SPEAKER_00: Okay, we got a huge news day for you. Facebook is turning off CrowdTangle, a service which lets you see which stories are trending and most engaged on Facebook. And the New York Times has inserted themselves and made themselves part of this story. The White House is very frustrated with Facebook over vaccine information, which they claim is coming from just 12 sources on the platform. Additionally, we talk a little bit today about beaming the internet into Cuba to try and promote democracy there. Plus, Facebook is the last of the party, they are going to dedicate a billion dollars to creators next year. Finally, tether investigation continues. The CTO hasn't responded to coming on this show. But he's gone on some other shows on YouTube with but 500 subscribers. And he's now calling this podcast, a clown show at the same time that our Fed chair is saying that cryptocurrency and specifically

SPEAKER_01: stable coins need to be regulated. It's a great show. Stick with us.

SPEAKER_03: This Week in Startups is brought to you by Rippling helps 1000s of fast growing startups automate their HR and IT from their team's payroll and benefits to devices and apps. See how at rippling.com slash twist. Squarespace, turn your idea into a new website. Go to squarespace.com for a free trial. When you're ready to launch, use offer code twist to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. And Twilio runs an amazing program for startups that includes a $500 getting started credit $3,000 in SendGrid credits, access to webinars made exclusive for startups, and full support via their Twilio startups team. Sign up now at Twilio startups.com slash twist. In our first news

SPEAKER_07: story, the New York Times Kevin Roos published an article yesterday about Facebook's internal

SPEAKER_00: battle over data transparency. Specifically, this article is focusing on post engagement data, which skews obviously right leaning on Facebook. And often when you look at the top stories on Facebook, they're from Ben Shapiro and Dan Bongino, who I don't really listen to, but he's a radio show host, and he's far right political commentator. So you understand what's going on here. Facebook gathers and publishes data via a company called Crowd Tangle and this company they acquired back in

David Friedberg: 2016. And it basically tells you what posts on Facebook are getting the most engagement. And it's used mainly by news publishers to track their performance of posts. If you didn't know, news publishers will sometimes post three or four different headlines. And they'll test which ones get the most engagement because they are addicted to getting traffic from Twitter and Facebook. In other words, this is a news story. And it gets very meta here. And this is where Kevin Roos makes the cardinal sin of making himself the story. And I think that that's the big angle here is that the New York Times is writing a story about themselves and their relationship with Facebook, which is incredibly complicated because Facebook is also giving millions of dollars to the New York Times, I believe cynically in an attempt to curry favor with them. But here, as we get into this very deep and weird

SPEAKER_00: relationship between the New York Times and Facebook, this service Crowd Tangle was providing this data. And then this journalist decided he would create his own Twitter handle to feature this content. So Facebook's top 10 is a Twitter handle. And it gleefully publishes daily who is in the top 10 pages in the last 24 hours. So here's a tweet example on July 14. The top performing link posts by US Facebook pages in the last 24 hours are from for America. And Ben Shapiro, Ben Shapiro, Sean Hannity, Ben Shapiro, Newsmax, Dan Bongino, etc. And this is obviously a very weird situation. You have this

David Friedberg: service that is run by Facebook, which has a business relationship with the New York Times, we'll get into that in a moment. Then this journalist takes it upon themselves to make a essentially a dunking Twitter handle. Now I'm sure the journalist is going to say like, Oh, I'm just sharing information. But this is an agenda based Twitter handle. I don't think Kevin Ruse would have created this if it wasn't with the agenda of wanting to show how right leaning Facebook is. So you have a left leaning newspaper that most people would say has gone really far left. And then you have this agenda based creation of a Twitter handle. If I was at the New York Times, I would have fired Kevin for taking creating this news handle because it feels like activism. Or I would have just told him take it down, right and sanctioned him in some ways like what are you crazy? Like you're taking this data, you're making this adversarial Twitter handle to kind of make some crazy point about Facebook is right leaning. That is inserting yourself into the news story. And it's the number one rule of being a journalist is to not insert yourself into the story. And not only did he insert himself into the story, he

SPEAKER_00: didn't just tweet from his account. Here are the top, you know, news sources on Facebook, he made a dedicated service for it that got really popular. And now you have Facebook, having two groups of people according to sources, and

David Friedberg: the sources are obviously going to be anonymous in a lot of cases that there are people inside of Facebook who are pro transparency, including the former CEO and co founder Brandon Silverman of this service crowd tangle that was bought by Facebook. And then you have this sort of anti transparency group, which ruse calls team selective

SPEAKER_07: disclosure, which included the VP of analytics and marketing Alex Schultz, a long time Facebook leader, who actually started on Chamaths growth team, according to my notes here, and the selective disclosure team went out even the framing of that by Kevin is, you know, interesting, I do think that it would be great if all this information was public, but

David Friedberg: this isn't some big controversy here. Facebook skews older Facebook skews middle America. And Twitter and Instagram are more coastal elites. And obviously, all the you know, journalists are blue

SPEAKER_07: checkmarked on Twitter. So I'm sure the trending stories on Twitter are going to be a little bit more to the left on Facebook, a little bit more to the right. So much ado about nothing in a way, but it does

David Friedberg: speak to just how lost the New York Times is in their ability to be objective and just cover a story. This is why a lot of people feel the journalists at the New York Times shouldn't be on Twitter, because it creates this murky relationship. What is going on here between Facebook and Twitter? And why should the journalist at the New York Times be essentially taunting Facebook by publishing this data day in and day out to try to make some sort of

SPEAKER_07: point here. And Brian Boland, who left the company in November of 2020, gave the following quotes, one of the main reasons that I left Facebook is that the most senior leadership in the company does not want to invest in understanding the impact of its core products. And it doesn't want to make the data available to others to do the hard work and hold them accountable. It's a fair point. You know, if

David Friedberg: you're Facebook, and you give out all this information, and it turns out the services right leaning, and it's influencing elections, etc, it is going to be problematic. And just like on Twitter, it can be problematic if it's super

SPEAKER_07: left leaning, or, you know, when you remove Trump from either or both of those, this is a very weird thing for Kevin Ruse to do. And Ruse said about this, every time I tweet went viral, I got grumpy calls from Facebook executives, who were embarrassed by the disparity between what they thought Facebook was a clean, well lit public square where civility and tolerance reign, and the image they saw reflected in the Twitter lists. In September 2020, the Economist published an article Facebook offers a distorted view of American news where the Economist plotted charts comparing Facebook engagement to website views. And as you can see, Facebook engagement, it trends towards Breitbart Fox News. And if you look at the way, yeah, if you look at the website page, it's a little more balanced. Now, you

David Friedberg: have to be careful when making inferences here, it could be that Breitbart and Fox News are covering topics that CNN and MSNBC are not covering. So if they were to cover stories about I'm just gonna pick an example here, Hunter Biden's artwork being sold for hundreds of 1000s of dollars or whatever that story is, you might not actually see MSNBC and CNN covering those. Therefore, when Breitbart and Fox News do cover them, they get 100% of the attention from them. And let's face it, Breitbart and Fox News are going to write even more sensationalistic headlines, I think, than CNN and MSNBC. Would we think that that's correct? Certainly with Breitbart? I think they're pretty far out there. So a few company quotes from Facebook executives discussing the article in an email thread to the New York Times. And this is a quote from the New York Times, john Panette, Facebook's vice president of global communications emailed the link to the article. This is the economist article I was just discussing to a group of executives with the subject line, the trouble with crowd tangle writing, the economist steps into the Kevin Ruse bandwagon. So here, I guess this thread, this email thread, it's not clear in the New York Times story was obtained by Kevin Ruse, and that they are talking about him framing a narrative with

SPEAKER_07: this Twitter handle this, you know, antagonistic Twitter handle putting these top trending sources, which are obviously right leaning and saying that now it's influencing and spreading to the economist

David Friedberg: Nick Clegg of Facebook's vice president global affairs replied, our own tools are helping journos to consolidate the wrong narrative. Now, it's not clear the wrong narrative, the narrative that Facebook doesn't want out there or an inaccurate narrative. Fiji Simo, the head of Facebook's app at the time,

SPEAKER_01: just tapped to lead Instacart wrote, I really worry that this could be one of the worst narratives for

David Friedberg: us. Okay, when several executives wanted to publish reach data instead of engagement crowd tangles, chief executive replied that crowd tangle team had already tested a feature to do that, and found problems with it. One issue was that false and misleading news stories also rose to the top of those lists, according to ruses reporting for the New York Times. So there's a difference between engagement and how many views people get to a story. And this is, you know, in defense of Kevin

SPEAKER_07: Cruz and his kind of meta point or his agenda here. And, and, you know, listen, I don't think that a journalist at the New York Times should be doing this kind of agenda based journalism, maybe if it's on the editorial page,

David Friedberg: but the one point that is correct here is, sure, it's it leans right, but also that fake news misleading news, link baity headlines, they're going to move up. And there's two types of traffic we're talking about here, there's the raw views how many people saw something which is reached data, how many people did it reach, and then there's

SPEAKER_07: engagement. Now engagement could be shares likes hearts replies depending on which platform you're on. So based on what I'm reading here, the crowd tangle data is based on engagement. But even if you were to use reach, which I guess Facebook executives were hoping was a little more balanced, it would still be problematic to them because fake news goes higher than real news. The new world of remote work is here to stay. So are all of

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SPEAKER_07: there are 12 sources who are responsible for most of this, and they want to take action against those 12

David Friedberg: sources. So here is a one minute and five second clip from Jen Psaki, and I'll comment on the other side.

SPEAKER_32: So about, I think this was a question asked before, there's about 12 people who are producing 65% of anti-vaccine misinformation on social media platforms. All of them remain active on Facebook, despite some even being banned on other platforms, including Facebook, ones that Facebook owns. Third, it's important to take faster action against harmful posts. As you all know, information travels quite quickly on social media platforms. Sometimes it's not accurate, and Facebook needs to move more quickly to remove harmful violative posts. Posts that will be within their policies for removal often remain up for days. That's too long. The information spreads too quickly. Finally, we have proposed they promote quality information sources in their feed algorithm. Facebook has repeatedly shown that they have the levers to promote quality information. We've seen them effectively do this in their algorithm over low quality information, and they've chosen not to use it in this case, and that's certainly an area that would have an impact. So these are certainly the

SPEAKER_34: proposals. We engage with them regularly, and they certainly understand what our asks are.

David Friedberg: All right, so this is interesting. Without knowing exactly what the White House considers misinformation, is talking about ivermectin and that Brett Weinstein discussion, is that misinformation? Or is that two doctors and scientists with pretty great credentials talking about the

SPEAKER_07: possibility that this works? Or is this anti-vaxxer saying, you know, this is Bill Gates putting

SPEAKER_00: microchips in your body? It's incredibly hard. And we are sitting here with the opportunity to have four or 5 million people vaccinated per day in our amazing country, which is incredibly privileged to have

SPEAKER_07: access to unlimited access to these vaccines where other countries are desperate to get them. And we are having states that are 40 or 50% vaxxed and other ones that are 60 and other cities that are 70% vaccinated. And now we have the delta variant spreading we went from went down to 11 12,000 cases a day 30 days ago. Now we're up at 36,000. We dropped down to a week or two ago, I think 150 people, the seven day average for people dying from COVID. And now we're back up above, I think 300. And so we're going to the

SPEAKER_00: second phase here, and misinformation is a big part of it, you've got a full 36% of Republicans, who do not believe in

SPEAKER_07: getting the vaccine and say they never will, and maybe some portion of them if they were forced to would. So this is an incredibly depressing victory that we could have had against COVID. And now because of the media, because of the libertarian nature of Americans generally, and this crazy political battle where getting vaccinated is

David Friedberg: suddenly makes you a Democrat and not getting vaccinated makes you a Republican when I thought it would be the opposite since Trump actually did this Lightspeed program and took credit for it. And

SPEAKER_07: obviously, Trump, and his kids are all vaccinated. So you would think that Republicans would follow them, but

SPEAKER_01: that's not what's happening, obviously. So a complete disaster and social media, their responsibility and all of this is, and the media is is paramount. And it's just very confounding how we're ever going to get this right in this country when we should all just be working together. Okay. In

SPEAKER_00: other news, Ron DeSantis, governor of Florida, suggests providing internet access to the people of Cuba yesterday on July 14, DeSantis penned a letter to Joe Biden, urging the Biden administration to write

SPEAKER_07: internet access to the people of Cuba, who are protesting obviously against their communist government. Here is his tweet, I urge President Biden to assist in providing internet access to the people of Cuba standing up against communist oppression and demanding a voice after decades of

SPEAKER_00: suffering under a cool dictatorship, which is really interesting, because on July 11, I was sitting at home thinking, you know, people in Cuba do not have broadband access in a major way. And they're

SPEAKER_07: obviously got their own type of firewall there. And it's censored. I wonder and I'd say here in my tweet, just three days earlier, and then I don't know if he saw my tweet or just synchronicity, a lot of people will come to the same conclusion at the same time, given the same set of facts, it's probably that more than anything, Cuba experts, I understand internet access is censored and expensive in the country idea. With the US beaming free internet into the country be disruptive supportive of the people. I think it's certainly a possibility from air water with various technologies, just a thought obviously Starlink exists. Obviously, we've had loon and other, you know, balloons and low aircrafts could beam in and you could beam directly certain technologies. So as of right now, DeSantis is plus 400 to win the 2024 Republican primary closely trailing Trump was plus 300. Which is

SPEAKER_01: really interesting when you think about it. Nikki Haley also and Mike Pence are listed in the odds,

SPEAKER_07: but that seems like a long shot. So some quotes from the letter technology exists to provide internet access into Cuba remotely using the innovation of American enterprise, and the diverse industries here. But it doesn't explain the specific technologies, I wonder which one would actually work the best because some of the beaming technology would require you to have a special type of antenna on the other side, like WiMAX and those kind of technologies, I believe, which people are not going to have in their computers or on their phones, but Wi Fi is. So we actually need to do is figure out a way to get Wi Fi into the country which has a certain distance. And here is the quote similar to American efforts to

David Friedberg: broadcast radio into the Soviet Union during the Cold War in Europe, federal government has a history of

SPEAKER_07: supporting the dissemination of information into Cuba for the Cuban people through radio and television Marti located in Miami. In addition to sending information, however, our efforts must include creating a means for the Cuban people to speak to the world. I think we do need and somebody here can fact check me what would email me DM me on Twitter, I'm at Jason or Jason Calacanis.com. Tell me what would be the best way to do this? Is it, you know, low airplanes, beaming Wi Fi and how low

David Friedberg: would they have to be in terms of the balloons that Loon used, or aircrafts? Or could it be done with

SPEAKER_07: boats? And I don't know how close we can get to the shores there. Obviously, if you could get Starlink satellites into the country, they could, they could receive it that way. But then that would require somebody to have hardware and become the Wi Fi router there, which means that person, if they got caught, would be in big trouble, obviously. So it's a really interesting concept. But I don't know what technology actually does this Antonio Garcia Martinez said now there's an interesting idea. So I think morally and politically great idea. I don't know the politics of Cuba. And I'm not a super expert on this. But I do think we should be embracing, you know, democracy anywhere, there is communism and supporting the people in their fight for freedom. And if the internet can help that, boy, is that going to be transformative. And I think the entire space race that we're seeing right now from SpaceX to Virgin Galactic, and every other company, Blue Origin getting to space, so many great reasons to do it. But

David Friedberg: giving internet, low cost, broadband internet, to the two or 3 billion people who don't have access to

SPEAKER_07: broadband today, and to the billion or 2 billion that live in very rural areas, this is going to be a

SPEAKER_01: game changer. And it's really the whole space race is worth it just for that one potentiality. Okay,

David Friedberg: another story came up today, friend of the pod, Taylor Lorenz, who was on reported that Facebook plans

SPEAKER_07: to pay creators $1 billion to use its products. Really interesting. Facebook for decades has been very greedy, shared no money with any of the creators. And now what's happened is it's not just YouTube giving money to creators and influencers. You have other platforms like Snapchat is spending $1 million per day for the past five months to encourage creators to create on it, tick tock launched a $200 million creator fund. And YouTube recently announced it would pay $100 million to creators to use YouTube shorts, its tick tock

David Friedberg: competitor. So creators are getting paid on YouTube, tick tock, Snapchat, the only holdout has been the very

SPEAKER_07: greedy, selfish, non sharing Facebook, and now they're changing that I think Facebook realizes that

SPEAKER_01: creators are looking to make money and they're going to move to the platforms that pay them the most. So with

SPEAKER_00: Facebook making 25 billion a quarter 100 billion a year, giving 1% to creators, no big deal. If you look at YouTube, they give 55% of the advertising revenue on a video to creators. Now, that's not 100. It's not 55% of

SPEAKER_01: all of YouTube's revenue, because some of that is on other videos that maybe aren't sharing revenue. But it is a ton of money is being spent by the other platform. So Facebook is dipping their toes smart move. I think it's going to work for them. People are on Instagram, and they want to monetize their celebrity. And I think, you know, this is why people have left Instagram to go to only fans or Instagram to focus on YouTube or leaving Facebook and Instagram to focus on Snapchat, or sub stack, or Patreon. And now you have Twitter embracing this with

SPEAKER_07: their newsletter, and super likes and subscriptions. So this is great for content creators and Facebook is late to the

David Friedberg: party, which is not always the case for them. Interestingly, they're late to the party in sharing

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SPEAKER_00: this amazing episode. Alright, US Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said a Fed report on central bank

David Friedberg: digital currency CBDC would come in early September during hearing on Wednesday before the US House Committee of Financial Services. Most interestingly to me and a lot of people who are in the audience here in response to a question from Republican House member Patrick McHenry Powell said the report will outline

SPEAKER_00: the benefits and risks of CBDCs as well as cryptocurrencies and stable coins more broadly. In the hearing, Powell said that stable coins need regulation if they are going to play a major part

SPEAKER_07: within US payment networks. Listen to this 60 second clip and I'll talk to you on the other side.

SPEAKER_47: And so stable coins certainly have some advantages in terms of a faster payment system and have some of the attributes of CBDC. But there are some risks with stable coins right now. Are there not? Are there concerns

SPEAKER_50: you have about stable coins? Yeah, I think the issue stable coins are a lot like money market funds or bank

SPEAKER_51: deposits or a narrow bank depending on the terms of and that kind of thing. But without the regulation and I think we we have a tradition in this country where, you know, we're where the public's money is held in what is supposed to be a very safe asset. We have a pretty strong regulatory framework around bank deposits, for example, or money market funds that doesn't exist really for stable coins. And if they're going to be a significant part of the payments

SPEAKER_50: universe, which we don't think crypto assets will be but stable coins might be, then we need an appropriate regulatory framework, which frankly, we don't have.

SPEAKER_07: Alright, so there you have it, folks. We've been talking about this tether investigation for a month now here on this podcast. And Jim Kramer has done two segments and coffee Zilla has done a segment and the Financial Times has been talking about tether. And they had their New York attorney general settlement, and they've been banned from working with people residing in New York. Stable coins are really becoming a risk factor here. And like the US Federal Reserve chair is saying here, people's money should be safe and stable coins are supposed to be

SPEAKER_01: money. Therefore, it needs to be regulated, it needs to be safe. And obviously it is not. And that is why people are really concerned about what is happening with tether. Also, pal made an inflammatory comment that is making the rounds in the crypto

SPEAKER_07: community right now, in which he was speaking about the arguments in favor of a US CBDC central bank digital currency, the

David Friedberg: people in crypto refer to this as Fed coin. And here is his comment, you wouldn't need stable coins, you wouldn't need

SPEAKER_51: cryptocurrencies if you had a digital US currency. I think that's one of the stronger arguments in its favor.

SPEAKER_07: So there you have it, folks, you know, people in his position do not tip their cards inadvertently, they do everything in a very predictable, well thought out manner 99.9% of the time. So there will be a central bank digital

SPEAKER_00: currency, and the US believes that it will eliminate the need for crypto currency and for stable coins. That is what the

SPEAKER_07: outcome will be for cryptocurrency and stable coins in my mind. And I've said this many times on the program, which then gets me attacked by laser eyed people who've, you know, created burner accounts in the last six months on Twitter, where

SPEAKER_00: they will reply, have fun staying poor, good luck with that. I'm still investing in startups, I think I'll be okay. But the point here is no government is going to give over their financial system to a bunch of randos, globally anonymous accounts, to a currency that is not in any way managed by a central authority. So what is the likely outcome here, we

David Friedberg: saw it in China, where they banned mining here in the United States, will they ban the mining and of Bitcoin? No, I don't think so. But they could put a tax on cryptocurrencies, they could make regulations that holding it require certain

SPEAKER_07: conditions, we already have some of those like KYC, and anti money laundering, but the noose is going to tighten in the developed world. And then that's going to leave the people participating in crypto and stable coins to either get legitimate and add a bunch of expense, and to for the government to try to maintain control of their monetary supply. And I think this is all going to come to a quick resolution. It's been a decade of this, it's now hit scale, people are super concerned in our governments and governments around the world. And they're concerned

David Friedberg: really, for two reasons. One, they don't want to see people get burned. But two, they don't want to lose power. So crypto people have it right. Fed coin, and governments cracking down on crypto is because they want

SPEAKER_07: to maintain control, do not be naive. The these governments are not going to give over their sovereignty as

SPEAKER_01: expressed through currency to just a random group of pirates on the internet, who believe in, you know, a radical libertarian approach to freedom of currency and freedom from the money printing machine at the Fed. That doesn't mean they're right. But that is just the reality. After we invited Bitfinex on this week in startup

SPEAKER_00: episode 1243 tether CTO, tweeted the following, then he goes, like, I don't understand why they don't speak in my clown show. I think he's referring to me. So Paolo, if you don't want to come on the pod, I understand. I don't understand why you're capitalizing certain letters and leaving some lowercase and you know, my Twitter handle is that Jason easy to remember five characters. You could have

SPEAKER_07: just mentioned me. And he says there are plenty of respectable shows where we are planning to discuss obviously, we're setting the bar a bit higher than his show. Stu and myself will happily discuss with more serious and professional hosts. And I responded, okay, so you're not coming on the show. Apparently setting the bar higher means they're going on shows that will give easier interviews and great headlines. And here's the headline tethers exciting future and interview with Paolo CTO, Bitfinex on the Quinn Republic, a very popular YouTube channel with 576 subscribers. Well done Paolo. I'm glad that you set the bar so high for somebody with 500 subscribers to their YouTube channel. No offense to the coin

SPEAKER_21: Republic. I'm sure it's this is a YouTube channel with great potential. But you can tell from the title

SPEAKER_07: tethers exciting future, either they it's quite possible tether paid for this interview or in some way is advertising on this person or they have a financial interest in it. Or it's just somebody who is giving

SPEAKER_01: them a really easy time home crowd interview, if you will, it'd be the equivalent of me interviewing the

SPEAKER_07: founder of one of the companies I invested in. So we continue to invite tether to come on the program and they just announced that they will be going public. So I think we're going to see tethers involvement in crypto deprecate over time, and they will only be able to operate in unregulated markets with, you know, people who maybe are of a certain profile who need a less regulated currency. In other words, you know, the people who want to be on the up and up and who want to be regulated will pick to use maybe circle and I don't have any financial interest in it or a regulated coin, a regulated stable coin. And then I think what happens is over time tether is for only

SPEAKER_01: people who maybe need to be part of the underground, and who don't want people to know what's going on with their tokens,

SPEAKER_07: and how they're moving money around. So Facebook and Amazon are both seeking the recusal of Lena Khan. This is kind of comical. But I mentioned previously that Amazon was seeking to have her recused because she had written about breaking up Amazon

David Friedberg: previously. And she'd written about antitrust, which is her bona fides for the position as the head of the FTC. So now Facebook is

SPEAKER_00: joining this pile on in a formal petition to the FTC Facebook said, and this is the quote for the entirety of her professional career, chair Khan has consistently and very publicly concluded that Facebook is guilty of violating the antitrust laws. When a new

SPEAKER_60: commissioner has already drawn factual and legal conclusions and deemed the target a lawbreaker due

SPEAKER_07: process requires that individual to recuse herself. You know, I'm no lawyer, but I understand their point. But I disagree with it. I think that you know, she has speculated on Amazon and Facebook and how to approach breaking them up and she was hired to do just that Amazon on June 30, said something similar given her long track record of detailed pronouncements about Amazon and her repeated proclamations that Amazon has violated the antitrust laws. A reasonable observer would conclude that she no longer can consider the

David Friedberg: company's antitrust defenses with an open mind. Of course, again, of course, again, you haven't presented them to her yet present them to

SPEAKER_01: her. And then we'll make that judgment if she is going to be able to take them and your defense of your behaviors and she can take them reasonably. But this isn't surprising. And I think it's kind of a Hail Mary pass. I think there's no way they recuse them.

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David Friedberg: finally, as we wrap up here yesterday, Doge coins co creator Jackson Palmer posted a 10 tweet thread about why he's leaving

SPEAKER_07: crypto for good Palmer was partners with programmer Billy Marcus and they created Dogecoin in 2013. He donated all his coins subsequently. And he said that he wanted Dogecoin to draw positive attention to cryptocurrency and to encourage innovation with the technology by making it accessible and appealing to users. But in 2015, Palmer announced that he would take an extended leave of absence from the cryptocurrency community calling the community toxic and criticizing it for being white male dominated, and marred by buzzword failed business ideas. Some detractors argue that Palmer is anti crypto because he has an extra grind because he

David Friedberg: donated rolls Dogecoin in 2015. Just generally speaking, whenever you own some kind of currency or asset, keep some

SPEAKER_07: idiot insurance, keep 20% keep 10%. I've had this happen with companies where I sell my position, I always keep a little bit so I have some skin in the game in case it actually works out and you don't have to have these kind of regrets. But in 2018, Palmer said he had returned to the industry to help educate friends and family members interested in investing in crypto currencies and Dogecoin is now

David Friedberg: valued at around 25 billion. I own some Doge mainly as a joke. But I mean, he I think he does make some points here about how

SPEAKER_07: cryptocurrency and I think a lot of the early people in crypto feel like it's been co opted, and that the people in it are now kind of like the new old guard his quote directly from his tweet yesterday, cryptocurrency is like taking the worst parts of

SPEAKER_60: today's capitalist system, corruption, fraud, inequality, and using software to technically limit the use of interventions, audits, regulation, taxation, which serve as protections or safety nets for the average

SPEAKER_07: person lose your savings account password, your fault, fall victim to a scam, your fault billionaires manipulating markets, their geniuses is the type of dangerous free for all capitalism. Cryptocurrency was

SPEAKER_60: unfortunately architected to facilitate since its inception. But these days, the most modest critique of

SPEAKER_00: cryptocurrency will draw smears from the powerful figures in control of the industry and the ire of retail investors. They've sold on the false promise of one day, being a fellow billionaire, good faith debate is

SPEAKER_07: near impossible. I have brought that up over and over again. This is why I think Jackson has a very valid

David Friedberg: point. The crypto space has become super toxic. Anybody who questions anything is attacked with a flood of spam accounts. And I you've seen me on Twitter, maybe take pictures of them and circle the date created. They're almost all been created from December of 2020, or sometime in 2020 till now. And people are creating just hundreds of accounts, maybe 1000s, and then replying to any critique, have fun being poor, and attacking the people who make any valid criticism of crypto, this is when you know, there's no objectivity, and that it's

SPEAKER_07: starting to form into a toxic cult. And as we talked about, Bitcoin toxicity is an a strategy by a small minority of Bitcoin holders. But their concept is, we must get everybody to adopt Bitcoin. Well, who else wants you to do that cults, and multi level marketing schemes. So this is kind of where the crypto

David Friedberg: industry is at this point in time. And I think it's great that he is questioning it. And I think we will

SPEAKER_07: see a new cryptocurrency, a third wave of cryptocurrency come out of this chaos and toxicity, which is a

David Friedberg: regulated version of crypto, and more controls, more standardization, it'll probably not swing as wildly either up or down. And will Bitcoin play a part in Ethereum? Of course, I think those are really solid technological projects will tether be around. I have a feeling that's a house of cards. That's just a guess. I don't have the exact

SPEAKER_07: information on it. But I do think we'll see a lot of the bad actors be removed from the space when the economic incentive to 100 extra money or the ability to manipulate markets goes away. And so the noose is tightening, the

David Friedberg: regulation is coming, and government based competitors are coming, we always knew this would happen. And all that has to happen here is taxation comes, and then the new people who will adopt cryptocurrency, or the cryptocurrencies that are out

SPEAKER_07: there today is going to dry up. So if you start seeing people getting audited, or being arrested for tax evasion, or taxes being put on to crypto, maybe every time you buy a crypto, you pay a crypto tax of 10%, something like that would make new

David Friedberg: people and new entrance into crypto go away. And that's what crypto needs crypto needs that next group of cynically bag

SPEAKER_07: holders, or, you know, adopters, and I think that spigot of adopters, there's a chance it's turning off, because it might be more trouble than it's worth. If people see this level of toxicity, and they start seeing taxes, and they start seeing regulations, I think we're going to see a major slowdown in crypto. Okay, that's our show for today. And we'll see you all tomorrow. Bye bye.