David Friedberg: okay everybody it's an awesome news show for you today i am well rested i got a lot of energy and i got a lot to say about today's news story my last day in italy a 21 day italy uh vacation the longest vacation of my life i had to work the last week but i have been writing every day the new book is coming out better than i ever could have imagined i got uh well over 9 000 words done i've got the chapter list to work on when i get back i was cranking a thousand two thousand words a day typically a non-fiction book is 60 000 words so you know i'm getting there folks okay in today's news facebook was caught cleaning up their algorithm reports from q1 and q2 the rapper tyga deleted his only fans account which was printing money and he's starting his own platform also we received a dm from a sex worker who listened to friday's show and the only fan segment so i'm going to respond to their comments and the wall street journal released an article detailing more about jack ma's whereabouts and his big fight with the dictators and authoritarians in the chinese

SPEAKER_03: communist party okay let's get to the show this week in startups is brought to you by pipe sas companies this is for you pipe helps you unlock your recurring revenue as upfront capital sign up in minutes and start trading on pipe for free for 12 months at pipe.com twist our crowd helps you invest early in pre-ipo companies alongside professional vcs if you're interested in investing you can join our crowd for free at o-u-r-c-r-o-w-d dot com slash twist and and brokers startup insurance program helps startups secure the most important types of insurance at a lower cost and with less hassle save up to 20 off of traditional insurance at and broker.com slash twist and while you're there get an extra 10 off using offer

Chamath Palihapitiya: code twist okay on saturday night facebook acknowledged that an anti-vax post was the most

David Friedberg: popular post on the platform in q1 of 2021 that's right facebook is spreading anti-vax news on their

Chamath Palihapitiya: platform at scale and it's worth digging into this because it is a very complicated issue because facebook isn't the person actually sharing this it's us consumers are choosing to share and amplify anti-vax posts and of course facebook is the platform allowing that so the grand debate will

David Friedberg: continue should facebook be editing the posts of their members or should they be a common carrier should they be like the phone uh and they just allow people to talk on the phone obviously i think we all know that it's much different than just using the phone because here something can trend and a lot of people can see it on each other so last wednesday and this story is a little complicated but

Chamath Palihapitiya: i think it's worth us going over last wednesday facebook released their first ever content transparency report which covered the second quarter of 2021 that's important to get the quarter straight here second quarter obviously april may june first quarter january february march four quarters in the year three months in each so uh you might remember that we covered facebook's internal transparency battle on episode 1247 of the speaking startups back in july this was the story in which the new york times kevin ruse inserted himself into uh the story by creating

David Friedberg: the facebook top 10 twitter handle using data from crowd tangle which is a company uh that facebook bought and it's a social media monitoring tool that just tells you what's popular on the platform and the sort of negative take on that on twitter which is kind of left-leaning was that facebook is right-leaning big shocker facebook is something that people all across the united states use and

Chamath Palihapitiya: it's kind of right leading twitter is something that elites in coastal cities in democratic places and journalists are addicted to and it leans left there's no shocker here i think we all understand

David Friedberg: that these two platforms have a position just like fox news uh and msnbc might have a leaning correct i think we all agree on that now facebook's uh transparency report uh is including widely viewed posts uh as

Chamath Palihapitiya: a section and uh this featured the top 20 most viewed posts over the three-month period from april to june of 2021 the list included a bulldog puppy meme which is in my wheelhouse and i'm all for a post from joe biden and was mostly filled with response baiting posts like what is something you

David Friedberg: will never eat no matter how hungry you get uh let me think about that i think that you really can't objectively answer this until you're starving on a raft in the middle of the ocean but you know that's a great viral uh query that people will respond to and we all understand how the signal works on facebook anything that increases the time you spend on facebook or on youtube will get shown more and that is the nature of these algorithms the nature of the algorithms being built is take all the signal you can find a like a click maybe you're scrolling on your phone maybe forwarding to a friend writing a comment any of those uh variables those behaviors those actions those engagements those were all

Chamath Palihapitiya: words we used in the industry those engagements are signal that they should show that post to more people if you show it to more people or different groups of people and it keeps growing then you keep showing it to similarly minded people which creates the classic echo chamber this is why

David Friedberg: if you watch youtube and you start at an eric weinstein or brett weinstein you might go to a ben shapiro which might lead you previously to a milo yiannopoulos or you know those other weirdos on the far far right and they call that this sort of intellectual dark web spiral right and you could have it happen i've had it happen with uh aviation videos i started watching aviation videos because i like planes and then i started watching ones of planes crashing and then all of a sudden my entire feed on youtube is a dystopian mess of pilots calling the towers before their planes crash we'll put that aside but that is the nature of algorithms and in fact the people who write these algorithms are not picking

Chamath Palihapitiya: aside they're not picking aside they're picking winning as a business how do you win as a business you get more eyeballs for a longer period of time this means if something is shocking or outrageous and

David Friedberg: more people comment on it then you show it more well misinformation arguably is going to draw a bigger response than just plain old information if you said hey the journal of new england medicine or whatever or you know this doctor said the following things about the covet vaccine that might not draw a response but if you said bill gates is putting a microchip in your body yada yada this might actually draw a bigger response which then the algorithm which is very clever at extending your time on site but very

Chamath Palihapitiya: stupid when it comes to helping society again the algorithm is not optimized for making society better it's optimized for making facebook more money and that is the key problem and by the way it's only a key problem if the person running the company doesn't care about society or cares about making money more than society and let's face it that is the nature of mark zuckerberg he has always cared more about growing facebook and his own pocketbook than he has about society period end of story uh feel free

SPEAKER_09: to add mention me i'm taking a twitter break anyway oddly the top 20 posts only included one in which

Chamath Palihapitiya: covid was mentioned so this was weird journalists have got their hooks into it they're looking at this transparency report and they're wondering what's going on it could be that maybe facebook is starting to

David Friedberg: pay attention and maybe deselect stuff from being shared right the mind wanders when you don't have information and when you get some information it creates more questions sometimes uh than answers so this is a very interesting moment but this was the q2 report which then led everybody to say hey wait where is the q1 report now once you leave something out when you make a sin of omission journalists are really good at this i know i've been talking the last couple of episodes about where journalists don't have a lot of information and maybe they don't do a good job and they're doing click baiting and they've got their own interest to get subscribers or to get advertisers well this is where actually journalists can do a great job when something's missing

Chamath Palihapitiya: they'll be they'll notice it right they're like detectives uh when they're at their best and something's missing they're going to ask that question so on friday the new york times reported that facebook had a transparency report prepared for q1 but decided to not release it for fear of looking bad aha so why well here's the quote from the new york times the most viewed link was a news article with a headline suggesting that the coronavirus vaccine was at fault for the death of a florida doctor the article in question was published by the chicago tribune with the headline a healthy doctor died two weeks after getting a covet 19 vaccine cbc is investigating why and this is the kind of headline that we've all been seeing where the fear-mongering amongst the

David Friedberg: press and the way the press presents information is completely um you know uh at worst uh they're doing it to get it the most cynical version of why publishers are writing these headlines is fear-mongering

Chamath Palihapitiya: to keep you tuned in to cnn uh breaking news breaking news breaking news everybody's dying

David Friedberg: of covet and then they never tell you exactly what's happening you'll hear that pediatric icus are being uh are full but they never tell you how many people are in a pediatric icu right they never tell you the denominator they never tell you the numbers they tell you it's surging they tell you it's breaking and you know all the stuff they don't really want to give you the numbers because the numbers actually might be well there were four pediatric beds and now there's five and that fifth child was put in their regular icu and it's not a problem so when the news is playing these kind of games they lose trust and so here you have it facebook has this headline with the chicago

Chamath Palihapitiya: tribune which i think is um a kind of crazy anecdotal story one doctor and the cdc is investigating

David Friedberg: why you really don't want to print a headline like that one could argue that the chicago tribune is doing a bad job by putting a headline like that and people have which is it's fear mongering it's done to get clicks if a healthy doctor died two weeks after getting the covet 19 vaccine they should put how was he hit by a bus was she um you know somebody who had an allergic reaction to it what what are the details here uh and the cdc investigating that doesn't really mean anything maybe they're investigating all people who died after a vaccine shot i want to welcome harry

SPEAKER_16: hurst you know him as the co-ceo and co-founder of the company pipe you've been on twitter over the past year you've probably heard me and my besties a number of which got their beaks wet talking about all the excitement around pipe and their fundraising and the product they're bringing to market i thought i'd have harry come on and explain it to you all harry welcome to the program thank you jason what kind

SPEAKER_21: of vetting do you do on the companies and what size company is it best for so the beauty of being a

SPEAKER_20: trading platform is that we can service companies of all shapes and sizes you know we've got companies that

SPEAKER_22: they're just getting started out have a hundred thousand in ar all the way up to uh publicly traded companies on the platform with hundreds of millions in ar and every company in between so there's you know a different offering in terms of trading limit size and bid price for each company stage in terms of vetting the way that we work with the companies that when you sign up for pipe you connect your bank account your accounting system and your payment processor and within 24 hours the next business morning we're going to give you your trading limit the amount that you're able to trade at any one time and the bid price the amount of cents on the dollar that the capital markets are willing to pay for the annualized value of your revenue streams all right thanks again harry for

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Chamath Palihapitiya: of thousands of dollars happy piping everybody so facebook critics have accused them of covet misinformation on the platform and this would support that theory and it takes two to tango or

David Friedberg: in this case three you have the public sharing a fear-mongering link that maybe they shouldn't you have the chicago tribune maybe writing a headline that is fear-mongering and inaccurate that scares more people and then facebook building a platform that whips it into a frenzy everybody is at fault the tribune article has since been amended and was most recently updated in april here is the new update at the top of the article update two weeks after getting a covet 19 vaccine a miami doctor died from a

Chamath Palihapitiya: condition that causes internal bleeding although it developed suddenly a medical examiner's report said

David Friedberg: there isn't enough evidence to rule out or confirm the vaccine was a contributing factor okay just like i said you probably shouldn't have printed the headline to begin with it's fear mongering and if you know people are resistant getting the vaccine printing it in a headline like that and scaring people it might not be the most thoughtful thing to do you might want to think

Chamath Palihapitiya: it through and maybe use a little judgment as a journalist as a publication as a publisher as whoever who wrote the headline um and as we know in a lot of cases the journalist themselves doesn't write the headlines some social media or somebody who's really good at getting clicks rights it also from the new york times and here's the quote the report also showed that a facebook page from the epoch times an anti-china newspaper that spreads right-wing conspiracy theories was the 19th most popular page on the platform for the first three months of 2021 and this is where facebook is super weird these like epoch times headlines and these weird publications you've never heard about they've been around for a short period of time they kind of have gotten um a lot of play on facebook because they play fast and loose with the headlines etc not that the chicago tribune is doing much better so the new york times got this information by obtaining leaked emails sent by facebook executives they say according to the article facebook executives debated whether releasing the q1 report would be a pr problem for the company duh obviously it is the cmo alex schultz initially wanted to release it but eventually wound up agreeing to shelve the report this shows you how insincere the executives at facebook are they literally are thinking about themselves and the pr for the company and the share price as opposed to what's in the best interest of society and this important discussion and just

SPEAKER_26: like you shouldn't expect the uh journalists out there to be acting in your best interest i wouldn't expect facebook to act in your best interest you need to act in your best interest you need to be an independent critical thinker hopefully this podcast helps you do that so uh all this is very

Chamath Palihapitiya: interesting because facebook released their q2 report last week vp of integrity guy rosen said the social network had undertaken a long journey to be by far the most transparent platform on the internet according to the new york times i think that's patently false twitter is public the data is

David Friedberg: public twitter would be the most transparent platform on the internet perhaps reddit with all their voting being public and comments being public i think that's an actually factually incorrect

SPEAKER_26: statement by guy rosen uh after the article dropped on friday facebook faced a bunch of online criticism uh obviously from journalists as well so on saturday night they decided to release a pdf of their q1

David Friedberg: transparency report via dropbox interesting choice which was unavailable at the time of this recording

Chamath Palihapitiya: who knows why it could be they're overwhelmed by people clicking it on saturday facebook's head of comms andy stone posted a thread and man it's gotta be tough to have that job on twitter describing the difficulties of defining misinformation and what he thinks facebook is guilty of here are the most important tweets from that thread uh here's the quote we've been getting criticism for holding an internal report until it was more favorable for us and then releasing it getting criticism isn't unfair

SPEAKER_30: getting criticism isn't unfair okay this is word salad but it's worth taking a closer look and making

Chamath Palihapitiya: note of some of the components of the story that's more weasel words you can tell this person's a comms person because they talk like a weasel um andy stone uh on twitter continued news outlets wrote about the south florida doctor that died okay correct statement when the coroner released a cause of death the chicago tribune appended an update to its original story new york times did not would it have been right to remove the time story because it was coveted miss info uh that's a great question um you

David Friedberg: know at what point should facebook be taking stuff down and interfering with the news process i think the new york times and the chicago tribune would tell facebook um or or you know twitter or any social platform like let us do our jobs uh andy stone continued on twitter saying of course not no one

Chamath Palihapitiya: is actually suggesting this and neither am i but it does illustrate just how difficult it is to find misinformation uh he also added we're guilty of cleaning up our house a bit before we invited company we've been criticized for that and again that's not unfair so he uses a metaphor here which is a key part of trying to persuade you to feel um a certain way about the company and the job they're doing cleaning up their house before we invited company obviously everybody wants to have a tidy house before you invite people over um but that is a way to try and convince you to not be critical of facebook really the the problem with facebook is this algorithm and their perverse desire to increase time on site by any means necessary not really being thoughtful about how their algorithm works why does the algorithm need to have these things spread why don't they just put a cap no news story can spread crazily or stories can only spread within you know your friend circle times two or something they could throttle all of this which of course with throttle maybe the time on site which they can't do because they have quarterly reports to hit and zuckerberg would never do it because he wants to get the stock price high we're cleaning up our house is a reference to not publishing the q1 results because they didn't look good obviously again he's just using a metaphor to try to be convincing he's a comms person he knows the power of metaphors you're being manipulated by those metaphors i'm just unpacking it for you um and meanwhile the q2 results look better uh as most of the top posts are memes and response bait uh you know those asking a question like oh what are your three favorite movies or whatever or what food is the most disgusting omg and that might be a great solution for facebook here if they want to have a pragmatic solution for staying out of the fray here maybe they just keep politics and news stories out of the top most shared stories they keep them throttled to

David Friedberg: friends of a friend or maybe two hops away and not let them trend in some huge way on their system you know is is is any of the sketchy by facebook everything facebook does is sketchy like that's

Chamath Palihapitiya: their mo they they care about growth above all else and really i think at this point i think zuckerberg

David Friedberg: should resign as the ceo of facebook and let cheryl sandberg take it over and let her make the decisions uh and i think she would make more thoughtful decisions than he does or let somebody else take over and uh let somebody who isn't as tied with their net worth to the fate of facebook run the company and do a better job it's time for management to to turn over at facebook that's my honest belief

Chamath Palihapitiya: there's other things zuckerberg could go do with his life in the same way bezos or bill gates have and he's young he should go spend his fortune doing other things whether it's philanthropy or building other businesses or buying other business or being a capital allocator or playing you know with oculus or spin out oculus and make it a new company whatever um facebook is also facing scrutiny obviously from

David Friedberg: the biden administration you remember in july biden said the platforms like facebook are killing people due to the amount of vaccine information which is let's be honest um a true statement and it's not

Chamath Palihapitiya: that facebook's killing them it's that uh people are conspiracy theorists they want to believe this stuff there's a certain number of people out there who will fall for these conspiracy theories i think they're inclined to believe them because sometimes they do turn out to be correct um sometimes the difference between a conspiracy theory and the truth is time uh going by and i know biden um you know i think pulled back on that but you know he's not wrong i think the bigger picture here is it's time for zuckerberg to go and i think he should go right now put somebody in place put cheryl in to be the ceo for now maybe she's interim maybe she stays forever and that would be just a much better look uh for facebook and he should just give himself a promotion uh to chairman of the board according to the washington post white house officials have alleged that many americans are reluctant to take the coronavirus vaccine in part because of false or misleading information they have read on social media services including facebook sure uh and americans didn't uh get exposed to this information at scale so it is a real problem my belief is that these platforms need to look at the algorithms and make decisions that are in the best interest of society not

David Friedberg: their own growth that is the core they're going to have to give up some growth for an algorithm that maybe doesn't optimize blindly for growth if you optimize blindly for growth people are going to go to dark places the darker and the more perverse and the more conspiracy theory uh you know the this content gets the more people will tune in and that's just the sad part of of uh an algorithm combined with the worst of human nature we want to aspire to consume better content to be our you know and to aspire to work towards our better angels not the dark crevices of humanity and really the

Chamath Palihapitiya: algorithms do not care and the people who built the algorithms do not care apparently so uh where does this end up i i i think this is why society is tired of facebook this is why they're not going to be allowed to grow this is why they're going to get kicked out of other countries uh and then on the margins i think people you know i talked to a lot of young people who are extremely talented and they don't want to be associated with facebook they don't want to work for the company and many of the people who've worked for the company who have i talked to said they felt a great sense of relief when they left because they didn't want to be part of doing something negative for society if you work at facebook you're working on the ad network go work on some education startup

David Friedberg: go work on a space startup go work on a you know carbon sequestering you know startup go do something

SPEAKER_36: world positive working for facebook is not world positive let's go on to the next story

David Friedberg: do you ever wish you invested early in some of the best performing ipos of 2019 and 2020 well our crowd investors did and now you can join them in what's next with our crowd accredited investors have access to invest directly easily and most importantly early our crowd investors have benefited from our crowd companies by yelling like beyond me and lemonade or being bought by companies like intel microsoft and oracle and my favorite uber our crowd's professional vc researchers identify promising companies and funds across a range of sectors stages and global locations our crowd is investing in medical technology breakthroughs in ag tech and food production solutions in the multi-billion dollar robotic industry and so much more so here is an easy call to action you're going to just go to our crowd.com slash twist o-u-r-c-r-o-w-d.com slash twist and begin reading deal memos and you'll get to invest in these amazing companies that researchers are working on if you're interested in investing you need only join our crowd there is no charge to join just go to o-u-r-c-r-o-w-d.com slash twist o-u-r-c-r-o-w-d.com slash twist to open your free account okay everybody rapper tyga uh spelt t-y-g-a kind of pronounced like tiger but tyga uh deleted his only fans account i saw on instagram and started his own platform my star with two wise uh just as i said would happen remember on friday show when i

Chamath Palihapitiya: mentioned that the um top only fan creators should just leave the platform and start their own well uh they could do that and just cut the fees apparently tyga is a fan of the show here's my clip from friday if the service can't do it correctly shut it down and then the people who are uh the top performers uh on this service should just make their own it's not hard to replicate the service to be totally honest the top 100 people should just leave and make their own only fans take back that 20 so there you have it folks uh once again uh you heard the future here just a

David Friedberg: little bit earlier and you know what i can predict the future to a certain extent on this podcast because i talk to founders all the time and sometimes you might wonder wow how did jason nail that a lot of times the reason i know this because other founders are calling me saying hey jacal i want to start a competitor to that and then i present it to you as a prediction when in fact it's confidential information i have so just know that sometimes when i make a prediction here it's

Chamath Palihapitiya: because behind the scenes i have a little bit of extra information the founders who are likely to

David Friedberg: start these things might tell me so sometimes that is what's happening um shortly after i recorded on friday uh tyga tweeted the following just deleted my only fans starting my own platform my star

Chamath Palihapitiya: more futuristic better quality and only a 10 fee obviously cut it in half creators will also be able to make content of their choice i think he's alluding to adult entertainment as opposed to still

David Friedberg: pictures i.e port and apparently apply now to be the first to get an invite he says my stars 10 cut is half of what only fans takes so when a founder trips and a company trips that's an opportunity for

Chamath Palihapitiya: other people to just roll right over them and you know what tyga is one of the top people on only fans i understand so he's got a good shot of doing that the tiger brand i think is going to be bigger and more uh attractive to both uh entertainers on these platforms and to the audience so congratulations to him on building i think what will be a billion dollar company not my cup of tea i'm not going to invest in it uh but if you have the ability to invest in it i'm pretty

David Friedberg: certain this will become a very good investment the new platform will launch in october coincidentally that's when only fans will start banning explicit conduct if you remember they're fine with explicit content but not conduct in other words you can be naked but you can't be naked and having sex

Chamath Palihapitiya: he has over 23 million followers on instagram and i've been saying over and over again the top instagram

SPEAKER_26: uh you know creators or tick tock creators should leave and make their own apparently here is an example of that happening albeit on the adult side according to my stars announcement

David Friedberg: quote creators will have the ability to sell nfts on the ethereum blockchain what a brilliant idea one of ones one of 50s just i mean every piece that uh an only fans creator creates could also go up in value uh and be sold wow i mean you get the membership fees and you get a little bit of that uh

SPEAKER_26: nft pixie dust great great vision after the only fans news broke last week competitive platforms have tried to take advantage of the opportunity and capture some of the fleeing adult creators just for

Chamath Palihapitiya: fans is a similarly adult themed platform i told by my researchers here and they released the following statement on august 19th the adult industry is sadly used to companies cutting their teeth on the adult

SPEAKER_26: market and then abandoning them once they reach critical mass just for dot fans was founded and built by and for sex workers and its staff is 100 comprised of sex workers and people who have been in the porn industry for many many years we are a porn site that will never change and we just have no interest in mainstreaming in quotes just for dot fans is number two in traffic to only fans and we are well poised to make sure adult content creators are not abandoned we welcome them all to our website we believe we have the most innovative platform out there and are constantly evolving to meet the needs of our community we welcome everyone to check us out just for fans followed up the statement with tips and tools for how users can migrate large amounts of content and data from one platform to another and

Chamath Palihapitiya: it appears they've got a lot of traction with migrating creators and users according to my research team as they've been tweeting about server migrations and apologizing for crashes over the past couple of days note just for fans takes 30 percent of creator revenue which is 10 percent higher than only

David Friedberg: fans and 20 percent higher uh than tyga's new platform mystar so i'm sure they will change that

Chamath Palihapitiya: according to the tos just for fans is a pretty unique referral model for top accounts uh here's the quote select members are allowed to make model referrals signing up new models to the system by a special link we provide they will earn five percent of a model's net earnings on subscriptions only for at least one year with the likely potential of the time period being extended but we reserve the right to evaluate the program after one year payments are made on the first of every month for the previous month chargebacks will be debited accordingly so this is interesting they're creating a multi-level

David Friedberg: marketing adult entertainment industry uh program also known as an affiliate program um if this was you know then they got one percent of every model that they brought in the systems referrals to the system uh it would be a full-blown mary kay cosmetics and uh as always we're seeing massive innovation from the adult entertainment uh industry maybe this will all come to podcasting at some

SPEAKER_26: point instead of listening to this podcast you'll all have to pay and then i'll turn you guys into podcasting to take some of your money uh not likely to happen we're doing very well with the advertising sold out i think we're sold out through november and we just went to five days a week so the podcast is doing great in fact we're hiring another producer if you're thinking of uh getting into podcasting or you've been in podcasting we're going to hire our fourth producer so there'll be seven people on the team not counting myself this podcast is doing really well uh regarding our only fan segment on friday we actually had a sex worker reach out to us via dm after listening to the segment as i i knew they would um and they are very thoughtful about these issues and obviously they're experiencing the first hand and they shared an interesting perspective i'll read it to you now

Chamath Palihapitiya: i thank you for the effort in trying to address sex workers respectfully there was a lot of nuance and key actors missed and misinformation which causes further harm to sex workers because of the attacks on adult platforms by legislation such as fosta sesta which i'm not aware of adult platforms have had to enforce an insane level of security and moderation so let's explain this fossa is fight online sex trafficking act sesta is stop enabling sex traffickers act both bills were signed into laws by trump in 2018 they create an exception to section 230 which is the law that allows you to be a common

SPEAKER_26: carrier you're not responsible for what your users post like on facebook and twitter they're not responsible if you say something uh slanderous etc which holds uh web publishers liable if third

Chamath Palihapitiya: parties are found to be posting ads for prostitution on their platforms according to 2018 breakdown by vox fosta sesta was intended to protect sex workers online but it seems like now its regulatory burden is forcing them to move offline which obviously is much more dangerous let's get back to this uh sex workers dm to our podcast handle twi startups content moderators on adult platforms is tighter than every other social media site i believe that actually only fans requires id 2257 and a credit card to join and it's behind a paywall unlike facebook or instagram who wait to take action the reports on the bbc are also incredibly flawed and pushed by the same groups that's interesting um 2257 is a reporting requirement for legal sex workers that keeps record of their ages this is intended to fight uh against child sex work uh back to the dms this is a full-blown moral panic that's being weaponized sex workers

SPEAKER_26: are literally dying because of these campaigns um i would think because they would be then going to sex work uh irl in real life as opposed to digital which has obviously a lot more safety um and comfort and ease than doing it in the real world which is really dangerous uh regarding crypto particularly

Chamath Palihapitiya: the u.s a lot of sex workers regardless of if they actually are working or not have lost their bank accounts

SPEAKER_26: paypal has closed accounts and seized funds we don't have access to basic resources to utilize crypto that's not even speaking to the nightmare it is to implement crypto for microtransactions so it's an interesting perspective you know um and i appreciate it i think the point is that even with 2257

Chamath Palihapitiya: and you know um driver's licenses and all that the people who are good actors are going to do all that and the bad actors are going to be able to route around that and so how do they route around it they could have one person who registers as a sex worker and then you know have a person who looks in a similar uh then use that account etc so there's gonna be a lot of cat and mouse so while i appreciate the the thoughts here um i do think that it is uh there is a lot of potential abuse here and we have to uh think about the geographical border so while i absolutely appreciate the sex worker's opinion here uh about the moral panic the fact is a child sex work is legal or not punished uh in the same way it is here in the united states and other countries uh or it's more acceptable i don't i'm not an expert

SPEAKER_26: on it so i actually don't know the exact laws um but you do have a global internet and i think when you add sex work to the global internet that can cause these unintended consequences so we're probably in

SPEAKER_47: agreement on that i would think actually the sex worker um who dm dust would agree with that the international thing is a particularly challenging one and bad actors i would be very interested in

SPEAKER_50: their uh perspective on those two uh so what is the solution um you know for good actors in the sex

Chamath Palihapitiya: worker community i guess they have to do very intense kyc and i think they have to think about um you know some constant verification and the fact that there are an international uh nature to this but there are no easy answers there's always going to be abuse in systems and abuse you know of credit

David Friedberg: cards you know leads to people losing money and abuse in this industry leads to child children sadly being abused and so the stakes are higher here so of course the kyc should be much higher than with

SPEAKER_26: finance uh will agree uh to disagree on that um and i don't think it's a moral panic i i think it's more the nature of an international global system with a lot of bad actors in it and probably very

Chamath Palihapitiya: little policing and the person who's running this platform might have a you know they might have

David Friedberg: not the highest moral or ethics or ability to police it or they may not want to police it to the level they should uh and their past seems a little sketchy so um it's complicated i guess is what

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SPEAKER_04: let's get back to this amazing episode okay the wall street journal just released an article

David Friedberg: detailing more about jack ma's disappearance in china here is the quote at the top of the article technological disruption once seen as a useful prod for china to catch up with the west has been recast as a threat to the ruling communist party in other words as we've talked about on the all in podcast and here on this week in startups china was leveraging entrepreneurship and capitalism and startups to create wealth prosperity jobs and be competitive with the democratic west however those leaders have become so powerful that they threatened the communist party essentially the dictators in china jack ma the billionaire co-founder of alibaba and founder of its spin out ant group didn't agree with this and acted more like an american tech entrepreneur than a chinese citizen and basically challenged authority and challenged the thinking in china as if he was bezos or bill gates or any number of outspoken entrepreneurs here in america quoting from the wall street journal xi jinping china's most powerful leader in decades is rewriting the rules of business for the world's second largest economy okay so according to the wall street journal jack ma and i'm just quoting here from the wall street journal had lost an appreciation for the risks of falling out of step he tuned out warnings for years according to people close with jack ma in other words he didn't really think that he was operating in an authoritarian country a communist country the warning signs were there he ignored them he basically lost an appreciation for the risks uh and uh he went

Chamath Palihapitiya: rogue so jack ma disappeared for almost three months starting in november of 2020 after criticizing the chinese banking regulators for hampering innovation and one of the number one things about the chinese culture uh and the communist party's goals is to have harmony and if you're criticizing them in their rules

David Friedberg: that is going to lead to discord and it is not going to lead to harmony so after moss comments the ccp

SPEAKER_26: blocked and group's 35 billion dollar ipo which would have been the largest ipo ever in the following months and group has since been forced to restructure and lost over half its value

David Friedberg: after fidelity cut its implied valuation from 300 billion to 144 billion um according to business insider china's most booming company was about to set a world record ipo think about that and the ccp shut it down due to what any american would consider light criticism this is an important moment for everybody to consider how lucky we are to be americans and to live in a democratic free society literally you could spend your life decades building an amazing company be at the finish line on the one yard line and then be disappeared and have your company taken from you and your ipo basically halted so they basically say in the wall street journal that now jack ma is playing golf uh according to people familiar with uh the matter and reading tao's text so um here's another quote from that wall street journal article he hired a teacher to learn oil painting starting out with images of birds and flowers and then shifting to an abstract style according to these people and photos of his artwork viewed by the wall street journal okay this is absolutely bonkers he is not oil painting he is not golfing he's under house arrest he's being re-educated i am almost certain this is probably something that uh was you know made up or maybe he is doing this and they told him you're taking up oil painting in golf and if we see you speaking out against uh the chinese communist party again uh you're gonna go to jail it's that simple if you'll put three million uyghurs in jail simply for being muslim uh and uh torture them and make them pick cotton in the fields i don't think you're gonna have much sympathy

Chamath Palihapitiya: for a billionaire so uh a beijing official quoted in the wall street journal believes that jack ma should have been more focused on quote giving back to the party instead of just focusing on his own

David Friedberg: interest again tall poppy syndrome in china it's about the society it's about harmony it is not about your individual achievement which is the definition of capitalism capitalism is a brutal competition and whoever wins gets lauded as the victor and whoever loses gets to start again and maybe uh fight the battle again but we like to celebrate the winners and we like to have winners and losers we like to have

Chamath Palihapitiya: equal opportunity capitalism is a beautiful system it's got some margins on the edges i talk about

SPEAKER_26: that in my new book which i've been writing while i'm here uh in italy and the book will be coming out next year uh and you're gonna i think you're gonna really enjoy it because this is some of the

Chamath Palihapitiya: some of the topics i cover in it the article also notes that there are a lot of claims rather than facts supporting what jack ma is actually up to now and what happened before the disappearance quote mr ma's spokesperson said details about mr ma's activities reported by the journal weren't based on facts but rather on unsubstantiated opinions and or third hand observations and didn't comment further okay let's pause for a second why would somebody say he was oil painting in golf jack ma could say that the ccp could say that somebody who's trying to make peace between the two parties could be

David Friedberg: saying that this is a total mess and the bigger picture here is china leveraged capitalism to build this amazing system and then xi jinping looked at it and said you know what i'm in charge and if i don't stop these entrepreneurs now capitalism is such a powerful force china's going to turn into a democracy that was the road they were on and now xi jinping has taken all the capitalists out of the running just like other countries whether it was putin in russia or mbs in saudi arabia authoritarians do not want competition from high profile entrepreneurs basically communism and dictatorships are not compatible long term with capitalism because we've learned that the world loves capitalism they love entrepreneurs they love innovation whether you're a person in china in saudi arabia russia america or in the uk wherever you are seeing somebody build something and come from nothing is so intoxicating that it could actually topple a dictator and a communist party that is what this experiment has proven we just ran one of the most important experiments in the history of humanity who is going to win capitalism and democracy that pairing or authoritarianism and capitalism guess what authoritarianism dictatorships communist parties plus capitalism doesn't work we have now proven it in three places russia china and saudi arabia the great kingdom experiment is over no more capitalism in those places all of those are now owned by the state america and the west wins again we've won again and we must and i don't want to make this a political show because it's not but i do care very deeply about human rights and i think if the united states and the west does not stand for human rights and democracy who will who's left we must make it a priority in the west germany france america canada mexico and also japan south korea and australia we must india make a block of countries that care about human rights and holds the line from keeping china russia and saudi arabia

SPEAKER_26: from spreading authoritarianism and communism to the rest of the free world that's i'm going to leave it at that i'm not going to talk about the situation in afghanistan but protecting human rights is critically

David Friedberg: important and this story is about human rights and individual exceptionalism being thwarted if you are hearing my voice right now you are in all likelihood in a democracy in the west and you need to think deeply about your position because we get to vote we're lucky enough to vote we need to vote for leaders who are willing to fight for humanity and for humanity to be free and for human rights to be

SPEAKER_26: respected on a global basis and if you're listening to this in a communist country uh we support you and we uh hope that you could fight the good fight and that you will have a revolution in your country just like we had in ours uh and that you will win that revolution and you know what sometimes you don't win but the fight is worth it because being free is what it's all about at the end of the day what are we if we're not free as humans uh end of um speech okay the wall street journal also reported

David Friedberg: that jack ma had tried to go back to beijing to resolve the issue but he's been unsuccessful so far okay uh it's understandable that jack ma is trying but the fact is jack ma represents um you know the tip of the iceberg in capitalism in entrepreneurship and there is no way that xi jinping is going to allow jack jack ma to become the most loved celebrity in uh china he jack jack ma is the equivalent of bezos or elon musk or zuckerberg pick the entrepreneur um maybe not zuckerberg he's not very well loved here but pick the loved entrepreneur they know that people love entrepreneurs more than they love lead you

SPEAKER_14: know politicians and he's not going to win that fight period end of story okay just a little button

SPEAKER_26: at the end uh which is a personal comment um and i i'm taking this from preet bahar's amazing podcast uh stay tuned with preet and he does a little button with his personal opinion at the end of the podcast sometimes and so i'm going to just give you my personal opinion as is my rights this is my podcast um and yes this has to do with uh getting vaccinated the fda has approved the pfizer vaccine

David Friedberg: here is the quote today the u.s food and drug administration approved the first covet 19 vaccine the vaccine has been known as the pfizer bio and tech covet 19 vaccine and will now be marketed as comirnaty terrible name for the prevention of covet 19 disease in individuals 16 years of age and older the vaccine also continues to be available under emergency use authorization e ua including for individuals 12 to 15 years of age and the administration of a third dose in certain immunocompromised individuals so this is great news i know many of you were looking at the facts the vaccine especially the pfizer one which essentially ensures you're not going to die from covet you might get covet you might have a breakthrough case as my friend david sachs did from the all in podcast but the number of people dying who have had the pfizer vaccine is extraordinarily low i mean we're talking 25 50 100 to 1 depending on the community and this data is obviously a moving target but i did see that in the new york times so uh that is the point of a vaccine is so you don't die your life is absolutely uh important it's important not only to you uh but to your friends your family and in fact

SPEAKER_26: humanity we all have a part to play as part of this human species and it's just not worth the risk to not get vaccinated you have to come to your own conclusion yes but this is a major milestone it is

David Friedberg: no longer emergency use it has been approved and it's logical that it's been approved because if you're taking the vaccine now you are taking it i think in month 9 10 or 11 compared to your uh friends and family uh your countrymen and country women and people around the world there have been over a billion people who've gotten vaccinated the pfizer vaccine has been used by hundreds of millions if

SPEAKER_26: not billions so if you were waiting for it to come off of emergency use this is a great moment for you to consider making your own risk assessment doing your own thoughtful research across many different sources of information the u.s food and drug administration is one of them and you know there's a lot riding on them making this uh officially approved and not emergency use there's a lot riding on it right they have a lot of skin in the game people can get in a lot of trouble if they approve something that's dangerous so i think this is a really big moment for those of you who are

SPEAKER_63: waiting to see hmm it's a new experimental vaccine okay if you got the measles vaccine if you got other

David Friedberg: vaccines as a kid i think now that it's been approved i would say it's reasonable to think of it like

SPEAKER_63: getting your chickenpox vaccine no big deal okay go get it that's my best advice you have to make your own decision and i respect your process and now you have a great piece of new information to help you

SPEAKER_26: make a decision and help us end this ridiculous pandemic which has just been absolutely psychologically economically uh emotionally spiritually parentally educationally brutal for so many people uh not to

SPEAKER_63: mention you know people dying so you know take this new piece of information and i would like you to think about it deeply okay i'm not making the decision for you i'm not telling you to do it

SPEAKER_26: um i want to tell you to do it but i want you to know i respect your decision making process it's no

SPEAKER_63: longer emergency use it is approved it's a big moment folks uh give it some thought okay great episode talk to you tomorrow