SPEAKER_00: okay everybody i'm back for a news program but i'm still in italy i got one more week in italy the longest longest vacation i've ever taken in my life and i'm absolutely enjoying it but i still need to do my podcast because i miss y'all and i got a lot i want to talk about i want to dunk on casey

SPEAKER_01: newton who dunked on superhuman which i'm an investor in i want to talk about apple opening up a back door to scan phones for child pornography i finally finally found a really interesting application for cryptocurrency it's the fourth or fifth best use case i can find and this is a cryptocurrency company you're not going to believe this that i would actually invest in and i might even buy the tokens i i believe in it so much finally i'm going to talk about whatsapp in afghanistan i'm not going to talk about the wider afghanistan issue i'm going to specifically

SPEAKER_02: focus on zuckerberg the cia whatsapp and the taliban stick with us this week in startups is

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SPEAKER_06: hey everybody i'm still in italy this is the longest vacation i've ever taken in my life i kid

David Friedberg: you not just a two years ago right before the pandemic i took my longest vacation which i think was at that point 13 days and i've worked really hard my whole life but i decided at the age of 50 i'd start taking slightly longer vacations taking the kids and doing some fun adventures long overdue

SPEAKER_08: after 30 years of grinding it out in the industry uh so three weeks in italy i'll be back in the united states next week but i wanted to i took two weeks uh basically off the show i did two interviews during that time one with splice and one with redfin did not want to lose those interviews they were great gets by our producers all three of them now we have three producers here because we're five days a week most weeks and i really enjoyed doing those two interviews well worth it but this week i'm going

SPEAKER_09: to be back to doing news uh for most of the days this week and taking two weeks off there were a lot of stories that i missed that i wanted to comment on so the first one up is uh superhuman and so casey

SPEAKER_08: newton who is a journalist who i'd say is amongst the best journalists out there in fact most respected has a very successful sub stack previously i think he reported for recode or vox i can't remember it's not important he now has his own uh newsletter i think he's one of the people's sub stack paid hundreds of thousands of dollars due to quit so that uh newsletter is called platformer and it's it's

David Friedberg: pretty good um you know as far as journalism goes and two weeks ago on august 4th superhuman announced the 75 million dollar series c at an 825 million dollar valuation for those of you who don't know i was one of the first investors not only in superhuman uh we put 500 000 i believe into the

SPEAKER_08: so the seed round before raul the founder ever and friend of the show you've seen him on many episodes

David Friedberg: here including episode 1214 episode 993 and episode 867 among many so i'm obviously a big fan and i'm a super power user of superhuman so platformers casey newton quote tweeted the announcement and tried to

SPEAKER_08: dunk on superhuman and raul i'll just read casey's words so they stand on their own and casey seems to be like a really nice guy actually very affable i've met him in person he's quite nice so i don't think he intended this to be you know super critical yet it was and he said ah the founder of a seven-year-old

David Friedberg: gmail skin who took a year off of product development to start a venture fund has raised 75 million from the chain smokers to build an early version in quotes of an outlook compatible service that

SPEAKER_09: will be available and in quotes next year uh and so this is riddled with errors and so of course that was quite embarrassing for a journalist to have this many errors in one tweet it also is dunking it's just straight up dunking so you're going to be very very careful when you dunk because if you're wrong and you get blocked or you hit the rim and you fall on your face it's quite embarrassing

SPEAKER_08: and that's what happened to casey here again i like casey i think he's you know as far as journalists go i would say very good um obviously he wouldn't get a sub stack deal for hundreds of thousands of dollars he probably was making a hundred hundred fifty thousand working for vox or recode and then he probably had a salary doubled or triple by going to sub stack that is the case of the virtuoso elite journalist you know the people who are the top 25 journalists in tech are going to make you know

SPEAKER_09: a hundred to two hundred thousand and if they went to sub stack they're going to double which is quite

SPEAKER_08: ironic we'll get into that in a minute and then he followed it up with superhuman is the most juicero like product to come out of this town since juicero itself which is super inaccurate and horrible what

SPEAKER_09: casey doesn't know and i think this is a very important thing for founders to understand is journalists have about five percent of the information a great journalist like casey or cara swisher they might get 20 of the information of what's going on in a company if you had 20 of the information about what was going on in a company or in a newsroom would you have the clear picture of what was going on probably not right and so this shows how ill-informed a journalist can be at their worst

SPEAKER_08: now sometimes they get the whole story they nail it and they get a pulitzer that's certainly not this uh and and that would be the case with john carrie right who did the incredible theranos story so

SPEAKER_09: let's pause for a second there and realize journalists are at an information disadvantage and in today's day and age they want to dunk why do they want to dunk well casey wants to dunk on twitter because he needs paid subscribers now he is in fact an entrepreneur and the more he dunks and the more salacious to take or the more you know hot to take the more he will be rewarded with paid subscribers so the idea that journalists are suffering with fifty thousand dollar salaries and doing it because they want to you know be advocates for the truth that is not this just be clear about that if you're talking about a company like vice or vox or substack authors they are venture-backed businesses or they are entrepreneurial journalists they will only make money if they get subscribers and so link baiting headlines at vox or buzzfeed you know generate the traffic they get which turns into pages at its worst you get things like gawker's worst worst moments and you know in

SPEAKER_08: terms of getting paid subscribers you might have something like strategy where you know that journalist or really an analyst he ben thompson is like a different beast he is like you know 10 times more knowledgeable than a casey newton who is 10 times more knowledgeable than a buzzfeed you know rank and file entry-level reporter and that's because of networks raw intelligence business experience any number of factors or even the approach so ben thompson's approach is listen i want to impress the hell out of bill gurley or bill simmons you know or kara swisher or some other business leader really

SPEAKER_09: the business leaders is who he's writing to here casey newton is really angling for like the woke

SPEAKER_15: mob and maybe dunking on people it's a different thing so he's doing something link baiting now i will i'm on a twitter break i said i'm taking off twitter because i got to write this book

SPEAKER_08: i don't have to write the book i want to write this book it's just burning inside of me i got thousands of words done in my first 24 hours on my little uh you know sabbatical here um of my

SPEAKER_01: vacation i'm making great progress but a bunch of uh entrepreneurs then basically picked up the mantle for raul and and just to give you even more context i am not only one of the first investors and i've told the story here many times about how raul came over for bagels when he had the idea and i

SPEAKER_17: i put in 500k immediately just hearing about what a great idea was to take on gmail

SPEAKER_15: i was the first or second investor in his first company reportive and i'm an lp in the fund that casey is uh dunking on and so where casey gets this wrong i'll give you my opinion here number one

SPEAKER_09: he doesn't understand casey how many paid subscribers there are for superhuman he doesn't understand how that's growing he doesn't understand the velocity of product updates in superhuman i've never seen anything like it it's it's tesla like really like literally i would say raul on a product basis is up there with alex from com uh vlad from robin hood steve jobs elon musk like if you look at those four folks they these are contemporaries in building product let me say that again steve jobs elon musk raul and alex from com these are some of the elite product creators in this generation obviously

SPEAKER_22: steve was a little bit earlier than this generation so you know but they're they're compare they're

SPEAKER_09: absolutely comparable in the velocity of updates and how well they're crafted and the engagement and the growth of those companies how do i know this i think you know how i know this i knew steve jobs not well i know elon very well i am an investor in raul and super and com uh you know superhuman and com

SPEAKER_12: alex and rules companies i have the inside information someone like casey does not when

SPEAKER_09: you're reading journalism you should assume you're walking into a house of mirrors you know one mirror

SPEAKER_15: makes you fat one makes you short you know what makes you wobbly that's a journalist view they're just trying to do archaeology they're trying to they're really like archaeologists would be a good

SPEAKER_08: way to look at it or a paleontologist like they're looking at these bones and trying to make a story out of it they don't know if they got a t-rex or a pterodactyl sometimes and that's the case here again casey newton i'll say it again i like him i like his writing i'm a subscriber to platformer i thought about unsubscribing from it but i was like yeah it's 10 bucks a month i i i like to know what the journalists are thinking because even if they're uninformed i have to deal with it as an investor anyway and i think casey probably gets a lot of things right um as well so the job is hard being a journalist but this is un casey like you know i don't think i've ever seen casey dunking on people it's a really bad look for him i actually diminished my view of him because i always thought he was more

SPEAKER_17: considered than this but you know who knows he could have a glass of wine he could have a rough day or he

SPEAKER_00: could be trying a different approach i don't know before we get into the ad let me just tell you straight up linkedin.com twist your first job posting free i'm not kidding linkedin.com twist your first job listing free nothing to lose okay now on to the ad too many small business owners are busier than ever they spend time searching for and interviewing the wrong candidates for a job opening and it would be much better for them to spend their time growing their business that's why linkedin jobs has made it easier to get the candidates worth interviewing faster and that's why they're giving you the first job listing for free at linkedin.com twist they know it's gonna work here's how it works you create a free post in minutes on linkedin jobs and you reach the world's largest professional network with over 750 million people i remember reading this ad when it was like 150 million my god they're growing it's like one of the biggest growth stories inside of microsoft in fact so they focus on candidates with the skills and experience that you need and you can use screening questions to get your role in front of the most qualified people we love linkedin jobs at launch and in 2021 we've hired a third producer a curriculum designer for founding university and two more researchers and we're still hiring for three more positions using you guessed it linkedin jobs so linkedin jobs will help you find the candidates that are worth interviewing faster every week nearly 40 million job seekers visit linkedin so post your job for free at linkedin.com slash twist terms and conditions apply because they're giving you something for free okay let's get back to the program another fact that's wrong

SPEAKER_09: here or that maybe casey uh doesn't know he did not take a year off to start a venture firm that is a that is false that's a lie that's misinformed he did not take a year after the mission one of his

SPEAKER_15: good friends started the venture fund and he's using raul's popularity because he's so good at product to raul sending his deal flow to his partner raul is the front person his partner's doing all the work how do i know this i know this because i'm an lp in that fund what does casey know nothing so he makes this huge mistake there uh and then he's dunking with the chain smokers being involved in this investment ignoring the fact that the other people investing in this are the greatest investors in the world today so the correct way to say this is hey listen the founder of a sas company that is growing fast and charges a dollar a day for a service that is 10 times better than gmail and super addictive

SPEAKER_09: and that the top user spent three or four hours a day in i can't give all the statistics because that is raul's job not mine was invested in by the top investors in the world to compare it to juicy juicero would be so stupid because juicero had uh it didn't work it was a product that didn't work and here's a product that did work so terrible take a lot of dunking who knows why he did it sahil said hey casey newton you're a bully i've been dealing with bullies like you my whole life so if you got a bone to pick with founders and startups pick on me uh you're an unkind dismissive critic that writes misinformation role has been working his ass off so that that's actually nice to see founders uh come to it i actually don't think casey newton's a bully i don't have other instances of him being a bully uh and i do think that this speaks to the adversarial nature

SPEAKER_08: of journalists today and entrepreneurs i tell all my entrepreneurs stop talking to journalists no good will come out of it when a journalist calls don't answer when a journalist wants to get on the phone don't answer just say i'm happy to answer questions by email let them send you an email if they say no i'm on the phone just don't respond because nine out of ten times no good's going to come out of it and what you should spend your time doing is competing with journalists by creating your own content create your own blog create your own podcast create your own youtube channel create your own tick tock and then grow your audience do not let yourself be interpreted by journalists why because journalists at their worst have an agenda at their worst have the need to get attention to sell

SPEAKER_15: subscriptions or get advertising or clicks or typically journalists are anti-tech today there's no other way to say it tech went from being underdogs to causing a lot of damage in the world a lot of good

SPEAKER_08: in the world and having an oversized footprint in the world and in today's climate journalists are just super anti-tech so soul savvy's co-founder dion prolicka which i am an investor in his company soul savvy which went through the launch accelerator mentioned how large sums of capital can blind journalists the impact of a product he says and here's the quote this feels a lot like what happened with us money blinds people and warps reality what we know and superhuman knows is that

David Friedberg: we have thousands of happy customers who love the product and who will continue to support i gladly

SPEAKER_15: pay 300 a year to sah superhuman because it adds a ton of value to my life and and dion's product soul savvy has a similar price tag and they raised a lot of money at a very high valuation which i'm very happy about

SPEAKER_09: and this goes to what journalists can miss because they don't have the inside information i learned this how do i know this how's jcal so informed on this topic i started as a journalist people don't

SPEAKER_15: know this because some of you listening are 20 years old well 30 years ago i started as a journalist 25 years ago when i was 25 years old i start my second magazine second not first second called silicon

SPEAKER_09: a reporter and i had 75 people working for me 30 of which were journalists and i know that we had partial information and we're trying to constantly unpack this information but what we didn't do was we didn't have social media to go dunk on people we stuck to the facts we kept it simple carbon health director of product alex cohen also shared a good perspective on superhuman surviving when others did not and he says man this tweet is not sitting well with me today imagine spending seven

SPEAKER_17: years of your life building a gradient of a client that has survived a graveyard of dead companies who have tried and failed only to get called lazy by a reporter with 130 000 followers and i think this is a this is a you know again i think casey's a good journalist i subscribe to what he does

SPEAKER_01: but i think there's actually something for casey to maybe refine here and maybe uh take a different approach which is do think about how much effort founders put into this stuff right and you know that maybe before you use your considerable following to dunk on them and to deride them and which could actually damage their business and i don't think so i don't think it's going to damage the business too much here because the people who use it love it and superhuman has 300 000 people in their wait list so i don't think you're damaging their business if anything it's going to damage casey's reputation with for further founders who will not meet with casey will not give information

SPEAKER_08: to casey and that's that's the gentle balance for journalists you really want to and this is really inside baseball you have to be careful when you pick your targets here this felt like you know like it was an incorrect take and you're hitting somebody with a bat in the back of the head who doesn't deserve it so be careful i have done this as a journalist myself i've taken on you know causes or people or had opinions that were off and now people won't talk to you there are people who don't come on this weekend service because i said something about facebook 10 years ago and i have to live with that and i think that's what casey's going to live with here is

SPEAKER_01: you know raul is an investor in many companies and maybe casey doesn't care but access is important

SPEAKER_08: for doing great journalism finally uh delian who is a wild man on on the twitter and he's one of those founder fund peter teal acolytes um or you know part of phil squad and he has no problem dunking on people i i like this kid uh critiquing raul has to be the silliest thing i've seen on here

SPEAKER_01: referring to twitter superhuman makes 20 makes me 20 faster than any other email client i've ever used i've even built some custom mods on gmail i get it's not for everyone but as someone who lives in email 20 a month is a no-brainer and this is i think another thing casey missed which makes him look kind of uninformed there have been many failed email clients sparrow etc who competed with gmail

SPEAKER_08: and nobody ever got it right until somebody said you know what i'm going to go after the top one percent to ten percent of users charge them a lot of money and be relentless in studying them and making the product better every single day so that um is the big myth here as well not only are there all the incorrect facts and the misinformed opinion but it does actually make people a lot

SPEAKER_01: faster if you're in gmail versus superhuman the superhuman person is going to get things done much faster period end of story raul did not respond directly but instead responded to people in case

David Friedberg: he's replies by either thanking them for complimenting superhuman or asking how he can make the product

SPEAKER_01: better to those who were critical which is an absolutely savvy brilliant move role is and i've watched raul grow as an entrepreneur over a decade he is one of the most considered humble hardworking diligent founders i've ever bet on and i've bet on some of the best as you know and i will keep

SPEAKER_45: betting on raul as long as he is willing for me to invest in his companies so you know casey something

SPEAKER_49: to think about uh you could you could have done better and you know just think play the long

David Friedberg: game casey is my basic point here don't play the short game trying to get subs and have bad takes and dunking on people actually maybe pick up the phone uh and talk to superhuman or talk to some superhuman users instead of dunking on them that would be that'd be real journalism if you actually talked to 10 users who were crazy about it and said why are you crazy about it then you could have an informed tweet this is why twitter is bad for journalists twitter is bad for journalists because it makes them look stupid and it makes them look petty and it makes them look biased and sometimes

SPEAKER_08: they are petty and biased and stupid but casey is not i don't believe stupid uh and i don't think he's cynical or bitter he just came across that way so a lot of lessons there um and finally if you're in the

SPEAKER_01: arena building things ignore the haters ignore the critics focus on your product which is what

SPEAKER_00: uh raul's doing and casey now he's a founder so people should start criticizing his product which is a newsletter which is uh you know something he's opening himself up for here so uh maybe at some point somebody will create uh like uh this would be super meta somebody could create a sub stack about journalists and how they're doing in their careers does that exist in the world i wonder that sounds like something peter deal would fund okay uh let's get let's get to another story from websites and online stores to marketing tools and analytics squarespace is the all-in-one platform to build a beautiful online presence and run your business blog or publish content promote your business announce upcoming events or special projects and sell products and services of all kinds and more they also have powerful e-commerce functionality and everything is optimized for mobile right out of the box so no matter what you're using an ipad a surface iphone an android phone it doesn't matter all these beautiful templates just work and of course it's got built-in seo free and secure hosting and 24 7 award-winning customer support uh we we did remote demo day in 2020 we were suffering through the pandemic we were confused how are these startups going to get funded i said you know what throw up a squarespace site it's a project maybe it turns into a business and boy did it ever we have now funded over a dozen companies over 14 million dollars in funding and this all from setting up a simple

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SPEAKER_49: amazing episode also when i was away apple made an announcement on august 6th that they would be

David Friedberg: rolling out quote a system for checking photos for child abuse imagery on a country-by-country basis

SPEAKER_08: depending on local laws according to reuters this means apple is joining facebook microsoft and google

SPEAKER_01: who have taken similar virtuous measures nobody wants to see people trafficking in child pornography and if we could stop it and we can catch these people and put them in jail that's a fantastic

SPEAKER_08: thing for us to do in society however apple's announcement is a little different than the other big tech companies which are scanning basically the cloud this time apple seems to be screening the photos before they're uploaded to the cloud now this is because you need to know the architecture of this apple has said we're going to keep all your stuff on your phone

SPEAKER_01: not in our cloud we're going to be the anti-facebook and the anti-google we will keep your stuff on your phone we'll keep it encrypted and you'll be on your own however what that does is it triggers a bigger dilemma which is if you're a terrorist uh if you're a criminal if you're trafficking in this kind of

SPEAKER_08: horrible content it's locked up on your phone so here comes the back door now if the back door to the iphone seems familiar it's because the san bernardino shooting done by terrorists was controversial

SPEAKER_01: because apple would not allow a back door to be given to the phone so if you protect people's privacy

SPEAKER_00: with encryption and you don't give back doors to that to the government which the government has always

SPEAKER_08: had then you protect individuals privacy in aggregate but you allow criminals to benefit from that this is a big dilemma there is no easy solution here but i think we can all agree that if there's

SPEAKER_01: a terrorist attack apple should unlock the damn phone and i you know the end period end of story so now we get to the next thing okay child pornography seems like an easy one give the information to the government put these people in jail should not be controversial except that now we have a technological edge case here the entire concept of the iphone is that it's its own black box it's its own you know black phone which is what i think the cia and other intelligence agencies call these phones they're phones that can't be unlocked can't be unencrypted you get the idea and so according to the ap here's how the technology works it's using something called neural match which is designed to detect images of sexual abuse of children and it scans for these images before they are uploaded to icloud while still on the device if the technology locates a match the photo in question will be reviewed by a human if child porn is confirmed the user account will be disabled and the national center for missing and exploited children will be notified i also think there's some database of child pornography that is also scanned for on the web i don't know what that's called but i remember reading about that in a wired story as i believe here's the reuters quote uh apple says will only scan in the united states and other countries to be added one by one because obviously laws will be different in different places but according to the reuters story in an internal slack channel 800 messages long many apple employees spoke out against the plan as told to reuters by an anonymous employee who saw the thread now again back to the slack channels in the discussions 800 messages not a lot of messages in a slack channel and we don't know how many employees are in here reuters doesn't have that information so there's no context we don't know if this was 10 people in there doing 800 messages 800 people doing one message we don't know if it was one person who was upset and is you know like a super privacy nut or if there are 800 privacy nuts at apple who are going after this and we don't know the denominator we don't know how many employees uh there are who have access to this room or whatever tech feature

David Friedberg: analyst jane m wang uh who is the woman that always scoops twitter's new features if you remember she tweeted the following i am concerned apple cannot and will not say no to potential requests

SPEAKER_01: from china given the market and factories and that is something i've been talking about on this program for a long time which is in other countries is another key angle of the story

SPEAKER_08: which is in countries that tell you give us the entire icloud of everybody which is china

SPEAKER_49: well and they're probably doing this and they're definitely doing the same new tick tock in my mind

SPEAKER_01: there's no question so every piece of information on tick tock is now on china servers if tick tock has access to your entire photo library and you have things in your photo library you don't want shared i'm betting the chinese government has it now if you're the son of a senator or a congressman or the president and you have things on your phone uh the chinese government has it they now blackmail the senator hey we have the nudes of your child or whatever it happens to be and hunter biden anybody uh you know this is actually happening this is not a you know some kind of hypothetical situation here where somebody could be blackmailed or it could cause political interference so there are genuine concerns here and if there's anything uh you know that can be learned from this uh it's that these issues are not going to be easy to solve especially not for apple who now wants to have the high ground on privacy but they're now proven that they can stand your phone and deliver stuff for me any way to catch these people i'm for period end of story i i know that that might be controversial coming from a tech person but i also think they should unlock the san bernardino phone sorry if you disagree with that i understand why you disagree with it i'm sure i'll debate it with my besties on the all in podcast but when it comes to certain crimes like this and terrorism i have zero sympathy and i'm willing to give up some of my privacy in order to have that happen i know that's a risk that's a controversial thing for a tech person to say um but i trust apple maybe i'm stupid but i do have some trust for that brand and for that company uh the eff the electronic frontier foundation and the center for democracy and technology cdt each release their own objections to this which is something you would expect the

David Friedberg: article also mentioned that apple has more plans to help authorities with their technology quote including dropping a plan to encrypt widely used icloud backups and agreeing to store chinese user data in the country i talked about in a previous episode in fact the way they're doing in china my understanding is from various reporting is that they are using a partner for their cloud so apple does

SPEAKER_01: not provide cloud services they outsource that eva uh galpernin from the eff she's a director of

David Friedberg: cyber security hopefully i got your name eva correct in their new faq i'm quoting eva here apple says they will refuse government requests to use their csam scanning technology to scan for other forms of

SPEAKER_01: content how exactly will they refuse will they fight in court will they pull out of the country entirely this is not a time to get vague so if somebody said i want to kill the president of the united states in an f sms message on imessage and they sent it to a friend now the government's saying hey you got any death threats against the president okay yeah let's scan everybody's phone and now we're in a police state so this needs to be very considered we need to um really have the government and private industry and citizens involved in this process which is what's happening right now when technology changes things we have this dance and this debate we need to be able to have this debate with no politics and we have to say we agree that terrorism we agree that child pornography are unique in how damaging and horrific they are to society we agree as a society will allow for this but we're not going to scan everybody find messages for words as an example even if it means somebody says something as threatening as i want to kill the president if somebody says that on their phone we don't know if they're joking uh you know we don't know if they're frustrated we know if they're drunk they don't need to get a knock on the door they don't need to have their phone scanned for that but she makes a great point which is once the cat's out of the bag this technology exists it's going to happen my suggestion is understand that your phone's probably already hacked don't

David Friedberg: keep anything on there that you wouldn't want people to see matthew green a cryptography professor at johns hopkins tweeted what he's hearing from apple regarding the backlash they're receiving

SPEAKER_49: and he's uh he's verified on the twitter uh that helps a little bit people are telling me that apple

SPEAKER_01: are shocked i'm guessing people at apple is what he means that they're getting so much pushback from this proposal they thought they could dump it last friday and everyone would have accepted it by the end of the weekend i agree i i i think a lot of people would be like yeah this is a no-brainer but i get it people are also concerned with what's on their phone and their security and privacy so i understand both sides of the argument again this is one of those issues that's not easy and it's going to be a case-by-case basis and we're going to have to have this debate for many years to come i think that reflects apple again this is matthew green and i'm quoting him i think that reflects apple accepting the prevailing wisdom that everyone is just fine having tech companies scan their files as long as it's helping police but that's not the country we actually live in anymore so you know one thing you have to realize here also is the people who are trafficking in child porn

SPEAKER_00: are likely not using an iphone they're probably using some very you know secure version of the tour network which is kind of another problem is you know which the cia and the fbi are reportedly you know

SPEAKER_49: have already hacked into that tour is like a network that anonymizes internet traffic they're probably using

SPEAKER_01: other services that are more encrypted and not centralized like you know android phones etc so i wonder if this is even going to work as difficult as this is to handle in a democratic country imagine what it's like to handle these kind of things in an authoritarian country it is not easy uh we're gonna have to uh follow the story for for a long time to come but uh i do think directionally apple is correct in what they're doing and i do think anybody who's nervous about their privacy is also correct it is

SPEAKER_32: possible for both of these things that seem to be in conflict are actually correct your right to be

SPEAKER_01: worried about your privacy and you have every right to be worried about your privacy and concern that apple has such sophisticated technology to do this and you could also agree that apple should do this and that controls need to be in place and we have to really think this through because it's going to get worse and worse uh as time goes on and these are not easy issues okay let's do another story okay

SPEAKER_00: it's time for another our crowd deal of the week right now you can join our crowds investment in boat center according to the deal memo boat center is the largest and only insurance-backed boat rental marketplace that connects owners renters and licensed captains very interesting sounds to me like airbnb for boats hmm boat center grew revenue over 100 year over year according to the deal memo and more growth could be coming with 12 million private boat owners in the us according to again that deal memo you want to read deal memos i write them for a living i read them for a living and they cost you nothing to read these deal memos and get smarter speaking of growth do you wish you were early in some of the best performing ipos of 2019 and 2020 well our crowd investors were and now you can join them with our crowd accredited investors can invest directly easily and most importantly early our crowd investors have benefited from our crowd companies ipoing like beyond me and lemonade or being bought by companies like intel nike microsoft oracle and my favorite company uber our crowds accredited investors have already invested over 1 billion dollars in growing tech companies if you're an accredited investor you can join our crowd for free at o-u-r-c-r-o-w-d dot com slash twist again our crowd dot com slash twist there is no payment involved unless you invest so go to our crowd dot com slash twist and sign up for free and start reading those deal memos which will make you smart okay let's get back to this amazing episode okay next up a blockchain 5g network setup called helium just raised 111 million dollars one one one interesting i wonder if they did that on purpose from a venture firm called a16c haven't heard of them and others to decentralize 5g okay this seems interesting i saw a lot of ico concepts of building decentralized uber 5g wi-fi and airbnb killers none of them uh ever built a product and they all seem to have absconded with

SPEAKER_01: your money if you're a crypto ico investor and they all seem like scams this one is backed by a real venture firm so let me explain what helium uh is doing in terms of mining crypto it's actually kind of interesting and it might be one of these ideas that actually has a chance of working so in plain

SPEAKER_00: english you're going to be able to mine crypto currencies run algorithms to to make these coins

SPEAKER_01: like bitcoins or ethereum tokens by installing hotspot devices and providing access to helium's 5g network in other words you buy this device you give people 5g and you earn cryptocurrency on the network you have a financial incentive to buy this device put it on your network and give people access to it very interesting so according to the yahoo finance story helium has over 11 000 global city

SPEAKER_00: locations in 112 countries and users have already deployed more than get this 112 000 helium hot spots in just over 24 months since launch that is not insignificant their stated goal is to decentralize

SPEAKER_01: the five decentralized 5g so this means i think that you buy tokens to use the 5g like if i'm a business traveler i buy it just like i used to buy boingo or i used to have um gogo wireless you know there were these services you could buy or i think if you're on comcast xfinity you could you see the xfinity routers you can kind of log into them but it's closed to their network it's a private network just for xfinity users so it doesn't actually grow that much this one seems fascinating i could take my verizon my comcast whatever connection i have if i'm at a university i put this hot spot in my university dorm i mine coins i give access to the other students and you know whatever the business across

SPEAKER_17: across the street access to my 5g kind of interesting right so in an april blog post they announced a partnership with freedom fi a company that manufactures open source 5g devices to provide

SPEAKER_67: a gateway to helium's network i didn't even know freedom fi existed or that there was this open

SPEAKER_17: source 5g movement so this is very interesting there were there have been other open source wi-fi movements we saw that 20 years ago when wi-fi first came out but this is taking cryptocurrency and mining

SPEAKER_01: and a financial incentive and adding it to something people desperately want and need and when they don't have it they will pay for it internet access right if you don't have internet access man you will pay anything for it hnt is the name of their cryptocurrency helium's cryptocurrency which can be mined by having your hotspot provide and validate wireless coverage over helium's network very simple it's a fancy way of saying giving people internet according to their website mining hnt is done by installing a simple device on your office window very simple you put the wit put it on your window slap it up okay now how do you earn hnt right their cryptocurrency think of it like earning bitcoin

SPEAKER_00: so the way you can earn it via your hotspot is hotspot something other people can log into just like

SPEAKER_01: you make your phone a hotspot completing proof of coverage what this means is passing random wireless tests on the network called challenges so if your network is discovered i guess you get paid right so if you put it up and other people see it you're going to get some tokens great and witnessing proof of coverage ie your device would need to be in close proximity to another device to witness and verify their proof of coverage test in other words they police each other and you get some hnt or you know

SPEAKER_35: the bitcoin uh in this case it's not bitcoin but just to make it simple for you to understand

SPEAKER_01: now the network data transfer um that you provide is another way for you to get more hnt so the more data that goes across your hot spot the more you get so hnt's price tag has gone 16x since january from a dollar 29 to 20.68 as of the taping of this recording uh and i think before i print this i'm going to go buy a thousand dollars worth of hnt if it's on robin hood because it seems like one of the few crypto ideas that actually has an application other applications for cryptocurrency obviously nft i believe in obviously a store of value i believe in and money transfer uh and i obviously believe

SPEAKER_92: that it's good for laundering money and gray market transactions and terrorism so i'm now up to this

SPEAKER_00: might be the sixth use case i think uh broadly speaking nfts and collectibles i believe in that yeah

SPEAKER_01: storing uh money a store of value i believe in that money transfer i kind of half believe in it kind of works it's maybe unnecessary for many people and then dark web transactions so i'll put those in one bucket so that's four and then this fifth one i actually believe in this i think i don't know if it's going to work it will require a big footprint but i kind of believe in the idea at least and i like the the start here so helium also published a one-day breakdown of hnt distributions which is more

SPEAKER_93: transparency than some other cryptocurrencies have given us lately oh tether 30 of hnts went to network

David Friedberg: data transfer 35 went to hotspot infrastructure that proof of coverage we talked about there and

SPEAKER_92: 35 went to founders investors and organizations that will manage blockchain governance so they basically

SPEAKER_01: swept 35 for themselves the founders get that uh so if this thing becomes worth 10 billion dollars the founder is going to make 3.5 billion and the investors so that's a little bit more um that's a little bit more transparency than we usually say and maybe that's the model maybe when you make a cryptocurrency going forward you give a third to your investors and founders you know insiders a third uh to you know people who are in one group of usage you know the the buy side and one group to the sell side i don't know how it'll exactly work uh but then you get speculators so this is the perfect example of what's called the utility token there is actually utility to the tokens the tokens do something get you internet access or you make them for giving internet access so this is where it doesn't feel like a security but it actually is because i'm going to buy it to speculate on it and this is why cryptocurrency is so so intriguing to so many people because if you can get the utility and the investment part together man that's never really existed in the world and that's why when you don't have the utility it feels like a security and when you do have the utility it doesn't feel like a security but if the price goes up it is a security so here we go this is clearly a security hnt as the coin should be under security law even though it's a utility in my mind and i think a really easy way because this has come up with the legislation which i didn't cover on the program yet because it's still in flux but part of the infrastructure bill was regulating you know cryptocurrency i have a very simple plan for regulating cryptocurrency and it's coming up on the next segment

SPEAKER_49: we'll get to it in a moment so hnts can be burned to acquire data credits uh which will help the helium

SPEAKER_01: devices powering the data transfer basically providing access to the network makes sense

David Friedberg: and data credits are like cell phone minutes or airline miles they are non-transferable and going to be used by the original owner so that's a very interesting one you can buy sell or hold hnt as a currency or burn them to power your helium device it's kind of interesting right you can use

SPEAKER_49: some like you know airline miles or or you know quarters in a in a video game or chuck and cheese tokens so i i would say this is somewhere between a good idea and a very good idea and it could work

SPEAKER_01: so you're not going to believe it but i think this is interesting i would have invested at this at the earlier stage and maybe i'll put in a small bet for their tokens okay as promised next up how should the us handle cryptocurrency regulation properly last week the senate officially passed the 1.2 trillion

David Friedberg: dollar infrastructure bill the bill's passing was delayed one week due to arguments over proposed amendments on crypto tax reporting the amendments wound up not passing uh this bothered some members of the crypto community including coinbase ceo and founder brian armstrong who we've had on the program

SPEAKER_67: who brian would love to have you on the program again so much has gone on crypto uh including you

SPEAKER_22: going public and crushing your last quarter uh so come on the program soon uh open invitation there

SPEAKER_01: for the folks over at coinbase so the main issue in all of this as i understand it is the definition

SPEAKER_00: of a broker in crypto which according to cnbc was quote written in language so broad

SPEAKER_01: one could interpret it to include anyone involved in any kind of crypto transaction i.e a server hosting company whatever uh the bill considered a broker anyone who is and in quotes responsible for regularly providing any service effectuating transfers of digital assets on behalf of another person so like a bank like a venture fund like a private equity fund if you're involved in this moving of money but it didn't include it did not exclude miners the software developers and others in the crypto economy who don't have customers essentially and one would argue the miners do have customers and the software developers ultimately do have customers but you could also make the argument i guess some

SPEAKER_49: people reasonably listen i'm just a software developer on this or i'm just a minor i'm not involved in the transaction the bill would also require crypto brokers to report customer information

SPEAKER_01: to the irs which is what i've told you will happen in crypto and i've said this since the beginning the government will let it fly under the radar for only so long when it comes big enough and it's costing people money and people see it as a way to avoid taxes the irs the government will come down on it like a ton of bricks and that's what happened in china and now it's going to happen in america and you know what i know this is unpopular for a technology person to say there should be some rules again newsflash you don't get to avoid taxes newsflash you don't get to be involved in money laundering or allowing black market or gray market transactions pay your taxes play by the rules you don't get to just take people's money uh without having to play by the rules in venture in equity crowdfunding sites like seed invest and republic have to play by a certain set of rules in terms of documenting what they do and making sure investors don't lose their money and diligence in reporting and how much people can invest and in icos and in crypto it's the wild west there is a very simple solution to this which i've come up with and um i can explain it very simple i just to put a final um note in this there was a lot of funky uh back and forth here with you know this horse trading that occurs by senators there's a senator named richard selby shelby from alabama according to c cnbc he blocked this amendment because quote his unrelated 50 billion dollar defense amendment was blocked ie people were going to spend money in his state i guess uh so the infrastructure bill was passed with the original language of the industry is now back at square one so you know that's one of

SPEAKER_49: the things in our system this horse trading and and you know uh this pork in our pork barrel spending i

SPEAKER_01: think they're referred to it as you know this kind of stuff is gnarly and when you mix it up with a complicated issue like this it's particularly gnarly because then people can in the crypto community say hey this person is just trying to get grift from the people who donated to their you know uh

SPEAKER_88: campaign to be elected and they're just looking out for themselves i'm going to put all that aside

SPEAKER_01: there's a very way to easy way to do this we want people to innovate we want them to take chances so i'm just going to pick some random numbers here you obviously understand this is a back of the envelope proposal it's not meant to be the final one it's meant to be the start of a conversation but if you're under five million dollars in tokens go have a ton of fun you need only register the product project you're working on with like some central database with the irs uh or finra or wherever some governing body so if you want to take money for tokens if it's under a million maybe we say you can you don't have to file but when you hit um you know one to five million you register okay you just have to register we know the project is listed in this database so as we were talking about previously you know this helium network for wi-fi if they were going through this or you know ripple which people think is a giant scam right now or something like tether which has legal action taken against it by the new york attorney general's office which said it was a scam basically if they're under a million you can kind of operate freely maybe uh one to five million uh it doesn't mean you commit crime but you don't have to register when you get to one to five million you register

SPEAKER_88: so we know who you are your social security number your name are tied to it you're responsible in

SPEAKER_01: some way and then when you hit 10 million tokens you have to do some amount of regulatory work like i do i have to do a bunch of work as an angel investor who has a syndicate at the syndicate.com so maybe you start registering transactions with the irs or maybe transactions over ten thousand dollars just like banks have to register them that's why i guess some people take out nine thousand dollars in cash because they don't want it to be reported i've never understood that i i would think that

SPEAKER_17: the irs or whoever was doing that would say you know ten thousand they have to do it but secretly

SPEAKER_00: they want to get it at eight thousand then at 50 million you have to you know do kyc etc and then at a hundred million you really need to have you know a bank charter or you need to have

SPEAKER_88: an accounting firm do an actual audit uh not in a test station but like an audit uh maybe you have to do quarterly financials maybe have to do monthly financials so just like we have limits on these

SPEAKER_01: private company investing as an example when i do a syndicate i can only have 250 people or 10 million those are my two caps uh and then reg a there's another set of caps why do i and seed invest and angelist republic private equity firms venture firms have to live by all these rules and then you say it's a token and you can do whatever the heck you want it's kind of bs it's time for crypto to grow up and actually that'll be good for crypto but we don't want to strangle crypto because as i said in the last segment when we're talking about the helium network and there's a lot of innovation going on here and so you don't want to strangle it and smother it so i would say a light hand some basic guidelines as it gets bigger the rules and the requirements increase very simple okay let's get back to the present day uh there's a terrible situation going on in afghanistan i have very mixed feelings on it as a new yorker with a brother who's a firefighter and having been in manhattan and

SPEAKER_49: watched the towers come down firsthand and uh having ptsd literally had ptsd from 9 11 um it was a very traumatic effect a very traumatic event for me my family and my friends and my fellow new yorkers uh which i still think about deeply to this day on 9 11 i have a very melancholy um

SPEAKER_45: you know day and the day before and the day after i think about the people who died and how terrible that

SPEAKER_01: was and of course we went to afghanistan because uh the taliban and al-qaeda were involved and orchestrated that so as you know we've been planning on withdrawing our troops and uh this has all gone down um you know the last couple days while i'm here in italy on vacation um and according to the new york times the taliban now effectively controls southern afghanistan the country's entire western

SPEAKER_49: border with iran as the u.s moves closer to completely withdrawing uh biden said the following in his address last night which i caught a piece of if if afghanistan is unable to mount any real resistance to the taliban now there is no chance that one more year five more years or 20 more years of u.s military boots on the ground would have made any difference in other words all the time and money we spent after killing osama bin laden and killing the taliban members who were actively involved in 9 11 and other terrorist attacks everything after that trying to build a new

SPEAKER_01: society a new government and a new military we did the best we could it's futile we need to get out but here's the tech angle uh putting this aside and i don't want to talk about my position on this

SPEAKER_49: i'll save that for the all in podcast uh next week next thursday we took two weeks off because besties were on vacation uh in a vice article published yesterday it was reported that the taliban is using

SPEAKER_01: whatsapp to quote to spread its message and gain favor among local citizens the taliban sends messages to those living in kabul stating they were in charge of the city's security now and any irresponsible behavior should be reported to them according to the washington post an example of irresponsible behavior for the taliban could be anything that goes against sharia law like reading a book if you're a woman or showing your ankles or uh the punishment would obviously be very

SPEAKER_00: severe so this is basically saying tell us who to rape torture kill murder imprison violate and

SPEAKER_01: otherwise uh destroy so on the fact page for whatsapp they state that they use end-to-end encryption we all know that this makes it hard to identify who is using the app and the vice article notes uh that end-to-end encryption would be could be could uh is a weaselly language uh for journalists

SPEAKER_49: could be the reason why whatsapp hasn't banned accounts used by the taliban yet again you know

SPEAKER_01: again back to the first story we talked about journalism and they only have five percent of the story however the taliban is included in facebook the owner of whatsapp's whatsapp uh they're on facebook's list of dangerous organizations which means any content promoting or representing them should be banned according to bloomberg that's pretty obvious so but this is we're not talking about public stuff here so again these are journalists dancing around the issue trying to figure things out or just filling stuff up in a story we all know that they're gonna ban stuff that's public that's not what we're talking about here bloomberg uh facebook's head of instagram adam mozari who we might have on the program at some point um stated the following in an interview at bloomberg uh in relation to the taliban uh we're relying on that policy to proactively take down anything we can that might be dangerous

SPEAKER_88: or that is related to taliban in general it's just like taking nazi stuff down or any other propaganda from authoritarians you know or bad people now this situation is evolving rapidly this is a

SPEAKER_67: quote and with it i'm sure the risk will evolve as well we're going to have to modify what we do and how we do it in response to these changing risks as they happen that's just a word salad of saying nothing here is a quote from pete singer a senior fellow at the new american foundation from the vice

SPEAKER_01: article many think of the taliban as archaic but they have leveraged everything from social media to drones we build it they use it this is another generic quote no offense to peter it's just filler of the article we know they use drones we know they use social media it's just filler of the article this isn't actually the important part let me if i may uh give you some possibilities to consider here

SPEAKER_136: do we know that facebook isn't intercepting or otherwise cooperating with the us military do we know that do those stories actually mention that i don't i don't mention them doing that

SPEAKER_01: couldn't we also use whatsapp and facebook even if it is end-to-end encryption to spy on the taliban and if one person was identified you would probably know the metadata who's talking to who so while whatsapp and i know this is probably too sophisticated for uh you know an average journalist or an average citizen to understand but metadata like location your idea of your phone um and who you talk to

SPEAKER_00: once you know one person's whatsapp then you know everybody they talk to you know who they talk to you don't even need to see the messages it would light up like a brain and neurons firing um or fireworks in the sky who's talking to who once you know who's talking to who now you can track down every taliban member so you actually don't need to know what's going on in the messages to actually use it and might facebook if approached by the ceia and they said we would like you to create this bogus version of whatsapp and in afghanistan when somebody downloads it in afghanistan in this region or on these specific

SPEAKER_01: phones that we sold to operatives in that area into the black market these black phones that we put

SPEAKER_00: into the black market with special ids on them we want to preload this version of whatsapp that we've built together in collaboration that not only tells us the supposedly encrypted data but also lets us turn on the microphones and turn on the cameras in those again you're going to think am i crazy or a conspiracy theorist no this is what the cia the fbi and intelligence has been doing forever if we want to get onto those phones we're going to get onto those damn phones you can be certain of it and i just gave you but two ways to do it it could very well be that zuck and whatsapp are actually in cahoots with the fbi and cia and intelligence to go into afghanistan and provide a bogus version or an alternate version of whatsapp that does much more than unencrypted data uh and you could be certain that in a terrorist-like situation even though apple might make one decision i actually think

SPEAKER_32: zuckerberg would make the opposite one apple would make the principal decision zuck would make the

SPEAKER_140: pragmatic decision zuck is facing getting broken up if he wants to curry favor with biden and he says

SPEAKER_01: yeah i will sign this nda or this judge's order or whatever agreement they have to make in those

SPEAKER_00: you know back rooms he's gonna do it that's my position zuck in a heartbeat would sell out the entire taliban and privacy and every citizen of afghanistan zuck would sell out americans and has zuck would sell out anybody to grow that service or protect his empire that's who he is he's shown us that for 20 goddamn years that's who zuck is he does not have a moral compass other than growth and dominance and money and the reach of his services and anybody who works there is complicit in that philosophy period end of story and in this case it happens to be a good thing the fact that he will make this decision to flip and give over the taliban in my world view of what's actually happening here

SPEAKER_01: again somebody can clip this and an aggregator can say i'm crazy and a conspiracy theorist

SPEAKER_00: just look at history this is how this has gone down many times i can assure you that before you know the modern day cell phone there were plenty of people plenty of people making bogus at t phones with spyware in them or television sets you know from you know any number of people or light bulbs

SPEAKER_01: with listening devices this is how it works folks when the country is at stake when this has to do

SPEAKER_49: with life and death companies ceos and the government work together to protect our interests

SPEAKER_00: and maybe there's an argument that they should so what you're reading in the link baiting press is probably not aligned with reality and i'm guessing uh the closer reality is the kind of backdoor dealing handshaking that i'm describing we'll see you all next time on this week in startups bye bye