SPEAKER_00: okay we have a great show for you today everybody amazon drivers are being monitored by cameras to make them more productive and to make them safer and it is having a dramatic effect in terms of

SPEAKER_01: distracted driving people blowing stop signs but there are privacy issues and it leads to a bigger discussion about pilots and surgeons should they have cameras too let's talk about that and tesla in a related story has released a new driver score which across five vectors makes you a massively safer driver that's something you can opt into and it is awesome and the aussie media fallout continues we'll get into that let's talk about beachfront homes and how they are now people in

SPEAKER_00: flood zones are going to be asked over the next 10 to 20 years to pay their proper share of their insurance because they've been subsidized up until this point plus i touch on a new program we're doing that could help you become a venture capitalist and break into venture it's called openscouting.com and i'll talk about that at the end of the program stick with us everybody this week in startups is

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SPEAKER_00: slash twist and use code twist okay everybody first story up really important one and uh there's a lot here to unpack amazon drivers are being monitored by cameras to make them more productive and safer on the road so is this fair is amazon overreaching is this in everybody's best interest is this big brother very complicated there's a lot of layers here so let's dig in uh first off thought experiment are airplane pilots under camera do we record doctors when they're doing surgery i mean those are life and death right but my understanding is those professions uh which take a lot of training a lot of education then say being an amazon driver a package driver they are not recorded under camera and i think that they would not allow themselves to be recorded under camera there might be liability issues and i think they have a lot of power right so according to gridwise.io you start delivering for amazon flex within a week of giving them a valid driver's license amazon conducts background checks that you should take anywhere from two to five days and just as an anecdote producer nick on this podcast his friend got laid off during covet and got hired as an amazon driver within 10 days of applying startups move fast amazon still runs like a startup so it's very important to note here how amazon works um they have a delivery partner program which employs 2 000 small delivery companies and has 115 000 drivers in the us so you would ask yourself why isn't amazon a hundred percent uh employing their own drivers well the cynical approach and the truth is they may want to pay less and they may not want those employees to have the same rights as their internal ones we have seen this before amazon and facebook hired third party companies to do what we would call menial repetitive tasks uh and then they could lean on those managers who would then lean on those employees to be super productive but those employees could never say like i work at google why don't i get the free 15 dollar you know neiman ranch steaks for lunch right and so there has been a little tension about this sort of second class third class citizens at big tech companies um another one that comes to mind is apple you know the apple employees at the mothership get treated a certain way how do the apple store companies get treated well they get treated really well but it's a major step down because they're retail workers but they're not outsourced retail workers right they work full-time for apple and so amazon works with a lot of these partners

SPEAKER_01: and they require these delivery partners to follow rules around hiring the driver's appearance routes safety mechanisms etc and these rules around safety include netradine cameras n-e-t-r-a-d-y-n-e cameras

SPEAKER_00: and there's a motherboard article vicebotmotherboard.com and the article is very good uh and i invited actually the author uh we invited the author to come on the program because she points out a lot of important things so amazon has installed ai cameras and more than half of its delivery fleet in the us already the cameras and software are made by this again tech company called netradine netradine is a vision

SPEAKER_01: based dash cam that runs ai coaches drivers on how to be better and safer which is awesome we do not

SPEAKER_00: want uh drivers to be getting in accidents and god forbid uh people getting hurt and there has been a lot of criticism of amazon specifically and their drivers driving too fast because they want to hit unrealistic goals or you know really hardcore goals so this company um we've also invited netradine on the program but we didn't want to not report on the story so i'm going to report on the story here but we always want to follow up right now here at this week in startups we want to follow up and give everybody a chance to talk about their intent and i think that's really important because it's very easy for you know somebody like motherboard or vice or somebody who's incredibly union based you know an employee based uh worker based to criticize this and then it's very easy on the opposite side for you know people in tech perhaps myself to think this is awesome right and i which i don't um i am uh figuring this one out for myself and that's really what i want the audience here to do and when we do this show have a really open mind to thinking about this from first principles just think what is the goal here what is the intent why are they doing it and is it good for society is it good for everybody so according to pitch book this company netradine uh was founded in 2015 it's raised 200 million dollars to date all right i'm going to pull up on the screen here if you're watching on youtube um how the software works this is an image that motherboard acquired i'm not sure how um and it just shows a driver with their face pixelated and it shows uh that they didn't stop at a stoplight so uh drivers and amazon delivery operators told vice that the netradine cameras often

SPEAKER_01: punish drivers for events that are normal or out of their control such as looking at a side mirror or changing the radio station or stopping in front of a stop sign uh when at a blind intersection and

SPEAKER_00: getting cut off in congested traffic here is the caption from that image the netradine interface can be accessed by amazon and delivery company that employs a driver so this means um there are some privacy things she means you could be uh watched at any time i assume and i don't know if this is in real time where you can see and turn on a live feed that is not clear but of course none of these systems are perfect so as uh amazon delivery operators told vice and let's face it nobody wants to be on camera all day uh unless you're like a kardashian or me or a news anchor uh or an actor or a reality star yeah i think the majority of amazon delivery drivers do not want to be watched on camera all day and of so of course they're going to give the uh the downside here and and their um feedback is of course valid the good news about this kind of feedback and even this process of the press you know sort of taking the side of the drivers here um changing the radio station well maybe that's an opportunity to give them a siri-like interface or an okay google-like interface where they don't need to touch the radio station looking at the side mirror well that's something the software can obviously fix and stopping in front of a stop sign when at a blind intersection you know this can all be fixed with

SPEAKER_01: software and if you did get cut off by somebody and you ran into them the upside here is that you would have video footage of it video footage that your eyes were on the road and now you if you did get an accident you don't get blamed for and get fired because you just say hey look here's the receipts so there is an upside for good drivers as well the netrodine camera also requires amazon

SPEAKER_00: drives to sign a consent form so you know you're basically signing away a lot of rights here which is the nature of employment if the camera detects an event that they deem unsafe the footage will be uploaded to an interface accessible to amazon and sometimes a robotic voice talks to the driver stating distracted driver or maintain a safe distance distracted driver maintain a safe distance i wish that was in every car don't we all wish that was required in all cars if i could tell you today all cars and you have your finger above the switch would alert a distracted driver they were distracted would you push the button of course you would push the button 100 of people would push that button nobody wants to die on the highway nobody wants a loved one to die on the highway whether they're the distracted one or somebody else's maintain a safe distance wait that should be in every car if i put your finger over the button i hate to get all squid games here and it said you get to press this button and every single person has to maintain a safe distance and get that alert you would do

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SPEAKER_00: company and congratulations on that milestone motherboard is going to you know uh frame this as a robotic voice talking to the driver i think that that's their embellishment there um yeah sure instead of using a robotic voice use a beautiful you know text to speech uh you know one of these recordings uh and you know say it in a nice way potentially distracted driver are we maintaining a safe distance like you could say it in a non-accusatory way and i think anything that gets reported i think a nice thing would be anything that gets reported the driver should get an alert about that as well and they should be able to respond to it so you know the thing here is you really want people to be able to measure their driving and manage it and perhaps uh you know the driver companies could say listen we know you're going to get a certain number of these it's only going to be come a discussion after x number of these are reported and we'll just have a discussion about it and how you could be a better driver so that is kind of not in the story here we're assuming bad faith we're assuming the worst uh you know i think people don't trust big tech they don't or you

SPEAKER_07: know the sort of left uh doesn't trust big tech and uh they trust the press a lot less to be honest if you look at all this uh surveys on trust in the united states big tech companies are trusted massively more than journalists so i'm just putting that out there as well journalism has a serious trust problem and it predates trump and the fake news uh you know attacks so amazon drivers uh and their delivery partners are going to be scored on their performance or they are uh and these are upload

SPEAKER_00: and the uploaded events obviously impact their scores uh good scores can result in bonuses prizes and extra pay for drivers so yeah put the carrot out there safety and compliance make up 40 of a delivery services partner score this is good safety is good right and so we have privacy running into

SPEAKER_01: safety who gets to win in that battle is what we're really talking about here isn't it how much privacy are we willing to give up in order to make this safer is the next step we're going to actually have the heart rate of drivers make them blow a breathalyzer test to make sure they haven't been drinking are we going to ask them to give us their sleep data from their

SPEAKER_00: you know smart watch uh or their fitbit or their apple watch to make sure they got eight hours of sleep if they didn't get eight hours of sleep or they didn't have enough rem sleep we don't let them drive uh that seems overreaching right uh that seems crazy maybe not the blowing into alcohol i mean if

SPEAKER_08: there was a real problem around people being driving drunk and they actually give that to people who

SPEAKER_21: have been uh convicted of driving drunk they will make them blow into a breathalyzer before using their

SPEAKER_27: car but i think the sleep one would be the next domino to fall so does that feel too intrusive kind

SPEAKER_00: of feels too intrusive i don't want to give my sleep data if i'm a driver to them now what about your pilot what about your pilot should the pilots have to share their sleep data to make sure if if we knew that 50 of accidents in planes were the result of sleep issues uh and then what do we do we cancel a flight if the person had a restless night's sleep would you want every pilot to have to pass a breathalyzer before getting on the flight i don't know that i'm opposed to that i mean what's the downside i mean is it is there some pilot union that's going to say yeah we we want the right to have a couple of drinks before we get in there um back to the amazon story drivers have emailed amazon asking what they did wrong and requested photos from the cameras but amazon did not respond according to the vice article so there you have it folks you know i think in fairness if there is an issue and this is where a union or employees or the press can actually have a good impact in this negotiation it's completely reasonable if i'm being accused of something that i should have a copy of that video right and i should be alerted to it and we can have a positive discussion around it uh the article also notes that many drivers believe the cameras are just a cost-saving measure for amazon okay so whenever new technology is introduced people are going to look at that and their minds are going to wander and they could wander to dark places and they'll take the most the least charitable the most cynical look at why these cameras are in there are they there for safety or they're there for something else when drivers try and tell their delivery partners about the camera issues the partners don't see the issues as a priority because their main concern is getting the packages out okay whatever i i think these companies are probably the the third party delivery companies i i don't think they're being run by like you know harvard mbas who are you know trained in how to manage people of course they're going to be run haphazard that's kind of the idea i'll be honest like to tell you from the inside a lot of times when people hire third party companies when facebook hires third party companies to manage hate speech on their platform it's so they can say they don't have to take responsibility for it let's be honest and they just don't want to have that those employees under the umbrella of oh they work for facebook they want

SPEAKER_08: to be able to fire them and i think that's what's driving amazon with these third party ones if that

SPEAKER_00: company gets into an accident god forbid kills a child because the person was drunk or driving recklessly amazon can just say we have terminated our relationship with that driver partner that's really what it's about i'll be honest and that's not cynical that's practical um sometimes it's also because they want to be able to scale up and down in different regions and have lots of different options to deliver packages so that is part of it as well some drivers told vice that they end up covering the cameras with stickers to avoid problems that's a quick way to get fired i mean if it knows

SPEAKER_33: when you're looking at the mirror or changing the radio station they're going to know when you put a

SPEAKER_00: sticker over at newsflash so should they just train the drivers more should they have these cameras i think

SPEAKER_01: these cameras will be a net benefit for society and for the drivers themselves a re on reddit uh

SPEAKER_00: allegedly a driver released a screenshot of messages from their delivery company owner stating that drivers who registered an event on net dime would not be able to get a bonus good morning team i'm quoting here i just watched about 12 videos of someone here on the team with no seatbelt on the text reads this will damage my revenue and our scorecard for next week several thousand dollars gone if you

SPEAKER_07: show up for any event on netrodine your incentive will be gone automatically um okay so it's a little

SPEAKER_00: severe uh but if you're driving without a seat belt and you're a professional driver for a living you're kind of shouldn't be a professional driver for a living and this would be the equivalent of a surgeon not washing their hands or wearing a mask during surgery vice previously reported back in june that delivery companies were telling drivers to turn off their uh mentor app uh that monitor safety to hit amazon delivery quotas so there's a little bit of this sort of delivery quota thing and i think people probably think that this is also part of why they're doing this it seems amazon is telling

SPEAKER_07: drivers deliver as much as possible as fast as possible but then if they cut corners or play with the radio they're getting yelled at by the ai camera now i don't i don't that's not actually what

SPEAKER_00: i think is happening here i think amazon wants to make it as safe as possible i honestly do um and i think there are probably a lot there's probably a lot of turnover in these jobs and there's a lot at

SPEAKER_07: stake because they are asking people to go fast and if they're asking people to go fast you can't have people you know working at a brisk speed who are cutting corners uh amazon has reported that safety

SPEAKER_00: driver safety has benefited from the netradine cameras uh since the cameras have been put into vans alexandra miller a spokesperson for amazon told vice there have been 48 fewer accidents 77 fewer stop sign violations 60 fewer drivers not using seat belts 50 less following distance and 75 less distracted driving does that seem like uh success to you that is a dramatically safer safer world we're living in so looking at those statistics what does it tell you it tells you probably before this that the drivers were feeling pressure and the drivers were cutting corners when you see stop sign violations 77 fewer ones pretty clear amazon was pushing the drivers too fast and that this is probably a corrective measure and if people are distracted we all know people distracted driving it's incredibly hard not to look at your phone well if you're going to get fired for looking at your phone and not uh stopping at a stop sign um that's probably a good thing for a driver so it's a it's a job you're not uh driving your personal car you're driving a big truck and um the company that makes the uh cameras framed it this way uh in a tweet uh from netrodine many driver safety solutions are built to see what went wrong resulting in fleets prioritizing fixing bad driving behavior rather than rewarding good ones but imagine if you flip the system prior to understanding who your best

SPEAKER_41: drivers are um i think that's um very clever framing by netrodine uh i would like to see the numbers

SPEAKER_00: if an amazon driver has no accidents maybe they should get a hundred dollars every month they don't

SPEAKER_01: have an accident and then at the end of the year every year they don't have an accident to get another thousand dollars show us the numbers amazon let's make it like if you want to put something like this in if i was running this i would say there's a hundred dollars a hundred dollar amazon gift card right you get a hundred that would be even better you get a hundred dollar amazon gift card if you're a full-time

SPEAKER_00: driver if you get no accidents and uh no alerts and uh a thousand dollars at the end of the year if you have under ten and if you have none you get something even better so if you want to deploy stuff like this and get the results i think you should be public about what the carrot is okay it's time

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SPEAKER_27: invest now there's a dovetail here with this story in similar news tesla recently released a safety

SPEAKER_00: score for their drivers which i cannot wait to turn on in my car i was out of town when they turned this on and i haven't updated this offer yet um but this i can tell you unequivocally that tesla has made me safer driver because i put the speed limiter on so i no longer get speeding tickets i no longer accidentally go over the speed limit um and their safety score is based on driving for the past 30 days as you can see here in this image uh 90 or a 90 score uh and on their website tesla states the safety score beta is intended to provide drivers transparency and feedback of their driving behavior so this is more like a fitbit this is more like having a coach you're electing to put this on you're electing to have the uh car make you a safer driver and so uh it's between zero and 100 obviously and higher the number the better tesla looked at five factors that impact safety scores for collision

SPEAKER_08: warnings per 1000 miles um and you can set that in your car as like really sensitive or not i have it on i had it on really sensitive and like you know when i go into my traffic circles or if i you know i'm

SPEAKER_00: getting on a highway it can really go off really quickly hard braking aggressive turning unsafe following and forced autopilot disengagement that last one means if you don't hold on to the steering wheel um it will disengage the autopilot so to calculate a driver's score they use a formula to predict how many accidents could occur per 1 million miles driven based on their driving behavior the former the formula is called the predicted collision frequency pcf so let me be honest about what's happening here and this is basically like the system the knicks are using for their three-point shooting they have a system that watches everybody shoot three-pointers and tells you

SPEAKER_01: like why they're hitting them and why they're not and the knicks were the most improved i believe last year three-point shooting team it's a very expensive system they gamified three-point shooting

SPEAKER_00: at the knicks and my knicks were the fourth seed in the east last year and this year we're going to go even further we're going to get to the second round i hope um here's my hot take tesla just gamified driving you're going to be a better driver because they are going to tell you exactly what you're doing wrong if you can measure it you can management manage it and i think all of us are thankful and would want these to be standard these should be standard on all cars and tesla is the tip of the spear here so it's very easy to criticize tesla for autopilot and disengaging and yeah they're letting people use autopilot and people might you know do stupid things like you know you see these stupid folks who will leave the front seat or they will put a weight on the seat or a weight on the thing to try to trick it those idiots are the same idiots who will ride on the top of motorcycles and put the video on youtube and you know sadly they're the same idiots who will stand on top of a motorcycle and flip off and and you know die uh there are reckless people in the world who do stupid things with

SPEAKER_01: automobiles motorcycles and and other stupid things in life what we want is we're kind of working on

SPEAKER_00: the average driver here whether it's the average amazon driver or the average uh tesla driver and we

SPEAKER_07: should have this be required in the next decade for all cars we should have everybody opt into this and you know what insurance would plummet if this was available if you have and you know if you want to

SPEAKER_00: not have this you should buy an old car and you should pay a higher insurance rate because i just know watching people drive how many times do we see people you know on their phones putting their makeup on eating a slice of pizza i'll be honest when i was younger i'd be eating a slice of pizza and drinking a

SPEAKER_07: you know uh coca-cola and you know maybe i was not as safe as a driver as i am now and um this type of

SPEAKER_00: stuff is going to make the world better and we have far too many people dying especially young people if you look at you know how young people die tragically today or it shows how safe the world

SPEAKER_07: is uh young people die in the in the modern world from uh overdoses from opioid suicide and cars that's it you know and uh that those are the leading causes of death in a lot of age classes and we should aspire to cherish every human life and to have every one of them matter and giving up a little

SPEAKER_00: bit of privacy is okay do i think people sleep data no but if we're going to have this conversation i

SPEAKER_01: want to have the conversation about pilots and i want to have the conversation about surgeons as well all right and just to give you a little background on the three pointers the next three point percentage rose six percent or so from 33 in the 2019 2020 season to 39 in the 2021 20 2020 2021 season

SPEAKER_00: and they took about 300 more three point shots so their volume went up their efficiency went up those usually have a negative correlation start putting up more threes you're probably taking worse shots so this is indicative of a massive improvement which is what we're seeing with the amazon drivers so without passing judgment on privacy issues or unions or jeff bezos personally wealth and how you feel about capitalism if you measure it you can management you'll get better and you can get dramatically better through these systems how do they do it they added a four point line of practice so here is a quote from tibbs in the athletic the big thing was we knew we were going to have to work on our shooting the four point shot we like the concept of it it also provides a good line for spacing so that when you do get movement and penetration spray out pass pass that a guy can get into rhythm into a shot and attempt or step into a three so his weight is going forward there's a lot of benefits to it and i think that's where the game is going so essentially the four point shot is just being five feet behind the lot the three point line and if you're practicing that how easy is it to hit three point shot the equivalent here would be well if you're making sure i'm not changing the radio or looking uh at my you know phone or distracted like if you're taking this to a little bit over the top you're going to get over the top results surgeons and pilots do not have to be recorded surgeons do not have cameras as it would be a privacy concern according to stat news according to bloomberg

SPEAKER_08: there have been problems with patients suing hospitals for recording their medical procedures only some large airplanes have cameras installed in strategic places according to usa today

SPEAKER_07: the ntsb the national transportation safety board is calling on the faa to mandate cockpit video

SPEAKER_21: recorders on commercial aircraft but pilots remain opposed they are opposed because the film could

SPEAKER_00: misinterpret and lead investigators away from accurate conclusions if an issue does arise according to them that's very convenient uh i wonder if uh uh you had your hand over the button and you got to decide that all cockpits in commercial flights had cameras would you press the button as a civilian as a person making the decision for society 100 of passengers would click that and 100 of flights would be safer because of it uh the reason this will never happen is because the union so this is in time to just pause for a second and think the union is acting as they are constructed to do to protect not the passengers of the plane they're there to protect the interest of the pilots the pilots are um but two of the 300 people on that flight the other 300 people would press the button to record what was going on so 100 and i'm curious if you're a commercial pilot out there um would you um if you weren't a pilot want this to occur and what is the expectation of privacy when you're at work and you're responsible for the lives of 300 people i would argue you have no expectation of privacy uh you should not expect privacy in the cockpit of a so there's something that society should get behind and that's something where i think motherboard or any of the people who are on this sort of left here take a moment to think about when you see a story like this about amazon drivers yes they don't have the power to fight this either do it or you don't have your job the unions have so much power when whether it's

SPEAKER_07: teachers or for um these pilots that they can actually act against the best interest of society

SPEAKER_08: and i believe that's what's happening there uh there is no misinterpretation of what's going on in the in the cockpit let's be honest what are they going to misinterpret like you're just that's a cya

SPEAKER_00: thing and then in terms of privacy concerns for surgery um i would put that in the hands of the patients the patient should say would you like your surgery recorded you can get a copy of it and would you elect to share that surgery with other uh surgeons um with your face blurred out or not having any identifying information to make that procedure safer for others and just check those two boxes easy solution so whenever we talk about these things let's have a real first principles

SPEAKER_21: basic discussion and and let's put everything on the table and think about it critically here at

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SPEAKER_00: do a follow-up on tuesday story today's thursday on the ozzy media uh fraud fiasco bizarre behavior uh the fallout has been uh swift it has included a formal board investigation announcement uh some high profile talent are resigning and the coo uh in question has been placed on leave and cnn did ex an expose on the working conditions there uh the aussie board of directors released a statement after we recorded on tuesday announcing they had hired a law firm to conduct a formal investigation and that was first reported by the wall street journal the board also asked the coo and co-founder samir rao take a leave of absence pending the results of the investigation remember he's the guy uh who they said was suffering from mental illness and that caused him to pretend he was a youtube executive and create a fake email address apparently and to use a voice modulator to pretend he was a youtube executive to lie about ozzy's incredible performance on uh youtube uh and what a great investment this would be when you lie about facts related to your company while selling shares in the company it's called security fraud and you go to jail for that and the sec does not take it lightly and this is a premeditated act of securities fraud in my uh opinion my professional opinion as an investor in 350 companies uh who's been doing it for 10 year over 10 years uh but not a lawyer my professional opinion is kind of the definition of a premeditated act of securities fraud similar to bernie madoff or elizabeth holmes so uh why did it take so

SPEAKER_07: long to do this board investigation it's because it got called out so this is an example of the press doing their job uh and holding uh people accountable and then who will be the beneficiary of this investigators at organizations like the sec and the uh potential investors who are going to lose all

SPEAKER_00: their money who will absolutely get all their money back immediately um so katie kay is a popular

SPEAKER_01: journalist and broadcaster who formerly worked for the bbc she resigned uh three months after joining kay co-hosted a podcast with carlos watson the founder titled when katie met carlos which covered the 2020

SPEAKER_00: election here is her resignation tweet i guess that's the thing now it's not gonna be a resignation letter it's a tweet uh with a note and um whenever you're screenshotting notes and we all know this

SPEAKER_07: whenever you screenshot in the notes app and post it to twitter it's not good it means you need more

SPEAKER_61: words to explain what's going on uh than the 280 character limit yesterday morning i handed in my

SPEAKER_62: resignation to aussie media i was looking forward to working with the talented young reporters but i did

SPEAKER_07: not expect this exclamation point and um here's the uh screenshot of our notes app i have resigned from

SPEAKER_01: aussie media period i had recently joined the company after my long career at the bbc excited to explore opportunities in the digital space i support the mission to bring diverse stories and voices to the public conversation but the allegations in the new york times which caught me by surprise are serious and deeply troubling and i had no choice but to end my relationship with the company uh cnn

SPEAKER_00: business reported today that aussie media had difficult working conditions for their small staff and employees were often overworked and exhausted um which is not i'll be totally clear being overworked

SPEAKER_07: exhausted in media is kind of the tradition uh whether it's the new york times or a startup publication you especially in ones when we had to file uh you know a daily or weekly or monthly you know in a print publication it was arduous we would do overnights two or three overnights in a row or go home for four or five nights sleep get back to the office at 8 a.m leave at you know 1 a.m get a couple of hours sleep come back um some people would sleep at the office it was brutal um and it was known for that cnn spoke to a lot of unnamed former employees so you can take this with a grain of salt um obviously but one woman was quote hired as a graphic design intern when she was still in college and was promoted to

SPEAKER_00: creative director just two years after she graduated it was an experience that one of the former staffers said empowered them and would likely not have been available to legacy media outlets so

SPEAKER_07: the good news was i guess they gave people a lot of opportunity and in exchange they wanted people uh to work really hard uh one former staffer recalled and i'm quoting from cnn that in the publication's

SPEAKER_01: early days watson seemed to expect a full-time editorial staff of about four writers and two editors to produce 40 high-quality magazine articles a week so that would be 10 stories per writer if my

SPEAKER_00: math is correct which would be two stories a day six hours six hours to do a story i guess if they were

SPEAKER_08: working a long 60 hour week that's insane that's bonkers this person obviously had never run a media

SPEAKER_31: company was completely unqualified a magazine level article of 1500 words would take a week to two

SPEAKER_07: weeks in my experience in the old days uh back in the 90s people got paid three dollars a word to do them and they might be under contract to do six a year for wired or you know four a year for the new

SPEAKER_00: yorker or something and those outlets would kill two or three of those no those would be three four five ten thousand word pieces um but you're in a normal magazine yeah you could work on a story for two weeks maybe so this is a magnitude more in terms of expectation but that tells me is this person was unqualified so why do you obviously keep their team so small after they raised a bunch of money in

SPEAKER_07: the 2010s i guess uh maybe because they were seeing a bunch of layoffs at other companies but i think this is more about inexperience in running a media company it seems that watson would often

SPEAKER_01: call last minute meetings on sundays have people waiting cars outside his house to push the meeting

SPEAKER_07: back two hours then show up 20 minutes late to the meeting this is indicative of a machiavellian crazy founder uh i've seen this behavior it's manic uh you know it's one thing to be a busy founder and you're 20 minutes late or a meeting gets pushed back two hours uh but to have people outside your house

SPEAKER_72: and do this and create fire alarms that's not your job at a company your job is to try to create

SPEAKER_07: a very brisk pace that gets done but not make it feel like it's you know people's hair is on fire and that it's defcon five or four all the time so this would basically turn a one hour sunday meeting into a four to five hour event and was especially hard on people who live far away from his home uh yeah this just seems like um uh an erratic uh machiavellian crazy founder who maybe had a sense of grandeur that this was so important that people needed to jump at his whims i'm very careful with this stuff like i like to go fast and build a lot of new projects but i don't want to destroy people's life and i don't want anybody to ever think that they work harder than me and i think that's the difference

SPEAKER_00: if you're working as hard or harder than anybody on your team um then i think they can respect that

SPEAKER_07: you're you know you're setting the pace basically this person seems like a deranged uh person to me who maybe had like delusions of grandeur and is a terrible leader i ran silicon alley reporter my first magazine as a tyrant and with very ambitious goals i was uh i would be particularly rough on people if they didn't bring it but i would be there and i worked more hours than anybody and i told people very upfront we're gonna we are up against it we have no money we have no budget we have no business doing this if you want to come here i'm hiring 24 year olds 23 year olds i'll hire you for first job all i ask is that you work 60 70 80 hours a week like me and we have to put the magazine to bed you just work until you drop and we get that out the door and you know people like rafat ali or will leach who went on to work at deadspin brian alvey you know countless great people shenny jardin uh all bought into that and we all crushed it together and it was an esprit de corps we all were in it together so this is a train wreck um luckily this isn't a blood testing company or a money management firm like madoff nobody read any of these uh articles or watched these youtube videos apparently so uh you know this one is going to leave a crater of uh you know dozens of people losing their job i guess and they're better off because this is not a job they would want and a bunch of rich people including lorraine

SPEAKER_00: pal jobs i guess who backed this individual but who was uh from what i'm hearing in the back channel is incredibly frustrated and trying to disentangle herself from this mess for a couple years now you

SPEAKER_07: know this guy is just a disaster and uh should never been put in charge but sometimes people who are a disaster are able to delude other people through sheer force of will to give them money and start projects you got to be crazy to start a company and you know sometimes you put people in charge who should not be in charge it's just the nature of our business uh whether it's the media business or the tech business or just entrepreneurship uh writ large so uh i'm sure more horrible things will come out but thankfully uh nobody's blood tests or bank accounts were drained and ruined

SPEAKER_80: because of this schmuck's behavior beachfront homeowners may have to pay market rate for their flood insurance going forward for a little bit of a history lesson since 1968 flood insurance has been subsidized by our federal government through fema and the average premium is 739 and flood insurance is priced based on whether or not a home is inside the hundred year flood plain which is land expected to flood during a major storm so according to a new york times article quote the result has been a program that subsidizes wealthier coastal residents at the expense of homeowners further inland who are more often people of color or low income according to the new york times so in 2019 fema announced it would start pricing flood insurance based on the particular risks facing each individual property which they called risk rating 2.0 the new system takes effect next month for people purchasing flood insurance and for existing customers rates will rise in 2022 april of 2022 according to the new york times article quote federal officials say the goal is fairness and also getting homeowners to understand the extent of the risks they face and perhaps move to safer ground reducing the human and financial toll of disasters the article uses a florida homeowners rising rates as an example one woman currently pays 480 a year for flood insurance but it will eventually have to pay 7147 they don't say how much her home is worth but i'm assuming if it's a beach run home or in a beach run community you know it's probably that's seven thousand maybe that represents two percent five percent of the home value uh so it's worth 50 times the seven thousand maybe a 350k home or more uh this new insurance policy comes as tropical storms and hurricanes obviously been the rise in recent years you know that and when you abstract uh the cost of something from people you really screw up incentives and the incentive here should be that people stop building in flood zones so that we don't waste money and you don't want to give people an artificial sense of what something costs what's another example of this health care right now when people pay ten dollars when they go do a copay or they pay fifty dollars to visit the doctor they don't know what the actual cost was there's no customer in health care when there's no customer there is no competition when there is no competition there is no excellence what's another example of this well another example would be public education when there's a public school and teachers unions and it's a city state region without uh vouchers where parents can take their tax money and then go spend it on a private education or there's not charter schools if there's not competition well then there can be no excellence and if a school has to fight for students and there's other options parents can homeschool parents could go and take a voucher and go to a private school parents could go to parochial school a charter school you will see all schools get better you want to have competition in the system in america one of the most dangerous things we've seen in the last two decades is this group of whiners who want to remove competition from the system and want to remove striving from the system the reason america as a 300 million plus country is so powerful despite our modest size being 20 30 the size of india china etc the reason we uh have punched so far above our weight is because of our competitive spirit because we have a competition in us as they would say in there will be blood i have a competition in me that competition is what makes for excellence now does it mean it equals outcomes no but we do have uh hopefully a relatively fair starting line that's why everybody around the world has wanted to come to this country so we need competition these people are being abstracted from that competition and that reality and so it's completely unfair so obviously i'm in favor of this especially because they're giving them i think a decade and there's a cap on how i think maybe 18 a year i read of how much they can increase these so they're going to get people like 10 year landing they should sell their homes and if there's other rich people or affluent people who can afford the insurance who want to take that risk and they're okay with living you know on a beach in miami or somewhere where floods louisiana that's their choice but we want to actually incentivize people to move out of those areas right and so this is the right decision and according to the center for climate energy solutions from 1966 to 2009 the average number of tropical storms was 11 per year with about six becoming hurricanes from 2000 to 2014 the average was over 15 tropical storms per year including seven hurricanes so you know about up significantly um here's a chart if you're watching on youtube of hurricanes and major hurricanes from 1850 to 2014 it's just a steady rise um it's not actually unmanageable we just need to move where people are living over time and incentivize them to do it show me an incentive i'll show you an outcome an incentive that abstracts people and obscurifies the true cost is going to mean they're not going to be incented to move their homes or to put their homes on stilts and all those kind of things so here's the pricing data released by fema quoted in the article flood program ensures 3.4 million single-family homes around the country 2.4 million homes will see their rates increase by no more than

SPEAKER_84: 120 in the first year so nothing anybody can afford that um at an average 15 minimum wage an average 15 wage in the country 20 wage in the country this is nothing 627 thousand homes will actually see their

SPEAKER_80: costs fall in year one 230 000 homes will see an increase of 240 in year one 74 000 will see an increase of 360 in year one 25 000 will see an increase of up to 1200 almost half of the 25 000

SPEAKER_84: homes seeing the largest increase are in florida and all these increases are year one so this would be a yearly increase of a couple hundred bucks for us you know 10 of these people so it's really only

SPEAKER_80: going to affect 10 percent um here's the quote from the article because federal law prohibits femur from raising any homeowners flood insurance by more than 18 percent a year could take 20 years before some current homeowners are charged their full rate so um how is congress responding uh from the new york

SPEAKER_84: times article last week 38 members of congress signed a letter urging house speaker net supposed to block the change so stupid um you really this is a change that's good for everybody we want to start to see people pay a fair rate and as i just said these numbers are de minimis why should people with beach

SPEAKER_80: front homes and who are living in these crises get a free ride for everybody else i mean it's nice as a country that we're looking out for other people who you know through no fault of their own you know maybe have to deal with this but at this point you know if you're buying homes in those regions i think

SPEAKER_84: anybody buying a new home there should just get no discount if you're buying a home for the first time there should be no fema discount you you're i don't have any indication here maybe one of you know in the audience or a researcher can pull it up for me i i don't know if new people um are actually subject to getting this kind of fema discount or not quote from the letter we are concerned about the

SPEAKER_80: burden of potential double digit rate hikes on our constituents by fema untest fema's untested pricing methodology so this is a perfect smarmy you know manipulative quote double digit rate hikes double

SPEAKER_84: digit rate hikes on a really de minimis amount of money is nothing so they should talk the reason they don't put the real numbers in here is because they know their argument would fall apart so always

SPEAKER_80: with numbers you want to know the absolutes when people start giving you percentages ask for the absolutes when they give the absolutes ask them for the percentages you always want to show both numbers this is just from dealing with startups and investors somebody will tell me oh my god we're growing 78 on average for the first six months and i'm like for the last six months i'm like okay

SPEAKER_84: what was the number of user paid users you had like 10 i'm like so how many do you have now like 80 i'm like okay and what does it cost 10 a month i'm like so you have 800 a month in revenue great congratulations but let's put the percentage number in context with the absolute number so um yeah future homeowners may not qualify um for as high of a loan right if you're giving a loan and you're a mortgage broker you don't want to have to be left as the bag holder here and um you know even if you paid off your mortgage insurance rates will continue to rise yearly in until they're no longer subsidized which is the right idea here we we want to uh have people who want to buy these homes be the risk takers uh and we don't want the government uh subsidizing them if anything we should be putting this money towards buying more affordable housing and not not not subsidizing people who are living in beach communities and who are being who could easily sell those homes to people who want to take the risk right it's totally fair and people should pay fair market at this point and giving them a 10 year 20 year looks like it's a 20 year a landing is more more than reasonable i'm guessing a lot of these people are 50 years old 60 years old 20 years to pay your fair share not a problem so i thought i'd bring that up because incentives are really important when you're thinking about building businesses all right everybody

SPEAKER_01: i want to tell you about a new program i started which could be your start to becoming a venture capitalist that's right and what experience do you need to have in order to do this you need no experience

SPEAKER_00: you need an internet browser you need a brain and uh you need a little bit of time here's how it works i call it open scouting what's scouting many of you know famously i was uh sequoia capital very famous venture capital firm here in the valley it's first scout and i made a bunch of investments as a scout one of them was uber one of them was thumbtack one of them was data stacks and it worked out really well for me and it actually started my career as an investor people don't know this but previously i was a journalist and an entrepreneur and now i'm only known as an investor so that

SPEAKER_07: just tells you something about your career like you can reinvent yourself over time

SPEAKER_00: what we do here with open scouting is instead of you having to apply to become a scout and me anointing you as a scout which is what happens in typically in scout programs is they pick people they already know and they say hey bring us companies we'll give you some of the carry what's the carry that's the profit that comes from an investment if there's no profit you get nothing if there's a lot of profit like in the case of uber it did okay uh you know you get to buy a couple of houses and that's that's a great thing um so we started open scouting i got the domain name

SPEAKER_01: openscouting.com so i'm flipping the script a little bit i'm saying anybody on the planet can become a scout i don't care if you're a kid in bangladesh if you're a grandmother in boise idaho or anything in between you could be working as a receptionist you know and have seven of your eight hours a day available for you to surf the web and you're bored out of your mind i don't care who you are here's what i care about you find a great startup which you can find them all over the web and then you go to open scouting maybe you've met the startup maybe you haven't

SPEAKER_97: and you submit you fill out a form and when you see on open scouting here you fill out the form

SPEAKER_27: and you tell us about the startup and why you think it's going to change the world now i do know we're going to get a lot of low quality submissions here because it's open

SPEAKER_00: but i got people i got researchers i got associates i got principals who will look at this incoming stream and if you submit something like i don't know uber in year 12 of the company like we're just going to be like delete we don't need that but who knows you may find the next uber or maybe you find an app you love that's brand new it's in the app store nobody knows about it yet maybe you find a website you love and you tell us about it and you tell us why you love it and why you think it's a good investment and it will take about a minute or two to fill it out we made the forum purposely very short right now we're going to probably build a longer forum and maybe we'll ask for more information as time goes on if we invest in that company right so if we invest and we're not already in touch with the company or somebody else hasn't submitted them because we are in touch with a lot of companies

SPEAKER_08: and if you tell us about a company we've already invested we're not going to give you five thousand

SPEAKER_00: dollars that makes no sense or if we're already talking to them or they've already filled out a form on our site or somebody else has submitted them so you got to get there first right you submit the company first and we invest we give you five thousand dollars in cold hard cash cash why cash well because carry that splitting of the profits from it could take 12 11 or 12 years like that's what it took for uber to go public so there's a long cycle here between when you would get paid or if you already have money and the five thousand dollars is not important to you you can take 10 of our carry on that first investment so we make that first investment if

SPEAKER_07: that million dollars turned into 101 million dollars we get 20 of the carry that's 20 million dollars you

David Friedberg: get 10 of that 20 million you get 2 million bucks pretty sweet deal right so that's how it works

SPEAKER_00: it's new it's different nobody's ever really done this before i should give credit to bryce from something called ndvc which is i think now defunct but he came up with the idea of paying cash for referrals i think he was the first to do that because he wanted it to be more open to people who needed cash now maybe people are a different station in life they weren't already affluent and they could use the cash so that's the program and it's an experiment but we'll see if it works but we're getting you know a good number of people submitting stuff every day this is all done privately so we don't tell the company that you submitted them nor do we want you going out there saying you work for jason calacanis and you're part of the launch team or you're part of this being started you can tell people that you're going to submit to open scouting and it's an open way to

SPEAKER_08: submit people and yeah that's fine but don't say you work for us because then i do then i would need to in advance clear you and make sure you're not a criminal or you represent our company i have to

SPEAKER_00: train you etc so this is you're just filling out a form submitting a company and if it happens to work out you get your beak wet that's it