SPEAKER_00: Hey, everybody. Hey, everybody. It's Fridays this week in startups and we're winding down Molly's first week as my full time co host. We're going to cover some news today. 15% of the world's Bitcoin mining network was taken offline on Thursday after Kazakhstan. Nice. As president turned off the nation's internet. I kid you not. And a report just came out at 2021 crypto scammer stole $14 billion. But this number might not be as bad as it seems might in fact be an improvement depending on who you believe.

SPEAKER_06: If you believe Jason, it might be worse than that. We are also going to do some fun stuff because Friday we have a we live in the future segment about AI enabled deep fakes delivering some shocking news to the staff here at this week in startups. We're going to go over the memes of the week, all of which literally all the memes of the entire week were provided by junior associates at the A16Z firm via Mark Andreessen's Twitter.

SPEAKER_09: account. And finally, producer Rachel has another great Okay Boomer interview with YouTube creator and software engineer Ben Awad and Molly as a special surprise to you as a way to welcome you to the show. The producers made this little tribute video.

SPEAKER_15: What? Roll the tape. This weekend startups welcomes Mollywood. The team is getting ready from Montana to Cali. Call a Big Ten.

SPEAKER_18: Oh my God. He's inflammatory. He's breaking stories. But unicorn cup tables looking ever so grand.

SPEAKER_20: Hooray for Mollywood. All business and quit with Mollywood. This is the show for you. If you are interested in being invested. So keep the notice there now. Start up the live stream now.

SPEAKER_21: From all of us here at this week in startups. Welcome Mollywood.

SPEAKER_23: Welcome Molly. It's been a great first week.

SPEAKER_24: This is the greatest day of my life.

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SPEAKER_06: So what's in the news, Molly? We're going to talk about crypto a little bit and various disruptions, specifically of Bitcoin and mining and a little bit of scamming. So the big news this week, actually, which has been sort of under our radar and a lot of people's radar, I think because they haven't been laser focused on Kazakhstan, which I forgive you.

SPEAKER_28: I mean, I'm kind of obligated to do one of those. You pretty much have to.

SPEAKER_06: So Kazakhstan has been having all of these protests and they've been over a variety of things. There's been sort of like income inequality and corruption and autocracy. But part of the protest was also around Internet access and there was a big Internet shutdown. So that is, you know, your basic global news update.

SPEAKER_31: And for our purposes, super relevant because that Internet shutdown took about 15% of Bitcoin's total mining network offline.

SPEAKER_35: Offline. Wait, 15% of Bitcoin mining is in Kazakhstan? Apparently 18% is in Kazakhstan. Nice. I'm sorry.

SPEAKER_39: It is nice. My country, we make great Bitcoin and goats too. My wife.

SPEAKER_40: My wife, she has a Bitcoin miner. I really didn't want to do it and I had to. You had to.

SPEAKER_41: I had to do it. I'm so sorry to the people of Kazakhstan. It's not our fault.

SPEAKER_06: I mean, it is our fault now, but it's not. Yeah. Kazakhstan is the second biggest country for Bitcoin mining. Wow. And then here's the shocker. What's the biggest country, do you think?

SPEAKER_43: Well, I would think the US, right? Well, it is.

SPEAKER_06: A lot of people would have thought China, but of course, you know, China basically banned it. And so Kazakhstan became the hub, the place that a lot of miners fled to, mainly because it's got a lot of coal based cheap energy.

David Friedberg: God damn it.

SPEAKER_48: Mm hmm.

David Friedberg: This is the worst aspect of Bitcoin is that it uses so much energy.

SPEAKER_00: I know there's a lot of arguments of why it's, you know, worth it or whatever, but honestly, like if you've got a dictatorship and you've got fossil fuel, here's a quick way to make money.

SPEAKER_51: And this is why like a global economy, we have to start solving these problems on a global basis.

SPEAKER_52: We have to get this hash rate down and really optimize Bitcoin better. Yeah, it's unacceptable.

SPEAKER_06: And I know I'm just going to head it off now. Like I have tried to on every podcast. Don't come to me and tell me that there's a lot of mining that happens with renewable energy. That's not additive renewable energy. You're just replacing. And frankly, you're taking up like land for solar panels that could have been used for something else. Like, yay, with the methane flaring, it's a teeny tiny percentage of the overall energy. That is used. But a cool one.

SPEAKER_09: I think the methane is cool or like any blow off from any type of, you know, an excess energy fine.

SPEAKER_56: But yes, you're absolutely correct. That is intellectually dishonest. It's a dishonest take that. Yeah. Oh, we're using renewables. It's like, yeah, but that renewable could have been used to take other carbon out. And now you're using it to, you know, solve math problems. But again, Bitcoin does provide other value in the world. So anyway, don't add us. But this did cause Bitcoin to fall below 43,000, I guess. Or was it just because the markets were roiled this week with uncertainty? I think a little bit of possible to tell.

SPEAKER_58: Probably impossible to separate a little bit of both.

SPEAKER_06: But certainly it's not a good sign when you realize sort of how fragile the infrastructure is for creating this and keeping this this kind of operational in the future. I mean, it's a pretty big deal of 15. But, you know, what is it? I mean, I guess because if it goes down supply chain has come offline and we've seen that disruption.

David Friedberg: Yes. I mean, that's the thing I'm trying to figure out is if Bitcoin. The thing I thought was pretty amazing was when China kicked out all their miners, Bitcoin didn't miss a beat, really.

SPEAKER_00: So I guess we'll find out next week what the situation is, because it does seem to recover from these in a couple of days. So that I think is the biggest thing that has turned me from, you know, like a Bitcoin skeptic or just like not really super interested to this feels like a real technological achievement that nobody has been able to hack or shut down the network yet. A hundred percent. That's amazing.

SPEAKER_01: What was your thesis on why it hasn't been hacked or shut down yet?

Jason Calacanis: I mean, I think that is a case where decentralization works.

SPEAKER_43: You can have individual hacks and you can have individual failures, but it's not no failure is big enough to take down the whole system. That is legitimately the power of decentralization.

SPEAKER_06: And then once you have something that's like between a one and a three trillion dollar asset class, it's not going anywhere like it's certainly not. There's no I don't think scenario in which Bitcoin goes to zero. If anything, I think we just continue to find more uses for it and hopefully make it cleaner over time. Yeah. You know, miners have been migrating to the United States. Now that seems like it could be because we have clean energy here, but it's actually because a lot of coal producing states are saying, hey, come and use our excess coal, you know, keep our economy going. But yeah, that's gotta be banned in the United States.

SPEAKER_66: Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00: A hundred percent. We should ban any carbon for cryptocurrency. That's just ridiculous to be using it. Don't at me, please.

SPEAKER_52: At Jason is my Twitter handle. Do not at me about this issue.

SPEAKER_70: The environment is worth more than, you know, people having a more efficient Bitcoin network. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: But, you know, the Internet, you know, doesn't hasn't been taken down wholesale either. So this was a discussion we had about the Internet, right?

SPEAKER_56: In 93, four, five, six, seven. Oh my God, somebody's gonna be able to take down the entire Internet. And I was like, you know what?

SPEAKER_00: It is so disparate now that, yeah, you could take down a section of it. Sure. You could clip the cable going into Australia or Hawaii. They still have some satellite hookups and other things. And it's just, it's becoming super redundant. So congratulations.

SPEAKER_06: Actually, you can kind of do more damage to the Internet now, I think, than you probably could to the Bitcoin network because of cloud services. Like we've done this really interesting thing on the back end where we have centralized a lot of the Internet on AWS or Microsoft Azure.

SPEAKER_74: We created a single point of failure.

SPEAKER_06: We really have.

SPEAKER_58: We've created like maybe three.

SPEAKER_00: There actually is. I've been talking to some startup companies. There's going to be a movement of like distributed cloud.

SPEAKER_56: So imagine you could take, you know, if you're a Dropbox, you have your AWS set up, but you could also then go to Rackspace and Google Cloud and Azure and your own personal cloud. And then as users come in, it just routes them to whichever cloud is the cheapest, fastest, or you choose that. I want to load balance, you know, Netflix across five services. And I think a lot of these services are starting to do that load balance across services. And then you're, you're not dependent on anyone. And they're basically doing it for financial reasons more than redundancy. But a little bit of a hybrid cloud thing is a lot.

SPEAKER_43: You know, people are doing it for security and redundancy and financial reasons. And it is like, it's just a lot smarter.

SPEAKER_81: A lot smarter. Great for the US though. I think we were talking about China earlier this week.

SPEAKER_00: The fact that China is just becoming insular and Xi Jinping, the Mad King is, you know, banned Bitcoin is another unforced error. For their economy. Like if Bitcoin is really inspiring people to create distributed systems and a lot of, you know, downstream projects are being created, inspired by it, or informed by it, or in partnership with it. God, that's just like, they just got rid of, it would be like throwing the internet out in 1993 or four.

SPEAKER_52: It's impossible to understand what they're doing.

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SPEAKER_00: That's dot C O slash twist. But in another quick note on crypto, I don't know if you saw this in 2021 crypto scammers sold $14 billion in cryptocurrency up 79% year over year. According to CNBC, I'm not sure how they got this data, but here's a chart from chain analysis.

SPEAKER_56: Chain analysis. I hear a lot of people talking about it too much about this company, but we should probably have whoever runs it on the pod because I think it's a private company. It seems like it.

SPEAKER_43: And I want to know where the how they get this data on a network that is seemingly relatively opaque in some ways.

SPEAKER_52: I'm sorry, chain analysis, not chain analysis. It's chain analysis, which is a terrible way to name your company. Should have been chain analysis because it is literally chain analysis.

SPEAKER_03: Because anyway, but I guess they got the domain name.

SPEAKER_94: Okay. I'm not going to give people marketing lessons here.

SPEAKER_97: I'm not going to admonish them for their bad naming strategies, but I mean, we are, but like not right now because not right now because we want to get to the story.

SPEAKER_00: A large part of the scams occurred due to the rise in DeFi, which of course stands for decentralized finance. Platforms grew 900% in 2021 according to chain analysis. DeFi is trying to cut out traditional financial intermediaries like banks and replace them with smart contracts. You know how this works. You take your crypto and you loan it out. Yada, yada. When you remove the intermediaries, you also lose protections. As we just discussed this week with OpenSea being able to freeze NFT sales.

SPEAKER_56: They are centralized and, you know, DeFi is not. So you remove the intermediary, you lose your protection. And many of the protocols could have vulnerabilities at this day because hackers can get through.

SPEAKER_00: Rug pulling has also become popular with developers taking investors' money after laying out crypto projects they're building and then not actually doing them, which is what we saw during the ICO craze.

SPEAKER_56: I don't know if they take into account painting the tape or people front running markets. But CNBC also knows that legitimate usage of crypto is greatly outweighed by criminal activity or that greatly outweighs the criminal activity.

SPEAKER_102: It greatly outweighs it.

SPEAKER_56: That's their claim with only 0.15% of transactions in 2021 involving illicit addresses. I'm not certain that's the way you should look at it. If certain crypto projects are actually Ponzi schemes, then that would be different.

SPEAKER_01: These are known crimes, I guess. Right. It's sort of like different types. There's there's many, many.

SPEAKER_06: It's a multi-layered scamming environment, basically. You can have the one where you're just not going to be able to access it or you didn't get in early enough or your exchange got hacked, as was the case with me way, way, way back in the day. And or you have the part where you just actually get scammed, but it is like the kind of you just straight up get ripped off by a criminal that has really declined over time. And it was in some ways to be expected. I guess you have this brand new thing. You have, you know, people who are smarter than other people who are figured out how to make money off of it. There's always going to be some amount of scamming. I will say I think that is probably the least of the in a rapidly warming planet.

SPEAKER_43: That's probably the thing I'm worried about least.

SPEAKER_107: I don't trust chain analysis in this analysis. I'll be honest.

SPEAKER_09: I think that this leaves out a lot of the grifts and the crimes that occur on reported stuff.

SPEAKER_00: But, you know, fine if, you know, they want to believe this. But I think that it probably isn't in decline. It's probably that they just don't have great data on this. And I think they're in the crypto space and I think they would probably lean towards the most charitable analysis of this.

SPEAKER_56: But again, this doesn't take into account if something's a grift. It doesn't take into account if people were painting the tape and it's backwards looking too. So I think people will find out if they were involved in a grift or a scam or a Ponzi scheme like Madoff's victims five or ten years later. So if there is a giant, you know, crypto grift going on in NFTs.

SPEAKER_00: Well, until you sell that NFT for a loss, you actually haven't been scammed. And that's a different type of scam than actually being hacked. Right. So being hacked, I think if people are putting stuff in cold storage, if they're buying stuff on Coinbase and locking the account and they're hodling. Yeah, the amount of hodlers is probably so high right now that on a percentage basis, the people getting hacked seems low. Right. Yeah.

SPEAKER_43: Yeah. No, that makes perfect sense. The part you don't know is where the real crime is happening. The part you can't see under the surface is the real iceberg.

SPEAKER_54: Exactly.

SPEAKER_116: All right. In our reoccurring segment, WLITF, we live in the future.

SPEAKER_00: AI generated models are getting shockingly good and easy to make. I know this because every now and then people will send me myself singing to rap songs. Somebody just sent me myself singing to a Biggie Smalls hypnotized and it was not bad.

SPEAKER_56: And it's getting better. Yeah.

SPEAKER_09: I did. Okay. Actually, I got to pull it up from somewhere. I don't know where it is. But we talked about this AI generation. I think you talked about it on your former show, Marketplace Tech, with Andy Bourdain's voice in the documentary Roadrunner film about Andy Bourdain. That was episode 1248 of This Week in Startups. They literally two or three sentences he said in that were from email.

SPEAKER_00: And I thought that was an okay use of it. I think they should have told people, but I still thought it was okay. I thought it was actually kind of cool. I'll be honest.

SPEAKER_56: Synthesia, another startup that doesn't know how to name their company and you'd never be able to spell over the phone. It's another company that makes you create AI videos from text in 50 plus languages. They have over 40 prebuilt avatars and brands can customize their own. They've raised a little bit of money. 66 million dollars a day. That's not so bad. Kleiner Perkins put in 50 million. And there was a special AI video made for the producers. What? All right.

SPEAKER_125: Thanks so much to the Twist team for working so hard. Jason has decided to double your carry share and your salaries. Congratulations and thanks for all your hard work. All right.

SPEAKER_126: That's it.

SPEAKER_09: I'm going into the matrix. I'm going to kill that AI. I'm going to kill. Wait a second. If that AI just doubled your salaries, then I don't need half as many of you because I can just hire you.

SPEAKER_00: So sure. You're all fired. And I'm doubling the share of the AI from $1 to two. That's actually not bad.

SPEAKER_01: Note to self about my new job. Don't make jokes. Wow. No, make jokes.

SPEAKER_06: I mean, the whole thing is the AI. Yeah, look at that.

SPEAKER_113: I mean, seriously, that is good. Well, it's, it's, it's, it's good enough. And I think every time you get something like that, that's good enough.

SPEAKER_04: And you can't really tell and you get, you know, the uncanny valley situation where you're like, is it real or is it not real? And I'm a little freaked out. You, you take a step further. And actually, I think this about the Anthony Bourdain thing too, which is that every time

SPEAKER_06: you do something like that, and you aren't super transparent about it, you normalize it that much more. So that then when you really start to push the envelope and, you know, have a bot announced to your company that you just doubled their salaries. Everyone's like, well, isn't that just what we do now? I don't know. Well, also just think about people getting canceled, like some politician, you could literally take Obama's voice. And when he was on the campaign, he thought he said, votes, votes, votes, votes, votes, votes, votes, votes, votes, votes, votes, votes, votes, votes, votes. just doubled their salaries yay everyone's like well isn't that just what we do now i don't know

SPEAKER_09: well also just think about people getting canceled like some politician you could literally take obama's voice and when he was on the campaign trail you could have obama say something completely

SPEAKER_56: inappropriate and maybe that could actually you know in today's fake news environment where you know people believe that there's a gps chip and obama is not an american citizen yeah they might believe obama said something you know just horrific or something also here's the really

SPEAKER_06: bonkers part about that video so you would look at that and you'd be like well it might be real but it could just be like somebody that's sort of uh vaguely mark zuckerberg like yeah what's really

SPEAKER_136: that's not a human man anymore i don't care i got a shiny two dollar bill are you saying that mark

SPEAKER_138: zuckerberg does not cross the uncanny valley for you i might be in agreement because like i listen i've talked to mark in person that's not right i got a funny story from how long ago

SPEAKER_141: how long ago i'm just saying sometime in the coronavirus era he's been i was at a ted dinner

SPEAKER_144: years ago uh years ago billionaires dinner human man and he was there and me evan and

SPEAKER_137: was he the sergey or larry are sitting there and zuckerberg comes up and he's talking to us

SPEAKER_138: and then like he leaves and i swear to god evan williams goes leads over to me i don't know if

SPEAKER_141: he goes he's a little odd isn't he i mean this is like i think they just opened up facebook to the public right and then there is at the parties and everyone's like uh and now he's a little strange right i was like a little very strange he went into lockdown and they replaced him time for another

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SPEAKER_06: is almost as lifelike as mark zuckerberg you can't what is really astonishing about it is that it took justin producer justin two minutes to make it took him like two minutes he just typed it in and voila mark's sister allison here yeah they've ever doubled their salaries i have such a great joke but i'm not going to say it i mean that's what's bananas it's only going to get better and it's going to be that easy you're just going to type it in and a bot's going to you know what is kind of cool though is that they're apparently using this they call it synthetic ai to train synthetic data rather to train artificial intelligence algorithms instead of like the big you know clear view data i'm not

SPEAKER_01: saying somebody should do this which is interesting i'm not saying somebody should do this but we talked

David Friedberg: yesterday about ben shapiro's like obsession with uh trans people uh non-binary people die on this hill aren't you if they made uh if they took his podcast and then made a version of it where he was trans

SPEAKER_160: that would be inappropriate or you're gonna take me right down too we're just rolling down the hill

SPEAKER_161: together i don't know maybe we'll take it out of the show maybe that's the line obsession is i'm just

SPEAKER_00: obsessed with ben's obsession with like his hill he's going to die on is that trans people trans women

SPEAKER_67: are not real women like he just cannot just leave trans people alone and let them live their lives

SPEAKER_168: just leave them alone i think it's probably like it's hard enough if you're choosing to transition like you got enough challenges they don't need you obsessing over them it's weird dude uh all right i i

SPEAKER_116: do think that that's actually a very valid point uh that the amount of time it takes to make something

SPEAKER_00: that is just kind of dancing along the uncanny valley we're trying to climb up it is very interesting because i always when i in my younger years i was like it's going to be incredible someday i'm going to be able to talk to an ai like alexa or something uh or talk to a virtual assistant and say i would like to make uh episode three of book of boba fett but here's what i want to have happen i want to have boba fett fight you know uh han solo or meet him in a bar on mustafar whatever and i come up with

SPEAKER_119: that and it just makes it for you and like you could just have a kit to make your own star wars

SPEAKER_06: you know it'd be pretty cool who's that filmmaker that insists that everybody has to come to the damn movies to see his perfection in the art christopher tenet christopher tenet just had a heart attack

SPEAKER_05: just now he just heard you just christopher nolan christopher nolan of tenant nolan christopher nolan of tenant thank you we just heard you describe the idea of just like i don't disagree with whipping up

SPEAKER_177: i think his films whipping up a tv show his films need to be seen in a video i agree i don't care

SPEAKER_179: you're not the boss of me you're like i'm watching it on my old i'll watch it where i've got an ipad mini

SPEAKER_104: and i'll watch it on there don't be trying to save me your weird food that's mostly just like slimes because you think you're an artiste i like a taco truck i'm off the rails okay all right

SPEAKER_184: it's just i mean it is the friday show and it's been a little meal of the week exactly of the week

SPEAKER_00: okay everybody knows that mark and jason is known for blocking people on twitter uh and this comes after he was a vibrant tweeter but then he said so much stupid stuff that had the risk of ruin because he likes to be dank um i think the most famous guffaw he made was like wasn't there one where he said something to the effect of we should pull up the exact language because i think he said like colonization of india was like a good thing and that was a little rough yeah i think that's when

SPEAKER_09: he decided to stop tweeting because he realized like his sense of humor wow or his insights were

SPEAKER_56: not uh conducive to investing in startup companies because it creates blowback to everything he's involved in right so then every time facebook gets mentioned if it's a story where they want to criticize facebook they're like board member mark andresen who said something about colonization i think it had to do with mark was giving free internet to the people of india and they were like we know what you're doing you want facebook to take over in india no we are not poor people who need free internet and then mark tried to come to his defense so we should pull that exact up because it is relevant to why for people who don't know why mark andresen is not involved on twitter i think it's because he said something stupid like that um and then he blocked me after i said that was a stupid thing to say you're blocked i've been blocked unblocked and re-blocked like multiple times he was an lp in my first fund we were kind of friendly he was going to invest in weblogs inc yeah and then i had a blow up with him because i was like hey come on the pod hey come speak at the event and he was like no and but have these people who are like my junior partners speak and then i kept going back and forth with their pr people the pr person maybe go to lunch with them and you know how i feel about going to lunch with pr people i did that and she was like here's how it's going to work when you give you these two people and then maybe next year mark will do it and i was like here's how it's going to

SPEAKER_116: work i'm going to ban you guys from ever being on the show ever again the end bye and i just like walk

SPEAKER_00: out i was like i didn't get where i am by like kowtowing to pr people sorry to the woman over there who is like uh machiavellian and like wants to control the media and they're going to create their own media empire uh adjacent to the rest of media um but anyway there's a big debate and he started

SPEAKER_116: tweeting uh memes so he's got somebody making a meme so he decided he'd get back into the game with memes

Jason Calacanis: exactly so he blocks a bunch of people that becomes its own weird news story he maybe blocked jack dorsey oh he did yeah jack he did it and i was like oh welcome to the party jack okay so you know he's

SPEAKER_06: into it so so then somebody actually made the kind of excellent point that like mark andresen blocking a bunch of people was sort of an alpha move i guess but then you pretty much ruin your own alpha move when you spend the next like eight solid days constantly tweeting yeah memes about how hilarious it

SPEAKER_108: is you blocked everybody so he's like got this one which you know yeah you blocked me you invented the

SPEAKER_207: block button and you're ceo of a company named block change the name uh so see the lady hysterical lady is supposed to be jack dorsey and then mark andresen is the kitty cat with the salad not not a great

SPEAKER_210: not a great meme not a great meme not a great meme in fact great first reply you read it for our

SPEAKER_43: listening audience mark if you need a cheap intern to make funny memes for you shoot me a message okay

SPEAKER_09: you deserve better than this hilarious uh and then he did this one from a friend uh this is the classic

SPEAKER_56: like stick figures of like everybody at a party and there's like a wallflower in the corner having a drink and nobody's paying attention to him um and he says they don't know i'm blocked by p marker on twitter yes we do you literally can't stop tweeting it and the people dancing having a good time are like

SPEAKER_01: we do i think i was directed at me um perhaps maybe which one are you the guy in the corner i think i'm the guy in the quarter who's like wearing it as a badge of honor because i always talk about it

SPEAKER_51: and people are like oh don't you care about your relationship with mark and trees and i'm like

SPEAKER_01: no it's like that's one of the great things about our industry is like no jason i don't need mark and

SPEAKER_56: treason to be successful i invest before he does he needs me because i can bring companies to sequoia or to chamath or to sax before he even knows they exist so he should be nicer to angel investors and early

Jason Calacanis: stage investors he's a weirdo i'm a little i know i feel i i checked when this was all happening and

SPEAKER_06: i was like well i'm not blocked because honestly give it a day i have literally no value to this person either way but now i'm like oh maybe this is my chance and then would that be like a badge of

SPEAKER_224: honor it kind of is being in the block club is pretty good it kind of is it's like when we got

SPEAKER_06: all excited that tay diggs had followed us on twitter but it turned out he just followed everybody maybe that's what it'll be by the time he gets around to blocking me he will have just blocked everybody and it won't be any fun anyway he had a whole series of these from a friend yes just made it feel even more boomer and then all of them were just awful and it was like you know it's like a happy raccoon bad opinions verbal abuse awful takes and embrace blocking here's my

SPEAKER_03: favorite yeah logan bartlett who is funny this is funny he's actually funny as opposed to mark

SPEAKER_56: interesting who is weird just weird um it's truly remarkable to see one person both in fact the

SPEAKER_138: browser and killed the meme in just one lifetime that's great well done logan well done and then

SPEAKER_06: zero heads twitter hero twitter user zero hedge pointed out a very funny fact about mark henderson's

SPEAKER_04: account it's like p marka has blocked everyone on twitter except elizabeth holmes who's following

SPEAKER_00: following elizabeth holmes uh fantastic amazing praying for exits uh who was on episode 1348 i don't know if you heard that one um but we did a voice masking for this uh meme account to be on the show it's pretty entertaining he did an ama on his instagram story today and chimed in on the p marka

SPEAKER_56: situation tired yet of cone heads blocked memes a little sensitive much uh conehead being like the coneheads on saturday night live and mark has uh i guess an egg-shaped head i think uh is i guess the joke i think he's having fun as he should i just wish he would let someone help him because he could

SPEAKER_237: easily become vc elon if he felt compelled to yes he could be better at twitter slippery slope yeah you

SPEAKER_00: got to be careful i think as an investor you don't want to go there um because it blows back on your companies like if you're the ceo of a company and you want to be you know sharp elbowed the problem is uh you know if you get too sharp elbowed like that uh it could blow back on the companies like it did on

SPEAKER_06: facebook yeah yeah so that's a fair point it does make you i mean i thought his account i i honestly sincerely had a moment of wondering if his account had been hacked when i saw how many of those from a friend things yeah there were like i am i hope that was some sort of overzealous intern but if not then he's got too that's too much time to be spending on this thing uh yeah but he doesn't

David Friedberg: do boards anymore i don't think um so i think he like and he's got all his partners doing the investment i think he just is like a bigger head now but i don't know uh this one was interesting from jane

SPEAKER_00: man chun wong yeah this is her block list she's blocked 513 000 wow i think the way she did that was with these block lists are you aware of block lists no so there's a feature that they made uh called block lists so i can take my blocked accounts export it and give it to you and so if

SPEAKER_56: you are on the left or the right and you don't want to hear from the other side you can export block lists and they made a bunch of block lists of people who were sharp elbowed um i was on one of them weirdly uh and uh somebody like uploaded and they're like i don't see you anymore i'm like are you did you upload a block list like yeah i was like which one and somebody um actually i think it was will wheaton had put me on his block list for some reason and i was friendly with will wheaton

SPEAKER_116: which was weird um but he blocked me at some point because i said something that he didn't agree with and then he went back was like if i blocked anybody i was blocking a lot of people that's important time and you don't want to be unblocked let me know so um but i don't know how you let

SPEAKER_37: somebody know if they're blocking you i don't know yeah all right so uh but clearly i need to up my

David Friedberg: game in this department so and if you don't know jane mansion wong she is the one who reads the source

SPEAKER_00: code and finds little tips as to what twitter might do next so it's a very cool account for you to follow uh wong m jane w-o-n-g-m-j-a-n-e worth following all right so um might be news to you molly or you might know that we on fridays have rachel do a segment called okay boomer and so we like to uh lead into

SPEAKER_56: it so maybe we'll bring rachel on and to tell us what's in this okay boomer segment oh there's rachel how are you we see you how are you awesome we stand you we stand you millennial gen z you're gen z yeah you stand you gen z producer as long as i'm not blocked your stand not blocked it's the opposite

SPEAKER_254: right yeah 100 yes so uh is this week's okay boomer cringe or not cringe definitely not cringe it was a

SPEAKER_266: really cool interview i got to speak to ben awad he's a 2018 ut dallas grad who now works as a software consultant and a youtuber um it was a phenomenal conversation i talked to him a few weeks ago and

SPEAKER_268: it was just a really really good talk i think i think everyone's going to really like it

SPEAKER_81: fantastic any uh questions or thoughts uh molly so you said he's a software engineer but he's also a

SPEAKER_06: creator right and is this just like here's what i really want to know is this what all gen z's are

SPEAKER_58: going to be like whatever your actual job is plus your creator job i actually had this conversation

SPEAKER_266: with him and i think it's really interesting um how so many people are building in public now and that isn't necessarily stuck to the startup community anymore i don't think you necessarily need to be building a startup or building something that um you want to put on your college essay to uh be a creator i find that a lot of people outside of like the startup community are doing this not just um i don't know if this makes any sense but when you go through like your tick tock algorithm on mine i am constantly seeing people that are like developers because it's like learning you and i think in ben's case specifically that probably happened to him where he just started like getting fed all this information so we're definitely seeing like an influx in people creating outside of just uh the startup community in public no cap no cap

SPEAKER_279: yeah i like the lingo i can't i can't i can't

SPEAKER_288: was that too chewy was that chewy or not that wasn't that was cringy not chewy it was i think it's chewy i think totally different i think i think no cap means i'm chewy

SPEAKER_266: i will i'll give you some chewy oh sheesh no the augs are in are they back in augs are totally in yeah emma chamberlain was wearing them so they're in oh thank god she's like the the it girl get her on the podcast emma chamberlain if you're listening please all right bet all right let's go to

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SPEAKER_296: for being on today's show ben so ben is a 2018 ut dallas grad who now works as a software consultant and youtuber he has more than 367 000 subscribers on youtube 760 000 followers on tick tock and i think i actually found you on youtube even though you have been taking tick tock by storm i absolutely love your video handling the business side which is just a bunch of jokes about tech and like pitching startups and my favorite app of yours has to be the dating app for programmers where users swipe on each other's code rather than photos and before you came out with more of the comedy stuff i did watch some of your tech videos but i didn't really like put two and two together until tick tock and i realized wait a minute the band that i watch coding interview uh content about is the same ben making the jokes over on tick tock and that video was coding interviews are broken i actually think you have more than like 1 million views on that video now which is absolutely incredible to see i found that video when i was going down a rabbit hole with tech with tim videos i don't know if you know or watch any of his videos but i absolutely love him and one of the comments was coding interviews are like school tests they both both make you memorize stuff you will never use and i think that is a great place to start if that's okay with you i'd love to start talking about the next generation of software engineers and

SPEAKER_303: do you think there's going to be a change now the next generation of software engineers are interviewed

SPEAKER_307: i do but i think there's going to be like a split so there's going to be like the top end like fang companies facebook apple amazon excuse me meta netflix google right i don't think they're going to switch up that much and the reason why is they don't really have any incentive to switch it up right now they have so much demand that they want to make it as hard as physically possible and they just like to get the cream of the cream of the crop but in my opinion like at like when you get outside of those companies we're going to see more and more companies like switch it up a little bit because one thing you have to realize is like what you do on the job and what you're tested in the interview happens to be very different and so more and more engineers are just like yeah i'm just not going to interview at the companies that ask those questions anymore so if you if you're a company who's having trouble hiring part of it could be the interview process is testing for the wrong things because you can have senior engineers that agree at their job they just haven't studied algorithms in the last three years because they didn't need it for their job and so now they're going to study lead code to go get their job it makes serious sense what happened to all the experience they had you should be hiring them for like the job experience that they have um so i do think there's going to be more people switching over and i think it's already happening i think there's less um but they're still going to exist five years from now they're still going to ask them and you know you as a software engineer you just have to decide is the company i really want to work at worth it for me to grind you know algorithm questions and sometimes the answer is yes because like the compensation package that you know these big companies give you that ask those questions are fantastic but there's tons of other companies that are fantastic as well that don't ask those questions so yeah that's my two cents

SPEAKER_296: which one do you think that gen z is more interested in the flexibility of like the startup culture

SPEAKER_303: and um kind of like the coolness right now i feel like that it has or the compensation that they know

SPEAKER_307: big tech is right is driving i think we're they're gonna be they want both like different people want different things and they're just gonna like i don't think you say gen z as a whole is going to want startups more but also the thing is startups pay a lot of money now too especially if you get like the like mid-tier that are like around 100 employees or whatever like they pay really well too i would say like the like fang's a little overrated and like how good they are in the sense of there's tons of other companies that are don't have the fang label um that pay very comparable um if not more um and they you know just don't have the name recognition that fang has uh with that said like yeah i think like personally i'm more interested in working at startups in general than i am working at like say is like a google just personally because i just like smaller companies and smaller teams and i think some gen z is going to be like that but some gen z you have to realize like still to this day like as a computer science student like at least 50 of them are like studying and wanting to go to like a big fang company like i don't think the culture's gone the culture's there there's a reason why you just like bang fang fang that's all you hear and you know it's a great place to work like if you can get in you should go and you should work there like why not like then you can work anywhere

SPEAKER_296: too yeah well and speaking of i mean working anywhere again you had a video online that talks about moving to a boring place and i think you said that was tennessee and you tried out like la and new york city and you ended up in tennessee i guess this is like a two-handed question that i have for you number one is probably do you think younger software engineers are really pushing for like this remote work or do you think they do want to go back to that culture that um lies in silicon valley or new york city where they have ping pong tables in the offices and then also do you think that boring cities are better for programmers because the other cities that have all these opportunities just aren't necessarily geared towards being a software engineer like you mentioned in your video yeah so

SPEAKER_319: so i think it's like two different types of people so for the first one like i do think remote work is

SPEAKER_307: like gonna like be the thing like i think just especially if you were working during covet and you tasted remote work like i think most people more people enjoyed remote work than didn't enjoy remote work at least programmers i think other people in other industries were like oh my gosh then you get back to the office like when my family members is in business and like yeah i want to get back into the office it's so boring working by myself but like programmers i feel like the vast majority of them are very happy to remote work you know some of them want to go into the office that makes sense so i do think there's just gonna be more companies that like are remote first and they support remote things i don't think that's going away i think that's like super important and as far as like boring cities versus la sf like new york city i think i'm actually just kind of weird like personally i cannot get any work done when i'm in like a city like new york um i actually haven't spent that much time in sf so i can't really comment on sf i've just heard it's like kind of a crappy place right now and like everyone's moving to like austin or new york so like i'm like all right why would i go visit now it's like at the worst like peak of time ever like i'll probably go visit at some point but i can't comment on sf but for me like when i'm in new york all i do is like go eat like i get wined and dined i'm eating food i'm going and doing things i'm doing nothing related to work whatsoever like the entire city is just like gets me in a mood to not code so like i do really well when i'm in such a boring place that there's no option for me to do anything but actually get the work that i need to do done and so i've i've been incredibly productive in tennessee like i just had a stretch of time where i was not consistently posting youtube videos and that was because i was traveling and going to like quote unquote fun cities and now i just am getting back into a regular routine because like there's just nothing else to do here like i just i just do that and so like i like a mix of both though like i can't just live in a boring city my entire life like what i like to do is this is like my haven to do work and then like i'll go to conferences or meetups or whatnot in like bigger cities yeah for like a week for funsies or whatever i feel like

SPEAKER_296: that's why austin is like such a draw to be honest with you right because i feel like la and new york i want to say like overstimulating but i don't even know if that's the word because it's and it's not fomo but just the fact that there is so much to do and the fact that you have to do that it feels like you have to do so much and also the process and i've been to austin quite a few times and i think it was one of my favorite cities for tech i was just in miami and austin still is like prevails for me because i think the opportunity there is first off there's a lot of cool people in tech there and second off i don't feel that like need to be doing stuff like all the time have you ever

SPEAKER_307: like considered moving to austin so i definitely like i lived in austin so long so i actually lived in austin like 23 years of my life so i really like austin is like a really nice middle ground because like there's stuff going on but also i didn't feel the need to like do it all the time so i could see myself probably going back to austin at some point and that might be just like the place that i live like more long term later but i lived there so long i was like all right i want to try something new something totally now and everyone's also moving to austin right now that austin is just getting so busy yeah it's so different than it was like a couple years ago that it feels a little weird like there's so much traffic and stuff now that i'm also like like austin's like too cool i need to go to like more hipster of a place now it's like too mainstream oh my gosh like i actually kind of like dallas when i was in um when i went to school there so i can see myself like in dallas or like plano area uh as well i like texas a lot so i could do that i might do austin

SPEAKER_315: we'll see it'll say much like tennessee maybe i'll live in tennessee longer but i'm kind of like

SPEAKER_296: trying out some different places here yeah i totally get that i definitely see dallas as a really young city i went for my second time um over the summer it was so cool like a very cool city and i wouldn't be surprised if more tech people actually started migrating over there i was also looking at rent and the difference in rent is like astronomical but there are still a lot of young people in dallas like it's so surprising um to me that more people aren't moving over to dallas during this whole i don't know i want to say work from home movement but i guess it's not even a movement anymore because everyone's kind of just been doing this for like two years how did you start even content up on the internet because i don't know of many i feel like the people that i watch that are young our generation um youtubers that deal with tech are very few and far between there really just aren't that many like i mentioned like i think tech with tim is probably like one of my the people that i've been watching the longest and i really can't name that many other people in his genre and your genre that are taking over the space so why did you decide to start creating content over on youtube

SPEAKER_307: so i have like a really weird origin story because when i was 16 i took a java class this was like my first intro to programming thing and i tried it i did pretty well at it i liked it and i wanted to kind of start making things that i could actually use because like i got like the abstract concepts on paper but i was like all right this is no fun i want to actually do something and so what one of the things you could do with java at that time was build android apps and i had an android phone so i was like okay i'll build some android apps so i can actually like get something on my phone and for whatever reason i decided to live stream myself on twitch making an android app i don't know why i did this i can't tell you but it happened i think i might have been like 17 or 18 at the time when i actually did that because it like took me a little bit to actually learn java to even be able to like open android studio and do that thing but i streamed myself on twitch and it's a terrible stream by the way like this is somebody who has no idea what they're doing you're literally watching me for like two hours just like google airs and like get no progress gen whatsoever so terrible content not a good stream but i did it and i did for like a couple times and then i posted it on youtube uh just like the recordings afterwards and then i didn't look at it for like a year right and i came back and maybe i was like 19 or something i don't remember but i looked at the my youtube channel and that video had gotten 10 000 views i was like holy crap like 10 000 views is a lot for somebody that's never made a piece of content before like that's a ton of these especially when i was like that young so i was like holy moly like this is a terrible piece of content like this is not good i don't know who's watching this like what so i was like you know what what if i try this again but i just like put a tiny bit more effort into it like can i make better content and so that's what i tried doing i just tried making like slightly better content than i was doing at first i was terrible so that's the other thing i knew was bad but i also knew i was slightly better than the video that had 10 000 views because that was extremely bad so my strategy was to just start making content around the stuff that i was learning in my free time because i was like coding and stuff and i was like all right if i'm gonna get better i should just make a crap ton of videos so i just made like a crap ton of videos like we're talking like i have like if you look at my video log i have like maybe a thousand videos a lot of videos it's a lot of coding tutorials probably like 800 of them are coding tutorials or something because i just like sat almost on a daily basis and just like made a video and just like to practice to get better at it and then yeah it just kind of went off from there like i just kept making more and more videos and here we are today and that's how you

SPEAKER_296: really make a good software engineer is doing all that practice but holy shoot like that's a ton and

SPEAKER_307: how old are you when you said you started this so i think i was like maybe 19-ish or something when i started doing like youtube more seriously if you will okay okay that's so awesome and so i guess

SPEAKER_296: you said those videos you're in the beginning were really bad then what makes a good youtube video because right now you have a great blend of i think like just being quick and funny and like the self like deprivating humor and then information at a really high pace first off i guess like what do you think makes a good video and then also how did you find out that you should start like going i don't want to say into comedy but it's kind of like how did you decide to bring more of humor into your videos because i know those weren't you weren't showing how funny you were in the beginning

SPEAKER_307: of your youtube journey right i think it's very different depending on what niche you are the different like in one niche it can be drastically different what qualifies as a good video and for me i was making coding tutorials for like maybe two years straight or something but in that time once in a while i would do like a slightly different type of video than a strict coding tutorial and when i say coding tutorial basically what i would do is i'd sit on my computer i'd start coding something like a website and i'd narrate my thought process as i'm building it so that was the type of video i was making and then once in a while i'd mix in if you will my thoughts on technologies like somebody would ask me what do you think about javascript or this javascript library and make a video answering that and all the videos where i was starting to put like my analysis on what i thought like a good library was or something that video usually got more views than the one where i was just staying there coding that was something i had like in the back of my head as of making content that those usually did better and then it was april 1st i posted just like i was like you know let's just make a funny video right because april fool's day and i made a video about something of like it was something about react like me and react are breaking up or something and i put like emotional video or something and i started to be decided to be like sarcastic in that video right that was the first time i think i was ever sarcastic in a video on youtube up to that point i was just like genuine like i'm just like teaching how to code like that's all there is in it but anyway that video did way better than all my other videos right um so i was like hmm that's kind of interesting what if i do another video like that not on april's will say um and so then i just like kept iterating on the concept of like introducing sarcasm and humor into my videos because i am naturally like that like i'm just naturally kind of sarcastic naturally really funny so well not not funny is not the right word but i like like i was like the camera act was me being very serious to make coding tutorials like doing coding tutorials it's easy for me to be serious because like we're talking about serious topic we're coding blah blah but also i was like basically not showing a side of myself which was the sarcasm bit like when i started doing that like it was they liked it so i kept doing it and like here we are today and then what i think it makes a good video is like a mixture of like one also i think like how concise you they say things so okay this is my basically my template for making good video this is what i like to put in mind so one some like form of humor or sarcasm if you will to being concise not putting like fluff with that said there's some fluff that you can put you have to you have to know what fluff is okay and what's not okay but i like to be in general pretty concise um and also i think one of the most important things on youtube is picking a topic people care about you can make the most interesting video ever but nobody cares about your topic so i would say okay this is there's like three things as a youtuber there's three things that you can do well any type of content but this is how i think about youtube there's three things that how you can improve one the like quality of your actual video so that means maybe like the video itself um how you talk your mannerisms your hand motions blah blah that's what's one element and that's like you can tell how well you do based on watch time that's the analytic you look at then you can see if the topic of your video is good based on the title so if you're picking good tiles for your video that means you're picking good topics and that's through the click-through rate that and the thumbnail so if you're picking an interesting topic that helps you so much like you can be a boring person but you're talking about interesting topics and you drop some hot takes that that also helps is like i'm just like kind of opinionated it turns out being opinionated on the internet's kind of helpful and then lastly yeah thumbnail thumbnail title and content those are like the three things you just like hone the thumbnail and i'm terrible at thumbnails so i actually i don't think i'm good at thumbnails i think i'm okay thinking about topics of videos i think i'm okay doing like the actual talking in videos the lucky thing for me is there's just not that many tech youtubers so that worked out for my benefit like there's still not that many like yeah i feel like a lot of people if you're a cs kid that grinds making tech

SPEAKER_296: content you can make it in switching over kind of a 180 but we had a question from another producer about design trends um in the software engineering community engineering community in general do you see any designs that are popular right now between engineers that just haven't hit mainstream mainstream

SPEAKER_307: yet i okay so i'm maybe like the opposite like i know people are like like a certain thingy mover and like it may not be the thing that everyone's using and it's not mainstream and they like pick that and they like grow with it and they like think everyone should use it right um but for me i happen to just be using all the hype technology like unfortunately i happen just to be a mainstream person when it comes to like technology right now okay so i actually use what's called the hypebeast stack because the hypebeast stack just happens to have all the hype technologies so it's called the hypebeast stack and the hypebeast stack includes typescript which just happens to be the most like is growing popularity in javascript node.js react.js which is the most popular react framework and then postgresql which is probably like one of the most popular databases and then i like to use graphql which is from facebook which is quite popular you could say maybe that's like a little bit of an under the hog but not really like so i i so one of the things why i happen to like these two is the communities around them are really good and sometimes smaller communities are good but there's just not as many resources so it just happened that i liked all the most popular technologies like happen to run with them but if i didn't like them i'd be using some other stuff so like just like to throw out a name out there like i do like making things with svelte which is just like a smaller front-end thing that like you could say competes with react i'm a fan of it i enjoy using it it's great okay i also just like react better that happens to be the mainstream one i heard you're like a huge fan of react actually i am a huge fan of react so exactly so i'm just kind of the mainstream person that uses the mainstream things right now and okay okay my hipster take okay so i guess the the one thing i do like that's less mainstream is i did make a project using elixir and i quite liked elixir okay and so i'm a fan of

SPEAKER_296: that it's something to be said about community too because i think as again pushing on being like as somebody that's young and in tech the amount of like discords and slack i'm in because like things weren't working it's so much easier to be on something that's an extremely popular platform like for example i was really interested in going into like ux ui for a little bit but it wasn't really my major in college so i took like a class that was really taught by another student that was like free on my campus and just joined like a bunch of discords on figma and because figma was the most popular one any problem that i could ever think about that arose another person already had do you have any recommendations i guess to to wrap up here that you have for younger software engineers or content

SPEAKER_307: creators like what's your advice that you have to them um okay so this is what i'll tell programmers first is you should be building projects and then everyone asks me ben what's the best project i should make for my resume and i tell you you shouldn't make a project for your resume what you should build a project for is either yourself if you can think of a good idea but some people just can't think of good ideas i'm one of those people i haven't like made my own project in a very long time i build projects when somebody else tells me a good idea i'm like huh yeah that's a good idea i'll make that so if you're one of the people like me and you can't think of good project ideas should go talk to your parents or talk to your friend and ask them what their billion dollar startup idea is they're going to have a couple for you and then you're like you know what that one you started there kind of sounds interesting to make and you go actually code that and you build like a somewhat useful project um so that's why i'd recommend to programmers go out and do that and it's very helpful for content creators what i'll say is the difference between like content creators that are making content or like you know that made it and ones that haven't is the ones that made it just like kept making content so what i'll say is like for content creators if you're getting started uh you need to make some bad content because bad content is how you get good at making good content and you can't make good content without making bad content so there's a lot of people that are worried about putting out their first piece of content because it's gonna be bad well you should put out that bad piece of content because that's how you get to the good content uh maybe just use an alias if you

SPEAKER_296: feel bad about the content you're making that is such a good i like that advice a lot actually one of my favorite accounts i don't even know his name but he has like a bunch of subscribers now but his name on youtube is just better ideas and i'm like i love that because like you don't you don't got to put your name out there somebody googles you during an interview you're never going to be found but no that's awesome advice so thank you so much for being on um what's your youtube

SPEAKER_369: uh twitter whatever people can find you on tick tock github yeah just search ben space awad a w a d

SPEAKER_296: you'll find me on the webs like yep awesome awesome well thank you so much for being on ben really excited to talk to jason about our conversation