It's actually wonderful. I don't want to make this into a commercial.

Jason Calacanis: Firmware engineer. Boom. Senior customer and channel marketing manager. Boom. Support

SPEAKER_22: engineer. Boom. Let's go. Let's go. And if you don't see a fit, just join the talent pool, right? Just get in there and just say, hey, I have passion for this and go ahead and blow them up.

SPEAKER_165: If you're a fan of the show, just go ahead and blow them up and say clarity.io is cool AF.

SPEAKER_18: Oh my God. All right. That's really happening. All right. It's really happening. Molly, congrats. Four deals in the first six months. I said do six, but you did four.

SPEAKER_560: Um, I get her going. That's how I get the cowgirl going. I just got the cowgirl going. Look out. Yee-haw. I just saddled up. Oh, I get to see you two behind,

SPEAKER_217: but you'll make it up in the second half of the year. Let's do eight, but we need these. We have to

SPEAKER_307: hunt now. We're, we're not in passive mode. We're in hunt mode. Yes. I need deals. Bring.

SPEAKER_22: We found another SaaS. How great was the investment meeting yesterday?

SPEAKER_80: I love our investment meeting. This job is great. Twice a week. We talked for two hours

SPEAKER_08: about finding great companies. I mean, it's literally like a masterclass in there of us, like debating the finer points. All right. I got to do a blueprint. Molly,

SPEAKER_22: go find us some more companies. Congratulations. Really just so happy for you. Finding clarity.io

SPEAKER_10: And sale plan. What's sale plans domain name? Sale plan.com. Wow. Right up top.

SPEAKER_195: They even got that cool domain. Yeah. And right up top. There's a careers button that links to what

SPEAKER_08: is a notion page. I'm clear. So go ahead and click on that. You pull up that page. Join the sale plan crew. So here's what you do. You're an engineer. You're a data scientist. We got two companies for you to apply to. I want you to apply to both. Sell plan and clarity. Sell plan.com clarity.io slash careers. Sale plan.com and careers right up top. Embedded software IoT engineer. Get to live

SPEAKER_22: in Miami, Fort Lauderdale. Go to Barry's bootcamp with Keith for a boy. You got a cloud engineer. You got a data scientist. What a great life. Okay. Do something meaningful with your life. Quit

SPEAKER_12: Facebook. Exactly. Like nobody's saying don't have a job to the nobody that was so mad at us earlier. We're saying get a job that means something. Yeah. There's something meaningful. Yeah. That's all I'm saying. That's all. That's all. All right. That is it for the news. Next up, Jason's back with everybody's new favorite segment. So many new favorite segments, but this is a great one.

SPEAKER_578: Rock is in the building. The blueprint. The gun show. There we go. Let's go. Where's my spinach? All right, Molly. Go get go find some companies. Get the heck out of here. Okay. All right,

SPEAKER_235: everybody. It's Wednesday and it's time for part seven of a 10 part series. We started here a mini series, if you will on this week in startups. It's called the blueprint. Yes. Shout out to Jay Z.

SPEAKER_54: Rock is in the building here. I'd like to talk about career advice. One of the most frequent emails I get is, Hey, can I get some career advice? And sometimes we do ask Jason's here, but I thought I would put together just a 10 part series on things I get all the time. And we did one on branding yourself and having a breakout skill. We did one on when to quit your job, building your network,

SPEAKER_59: right? Networking super important in terms of getting power. Shout out to Jeffrey Pfeiffer at Stanford, creating or waiting. We did in episode four, generalists versus specialists,

SPEAKER_08: especially in the startup lens, getting ahead of trends and how to spot trends. I did all of these can be found at this week in startups.com slash the blueprint. Now the episodes are embedded in larger episodes of this being served. So you might have to jump ahead in the episode. But I think at this week in startups.com slash the blueprint, we created a notion page that'll get you to the

SPEAKER_165: playlist. And it'll deep link to those moments. Today, I want to talk about should you go into debt for college and just should you go to college? And what are the alternatives there? Now? The

SPEAKER_235: reason this came up is because as we talked about earlier in today's episode, major news today from

SPEAKER_256: the New York Times President Biden is going to announce today that he's canceling $10,000 in student debt for Americans earning $125,000 or less per year. Let's put aside how we feel about that. Is it fair?

SPEAKER_54: Is it unfair? We know that there are specific things about college and higher education in the United

SPEAKER_589: States in the year 2022. That is much different than when I went to school. I went to school 1988 to 1993 took me five years at night to graduate from Fordham University with $10,000 in debt on Pell

SPEAKER_59: grants. I paid for the rest and it was about 10 $12,000 a year in just tuition. I lived in a $300 a month apartment, literally like the top apartment with low ceilings where you had to duck to move around this like little tiny apartment on 10th Avenue in Brooklyn. The administration says they're going to

SPEAKER_54: try to get most of this 90% of it to households that are less than 75 a year. So they're trying to do the right thing here. But there's a reason why this is an important issue for young people today.

SPEAKER_165: It's because the average US undergraduate has $37,000 in student loan debt as of October 2021. And then when we look at graduate student loan debt, 91,000 as of October 2021. These are big numbers, folks. And I like to look at these numbers in relation to your first year salary. My belief is that you should be making much more in your salary coming out of school than you have in debt. Why? Well, because you got to pay tax on that 30 40% typically. So if you graduate with $37,000 in debt, and you make 50 40 50 60 grand coming out of school, which I think is probably what most people

SPEAKER_59: with generic degrees coming out of school make, you know, obviously, developers might make more. Um, but if you're just, you know, going into sales, business, finance, whatever.

SPEAKER_256: Uh, yeah, let's say you make 50, you pay a third of it in taxes. Okay, you know, your mate,

SPEAKER_59: your debt is much more. The average salary in 2022 for college graduates is 55k, according to the National Association of Colleges employees. Now there are some people who get really silly degrees that

SPEAKER_08: don't entitle them to anything more than working at Starbucks. Not that there's anything wrong with working at Starbucks, but you can work at Starbucks without a high school diploma, I believe. And if you're getting a $15 an hour job, you know, you're working $2,000, 2000 hours a year, which is what the average American works just about 2000 hours for full time job, you're making 30 grand a year. Now your debt is way more. So just as a rule of them, you have to be making like twice as much as your debt for it to make sense. So you got that 37,000 in debt, you should have a job paying you 70,000 something in that range, right 75k, because you're gonna have to pay this off. And sometimes the interest rates on these things are super predatory. So you don't want to take those variable interest 1520 25% loans, those things are crazy. Now, if it's a Pell grant or something like that, and it's very low. That's a different story, right? If it's the government's giving you a three or 4% loan, it's not that bad. So the devil is in the details on these only 14.3% of the average graduate student debt is from undergraduate study graduate students are a big part of this

SPEAKER_165: problem. And the average graduate student debt is 141% higher than the average debt balance among all student borrowers. In other words, people go for graduate degrees. Now some graduate degrees, like a lawyer, a doctor, you know, etc, an MBA, you know, they might entitle you to a great job. But you also have to remember, like, do you really want that job? And so I think the people who don't do a couple of years of work, either before they go to college during college, or after their undergrad, they're at a disadvantage, because they don't know what career they want. So sometimes people will go be $200,000 in debt for their law, MBA, or medical degrees. And they actually hate the job. And now they're trapped. And they're making 150 a year 100 250, whatever it is, in some elite job, but it's less than their debt. And man, they have to pay that debt off over 15 years, and they can never buy a house. Now they're 37 years old, and they hate their lives. And they never wanted this job. So I want you to pause for a second. And I want you to look at the alternatives. And that's going to be a big part of what we discussed today. You know, the average in state tuition at a public four year college is very important for you to know, public private community colleges. If you are a self driven person, going to a city college, you know, a public college like this, as opposed to a private one, if you don't have the means can be radically cheaper. If those in state public four year colleges are $9,400 a year, you're talking about getting out of your getting your degree for about a quarter of what the average private colleges private colleges started like the average 36 or so. And

SPEAKER_08: where I went forward and I think I heard it's like up to 70k a year. And if that's true, this is only available to really rich kids or middle class kids or people on scholarships and middle class kids who want to go into severe debt, it's simply not worth it for undergrads. Well, due respect to my alma mata, I would not advise anybody do that. If you happen to have rich parents, okay, whatever your congratulations and being in the lucky sperm club. But for everybody else, that's just dumb.

SPEAKER_54: There's no way to get out from under. And what I want you to do is to really think about these numbers. Now I know when you're 1718 years old, you may have been told, hey, you got to go to college, that's just how it is. And then you start thinking about well, I want to have like a good college I know. And then all of a sudden, you're putting yourself 100 200 300 debt, what you need to do is forget about what the college is going to cost for a second in that experience. And think about what happens after college. So when you're making that decision,

SPEAKER_165: I want you to not think of the first order impact. Okay, I'm going to go to a school, it's going to be like this, I know, my friends are going to be there. Parties are great. Oh, I'm going to be in Hawaii, or Florida, or whatever destination I like, or I like the sports team. Let's pause all of that. Not that those aren't valid, you know, your experience, I guess is valid. I want you to think like an adult, you're 1718 years old, I want you to think about when you're

SPEAKER_08: 22, and you graduate, what's life going to be like for you then? And do you want to live under a 500 or $1,000 a month payment for the rest of your life, or seemingly the rest of your adult life, your best years, because you could be so in debt that you hate your life. And you can't afford to do

SPEAKER_54: the things you want to do just for this four year experience. And then what would happen if you were

SPEAKER_165: debt free, and you still got to go to school or your debt was 10k or 20k, and you could easily manage it at a $200 $300 a month payment. That could be a much better life for you. So don't

SPEAKER_08: look at the four years, look at the 40 years. Think about years 22 to 62, your working years, those prime years, how do you want to live your adult life? And that's what we're not having a discussion with kids. And I think kids are being young adults are being manipulated to think college is this magic one it is not the magic wand is skills. And your executive function executive function is a fancy word for discipline. What is your discipline to learn new skills? That's what I

SPEAKER_165: want you to think about developing a person who has high executive function, executive function, again, a fancy word for your ability to sit down, shut up and do some goddamn work in this world.

SPEAKER_54: That's what executive function is, can you sit down and shut up and work and learn a new skill? You've got an executive function, you don't need any of this college. It's a luxury. If you can sit down and teach yourself how to be a video editor, teach yourself social media, teach yourself accounting, teach yourself programming, teach yourself how to be a sales executive, read books, listen to podcasts, build websites, build small businesses, use no code, if you can go to founder.university and show up

SPEAKER_165: every week and kick ass founder.university, we charge you 700 bucks to come for 12 weeks, if you come for all 12 weeks, we give you the 700 bucks back. It's basically free if you show up. If you have executive function, you could do anything in life. You just sit down and learn skills. Executive function and skills is what it's about. Now college should be teaching you that stuff.

SPEAKER_54: But too often college does not give you any skills that the real world needs. They're out of sync.

SPEAKER_165: The sync is off, folks. So if it's out of sync, and you're going into massive debt, that would be

SPEAKER_08: considered a bad strategic decision for you to make. If I told you, hey, give me $100,000. And I'll teach you how to be a developer and developers make 150k, you'd be like, Okay, that kind of fits J cal's rule. It's like the salaries twice as much as the cost. Now, if I told you, you could go to, you know, one of these developer schools for 20k, and the average salary of a developer is 150k, you're like, Well, that seems like a pretty great deal. But you need to have executive function, don't you need to have the ability to sit down, shut up and learn and work. Most young people don't have it yet. Most parents don't prepare their kids to be resilient, to have grit. These are fancy words, grit and resilience are fancy words, to be able to buck up and get through hard things. Do you have the ability to sit there and go from chapter one to chapter two to chapter three on your own? Most people need a babysitter, colleges like this great giant babysitter, and way for you to go from 18 to 22 years old and maybe absorb some knowledge and you know, you're too old to be at home, but you're too young to be in the workforce, kind of bull when you think about it, what you need is executive function, the ability to add skills, and then you don't even need to go to college. Now, if you're one of those people who has executive function, and you can acquire skills, if I told you right now, you could be $200,000 in debt, or I could give you $200,000 to invest in yourself over the next four years, would you give the $200,000? If I gave it to you upfront in a gave you $200,000 in a in a in a nice briefcase $100 crisp hundies, you got bricks, would you take it and hand it

SPEAKER_165: to a college and say those people are going to teach you how to get more than that 200 back, they're going to give you five times 10 times that 40 year career, you make, I don't know 100,000 a year on average 200,000 a year on average, you make four to 8 million. Do you think that that college when you give them the 200,000 is going to return 20 times 40 times your investment? Do you really?

SPEAKER_54: Because to be candid, you could make $50,000 a year working any job, and a little bit of overtime,

SPEAKER_165: right? You don't even need to go to college for that. So that really the delta is that extra 50k. Do they actually get you that? Probably not. The skills that they're teaching in most of these

SPEAKER_54: degrees is not in sync. That's why we have this problem to begin with. So they've raised the price to the point of absurdity, while not increasing the value of the skills of the executive function of

SPEAKER_256: grit, resiliency, etc, to make you able to operate in the real world. Let alone if you're paying going,

SPEAKER_59: you know, to 100,000 a year school, which is bonkers. So what are the alternatives for you?

SPEAKER_165: I'm not going to tell you not to go to college, I'm going to tell you not to go into debt in college.

SPEAKER_08: Debt equals death. Do not go into debt for skills that do not result in a return on investment ROI. I want you to think about ROI. If you're going to go for a degree that does not have a clear path to you making more money and having that degree, then you should not go into debt for it. You're getting a luxury degree. If you're going for philosophy, psychology like I did, and you're not planning on being a psychologist and going to graduate school for it or a counselor and going for your master's

SPEAKER_165: or something. What are you doing? You're wasting money. And the difference when I went was, it wasn't that expensive. And I didn't go into too much debt. And I worked during the day and I went to school at night. So what can you learn on masterclass on a code academy type? One of those code things? What can you learn on YouTube? What could you learn in internships, apprenticeships, or building your own businesses? Think about it for a second. If your cost of living was 1500 bucks a month, right? It's 18,000 a year. And then you were going to spend 30,000 a year on college tuition, you're at 50k a year. Okay, well, the 20k of living expenses is static, right? It's, it's fixed for people going to college or not, if you're not living in the house. So you can basically got 30,000 a year to play with. What could you do with $30,000 a year? Right? So let's say you work to get that $1,500 a year 2000. I'm sorry, 1500 2000 a month to get yourself, you know, a shared two bedroom,

SPEAKER_59: and you got one of the two bedrooms, paying 1000 for that you got 500 bucks for your food 500 bucks for entertainment, whatever it is. I don't know, you got to work, whatever that is 200 hours, half time, to make that, you know, whatever it is, 20 bucks an hour, pay your taxes, still have money left over.

SPEAKER_589: You start doing the math on this. If you're self directed, and you can build businesses and learn,

SPEAKER_611: you're going to learn more and get a better deal. But you're going to have to have that executive

SPEAKER_589: function, you have to learn to add skills on your own. And that's what this is all about.

SPEAKER_59: So if one of my children have three daughters came to me and said, Hey, J. Cal, aka dad, or a nephew or something, I want to build a business, you were going to spend 200k on

SPEAKER_54: my college 50k a year, any chance I could get 50k to build the business would be like, Oh, let's start

SPEAKER_165: crying. Okay, great. What's the business? What skills do you have to build it? Let's let's talk that through. And they take four shots at building four businesses, a 50k each, huh? Let's say all four fail, who's going to be more qualified going into your five person who got the I'm not going to pick

SPEAKER_59: on people, but philosophy degree, psychology degree, the degree I got English lit, whatever, who's going to come out in year five and be stronger and more resilient and have a better future, the person who tried four businesses, all four failed. Uh, that or the person who came out of it here in year five with the English degree, I think we know the answer to that. Clearly, you're going to have learned so much running those

SPEAKER_32: four businesses. And so that's what I want you to think about when you're making these decisions,

SPEAKER_165: not saying don't go to college, say don't go into debt. Unless the debt is a clear path to a win. In the school is teaching you things that get you to the other side with a higher salary. And you can just look at things that don't take a salary, what jobs could you get? This is why I think maybe working for a year before you go to college is a fine thing to do too. We have a lot of stigmas about this. Oh, you went you didn't go directly to college, you worked for a year. Oh my god, everybody's heartbroken. Why? Why are we funneling people into a broken education system that's overpriced for 90% of people and putting them into crazy debt when there are so many more options out there? I didn't have YouTube as an option to learn things. The business world was a closed ecosystem where it was very hard to figure out how to do it. Now all the answers are on YouTube,

SPEAKER_59: Quora, this podcast, you know, Founder.University, countless other, you know, um, online education resources. So grow with Google, right? This is a career advancement program focused on in job demands. If you haven't heard of that, go check out Grow with Google. You complete

SPEAKER_165: these courses on your own 10 hours a week. It's incredible. So just give up. As I've said many times watching HBO, Netflix, Hulu, maybe take a course, maybe get a job and go to school at night, maybe challenge yourself. I'm going to work four days a week and go to school three days a week.

SPEAKER_08: That's what I did. Basically, I worked five days a week. I went to school at night, whatever you do, please do not put yourself in debt. Now let's talk about Google. They intentionally created these job offers because they know they want to help society and they want to find people who can fill the in

SPEAKER_165: demand jobs and they partner with employers for both hiring and upskilling their current workforce. This is the idea. There's not enough employees. 1.5 million job openings with a 66 median salary for the jobs that are in Google's program. Think about that for a second.

SPEAKER_235: You could go to Google, right? Let's pull that up here. Job ready skills that will put you to work.

SPEAKER_165: We have such a broken education system that Grow with Google exists. Learn at your own pace. No experience necessary. Stand out to employers and a path to on-demand jobs. No experience necessary.

SPEAKER_59: There's 1.5 billion jobs. Learn at your own pace. Three to six months. Stand out to employers. Make your resume competitive with a credential from Google. 75% of programs graduates report an improvement in their career within six months of certificate completion. A path to in-demand jobs. 66K median average salary. Let's just pause for a second. That 66K is higher than the bachelor's degree coming out of the average college as we talked about earlier. So you can not go into debt.

SPEAKER_08: You can do this in under six months. This is incredible. So these kind of hacks are there. So you have to ask yourself, why are we pushing kids into a broken system and having them ruin their lives for 20, 30, 40 years? The answer is tradition. The answer is predatory loan companies, predatory schools, and kids don't think. So if you have a child in your life who's 17 or 18 or 19 years old, and they're going to make this decision, you have to do the thinking with them. So if you have a younger sibling or a cousin or a child or a friend, you really have to pause and let them listen to this blueprint two or three times to understand that college is not the only path. And it may have traditionally been the best, but we took a heuristic, we took a rule of thumb, and we let this rule of thumb exist for 20 or 30 years. But we never said, does it still apply? The rule of thumb that college is worth it, and college will get you ahead and higher education was uniformly worth it. That rule broke, because colleges became too expensive. If colleges today, if the average debt was 10 or 20k, we wouldn't even be doing this blueprint, we would have saved it for another topic. The only reason we're doing this is because people are graduating with 40k 50k 100k 200k in debt.

SPEAKER_10: If again, if it was 10k, like I had in those Pell grants, 9k, I easily paid it off, I was making 5060k

SPEAKER_165: coming out of school in IT. Let's make it 5060k while in school, in fact, I think. So you had this very easy path and to pay that stuff back. That's what I want you to think about. The heuristic that higher education is always worth it is no longer true. Therefore, you have to question it, and you have to make a better decision, you cannot rely on the rule of thumb. And in fact, the rule of thumb

SPEAKER_401: thumb that I'm going to give you might be more appropriate for you. And that rule of thumb,

SPEAKER_165: the rule of thumb is, can you learn this skill on your own for free? If so, do that first. If you can learn the skill on your own, because of your high executive function, please do that first, and then consider college. So I'm just asking you to give it a shot. And you can do it in high school, you can do it while at community college, but I want you to run a test for yourself a three to six month test. And if you run this test, the blueprint test, are you able to add a skill for three to six months, add a skill that's in demand in under six months. If you can learn an in demand skill in under

SPEAKER_401: six months, you are unstoppable. If you can't, then there's something wrong with you. You're broken in

SPEAKER_165: some way that you don't have that motivation, you don't have that executive function yet. And you're

SPEAKER_08: going to need to figure out why I hate to talk to you this candidly. But an adult who is successful in the world can sit down and say to themselves, I'm going to spend 1020 hours a week, I'm going to set a schedule under a time blocks on my schedule, and I'm going to add a skill. Now, six months is a long time, maybe you want to just set a one month goal for yourself, I'm going to work for two hours a day for 30 days in a row, no days off 60 hours in one month to learn video editing, or to learn coding or no code, or to learn coda and notion and Zapier, to make you happier, you're going to learn some skill that's in demand. Do the 60 day challenge, do the six month challenge, learn a new skill and then then evaluate and say to the people, why would I give you $50,000 a year? What are you going to teach me? And how is that after four years going to get me a better degree? I want you to challenge the college and ask them that, what will you teach me in four years for $200,000? That'll get me a job that pays double 200,000. That's the benchmark, right? I want you to be able to whatever you

SPEAKER_165: invested make double. If you invested in a code school for $50,000 a year, or $25,000 a year, do you not think you're going to make double that as a developer? I think you are. If you did it for design school, or a growth university, like a, you know, growth hacking university, if you spend 10 or 20k on it, are you not going to be able to double that in salary? Okay, if the college can't guarantee you that your total spend on what they teach you will get you double, I think you know

SPEAKER_54: everything you need to know. It's a luxury product, not a must have product. It's not a good choice for you as an investment. So please look at this in the lens of ROI. And then look to yourself. Do you have executive function? Do you have grit? Do you have resilience and the ability to use that grit, resilience and executive function to sit your ass down and shut the hell up and learn a new skill? The future is about skills, not degrees. If you cannot acquire skills, the degree is only going to set you further behind. Because all that debt then takes away from your ability because you have to service that debt instead of adding new skills. Imagine being debt free, and then just working at Starbucks or in an Uber or DoorDash or Apple Store. So you got some way to pay your base, you know, living expenses keeping your burn very low while adding skills. Now you're unstoppable. The unstoppable

SPEAKER_165: people in the world are the ones who can constantly add skills. I know what I'm talking about here, because I invest in them every day. The five professional certificates you can earn for free at Google. I don't mean to make this a commercial for Google is 100 other places this digital marketing and e commerce. Okay, median salary 51k job openings for digital marketing and e commerce 218,000

SPEAKER_59: high T support where I started my career fixing laser printers and getting under desks and changing the cables before Wi Fi existed. Job openings 400,000 median salary, average salary 52k average

SPEAKER_165: starting salary data analytics 74k salary 380,000 job openings project management fancy word for like building a tech product being a PM median salary 73k job openings half a million half a million folks

SPEAKER_22: UX design median salary 92 job openings almost 100,000 right now this is right now folks I tell you all the time

SPEAKER_54: sales project management design coding building in the world if you can't build anything why do you deserve to get a job if you can't build or service customers the world doesn't need you you're providing no value but nobody has this discussion when you go to colleges what do they show you and go to college they walk you around the campus they show you the accoutrement they show you everything but the ROI why because you're getting suckered if they really were good

SPEAKER_08: at what they did at these fancy dancy colleges and you know the devries and the other hit and run

SPEAKER_104: ones that divide paid 100 million dollar fine huh tells you everything you need to know i think guilty as charged when you pay 100 million dollar fine settlement i think it's because you're guilty that's just my personal feeling i'm sure they admitted no guilt but my feeling is you don't

SPEAKER_22: pay 100 million dollar fine unless you're guilty as f you you listening to my voice right now know what

SPEAKER_08: i'm saying is true google running this great thing is telling you the outcome when you go to a college they show you the quad they show you greek life they show you the cafeteria the sports center what what is this you're joining a private club or are you getting educated to go out and have a career in the real world don't get suckered folks take all those discussions and be a jerk on the tour say hey tell me about the skills i'm going to learn what skills will i learn in year one when i give you 50k what years will i learn in year two when i give you 50k give me your three and year four as well tell me the top five skills in 48 months so i'm going to be here for almost 50 months every 10 months i should

SPEAKER_32: get a skill give me the five skills and then let me um take those skills and tell me what jobs i

SPEAKER_597: qualify for and how many of those jobs are available that's just what google did they told you you can

SPEAKER_165: you can learn all six of these all five of these in six months each okay five times six is 30 that's half the amount of time you almost that's 60 of the time you're going to be in college so if it's 60 of

SPEAKER_59: the time you're in college you can come out with five specific skills you can be a project management ux designer data analytics it support and digital marketing e-commerce you learn all five of those things on google for free basically okay okay what are we talking about here folks if you're going to go 100k in debt you could learn all of these in six months you do it in 30 months and have

SPEAKER_08: these five things on your resume this is what's happening in the world folks this is the truth the roi of higher education is broken the the truism the heuristic the rule of thumb that college is always worth it is no longer true college is might be worth it at the right price and i tell you it's

SPEAKER_104: kind of hard to beat zero or a hundred dollars or five hundred dollars or five thousand dollars for

SPEAKER_10: a course that gives you a specific skill coursera you know is the the back end that does this and they have like five thousand courses over a coursera there's a ton of places all right listen i've already talked for 20 minutes about this it's something i'm very passionate about if you're a young

SPEAKER_08: person you got a young person in your life just sit there listen to this once go do some online research listen to it the next week and make a plan and then when you go talk to colleges i want you to evaluate colleges through the same lens you're evaluating these online programs and then i want you to challenge them and say hey why is your program here at this two-year college four-year college better than me going to google and doing it at home tell me and they might say well we have a lab here and you'll have other peer students to work with and uh you'll get to of course be part of the social life here and and build a network of people who are also going for a ux degree those would be valid reasons that's what i would do if i had a college i'd say well when you do the google thing you're at home alone it's kind of lonely right if you come here you're going to be with we have 500 people in the ux program and some of them be ahead of you some will be behind you and you get to work on projects together and socialize and of course you're going to be in the lab for two or three hours a day and there you're just going to be in front of your screen so you're going to do projects in the lab and we're going to teach you much better than google could ever teach you because we have uh professors who'll be sitting there and if you have a question you can ask them and they'll stay after

SPEAKER_33: class and walk you through stuff you don't understand which google's not going to do that

SPEAKER_34: that would be a great answer if they give you that answer okay take that into account and then you

SPEAKER_165: could put that against well what if i hired a tutor because tutors cost 100 200 bucks an hour for like a high-end tutor so if you're gonna go 50k in debt i mean think about it folks like 100 an hour tutor of 500 hours you get 500 hours of one-on-one instruction you realize how long that is if you were doing 10 hours of tutoring a week i don't know if you could even do 10 hours of tutoring a week that's that's a year of one-on-one 10-hour tutoring that's if you went to school five hours a day it's two hours a day of one-on-one touring that's when you start to realize like the roi might be broken you wonder where where where's that money going to in the colleges how many administrators do they have who's getting paid all this money right where is this money going to some endowment or whatever the colleges need to justify their existence either by lowering prices or providing more value and then you you as the customer look at yourself as the customer you're the customer and once you are have that agency agency another fancy word which means like you make decisions for yourself you're in control of your destiny and so what agency means you have to have agency you have to be your own advocate that's what the fancy word agency means i always like to tell you what these fancy words mean so take control of your destiny don't don't just put your destiny in the hands of tradition don't put your destiny in the hands of you know some people who run the

SPEAKER_59: college or some heuristic that college is always a good deal it's not always a good deal make smart decisions and make thoughtful decisions all right here end of the lesson blueprint number

SPEAKER_08: seven is in the can and i hope you enjoyed it this week in startups.com the blueprint this week

SPEAKER_10: in startups.com the blueprint i would be very helpful for me if you would send this to 10 friends and just say hey you know have your kid watch this when they're 16 or 17 years old and then email me back or just that mention me if it has some positive impact on a parent or a kid making this decision or some group and then tell me what i got wrong jason at calcanis.com for life we'll see you next time bye