SPEAKER_00: This Week in Startups is brought to you by InVision. Get InVision for Startups with unlimited users on the full suite of InVision tools plus enterprise-level security and support at InVision.com slash twist. That's I-N-V-I-S-I-O-N dot com slash twist. Squarespace. Turn your idea into a new website. Go to Squarespace.com for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. And Calm. Seize the day. Sleep the night with the help of Calm, the number one app for sleep. This Week in Startups listeners get 25% off a Calm premium subscription at calm.com slash twist. That's C-A-L-M dot com slash twist. Upcoming launch events. Apply for our next Founder University, September 9th and 10th in San Francisco at founder.university. SPEAKER_02: And get your free Founder Pass for LaunchScale in San Francisco, October 7th and 8th at launchscale.net slash tickets. SPEAKER_04: Hey, everybody. Hey, everybody. Welcome to another edition of This Week in Startups. I'm your host, Jason Calacanis. And it's our news roundtable. SPEAKER_06: You've been begging us to do a news roundtable. We've been doing all these great interviews and other podcasts. But I decided we would get back to news roundtable time. Zach Kolias is with us again. How are you doing, Zach? Awesome. Happy to be here. Yeah. New fund? What's going on? Any announcements? SPEAKER_10: No, I haven't announced it yet. Haven't announced anything? It is there. And it's a lot of money to spend now. Yeah, it's not announced. SPEAKER_12: Not announced. So I just announced it for you. If there was one. SPEAKER_14: I mean, people know I have it. I just haven't announced it. Officially announced it. But you're an angel investor. You have an angelist syndicate. SPEAKER_06: Average check size going forward. Now it's about $500 to a million. Wow. It's growing. SPEAKER_17: And you used to be putting in whatever, $250. SPEAKER_18: $200, yeah, $200. SPEAKER_17: Yeah. And you had to grind it out doing syndicates. Yep. Hard work. Which is hard work. SPEAKER_20: But now you can just write the whole check yourself. That's amazing. It's amazing. That is a turning point. SPEAKER_21: I still am doing syndicates though. Because the syndicate backers are amazing. SPEAKER_22: They're like such a great source of deal flow. They help me with diligence. They're like my team. They're like super great. SPEAKER_25: It is one item on the cap table. Yep. But you get 50 to 250 people helping. And that's what people don't realize. And you can go see Zach's syndicate on AngelList. Just do a search for Zach on AngelList. You'll find it. And Antonio Garcia Martinez is back with us. He, of course, is the author of Chaos Monkeys and a contributor to Wire Magazine. Welcome back to the program. SPEAKER_27: Thank you. SPEAKER_25: All right. Let's get right into it. There's a lot of stuff going on. And since you're an expert on Facebook, you worked there for about six months. SPEAKER_29: Right. How long did you work? SPEAKER_30: Those were a critical six months though. It was. How long did you work at the Facebook? How long did I work at the Facebook? Two years. A year before and after the IPO. SPEAKER_33: A year before and after the IPO. So you're right there in the thick of it. We saw Casey from the New York. SPEAKER_25: No, Recode. Where's Casey? SPEAKER_35: Verge officially. SPEAKER_25: Verge. Okay. I don't know. This guy's a musical chance, but he's from the Verge. He just did a story on content moderators. SPEAKER_38: And the content moderators at Facebook, and I heard him on Kara's podcast, are dealing with SPEAKER_39: PTSD because they're seeing people murdered, tortured, animal cruelty, Nazis, everything horrible in the world. And they're getting paid 30 grand a year. And I thought to myself, we're in the lowest unemployment in the history of the country, I believe, or a modern day low. Why are people taking this job to moderate the worst things on Facebook if they can't handle moderating the worst things in humanity? SPEAKER_40: What is your take on Facebook's content moderators having PTSD? SPEAKER_30: You know, I mean, it's really unfortunate, but it's understandable. You know, it's funny. In those two years, I dip my toe in the content moderation world. Facebook at the time was so chaotic. I was the PM for the ad review team. And so we had a series of content moderators. And how this typically works is, right, you've got a hybrid between software and humans, right? And you try to deploy as much smart software so that the human sucks up as little of the sort of cognitive load of looking at this horrifying content as much as possible. Right. And typically, I remember it's a scene in Chaos Monkeys, actually. Every quarter, you have to give a presentation to Cheryl and show that the total number of employees stayed flat and the amount of content reviewed went up and followed the growth in the ad system. And if you manage to do that, I mean, it literally is almost like, you know, a labor productivity plot in like Econ 101, right? SPEAKER_47: Where it's like flat headcount and like more and more productivity as technology made it more and more efficient. SPEAKER_48: They're intellectually dishonest, though, because they were using external employees from contracting SPEAKER_38: companies. They're not Facebook employees. They're contractors. SPEAKER_50: Which wasn't the case when I was there. SPEAKER_44: But I think part of the reason why they've gone to contractors are so desperate is because if the amount of content you're supposed to moderate suddenly jumps up and the technology isn't there yet, you have to throw bodies at it. SPEAKER_30: And so they just went out and said, throw as many bodies as possible at it. And hence, we have a contracting firm in Florida somewhere, wherever the story was, in which, yeah, unfortunately, they're just pressing these people, not paying them very well and completely rotting their minds by looking at all this content. Yeah, that's... SPEAKER_25: That was, I was thinking like, number one, I don't mind them outsourcing it because outsourcing SPEAKER_38: it in a way means that you almost have like this more objective third party that they can point to and say, like, we gave them instructions and they followed the instructions and it kind of gives them that nice arm's length. Does it? Does it? I don't know. In terms of liability, I don't know. But anyway, they're paying them so little. That's right. Like, it literally is like $28,000 or $30,000. And I'm just wondering on both sides, like, you don't have to take this job. You don't need to stay in this job. And why are they paying them so little given how horrific the job is? But if you decided to go work in an industry where you had sensitive content, I don't know, the adult industry, adult film industry, you wouldn't go work for the adult industry and SPEAKER_55: then say, I'm really offended by seeing pornography. SPEAKER_57: I don't think you can actually blame the employees here, right? SPEAKER_44: I mean, look, they took a job. They may not have understood exactly what it was. They got into it. Like everyone else, you try to do a job as well as you can. They needed jobs because of whatever. I think, I mean, I think to me that the interesting thing here- SPEAKER_61: No, I think they train them and explicitly tell them, like, this is going to be horrible. SPEAKER_44: I don't know. I've never gone through the onboard. I couldn't say. SPEAKER_30: But I think the takeaway here for me is that when everyone clamors for Facebook to moderate more and more content or when, you know, journalists say, hey, the Christchurch shooting video was up for eight hours. We've got to get that down to six when you're straining the very hairy edge of like Facebook's AI capabilities. Well, to get from eight hours to six or eight hours to five minutes or whatever we consider SPEAKER_44: to be the acceptable bound, that means throwing way more bodies at it in order to solve that problem, which, I mean, maybe that's a trade-off we want to make, but I think people should understand when they make those demands, there's a very realistic real-world trade-off, which is a bunch of people in Florida getting paid almost nothing to stare at videos to try to like stanch the wound as quickly as possible. SPEAKER_63: I mean, you're asking these journalists to actually start thinking a little bit before they write these salacious pieces. You're asking way too much. I mean, that's crazy. SPEAKER_67: That would be really like asking them to actually sit down and think for two minutes about the consequences of what they write. It's like you're just asking way too much. It's impossible. SPEAKER_38: Well, I like Casey as a writer, but I kind of agree with what you're saying, Zach, because it seemed to me like he was just telling one side of the story, which is aren't you the same journalist who said Facebook is responsible for moderating? Then they moderate. And now you're saying they're responsible for the mental health of the people moderating. Well, are they like responsible for like if you're that sensitive that you can't handle the worst of humanity? Do not work in the worst of humanity review department. That's to me the crazy thing. SPEAKER_57: I think that's putting the blame on the employee, which I wouldn't do. I mean, I don't know whose brain wouldn't be scrambled by staring at beheading videos all day. I mean, anybody's brain would. SPEAKER_71: But why would you take that job if you couldn't handle that? Because you don't know. You don't know. You don't know why. SPEAKER_73: I think Antonio's right here. Like it's like at the end of the day, like we have a long legal history of how we deal with basically the consequences of the work you hire people to do. And so if you put them in a factory and the machine cuts their head off, you're responsible for that. So if you put them in front of evil content and they become PTSD, you're responsible for that. SPEAKER_75: I'm going to play devil's advocate here. If you know that deep sea diving and welding is the most dangerous job in the world, which I think it is. SPEAKER_77: Those guys get paid a fortune. SPEAKER_38: They get paid a fortune. I agree. The pay is certainly an issue here. They should literally be getting paid $75,000, $100,000 to do this job because it's so traumatic that they probably have a lifespan in terms of, a job span in terms of how long you can reasonably do the job before wanting to get out of there. But you don't take the job to be a deep sea welder unless you are buying into that. SPEAKER_78: Let's put that aside for a second and go to the next jump, which is I think you're pointing SPEAKER_79: out, Zach, which is why are we setting an expectation that all content can be moderated when in fact these companies are based in the Bay Area, which is a city of a few million people, and we can't even solve homelessness with 7,000. And we're asking the same group of people to police a city that has over a billion people in it. SPEAKER_38: Newsflash. If you can't get the couple of million people in San Francisco to behave in some reasonable standard, how on earth do a billion people get police? It's a fool's errand. You cannot police it. Can you? SPEAKER_14: Maybe, maybe, maybe, it's hard. I mean, it's hard. I think it's not possible. SPEAKER_38: You can stem the tide, but why do all these snowflakes and liberals think that Facebook or Twitter SPEAKER_25: or YouTube is going to be able to moderate a billion people a day or in Twitter's case, it might be like 30 million, when we can't, with tens of thousands of cops in a major city, prevent violent crime or homelessness or graffiti. You're not going to solve this problem. SPEAKER_44: Well, but, I mean, Facebook has solved smaller versions of the problem, right? Like, Facebook filters pornography pretty well. SPEAKER_30: And so, like, there's smaller versions of this problem. I think what we've done is we've expanded, you know, the scope of what can be content moderated to the point where the wheels are falling off the AI. SPEAKER_64: And, I mean, that's the reality of it. And then there's been mission creep there, to use a military term, in terms of, like, what they should or can moderate. That, to me, is the issue. SPEAKER_68: So, the AI can now pornography, because it's a fixed set of data, SPEAKER_25: or it can reasonably nail it, 99%, whatever, to some point in mind. Yeah, I've never seen, actually, pornography on Facebook. Right. But hate speech. SPEAKER_87: Harder. Much harder. SPEAKER_38: Well, if you took the transcript of every racial joke told by Dave Chappelle or whoever, and you put it through that filter, would it pass or not, Antonio? SPEAKER_47: Most films made before 1990 probably wouldn't pass. But, yeah. SPEAKER_25: Well, I mean, I think that's the level we've gotten to in terms of policing speech right SPEAKER_32: now is that the average comedian on David Letterman or Johnny Carson in the 90s or 80s wouldn't pass the terms of service of Twitter and Facebook today. SPEAKER_44: Heck, not just those comedians. I was looking at some of the old Protestant propaganda from the Reformation after the printing press, and a lot of the anti-papal literature wouldn't pass Facebook now. SPEAKER_93: Really? Yeah, no. Well, I mean, I posted that. SPEAKER_94: I was just thinking the same thing. I was wondering about the papal literature. Yeah, yeah. SPEAKER_93: I always try to class things up here, man. SPEAKER_94: All right. SPEAKER_93: That's what I'm here for. SPEAKER_97: God bless you, Antonio. Thank you, Johnny. Thank you for taking us down that. It's not a rabbit hole. It's just a bull stop. SPEAKER_44: They were flatulating at the Pope. You can't flatulate at the Pope on their current content moderation standards. David Friedberg: Wait a second. SPEAKER_99: You're saying you can't fart in front of the Pope? SPEAKER_44: I don't think so. No, they had their buttocks bared in the woodcut that I'm referring to, which I'm happy to share later. SPEAKER_101: Don't go down with this. Don't go down with this. SPEAKER_44: This is bait. SPEAKER_38: This is JFK. He's dangling. Is it 4chan.com slash what to get to the papal stuff? SPEAKER_109: The reformation. The A slash referent 4chan. Martin Luther fanboys. SPEAKER_110: I just had an actual epiphany. SPEAKER_112: Martin Luther dank meme stash. That's what it is. Is that what it is? Yeah. SPEAKER_25: I just had the ultimate. I've threaded the needle, gentlemen. SPEAKER_38: We can solve content moderation. All you have to do is pay the 4chan and 8chan trolls and fanatics $25 an hour to remove the same content they're posting to 4chan from Facebook because they can identify it. Literally, you kill two birds with one stone. SPEAKER_121: They remove it from Facebook and move it to 4chan. SPEAKER_122: That's a brilliant idea. Let's have the guys who create it remove it. Get paid to remove it. SPEAKER_123: Can I sign up for this? Because I'm just going to create it like crazy and the next day I'm going to take it all the time. I'm going to create a Cobra just like that. SPEAKER_124: It's the Cobra secondary effect. I'm going to print money on both sides. SPEAKER_126: Yeah, exactly. SPEAKER_128: I love this business. SPEAKER_131: This is a good business. Can I invest in this business? I like this. Well, I mean, sometimes you need to hire some questionable people to solve- The criminals make the best cops. SPEAKER_25: I'm just saying. I'm just saying. All right. When we get back, Johnny Ive has left Apple. We just don't know what year he left. Thank you. SPEAKER_39: And Zuckerberg is trolling the Winklevii. Oh, this is your theory. Okay. My theory. SPEAKER_25: The ultimate Zuckerberg troll. The longest revenge game in the history of revenge games. And when we get back on This Week in Startups. SPEAKER_111: You already know InVision as the product design platform used by thousands of startups. All my startups use it. And it's also used by 100% of the Fortune 100. Well, now they have a new offering with startups in mind. It's called InVision for Startups. And they will help you streamline your workflow from design to development. And it will make your startup life so much more manageable. InVision for Startups gives you the full suite of InVision tools all packaged with a startup in mind. Get unlimited accounts. And that's what you need. You want everybody to have a voice in product development. Some people a little bit of less of a voice. Some people a little bit more. It's one of the nice things about having a SaaS product with unlimited seats like that. Everybody gets to have a voice. And you get to centrally control that. Plus you get the enterprise level security and custom support. And here is my CMO, Presh, inviting teammates to help create a simple freehand drawing. Look at how beautiful that is. With InVision tools, it's so simple. He's making an iPhone mock-up in just seconds. And he has a full one done in minutes. And this is freehand collaboration. It lets you draw just like you're using a pencil and your beautiful moleskin. Boom. You just do that all online from concept all the way to development. So here is your call to action. I want you to go to InVision.com slash twist. That's I-N-V-I-S-I-O-N. InVision. You know how to spell it. I-N-V-I-S-I-O-N dot com slash twist. As in this week in startups, streamline your workflow with unlimited users on the full suite of InVision tools plus enterprise level security and support. So all your designs, all your great ideas are safe and secure for your team to iterate on. Go ahead and check it out. InVision.com slash twist. SPEAKER_06: Let's get back to this amazing episode. All right. Welcome back to this week in startups. I'm your host, Jason Calacanis. With me, Zach Colius. You can follow him on the Twitter. Zach Colius. C-O-E-L-I-U-S. And Antonio Garcia Martinez. He's Antonio. GM. The GM of all Antonios. And if you haven't read Chaos Monkeys, what are you waiting for? Great book. Great audio book. Pretty funny too. SPEAKER_38: Hey, Johnny, I've left Apple, which I think is apparent since I saw that $9,000 or $12,000 SPEAKER_25: iMac Pro tower that looked exactly like the tower that they discontinued and came up with the cylinder for. And the stand of that monitor was? $9.99. For a piece of metal. SPEAKER_147: $1,000 for the monitor. Do you know about this? SPEAKER_10: The one that looks like a cheese grater, right? No, no, no. The monitor stand. It literally kind of looks like the mic stand here. But it's $1,000. Okay, got it. SPEAKER_40: This is the level of insanity at Apple. SPEAKER_33: Beautiful. It's beautiful. They discontinued the Mac Pro tower, which is the tower that all video editors relied on to be able to switch video cards out and add rate arrays and just generally have a functioning computer that you could open up and change the memory in. SPEAKER_153: They then came out with that little garbage can, the cylinder. That was not expandable in a very reasonable way. It was absurdly expensive. They said, don't worry. Everybody chill. We're going to come out with the Mac Pro again. They come out with it again. It's the same thing with a cheese grater on the outside of it. SPEAKER_17: But to put a cherry on the top, they came out with the 5K beautiful monitor again. SPEAKER_33: The stand for the monitor cost $1,000. Dollars. It's bonkers. Tim Cook is very upset with the Wall Street Journal because they reported that Johnny Ive was leaving because maybe he felt Tim Cook doesn't care about design. And he said at a base level, he chose a lack of understanding of how the design team works and how Apple works. Tim was a little bent out of shape about it, which means it's probably true in all these cases when you're protesting a little too much. SPEAKER_156: Does it matter? Does Johnny Ive matter at all to Apple at this point in time? Anybody care? SPEAKER_158: I've never actually understood any of that industrial design stuff, so I'm not really smart enough SPEAKER_161: to know. To me, it looks slightly better, but not world-changing. But who knows? SPEAKER_38: All I know is that we built a PC tower here to put video editing software on, and we spent $4,000 maxing it out to have the highest speed anything. And it's much better than an $8,000 Apple version. And I moved the entire company to Chrome, boxes, and the Pixelbook. And it is such a better operating system than Mac OS because you don't get the grinding spinning to a halt. SPEAKER_57: You know what that price delta is? That's the brand affinity value of Apple right there if you want to price it. SPEAKER_30: It's absurd. Right. SPEAKER_164: It's $3,000 for a laptop. SPEAKER_30: That's the goodwill the account will put on the book value for the company, right? It's just the burnished steel and just the Mac goodness you get when you tell everyone you've got a Mac. Chamath Palihapitiya: You know what? I have the Pixel 3. As he talks with a Mac in front of me. SPEAKER_38: Well, as a studio, Mac. I don't actually use the Mac OS anymore. I literally have not used it. All right. SPEAKER_169: You're a Chromebook guy, right? You're like Chrome OS. SPEAKER_25: I am 100% Chrome OS now because it's so distraction-free and it's so stable. And now you can load Android apps on the desktop, which I don't really do, but it's kind of nice if I needed to to check out an app. And I think that's going to be kind of the future of this. SPEAKER_153: Okay. Let's talk a little bit about Facebook and Libra, which is at Libra on Twitter with an SPEAKER_29: underscore. Some other troll owns at Libra. I own Libra. Facebook owns at Libra underscore. SPEAKER_156: I own at Libra, which is hilarious to me. SPEAKER_75: It is awesome. But let's break this down for a second. The Winklevii, who sued and settled with Zuckerberg for allegedly screwing them over, which he did. But let's face it, he didn't create the Facebook because if he did create the Facebook, he would have created the Facebook. Okay. SPEAKER_25: As we all know from the movie. But they came out with Gemini, which is going to be like some sort of a stable coin that the world banking can get around. SPEAKER_40: And months later, Zuckerberg creates Libra? SPEAKER_176: Libra. SPEAKER_40: Wait a second. He didn't create blue. He didn't create Zoom. SPEAKER_33: He didn't create Tiger coin. He created another Zodiac. Are there 12 signs of the Zodiac or eight? I don't know how many there are. SPEAKER_153: There's 12. SPEAKER_180: Yeah. SPEAKER_153: There's 12 Zodiac signs. Oh, look at that. There's Libra. Oh, Libra follows me too. Inside.com slash Libra. SPEAKER_181: Only 25,000 followers? It's kind of lame. I mean, I expect you to go a lot deeper than that. SPEAKER_182: Listen, I own Libra and yeah, it's gotten very popular. SPEAKER_06: So I'm doing the ultimate troll now. I had my team post to Libra a horoscope one day and then some Libra about the cryptocurrency the other day. So it's kind of like a hybrid. You just sell to the Winklevai for God's sake. SPEAKER_04: I know. That's an interesting idea. Anyway, you're not allowed to sell Twitter handles. Oh, I see. You're not technically allowed to sell them. Okay. SPEAKER_38: Quid pro quo. This is not... SPEAKER_79: Given what we just talked about, the world is on fire demanding that Facebook police the multi-billion member community that they've amassed on a global basis. They're getting dragged into Congress. They're getting shut down in different countries during elections. People believe our democracy might have been handed over to the Russians or effed with SPEAKER_153: because specifically of Facebook. And they have the audacity to say, our bad, but give us your money. SPEAKER_195: But let's replace the dollar. Let's replace the dollar. Yes. I love it. They still have who you are. They still have stones. SPEAKER_199: Exactly. They still have stones. Exactly. It's great. I don't... SPEAKER_25: It's the ultimate double-level troll. Right. They're trolling the Winklevii. Right. And they're trolling humanity. That's right. And governments. SPEAKER_67: Or it might actually just work. Right. I actually think it's a good idea. I think it might work. SPEAKER_207: Okay. SPEAKER_67: I think it could be... SPEAKER_207: Let's just talk about audacity. SPEAKER_67: No, they're ballers. That's big. Like, that's a big baller move. Like, that's when you know Zuck is still rolling. I got it. He has not pulled Larry and Sergey and gone kite surfing and hung out in this boat. He's like, he's still rolling. He's still deep. He's still deep. He's rolling deep. Yep. SPEAKER_25: And he still wants to move fast and break things. And he's going to change the world. He's going to change the world and break... The world. ...currency. SPEAKER_17: He's going to break the monetary system after breaking democracy. Changes the world. SPEAKER_30: Somali pirates are going to start accepting Libra coin for hostages and shit. It's going to be nuts. Yeah. SPEAKER_67: It's amazing. And it actually might work. That's the best part about it. Like, you know I'm a huge crypto bear. SPEAKER_73: I think the whole thing is flawed at its core. As am I. Because it's like, there's no fundamental value. And Zuck's like, yeah, we can solve that problem. Boom. Basket of currencies. Okay. SPEAKER_67: Explain. SPEAKER_220: Explain what is brilliant about Libra. Well, so the core... Underscore. The core problem... At Libra underscore. SPEAKER_223: Explain what's great about... It's right. What's cutting edge about... At Libra underscore. SPEAKER_224: This is going to be Jason's favorite discussion topic. Yeah, yeah, yeah. For a long time. SPEAKER_182: We're going to be talking about Libra no matter what is going on. This is a meta-level troll. SPEAKER_25: Because I am trolling the troller. SPEAKER_228: Right. SPEAKER_25: I mean, that's meta. Anyway. What is brilliant about the basket of currencies? And just explain why you think this might actually work. SPEAKER_73: Yeah, I mean, so the fundamental problem with all cryptocurrencies is that they don't have a fundamental value. Like, there's no inherent value to any coin that exists. So, like, you know, they all are like, fiat this, fiat that. But, like, at the end of the day, the dollar represents a claim against the U.S. economy and the GDP of the U.S. economy. And it's basically legally required for paying taxes. SPEAKER_232: And a shit ton of nukes. Yes. SPEAKER_233: And you can say there's a bunch of aircraft carriers, too. SPEAKER_235: You can throw in a couple of nuclear subs and maybe some Navy SEAL teams that can kill you from three miles away. SPEAKER_73: Right, right. So, you can run the math. You can say how many dollars are in existence. And then you can say how big is the GDP and how big is all of those nukes. And then we'll say, okay, what's a dollar worth? And so, the dollar is a claim on that. Whereas, Bitcoin is a claim on nothing. Like, zero. A white paper. Yeah. SPEAKER_66: Well, it's presumably tied to the cost computation because there's mining. But the cost computation is not value. It's actually a cost. SPEAKER_73: So, there's actually no value there. You own a negative cost. So, every day, we basically have to burn money just to keep that ship floating along. SPEAKER_14: Whereas, U.S. economy produces money every day. SPEAKER_61: It's a fair point that it's an expense. But it is an infrastructure that has magically appeared. Yeah. Which is interesting. Sure. Sure. But you're right. Continue. SPEAKER_73: So, that's the core problem. It's always been my core issue. It's like, at the end of the day, when the next macro downfall happens, whatever it may be, like, everyone's going to start selling everything. And at the end of the day, what are they going to sell? SPEAKER_158: They're going to sell their crypto really fast because everyone else is going to be selling their crypto. And so, the same thing, the momentum that drove it up will drive it right back down. SPEAKER_73: So, it's like the best short ever when you get really scared is short crypto. Which the crypto fiends say that, like, oh, no, no, we're going to hold it because it's going to be strong like gold. But they're idiots. Anyway. So, Libra, the core thing about Libra is that that's the core problem. They said, okay, let's go in and create a basket of currencies that basically represents on a one-to-one basis. Each of those crypto Libra coins, whatever we're going to call them, and we're going to have actual dollars in a bank account. Let's call them Libri. Yeah, we're going to have Libri. Yeah. We're going to have these in a bank account to represent on a one-to-one basis. So, not like the bullshit, like, fraud that is, like, going on with Bit2Rex and... XRP. No, no, no, no. Pick it. SPEAKER_67: What's the... Pick them. Bitance. Binance. Yeah, I'm blinking on the name of it. I'll remember in two seconds. Anyway. Not like the fraud that's going on with that, basically, like, pegged currency where it's, like, one-to-one. SPEAKER_248: RIPO. Yeah. Anyway. But it's all two problems, right? SPEAKER_131: Oh, you're talking about there was a one-to-one currency. But it turned out it wasn't one-to-one. But it was $75. SPEAKER_236: It's a fraud to go. And it's still valued at a one-to-one basis, even though it's only basically reserved at 75%. Isn't the New York Attorney General investigating all that? Of course. SPEAKER_255: Yeah, it's a fraud. SPEAKER_220: The whole thing's a fraud. But anyway. Okay. So, stablecoin equals good. Yeah. SPEAKER_30: So, to be clear, there's two things, right? One is actual intrinsic value. And the other is the volatility inherent in Bitcoin that makes it... You want a store of wealth. Yeah. The thing can't go up or down 10% a day. It's impossible. Yeah. It'd be like living in Weimar, Germany. It'd be at just prices literally every second. Right? So, presumably, they're going to have a massive foreign exchange desk to be sitting there buying and selling this basket to try to produce the stability among the very strong currencies. Yeah. It's super easy. SPEAKER_73: Like, if you want to basically own Libra, you put your money in. It goes into a bank account. It sits there. It generates interest. And that's a one-to-one basis. Is it going to generate interest? Yes. The interest that basically is generated from your currency is going to be used to fund the partners that basically Facebook has gotten to sign up to basically be the launch partners. And then you get to the cool part, which is programmable money. So, programmable money is super powerful. Smart contracts are cool. Like, micropayments for content. Like, right now, you can't do micropayments for content because you've got to go to the banks. And the banks are old and shitty and slow. But now you could basically go through Libra and boom. You want to pay two cents for this article? Boom. SPEAKER_79: Why hasn't Google or Twitter decided to do their own cryptocurrency and embed it in Chrome and YouTube? SPEAKER_57: Twitter. Why would Twitter do it? I mean, Twitter can't ship a change to a button. It takes them three years. And they're going to have to ship a currency. SPEAKER_267: Okay. Fair enough. SPEAKER_224: Google no longer has the stones that Zuck has. SPEAKER_16: Zuck still has the stones. SPEAKER_33: So, he doesn't mind putting himself in the crosshairs of regulators. SPEAKER_269: Does this help or hurt Facebook and Zuckerberg's regulation issue? Who cares? SPEAKER_59: You know what the bigger existential threat is to Facebook? Because they lost the stones to do this sort of shit. SPEAKER_44: Losing those stones is a bigger threat to Facebook than anything the U.S. government can ever do. And that's one of the underlying ironic realities that nobody wants to accept and nobody in the whole tech commenter community wants to fucking accept. That the big risk of Facebook is not doing this, not doing it. Because at the end of the day, they can't do anything. Who cares? SPEAKER_67: The history of these tech companies is they go up and they go down. And they all go down when they lose their stones. When they lose their stones. The moment that they basically like they stop. SPEAKER_166: It's not because the EU showed up. What army does the EU have? Who cares? It's a bunch of windbags. I mean, that's the... SPEAKER_272: Wow. So audacity is the currency. Yeah. If anything. Yeah. SPEAKER_274: But as soon as you lose it, you're done. You're done. All right. SPEAKER_06: When we get back from this quick break, top three use cases each. Write them down on a piece of paper here. Let's assume Libra succeeds. SPEAKER_275: Legal or elicit or elicit? SPEAKER_04: I'm going to leave it up to you guys. Okay. Legal, elicit, whatever. SPEAKER_276: Because the criminals are always the early adopters. SPEAKER_04: Okay, great. There's a little tip off of what we're going to preview. When we get back, top three in order, Libra use cases five years from now, when we get SPEAKER_06: back on this week of service. SPEAKER_111: Do you want to turn your idea into a website, a beautiful website? Well, if you did that with Squarespace, you're going to be able to blog and publish content whenever you want. You can sell products or services because you've got all that great e-commerce functionality in there. And you can promote a physical or an online business, or you can announce that special event like I did, or a special project, super easy. Squarespace is the answer. It provides beautiful and customizable templates and also powerful e-commerce functionality. So you no longer have to get those things in two different places. 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Go to squarespace.com for a free trial today, and when you're ready to launch, I want you to use the offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. I know you don't need the 10% off, but please remember to use TWIST so they know we sent you. And if you want to, go ahead and thank at Squarespace on Twitter for supporting independent media SPEAKER_06: like this week in startups. Again, squarespace.com. Use that promo code TWIST, and you'll get 10% off. Thanks again to Squarespace for being one of our longest-running supporters. I truly appreciate it. Great job to the team over there. We love your product. Okay, let's get back to this amazing episode. Welcome back. SPEAKER_32: My guests, Zach Coleus and Antonio Garcia Martinez. Go buy Chaos Monkeys. SPEAKER_06: And go ahead and join Zach's syndicate if you are an accredited investor and you want to get in on angel investing. I think you should, but it's risky. SPEAKER_32: What percentage of net worth, Zach, should new accredited investors who want to learn about angel investing deploy over the first five years of investing? SPEAKER_73: So what I say is it's sort of like buying a lottery ticket that's actually positive EV, which means your expected value on a lottery ticket is a fraction of every dollar you put in you get back. Whereas if you angel invest, it's still likely you're going to be ripping it up. But every now and then, you write that 25K check into Uber, and then God help the rest of the world after that. Why am I here? SPEAKER_285: I wonder that every day. I do too. Why are you still working? SPEAKER_287: 14 people who work for me. Why are you still working? SPEAKER_189: That literally is like, everybody's like, can I have a raise? Are you going to keep coming to work? SPEAKER_291: Is it okay for me to ask for, you're going to keep coming to work? SPEAKER_73: It's the only investment that actually is positive EV and can change a rich person's life. There's no other investment that could ever return 100,000 times your money, but theoretically, this can. Yes. SPEAKER_25: What is the number of investments you have to hit in order to have a reasonable chance of an outlier? SPEAKER_73: It's a lottery ticket. You should just treat it like a lottery ticket. You could make one bet, or you could make 1,000 bets, and every one you might rip up, but one might pay off. SPEAKER_33: I tell everybody get to 30 or 40. I think that's when you have enough in the basket that you could hit an outlier. That's just my own thesis or theory if you have good deal flow. Okay, Libra use cases. Facebook claims that this is a non-profit somewhere in Switzerland, and they are not going to control it in another year or two. SPEAKER_295: Okay. SPEAKER_33: Okay. I think it's the answer to that. Yeah, sure. Okay, sure. Right. But there's also other people who put money in, but 10 million here or there. Uber put in 10 million or something, so that doesn't seem like a major commitment. But let's say this does get included in every single account across the Facebook, you know, triumphant of WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook. They all have it. What becomes the use cases? SPEAKER_217: So you think of the credit card companies, right? They basically intermediate almost every transaction you make, and they sit there and they take their bit every single time to do something that is no longer necessary. SPEAKER_73: We walk around carrying supercomputers in our pocket, and we don't need to basically have a bank and a credit card company and like a 50-year-old piece of technology that basically takes a cut of every transaction that we make. Facebook intends to basically have your money sitting here. And then when Antonio and I want to exchange money, we don't need a bank between us. Basically, I just put my phone on his and boom, I send him money. SPEAKER_301: And then Facebook takes? Nothing. Zero. SPEAKER_73: No, they don't want to intermediate that transaction. They simply want to cut out all, like when you have the scale that Facebook has, the only way to move the needle in that business is to get bigger. SPEAKER_14: And the real money is the banks. Cut them down and kill them. SPEAKER_38: Weren't the banks and the visas and the MasterCards participating in this? No. No. None of them? I thought some financial- SPEAKER_30: They were in the press release, but I'm not sure exactly. SPEAKER_13: No, I don't think they joined. No, I don't think any bank joined, and I don't think Visa joined. SPEAKER_06: I thought one of the credit card companies joined. Let's take a fact check there, Jackie. SPEAKER_307: That's a long way of saying drugs, sex, and death. That's going to be the first use cases. Drugs, sex, and death. Sex and death, yeah. Okay. SPEAKER_57: Well, I don't know about the drugs, sex, and death, but supposedly in China, you can pay for almost everything in WeChat. Yeah, everything in WeChat. Like down to a little noodle shop, yeah. Got it. It basically becomes a form of currency. SPEAKER_17: And is WeChat tied to their crypto, or is it- No. No, it's real money. Yeah. It's real money. Still connect to our- SPEAKER_40: So what are the chances the United States government allows this in the United States or tries to stop it? SPEAKER_217: In the history of the United States government, any of these things is blatant and raw incompetence. Like, you watch them talk about technology, and they're morons. So they're like the head of actually like regulating technology? I'm not holding my record. SPEAKER_64: I mean, they're going to stop until they figure out how to tax it, obviously. That's what a politician does. SPEAKER_22: Maybe. SPEAKER_17: Ah, so that's their key is can we get a vig on this? Yeah, obviously. But if we're just sending money back and forth between each other, or tokens, or whatever SPEAKER_33: they are, I guess they're going to have to come up with a system where if you send over $10,000- That's right. You report it. SPEAKER_79: So they're going to add banking reporting to this. SPEAKER_44: I mean, the other question is how does this turn into fiat, right? That's always, in the crypto world, it seems all this beautiful crypto libertarian Mad Max or whatever, but I want a greenback and suddenly, oop, you get bogged down in the banking system and suddenly all the regular rules apply, right? Until everyone starts accepting Bitcoin, which no one does. SPEAKER_30: So that's, I mean, how do you reclaim your Zuck bucks into dollars or vice versa? Can I show up with a briefcase of a million dollars and turn it into Libra? SPEAKER_06: There was a thing going around the poker community in Vegas where there was a guy who, there was a guy. There was a guy. You've got a guy. Zach knows this right. I've got a guy. No, there was a guy who was, you know, giving people, I guess, like thumb drives and you would give him, you know, some cash. So he would give you a Bitcoin. You got, and he was just basically doing all, he got busted. I guess somebody tipped off the government and he had been moving around, you know, let's call it hundreds of thousands, little millions of dollars. And it was very serious money laundering charges. And in the casinos, really, casino chips are the biggest corollary to this in my mind. And people don't understand how those chips work. SPEAKER_38: I now play in some poker games at, like, say, the Aria. And, you know, there are $5,000 chips. SPEAKER_17: Now, when you're playing, you know, when I used to play it like the, whatever, $500 games, you're doing $5 chips. They'll just cash you in and out. You've done this, Zach. Like, cashing out, you know, $5 chips, they'll do it to the cows company. They don't care. SPEAKER_33: You come up with a $5,000 chip. Each of those chips, where did you get the chip? Whose chip is it? And you're like, I was playing poker. SPEAKER_153: They're like, when, where, what table, with whom? Did you buy this $5,000 chip? And I was like, when I was just at the game, my friend who was playing blackjack spotted me like 10 times. I was playing poker. I won a little bit. SPEAKER_322: I go to cash out for $15,000, they wouldn't cash me out. SPEAKER_153: And I was like, my friend gave to me, he's like, then your friend's got to cash out. So then I got to go to my friend. SPEAKER_33: We got to go to the cage. He cashes out. Then he hands me the $15,000. It's crazy. SPEAKER_38: That's what's going to happen with this. It's going to get so locked down. But I think the real hidden thing here is going to be the ad network, which you, Tony. The ad network. Okay. Let me explain. There was something called Steemit. I thought it was the most clever after crypto kitties of the crypto projects. And I'm not joking. Steemit was Reddit with a cryptocurrency attached. I think it was called Steemit. Okay. So imagine if voting something up cost you a penny. And if you got voted up and you got a thousand. SPEAKER_327: It's like karma, but actually with financial value. Exactly. Like Hacker News Karma. SPEAKER_17: Yeah, like Hacker News Karma or Reddit Karma or Reddit Gold, I guess they called it. That to me on something at scale like Instagram where Miley Cyrus or somebody. SPEAKER_32: Oh, there it is. There's Steemit. So this person here at Steemit, see the $12 and then scroll down a little bit to the second one. And you can hit command plus plus on this and it will get bigger. But that third one there got $32. I think that's US. Click on that dollar amount there and let's see what it says when you click on that. SPEAKER_38: Thank you, Master Nick. Pending payout, $32. So that person for hitting that got $32. This was something I was doing with Netscape when I cloned Dig and Reddit and I said, I'll just pay the top 20 Redditors and Dig people. And I hired them for $1,000 each with AOL's money to just pay them $1,000 each to just submit the best stories from all around the web. SPEAKER_40: And it worked. This is what Facebook's going to do. SPEAKER_39: Can you imagine you're an influencer on Instagram and you get $300 in likes for that photo? SPEAKER_331: I have a hard time picturing them doing that. SPEAKER_30: It's going to create such perverse incentives. Talk about misinformation and viral content. It's going to go bonkers if people actually get paid for it. Think of all the Moldovans who will show up. How much worse is it going to get? SPEAKER_333: I mean, they're currently getting paid for it. We just put Trump in office. How much worse is it going to get? SPEAKER_30: Yeah, but it's not Facebook. It's not Facebook paying them. That's a thing. SPEAKER_73: If you ever exist, once you have programmable money, you will start to have micropayments. That's going to happen. Content micropayments are going to happen. And at the point you do that, then somebody's going to build in a mechanism where basically SPEAKER_262: your content gets through. SPEAKER_336: Let's go with a super heart. You double tap, you give a heart for free. SPEAKER_111: You triple tap, you give a heart and a Libra or a penny of a Libra. You five tap, you gave three Libras, whatever it is. SPEAKER_338: On Twitch, it's happening right now. You go watch on Twitch. And Cam Girls was where this started, going back to the adult stuff. SPEAKER_217: If you go to China, basically, there's huge amounts of money moving around like this. This is definitely going to happen. SPEAKER_79: That's going to be the most fascinating. SPEAKER_38: Can you imagine some of the – I mean, who's the biggest person on – is it one of the Jenners or Kim Kardashian? Kim Kardashian gets paid what to do a social media post? Would they get paid for the Fyre Festival, Kendall Jenner or Kyrie or whatever? Big numbers. I think they got paid like $150K. Six-figure – SPEAKER_32: Yeah, $250K to do the Fyre Fest one. You guys got to take us to Fyre Fest two, right? Of course. Yeah. SPEAKER_345: We're going to be there together, both Justin Tutu's, holding hands. Absolutely. SPEAKER_06: No, I got the baller Sherpa tent. It's going to be amazing. Oh, you haven't got anybody yet. Oh, it's three bedrooms. I just assume. One, two, three. Okay, good. Yeah, it's a three-bedroom suite with cheese sandwiches. Unlimited cheese sandwiches. That, to me, is the huge win. SPEAKER_352: Can you imagine that? SPEAKER_73: It's a world that's coming. I don't think people realize how much our world is going to change the next 20 years. SPEAKER_217: We are at the very end of a generation that I don't think people understand the consequences of. SPEAKER_356: Give me your top change that you see happening. SPEAKER_73: Well, I mean, robots basically are going to eliminate human labor in our lifetime. In our lifetime, they will – Oh, God. No. Physical human labor will cease to exist in our lifetime, at which point, basically, we really won't need the vast majority of humanity to do work, at which point, like, capitalism starts to become very problematic because if you don't have to pay people for their labor, like, what are you going to pay them for? You're not. At the same time, basically, VR becomes almost real, and, like, you are going to be able to go into VR, and it's going to feel real. It's going to look real. It's going to smell real. What are all those people who don't have jobs going to do? SPEAKER_294: They're gone. You're saying – I get so excited. I spilled coffee on myself. It's okay. SPEAKER_38: You believe all human labor – SPEAKER_359: The vast majority. SPEAKER_38: The vast majority of labor done for compensation is going away. Physical labor. Antonio, you disagree in our lifetime. SPEAKER_360: I used to believe that. Now I'm a little bit more skeptical about it, having talked to various people. I think there will be jobs invented for these people. SPEAKER_364: Nope. SPEAKER_362: Nope. SPEAKER_364: No, there will be jobs invented. No, because you don't – physical labor will no longer be necessary. But the wealthy – but they don't have other things to sell. SPEAKER_368: To do what? I can tell you. I can tell you. SPEAKER_369: I mean, fucking babysitting via telepresence robots and shit. SPEAKER_370: Robots will do a better job. They're more trustworthy. SPEAKER_371: Yeah, absolutely. Here's what's going to happen. I have a plan. Okay. Let's hear it. Let's hear it, John. Mary Jason has a plan. Mary Jason has a plan. SPEAKER_189: Here's my plan. SPEAKER_06: The robots – because I talked about this four years ago with Henry from Cafe X. Sure. We have greeters, or they have greeters at the Cafe X machines. For now. For now. They don't have to have them there. SPEAKER_33: No, sir. SPEAKER_153: So what I said was, why not – and I'm reticent to say this here, because I think it's such a good idea, and they're probably going to do it. SPEAKER_40: But imagine if you went there, and there was somebody playing a guitar, or reading poetry, or doing some other – SPEAKER_360: Doing mime. Yeah. What's that? Performative dance, or like a mime. SPEAKER_310: Well, I was – yeah, I mean – SPEAKER_360: Cirque du Soleil in front of the coffee machine. SPEAKER_135: If you guys – if – Antonio, if you want to do performance, we can make room for your SPEAKER_33: interpreter dance. In a two-two. In a two-two. But I think that I'm going to go with the Zach side of the bet, which is we create more labor. Because look at it. The idea that podcasters would be a living, talking and having your own talk show that 15,000 people tuned into would be viable. SPEAKER_131: The fact that being an influencer and wearing bikinis and bathing suits or doing stunts – SPEAKER_44: And not only that, and human contact – when robotics does everything, human contact becomes a luxury good. And so the wealthy will actually pay to talk to humans rather than robots. SPEAKER_389: The average American right now watches 40 hours of television a week. 40 hours. Five hours a day. SPEAKER_73: 40 hours of two-dimensional – SPEAKER_391: I can't do anything for 40 hours a week, much less TV. SPEAKER_395: Non-responsive screen. SPEAKER_393: You weren't doing 40 hours of Facebook when you weren't there. Well, that's – yeah, that's – it was. SPEAKER_395: I mean, for a brief period, he was doing 80 hours. I was doing 80 hours. Really? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. SPEAKER_111: He actually worked – At one point, he worked. At one point, I actually – What was the earliest you left? The office. And what was it like to leave at that hour? SPEAKER_399: What does leave mean? Yeah. SPEAKER_111: Exactly. SPEAKER_403: Do you have to leave the door at 5, 6 p.m., 7 p.m. at Facebook? I never did it. Back then, yeah. You never did it? No. I ate all three meals there. SPEAKER_405: Did you ever see anybody do it? And if you did, what would people be like? SPEAKER_166: Nobody at my – I don't know. Well, yeah, no. There were some of the senior people would leave, really. SPEAKER_406: And people would roll their eyes or be like senior people? SPEAKER_407: I would, but – SPEAKER_406: See, that's my joke here. SPEAKER_407: Zuckerberg was there late as hell, by the way. He'd have meetings at 10 at night. SPEAKER_156: When I – when people leave my office at 6 or 7, I go, oh, half day? It's my standard joke, but I don't let people work right here. SPEAKER_409: You're admitting to labor violations on air, so good luck with that. SPEAKER_156: No. SPEAKER_409: I mean, everybody gets paid – SPEAKER_411: They get paid overtime, of course. There's a union, right? Have you guys unionized yet? SPEAKER_153: Can we edit this show? No, actually, you have to really consider that, the overtime thing. I think it's 46K. Under 46K, you have to pay overtime. Under 46K, under 42K, I think, in California. Anyway, there's a rule around it. So, what do you think will be the other – so, end of manual labor, VR becomes so good that SPEAKER_33: some people get lost in it, just like some – SPEAKER_158: The vast majority of humanity, basically, will spend the vast majority of their lives in VR in our lifetimes. You think so? SPEAKER_417: Yeah. I mean – That's the one that I don't think so. I mean, like the insult – SPEAKER_421: I put that head side in, I'm just like, no. Yeah, we got 50 years. In 50 years, absolutely. You know what? I put that shit on, and that's not compelling. SPEAKER_73: Like, you're looking at the very bottom of the curve, just like everyone looks at Facebook when it was at 20 bucks, being like, this is a dumb company. I mean, the counter-argument, we've been hearing that for 20 years. SPEAKER_44: VR has been like the perpetual technology of the future for 20 years. SPEAKER_14: Yeah, but look, like, if you look at every curve, every curve, the chip curve, the knowledge curve – How much better does it have to get? SPEAKER_04: When I go in there, and I put golf, it feels like real golf to me, but I would rather see my friends and go to the, you know, Warriors games or go play poker with my friends. SPEAKER_89: If you're old and wealthy, you have options that a lot of the users don't have. SPEAKER_73: Average American, 40 hours of television a week. That's the baseline. Non-responsive, two-dimensional screen that basically, like, you can't – like, you're going to put them into VR, and they're going to live there. SPEAKER_06: All right, so you got VR and end of physical manual labor. What do you got in our lifetime that's going to be game changer, bigger than those two? SPEAKER_44: The thing that scares me, or I think about it a lot, is the rise of democratized media, right? This, the fact that we've invented human telepathy. Everyone can talk to anyone as much as they want with unfettered access, with absolute privacy encrypted. Like, this, I'm not sure that – the post-World War II world that we've lived in, right, with, you know, mass market, mass society-type concepts like liberal democracy, and just this – you know, the notion that we have a continent-spanning country with 330 million people, and that suddenly now every Tom, Dick, and Harry can get as much, you know, distribution and create an ethos as much as, you know, the blessed, anointed media figures from the East and West Coast. SPEAKER_30: I don't know how much of, again, this post-World War II world that we've been living in survives in that world. Because I don't know how you maintain any sort of cultural or political cohesion among 330 million people when everyone has this. I don't know that it's possible. SPEAKER_157: There's great books on the rise of nationalism that came basically at the point of the printing SPEAKER_73: press, and the printing press basically, like, unified thought at a national level because that was the scale that it made sense to basically own and distribute via printing press. It's like, it was functioning like an economic scale thing that created the nation, and now SPEAKER_294: we're just taking that construct that we currently think is real, and we're tearing it asunder, and it's not going to respond well to what's happening in the next 20 years. SPEAKER_04: Is there a solution? Is it to just have smaller, I mean, you look at the Nordics, you look at, you know, 10 million SPEAKER_442: sized democracies, and it works a lot better when you only have to contend with 5 or 10 or 15 million people. SPEAKER_44: The first order solution is, oh, federalism, 50 experiments in democracy, whatever. But I think the problem here is, and, you know, looking back at our time, I think from a thousand years from now, is the biggest thing going to be this? I think the biggest change that's happened is the coupling of the movement of atoms with bits, right? Like, I'm old enough, I'm not that old, but I'm old enough to remember when I was a kid, letters were still how most humans communicated. It was the only way normally, like, I still have a pile of letters from old girlfriends and parents and whatever, right? But that was like a piece of paper written down, you know, a little stamp. SPEAKER_444: Stop email, stop writing me letters. SPEAKER_44: And then four days later, it gets there. But now, now my entire social and moral and political reality is refracted through this black mirror and has nothing to do with the geographic proximity to me. And the fact that you see, like, deep alliances in politics between, like, the Brexit and the Trumpers and Salvini in Italy, it's like, when the hell would that, that would never SPEAKER_59: have happened before without some international movement like communism behind it, right? SPEAKER_06: I hate to be an idiot. Yeah. But it's kind of my role on the show. Yeah. Do you realize I didn't know what black mirror meant? SPEAKER_25: Right. Black mirror is staring into your phone? Yeah. Wait a second. Did everybody in the room know that? God, Jason. And literally there's eight people who- No, it's the mirror from Snow White. That's what it was. No, I just thought it was like, oh, dark mirror. Like, we're looking at humanity. I never actually thought it was the iPhone. I'm an idiot. When we get back from this commercial, I'm going to tell you what I think is going to be the sea change that will break humanity forever. We'll get back on This Week in Startups. SPEAKER_111: Are you struggling to sleep at night? Well, you're not alone. One in three U.S. adults are not getting enough sleep. And it's critical if you're an entrepreneur or an investor, you need to get great sleep so that your cognitive function is at a high level, like learning and problem-solving, decision-making, all of these behaviors that we have to do as entrepreneurs and investors. We need sleep. And people who don't get the right amount of sleep, they're prone to accidents, weight gain, and depression. Don't I know it? But when you sleep well, you're so much more focused. We get relaxed and we get crisp and we're happy. And that's why we are partnering with Calm, the number one app for sleep. You'll get a library of programs designed to help you get the sleep your body and your brain needs from soundscapes and over 100 sleep stories. I love sleep stories. And so does my daughter. SPEAKER_452: And then they have all these other ones, even ones for adults. And you play them and you drift off to sleep. Here is my man, Presh, my CMO, who needs to get his sleep because he's working for me and I'm not an easy boss. And you see him going through Easter Island and all these different hidden forests, beautiful stories and sounds, including Matthew McConaughey. All right, all right, all right. He'll read you a sleep story as well. And he does a great job. Thank you, Matthew McConaughey. And of course, you know, I'm an investor in calm.com. So it's so great to have Alex on the podcast years ago, back in 2012. And then now we're sitting here seven years later and they're a sponsor and a partner of This Week in Startups. That is just amazing and touching. Thank you to the team at calm.com for working so hard to make such a beautiful product. And then coming full circle from being a guest on the podcast to coming now and supporting it as a sponsor. Oh my God, my heart is filled with so much joy right now. So much joy that I'm going to give you 25% off a calm premium subscription. Go to calm.com slash twist. SPEAKER_06: That's C-A-L-M dot com slash twist. Thanks again to calm. And thanks for supporting the podcast. I really do appreciate that. Let's get back to this amazing episode. SPEAKER_04: All right, welcome back to This Week in Startups. Apparently, the original island for Fyre Festival is for sale for $11 million. I put in a bid for nine. I think we're going to let me about put it in for eight. We'll low ball them. And yeah, we're going to kickstart this and we're going to start Fyre too. My favorite part of that festival. SPEAKER_06: Did you see the docs for this? You haven't seen the docs for Fyre Festival? Oh my God, you guys are going to have a great weekend. It is going to be awesome. SPEAKER_33: It's so great. Okay, here's my thinking of what cracks humanity. SPEAKER_454: Sure. SPEAKER_153: I believe that AirPods are going. SPEAKER_455: Sorry, go ahead. It's not what I was expecting, but go ahead. SPEAKER_33: I believe that AirPods are going to be air implants within, let's call it 10 to 20 years. SPEAKER_458: And the aliens are going to hack it and then take over. The Russians, the Russians, them. SPEAKER_79: No, they're going to go into your ears. SPEAKER_33: And I believe that you will have a similar function with contact lenses and or glasses, SPEAKER_32: obviously. There's a Black Mirror episode, by the way. SPEAKER_460: Neuroimplants. SPEAKER_32: Neuroimplants. But this is the second order that people are not anticipating. SPEAKER_38: I think the same way you have Trump derangement syndrome, you have a social media isolation, FOMO, is going to lead to a proportion of people jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge and SPEAKER_40: killing themselves and having anxiety and depression. SPEAKER_33: That is unheard of because we're already having that happen. We're already having a populace where young people, the leading cause of death went from drunk driving, like for young men, to suicide. SPEAKER_462: Instagram. SPEAKER_33: Well, I mean, we joke about it, but I think the social isolation and not looking people in the eye and having a poker game or a bottle of wine or a real conversation, it is death SPEAKER_49: by Instagram. I mean, it's a joke, but it's not. But Instagram isn't the cause of it, right? SPEAKER_44: The social fabric has crumbled and they resort to social media as a stopgap, which it's a SPEAKER_30: digital proxy for that. I've often joked that Facebook is the real community, like porn is the real sex, right? SPEAKER_465: It's like no one would actually use it if you had a real community, but it's like the fill-in, right? So I don't know that it's death due to Instagram. SPEAKER_38: It's a synthetic version that lets you feel empty inside. It's eating the empty calories. SPEAKER_467: If incorrectly used. Yeah, sure. SPEAKER_38: And it's the sugar and the wheat and the reaction of your body to it is really making you feel this crazy anxiety. SPEAKER_468: The high fructose corn syrup. It's the high fructose corn syrup. It's the high fructose corn syrup. SPEAKER_38: Of social fabric. Of social fabric. And we were wondering what would happen if you took out religion or the nuclear family or some common nationalism or belief in country or belief in the constitution or belief in humanity or God or any of this shit. SPEAKER_79: And now you have people are going to be saturated. SPEAKER_381: It's just performative narcissism. That's all it is. Yeah. SPEAKER_79: And they're going to be saturated with it as they fall asleep. And as they wake up, they're going to be coming in and out of sleep with these devices SPEAKER_41: implanted into them, programming them with an algorithm. SPEAKER_217: I mean, just think about when you have neural implants and you have a machine that basically feeds content into those implants and that machine has ML. I mean, it's like, oh, you like that? Here's some more. SPEAKER_470: Oh, you like that? Here's some more. SPEAKER_73: Yeah, where does that lead you to? It's going to lead. You know how the matrix starts? It's not because the machines plug us in. And we're just like, woohoo, let's go. SPEAKER_435: Well, yeah, I know Kung Fu, right? And it's like, if you think about that, I don't know if you saw that New York Times interactive piece. SPEAKER_33: It was a Kevin Rue's piece, I believe, about like the road to the alt-right, which was a little ridiculous because they put a bunch of not alt-right people on it. SPEAKER_153: And they kind of proved that the alt-right person then got out of the alt-right. That's right. SPEAKER_477: There's a happy ending. SPEAKER_153: It was a happy ending. So it was kind of garbage, but it's just very hard to read the New York Times now because SPEAKER_478: it's gone so liberal hysterical that like it's so anti-tech and so woke. SPEAKER_381: The person who pays gets what he wants. And if you go from an advertising model to a subscriber model, the subscribers get what they want. SPEAKER_79: Is it me or just New York Times like this crazy liberal woke madness now? SPEAKER_480: I think Antonio has the right theory on this. Right. Which is... Pick a side. They did Fox News. Pick a side. SPEAKER_30: Again, I'm going to class it up here with a longer term view, which is if you look at why newspapers have the notion of objectivity, right? It's because part of it's ideological, if you go back and read some of the literature, mostly it's because Macy's needed a national market to advertise in the 1910s and 20s. Before the 20th century, most newspapers were completely partisan. The press Democrat meant it was a Democratic Party thing. And most party members would just join and subscribe. And most newspapers were subscription driven. But that doesn't really suit the purposes of Macy's or Sears or anybody else. And so they sort of pivoted to human interest and news with a divide between sort of op-ed SPEAKER_44: and opinionated side versus the news side. If you look at even most of the Western world, you go to the UK, there is no such divide, right? Like you read the spectator or the observer or the Daily Mail and you know you're getting one particular point of view, right? What I think is really ironic, what's going on right now, is that who has that business model now? Facebook and Twitter, of course. Facebook are the national method of reach. So who's freaking out about objectivity and both sides of them? Facebook and Twitter, of course. And every time the conservatives raise their hands, somebody rationally have to say and say, oh, they're shutting us down, even though Fox News is like the biggest network on Facebook by far. They have to sit there and say, oh, sorry, sorry, and like talk them off the cliff, right? And then meanwhile, New York Times, I just need a huge jump in subscription since Trump got elected, can sit there and basically placate their customer because at the end of the day, the customer wins, right? And so it's just very interesting, which by the way, I think is totally fine. SPEAKER_483: Which they're leaning into. Right. Which I think is fine. SPEAKER_166: Newspapers in the past, that's how they used to work and that's just, that's fine. They don't work that way anymore. They just don't work that way anymore. SPEAKER_14: It's like objectivity never was true and now it's definitely not true. SPEAKER_485: Definitely not true. SPEAKER_38: Well, it felt so nice though to open up the New York Times and have this idea because I grew up in the 80s and 90s in New York with some of these journalists who were contemporaries and when I had my magazine in New York and we really, it was drilled into us to be objective by our editors who were training us and they would say, did you talk to the other side? Is there other opinion here? Did you fact check this? Now it's like, did we fact check it? That breaks the narrative. Right. We can't fact check this. If we fact check this, then like we pointed out earlier with the flaw in the Facebook, SPEAKER_153: you know, Casey's story, well, didn't you just, well, ask them to police it and now you're complaining that they're policing it? Like it doesn't make any sense. And so, I don't know. It's over. I mean, right. SPEAKER_147: I mean, it's over. SPEAKER_490: Okay. Okay. I think we're, it's over. It's over. SPEAKER_217: We now, we now basically have to assume that, and what's scary is that like now we have SPEAKER_73: to assume that all content is truly flawed, biased, and we actually have to use our brains. But the problem is that the vast majority of old people in this country who vote and who have the majority of the political power, they basically have been spoon fed this lie for the last 50 years that content is subjective. That's the way it is. They believe that. So they go out, they watch Fox News. They're like, oh, that's the truth. And then they just go down. And the liberals are doing it with MSNBC and New York Times. In both directions, on both sides. But they go down the stupid hole and that leads to the current political partitism that we have. SPEAKER_38: Two, Ben Shapiro and Rachel Maddow back-to-back on my drive home. And it could not be, it is painful. Both painful. Well, no, they're both hysterical in different ways. And you hear one person doesn't bring up the Mueller report. Right. SPEAKER_17: And the other person is obsessing on every page of the obstruction charges. SPEAKER_49: And it's like, he's telling you he obstructed in plain language. And neither is lying, to be clear, right? No. SPEAKER_44: And that's the thing. And that's one of the great ironies. It's like, never has it been easier to document reality. Literally, everyone can live stream TV. Like, I remember, you used to take a fucking van with an antenna with three dudes inside to, like, live stream a video feed. Now, everybody can do it. Like, there's no ambiguity about what's going on. And yet, no one knows what the fuck is going on. Right. That's the weird thing. That's one of the great ironies. SPEAKER_52: I think I know what's going on. The crazy people who are the most mentally ill, who are the most extreme, have taken over SPEAKER_25: the dialogue. That's right. And everybody else is like, you know what, this is a shit show that I don't want to participate in. Right. So you get on Twitter. SPEAKER_33: And, like, if you see the liberals fighting with the alt-right people, you're just like, oh, my Lord. SPEAKER_25: It's just like, you turn around and walk away. Right. It's like, walk away. It's like seeing, like, a crazy deranged person on the street. SPEAKER_497: It's like a bar fight. You just walked the other way. It's like a bar fight. I don't care. I'm out. I'm not going to catch the bottle on the head. I don't care. I'm out. SPEAKER_153: These guys are drunk and they're swinging bottles. I'm going to get, I'm going to be collateral damage here. I need to get out of this. SPEAKER_93: That may not be a bad thing, to be honest. SPEAKER_44: I think 90% of Americans are perfectly sane, normal people who believe in rule of all the rest of it. The 10% are all on Twitter, streaming at each other. They're all out of their minds. SPEAKER_79: And, like, we've contained them in a way. We've contained the zombie apocalypse. If this truly, it's almost like identifying who these maniacs are. SPEAKER_38: Because Twitter is us, intelligent, thoughtful people. Yeah, I don't know about that. Considered. SPEAKER_504: It might be an overstatement. No. I'm not sure. SPEAKER_79: And then you have all these people surrounding us, considered thoughtful, well-read, individual citizens. But it is all the crazy people. SPEAKER_38: Because when I go out into the real world, I don't meet these crazy people, like, on Twitter. SPEAKER_508: No. No. SPEAKER_38: They've just all populated in one. They should just shut Twitter down, right? SPEAKER_71: I mean, that's basically what it's come to. SPEAKER_73: No, it's just going to get worse. Twitter is just the beginning. Yeah. Like, we're looking, like, think back to, like, when we started in Silicon Valley. So you think back to where, like, when I first moved to Silicon Valley, it was 2005. And I remember I had an index that I made up of the number of tech stories that were on page one of the New York Times. Yeah. And that was my index if I had made the right choice to move to Silicon Valley. Yeah. And I was like, oh, look, it's going up. I made the right choice. But it's like, like, Silicon Valley is just beginning to take over the world. Right. And, like, we have not changed the world yet at the way we're going to. Right. SPEAKER_363: Like, in the next 10, 20 years, the world is fundamentally going to change. Like, we're still living in the old afterthought, leftover old world. SPEAKER_38: I'm actually thinking these VTOLs, the vertical takeoff and landing things, are real. Sure. Yeah. Like, this is actually going to happen. SPEAKER_135: Yeah. They, we were promised flying cars. Yeah, we're going to get them. And we're going to get flying cars. Yeah. What do you think? SPEAKER_79: Over, under on VTOLs in a major city. Didn't we bet on this the last show I was on? We did. SPEAKER_514: And I just want to bring it up again because I am. I don't remember what the bet was. But you've got to specify, like, sub-100K or something because, like, I'm sure you can buy one now for a million dollars, right? SPEAKER_68: No. Okay. Here's what I'll say. Kittyhooker. A commercial under $100 ride, let's just say. SPEAKER_514: How about benchmark it? A VTOL thing that costs no more than, like, a BMW 7 Series. SPEAKER_517: Well, but you'll never own it yourself. SPEAKER_209: A VTOL that costs the same as Uber Black. Yeah, you're never going to own it yourself. As an Uber Black ride. SPEAKER_517: It's going to be an autonomous fleet of VTOL. SPEAKER_38: We can leave on the Embarcadero and get to Oakland Airport for the same cost or less or, you know, plus or minus. It's going to be decades. SPEAKER_271: No. God, no. I'll take the under on that. Yeah. I'll bet you a lot of money. I'll bet you all your- Here we go. Here we go. SPEAKER_32: You said decades. Pick a number. He'll take the under, I'm sure. SPEAKER_518: You'll take the under. Well, we'll see. I mean, if you're saying 20 years. SPEAKER_520: Okay, 20 years under. I'm taking the under, too. I'll hit the under hard. How much are we betting? What are we betting? SPEAKER_521: The chunk of one signal that I own. SPEAKER_520: No, I want to go for that. SPEAKER_522: No, it takes too long. Oh, yum, yum. It takes us two decades. I have to wait two decades. Oh, well. SPEAKER_523: Okay, okay. Hold on a second. SPEAKER_522: I'm going to have to wait two decades to get paid. It takes long. SPEAKER_06: It does take too long. Yeah. It does take too long. Yeah. But we can put the clip on YouTube and we can make a smart contract with Libra underscore. SPEAKER_30: And to be honest, what do you mean by, you know, a VTOL aircraft? I mean, a helicopter in some sense would kind of qualify. SPEAKER_06: An electric helicopter. SPEAKER_68: Oh, it has to be electric now. Oh. Of course. Yeah. All the VTOLs are electric. They can't really, if they were, yeah. Like a quadcopter. SPEAKER_206: Okay, right. SPEAKER_04: You know, like one of those quadcopters. Okay, you're going to get that, right. SPEAKER_206: Like, yeah, the 20 and under, I win. SPEAKER_13: Just give me the money now. I already won. SPEAKER_04: Yeah, we win. We already won. We totally win. SPEAKER_13: I don't remember what we bet last time on the show. I think it was like 10, 11 years. SPEAKER_318: I just need to have somebody go through all of them. All right. Other topics. Is it frothy? Is it a bubble? Yeah. Oh, yeah. SPEAKER_530: Of course. But the music's still playing, so I'm going to keep dancing. In the last? SPEAKER_182: Sorry. No, I don't need a buffet. It's too gross. But if the music's playing and the cops haven't broken up the party yet, I'm going to keep SPEAKER_121: investing. SPEAKER_158: Did you hear what Bill said on, Bill did a 20-minute VC podcast. I heard it. SPEAKER_73: And he, Bill, this is Bill Gurley. SPEAKER_536: The Bill Gurley we play poker with. Bill Gurley said. SPEAKER_73: The cold water Bill Gurley. He's like, oh, it's getting out of control. And he's like, the music's playing. I'm going to, his quote was even better. It's like, basically, the secret to not getting killed is to not give up and to have the most fun at the end of the party. Just rage into the very end of the party. SPEAKER_538: Yeah, I think you just have to go for it at the end of the party, Bill Gurley. SPEAKER_540: I'm going to just kick some ass and shoot my sick shooter in the air. Yeehaw. When Bill Gurley says that, we're in for some craziness. Bill Gurley's on the podcast story. He's done two podcasts recently. SPEAKER_68: Okay. So we know that's a bubble. Trade war with China for tech, I think, is something we should talk about. Yeah. I mean. Huawei is going to be allowed to buy our technologies. Trump was flip-flopping on that. He called them very dangerous. SPEAKER_153: He said it was the biggest long-term competitive threat. And now we're going to let them into the United States? Is this crazy? I think it's insane. SPEAKER_544: Why would you let, are we going to let them be our critical infrastructure? Because no one else is building it. There's a massive 5G gap in the United States. They're not building the hardware. We're also going to buy it from. SPEAKER_158: And the regulators basically prevented the proper approach to 5G, which was to basically cut off all the entrenched interests and reformat how we basically deal with the mid-band. And instead, they're like, no, no, we're going to make them go in the high bands, which doesn't work nearly as well. It doesn't go through walls. It doesn't go long distances. It's like in China, they're like, no, no, let's just do what we should do, which is SPEAKER_73: use the mid-band for 5G. SPEAKER_06: So we've got to start over in the United States and not have 5G for a little while? SPEAKER_158: I mean, it's very unclear how this is going to play out, but I wouldn't bet against, I wouldn't bet against Huawei. SPEAKER_06: I've got to tell you something. I'm not like a crazy nationalistic guy. I mean, this is the greatest country in the world. SPEAKER_550: But. You said that in the Trump accent. I'm moderate. Okay. SPEAKER_549: Greatest country in the world, and we're winning. That's pretty good, Jason. Okay. He's really good at it. SPEAKER_555: All right. SPEAKER_553: Where's your MAGA hat? SPEAKER_559: Little Rocket Man. There's one. I'm going to stop by. You may have heard of a place. SPEAKER_558: He's a good friend now. He just got, he got called a friend. SPEAKER_559: My good friend. You may have heard of a place. D-M-Z. The Donald Military Zone. Okay? I'm going to be in town. Maybe you want to stop by? SPEAKER_562: Terrified. SPEAKER_06: Terrified. SPEAKER_562: I'm terrified. SPEAKER_06: There's a company I'm more worried about than Huawei from China. Anybody want to take a guess? They're already here. They've already. Take it easy there. You're not on the show. Look at this. I got the engineers who want to take a guess. Take it easy back there. SPEAKER_79: What company is at scale already and ready to do mass surveillance and is already doing mass surveillance of Americans? SPEAKER_567: TikTok. SPEAKER_79: Correct. We've got tens of millions of Americans using TikTok. SPEAKER_39: We have to kick TikTok out of this country and ban it. This is a message to Donald Trump. TikTok is in the pockets of tens of millions of Americans. They spent something in the order of hundreds of millions of dollars promoting it. But who do you think has the keys to TikTok? The Chinese government. The communists. SPEAKER_315: I don't think we can call them communists anymore. What do they refer to themselves as? It's the Chinese Communist Party still. Okay, so the Chinese Communist Party. SPEAKER_39: The capitalist communist hybrid now has 30, 40, 50 million Americans, their cameras, their location, their microphones. Yet we cannot have Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Google in China. We must, Mr. Trump, President Trump. This is a message to President Trump. We must ban TikTok. It is a secure. I'm not joking. This is a DEFCON 4. Is there a 5 in DEFCON 5? SPEAKER_38: This is DEFCON 4.5. We're getting there. We have to ban TikTok until we are allowed to have our own surveillance state in China. Thank you. This is the end of the message. I'm Jason Calacanis, and I support this message. What do you think of my theory? That we should kick out TikTok? SPEAKER_261: I mean, who the hell is on TikTok? Is it actually anyone that presents a national security interest? Well, look at this. SPEAKER_25: We have three interns in the room and a millennial. And they're trying to spy it? They have TikTok on their phone. Raise your hand. No. SPEAKER_38: No. No. No TikTok. Okay. Four out of four Gen Z and millennials don't have it. There's a lot of people with this TikTok. But just generally speaking, should we allow the Chinese startups to have a presence here in social networking, et cetera, while not being allowed to have a presence over there SPEAKER_153: ourselves? SPEAKER_579: Yes or no? SPEAKER_158: I mean, I don't agree with Donald Trump. I don't agree with Donald Trump on just about everything. But I do think that reformatting the relationship with China was something that should have been done 10 years ago. SPEAKER_217: So that doing it now is about time. SPEAKER_582: Okay. SPEAKER_217: But he's caved. He's incompetent. But at least we're moving in the direction of reformatting that conversation. And the fact that it wasn't dealt with during the entire Obama administration was a complete SPEAKER_158: failure. They did kick the can down the road. They did not address the problem. They should have started a long time ago. SPEAKER_06: But they are funding our films. They did do the last Mission Impossible. Yeah. SPEAKER_158: Got a question. SPEAKER_588: Alibaba funded the last Mission Impossible. SPEAKER_33: That's why they – I think actually like the merging of media is a very good way to kind of integrate the cultures. But democracy peaked at 54 percent and I think we're at 51 percent of the global population lives in a democracy. I think that that's actually the big existential risk right now. SPEAKER_38: We're going to live longer. It's going to be amazing. We have flying cars. But the number of people living in democracies going down and the number of people who think it's important to live in a democracy is going down. What is going on? SPEAKER_79: People don't think it's important to live in a democracy. What are we supposed to make of that? SPEAKER_47: Well, because they haven't seen the alternative. Americans have lived in a bubble for the past 40, 50 years. They need to go spend a few weeks living like a Cuban in Cuba and then see what it's like or North Korea for that matter. SPEAKER_591: I mean, socialism is a road to nowhere. Well, that's a big – it's a loaded term. That's a great statement. SPEAKER_592: No, I didn't – for the record, I didn't necessarily agree with that statement. But yeah. SPEAKER_559: America will never be a socialist country. AOC, Bernie Sanders, never socialist. SPEAKER_443: But Zach is right. SPEAKER_44: There's a fundamental conflict happening here that we don't talk about because we don't talk about ideology anymore in this like post-religious liberal way. There's no there there anymore. But the reality is like, no, there's fundamental distinction from the West and Chinese politics and values, and it's just fundamental. Like Chaos Monkeys for its Chinese translation got centered, and I had to just accept it, and I would never accept that in the West. SPEAKER_30: Or I just read today that, in fact, Chinese border control is installing some sort of malware app on your phone if you enter, I forget, whatever the province with all the conflict SPEAKER_261: with the Muslim minority. It's like there's a fundamental difference here that no one wants to talk about because, oh, it's kind of impolite. Yeah, I can't believe that they – It's like the little fart in the room that no one wants to acknowledge. SPEAKER_597: You're saying they're forcing you to put Facebook on your – Yeah. I mean, that was – No, no, no, no. Yeah. No, no, no. I thought you said spyware. SPEAKER_600: Malware. Oh, malware, different than Facebook. It searches your phone for sensitive documents. SPEAKER_61: No, and it uploads all of your texts and everything. Everything. Everything. SPEAKER_06: The scary thing I saw was there was this like – Kai-Fu Lee was showing this video on 60 Minutes or 2020 or Primetime Live he was on talking about his book and they were showing how they found a journalist in under five minutes in like Shanghai or something on the CCTV. Yeah. Let alone the environment. SPEAKER_520: I mean – We didn't even get to the environment. Panopticon is here. I mean, there's – Define what Panopticon is. SPEAKER_217: Oh, so basically like always being watched by the – it's – Foucault wrote a book back in whatever the hell. Bentham. SPEAKER_609: Bentham. Bentham? Jeremy Bentham. Oh, shit. I get confused. Anyway. SPEAKER_338: What does Black Mirror mean? What's that? SPEAKER_612: What does the Black Mirror thing mean? SPEAKER_611: Yeah, but finish this up. The Panopticon thing is a good thing. SPEAKER_612: The Panopticon will always be watched and the technology now makes it possible. SPEAKER_44: What it literally was was that round jail in which all the prisoners were windows and there's one guard in the tower that can tell us, which by the way was actually built. Cuba has a prison that's a little Panopticon. SPEAKER_147: Foucault wrote a piece about it. That's a piece I'm thinking about. No, he did. No, you're right. No, he did. Sorry. Yes, you're right. SPEAKER_33: The thing about the Panopticon that was so revolutionary was that the windows were one way. Yeah, you never know. The tower. The tower. SPEAKER_39: So you didn't know what the guard was looking at. That's right. So you assumed he was looking at yourself. SPEAKER_294: Right. Yeah. I mean, look, we carry around the destruction to humanity as we currently know it, which this supercomputer basically is going to take over our – as we currently know. SPEAKER_44: Okay, okay. Before we all have privacy paranoia, I think in the context of China, it's super scary. In the U.S., we have other technology called the Constitution in courts, in which I think it's less scary. And to model our public policy based on Chinese autocracies would be in some sense just lowering SPEAKER_30: ourselves to a different level when we don't need to have that paranoia in the West, right? There's an advantage to openness. There's an advantage to not being super privacy paranoia. SPEAKER_06: It does feel like even under Trump's explicit attempt to control the government, to control the different institutions, we've maintained some level of control over him. SPEAKER_68: Like the Mueller report came out. SPEAKER_49: Mueller's going to testify. It's taking a little bit of time. I mean, this is still a country of laws and not men. Sure, he's just one guy. There's still institutions. So what? Yeah. SPEAKER_623: And they'll survive. Will they hold up? SPEAKER_38: I mean, this is the thing with like the New York Times is back to the liberal, insane, historical New York Times. SPEAKER_06: They're like, will Trump leave office if he's voted out? And it's like, yeah, I think there's a large number. SPEAKER_628: Dude, the guy can't tie his own shoelaces. I mean, it's just ridiculous. SPEAKER_153: There's a large number of military people who would love to drag his ass out of the White House if he refused to leave. That's right. And by the way, he's not spending any time with the White House anyway. The second he goes to Mar-a-Lago, you could just lock him up there and change the locks. Right. He's not getting back into the White House. SPEAKER_158: But the fundamental problem is not actually like the breakdown of our infrastructure and our institutions from the top. It's from the bottom, which is like- That to me is more dangerous. I think Antonio is correct. It's like now that you create a world where anyone can communicate with anyone, anywhere, anyhow, like you get these what are fundamentally just frenzies that are built on lies. SPEAKER_73: I mean, you look at the sort of like the anti-vaccine frenzy, which is built on a lie that's been disproven a long time ago. And yet, but there are people in America who will fight and die. They will let their children die from heinous deaths. They will take that risk in order because they believe a lie. So imagine if you take that and you just change a little bit and say, okay, the people in Northern California have decided they no longer want to have anything to do with the rest of America. And they come together using this phone. Violence comes out of that one way or another. SPEAKER_158: And I don't think that like the US like political system and the cultural system is designed to deal with that type of violence. And so it like it will build on itself. And I think Antonio is right about this. It's like the fear is not of our institutions at the top. It's the breakdown of like order. SPEAKER_633: Yeah. SPEAKER_530: And they voted Trump in. And so I was in Australia a couple of weeks ago and I love it. SPEAKER_06: Like I'm listening to the morning news and they're like, Jessica Biel, who's an actress SPEAKER_39: or a model or something, says that people shouldn't get vaccines. What an idiot. And who's listening in America to a model or an actress who's risking her kids' lives? It's a terrible Australian accent. She's a bloody idiot. And like literally they're mocking her for being an absolute fool. SPEAKER_25: And anybody who would follow her is a bigger fool. And then the next story. SPEAKER_33: Police arrested a man who attacked them with a machete. It was like, oh my Lord. SPEAKER_153: Oh, like a boomerang. It was like some crazy, like only in Australia, like Florida man story. All right. To sum up, Libra underscore coin, game changer. Follow at Libra to get your horoscope. Follow at Libra underscore to get news about Zuck coin, the Z coin. SPEAKER_29: Yeah, it's a little frothy, but we're still dancing here in Silicon Valley. And Black Mirror refers to your smartphone. T-I-L. SPEAKER_639: T-I-L. Today I learned. SPEAKER_156: Thanks for being on the program. And we'll see you all next time. Bye-bye.