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SPEAKER_02: Hey, everybody. Welcome to This Week in Startups. I'm your host, Jason Calacanis. And back on the pod. That's right.

SPEAKER_04: The Acquired FM boys are here. David Rosenthal and Ben Gilbert. Welcome back to the podcast. After two very strong appearances in 2020, the audience loves when you come do the news roundtable, boys. How are we doing? Very strong.

SPEAKER_06: I've always wanted to be very strong in the eyes of Jason Calacanis. So I appreciate that.

SPEAKER_04: How are you boys holding up with the dual anxiety of a surging pandemic right now? Cases are going way up. Thankfully, debts are staying low.

SPEAKER_09: We can talk a little bit about that. Maybe we can take the win on that. I'm not sure. And we're recording this four days, five days out from the election. How are you boys holding up?

SPEAKER_10: I haven't heard about that.

SPEAKER_11: Yeah.

SPEAKER_06: You know, trying to avoid doom scrolling, limit the news intake, except when preparing for your show in case, you know, we have to dip into politics. But now, you know, hopefully we get things resolved in a reasonable amount of time and there's not massive international chaos for our extended, protracted time period.

SPEAKER_01: Okay. I think I know how you're voting, Ben.

SPEAKER_20: David, how are you holding up?

SPEAKER_19: Are you in the Captain Chaos camp or are you in the let's go to boring old Joe camp?

SPEAKER_21: Definitely not in the Captain Chaos camp.

SPEAKER_23: But I will say, you know, I until yesterday, actually, still, I about a month ago, deleted Twitter, deleted New York Times, deleted Wall Street Journal off all my devices. Just go to them in the browsers because I was like, I need I need some mental sanity here.

SPEAKER_24: But but then preparing for your show, get back on.

SPEAKER_02: Yeah. And it was an eventful. It's been eventful, I think, in terms of this election again.

SPEAKER_04: And that tees right into our first story. Obviously, we haven't talked since the New York Post Hunter Biden stories were banned on Twitter.

SPEAKER_28: A move that Jack said was a mistake and was also a very weird feeling. I don't know if you had that feeling when you tried to tweet it and got that message.

SPEAKER_29: Hey, you can't tweet this. I specifically was like, oh, I want to see if I can tweet it. I was like, I'm testing to see if I can tweet this. Did you actually do that and see the message that like you're not allowed to tweet this?

SPEAKER_06: No, I did not.

SPEAKER_12: I have gotten the surprising thing, though, where I go to retweet something in the last week and it instead does the quote tweet UI. You're like, whoa, did I hit the wrong button?

SPEAKER_06: And you're like, oh, no, they're literally just not letting you retweet anything without thinking about it.

SPEAKER_04: That was I thought my Twitter client was broken or something, and then it was happening on mobile and desktop. And I was like, did they make a UX change here? And then I found out about it afterwards.

SPEAKER_37: But for people who are not obsessive about Twitter, what this basically means is instead of hitting retweet and just retweeting another person, it lets you do the quote retweet, which is it says, hey, here's an empty box. Say what you want about this tweet. And then if you hit retweet a second time, which they do not explain to you, it actually

SPEAKER_08: does a retweet, correct?

SPEAKER_38: Oh, you can still blank retweet.

SPEAKER_08: Yeah, you can. But you have to basically send an empty quote tweet.

SPEAKER_12: And I love the spirit behind this. I'm very curious. I'm sure there's product managers watching like a hawk. But I'm very curious if it's having the behavior that they sort of intended it to of slowing the spread of information.

SPEAKER_04: I had a weird experience. I was like, this is weird. When this company was explained to me, they were a bunch of libertarian free speech people. And they were like, as they would describe themselves, like the free speech party of the free speech party.

SPEAKER_44: Yeah, the free speech wing of the free speech party. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: Yeah. It was like the and now my how things have changed. I mean, Jack is all of a sudden super woke and and Zuckerberg as well all want to reinterpret

SPEAKER_28: section 230 of the Communication Decency Act and the Communications Decency Act, if you don't know, essentially says, you know, Twitter or Facebook or a blogging platform like Medium

SPEAKER_46: or Blogger.

SPEAKER_09: These are kind of like paper. You don't blame the paper company because you wrote with a pen and paper something on it that is outrageous and ridiculous. But here we are. People are blaming the paper companies because let's face it, these things spread a lot faster

SPEAKER_49: than paper.

SPEAKER_50: Just actually back in the did Section 230 ever come up for you back in the weblogs days?

SPEAKER_09: You know, what came up more in those days was fair use and content. People were kind of stuck on copyright more than, you know, who's responsible as a publisher. And people would say like, oh, you wrote a summary of that story. Therefore, you're stealing it. And I was like, do you understand fair use?

SPEAKER_28: Like if I comment on what if Engadget comments on Walt Mossberg's review, the Wall Street Journal was kind of starting to feel like Engadget was stealing it. And then the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times in reaction to Gawker or Engadget or whichever blog it was, wouldn't link back. And so we got into these holy wars just to link back.

SPEAKER_53: And they refused to mention our name and they refused to link back. And I would, as the publisher, because Peter was writing it, I would ride them so hard on Twitter, on Facebook, on my blog.

SPEAKER_28: Here are five examples of this journalist, this journalist, and this journalist taking our story and refusing to link to it. Here are the five examples of us linking to them today. And then we started saying, you know what, we're just going to stop linking to you.

SPEAKER_11: And then that's when, because we started to get more traffic and we became a traffic bit, then people started to give each other credit. But I was the bulldog in that, in that they would send me out to just attack every journalist by name. You know, this journalist at the New York Times refuses to link to Engadget. And here they are. And I would just study them like a hawk. Here's their five, the last five stories, these four originated from blog posts, and they credited no blogs. And people would be very embarrassed. And then I would email it to, you know, Martin Nieselholtz or whoever at the New York Times. And they'd be like, I'm going to keep calling you guys out. You look really stupid. And then they finally were like, oh God, enough of this.

SPEAKER_12: Then there was the era for a while where like they did actually credit people, but they wouldn't link to them. And that was just stupid. It was like, okay, you're acknowledging that they got the scoop.

SPEAKER_06: But like, here you are trying not to like, let traffic leave your website. And it feels like we're kind of past that now. If someone's, you know, reporting on someone else's scoop, they'll link to the article. But that felt like the like broken adolescent years.

SPEAKER_04: It was even more insincere than that. It wasn't even about the traffic. You know what it was really about for them?

SPEAKER_57: Ego in some capacity.

SPEAKER_37: No, it was even beyond traffic and ego. It was about SEO. So they literally did not want the SEO of these new blogs because SEO was how you drove traffic prior to social. Yep. So they desperately did not want the New York Times to link to Engadget with the anchor text.

SPEAKER_59: Because they knew they had domain authority.

SPEAKER_11: They had the domain authority over us. And so whether it was the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, or any other New York Post, Daily News, whoever, they were under strict orders.

SPEAKER_09: Then we would watch them and they would put no follow tags on us.

SPEAKER_04: So they'd link to us and some of them would put no follow, which means you're linking to it, but you're telling the search engines do not give credit to this. And New York Times had like a page rank of 10 and we had a page rank of two. And so it was always really like a really gnarly kind of debate. But now we're up to something which is even crazier. I think in my mind, where do you guys stand on 230?

SPEAKER_53: Are the platforms in your mind, David, responsible for the New York Times publishing a story? Did you think they should have blocked the New York Times story about Hunter Biden?

SPEAKER_61: Or the Post. Definitely not a New York Times story. Definitely not a New York Times.

SPEAKER_09: I'll let you know. That would have been hilarious. New York Post, like they would never have blocked the New York Times, right? I mean, let's be honest.

SPEAKER_23: Well, there's a, I mean, the crazy thing here is like, God, this is such a can of worms. Like the, I mean, to specifically answer your question, I think, no, they shouldn't have for a bunch of reasons. But one of which just simply being the Streisand effect, right? Like the...

SPEAKER_66: It was a practical reason to not do it.

SPEAKER_23: Yeah. Like the fact, the Streisand effect being the, what was it? It was that Barbra Streisand's Malibu mansion had like coastal erosion going on and she tried to hide the photo and prevent it from being published. And that just made it more of a thing. Like this just made a non-story a huge story.

SPEAKER_11: Yeah.

SPEAKER_28: So that would be a practical reason not to do it if you were actually trying to not put attention towards it.

SPEAKER_46: But Ben, even if it was stolen material and a publication that's been around as the New York Post, but that is right-leaning, should a platform then choose to link to it or not?

SPEAKER_12: Well, so now this is great. This is, we're getting into what Jack's sort of proposed solutions were in the hearings.

SPEAKER_06: And one of the things, at least the sentiment that he echoed and that Mark Zuckerberg echoed were, hey, it would be great to have like clear guidelines around what we're supposed to do with 230 when you have objectionable content.

SPEAKER_12: And objectionable can mean lots of things.

SPEAKER_06: But let's just zoom in on the most obvious example, like outright hate speech. And you have something that's either, you know, yeah, like the most aggressive form of trolling. The platforms today, under some circumstances, take that down. And no one's sort of arguing like, well, if they take that down, then they voided 230 and now they're going to be regulated as a media publication. It's like, well, they're taking down something that's like the filth of the Internet. So like, I'm glad they're doing that.

SPEAKER_76: I'd like to think of like.

SPEAKER_12: But this is a thing that they're taking into their own hands and it's not laid out in 230 or anywhere else.

SPEAKER_06: Like, here's the types of things that you should take down and here's the types of things that in order to remain neutral, you should leave up. And so the issue that we have right now is that this 1996, you know, law or small piece of a law that allows the parties to the Facebooks and Twitters. And, you know, I'm not totally sure why Sundar was in there and we were having a conversation about YouTube in the same. It makes sense, but it didn't seem like he was sort of on the same level as the other two in the grilling. But in order to retain this status where 230 has this carve out for us not to be responsible for the content published on our platform, it would be nice to update it and give us some guidance on what we should and should not take down.

SPEAKER_04: So, you know, let's throw to this clip here of Jack responding.

SPEAKER_11: And I thought this was a very interesting one where he talks a little bit about the algorithms and how the algorithms are making an editorial decision. And that kind of breaks 230. And here is just 30 seconds of Jack and we'll come back after this and a commercial break for some feedback.

SPEAKER_80: And finally, much of the content people see today is determined by algorithms with very little visibility into how they choose what they show. We took a first step in making this more transparent by building a button to turn off our home timeline algorithms. It's a good start, but we're inspired by the market approach suggested by Dr. Stephen Wolfram before this committee in June 2019. Enabling people to choose algorithms created by third parties to rank and filter their content is an incredibly energizing idea that's in reach.

SPEAKER_37: All right. That was a really interesting idea. When we get back, I'll ask David and Ben to give me their feedback on bring your own algorithm, BYOA.

SPEAKER_19: And when we get back on This Week in Startups.

SPEAKER_87: This Week in Startups is brought to you by Silicon Valley Bank. What's next? What if? Are we ready? Now what? These are the questions that can keep founders up at night and no one understands this quite like Silicon Valley Bank.

SPEAKER_28: For over 35 years, Silicon Valley Bank has helped thousands of high growth companies by providing scalable financial solutions along with insights and expertise that many other banks just can't. From healthcare to hardware, software to infrastructure, Silicon Valley Bank works with companies across the innovation landscape at all stages of the journey.

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SPEAKER_28: Will your business be next? Learn more at svb.com slash next. Silicon Valley Bank, built for what's next. Welcome back to This Week in Startup. It's our news roundtable. You just heard Jack talking about BYOA, bring your own algorithm to the party.

SPEAKER_09: What a great idea.

SPEAKER_11: From Wolfram, of Wolfram, Alfram fame, mathematician, search engine. Mathematica. Mathematica. Thank you.

SPEAKER_19: What do you guys think right off the bat of BYOA? Oh, man.

SPEAKER_93: To me, this is the corner of the thing that tech nerds love to be like, oh, that's a great solution for the problem, but the general public will never adopt.

SPEAKER_12: The general public, I don't have no analytics on this, but I guarantee you the people who are clicking the button to switch back and forth between home and latest on Twitter is sub-5%, probably sub-1%. And it's like the people who are listening to this, and if they added an ability to modularly load in your own .tw.algo or something, that's like a new file format that lets you pick how you want your fee to be sorted. This is a browser extension in 2005 type market.

SPEAKER_99: Yeah. What do you think, David?

SPEAKER_23: I have a slightly different take on that. Actually, well, Ben, I think you're right. I think nobody, this is like a product idea that's half-baked, but it was interesting. We're going to talk about this in a minute. We just had former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo on Acquired. One of the insights that came from him in that episode that I hadn't realized, Twitter knows what's going on, right? They know that Facebook and now Facebook and Instagram and WhatsApp are the juggernaut, and they're the number two player. They're Avis, Facebook is Hertz. So what do you do when you're Avis? You do different stuff. You're constantly trying to change the game. This is why they did Periscope. This is why they did Vine. This is why they did Twitter Music. All this stuff. And this is a classic example of if Twitter were to actually do it, Facebook is never, never going to change, never going to let users change the algorithm. That is their golden goose. And so if Twitter is willing to change this, they're just trying to do stuff that Facebook can't respond to.

SPEAKER_04: I think this could be interesting as well in terms of if you think about the browser wars or search engine wars, both of those things.

SPEAKER_28: The government did step in depending on the region you're in. Obviously, in the US, we had the Microsoft case with Explorer, their browser versus Netscape.

SPEAKER_04: And they said, hey, you can't really bundle this stuff. And part of the settlement was, hey, you get to pick your browser. And then I think in Europe now, they're sort of saying, hey, when the browser loads, pick your search engine.

SPEAKER_28: And that might be a really easy way for this Google action that just came out with Apple. An easy way to parse that, which is, hey, you load your browser. Anytime you load a new browser, even if Google's paid some carriage fee or whatever, it just presents you every year or every new install with pick your search engine. And it has the top six search engines there. And you pick one of them, DuckDuckGo, Bing, whatever, Yahoo.

SPEAKER_11: This could become like you load up your Twitter, you load up, and it says, do you want, which algorithm do you want? Do you want the Google algorithm?

SPEAKER_37: Because you could take the Google algorithm and put it on Twitter. Yeah. That could be really interesting to have a Google and Bing algorithm that indexes those services.

SPEAKER_23: Well, Twitter has this history, too, of third parties, right? Like, there was always that that was that was it was also a bane of their existence for a long time. But yeah, they've always had this, you know, ethos that like people can build on top of or into Twitter.

SPEAKER_28: Yeah, this was an interesting moment. I think I want to get your guys take on Ted Cruz, who I'm no fan of. I'll be totally honest. I find him to be a blowhard and just like most politicians, just incredibly annoying to even listen to. But boy, you don't want to be on the other side of this guy, because sometimes he does get it right.

SPEAKER_09: And I thought he was putting up a pretty good a couple of swings at Jack. Let's listen to this and come back in a minute after Ted hits hard at Jack.

SPEAKER_114: Mr. Dorsey. Does Twitter have the ability to influence elections? No. You don't believe Twitter has any ability to influence elections?

SPEAKER_119: No, we are one part of a spectrum of communication channels that people have.

SPEAKER_114: So you're testified to this committee right now that that Twitter, when it silences people, when it censors people, when it blocks political speech, that has no impact on elections?

SPEAKER_118: People people have choice of other communication channels with.

SPEAKER_114: Not if they don't hear information.

SPEAKER_123: If you don't think you have the power to influence elections, why do you block anything?

SPEAKER_118: Well, we have policies that are focused on making sure that more voices on the platform are possible. We see a lot of abuse and harassment, which ends up silencing people and having them leave from the platform.

SPEAKER_114: Mr. Dorsey, who the hell elected you and put you in charge of what the media are allowed to report and what the American people are allowed to hear? And why do you persist in behaving as a democratic super PAC silencing views to the contrary of your political beliefs?

SPEAKER_126: Let's give Mr. Dorsey a few seconds to answer that, and then we'll have to conclude this segment.

SPEAKER_118: Well, we're not doing that. And this is why I opened this hearing with calls for more transparency. We realize we need to earn trust more. We realize that more accountability is needed to show our intentions and to show the outcomes. So I hear the concerns and acknowledge them, but we want to fix it with more transparency.

SPEAKER_131: All right. So what's your guys' take on that one? I mean, this is the mix-up.

SPEAKER_133: This is the battle of who has the better 2020 beard. Yeah. Yeah. Can we talk about those beards for a minute?

SPEAKER_134: I mean, it does require a pause. You know, Jack's got such a strong beard game now. He's like ZZ top territory for sure.

SPEAKER_137: Yeah. Remember Brian Wilson, the Giants reliever back in like the 2010 World Series?

SPEAKER_37: Yeah. I mean, this is hitting a level of pandemic supremacy that has rarely been seen in the beard game.

SPEAKER_09: I mean, this is more than like mustache. What do they call it? Like the facial hair November or something? Yeah. Yeah. Movember. Movember. This is like, this is, he's not even up to Movember.

SPEAKER_140: I mean, this is October and he's already coming into Movember like this. All right.

SPEAKER_12: I apologize for getting us onto this. Yeah. I'm giving you both an off ramp here and apologizing.

SPEAKER_141: Who wins this slug fest here?

SPEAKER_143: So look, like they're both wrong.

SPEAKER_06: Like it's ludicrous to take the statement at face value that no, we can't impact elections. Like a hundred percent you can and that's what you're worried about and what we're worried

SPEAKER_78: about and why, you know, like that's why we're here. And the other thing is like. You can see that set up coming a mile away.

SPEAKER_06: Gosh, it's like literally you could see Ted Cruz like rehearsing with his friends and family like that line about who elected you.

SPEAKER_142: And I, you know, it's just such a, I, it's kind of like a Sorkin script at this point, you know, totally.

SPEAKER_151: And I wish I could credit state of Mississippi will not withstand the, I mean, I felt like I was in the insider or something.

SPEAKER_12: But yeah, I mean, I, I, I forget who had this take. It may have been Nilay Patel at the verge.

SPEAKER_06: Um, but the, the, the, the point that I think is really interesting here is the strategy is create these clips and these sound bites of you hitting Jack, you being Ted Cruz and

SPEAKER_12: then distributing them on Jack's platform. It's this like crazy irony of the whole situation of like you're trying to earn the love from your base for doing this to this guy who created the way that you communicate to your base.

SPEAKER_18: It's wild.

SPEAKER_156: Yes.

SPEAKER_28: Uh, that is like an inception type moment. Uh, AOC also incredibly good at this, at this point of, you know, setting people up for these, you know, tweet clips. Yeah. The clip game. It's basically politics is coming up to these, like these hearings and how strong is your clip game? Um, so I think we all agree that these platforms actually impact elections, which is why they're having this and why the Russians interfering and creating bot farms is a whole issue. So Jack loses that part of it, but then Jack kind of turns it up and says, Hey, listen, we're just, we're here to, we're here to help. We want to make it transparent. We were asking you for solutions.

SPEAKER_53: Did this Kung Fu move and flipping the energy here work, David or not? Or does it not even matter?

SPEAKER_23: Uh, I mean, I think from like a politics standpoint, it just depends what your goal is. It's like, no, I like, I don't think it landed well in the moment here, but I mean, it's, I think it gets back to what the goal is. Like the goal here is, is clips for Ted Cruz. Like, I think the real question is like, what, what could consequences of all of this be for the platforms? Um, interestingly, I think, you know, kind of along the lines I was saying earlier about Twitter trying to be orthogonal here, um, any consequences are probably good for Twitter. I think like, uh, anything that we can, if, as long as it also weakens Facebook and then opens up seams for Twitter, um, if it, on the other hand, if it just creates more opportunity for regulatory capture for Facebook, which actually thinking about it now, that's probably the more likely outcome here, uh, then that could be bad.

SPEAKER_59: So, yeah, I don't know.

SPEAKER_167: I like the way they're saying, Hey, what is your suggestion? Please you give us clarity. Y'all are so smart. Go ahead.

SPEAKER_28: I mean, I think everybody can agree what happens when another person threatens somebody or uses violence or hate speech or doxes. Like these are low hanging fruits. Super easy to say. We kicked that person off our platform. Just like somebody came into our restaurant and took a, a leak in the corner.

SPEAKER_09: We're going to kick them out of the restaurant. Like there's no discussion here, but somebody comes in and says, Hey, you know what?

SPEAKER_04: Um, I, I have stolen material or I'm reporting on stolen material, um, about Hunter Biden, which apparently like the information's correct.

SPEAKER_28: And then the question is how did they acquire this information? And then that leads to a whole nother can of worms, which is, is the New York post not.

SPEAKER_04: And I, I sound like I'm red pilled here, but I don't believe in censorship.

SPEAKER_53: Uh, is the New York post not allowed to do investigative journalism in the way the Washington post is?

SPEAKER_12: Well, here's another low brow, or here's another way to phrase that question is, uh, and yours is loaded and mine's going to be loaded too. If you don't have the editor, the managing editor or whatever the title is at the newspaper doing their job, is it Twitter's responsibility to do the job of the editor? Like, should I like that framing?

SPEAKER_06: What if, what if, uh, uh, not the New York post, but any other publication just turns into, uh, a loosely edited, uh, a whole bunch of bundled sub stacks. And then that brand becomes very popular. And so people trust it. And then people are putting out their own basically unedited, you know, journalist, journalist, here's something obtained source, and then straight to the public. If there, if the editor is abdicating their responsibility, at what point is it the responsibility

SPEAKER_12: of the platform to do that in our, you know, in our Republic?

SPEAKER_06: And like, that's the thorny issue. There's a value chain here of information to synthesize, synthesizing it into content, editing content, and then doing distribution. And as long as all of the actors before distribution are doing the job as they have for the last few hundred years in our society, then it shouldn't be an issue.

SPEAKER_12: However, there's lots of business incentives to, uh, not do those jobs exactly to the same level of rigor that we used to.

SPEAKER_18: And therefore it's putting pressure on the platforms to play that role in society.

SPEAKER_175: I think it's just an amazing point, Ben.

SPEAKER_04: You're basically saying, you know, the, the post is going to be like, Hey, we'll just publish this. And then, yeah, you guys amplify it and we get the benefit.

SPEAKER_28: We get the page views. Everybody wins. The incentives are so misaligned in terms of truthiness. Like if we want to get to the truth, really link baiting and amplification on these platforms is just a wicked combination. And listen, it takes two to tango. The publications and the platforms are in cahoots to do link baiting, to capture our attention,

SPEAKER_09: which is why poor David had to delete Twitter off of his phone because his anxiety was going off the charts. When we get back, Expensify CEO is doing the reverse. Yeah. This is a callback. It's a classic. You guys can use that on your pod. You're a pro. It's a pro. You know, this is professionalism.

SPEAKER_180: When you guys get to it, when 1000, when 1000 episodes you have recorded, you tell, I've been doing Yoda for my daughter.

SPEAKER_134: Sorry, everybody.

SPEAKER_181: So great.

SPEAKER_134: He Expensify's CEO jumped the fence. He's absolutely left the property. He is gone rogue and he's doing a reverse Coinbase.

SPEAKER_28: He is telling everybody on his platform, all 10 million customers, Republican, Democrat,

SPEAKER_04: Independent or otherwise, that they need to vote for Biden. We'll get some conversation started about this wild move when we get back on This Week in Startups.

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SPEAKER_183: Thanks again to Main Street for supporting independent media like this week in startups. Let's get back to this amazing episode.

SPEAKER_19: All right, Ben Rosenthal and, sorry, Rosenthal and Ben Gilbert are with us. David and Ben are with us. All right. They do acquire.fm.

SPEAKER_09: Go there and get the LP show. It costs like a hundy a year. They should probably charge a thou. It's an easy Benjamin for y'all to-

SPEAKER_143: Friendly reminder that we do have a free show. It is the main thing. We also have this $100 thing that's great, but like- The $100 thing is just the nuts.

SPEAKER_09: I mean, the free show is great too. But I mean, I'm just trying to get you guys some money here. I mean, I'm looking at your apartments and I'm seeing that there's like not much going on in the background there, David. We need to put some artwork up or something. Ben, I mean, it looks like an Ikea catalog.

SPEAKER_187: It's the Buy David Art Fund.

SPEAKER_09: Buy David some art fund. I don't know what's going on with that plant in the background. Did you get that specifically for your Zoom game, Ben?

SPEAKER_12: I am in an Airbnb and that was here when I got here, but much appreciated as a Zoom background.

SPEAKER_04: Yes, it's really, the Zoom game is looking good. All right, this is crazy. We just get over the whole craziness of Brian Armstrong saying, hey, when you come to work, let's do work and not talk about politics all day long inside of our Slack channel's email because it's too divisive. It's a distraction.

SPEAKER_09: And of course, people had some strong feels about that because people feel like we live in a unique moment in time and you cannot separate these two things. Well, hold my beer because Expensify's CEO emailed all 10 million customers. And I know somebody, producer Nick, who hasn't been using Expensify for a long time. So he was like a dead customer on their list. And he got the email where he goes over why everybody needs to vote for Biden,

SPEAKER_180: which is insane in terms of building a business.

SPEAKER_09: If I was a shareholder in this company, I would lose my, if I was on the board of this company, I would lose my mind because, oh my God, I represent other people's, you know,

SPEAKER_52: shares and money and this is going to mute our returns.

SPEAKER_134: You're going to lose 40% of the customers.

SPEAKER_06: That's the question. Is this altruism or sort of what he perceives as altruism or is it a genius business decision? My favorite line from the entire email is where he says, Expensify depends on a functioning society and economy. Not many expense reports get filed during a civil war. And his whole like argument that we need Biden in office in order to protect our democracy

SPEAKER_12: to not spiral into civil war and is, is kind of like, it just depends how much you buy it.

SPEAKER_193: But if you're a shareholder, you're kind of like, um, maybe, but then the second, wait,

SPEAKER_12: wait, let me, let me, the second level of that is you got to assume that most Expensify

SPEAKER_06: customers are pretty left-leaning. And the question is, did he make more sort of friends forever out of this than he did create churn? Probably.

SPEAKER_46: So Ben's cynical take, David, is Republicans are not tech savvy. Therefore, they wouldn't use a leading cutting edge product like Expensify because they're

SPEAKER_180: Well done, Ben, you just lost a third of your acquired FM subscribers.

SPEAKER_198: Where am I going to buy my artwork now? I didn't say any of that, Jason. That's kind of what you insinuated, Ben.

SPEAKER_201: You said they're left-leaning.

SPEAKER_200: This is good. This is good television here.

SPEAKER_202: But anyway, putting that piece aside, Ben's own, you know, biases.

SPEAKER_203: Um, it could, it could double the number of people because now people who didn't know what Expensify was now, all of a sudden they're the most talked about company.

SPEAKER_23: I was thinking the same thing. Like this is expense reporting software for God's sakes. I mean, like, these are the types of companies that advertise in airports. Why do they advertise in airports? Because how the hell else are they going to get in front of customers? Like, when are you thinking about expense report software? This is genius. It's like up two months from now, nobody's going to remember this, but people don't even remember the Coinbase thing anymore. And that was two weeks ago, but they are going to have like, oh yeah, Expensify. I've heard of them.

SPEAKER_103: As a shareholder in the company, if you were on the board of the company and this happened, what would be your reaction, David?

SPEAKER_23: Ooh, I want to make sure we got some DNO insurance.

SPEAKER_208: Yes. Yes.

SPEAKER_28: This could result in a shareholder lawsuit. You just pissed off whatever percentage of Trump loyalists there are. I mean, he's, he is the president of the United States. Even if the Russians gave him, you know, a third of his votes, you know, or whatever, there's still some group of people who you're going to lose as customers.

SPEAKER_04: In related news, breaking news, the Tide Pods department has just sent an email to 78 million people.

SPEAKER_09: They would like you to remember to vote yes on Prop 22. So Tide Pods for Prop 22 just happened.

SPEAKER_54: That's a joke. Is that a joke or did that? Okay.

SPEAKER_214: Tide Pods have not taken a position yet on Prop 22.

SPEAKER_15: Jason, it's not in the notes here. I don't know.

SPEAKER_216: But I mean, it's like, do we really need Expensify to take a position on the presidential election? I mean, this is Trump- Well, okay, so here's the reality, though.

SPEAKER_23: This is what I think is really interesting about the situation. The reality is, if I'm on the board of Expensify, I can't do anything because David has built his company in a way that he controls the company. Like, I guarantee-

SPEAKER_219: Oh, is he super voting shares? Yeah.

SPEAKER_23: Yeah. So they've raised, what, I think about 28 million in VC total. They did an 11 million Series A pretty early on. Then they did some growth money later. But they've been cash flow positive for a long time. I'm sure he definitely, I'm assuming here, but I'm assuming he definitely has majority equity control or majority board control, likely has majority equity control. So it's just kind of nothing. He can do what he wants.

SPEAKER_222: David Rosenthal, walking pitch book.

SPEAKER_224: Well, I mean, if this could also screw up future hiring of employees. Um, well, it's going to create a monoculture for sure.

SPEAKER_225: Like, no doubt.

SPEAKER_12: I mean, and I do think you, Jason, to your earlier point, like, uh, I don't think this was like a strategic nefarious, I think like, this is just truly what he believes. And I was, I'm willing to bet that somewhere along the line, there's sanity checks with big shareholders.

SPEAKER_06: Like, Hey, I'm going to do this. How do you feel about this? Here's why I feel strongly. Like, I don't think he caught his board off guard with this.

SPEAKER_19: Guarantee. I disagree. I guarantee he went rogue on this one.

SPEAKER_09: This is a Trump. This is total Trump derangement syndrome. This is TDS at the highest level. And again, I'm not red-pilled. I hate Trump.

SPEAKER_19: I'm voting 16 times for Biden. I have 16 ballots I found.

SPEAKER_230: You're just, you're so triggered by Trump that you'll, you'll, you'll go do.

SPEAKER_19: I think this is like a 2am Trump derangement syndrome type post. This person has been doom scrolling.

SPEAKER_04: And this is just crazy behavior.

SPEAKER_106: I have to say, because if he wrote it as a blog post or a medium post on his account, it would not be a problem. Right?

SPEAKER_233: Right.

SPEAKER_06: But the fact that he used the email information owned by, and those relationships owned by the company. Yeah. I mean, especially you go one level deeper, like, uh, I mean, if Nick had opted out, is

SPEAKER_12: this like a violation of the canned spam act?

SPEAKER_70: You know, there's going to be some lawsuits on this. Yeah. Whether they go anywhere. I don't know.

SPEAKER_93: And did it, did it influence any voters? Like that's the, who, who is an undecided voter in this election? Like who got that email and was like, Oh, great points.

SPEAKER_04: I think the only undecided voters, I'll be honest, from what I can gather are the people

SPEAKER_46: who voted for Trump last time and were casting a, I want to burn it down kind of vote.

SPEAKER_28: Like let's burn death system down, you know, like kind of Ross Perot voters, like third party. Like we all know somebody who was like, yeah, I hate all politicians. I want the non-politician in there. And then they saw what happened when you vote for a burn it down candidate and the building

SPEAKER_04: is on fire and you're like, Hmm, maybe burning it all down is not the best approach.

SPEAKER_46: Maybe we shouldn't light a fire. When we get back talking about lighting fires, y'all had my friend Dick Costolo, the famous Dixie on Twitter at Dixie, um, who got into a little bit of a kerfluffle where in response to the original Brian Armstrong Coinbase saying, leave your politics at home post, um, he wrote Dick Costolo, former CEO of Twitter, me first capitalists, I think that's us, who

SPEAKER_244: think you can separate society from business are going to be the first people lined up against the wall and shot in the revolution. I'll happy provide, I'll happily provide video commentary. Gary, you got him to respond to this on acquired.fm or play the clip when we get back from this quick break.

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SPEAKER_29: Once again, rcrowd.com slash twist. All right, welcome back.

SPEAKER_04: Great job, boys, on getting Dick Costolo on the pod. He was on acquired, what episode number? Did you guys number them? I'm just looking. It was the last episode, right?

SPEAKER_93: It is season seven, episode five. Okay.

SPEAKER_04: So, Dick, people don't know, was formerly a comedian. And he's a really, you know, he's got a big heart, that kid. Really, really.

SPEAKER_46: And he, basically, you got him on the pod, and one of you brought up the tweet.

SPEAKER_09: Whose idea was it to bring up the tweet? Did you guys have that in the show notes?

SPEAKER_244: Was that premeditated, or was that ad-libbed? Oh, it was definitely in the show notes. We were in the show notes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_12: And for the record, the reason we had him on the show is, you know, obviously, Dick, former CEO of Twitter, we have made it 120 episodes or something without telling the Twitter story, and it just felt like the right time to do it. So, the reason, we were all lined up months before this, and then, of course, he had that tweet, and, you know, then we emailed him and said, hey, do you want to talk about this in a medium that affords a little bit of long form and room to explain yourself rather

SPEAKER_06: than Twitter, which, as we all know, has very little room for nuance.

SPEAKER_256: Yeah. Yeah. So, Steven Sinofsky from Andreessen Horowitz responded, that's one way to settle a disagreement

SPEAKER_04: and avoid the messiness of open dialogue. So, he came in for his dunk. But here it is, Dick Costolo on Acquired. This is going to be a two-minute clip. We'll come back and talk about it on the other side.

SPEAKER_12: So, Dick, speaking of content and moderation on Twitter and taking down tweets, you recently took one down of your own volition. Tell us about that, and what were you thinking?

SPEAKER_260: Boy, did that go sideways. Holy smokes. First of all, I should know better, you'd think, than to use sarcasm on the platform.

SPEAKER_261: But I was making a sarcastic response to Parker and Jason Kalkanis in this whole back and forth about the Brian Armstrong's post about separating the mission of the company from social activism and social causes. I think Parker made some comment about, and I'm not going to remember his exact response to Jason, but it was something like, look, if you really want to go do that stuff, you'd go to a non-profit. And so, I just fired off this sarcastic response. I was also doing four other things that day and getting ready to entertain a bunch of friends the following day. So, I fired off this sarcastic response. I was like, I'm just going to cause an argument. I don't need to deal with this right now. I'm just going to not pay attention to Twitter for a little while. Boy, was that a bad decision. I should have used the pitchfork analogy, and then the headlines would have been, Costolo incites farmers to revolt. What I was trying to do that went horribly wrong was just make the observation that, look, if you think you can separate the social contract from the economic contract in society, then don't be surprised when the pitchforks come out. That went wrong quickly. A bunch of people were like, you should explain it. You get back on there and explain it. I'm like, how do you explain sarcasm? That seems like a bad idea. So, I just kind of left it up there and like, ah, people will settle down. And then I'm laughing because I started getting these violent threats on my Instagram pictures of tomatoes in my house in Napa Valley. And people were like, I hope these tomatoes burn in the fire. And how about if I line you up in front of those apples and shoot? And I was like, wow, wow, this is really bad.

SPEAKER_260: Finally, the next day was like, all right, I'll just take the whole thing down. But man, what a mistake that was. Whoops.

SPEAKER_256: All right.

SPEAKER_04: So, there you have it. He does the Miakopa. He basically takes ownership of it.

SPEAKER_263: And yeah, he took the tweet down. Is it the right move to take the tweet down?

SPEAKER_24: I think so. I mean, he was, you know, in the clip he was talking about, you know, he started getting death threats and all this.

SPEAKER_266: And it's just like, you know, you don't need any of that.

SPEAKER_04: Yeah, they were like, I'm going to burn down your tomato farm at your Napa house.

SPEAKER_148: That was probably the tame version of what he was getting.

SPEAKER_04: Yeah, that is the weird part about this moment in time on Twitter, which he, of course, was a CEO of. Now, he's an investor. He's got a fund. We've invested in a couple deals together, which is great. Would you have taken it down, Ben?

SPEAKER_257: Is that the right move, taking the post down?

SPEAKER_06: I think so. You know, I think you try and put up a... I think the common move here is you put up another tweet and say, hey, I tweeted something I regretted earlier.

SPEAKER_12: I apologize for it. Like, obviously, you can't actually take a tweet down. It's on the internet forever. There's screenshots, whatever it is. But like, I think that's the way you signal, like, I don't still stand by this.

SPEAKER_100: It was...

SPEAKER_28: Yeah, I mean, I think he is a comedian. People don't know that. He's obviously... The tweet is dripping with sarcasm. I read it and I was like, ha ha. But of course, the right is like, here's what the former CEO of Twitter says,

SPEAKER_04: and they weaponized it. And then boom, it's all of a sudden out of control, right? And now we've got a huge... And I do think... I mean, obviously...

SPEAKER_274: So I agree.

SPEAKER_46: Deleting the tweet, we got the trifecta here. Hattrick, we all agree. Delete the tweet and post something else.

SPEAKER_06: It is a useful point to make that he made. I will say, like, I remember reading that and being like, ooh, that's some language. But, and you know, my first response was not, oh, that must be sarcasm. I was like, whoa, that's strong language. But the point is a very interesting one, which is like, the way our society is heading, can you really draw this line and say that our political lives and our social lives and our activism lives don't come into the workplace at all? And our companies do not have... These two things shall not mix in the way that they sort of existed in the 50s. And, you know, frankly, I think when you have companies that are deeply involved in the fabric of society or maybe even the fabric of future monetary policy, like you look at Twitter with society, Coinbase with monetary policy, like these are inherently political organizations

SPEAKER_12: because they are foundational to civics. Like, I think it's a very fair point that he was making

SPEAKER_06: that I'm not sure you can actually separate these things. And by saying, hey, sorry, we're only here to make money. Like, we're in an era right now where companies are shifting to a multi-stakeholder mindset,

SPEAKER_18: not a purely shareholder mindset.

SPEAKER_04: So you are out of the... You're not in the expensify camp of like, we have to pick a side, but you're also not in the Brian Armstrong to, hey, we're not having this discussion at work. Work is work, politics, religion,

SPEAKER_279: societal issues are outside of work.

SPEAKER_06: I think whether we like it or not, businesses are on a one-way ticket to, you have to have something you stand for in the world.

SPEAKER_08: And you have to represent your community and your employees and your customers as well as your investors. And you can't purely and literally only think about your investors. But you wouldn't include religion in that.

SPEAKER_04: So somebody coming to work and saying, hey, I want you all to convert. I just found out about this new religion, NXIVM or Christianity or whatever. We all got to convert to NXIVM. We're all getting branded with the Expensify logo.

SPEAKER_11: No go on that. So religion, no.

SPEAKER_28: We all agree no religion at work.

SPEAKER_04: But then politics, social issues, social justice, yes. Or there's just no choice but to do that. I'm putting this out here because this is the counter I hear from people who don't want it at work. And it's not necessarily my positioning.

SPEAKER_28: But I do think Tom Cruise was wrong to set up a Scientology tent on a Spielberg film

SPEAKER_04: like he did on World of Worlds because that's disrespectful to Spielberg. And if you're Tom Cruise, you should have a little more respect for Spielberg, period. I don't know if you guys remember that story.

SPEAKER_286: No, I don't remember that.

SPEAKER_09: So, yeah, Tom Cruise, it was in the Mike Ovitz book, Who is Mike Ovitz? And he told David Miscarriage, like, we just don't want Tom to talk. We're aligned in our interests. Just please don't have Tom talk about Scientology ever. And then Tom's like, hold my beer. And he opens a tent at the World of Worlds. Wow. Free stress test. Set for people to come in and to do auditing and get an introduction to it. And Spielberg and him never worked again together. And Spielberg was really upset about it. Yeah, I mean, that makes sense.

SPEAKER_293: I think you hit on the thing on upset there. That's what I was thinking.

SPEAKER_23: Like, no, I don't think a company should. I don't think Expensify should be emailing their customers about a political thing.

SPEAKER_298: For what it's worth, I agree with that. I'd make that clear.

SPEAKER_299: But what about, David? You know, internally having a Slack channel

SPEAKER_28: where people are talking about Black Lives Matter, or Trump's behavior, or immigration, or whatever it is, that's not an acutely, you know, related to our startup SaaS software.

SPEAKER_24: And I think the thing that, to me, was so tone-deaf about the Coinbase thing

SPEAKER_23: was, like, your employees are upset about this. Like, it is causing them mental anguish, you know? And that is something that I think, as an organization, you do have to make room for and address. Like, I certainly would not want to run any kind of organization where it's like, no, like, Republicans aren't welcome here, or anything like that. Like, that seems terrible. Like, they should be.

SPEAKER_70: But also, like, people are really upset. You know, you gotta, like, you gotta take care of your people, right? Like, that's kind of how I think about this.

SPEAKER_04: I think that's a pretty good observation. If your people are suffering, for whatever reason, whether it's police brutality, or it was an immigration issue, or it was people, schools being closed, whatever it is. It could be wildfires in Napa, right? It could be whatever your employees are dealing with.

SPEAKER_23: Even if you don't agree with the issue, like, it's still your problem because your people are hurting.

SPEAKER_04: Yes. And then, there is some merit in your mind, David, or not, of, hey, we do need to talk about this stuff,

SPEAKER_28: but we can't have it become a distraction at work or become the entirety of what we do at work, correct?

SPEAKER_11: Like, so there is some limit to how much distraction there can be.

SPEAKER_64: Yeah, totally.

SPEAKER_23: I think it's, like, of course, like, you need to talk about it. You need to make space for it. It's super important. If it becomes for a certain number of, you know, people or a lot of people within your organization, that is 100% all they're doing all day, well, then they should go, like, work for a nonprofit that advocates for that cost. Correct. That is the line to me. Like, you know, you still got to do your job and the company has to do the thing, but you are also, like, it extends to the life of your people. You got to make room for that. If it becomes, takes over, then it's like, well, no, you probably shouldn't work here.

SPEAKER_314: Do you have a middle ground here, Ben? I'm, like, just not an idealist on many things.

SPEAKER_06: And you can kind of feel out what it is and feel what's right. Like, Brian Armstrong's point about we have to maintain our focus on our mission. That's a great point. But in putting this incredibly idealistic stake in the ground, I think you actually create way more distraction than if you had not done a Medium post, maybe not even done an all-hands email, putting the stake in the ground and just taken some small steps in the organization, especially with the people who feel the most strongly about it. Like, I think it's possible to have values as a firm and have people who do things in their spare time at work outside their responsibilities or maybe even hire people whose jobs are CSR or ESG or whatever the thing is.

SPEAKER_318: There's also employee resource groups are, like, literally, like, the best practices way to do this.

SPEAKER_240: Totally. And I just think there's a, there's just a much more pragmatic way to do it.

SPEAKER_04: I think, Ben, it's very insightful. The pragmatism here. I have a simple rule about this

SPEAKER_29: at my companies and that I advise people who are dealing with this issue in their companies that I've invested in,

SPEAKER_322: which is electronic communication is the beginning

SPEAKER_28: and the end of this problem. This should, these discussions are so charged, they cannot happen on Slack or HipChat or whatever you use for your corporate communications and they cannot happen on email because all empathy is removed and then they, there's no end to any chat discussion. Everybody knows this. It's not like at the,

SPEAKER_09: in some chat flame war, somebody says, that's a reasonable point you've made. I'm going to give it some thought and get, and, you know, let's get back to work. Nobody ever does that. Everybody's just going to post five more links to stories and statistics and keep fighting for their side. So, if you're listening to this, my best practices, if you want to discuss these issues, we will set up an all hands meeting for those people who want to go to it and we'll let everybody opt into that discussion and I'll host it as the CEO of the company. We'll set up a Zoom call if you need to or we can do it. We could all go to dinner or lunch and we'll have a luncheon or a coffee and if you want to go for lunch or coffee with your teammates

SPEAKER_37: and have a discussion about this issue, Save the Whales or politics or anything in between, by all means, look each other in the eyes

SPEAKER_09: and have that conversation face to face with empathy and with respect but not on social media. This is why I tell you that random channel on Slack is a goddamn unmitigated disaster.

SPEAKER_04: Whoever put that as a default is, I mean, I think the Joker put that in there and I'm not talking like, you know, I'm talking Heath Ledger Joker.

SPEAKER_324: Like a chaos agent.

SPEAKER_04: That is a chaos agent. The first thing you should do is, can you even delete random? Can you delete the random room? Get that goddamn random room off your Slack right now because it is a disaster. Speaking of getting ahead of their skis and,

SPEAKER_53: you know, a tweet that might need to be deleted, here was mine from the weekend. I don't know if you saw it but I've been getting into it with the Bernie bros. Let me see

SPEAKER_04: if you think I should delete this tweet, okay? It's a new segment on the show, Ben, David. Should Jason delete this tweet? Here we go. This is a tweet from October 24th at 11 a.m. I don't, what day of the week is that? I don't even know.

SPEAKER_326: That would have been a Sunday, Saturday, something like that?

SPEAKER_52: All right, yes. It's a weekend tweet. This is your standard weekend tweet. J-Cal having a cup of coffee in the backyard and it just came to me. It just came to me.

SPEAKER_46: Gig economy jobs are a free market safety net that catches people before the taxpayer funded safety net which is pretty awesome

SPEAKER_04: when you think about it. Now this has been quote retweeted 493 times when compared to just straight up retweets which are 57. Is that getting ratioed? And that would be called a ratio. I don't know how many comments I've had here but oh my lord did I, if you need to find

SPEAKER_28: where the, if you need to make a list of Bernie bros or AOC advocates for her next campaign just get the people from this list. You're good. You don't even need to use any analytic software.

SPEAKER_23: I've got a total aside of question I've actually been dying to ask you since we're deep on the acquired side on Twitter history right now. Were you one of the original

SPEAKER_64: featured accounts to follow?

SPEAKER_53: No. Famously I offered a quarter million dollars to be on the list. Oh wow. It was sort of a joke because my

SPEAKER_09: friend had started the company. They didn't want me on the list because I was a little bit too controversial and in the early days we kind of used Twitter like a chat room more than you know like a Noval here is a vaulted post that we will all setting up

SPEAKER_334: my Twitter.

SPEAKER_09: Yeah I'm just setting up my Twitter kind of like and you would just be like hey how you doing what are you up to and you

SPEAKER_28: would just go back and forth. It was a public chat room and in fact it was SMS based. So when they came out with that list as a they were looking for a business model and nobody thought advertising on social networks would work because it was kind of intrusive to put an ad between that's stupid like it's never going to work and actually if you look at the click throughs it doesn't actually work that well compared to like search clicks which are much more effective but in aggregate because people spend so much time there it does work putting that aside I said you know Ev I think the suggested user list you should sell those slots or you should have nine and then sell the tenth as a you know

SPEAKER_09: promoted one it's like oh that's an interesting idea it's like okay hold on I'm gonna write a blog post and I wrote a blog post and I said I'll offer $250,000 to a person and if I can monetize

SPEAKER_338: deal of a lifetime it

SPEAKER_09: would have been a deal of a lifetime and so Kara Swisher got on and this is kind

SPEAKER_78: of yeah Chris Sokka I feel like I was an investor

SPEAKER_09: Kevin Rose was an investor and we were all kind of friends and they weren't very high frequency Twitter so they wanted people who were like you know not high frequency but who are you know many celebrities back in the day this was the web 2.0 celebrity time period 2008 2004 to 8 anyway long story short I wasn't on that but that was also a way they kind of had influence over journalists because the journalists who did get on

SPEAKER_341: there like some tech crunch writers Kara Swisher I think was on it O'Malek was on it you know

SPEAKER_244: you're gonna have a pretty good view of Twitter

SPEAKER_09: if they got you your first million followers that was like that would be literally like handing I mean I'm not pointing out Kara Swisher here because she didn't ask for it but that'd be like giving a journalist a million dollars

SPEAKER_23: I mean that those straight up that was probably worth well more than a million dollars to be on that list okay yeah

SPEAKER_04: I mean if you you probably double a triple your salary so over 10 years you're probably making an extra half million dollars a year so it's probably worth five million it was probably like Twitter it depends

SPEAKER_344: if you're then investing that in Uber or not like some people are gonna put that in the savings account and some people

SPEAKER_345: are gonna invest in Uber that's a fair point it's a fair point anyway so that was the idea

SPEAKER_218: you paid that money you might not have had the money to put into wait let me

SPEAKER_143: pull a Calacana so speaking of Uber the gig economy yes let's

SPEAKER_134: bring it back let's bring it back thank you Ben for hosting now Ben's become the host look at

SPEAKER_04: you Ben what do we think of this tweet there is J Cal delete

SPEAKER_350: no way I would

SPEAKER_06: have ever tweeted this like okay I I can't imagine this passing my filter this seems so interesting in the abstract this passes the sniff test of it's a weekend I'm reflecting on the world I have these sort of interesting pattern matching mental models something about businesses I'm thinking about our country our economy our tax structure and you're like oh in a way these things are like kind of similar and then there's like a different test that should happen before you tweet it that's like in as this practically applies to many many many most of the people that have these jobs would they in any way look at it this way or would this just be pissing

SPEAKER_350: them all off and I feel I feel you did not do that second part okay

SPEAKER_191: so you're saying

SPEAKER_46: it's got a little bit of a Paul Graham kind of feel to it is what I'm getting it's got a little PG kind of Paul Graham is what do you say David should J Cal delete the tweet or leave it

SPEAKER_24: up now well I said what was

SPEAKER_356: his favorite game show delete what was your

SPEAKER_24: intention in tweeting it was it my intention get a lot of response or to put the thought out there I was

SPEAKER_28: putting the thought out there that there needs to be a there didn't used to be a level of let's call it on demand work where

SPEAKER_04: anybody who needed money could just make money right now like something acute happens I

SPEAKER_28: don't know my my car gets a flat bad example but I you know my my spouse loses her job or his job I need to make up a $300 gap we have a

SPEAKER_09: car I'm just gonna work you know whatever number of hours to make up that gap it's amazing that that

SPEAKER_28: efficiency with no friction exists in the world therefore there what those

SPEAKER_09: people would have done is they would have went to their friends and asked for a loan they would have tapped their credit cards if they couldn't do either of those things well guess what

SPEAKER_361: payday loan maybe

SPEAKER_09: they have to sell something or eventually maybe welfare or unemployment or some social safety net right so in

SPEAKER_53: way my thinking was this is like this little pressure cooker or this little thing that didn't exist before that for quick money you

SPEAKER_28: can get this frictionless job whereas getting a job typically meant waiting till Monday putting out resumes knocking on doors and the onboarding of getting a job is measured typically in weeks maybe months well right

SPEAKER_365: plus you have to apply I mean that's

SPEAKER_70: another thing too like you might not get the job whereas with Uber and like yeah you might not get it but like high likelihood you'll get it so

SPEAKER_368: that was my spirit of this David to answer your question okay so well I think this is a new feature of society

SPEAKER_04: and the the implied my implied message was if this didn't exist then people are going right to that other safety net right so there's like a little safety net on top of the safety net and that's kind of cool that this

SPEAKER_23: exists yep I totally agree with you on that by the way so which is separate from prop 22 if we want to get into that but anyway I think that you leave it up then you still like you thought that you clearly still believe that why would you take it down

SPEAKER_375: no just because of the ratioing yeah

SPEAKER_240: I'm trying to reflect on like why why this

SPEAKER_06: because clearly this this is deeply upsetting to a lot of people and I think it's because the assumption is that there is a high liquidity in our jobs marketplace so it's really easy to have a great job and if that falls away then you dip in and you know you you you drive over for uber for a little bit and you pop right back out of it and you can go and get that other great job again and I think that that doesn't exist especially when you become there's this great line that's like it's so much more expensive to be poor than it is to be rich and it's like once you get at or near zero it becomes so damn expensive just to live your life that like you're trapped forever and I think that I

SPEAKER_134: mean it's also coming from the wrong person

SPEAKER_04: like the guy who got rich off uber saying this is obviously got a horse in the race therefore yeah but you know the there were a lot of F Jason's in the responses here and you look like a store brand Kevin Spacey ouch Jason

SPEAKER_240: I'm curious like had so

SPEAKER_04: consolidated wanker

SPEAKER_93: energy here do you when stuff like this because this is not the first time something like this has sort of happened in your life like a Donnybrook

SPEAKER_240: does it make you want to not do that anymore or does it make you want to be like I'm going to be myself and like I don't care yeah

SPEAKER_134: pretty much the opposite actually that's I think one of the the major flaws in this operating system and or features

SPEAKER_383: is that Twitter it's driving traffic it's

SPEAKER_202: kind of like it's kind of still my opinion I wouldn't delete the tweet I think I think the tweet stands the

SPEAKER_04: tweet stands it is a safety net and I think y'all are going to be by y'all I mean socialists and Bernie bros you get rid of

SPEAKER_28: those jobs you're going to see a lot more people who are going to be on the dole they're going to be tapping you know taxpayer resources or be careful because those jobs also drove the wages up at other places because people could go to the gig economy that made shift work like Walmart Target Starbucks all those places had to raise their wages to compete against the

SPEAKER_09: flexibility so more options equals more competition equals better pay equals better opportunity I mean Amazon has had to raise their prices Apple has had to raise their wages in their warehouses and stores because of this and so this is just

SPEAKER_87: based I mean we had pre-pandemic we had record low unemployment do you think the gig economy was not the driver of that of course it was yeah one of the major drivers

SPEAKER_23: there are studies that are crazy I mean whether you even cut these studies you know in half but that like the gig economy is 20 percent of American workforce now like yeah cut that by a quarter either by three quarters it's still enormous yeah I mean

SPEAKER_11: this is the the weird thing that's gonna I think if you know whether prop 22 passes or not I don't think it affects Uber stock price other either way it goes up is my belief because it just cements their lead I've said this many times before like yeah funny

SPEAKER_06: thing about regulation on incumbents yeah

SPEAKER_04: like what now people have to work a specific shift and they have to

SPEAKER_203: wear an Uber uniform and you can't work for Lyft or DoorDash or whatever

SPEAKER_394: that's that's the big issue right is the multi homing on the

SPEAKER_04: supply you're going to if you're full-time you can be exclusive you can't work for a competitor so I don't know but wait you were gonna say David you're you're are you vote yes or no on 22 prop 20 I debated

SPEAKER_396: really no I am in California down in

SPEAKER_23: San Francisco I really debated a lot because I actually believe the same thing that we were just talking about that like I think these I think the gig economy is really important to the economy um I ultimately voted no though because um uh not because I think AB5 is the right solution but the uh I felt like prop 22 was just too much of an overreach on the uh what was it seven eights of the legislature required to overturn it like if they'd left that out in

SPEAKER_70: there I would have I would have voted yes but I was just like come on that's like that's too much what

SPEAKER_04: what about you Ben are you pro 22 and letting people have options or do you want to take away the option and make people go full-time uh there's a little framing

SPEAKER_12: there as you just framed it I want people to have options I would say I'm honestly not up to speed enough as a Washington resident I mean basically

SPEAKER_04: it makes everybody be full time and you treat them as such and you know it's just gonna yeah it's gonna be an interesting one okay uh the DOJ back on October

SPEAKER_11: 20th they filed a little bit of a lawsuit there against Google uh Google uh allegedly I mean we kind of know this has paid Apple between like eight twelve billion a year to be the default search engine these deals have existed forever uh this is how the Mozilla Foundation the non-profit foundation broke all records for a non-profit in terms of generating revenue and the IRS didn't even know how to handle that they had to do like some really crazy that's a whole nother story this is

SPEAKER_403: like the mid-2000s is like oh five oh six oh seven when they're yes yeah yeah

SPEAKER_141: they basically the Mozilla browser which was the sort of open source version of

SPEAKER_11: Netscape just became the default browser and they just started printing money because Google bought uh was paying them for all those searches um Apple uh did

SPEAKER_04: look at making a search engine I can tell you that because I was building a search engine and Steve Jobs looked at Mahalo.com

SPEAKER_318: oh that's right I can break

SPEAKER_04: that news right now uh oh I I we gotta cut over to acquired right now I I basically I knew Steve I emailed him and he looked at it um and I'll just leave it at that um and uh I wrote back in 2015 after Apple announced Spotlight I said Apple is launching a search engine to destroy Google and I said Tim Cook is suggesting a better path for Apple users Apple will give you the ability to search for free as in ad free and data collection free talk about prescient

SPEAKER_09: uh and uh in fact the power move would be for Apple to buy DuckDuckGo and use their excellent web search to backfill um underneath the one box because Apple was doing clever things when you searched on your desktop if you search for weather we give you weather if you search if you know if your result is in the app store and now we're seeing that on mobile phones so

SPEAKER_11: according to the financial time Apple has quietly increased its efforts to develop its own search technology on iPhones obviously it will search your documents obviously will search the weather it does a local search you probably seen that if you search for in and out burger it doesn't give you Google's in and out burger results it gives you their burger results and so uh which by the

SPEAKER_403: way this this already ships in mac os and ios is

SPEAKER_12: just a sort of silent background thing and that the easiest way to tell is when you open up Safari and you type searching something and you start searching something and it says Siri suggested result it's because Apple already

SPEAKER_403: has a web crawler and they have a I mean they they have a map of the web and they use that to figure out yeah so

SPEAKER_53: they're slowly intercepting which means maybe they would eventually take this away from Google and I think

SPEAKER_04: this is a bit of a standoff that Eric Schmidt and Steve Jobs when he was alive were involved in when according to Steve Jobs Eric Schmidt stabbed him in the back and basically did Android right that was like their big breakup sure um but this seems to be an absolutely ridiculous uh DOJ

SPEAKER_28: filing this is of all the things you could go

SPEAKER_53: after Google for and Apple for the the default search engine deal is the easiest one to unwind it feels totally political to me what did you think when you saw this big like

SPEAKER_28: Google's in hot water because they have a deal with Apple this has been hiding in plain sight forever this is a publicly announced yeah

SPEAKER_208: you know so small part of Google's revenue who

SPEAKER_06: cares a few thoughts I mean the first one is oh my gosh the very

SPEAKER_12: first thing that I saw was DOJ and Google I was like it's finally happening like Google is gonna have its Microsoft moment just like everyone else you start reading into this and you're like oh all right wake me up when it's over like this is this is a show pony here um but I think it's actually very interesting to understand the deal between Apple and Google and I think that David and I were pretty well prepped for it because we did this um top 10 acquisitions of all time episode and all uh nine of the 10 were revenue creative

SPEAKER_403: where uh you know the companies combined and then made a crap ton of money like Facebook bought Instagram and then made a crap ton oh hold on maybe I should guess these

SPEAKER_418: hold on oh what do

SPEAKER_403: you think you won't get two you definitely not get number two

SPEAKER_04: hold on no no don't be don't be so sure okay uh well Microsoft bought PowerPoint back in the day uh I

SPEAKER_53: believe they bought Excel uh no no just PowerPoint just PowerPoint so that was an interesting

SPEAKER_04: one but I don't know if that would be on your list um clearly applied semantics that Google bought and YouTube Google bought and Android YouTube's on the list yeah Android's on the list YouTube Android I don't know if you put applied semantics but that's what created AdWords which are the ads that are on other sites but maybe you left that one off we did

SPEAKER_315: you so those two well it was uh Overture that Yahoo bought which really

SPEAKER_365: inspired everybody and then yeah oh that was on your list uh it was not on the list but um because it was weird what all happened and then

SPEAKER_29: you obviously have Instagram WhatsApp so there's four right

SPEAKER_429: there uh WhatsApp was an honorable mention oh

SPEAKER_11: an honorable mention okay because it was

SPEAKER_429: speculative it was very

SPEAKER_46: speculative that's true you wouldn't put Oculus on that list because nothing's happened there there's is there anything that

SPEAKER_32: Apple has ever bought that's been a revenue driver let's think that through here well they

SPEAKER_12: did one enormous acquisition that has to be on there it's you have to squint to call it a revenue driver but it's the most important

SPEAKER_05: thing they've ever done

SPEAKER_171: really what is it they

SPEAKER_226: bought next oh well played gentlemen well

SPEAKER_191: played they yeah that was an act was that was an aqua hire because

SPEAKER_09: they did buy Siri but Siri's garbage I mean

SPEAKER_191: the fact that Siri is

SPEAKER_09: still so shitty is just unbelievable oh wow that's a great pull

SPEAKER_433: and then we had um I think these were honorable mentions but we had PA semi and authentic uh which uh is Apple Silicon uh

SPEAKER_435: huh huh all right well done who else was on the list anybody

SPEAKER_06: else so the big one you missed um which is the number two which shook David and I both is uh double

SPEAKER_435: click oh yeah double click by Google of course yeah they brought that for like three or four billion I think it was all display

David Friedberg: advertising three billion and it's gotta have made it's gotta have made over a hundred billion we estimate

SPEAKER_104: 122 billion of value

SPEAKER_04: 120 something a couple of billion a year for a decade yeah um double click was the original Silicon Alley company that's right I interviewed them I

SPEAKER_53: interviewed them for Silicon Alley reporter in the first issue when they were at a company called Poppy Tyson Poppy Tyson was an ad

SPEAKER_28: agency and Kevin Ryan and Kevin O'Connor were building double click inside of the Poppy Tyson office oh no way because they wanted to be next to an advertiser so they Poppy Tyson gave them advertising space and there were five of them and I went to visit them and they were like we're gonna build this thing to serve the ads and I'm like what do you mean ads and they're like you know the banners that are on

SPEAKER_46: hotwired imagine if one company served them I'm like but why would they need you to do that this on their servers it makes no sense like oh well we can do average I was like that's bullshit get the fuck out of here what are you talking about nonsense so this Google one is not the one we were expecting right David real quick

SPEAKER_445: the others you missed booking.com yes no

SPEAKER_06: that's a good one oh and there's two I was gonna say so there's two media companies what do you think the other one is other than it's gotta be Marvel of

SPEAKER_11: course yeah Marvel yeah that's a no-brainer Marvel has 20 films that have done over a billion dollars each at Marvel franchise and

SPEAKER_341: that doesn't count merchandise it's gotta be 50 billion that's 5 billion to 50 right I

SPEAKER_50: think we said ESPN is better but like Marvel's

SPEAKER_279: the second best longer that's for sure yeah yeah right so you're talking about that's a 30 year story yep and we

SPEAKER_06: determined the absolute dollar return to Disney on the Marvel pickup was

SPEAKER_12: 16.3 billion as evaluated by Disney's market cap in March and we did the episode and I think they spent 4 billion on it I was

SPEAKER_04: just going by 20 movies times roughly a billion each you know it's gotta be and then I mean we're not even looking forward like those movies them right just that one those three phases those 20 movies are going to generate as much in the future as they've generated already through Disney plus this episode

SPEAKER_23: though it highlighted so much for us just the power of tech business models because it like take Marvel amazing incredible company it costs so much to make those movies

SPEAKER_148: Instagram doesn't pay a dime for the content on their network yeah yeah

SPEAKER_11: it's a fair point yeah I mean when you don't have to pay for the con Robert Downey jr is getting paid 50 million a movie right 100 million a movie just to show up for like six minutes he's got like 12

SPEAKER_143: lines totally so so so okay so I'm gonna weave us back here so yes the only

SPEAKER_12: one of these that was not revenue creative is Android and it it right the reason it makes the list right is and it generates some revenue like it generates actually a really nice amount of revenue from the Play Store now but the reason that it creates so

SPEAKER_06: much value for Google even though it's not a huge revenue driver is because of all the money they don't have to pay Apple if iOS was the only mobile yes operating system and this like I think this is like new news to a lot of people that's like oh my god there's nine billion dollars that flows out every year from Google to line Apple's pockets in order to cut this deal and when you really look at like why they built Android at all it was a hedge like what why why Google is like we need an operating system here so that we don't owe our traffic acquisition costs to someone else and there's there's um uh uh of interesting philosophical point here where Apple really likes to be on their soapbox about privacy about we don't do this dirty advertising based on user yeah we just wash the

SPEAKER_461: money we just wash it what is it what percent of their

SPEAKER_462: profits they got offense right

SPEAKER_06: like they don't have to exactly they don't have to be involved in that at all but they mint money from it yeah

SPEAKER_46: they just get one check a year instead of like a million advertisers giving them 90 thousand dollars each they just get one advertiser to give them

SPEAKER_466: nine billion dollars and absent this lawsuit it wasn't

SPEAKER_12: going to be disclosed it's not like it's in their quarterly earnings of like oh we have this huge revenue stream like it's it's just done yeah yeah

SPEAKER_09: it's done it's they they announced like every five years they're doing it for another five years it comes up but you know the scope of

SPEAKER_04: it and how it works what the kickers are you know but I've

SPEAKER_53: got an easy solution for this one which is it's going to end at a certain point in time so what if they said this is what I would do if I was Apple I would say searches are now an

SPEAKER_28: auction in Safari and so you can pay by search you just pick you want 10 cents a search or 50 cents a search anybody can buy them and every time you use the search box it just gives you a random one that's one crazy solution but the easier one is

SPEAKER_06: and Google probably still pays them just as much money because Google correct because they're they're they're going to be able to pay the most they're going to

SPEAKER_314: pay the market-bearing price and there will have been choice involved in the selection but

SPEAKER_37: there's free market right so that's a that's a brilliant solution okay we solved it's a free market well here's an even

SPEAKER_04: better free market if you want

SPEAKER_28: to be at the default search engine we list five of them and you the consumer picks which five and we charge all five all five pay us per search 10 cents a search for and if you want to

SPEAKER_09: be on the list you can put yourself there and then if you want to stop you can take yourself off the list at any time so you can just go into your interface Yahoo DuckDuckGo or whatever competitor so if Bing wants to make a push and lose a billion dollars a year

SPEAKER_87: on search they can just buy out all the searches right just make it a free market which is what Google does with its ads problem

SPEAKER_314: I think because Google has the

SPEAKER_06: best LTV per user they would always be the highest bidder like I think that's how it play out

SPEAKER_366: somebody like Amazon decided they want to F with them

SPEAKER_64: oh it's interesting that would be

SPEAKER_108: interesting is you you get information about the type of search before you bid on it if it's a product search then Amazon or yeah or you just say

SPEAKER_28: you know Amazon's just like you know what we're gonna put the app we're gonna make they're gonna take a nine they had their own search engine project right we're gonna put a nine up on this thing and we're just gonna we're just gonna screw with you know

SPEAKER_46: Google we'll just bid on it because you know I don't know if you saw today but I think they're doing 20 billion in advertising or something crazy on Amazon

SPEAKER_413: Amazon are making a lot of money for easy it's bonkers yeah

SPEAKER_314: David do you want to drop some

SPEAKER_100: Amazon earnings nuggets this I'm

SPEAKER_383: such an Amazon fanboy but like go

SPEAKER_04: ahead I mean then we'll wrap on that I mean we got so much we could do a two-hour show here and

SPEAKER_383: we're there just we get so much

SPEAKER_488: content give us the Amazon one it's so juicy it's so much juice

SPEAKER_489: it's crazy having this company generated 96 billion dollars of revenue last quarter I'm sorry

SPEAKER_163: last year no last quarter last quarter and that's up 30 I think 37 percent annual growth on a bay

SPEAKER_491: on a 96 billion dollar it's a 25 year old company and their revenue growth rate is what David 30 so like Facebook's revenue growth rate was what like 11 percent or something like that makes no sense

SPEAKER_493: and that is bonkers it's bonkers

SPEAKER_23: Amazon generated like I saw that they started really highlighting their free cash flow so they generated in the last 12 months 30 billion dollars of free cash flow what are they gonna do with it while growing 40 percent

SPEAKER_318: the basis is Bezos the Bezos is like top five allocators of all the capital allocators of all time he is allocating it all back into the

SPEAKER_28: business of course what is he but what's left I mean what can they're doing everything 30 billion I mean

SPEAKER_24: prime air video tons of AWS

SPEAKER_50: investment they're hiring a hundred thousand people by like the end of the

SPEAKER_497: year did it say they they hired 250

SPEAKER_04: thousand people last quarter yeah

SPEAKER_50: something like crazy it's insane

SPEAKER_04: here's a pro tip for Bezos being the richest guy on the planet is a bad bad moniker let me tell you that is not what you want to be you want to be the thousandth richest person or the 12 thousandth that's a great place to live

SPEAKER_28: you don't want to be number one what he should do is he should just raise the

SPEAKER_09: minimum wage for the factory workers to $25 an hour I'm dead serious right now and I listen I know I'm a free market guy I think this would be the power free market move is to just take whatever the minimum wage is and go 50 percent above it and I'm talking about the local ones as well so the $15 becomes you know whatever 25 30 just jump the fence and pay those folks a ridiculous amount of money or give them bonuses that net them out to that amount and that would make him look so incredible I don't

SPEAKER_11: know if you guys know the story around Home Depot oh it's a great story yeah they

SPEAKER_53: used to pay the associates like a crazy amount of money they got you know the people were making 50 60 70 thousand dollars a year for being associates and then there was a real career path where people who were associates wound up being the managers of stores and the associates were I mean I don't know if you remember the early days of Home Depot but they were super helpful people and they and they kept great people this would be an amazing move on Amazon's part to just be mention you know add five bucks to the minimum wage and then that takes the that would give him the

SPEAKER_04: high ground when he gets his ass dragged in there he'd be like well Apple pays $15 and I pay $25 an hour so it's a

SPEAKER_307: Facebook to look at if you read their earnings release he's he's trying to do this without actually doing this which is such a Bezos move they talk about how they were leaders in going to 15

SPEAKER_148: bucks an hour which I think they were for sure they were yeah and how like Target and Best Buy have responded and

SPEAKER_29: you know but he took their RSUs away

SPEAKER_04: because the unionization stuff was happening he's like okay you got oh yeah oh you you want me to go from 11 to 15 that's fine RSUs off the table boop you want to be union great boop we'll take those RSUs now you don't own shares I mean that was that was a little hardcore move not to mention Amazon was probably

SPEAKER_05: the best investment you could make at that time to today I mean this is why

SPEAKER_11: union leaders and this kind of mentality of I don't want to be an owner and it's us versus them is the

SPEAKER_46: wrong mentality to take in terms of having equity you always want to get

SPEAKER_513: the equity I mean guys 10 years ago Amazon was a $30 stock it's a 30

SPEAKER_365: $3,500 stock now it's bonkers oh did

SPEAKER_134: you guys see that Ryan Smith bought the Utah Jazz so great for me now I've got

SPEAKER_142: Cuban Chamath what do you mean I've got what does that mean these are my friends

SPEAKER_202: I can go to a game I can get tickets this is I can go to Boston with gross back I can go Ted Leontes the

SPEAKER_12: Wizards when this is gonna be a thing again you got to take us to get some

SPEAKER_202: floor seats we need to go to games I have sat on the floor in my life six times

SPEAKER_04: now and multiple playoff games and one NBA final whoa the Raptors that was worse for the Raptors I have paid

SPEAKER_11: 0.0 dollars for my floor seats today

SPEAKER_314: that's does anyone ever actually play pay for floor seats like the people

SPEAKER_09: sitting in them 100% like the people who like Spike Lee complains about how much he has to pay for garden floor

SPEAKER_148: seats oh man I went to a have you have you been to the suites at the at the

SPEAKER_04: new Chase Center I took a tour after a game and saw some of the suites but yeah they're pretty the bunker suite and that

SPEAKER_108: kind of FRB suite right before the

SPEAKER_338: pandemic oh my gosh wait such an

SPEAKER_318: incredible idea you put the suites under the floor level in the tunnel oh so

SPEAKER_435: great yeah so for people who don't understand you cannot see the game

SPEAKER_04: except on TV is from those bunker

SPEAKER_64: suites correct yep but they've a whole wall of the suite is a giant TV right

SPEAKER_04: and well that's crazy leave the suite and

SPEAKER_28: go sit in chairs and watch the game so you're in the first four rows or something like that yeah you're not on

SPEAKER_04: the floor and you go into your little private cave and you got like a man cave and it's amazing and then what I

SPEAKER_46: understand because they were trying to sell me one of these and I was like how much I mean I was like I'm rich

SPEAKER_413: that's crazy no like I can invest in

SPEAKER_524: not the suite owner it was pretty crazy

SPEAKER_52: the amount they wanted for that I was thinking about it and they said well here's the great part you have access to the suite all the time you can go to your suite and use it for meetings so Ben like we could tape the pod in the suite we could go to the suite anytime

SPEAKER_525: it's a business expense it's a bit yeah

SPEAKER_52: you can use it as your office basically you have the key to your suite you can go use it and take meetings so if you want

SPEAKER_23: and it's not just basketball games it's all the concerts there it's ever you get you're bought out for the whole thing

SPEAKER_28: if if Coldplay is playing Ben we could all go work from there from the day tape two or three pods you know do an

SPEAKER_224: acquired FM LP show God I hope our brand is

SPEAKER_93: not like we're going to a Coldplay pod well whatever I mean the girls love the

SPEAKER_202: Coldplay you know I'm saying you bring the ladies whatever I'm not the Coldplay but you know I mean I like the

SPEAKER_142: scientists Amazon would rank where in terms of GDP if it was a country boys here we go do do do not comparable can

SPEAKER_240: we not do this this is like the biggest

SPEAKER_142: fallacy like enterprise value does not

SPEAKER_307: equal we're talking revenue or revenue

SPEAKER_142: would equate no we're doing enterprise

SPEAKER_21: value this is apples and oranges okay

SPEAKER_06: what's the market what's the market cap of like a country then like how would

SPEAKER_519: you value America like can you do the

SPEAKER_06: sum of future GDP cash flows in order

SPEAKER_525: to compute I mean that's basically what

SPEAKER_11: we do with our debt right like what is our debt ratio to our GDP now is it 1.5

SPEAKER_04: or something GDP yeah I mean it was very reasonable for a long time US GDP to debt

SPEAKER_49: ratio here we go let's take a look that's

SPEAKER_539: useful that's effectively revenue to debt

SPEAKER_49: right it's not earnings right but GDP

SPEAKER_11: United States gross the United States debt to GDP ratio in March 2020 was 82 percent up from 79 percent so we're almost up to a hundred which country has the highest debt to GDP ratio this is an easy one you should know about it because they had some financial issues famously in the

SPEAKER_04: 80s and 90s and giving it away no Japan Japan the national debt is more than twice the amount of the annual gross domestic product more than nine trillion so but we will get there I mean I think that's what's going to happen to the United States is will be 1.5 or something which you know how do you even know if that's I don't

David Friedberg: think people in the world know if that's

SPEAKER_314: good or bad wait Nick while we're talking about this can you look up basically where Amazon's revenue would have it fit in the

SPEAKER_12: GDP charts rather than its its market cap because I think that's an interesting pretty damn high yeah because what will be

SPEAKER_543: pretty high yeah David what was their

SPEAKER_365: revenue yeah run rate there at 400 billion

SPEAKER_318: so record this past quarter it was a basically a hundred billion so running

SPEAKER_115: heading into Q4 so GDP let's see so

SPEAKER_18: whose GDP is probably around 400 billion

SPEAKER_49: a year so who's got a GDP in that 400

SPEAKER_183: billion range let's see GDP of 400 billion 399 is Ireland I was gonna guess

SPEAKER_50: some sizable European countries would be

SPEAKER_314: Ireland okay so where everyone keeps but above Israel yeah off sea overseas cash flows is actually the country in which they're

SPEAKER_224: comparable in size to but you know in a short period of time you know they could get to a billion and a trillion Ireland's

SPEAKER_394: not growing at 40% a year that's what's

SPEAKER_489: just so insane about this they're growing 40% a year at a 400 billion dollar revenue

SPEAKER_06: run rate there are late stage private startups that would love to grow at 40% per year and here we don't a quarter century into Amazon's existence well and

SPEAKER_53: and then you have to ask yourself if you're the government do you want to ankle this

SPEAKER_167: do you want to Tanya Harding Jeff Bezos

SPEAKER_28: like literally that's what our government wants to do they want to run up with a

SPEAKER_04: pipe and smack Tanya Harding style the kneecap of Amazon why would you kneecap Amazon if they're not doing anything that any of us can feel is anti-competitive

SPEAKER_244: what's anti-competitive about what they're doing charging four dollars for a lightning cable when Apple is charging us 20 and they don't let any third-party cables in their store sounds a lot more anti-competitive

SPEAKER_560: me let's start with Apple yeah totally well

SPEAKER_362: that's the thing number one thing that Amazon is doing that's anti-competitive

SPEAKER_23: well and all of Amazon's businesses are in hyper-competitive markets e-commerce web

SPEAKER_70: hosting computing video like these are hyper-competitive markets groceries yeah

SPEAKER_12: with Whole Foods I mean to me that the grayest area is competing with the sellers on their platform would you would you rather

SPEAKER_202: they take the sellers off of Amazon is that a solution here well yeah that's

SPEAKER_314: interesting that's the opposite that they've been going like every year they

SPEAKER_12: been Jeff Bragg's in the annual shareholder letter about how much the third-party sellers are starting to kick their ass in terms of the amount checkmate transact on

SPEAKER_28: checkmate on the platform yep yeah I mean it's literally checkmate it would be like it would be like Apple allowing multiple app stores on their platform that's the

SPEAKER_167: equivalent right we're not allowing third party app stores now right yeah I mean

SPEAKER_06: the only thing that Amazon really has to

SPEAKER_12: look out for is if it's ever perceived that they're charging a lot of money for something after they competed away the competition and frankly like that's just not in their DNA they're a retailer they're used to retail margins they're not one of these you know 80% gross margin

SPEAKER_314: software companies like they're used to competing in these low market or low margin businesses and would that even

SPEAKER_46: work like would it work for them to say like we're gonna put every you know you know every maker of televisions out of business or every maker of lightning cables out of business or USB C cables out of business and then we're gonna triple the price really

SPEAKER_338: consumers would go for that no no and so I'm gonna do that though that's not the game they're playing no I mean the only

SPEAKER_23: business line they have where you could potentially run this as a strategy is AWS but

SPEAKER_394: they've proved for the last 15 years that's like they just keep lowering prices not raising prices there is one potential

SPEAKER_04: solution here I think if we were going to rewrite the law so this is the only one I think is interesting you guys know about SK Telecom in Korea in South Korea I know

SPEAKER_06: about the SKT esports team that they sponsor but I know a little bit about SK

SPEAKER_28: Telecom the reason why SK Telecom has got all these investment arms and they're like investing money around the world and apps

SPEAKER_53: and everything and have a venture arm is because they're capped at 70 percent I

SPEAKER_04: believe ownership so ownership cap let's see so there is some SK they can only have a certain percentage of market share and so

SPEAKER_28: there's some market share cap that they can't have more than which then means they

David Friedberg: have to look for other businesses right it's

SPEAKER_12: like how all the local TV stations like once

SPEAKER_05: you bought a TV in every market in the 70s you had to start buying newspapers and other stuff because you couldn't buy any more local affiliate TV stations correct and so

SPEAKER_04: that was my understanding of that somebody who is from Korea can correct me if that's

SPEAKER_46: no longer correct but I remember they invested in my friend Sky Dayton's Helio company which he was making smart

SPEAKER_584: customer back in the day okay I think

SPEAKER_04: was awesome you remember he came out with like the most sophisticated handsets from Korea in the United States for Helio maybe three years before the iPhone came out yeah and he just crushed it and then got

SPEAKER_226: crushed right you think really like he uh he

SPEAKER_23: has that thing the kind of oval one that flipped out and like it was like the closest thing to an iPhone before an iPhone you you

SPEAKER_04: could they were ones that flipped open in a circle I mean it was they were gorgeous and like celebrities had them and they really were you know super compelling but the reason was SK Telecom just backed up the Brinks truck and gave him hundreds of millions of dollars to do that because they had all this funny money sitting around so if you capped Amazon at 70% of you know book sales or whatever then they'd have to say you know what we have to have other competitors because I don't know how that

SPEAKER_108: gets enforced Bezos takes the 30 billion in free cash flow every year and

SPEAKER_23: reinvest it back into growing all of his businesses if he couldn't do that that would be an issue what do you think about

SPEAKER_11: forcing them to spin out AWS or spin something out well why like I why people

SPEAKER_12: float this but like what what's to be gained from that they'll find something new to invest the free cash flow into yeah and I don't think it's not like they're bundling AWS with retail products in a way that creates lock-in and is anti-competitive and

SPEAKER_11: who's the most anti-competitive if we say Amazon's the least Facebook Google or

SPEAKER_46: Apple are the other three we'll end on this of those three if you had to rank them in terms of anti-competitiveness or who to go who'd you go after first that's an easy one who do we go after first it's not Amazon Amazon's last in my book totally who is first is it Facebook Google or

SPEAKER_12: so what are we optimizing for is this which standard of anti like is it the

SPEAKER_143: consumer welfare standard are we let's go for limiting competition okay because on

SPEAKER_28: consumer harm I don't know that any of these companies are harming consumers I think that one's thrown out the window

SPEAKER_04: these companies are too sophisticated and too customer centric to harm can you name any harm coming from Apple except for the high prices I mean you could go to Android

SPEAKER_23: pay half conversation is Google like that's that's the only one where I can make the case that Google has a 90% market share in

SPEAKER_394: search and innovation is stifled because of

SPEAKER_599: that okay I like it what do you think

SPEAKER_53: Ben it's really hard I mean listen we're in the industry we in we're capital allocators and we have podcasts about technology and we struggle with this question how on earth is

SPEAKER_131: Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham and all these other dipshits gonna figure this out like it's so clear they don't know what the

SPEAKER_314: hell they're brilliant they're just a different kind of brilliant yes sinister

SPEAKER_46: brilliant they're like brilliant in like a boiler room political you know what was

SPEAKER_604: that Kevin Spacey show oh on Netflix

SPEAKER_46: canceled yeah they're they're house of cards brilliant right like that kind of brilliant is what they are but we can't even figure out how to police these companies because there is no consumer harm am I really being harmed by I'm in

SPEAKER_554: the Apple ecosystem on my phone and my iPad but on my desktop I'm Chrome OS and I'm Windows and when there's a problem it's like oh I message is the one I would say to me the most frustrating anti-competitive thing in my life is I message yeah that's it yeah the Apple store the app store

SPEAKER_06: Apple I'm gonna go Apple I'm gonna go Apple too and the biggest reason is I think that the market for smartphones is

SPEAKER_314: distinct from all of the things that they are leveraging their position in the US smartphone market to extend into and they

SPEAKER_06: don't they shouldn't be allowed to keep me from playing Fortnite or from you know

SPEAKER_12: paying for a digital service that I want to pay to in the way that I want to pay or that person wants to offer it to me because they're a leader in the smartphone

SPEAKER_06: market like that's the one that seems the clearest to me in terms of extending and

SPEAKER_338: leveraging like the actions that I agree the actions that Apple is taking are the most anti-competitive I think Google's

SPEAKER_612: position though regardless of whatever

SPEAKER_435: they do I agree with you David they have

SPEAKER_04: the most monopolistic position in terms of percentage but users don't care because it

SPEAKER_131: works like what's not working what if they broken right all they've done is broken Yelp and like they've just well

SPEAKER_24: but there's nobody driving them to be better is the issue like you don't care because it works but like you don't know how good it could be whereas when smartphones and iOS and Android are driving each other yeah so it's an

SPEAKER_11: abstract argument they have the market

SPEAKER_46: share and we we're imagining that there could be a better competitor but we can't even vocalize or conceptualize what that is but with Apple there's very specific things they're doing that are anti-competitive and sharp elbowed not letting me jailbreak my phone and have whatever software I want on it is anti-competitive that is or that is restricting consumer choice I messages like

SPEAKER_09: restricting computer choice I think and making people pay the tax to get on the iPhone through the app stores feels anti-competitive

SPEAKER_554: I mean that's the that's that's the most I can say about the entire industry I think

SPEAKER_06: yeah I would sum it up with just because you have the dominant market share in smartphone sales in the US it shouldn't mean that you get to skim off the top of all software sold all not like some like all software sold that is usable on that device and the most like the place where that's the biggest gut punch to me is this is the primary way that we interface with the world now especially during COVID like but yes just the way the world is trending it's not like the smartphones like a little ancillary thing in our lives so sure you can have your own little store there that is the way that we get to the world and so just because you own that pinch point it does not feel right that you get the cut on anything I can access in

SPEAKER_04: the world through that I hundred percent agree with you and I think that their excuse that you can go through the web browser is just lame and stupid because

SPEAKER_621: everybody knows a browser does not I mean listen I do it all the time when I buy a

SPEAKER_151: book an audio book I open up audible in chrome well they did the special deal

SPEAKER_307: with Amazon so now it you don't even have to do that anymore which just goes to

SPEAKER_624: show even you can buy in the audible

SPEAKER_307: app I don't know it was certainly on Kindle and prime video I don't know about audible but I think so that just shows

SPEAKER_383: even more the how ridiculous it is it's like oh yeah everybody else will do this special deal with Amazon like that just

SPEAKER_29: so it's like we don't do special deals except with Google and Amazon yeah okay so now you're just being liars okay everybody

SPEAKER_46: listen to acquire.fm if you got a hundy give the boys a hundy let's upgrade that Airbnb let's put some goddamn art on David's wall and any good investments

SPEAKER_11: boys any good investments any plugs any companies you want to plug that you invested in that you're super bullish

SPEAKER_49: about they always love that when you get

SPEAKER_307: them some downloads company I'm an angel investor in that actually we've had on the LP show on acquired mystery in

SPEAKER_23: Seattle this is like my favorite COVID pivot these guys were like a algorithmic date night like you tell tell mystery like oh I want to go on a date night this night you know I was working great but then the COVID obviously so now they are are like for remote teams for companies like teams in Apple Amazon whatever they take care of all your culture events so it used to be like HR would give a team like hey you're a 12 person product team here's a credit card go out to a bar have fun you can't do that on zoom so no these guys take it all over they have amazing events that they plan for you like it's

SPEAKER_53: going great you know they were we were considering them for I think for the accelerator recently and this is a great pivot I'm looking at it right now and look at this you can send a box to everybody in your company it's something engaging three to five hours of entertainment you do date night you can do your family you can do a birthday or an anniversary what a great pivot if you are suffering from anxiety depression

SPEAKER_46: and doom scrolling David I'm not saying you are I'm not saying I'm not I'm not saying I'm not in the same exact I'm doom scrolling like you're doom scrolling at 3 a.m. and you can do something else like get this huge hit here wow really good

SPEAKER_635: family box to entertainment for the whole family I love this curate my life give me something to do and they've got this guy

SPEAKER_23: wonderful Harry Mack he's a freestyle rapper based out LA and he's like like you just like he'll be like give me some words like just something concepts whatever and like you just like give him like six random things and then like he just this dude is amazing so he's on the platform so like rather than doing a crappy zoom event for your team like he'll do the thing wow this is

SPEAKER_87: so cool I'm looking at the corporate

SPEAKER_11: gifting and that is a huge win for them so try mystery.com slash four dash business use the promo code twist for 50% off

SPEAKER_04: okay Ben what do you got you got a

SPEAKER_11: company you want to give a quick plug to something you invested in you love you yeah they're all your children you love them equally but for sure one more love than the other kids go for sure and you

SPEAKER_06: know I do a lot of b2b stuff but for the sort of more consumer world well first of all just second the mystery team is

SPEAKER_12: awesome they're a great Seattle based company and good plug by David I want to give a shout out to boundless it's an immigration company they're making it easier to immigrate they actually just bought their largest competitor and so they now offer tons of different types of visas so no matter how you're immigrating to the US or potentially future other countries in the future they're just the they're the sort of

SPEAKER_06: sane way that you would expect to go through a process in our modern web-based

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SPEAKER_151: gonna get green cards people but go to balance and check it out what stage are

SPEAKER_554: they in is there an opportunity for me to throw a little cash in these companies what's going on boys Ben what's the

SPEAKER_183: story the series a series b boundless

SPEAKER_12: where there could be they just they've raised a few rounds foundry group just just invested a little bit more so they're sort of post Brad felt yes

SPEAKER_635: oh very nice Brad felt coming on the pot soon I think oh I'm trying to get

SPEAKER_04: him yeah you know he was on early on in the early days but I always insisted everybody be in person and he's like well I'm a recluse like I'm either in Alaska that's not his thing boulder and I was like well I'm not going to Alaska and I'm in boulder once every five years so but now that we're zoom here we go

SPEAKER_11: all right listen boys this has been great everybody go to acquired FM boundless and try mystery.com did I get that right try mystery okay we'll see you all next time bye-bye you