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SPEAKER_02: Hey, everybody. Welcome to This Week in Startups. It's your boy, Jason Calacanis.

SPEAKER_03: And yes, I have a bit of a sore throat, but don't worry. I've got two very talkative people with me for today's news roundtable. You guys have been complaining we haven't done a news roundtable in a while, and you're right. We need to do more news roundtables, and that's one of our big goals for 2020.

SPEAKER_04: Back on the program for his ninth appearance, Ian Thompson is with us.

SPEAKER_03: He is with The Register, where he is a journalist and an editor. And The Register is an antagonistic journalistic publication in tech, correct?

SPEAKER_07: We call it like we see it. The motto is, biting the hand that feeds IT.

SPEAKER_10: Right.

SPEAKER_11: But, yeah, generally when PRs ask me, you know, it's like, how do we get into The Register? The symbolizes, well, just screw up really badly. We'll be there for you. Yeah.

SPEAKER_15: And Kristen Dumont is back with us.

SPEAKER_03: I threatened that after she did an amazing appearance on episode 975, talking about Machine Zone and her journey from a partner at Wilson Sincini to being the COO of Machine Zone and then taking it over, is back on the program. Nice to see you.

SPEAKER_17: Nice to see you.

SPEAKER_03: We had a great time when you were on the pod. Yes, we got to talk about WeWork.

SPEAKER_18: We got to talk about WeWork and a bunch of stuff.

SPEAKER_21: Arnold Schwarzenegger, all kinds of fun stuff. Oh, don't get me started. You did your impression.

SPEAKER_22: I did.

SPEAKER_20: Don't get me started on WeWork. We're in one of their offices at the moment. Are you? And it's grim, really grim. How so?

SPEAKER_11: How is it? Oh, they've started cutting back on everything. So, you know, there's been a piece of gum in the urinal in the toilet for the last five

SPEAKER_28: days. They've taken away the free beer. That's only on one floor now. And instead, we've got seltzer water.

SPEAKER_30: I thought that was the whole point, was the free beer.

SPEAKER_28: Well, exactly. Yeah. I mean, particularly for British journalists.

SPEAKER_03: I thought it was pretty lame when we were there that they were so antagonistic with the cleaning staff. That was a big tell for me that this guy, Adam, was a huge D-bag.

SPEAKER_35: Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_03: Was they kept going on strike. And I'm like, okay, wait a second. These are the people who are cleaning the bathrooms and making us coffee. Does it actually matter if they get paid $15, $20, or $25 an hour and get benefits or you have to make them contractors and try to squeeze the people who are making the least in the building? The building is filled with professionals. WeWork has raised tens, whatever, over $10 billion or something or billions at the time. And they're giving a hard time to the cleaning staff.

SPEAKER_39: And the whole purpose is the space. The space is beautiful. Come be in our space. Right. It actually makes no sense.

SPEAKER_03: It would be like having a restaurant. It'd be like, you know what? I'm going to just squeeze the life out of the waiters and the prep chefs.

SPEAKER_40: Roaches are fine. Who cares?

SPEAKER_04: Yeah. Just who cares about the quality of the product? It shows you how deranged Adam Newman was.

SPEAKER_11: They're also massively sensitive about social media. Because when they took the beer away, I tweeted out a photo of it with WeWork tagged. Within three hours, I'd had a WeWork staffer come up and apologize to me and ask if I wouldn't mind taking down the tweet. Oh, my God. And it's just like, you can't run a company on social media. It's stupid.

SPEAKER_03: This is when you know your company and when your company and you have made bad life choices is when you're asking people to take tweets down.

SPEAKER_52: Yeah. Like, when you're playing that level of defense, it's time for a little introspection, perhaps.

SPEAKER_53: I think there's a lot of introspection going on right now, don't you think? That WeWork?

SPEAKER_03: Oh, it's brutal. I would think so.

SPEAKER_04: There's a lot of people who are pursuing the business model. Yeah. And we've got a couple of companies that are in space-related businesses, not directly competitive.

SPEAKER_57: It's a smart space.

SPEAKER_04: Yeah. It was a great business. Listen, there's a lot of interesting business models around there.

SPEAKER_03: But once somebody basically spoils it for everybody, now all these companies are having a hard time because people are like, oh, the space is radioactive. Let's stay away from it.

SPEAKER_11: I mean, while Adam walks off with his billions of wonder barefoot through the streets of New York.

SPEAKER_59: That was also like, I mean, what a hit and run. Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_33: He liked, in order to get him out of the company, they just had to pay him a billion on the way out or something crazy.

SPEAKER_63: It baffles the mind. SoftBank has really lost the plot at the moment.

SPEAKER_33: It's stunning. All right.

SPEAKER_03: Let's get right into it. Right off the bat, Bezos' phone was allegedly hacked by not only Saudi Arabia, but MBS, Mohammed bin Salim Salman, colloquially known as MBS, who did a big tour of Silicon Valley a couple of years ago. There's a lot of pictures of people cozying up to him like Zuckerberg, et cetera, Marc Andreessen, et cetera. And now, the claim is that Bezos received a WhatsApp text from MBS. It had an MP4 file, which Bezos opened. I think that's a video file. And before the hack, he had 430 kilobits of data coming from his phone per day. And after it, he had 101 megabits, 232x increase, which would lead one to believe they were taking everything off of his phone. And then there was this claim that he was taunting him about his extramarital affair as well. MBS, that is. What do you think? I mean, you're pretty close to the hacking and that space, Ian. What do you think?

SPEAKER_71: Well, okay.

SPEAKER_03: Did MBS do it? It's kind of outrageous, which is kind of his wheelhouse.

SPEAKER_73: Yeah.

SPEAKER_28: I mean, I wouldn't doubt that he'd have the will to do it. I think what worries me about this and what worries a lot of people in the community is the figure you just mentioned, the 430 megabyte kilobytes for a phone, which just makes no sense because just turning a phone on should produce a higher data rate than that.

SPEAKER_52: Unless, you know, people who are in his position have multiple phones typically. Yeah. And they might have one just for WhatsApp, just in a pouch. Just for celebrities. To not be tracked it. Exactly.

SPEAKER_79: Or just for having an affair.

SPEAKER_83: Yeah. Well, you said it, not me. But yeah, he might have a burner phone.

SPEAKER_84: Yeah. I mean, it's a possibility. They haven't found the malware either, which it could have deleted.

SPEAKER_28: It could have been set to delete itself afterwards. But if you go to all that trouble to get it on there, why not leave it on there? And the only technical sort of deep, deep dive into this has been from a firm hired by Jeff Bezos. So there's no real consistency to or no real way that you can trust the data without actually getting in there with both hands.

SPEAKER_03: Oh, he hired that guy, the physical security guy.

SPEAKER_86: DeBecker. Yeah, Gavin. Gavin DeBecker.

SPEAKER_03: I know Gavin. One of his guys trained me to use my test.

SPEAKER_86: He's a physical security guy.

SPEAKER_03: Yeah, no, I mean, literally, when I had a stalker issue, somebody put me in touch with one of Gavin's guys, and he trained me on how to use my firearm, which was kind of cool

SPEAKER_04: to have like a CIA Green Beret guy shut down. I mean, it's expensive, but it's worth it when you have security concerns.

SPEAKER_90: But that doesn't make sense because it's security concerns.

SPEAKER_68: Well, I mean, he's got a good reputation in the industry, but he was talking about the Saudi links months ago. Yeah. And this report seemed to confirm it. And I mean...

SPEAKER_93: But wasn't the report commissioned to go find something? That's what's suspicious about it. Here, spend whatever you got to spend.

SPEAKER_95: And please go find that the Saudis hacked my phone.

SPEAKER_28: Yeah. I mean, I understand he's really pissed off about the blackmail attempt. I'm very respectful in the way he handled it perfectly.

SPEAKER_96: He went balls out and just said, you know, these photos exist, so to speak.

SPEAKER_28: But just like these photos exist, I'm not particularly embarrassed about them. I'm the richest man in the world. Do what you want. But...

SPEAKER_38: Or they're going to come out anyway, so let me pretend I'm being super brave.

SPEAKER_28: But I mean, the alternative thing is that his paramour sent her brother the pictures, which why would you do that in the first place?

SPEAKER_99: That is the most creepy weird thing ever. That is the creepiest thing ever. Yeah. I'm going to go ahead and tell my siblings right now. Yeah. Check this out. No. Jamie, Josh, no. Don't send me anything.

SPEAKER_101: Check out the nudes.

SPEAKER_96: Well, also, I mean, and if that wasn't the case, he hasn't sued the National Enquirer. But then again, you do need an awful lot of money to sue the National Enquirer.

SPEAKER_11: The Enquirer also has links with the Saudis.

SPEAKER_28: But it's just so... There's so much fluff going around, and there's no proof. And as a... You know, from a hacking perspective, you need proof. And you need something which will stand up. And we don't have it as yet.

SPEAKER_93: I think the PR strategists who came up with this deserve the round of applause here. Yeah. It's like sex, Sanchez, and Saudis. Like, it's like, it's just so much clickbait. It is pretty out there. It's pretty great. And so everyone just went bananas and suspended all intellectual rigor and loved it that it was supposedly the Saudis. I mean, this is thin, thin evidence. That report is extraordinarily thin. Yeah. And it was much more pedestrian than that. She got nudes. She shows them to her brother, whether or not that was nefarious or not, or part of a plot. Other people, I'm sure, will speculate about that. And then he tries to sell them to the Inquirer. And then, you know, now we're all sort of getting trolled.

SPEAKER_112: My hot take on this is don't take nudes. I know.

SPEAKER_113: No, men don't take nudes.

SPEAKER_114: I'm going to just say, overall, don't take nudes. And if you don't explicitly want them on the interwebs, because that's where they all wind up eventually.

SPEAKER_116: It always does. It always does.

SPEAKER_114: It's like 100% of the time that happens. And then also, if you're incredibly powerful, don't buy a newspaper and go to war with the president.

SPEAKER_120: And then expect nothing's going to happen.

SPEAKER_04: Yeah. I mean, this president and MBS are very good at retribution. It's kind of their speciality is to exact retribution. Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_11: The Saudis have built an entire governmental system about it. Yeah. I mean, it's easy to finger the Saudis. Occam's razor would suggest it's the brother. Well, we know it's the brother.

SPEAKER_106: Well, we don't know that the brother isn't hacking. Something potentially odd is happening on his phone. That's literally it. We don't know anything beyond that, except that the brother said, I'm going to sell the photos for 200 grand. And that's it. But those are the facts.

SPEAKER_03: I'm going to make a hard link here, a hard turn. I just realized Jeff Bezos actually went down in a helicopter crash, I believe, when he was looking at a ranch. Can you fact check that, Nick? Like, do a search for Jeff Bezos, helicopter crash. And Sanchez is a helicopter pilot. Right. Like, she is, I think she may even be a stunt pilot.

SPEAKER_132: I think that's right. And isn't that how they met?

SPEAKER_03: It might be. I tell all my friends, stay out of helicopters. Rest in peace, Kobe and his daughter and everybody else who was impacted by that.

SPEAKER_135: Here we go. Jeff Bezos had a brush with death.

SPEAKER_137: He did. The billionaire was, I mean, look at these oppressive ads on Business Insider. Yeah, he was scouting for a large ranch to buy in 2003.

SPEAKER_42: I remember this like it was yesterday.

SPEAKER_140: And a pilot named Cheater. Come on, that can't be true.

SPEAKER_03: I believe it. But all of these, the dynamic with all of this, and it really is a tragedy with all these kids dying as well. It's just brutal to watch. Pilots who have rich, powerful clients take crazy chances all the time.

SPEAKER_144: Yeah.

SPEAKER_03: And it, or not all of them all the time, but with one pilot, I think that guy would take that risk. If there had been two pilots, they would have looked at each other and said, no to what? They just told us to stay out of there. Should we do it? No. You have kids. I got kids. But when it's one pilot and they have the high profile client, they're like, and then some of these guys are hot dogs, right? Like, or gals, maybe Sanchez is as well. But they, maybe they were in Nam, maybe they're in the army. Yeah. And then all the rich people I know who get pilots, they get these ones who have 50, you know, years or 40 years, they're 50 year olds, they're gray hairs. They may have been in Vietnam. They may have done all these crazy missions. It's only a matter of time before you take a risk that you shouldn't take. I've seen it. I saw it up close and personal once. I was flying on somebody else's plane and they had too many bags and we were coming from a ski resort and the pilots like too many bags. And then one of, I won't say who, but one of the passengers was like, oh yeah, can we make it this way? Can we fit it this way? And I just said, listen, when the pilot says too many, the pilot said too many. Like, are we really arguing with the pilot about the weight on the plane? You're not an expert on this. It was uncomfortable for me because I'm saying this to somebody whose plane it is.

SPEAKER_42: I was like, I don't really think we should be debating this with the pilot, right?

SPEAKER_20: Yeah. I mean, there are old pilots and there are bold pilots, but there aren't old bold pilots.

SPEAKER_153: Yeah. I read that on Reddit. Yeah.

SPEAKER_11: But no, I mean, I know what you mean. I was taking a helicopter back from the British Grand Prix and the pilot was just like, right, okay, should we have some fun? And started doing some mini aerobatics. He's just like, I'm hoping you know what you're doing because I have not a clue. And this feels really quite unnerving.

SPEAKER_03: All right. When we get back from this quick break, DJ Elon, DJ EDM, take us to commercial with a little don't doubt your vibe, but my boy, EDM.

SPEAKER_157: We'll be right back.

SPEAKER_159: It's too good. It's so good.

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SPEAKER_52: Okay, let's get back to this amazing episode. All right. Welcome back. It's the Z Morning Zoo and that is DJ EDM with Don't Doubt Your Vibe.

SPEAKER_03: Actually, that's Elon Musk from Emoji Records and his new track, Don't Doubt Your Vibe, sweeping the nation and the interwebs.

SPEAKER_53: It's the inspirational track of 2020.

SPEAKER_03: It is. I feel like any time you do the short burn of the century, you're well within your right to release an EDM track. It's the gloat song. It is.

SPEAKER_171: It's pretty clear what's happening here.

SPEAKER_107: I've got to say, though, as someone who still goes out clubbing, you know, at weekends, if you put that on the dance floor at two o'clock in the morning at Public Works, you'll clear the floor. It's terrible.

SPEAKER_175: I know, but if your lead-in was, this is for everybody who ever doubted you, who ever

SPEAKER_182: held you down, who didn't believe in you, take it back.

SPEAKER_181: If only there was someone close to him who understood music who could explain to him that this is really, really bad. I don't know. I like it.

SPEAKER_185: I have to say, I like it.

SPEAKER_59: I'm going to go ahead and this, I think this has Blood Pop's hands on it. A music producer I know in LA who we're mutual friends with. This feels like a Blood Pop production to me. I'm not certain. He could have done it on his own.

SPEAKER_189: I mean, fair play to do what you want.

SPEAKER_192: Well, actually, it's the follow-up track, which Elon DMed me. What's the follow-up track? Screw you short sellers. It's called Tesla Q. Oh, good grief. Tesla Q, Tesla Q, Q, Q, Tesla Q.

SPEAKER_03: But in all seriousness, oh my lord, the people who shorted this stock at $150 or $200, I'm not perfect at math, but I think they lost a ton of money and he told them not to do it.

SPEAKER_201: It's like a billion in a day.

SPEAKER_03: And I was on CNBC, I think it was three years ago, and they're like, what do you think about the short sales? If there's somebody you want to bet against, I'm going ahead and tell you, not Elon Musk, not Steve Jobs. There's some people, Zuckerberg, you really don't want to bet against them.

SPEAKER_202: Pick a better target to bet against. Because these are people who will just work, outwork anybody.

SPEAKER_39: And I'm sympathetic to them. I'm sympathetic to the shorts because it doesn't make any sense.

SPEAKER_208: The stock price makes absolutely no sense. And you just have to decide it was not the Tesla IPO. It's the Elon Musk IPO.

SPEAKER_93: And so that's what we're trading on is sort of the Elon Musk personality. Because it's not a novel business. It's a low margin business.

SPEAKER_210: Selling cars. But self-driving cars, big question mark of how great that goes.

SPEAKER_213: But when are they?

SPEAKER_03: I mean, based on what I know, as a driver to the car, and based on speculation, I can infer from public tweets and whatnot, I think they're a full 70, 80% of the way there of miles driven. And I think when he says feature complete, he doesn't mean you can leave the car and take the steering wheel out. He means it's feature complete that it will go from one location to the other. But with you having the ability to take over if it needs to. I think he's pretty close.

SPEAKER_215: And people believe in him.

SPEAKER_93: Again, it's the Elon Musk IPO, right? It's all about the future. You're selling me a dream and I like it.

SPEAKER_68: But the stock price doesn't make any sense unless you're buying for the very long term. Correct.

SPEAKER_93: Which I'm not sure how many retail investors are.

SPEAKER_68: Yeah.

SPEAKER_52: I'm not sure they're not, though, because this is a new phenomenon. Like having a bunch of people on Robinhood, full disclosure, I'm an investor. That's a strange flex, but okay. Okay, Boomer.

SPEAKER_83: Full disclosure, I traded some shares on Robinhood on my way here in Uber.

SPEAKER_03: Okay. And I'm meditating with calm after this. But I think of the $100 billion, what is future Elon Musk value versus the value of the business now? 70, 30? It's got to be a $30 billion business.

SPEAKER_215: I was going to say it's like 90, 10, it's what?

SPEAKER_106: $300 million in operating income? Something like that. Isn't that right? Yeah. It's something like that. Yeah. I mean, they're not trying to make a profit right now.

SPEAKER_228: What, $20 billion in operating income?

SPEAKER_63: Yeah. I mean, they've got the German and Chinese factories still to come online. Unfortunately, the Chinese factories are going to be delayed because of this virus outbreak.

SPEAKER_222: Well, they started delivering some cars from it. And from what I understand, they got that done faster than anybody could have imagined. Building in China is amazing.

SPEAKER_178: Yeah. You can put up a hospital in 15 days, apparently. What's that? You can put up a hospital in 15 days, apparently, as they're doing it.

SPEAKER_229: Yeah, that's our next story, too.

SPEAKER_107: But yeah, I mean, Germany's going to take a while longer. The gigafactory out in Nevada seems to be doing good stuff.

SPEAKER_178: And that's the really interesting part of this, to my mind. The batteries. Yeah, the batteries.

SPEAKER_211: And I do think Elon leverages social media brilliantly. Yes. People love it. They just eat it up.

SPEAKER_114: They do. I mean, except when he swings a sword and hits himself in the leg. Which, you know, those kind of moments are ones he's, I think, learned to not do. But you know what?

SPEAKER_206: He doesn't cut deep enough that it is really a deterrent.

SPEAKER_59: I mean, the SEC stuff was, I think, pretty cute. Yeah. I mean, that was very serious.

SPEAKER_235: But what was it? A $20 million fine or something like that?

SPEAKER_60: Yeah, it's just not where you... It's a lot to spend for a dumb tweet.

SPEAKER_03: Yeah, and also, like, probably not a group of people you want to get into it with.

SPEAKER_93: True, but a $20 million fine, and then how much value are you accreting later? So, I don't know. I might pay that $20 million. It's like an investment.

SPEAKER_241: In a way, it's true. Like, the amount of press he's gotten and the amount of attention that he gets...

SPEAKER_93: And the amount of wealth he's created for people is extraordinary. So, he's saying, look, I'm going to make $20 million mistakes here and there, but I'm going to make you rich. So, there we go. That's the trade we're making.

SPEAKER_114: Yeah, and I think it's these Robin Hood investors. They might hold it forever. Like, young people buying, you know, two shares of it, three shares of it, and then holding

SPEAKER_03: and then maybe buying another share every year, and they want to own 20 of it. They might actually be getting it long-term correct. That's actually a good point.

SPEAKER_93: That actually makes sense. If they're holding it for the long term, it does make some sense. But based on what it's doing right now, it's very divorced from just the math.

SPEAKER_130: Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: The question is, when he puts up five of these factories, and they're producing 500,000 cars each, and he starts producing 2 million of them, and so all the arguments of why he wouldn't get there have now been proven wrong, I agree the stock is just, some percentage of this is the short squeeze. Maybe half, maybe a third is the short squeeze. Yeah, because they're having to buy to make sure. A third is reality, and a third is the, you know, Elon as Thomas Edison, you know, theory. Like, it's going to be more incredible things that blow your mind coming out of this company.

SPEAKER_03: But yeah, the shorts are, I mean, they're desperate now.

SPEAKER_114: Who doesn't cover at this point?

SPEAKER_107: Well, I mean, did you see the complaint that was filed a couple of months ago to the National Transport Safety Bureau, and it was from a short seller, and he said, I don't own a

SPEAKER_96: Tesla myself, but this accident, and this accident, and this accident is something you should be looking into. It was so desperate.

SPEAKER_254: You know, it's painfully bad.

SPEAKER_15: Yeah, I mean, they're going after, like, the Tesla fires, and it's like, they're such

SPEAKER_24: a low percentage compared to gasoline. I was going to say, gas and diesel cars don't catch on fire.

SPEAKER_257: I think it's a factor of 10x that they catch on fire. Yeah.

SPEAKER_93: They're going, people who own the stock think they're part of something bigger and really special. It's hard to then be very pedestrian about it and say, be very concerned about these random fires over here. People say, you know what, it's for the greater good.

SPEAKER_59: Yeah, and I think that these cars are going to get cheaper and cheaper. To produce, and that's going to be part of the magic, is that I don't think people

SPEAKER_04: understand how quickly, in a decade, he went from $150,000 cars to $45,000, you know, took two-thirds of the price off. I think there's actually another 50% coming off. I think he'll have a $15,000 to $25,000 car.

SPEAKER_68: And more importantly, he's made electric cars cool.

SPEAKER_96: You know, he kick-started the entire, yes, we had electric cars before, but they were boring, and they didn't go very far between recharges. He actually put a coherent platform forward and kick-started the electric car industry

SPEAKER_68: just as he's revolutionized.

SPEAKER_114: I do think they need to get an IQ test for when you buy one, and just have a certain minimum IQ.

SPEAKER_04: I don't know if you guys saw the white Tesla getting airborne on Twitter. Nick's going to find it in about 90 seconds.

SPEAKER_267: I missed this.

SPEAKER_04: This idiot, and he might be a YouTuber, I need to know who this person is, and I'm not going to report them to the NTSB, but somebody needs to find out who this person is so they can lose their license. It's a white Tesla getting air. This is it.

SPEAKER_268: Watch this. This is going to blow your mind.

SPEAKER_03: White Tesla, and the sound on this one, it makes a crunch. This is, and there's like two different views of it, so they obviously set this up, and it's got to be L.A. or somewhere in California.

SPEAKER_271: It looks like L.A.

SPEAKER_03: It looks like L.A. to me, and when you see this thing, I mean, you just type Tesla airborne, and not the security footage one, but this white one, when it goes airborne.

SPEAKER_93: Well, you're saying IQ test the owners. You really think these are the owners of the car doing this?

SPEAKER_274: Yeah, I know.

SPEAKER_275: I was actually thinking that as well.

SPEAKER_63: It's a parking valet.

SPEAKER_52: No, it's a parking valet, yeah. Oh, I mean, this thing gets so airborne.

SPEAKER_63: The front suspension on that's going to need a tweak.

SPEAKER_163: It makes a crunching sound, and, you know, this thing's got batteries in the floorboard,

SPEAKER_03: so you want to be really careful with this idea, but these things are way powerful when you put them on ludicrous mode.

SPEAKER_63: Oh, the torque on them is amazing.

SPEAKER_03: Yeah, but at least now they have, you can cap the speed.

SPEAKER_04: So I've capped the speed on all of our Teslas, because they got pulled over twice on the 280,

SPEAKER_03: going slightly faster than you're supposed to. I apologize to CHP. It's not going to happen again.

SPEAKER_107: Slightly. We're talking, what, 50, 60 miles over? I don't want to talk about it.

SPEAKER_284: The acceleration.

SPEAKER_107: I still have my license, but.

SPEAKER_284: The acceleration is terrifying on those.

SPEAKER_15: The problem, I think, with, like, the Mercedes and the Tesla, like, sort of breed of cars

SPEAKER_03: is, weird flex, but okay, is when you're going fast in them, you don't feel it. Yeah. You know, like, I feel it.

SPEAKER_287: Does that get you out of tickets?

SPEAKER_03: No. Apologizing incessantly gets me out of tickets. I just start apologizing. I am so sorry, officer. I wasn't looking at the speed. When I looked down, I was over the speed limit, and I apologize. You know, I'm just heading home to put the kids to bed.

SPEAKER_288: I'm heading to a charity event.

SPEAKER_04: No. No, but then they. For the disadvantage. Almost every time they put it down 10 miles or whatever, they kind of give you a little break for being courteous. Yeah. So they did. I think they did that both times. They got, like, five or 10 miles off.

SPEAKER_193: Whereas if when they come up and you go, am I being detained? It's like, oh, you're in trouble now.

SPEAKER_04: All right, when we get back from this quick break, we're going to talk about the coronavirus I've apparently have a 50-50 chance of having right at this very moment. Sorry to my co-guest today. Apple.

SPEAKER_03: And we're going to talk a little bit about Barstool Sports, raising money through gambling online, which I know both of you have some thoughts on when we get back on This Week in Startups.

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SPEAKER_03: Okay.

SPEAKER_298: Let's get back to this amazing episode.

SPEAKER_02: Hey, everybody. Welcome back to This Week in Startups. Next up, we're going to talk a little bit about this coronavirus.

SPEAKER_03: It seems like a couple hundred people are now dead in China, close to 10,000 infections

SPEAKER_04: worldwide at the taping, a couple of them here in America. I think we had our first transfer in America of the virus. And the stock market is in a panic now that this is going to cause tens to hundreds of billions of dollars in damage, which makes sense because my mailbox today was three different conferences. One of them in Hong Kong postponed. One conference in Park City I'm going to next week.

SPEAKER_03: They asked anybody who had been to China in the last three months to not come to the event and take a rain check. And then another one was like-

SPEAKER_178: Defcon China's been, well, not canceled, but they're saying delayed, but it's been pulled off. Postponed, yeah. Pulled off, yeah. But, yeah.

SPEAKER_300: Oh, my God, this poor guy. Yeah, look around.

SPEAKER_32: Just the look on his face is just like, why didn't I call in sick before going into work today?

SPEAKER_301: All right, so this, I think, is the point of discussion.

SPEAKER_114: Are people being too conservative with letting people back into countries? And was the reaction too slow here?

SPEAKER_304: I think, honestly, based on current data, and bear in mind, all the data we're getting is from the Chinese government. False.

SPEAKER_178: Yeah, who has a vested interest in playing this down. On current stats, we lose more people to flu every year by a factor of like 100 than what

SPEAKER_107: we're seeing at the moment. But this is Chinese government figures, and I don't trust them further than I can throw them. And, yeah, so I think countries were a little slow in locking down, but it's looking now as though China's getting very locked down in terms of flights going in and out. Russia's closed its border with China as well.

SPEAKER_04: One of the great things is when these things happen, people opt out of flying, which then gives the airlines a really easy way to say, we're canceling these flights, because there's 20 people on them. They can't function. What's your take on it? Do we react too slow?

SPEAKER_93: Well, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, a week, what, a week ago, I was saying, I can't even believe we have employees just making it personal to the employers here in the Valley.

SPEAKER_106: We have employees who are flying back. What are we going to do? Are we going to let them in the office or not? No. Right? Everybody's lying. There's absolutely no truth coming out of China. Shocking. Yeah. Right? And so we don't even know if people are contagious when they're asymptomatic. That'll be terrifying. Right? And then you've got the people going, no, no, no, this is just the common flu. Yeah. Well, first of all, you don't know how many people actually have died. That's the rub.

SPEAKER_93: The number of people who are dying in terms of, you know, the rapidity of the death rate is terrifying, right? I'm sure the proportion of death to those who are infected is higher than SARS, flu, et cetera. So I actually think it actually is terrifying, and it's going to have a very, very significant

SPEAKER_106: impact on commerce. So we're even feeling the impact in our games. We leverage a lot of art studios in China. Oh, they're not going to work? Everything's shut.

SPEAKER_315: Got it.

SPEAKER_106: So we're having to frantically find, you know, new sources of labor. And so if we can't put new art in our games, you know, they're games as a service. So sorry, players, you're going to see some old art.

SPEAKER_317: Yeah, you're not going to have as many swords. Yeah, that's exactly right.

SPEAKER_316: Swords are important. Yeah.

SPEAKER_317: Less swords and shields.

SPEAKER_319: That's right. Orbs of invisibility or something.

SPEAKER_318: Pea shields.

SPEAKER_222: I don't know how these nerds are going to get through.

SPEAKER_08: This is the real tragedy of all. Oh, the tragedy. You really thought it was about something else? The good news is they're going to be able to play in their mom's basements for a lot longer because their school's closed.

SPEAKER_325: It's always the good thing about natural disasters is mobile gaming revenue goes through the roof. It does. It does.

SPEAKER_330: We like hurricanes. We like all kinds of natural disasters. Big hurricanes. I mean, yeah, everybody bumpers down. I am here for you. Oh, I'm tempted to go home.

SPEAKER_335: There's a natural disaster. I'm here for you.

SPEAKER_336: Wow. It is crazy.

SPEAKER_107: It's also apparently, I mean, I've seen a couple of reports that this is kind of showing some of the weaknesses in the Chinese social control model because apparently eight people

SPEAKER_178: were prosecuted in January for spreading false information about a new virus outbreak and they were all doctors and they were re-educated as it were.

SPEAKER_28: So it's possible that they were aware of this and then just keep a lid on bad news and now we've got the outbreak.

SPEAKER_93: Yeah. Yeah. We have, I have somebody who was saying, you know, she's from China. Oh, I called my parents and they said, no, no, everything is fine in my, in my town. Really? You believe that? Yeah. It's a little terrifying what people will believe.

SPEAKER_339: Also, we're taking the, where is the mandatory quarantine? Like if I was coming back. Yeah, where is it? From China. I know they check doctors, check them twice. But they're just checking for fever. Australia, yeah.

SPEAKER_340: They're just saying if it's symptomatic, then we'll check you.

SPEAKER_68: It's two weeks. It's two weeks?

SPEAKER_107: Yeah. In Australia, it's two weeks. They're flying them to Christmas Island and leaving and keeping them there for two weeks. Keep an eye on them. In the US, I think I heard that one of the flights got taken to an Air Force base. One flight went to Alaska. They deplaned everyone and checked them out. But you don't know what the latency is on this.

SPEAKER_15: I know that one of the planes came into SFO here in San Francisco and-

SPEAKER_344: They didn't do anything. They didn't do anything. It was not quarantined. There was nothing.

SPEAKER_347: They just walked straight through the airport.

SPEAKER_114: I would, if it was me, I would welcome being in quarantine for two weeks for the better good of society. When you go to Japan, people who are sick, people, anytime you go your first time to Japan,

SPEAKER_163: have you ever been? Yes. And no. So when you first see people wearing masks in the street, you're like, what is that about? Is it smog? And it's like, no, they're sick. And they don't want to get their fellow citizens.

SPEAKER_349: That's what it is.

SPEAKER_350: They don't, it's courtesy. And the common courtesy is if you were potentially exposed, like just chill on Christmas Island. Sounds delightful.

SPEAKER_28: Yeah. I mean, I got swine flu in isolated myself and it was just- What? Yeah. This was just after I came to San Francisco.

SPEAKER_107: Wow. And my girlfriend, now wife, God bless her, would go out to get ingredients for chicken soup, leave them on the door, ring the doorbell, and then- Run. And then run. Well, step back 20 paces and then we'd have a chat. How romantic. Oh, I know. She still does it, actually. That's like every Friday night. That's the date.

SPEAKER_33: It's become their tradition for the weekend. It's date night. It's date night. Ding dong. Enjoy your burrito. I'm out. I'm sorry.

SPEAKER_114: I didn't see you for a month while you had- It was awesome. Let's recreate that. Yeah. It's terrifying. And also, there seems to be, I heard one report that there are these wet markets, they call them, which are exotic animals and a lot of like raw meat.

SPEAKER_03: And is it true that this was potentially from- Bat soup.

SPEAKER_366: Yeah. I've heard about the bat soup thing.

SPEAKER_262: This is where the xenophobia stuff is coming up. Yeah. That if you criticize bat soup, you're xenophobic. No, no, no. We've lost our minds.

SPEAKER_114: Literally, that's just, that's like the 1% of liberal, hysterical liberal people.

SPEAKER_04: I had a hysterical liberal person arguing with me about how China has done so much more

SPEAKER_03: than America in reducing poverty. And I said, what?

SPEAKER_263: Have they been to China?

SPEAKER_372: Well, and it is true that a large, on a gross number basis, a large number of hundreds of millions of people have gone from poverty to the middle class as they have built iPhones and Amazon products from Americans, for Americans, who are responsible for the standard of living

SPEAKER_04: increasing in China because we are their big customer.

SPEAKER_107: Well, kind of. I mean, also, you've got to factor in that the government has, the Chinese government has been spending enormously on infrastructure, you know, on schooling and education in particular.

SPEAKER_377: And re-education camps.

SPEAKER_107: There is that, yeah.

SPEAKER_377: And disappearing people, you know, who are doctors. Oh, yeah. Disagreeing.

SPEAKER_107: Trust me. I mean, I have no qualms about criticizing the Chinese government, although, you know, I welcome our new master's for the next century. But no, I mean, the Chinese government has done a certain amount to lift people out of poverty. American markets have done even more. But I think coming back to the food thing, if you've been to a food market in China, it's an eye-opener. You know, I mean, it's kind of how I imagined food markets in the U.S. a hundred years ago.

SPEAKER_178: You know, things are sold live because that's the way to guarantee they're fresh. Meat is left open.

SPEAKER_107: You know, refrigeration is just an afterthought.

SPEAKER_380: It's not xenophobic to say you should have health standards and health inspectors.

SPEAKER_242: That's logic. Like, humanity has learned this already.

SPEAKER_93: But that's the beauty of radicalism, is you can just call you a xenophobe, and there you go. It just makes it true.

SPEAKER_383: Yeah, square points. You're a bigot. You're a bigot. You don't want to eat. I like exotic foods. Don't get me wrong.

SPEAKER_93: But the point is to just say we think the origin of it was bat soup, and then to be called a bigot is absurd. But that's already popping up in the last two days, is that we can't actually talk about

SPEAKER_21: the origin of it, because now you're getting dangerously close to being racist. Oh, for goodness sake.

SPEAKER_31: This is how humanity fails. And the last time it was birds, right?

SPEAKER_386: It was the bird flu. Bird flu, yeah.

SPEAKER_107: I mean, but you see, we've always had this ever since we've domesticated animals. You know, we got pneumonia from cows. We got flu from chickens. We get an awful lot from pigs. Yeah. You know, transgenic stuff has always happened, and you've just got to roll with it and learn how to deal with it.

SPEAKER_274: Yeah. I think shutting the borders quicker.

SPEAKER_04: Like, we need to have strong leadership across the world to just say, when this stuff happens, we just have to take a much harder line. And you know who does this really well? Japan. Japan is like, the last time SARS happened, they were just like, yeah, we're done. Sorry, nobody's coming in. Nobody's coming in. And if you are a Japanese citizen, you can come in, but we're going to quarantine you, and we're going to take this seriously, because-

SPEAKER_394: We want to protect our people.

SPEAKER_04: And we got a lot of, yeah, it's the common good, and there's so many people in such a

SPEAKER_163: dense area. So, with cities and airplanes, so you have these like 30 million, 20, 30, 40 million person cities in China, and then you have airplanes coming in and out of them. I don't know the last time you've been to China or- No. I mean, the airports there are getting humongous.

SPEAKER_114: It's like five SFOs, 10 JFKs in one. So, the amount of planes coming in and out of China now is just-

SPEAKER_178: Well, particularly over Chinese New Year, which is when this sort of really kicked Oh, that was the other-

SPEAKER_93: Which is really interesting, yeah. Well, when protecting your own people protects the world, it makes sense from every angle, but I'm not sure we're being logical at this point. But it at least contains the spread of the virus. The reason it's becoming so terrifying is how many countries it's spreading in, and then

SPEAKER_21: the virus is going to continue to mutate in very different ways across each of those continents, and then it just becomes stronger and stronger and stronger.

SPEAKER_401: Yeah.

SPEAKER_178: Yeah, the Australians have had some luck. They've actually managed to recreate it in the lab for the first time. Oh, really? I didn't know that.

SPEAKER_68: Yeah, they announced it yesterday. So, I mean, there are possibilities that this could be moving faster, but we're not going to know because the Chinese authorities aren't going to give us the information they need.

SPEAKER_405: And then we're going to have a vaccine to an old version of the virus. By the time we have a vaccine, it'll be useless.

SPEAKER_03: A lot of my friends, one of my poker groups has a thread, and they all bought masks because

SPEAKER_04: they all travel internationally, and one of them was able to get a hundred of these, what do they call them? N95.

SPEAKER_304: Oh, N95s.

SPEAKER_305: Somebody I know bought a gross of them and is giving them to all their friends as a gift. Yeah.

SPEAKER_409: Well, since all things relate to video games, Plague, the Plague game. Oh, yeah. I love that game. That was like the first big iPad game.

SPEAKER_93: It's a good game and it's actually had a huge burst in downloads. Yeah. As people try and track diseases. It actually crashed at one point, didn't it? Because so many people were doing it.

SPEAKER_416: Yeah.

SPEAKER_339: I kind of like played that game like 10 years ago when the iPad came out. And I was like, well, I think if they're cool.

SPEAKER_420: You just can't get Madagascar. It's still on my, you can't get Madagascar.

SPEAKER_114: It's still on my iPad. And every now and then I open it up and I'm like, I still don't understand how to win this

SPEAKER_03: game or how it works, but.

SPEAKER_421: Don't use our game for Koron. That's crazy.

SPEAKER_03: Yeah.

SPEAKER_423: It's a game, people. That's the headline is pretty funny. It is a video game and indeed we shouldn't use it for modeling.

SPEAKER_222: Yeah. I'm going to go ahead and say, yeah, that's not for science. Listen to the scientists maybe. Well, the other thing that's happening is I think.

SPEAKER_106: But the scientists are going a little off in very different directions too.

SPEAKER_350: Are they? Yes. Oh, how so?

SPEAKER_93: Well, you've got a lot, several scientists are saying, look, the infection rate is much higher than China saying. Right. The death rate is terrifying and I'm a scientist and I'm scared, which makes everyone else extremely scared. Yeah. And then you've got a whole other side of people saying, can everyone calm down? This is the flu. Why are you being so hysterical? So which is it?

SPEAKER_350: Yeah. I'm going to err on caution. Me too. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03: Because this is one of those things where we're tempting fate. I mean, it's pretty clear that one of these is going to be able to wipe out millions of people if we don't get better at this.

SPEAKER_21: What's the downside to being a smidge paranoid and taking a breath and saying, let's see what it is?

SPEAKER_68: I think also there's a very different attitude.

SPEAKER_178: I was listening to the World Service last night. There's a very different attitude between doctors in first world countries who are like, it's just flu. You go to hospital, they'll give you, you know, they'll look after you and chances are you get through it. But they interviewed an Indian doctor and said, look, if this gets into Mumbai, where

SPEAKER_96: we've got very overstretched health services, the transmission, if it's person to person transmission, you've got a massive problem on your hands.

SPEAKER_437: Yeah. Also, in the infrastructure in those places is much different. You could have infrastructure issues with sewage, with the number of hospitals, with hospitals and how clean they are.

SPEAKER_04: Oh, I'm sorry. Is that racist? Did I just say that? Like there's different levels of cleanliness in different hospitals in different locations in the world. Oh, no. I can't believe you said it. Oh, God, please don't cancel me for saying that different people get different scores on their health ratings, like A, B, and C in restaurants. The other thing is the Chinese government, I understand, is they're not able to, they're usually able to stomp down any dissent on WhatsApp and other messaging apps. I heard that this time they can't. It's just too many people going crazy.

SPEAKER_114: And yet it seems like I am perceiving the Chinese government as being very weak right now, after Hong Kong, Taiwan, and now this, it feels like the citizens are feeling a little

SPEAKER_350: more emboldened. And when you see a million people come out for different protests in Hong Kong or Taiwan, and then this, people are speaking up and saying, you're not doing enough.

SPEAKER_04: The citizenry is now demanding more of the Chinese government. That's actually a very positive sign.

SPEAKER_07: I think they overplayed their hand.

SPEAKER_107: I mean, you saw last year with the Chinese government, I mean, last year, Winnie the Pooh, or sorry, declared himself, you know, going to be, he would be leader for from now on in.

SPEAKER_96: And the Chinese Communist Party has been cracking down on dissent hard. And there's a backlash.

SPEAKER_178: And there's going to continue to be backlashes. And you're right, this makes the Chinese government, their sole argument for the populace

SPEAKER_96: is we have the best system because we look after you. And when that breaks down, it all breaks down.

SPEAKER_163: All right, when you get back from this quick break, we're going to talk about the

SPEAKER_04: about gambling and Apple just printing money by squeezing their customers with absurdly expensive products and just building a stockpile of cash. We get back on this week.

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SPEAKER_03: All right. Welcome back to This Week in Startups. This is our news roundtable. Kristen Dumont is back on the pod after a really great interview in episode 975. If you haven't watched it, go ahead and watch it. She's from Machine Zone. They make games. And if you're a developer, they've got openings. They're always hiring.

SPEAKER_456: It's going well. It's going very well.

SPEAKER_106: We have a new game coming out.

SPEAKER_04: Oh, really? Yes. When does it drop?

SPEAKER_106: I'm nervous to say, but I'm pretty locked in now. February 18th.

SPEAKER_350: Oh, boy. Yes. Does that mean the whole company goes on lockdown? Like, everybody's there every Saturday, Sunday? Yes. Really?

SPEAKER_39: Yeah, you're getting me on no sleep. Wow. Yes.

SPEAKER_408: That's what people don't understand about, like, games, movies, and magazines, newspapers. They're extremely intense businesses.

SPEAKER_28: It's extremely intense. Even operating systems and apps.

SPEAKER_178: I mean, it's just like when there's a new version of Windows coming out, then everyone's in there 24-7 just to update it back in the day when they didn't release new versions.

SPEAKER_408: I miss the finality of producing a magazine.

SPEAKER_114: Yeah, the sense of completion.

SPEAKER_03: Yeah, and the esprit de corps when we were, you know, everybody was there until, you know, 7, 8 a.m.

SPEAKER_372: And then somebody would take the zip drives to FedEx to send them to the – we had to

SPEAKER_04: send the magazine by FedEx. Or sometimes people would get on a plane and take it to the middle of America or Canada, wherever we were printing from at the time, and bring them the tapes. And we'd make two copies of it. Like, it was like sending the football or something, you know?

SPEAKER_28: Yeah, we had our computer – the first print journal job I had in early 90s, we had our

SPEAKER_178: computers stolen, office break-in, and they took all the computers, and we were just about to put an issue to bed, and we had three days to do – There was no cloud then. No, no. I had to do the entire thing, and it was the first 100-hour week I'd ever worked. It was pretty brutal.

SPEAKER_93: Yeah, and what's intense about mobile gaming is you're operating it every day, so the day you launch it is just really day zero. Right. So now the new sort of fatigue sets in.

SPEAKER_437: It's basically you run a marathon, and when you get to the finish line – And then you have to do 100 more. On the other side of where it says finish line, it says starting line. That's right. You get one step. It's like, oh, screw it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_93: It's very different than the days when you used to wait until they got on the shelves, and they were so excited your game is done. What's going to happen? I have a confession.

SPEAKER_470: I've been playing StarCraft II, and it is amazing. I love playing StarCraft.

SPEAKER_04: It is so much fun. It's like playing chess or something for me, or poker. It's like so strategic.

SPEAKER_471: You get into the machine zone.

SPEAKER_04: Exactly. No, like 10 years ago, my team at – Mahalo back in the day – would play this at night, and they'd be there until 3 in the morning playing the same game. I'm like, you guys are huge nerds.

SPEAKER_15: And then I went in there, and I still had my list, and I saw all my developers. And one of them had played, and one hadn't played in two years. And I was like, oh, I miss those guys. Yeah, it's fun day. It was kind of fun.

SPEAKER_477: It was a great game. You have a nice visceral response to games.

SPEAKER_178: It was a great game called Elite in the mid-'80s, which she loaded up with a cassette and a tone control. And I've just found an open-source version of it,

SPEAKER_66: and that was last weekend, gone. It was just like, yeah.

SPEAKER_350: Yeah, I want to get my 10-year-old daughter to get into video games. I got her into archery and skiing.

SPEAKER_480: I need more girls to get into games.

SPEAKER_350: Yeah. Actually, poker is the one I'm trying – I was speaking at Stanford, and I just asked who plays poker in the room, and almost every guy had played poker, and only two women had played poker. And it was 50-50. Interesting.

SPEAKER_163: What I said in the class, again, getting myself canceled, is all the things that when I was growing up, at least,

SPEAKER_04: they steered women away from and girls away from in school, aggressive behavior, deception, math, and strategy. They were just like, not for girls, right? Like, only for boys. Ian Thompson is with us in his ninth – we've got to do something for your 10th. We've got a little cake or something here, a cupcake. Okay, from the register, he is Ian Thompson, spelt incorrectly I-A-I-N-T-H-O-M-S-O-N.

SPEAKER_493: My parents and I have had words.

SPEAKER_319: He's with the register, and congratulations. Today is Brexit. Oh, God.

SPEAKER_107: So now you guys have just totally – We have a bunch of people standing on the white cliffs of Dover shouting at the French, leave the cheese and wine and bugger off. You know, it's just –

SPEAKER_03: But on a realistic basis, I mean, I went from Garnord or Pancreas Station to Garnord, took the train through the tunnel from London to Paris. It was delightful.

SPEAKER_501: And you don't have to do anything. You just take the train.

SPEAKER_304: Nope. No, you get your passport checked in at St. Pancras,

SPEAKER_107: and then you get off at Garnord, and you're right in the center of Paris. Now what's going to happen? I think I'm just like – There'll be – Well, I mean, we still have the passport check. I mean, we're still in the European Union effectively until – for the next 11 months. But then – And we always still have passport checks because we always had passport checks. It was a negotiated settlement that we did with the EU. But what it's going to mean in 11 months is that if you're British, you no longer have the right to work and live in Europe, which is going to harm an awful lot of people. A lot of my friends who do a lot of business in Europe are now sorting out citizenship in foreign countries. Having an Irish passport is like gold. You know, the number of Irish people applying for Irish passports, which you can do if you've got – I think it's like a grandparent who was Irish – it actually crashed the Irish passport system for a while. Wow. Because so many people were trying to get on there. It's a – Personally, I think it's a disaster for the country,

SPEAKER_28: and we'll go back cap in hand in five or ten years and ask to be let back in. But in the meantime –

SPEAKER_504: It's heartbreaking, though, for, you know, the empire that, you know, went around the world

SPEAKER_04: and tried to, you know –

SPEAKER_16: Now consists of the Falkland Islands.

SPEAKER_04: Spread democracy around the world, right? Like, I mean –

SPEAKER_16: For white people, yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: I mean, I'm not saying it was perfect.

SPEAKER_14: You know, it was a – To close the borders for a country that tried to, you know –

SPEAKER_28: Also, I mean, I'm sorry, Britain was made on immigration. You know, it's like the Huguenots came in and kick-started the, you know, the finance and jewellery business. The, you know, we've had waves of people coming in

SPEAKER_107: and improving – I mean, improving the country.

SPEAKER_68: I mean, until we had the mass Indian migrations, curry was a rarity. And it's just like, what are you going to do on a Friday night after you got lashed up at the pub? Go to the Scone House?

SPEAKER_374: Can anybody can translate latched up at the pub?

SPEAKER_107: Is that when you locked your horse up? Getting lashed, getting a wee bit merry, let's put it out.

SPEAKER_511: Drunk. Our director, Sir Charles, is also crying right now. That's a good word. All right, guys. It's going to be okay.

SPEAKER_514: It's going to be okay.

SPEAKER_39: I think more people care about Megxit than they care about Brexit.

SPEAKER_03: All right, Barstool Sports is now valued at $450 million. Pan National Gaming bought 36% of it.

SPEAKER_04: Barstool did somewhere between $90 and $100 million in revenue last year with podcast, merch, and gambling. And the explicit play, according to the video I watched on the Twitter, was wagering and gaming is now going to be legal in the United States. There was some referendum passed by the Supreme Court, I believe.

SPEAKER_520: It basically said it's a state's rights issue.

SPEAKER_04: States' rights issue.

SPEAKER_15: And so we have now invested in two wagering companies. Neither one is operating in the U.S. yet, but we did that.

SPEAKER_106: And Drakken has just went public.

SPEAKER_15: Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_106: Via SPAC, but they're now public, basically on this news.

SPEAKER_03: Yeah. And so here is the, I guess this is the founder, and he speaks about...

SPEAKER_523: Help us help you. I'm locked in. Dan's locked in. Eric is locked in. The key people aren't going. I'm telling you, just like I said, people grew the day when they passed on us, I don't know, 10 years ago. Anybody who doubts us will pay the price in spades. We are going to become the biggest gambling company in the country. Why? Pan National has the infrastructure. We have the audience, and we know this space, I'm telling you, better than anybody. If you believe in me, believe in us, get on board the rocket ship, because the next stop is literally the moon. Music.

SPEAKER_526: New Elon Musk song. Yeah, exactly. It resonates with everyone.

SPEAKER_301: You're fine. But the crazy thing about this is, he's talking about buying the stock,

SPEAKER_163: which is generally something you don't do, is encourage people to buy your stock in this way,

SPEAKER_04: that you're going to the moon. I don't know what this person was thinking, but.

SPEAKER_178: Yeah, he's got his own problems with union busting as well. He should pay a big fine on that.

SPEAKER_114: Oh, yeah. Did he say? All unions. Oh, right. He was the guy who said. Yeah, he was the guy.

SPEAKER_532: He tweeted, I will never let a union in my place, or something like that.

SPEAKER_303: Oh, no, he also set up a fake bust or union Twitter account.

SPEAKER_208: Yeah, I was going to say, I think there was a whole faux persona where it was really him saying what he thought.

SPEAKER_93: But he got to disassociate it himself. We were talking about Elon. See, I didn't say it.

SPEAKER_178: Yeah, we were talking about Elon's $20 million to eat.

SPEAKER_535: Elon doesn't like unions either.

SPEAKER_107: No, but I mean, this guy is going to pay out far more for this.

SPEAKER_535: Is he going to get in trouble for that?

SPEAKER_107: Oh, yeah, he's already in trouble for it. They're definitely not kidding. In trouble how? Because it's illegal. No, no, I know that.

SPEAKER_538: Is he going to take it against them?

SPEAKER_107: Well, no, complaints have been filed,

SPEAKER_178: and there's an investigation ongoing at the moment.

SPEAKER_543: Oh, wow.

SPEAKER_542: From interested people who are pro-union. So that'll be fair.

SPEAKER_59: Oh, wow, yeah. He's going to face labor. Wow, his threats are under investigation. Yeah, he's going to take his tweets down. Oh, that was the penalty?

SPEAKER_548: Oh, that was the sole penalty? That's it? Oh, wow. That's pretty light. He got off easy.

SPEAKER_93: Yeah, that's pretty light, actually. Because Elon had to read a statement. I've broken the law. Here are all the ways I've broken the law.

SPEAKER_554: Confess. Did he say break the law? I don't think he said broke the law.

SPEAKER_93: Supposedly. Oh, oh. The ruling from the judge was that he had to issue a statement saying-

SPEAKER_555: What, allocution or something? Yes, exactly. Something like that.

SPEAKER_208: That he had broken the law and discouraged union organizing.

SPEAKER_03: The crazy part of this whole unions in the media companies is like, it's literally like

SPEAKER_114: the kitchen crew and the, you know, the deckhands on the Titanic forming a union. It's like, we want more money. It's like, the ship is sinking. We need to get on those boats quickly. Like, we're all going to die in freezing water. I mean, obviously-

SPEAKER_556: Don't tell me you like unions.

SPEAKER_28: I'm a union man. Really? I'm a member of the National Union of Journalists. What does the union do for you?

SPEAKER_107: It's honestly, it's one of the most useless unions out there because it's so broad. Everybody says that.

SPEAKER_178: But what you are seeing is with things like Ars Technica and other publications, their staff are unionizing. And a union is never really the best option.

SPEAKER_68: But if management is that bad, you have to unionize. That's a sign that something weird is going on.

SPEAKER_244: Okay, but then what do they get you? So you unionize and then what?

SPEAKER_68: Collective bargaining is the key thing.

SPEAKER_106: And then what do you get out of it?

SPEAKER_107: Better pay. Oh, is that what it is? Better conditions, yeah.

SPEAKER_106: So how do you know that you wouldn't have gotten the better pay without the collective bargaining?

SPEAKER_107: Because you can hold management over, basically hold management's feet to the fire. If one person goes on strike, it's no effect.

SPEAKER_93: Isn't it better to just create a sufficient market demand for talent so that then free market forces handle it?

SPEAKER_106: It's a cute theory. In practice, it doesn't work. It's actually not a cute theory. It absolutely works, which is, do you think tech workers are better off or worse off? They're way better off because there's such high demand for their skill set that I can't mess around. If I want to screw around and underpay somebody, I just lose them. So what's the point? Like the best way to actually inflate wage is to create demand for that talent. What I think unions do is it essentially protects people who are incompetent. It really says the high performers lose their voice and the low performers get a disproportionate say at the table.

SPEAKER_93: That's outrageous. And it basically says we're all the same. Humans don't like homogeneity.

SPEAKER_504: Ian, counterpoint, are you part of the lower third of the registered writers drafting off the first third?

SPEAKER_68: I've survived various journalism culls. I've sort of done this for 25 years.

SPEAKER_11: The point about collective bargaining, yes, individuals can negotiate higher deals for themselves. But when you've got management that decides to lower wages across the board, yeah, some people are going to leave. But particularly why it's so popular in the journalism industry at the moment is the journalism is contracting so sharply, there aren't other jobs to go to within your field.

SPEAKER_208: But I don't think management sits around and says like, I know, let me screw them on

SPEAKER_106: wages. Everyone's running a business. Like the markets are speaking as to what the markets demand and the markets want profits.

SPEAKER_93: And so you need to figure out, you either got to scale revenue, right? You got to scale down costs. You got to do a little bit of both.

SPEAKER_15: That's the problem in journalism. In journalism, there are too many writers. It's not as...

SPEAKER_11: Well, there's not enough revenue, basically. Not enough revenue. Facebook have taken an awful lot of the ad revenue.

SPEAKER_577: There's too many people competing for the same jobs.

SPEAKER_11: And margins are tight. Print companies who went into online...

SPEAKER_96: One of the reasons the reg has always been profitable is because we weren't a print company in the foot. We didn't have the art editors. We didn't have the accountants and the human resource department. Everyone either wrote, sold, or edited. And that's it. And we had one accountant.

SPEAKER_114: What I don't understand about these unions and the negotiation is if somebody like, let's say, Jim Bankoff, who at Vox, I guess, managed this, I think, relatively well.

SPEAKER_04: If he just said, OK, you guys want a union, that's fine. I'm going to pay everybody a 50K base. And then I'm going to base a bonus on performance. That will be between $0 and $100,000. And that'll be at the sole direction of your manager, who will then report to their manager

SPEAKER_42: and I'll approve everything. It's a recipe for political life.

SPEAKER_95: It's not a union that said that that was OK. That's exactly what they don't want, is everyone gets sort of same. Yeah.

SPEAKER_93: I want the same. Now, unions were super valuable. Unions used to be extraordinarily valuable. And the reason we have these laws that people are getting in trouble for is largely because of unions. So I don't want to take away from the fact that there was an incredible amount of social and legislative change that was led by the unions.

SPEAKER_106: But I don't really know that there's a time and place for them now. And I really have never met a union member who has a compelling argument of here's how I benefited from being in the union that couldn't have been achieved a different way.

SPEAKER_11: Personally, I benefit from the union because I get free legal cover from them. But the unions have free legal cover from your employer anyway.

SPEAKER_106: So in California, for example, you get free legal cover.

SPEAKER_07: Yeah, but if you're a freelance journalist, you don't have that.

SPEAKER_106: Then you should be fighting for employment, right?

SPEAKER_11: Well, no, because some people prefer to work freelance. I mean, it gives you a certain amount of freedom to do things. And the unions have done good things. Weekends are pretty good. The five-day working week is down to unions.

SPEAKER_96: Getting decent working conditions for factory workers, all down to unions.

SPEAKER_208: Yeah, I agree with that.

SPEAKER_106: I think factory workers have benefited incredibly from safety rules that were put in place by unions. You lose me, though, when you start saying, ah, I get to work less because of my union. But isn't that precisely what's wrong?

SPEAKER_07: But no one's saying that. What they're saying is we demand a fair wage for our work.

SPEAKER_106: So do tech workers. Tech workers demand a fair wage for their work. And sometimes you need to work six days and seven days. And it shouldn't be that somehow there's some protection, there's some protecto bubble of you can never require of me to work more than five days a week because the union has spoken. The business needs to succeed. It really sets up this versus mentality that's dangerous.

SPEAKER_350: The one thing I thought was interesting, though, and the one thing I thought was interesting in fairness to the unions was they did require, as part of the Vox settlement,

SPEAKER_03: because there was a pay in equality, I think they discovered, between people who had been there because they had acquired a bunch of businesses.

SPEAKER_04: So somebody at one unit with five years experience might be getting paid radically different. And then it might have actually split on gender in some cases. And they were able to fix those things. And then also, I think they had like a problem where most management was white males. And they said, hey, for any management positions going forward until there's more balance, we want to see at least two viable candidates. You don't have to pick somebody based on not being white, but there needs to be two candidates that make it to the final five that are not a white guy or something to that effect. So it's not a quota system for who gets the job, but it is a quota system for at least finding some viable candidates. What do you think of that?

SPEAKER_93: I have so many thoughts. Yeah. First of all, that's discrimination, right? So it's saying, I'm going to take account of your gender, your race, or your ethnicity for some point of the hiring or promotion process. It doesn't matter if you're white or African-American or female, that's discrimination to look at those things.

SPEAKER_106: Now, it can be aspirational. Of course, I want to make sure I have an extraordinarily diverse workplace. Why? Because I want to have a competitive advantage and having diverse points of view, having a ton of diversity, I think makes a company stronger. Mandating it is discrimination. Then to your first point, there's already laws that prevent that. And there's a ton of plaintiff's lawyers running around willing to take that case. And you don't even have to hire a lawyer. All you have to say is, I'm an employee of Exco, and I'm noticing a disparity in pay. That's enough to get everyone's attention, legal team, management, and people really take it seriously and they look into it. People don't – they're not intentionally discriminating.

SPEAKER_130: What they were doing, I think, also at Vox is – oh, here we go. The Ringer Union, at Ringer Union.

SPEAKER_242: It's been two weeks since we formally asked Ringer management to address reports of a potential acquisition.

SPEAKER_15: They have not done so. Yeah, the union doesn't get to be part of that discussion. Sorry.

SPEAKER_409: And neither do any of the other people. It's confidential.

SPEAKER_106: And going out on Twitter and complaining that you're not part of the M&A talks is ridiculous.

SPEAKER_304: I mean, different countries do it differently.

SPEAKER_178: I mean, Germany, for example, then unions and management work very closely together on these sort of things.

SPEAKER_107: And, you know, German manufacturing seems to work pretty well. Norway's gone a bit further.

SPEAKER_07: They, I think, have a law mandating that you have to have a woman on the board, which seems to be taking a little –

SPEAKER_106: California has that.

SPEAKER_07: Oh, really?

SPEAKER_208: California has that. And now Goldman Sachs is not underwriting IPOs that don't have some sort of gender representation. I don't know what the actual stat is.

SPEAKER_114: Yeah, I mean, if things are so bad for so long, putting in some backstop, I guess, is a reasonable accommodation is what people feel.

SPEAKER_612: Hmm.

SPEAKER_28: Yeah, I mean, it's – I know it's a cliche, but the bro culture is pretty grim at times in Silicon Valley.

SPEAKER_617: In tech journalism still or no?

SPEAKER_28: Not in tech journalism, no.

SPEAKER_617: No, because I mean, that seems like representation is really good in tech journalism.

SPEAKER_96: Oh, no, representation is very good, and actually – and that's down to, as you pointed out, companies saying, you know, let's just look outside the box a bit and consider people who 50 years ago wouldn't have been considered, and the results have been fantastic.

SPEAKER_93: Yeah. I don't think unions solve that problem. I think it's just our fundamental disagreement. Yeah. But I like you anyway.

SPEAKER_620: Oh, and love, likewise.

SPEAKER_163: Yeah, I find the union thing really interesting that it is the industry that's failing and everybody is scrambling to just try to save it.

SPEAKER_04: It might – I think actually the unions wind up saving money ultimately for Vox in these places because they can just say when somebody comes for a raise and they're an all-star and they're like, I've been here for 10 years and I'm an all-star. I need more money and I bring a lot of traffic. They're like, okay, yeah, according to the union scale, you're paid what you're supposed to be getting paid. And they say, well, well, but I have a bigger brand. I have more followers on Twitter. I get more retweets. I want more money.

SPEAKER_68: I don't think they're saying that you can't incentivize with bonuses. They're just saying for a flat rate, we want a living wage on a flat rate, and then you can put bonuses up there if you want.

SPEAKER_319: Right, and then if you do that for one person, then the union can come back and say, well, that person is getting more.

SPEAKER_04: Everybody else needs to get more. And so management can – I think what management winds up doing in these is they just – they can very easily build a business model around the union pay scale, right?

SPEAKER_625: Which suppresses wages.

SPEAKER_04: Which I think ultimately will suppress wages, yes. So I think overall wages will be more fair and it will be a very clear system for the writers. They know what they have to do to get the next 7 percent, next 15 percent bump, whatever it is. They know what to expect for each position, so there's clarity. But when you can negotiate for yourself, you might be able to negotiate for more than the average and make a compelling case, and that's over. I think they're just going to say, you know what?

SPEAKER_241: We have 500 journalists here. No one makes or breaks The Athletic. No one journalist makes or breaks The Ringer. No one podcaster there is going to change their fate.

SPEAKER_630: Right. It eviscerates differentiation, which I just don't think humans like.

SPEAKER_68: On the other hand, though, it does ensure that you actually get paid a living wage and a decent –

SPEAKER_409: But if you're succeeding, you're going to get paid a living wage anyway.

SPEAKER_262: Right? If you're the top person who's succeeding more, you're going to get paid – I'm not sure what we should define living wage, but I –

SPEAKER_242: Yeah, living wage is really highly dependent on what city you're in.

SPEAKER_163: Yeah. I mean, I was talking to somebody. They told me they had hired somebody for $45,000 in San Francisco for like an entry-level operations position.

SPEAKER_04: And I was like, did they not punch you in the face when you told them the salary?

SPEAKER_163: Like, you hired for somebody for $45,000 in the Bay Area. They're like, yeah. I'm like, they go to work in the city every day. Yeah. I said, how is that possible? How is that possible? Yeah.

SPEAKER_617: I mean, every job under 70K, 60, 70K is out of San Francisco. It doesn't exist here anymore.

SPEAKER_28: Yeah.

SPEAKER_107: You see, I can speak for my industry, but wages are fairly low in the journalism industry. And have been sinking for a number of years simply because, you know –

SPEAKER_595: Isn't it just because there's surplus supply?

SPEAKER_28: No, it's because there's a lack of advertising revenue mainly. I mean, that's what's really – Yeah, the duopoly took all the revenue. That's what's really hurt.

SPEAKER_643: If we want to blame the duopoly, I'm in.

SPEAKER_28: Yeah.

SPEAKER_440: Yeah, no, the duopoly is just like we'll take – I mean, I see it at Inside.com.

SPEAKER_04: People will advertise at Inside.com in our newsletters. And then, you know, they can only put a small amount of money to work.

SPEAKER_372: They get in each audience. But then they have this retargeting ability and this data from Google and Facebook that's extraordinary that no small publisher can provide.

SPEAKER_04: So I've been looking at Inside and saying, you know, although we're doing low seven figures in ad revenue, I think it's more sustainable to be subscription-based now. Because you start every month with last month's revenue minus churn, which – or people might expand their spend. So you're either at 95% to 105% of last month. Whereas with advertising, you start over every month.

SPEAKER_646: That's right.

SPEAKER_28: Paywalls work up to a certain extent.

SPEAKER_107: It is still possible to get an ad sponsor publication, which is profitable. We are certainly.

SPEAKER_178: But I think Paywalls – if you're a brand name – I mean, the FT were the first publication to do this because they have a very loyal, well-off subscriber base. The New York Times has made it work. The Guardian has gone the donations route. That seems to work for some people.

SPEAKER_648: But they started with a subscription base, which is such a huge competitive advantage. Washington Post makes it work.

SPEAKER_208: New York Times makes it work.

SPEAKER_163: Yeah.

SPEAKER_208: People are used to paying a subscription for their news service. So then if it's essentially just –

SPEAKER_163: Well, you also only need to get somewhere between 1% and 5% of your audience to pay, and you're good.

SPEAKER_208: It pays for everybody else.

SPEAKER_652: And it pays for everybody else. So you can still give something for free.

SPEAKER_303: I think you can see a variety of revenue models certainly in the industry.

SPEAKER_52: Okay. Next up. Uber and DoorDash had merger talks after a push from SoftBank to consolidate. The last round for DoorDash was $13 billion.

SPEAKER_04: But as Bill Gurley's research on Twitter, back of the envelope based on Whisper is that DoorDash is out of money in 12 months at the current burn rate. DoorDash holds 37% of delivery market. Uber Eats has 21%. Uber has like five years of capital in the bank or six years, and they're quickly closing in on break-even from everything that people are saying publicly. So I don't understand why it makes sense for Uber to – if there was a $13 million to give 20% of their company to DoorDash, why not just wait them out?

SPEAKER_655: Until they run out of cash.

SPEAKER_04: Yeah. Or maybe they stop discounting and burning so much cash. It used to be that people – my understanding was people were making $2 or $3 per food delivery. And then with this crazy competition based on Masayoshi-san's money given to DoorDash and to Uber, which is crazy to have two competitors – you're basically giving a dump truck full of money to two –

SPEAKER_39: One's going to get hurt. Yeah. One's going to get shot. It makes no sense. It makes no sense. Because it's all about scale. You've got to get scale for this.

SPEAKER_63: An awful lot of SoftBank's decisions don't make sense, but this was egregiously stupid.

SPEAKER_93: Well, I think that they were trying to avoid what's going to happen, which is one's going to have to die. So can't I just make them a better combined investment?

SPEAKER_208: But Uber's in a tough spot because they have to get to profitability by – I think he said he was going to do it by next year. So can't gobble up a bunch of unprofitable businesses and think you're going to get there.

SPEAKER_03: No, there's no way to buy DoorDash unless you were like, we're going to cut half the staff and raise prices.

SPEAKER_215: Yep. It was like a parent who has warring family members. And you put them in a room, please, can you guys get on that?

SPEAKER_167: Well, it's also a bit of a – I'll be honest. It's a bit of a shell game that I've seen where people don't want to admit failure with a business. So they sell it to another person. They get equity in that company. Yeah. And they'll do this just to have like a safe landing and then maybe some potential upside. But it never actually comes to fruition or rarely does. But it lets you mark on your books, not a shutdown, but an acquisition. That's right. You still have some equity in it.

SPEAKER_93: Yeah. And generally a nice price, right? Everybody gets to mark it in their books at some sort of profit and everybody looks good.

SPEAKER_28: Yeah. I mean, certainly the word we're hearing is that VC funds have tightened up considerably in the last year. So DoorDash are going to have more problems getting more funding in. It's over.

SPEAKER_437: Yeah. There's no more funding. There's nobody after Masayoshi-san except the public markets and they have spoken.

SPEAKER_178: Yeah. So the party is over for an awful lot of companies. It's just a question of how soon they stop twitching.

SPEAKER_330: Is the party over?

SPEAKER_675: It is.

SPEAKER_330: It's for sure over.

SPEAKER_676: Haven't we said that before?

SPEAKER_532: No, I can tell you.

SPEAKER_676: After like Pets.com, we're like, it's done. Now we want profits only.

SPEAKER_532: Well, this party's over. And that doesn't mean in next summer we're not going to have another kick-ass party.

SPEAKER_140: Fair.

SPEAKER_678: But the cops showed up. They put the lights on. They told everybody to get out.

SPEAKER_140: But aren't we all going to the neighbor's house and having the next party? Sun's up. Sun's up on this one.

SPEAKER_02: This rager is over. It's cyclical.

SPEAKER_304: Everybody's going to Denny's.

SPEAKER_685: Something like sunlight to kill everything.

SPEAKER_02: Everybody's going to get a rooty-tootie, fresh and fruity. Everybody's going to Denny's.

SPEAKER_107: A couple of months after I came here in 2008, the market just dropped. It died.

SPEAKER_28: And I forget which VC firm it was. But basically, they set up a gravestone. That was Sequoia. Rest in peace. That was Sequoia. Right.

SPEAKER_107: Just like get to break even. Then you had two or three hard years. And then the party started again. Yeah. You know, these things come and go.

SPEAKER_284: It grows at any cost. It doesn't work anymore.

SPEAKER_301: No. It is, as I tweeted, like racing towards, I don't know if we have my tweet, but racing

SPEAKER_372: towards the cliff, hoping a bridge will suddenly be built by the time you get to it at 100 miles per hour. Like that's worked. Like people are just like, let's go faster. And then somebody will build a bridge across, you know, that great ravine and we'll just keep going. And now it's like, yeah, there's nobody to build that bridge for you anymore. There's nobody who's going to give you another billion dollars and bail you out. And my fear with DoorDash is that round they did was internal. It wasn't outside investors. So once the internal investors have to pick up the tab, that's another sign of weakness that they couldn't get somebody externally to give them more money. And that means they're probably pumping the brakes and they're going to.

SPEAKER_04: Nick, you have my tweet.

SPEAKER_68: In funding terms, that's like saying, well, my car can go 120 miles an hour if I drive

SPEAKER_107: it off a cliff. You know, it's just, it makes no sense.

SPEAKER_273: Well, I do think it's an interesting story about SoftBank because what SoftBank was offering

SPEAKER_106: everybody with that huge fund was, you actually don't need to go public, right? You come to us. We're going to be the next, you know, the sort of the only show in town where everybody

SPEAKER_208: ultimately has to go to SoftBank as its final stop rather than the capital markets.

SPEAKER_408: I called it the Masa PO. It was like, you know, and I benefited from it.

SPEAKER_04: I sold them some of my shares in Uber. It was like a smart move to do, I think. Yeah, here's what I put. DoorDash and Postmates will likely pump the brakes next as accelerating towards a cliff hoping a new bridge will appear is now a bad idea. It used to work fine. Look, a new bridge. Hit the gas. It's now the age of accountability. Thank God.

SPEAKER_372: And this is because Lyft is cutting jobs this week because I think they are very quickly running out of cash. And they're, I mean, the one speculation I haven't seen is putting Lyft and DoorDash together. If you put Lyft and DoorDash together, certainly they would have to cut all the employees or

SPEAKER_04: like a large number of them and stop the discounting. But maybe that's a good idea.

SPEAKER_632: I just don't want to see Uber, which I still am a major, I'm not a major shareholder, but I have a major amount of shares. I don't want to see them acquire DoorDash unless it was for two or three billion. Not for 13 billion.

SPEAKER_712: And perhaps I misunderstand the businesses, but what's the moat to these?

SPEAKER_106: How comes anybody can't just come in and say, wait a minute, me and my buddies, we're all going to drive around. We'll go pick up the food and we'll deliver it.

SPEAKER_715: When you have like hundreds of-

SPEAKER_106: But is there that much stickiness from the consumer base?

SPEAKER_715: Yeah, it's really hard to download an app and put your credit card in.

SPEAKER_106: But I use them all.

SPEAKER_409: I use DoorDash. I use Uber Eats. I use Postmates.

SPEAKER_04: So the question is, if the fifth one want to go to those restaurants and be the fifth tablet in and be the fifth app on your phone, it gets harder and harder. I get it.

SPEAKER_106: At some point, you have consumer fatigue. But where I was sort of headed was, if fundamentally it's a good business, if you're running out of cash, it's oftentimes, as I'm sure you know, that last money in can be probably the best money, right? Because you have the most leverage.

SPEAKER_175: What's tough about these businesses is, huh? Is it fundamentally a good business?

SPEAKER_240: It is if you don't have four competitors discounting against each other.

SPEAKER_720: A race to a bottom.

SPEAKER_372: Yeah, because Grubhub went public and other people went public and they were making $3 a delivery at the end of the day.

SPEAKER_04: And it doesn't seem like a lot until you do, I think Uber did like 1.5 billion or 1.7 billion rides, which includes Eats, cars, bikes, everything. That's right.

SPEAKER_106: And none of these are employees, correct? Aren't they all contractors? I think they are.

SPEAKER_93: So then your profit margins get worse if you're in any way going to have to convert those people to employees.

SPEAKER_372: I think actually converting to employees would be the ultimate win for Uber because then if you're a full-time employee, you can't work for another company. So they could say, yeah, you either work for Uber.

SPEAKER_722: But they have to have done the math on that.

SPEAKER_372: And they just have to raise prices slightly.

SPEAKER_722: But I think consumers will tolerate it.

SPEAKER_372: Consumers will tolerate it. And then they could tell people what shifts to work. So then it's like, you're a full-time employee. You've got to work Thanksgiving. You've got to work Christmas. You've got to work Friday and Saturday night when we're peak. Right now, the drivers, they might not want to if it's at minimum wage. Like right now, if you work Christmas Eve or you work Thanksgiving or you work any of those days, New Year's Eve, you get paid three or four times per ride for giving up your holiday or giving up your Friday and Saturday night. There are some people who drive into San Francisco just to do Thursday, Friday, Saturday. And they sleep in their cars.

SPEAKER_725: Yeah, but if they became employees, they would get holiday pay.

SPEAKER_372: No, because you'd be able to dictate that in order to be full-time, you have to work. It's just like Amazon can say our busy season is a holiday.

SPEAKER_617: In order to work your full-time, you've got to work those days.

SPEAKER_28: If you get time off in New Year's Eve, that would certainly be legal. But I think consumers are getting slightly wiser about this. I was over in New York a couple of months ago and was talking to someone because we were just going to order a Lyft and go to the end.

SPEAKER_96: It's like, oh, no, no, no, no.

SPEAKER_68: You don't order a Lyft at night. You order a Lyft during the day when you can't get a taxi. You order a taxi at night because they don't surge price. So people are getting it. Yeah, they know what's going on and people are getting smarter about this.

SPEAKER_437: The other rumor is Lyft and Uber are going to either raise the prices on UberPool and Lyft line or deprecate those services. Yeah, they're going to have to raise prices. Well, they have to do one or the other.

SPEAKER_733: How long can you run at losses?

SPEAKER_167: And if those systems don't work, yeah, maybe they just go with UberX and you give up 5%

SPEAKER_437: of the rides or 10% of the rides to have more profit.

SPEAKER_304: I mean, you can't have a service where basically a VC is paying 30% of your fare that it doesn't

SPEAKER_107: work in the long term. It comes back to what we were talking about.

SPEAKER_215: But that was SoftBank's bet, right? Yeah, I know.

SPEAKER_93: We actually can fund those losses at SoftBank. And so you achieve such scale that then you're essentially the monopoly of who can charge whatever you want.

SPEAKER_505: And hasn't that worked marvels for them? Well, if it hasn't worked. It worked well for Amazon, I'll tell you that.

SPEAKER_106: I was going to say, it's worked many, many times.

SPEAKER_163: Yeah, it's very uncomfortable for people to see companies losing money over a decade or two.

SPEAKER_305: It's just, I think civilians and even people who are professionals in the stock market, they just don't understand it. So look what they did to Amazon for a decade. They were like, this company is a disaster.

SPEAKER_04: Now they are throwing money at it. It's a trillion dollar company. And so the public markets just want to have an idea that Uber and Lyft can be

SPEAKER_305: profitable at some point. And now you saw Uber got rid of the Uber Eats in India. They sold to the local pattern and got 10% or 20% of it.

SPEAKER_742: Same pattern in China a few years back.

SPEAKER_04: Yeah, they did that with Didi and they own 17% of Didi, which is a hundred, I think will be a hundred, two hundred billion dollar company.

SPEAKER_241: So they'll make, you know, 17 billion just doing that.

SPEAKER_366: Well, I mean, Yahoo's stake and Alibaba kept that coming.

SPEAKER_241: I just was going to say that.

SPEAKER_210: Yeah, I mean, that kept them afloat for years. I think that was the motivating factor.

SPEAKER_04: And I think Bill Gurley's fingerprints are on that. Like, if we can't win China, like, let's get a piece of the winner. And that strategy is working.

SPEAKER_305: So I think Uber is going to wind up racing to profitability very quickly. Faster than people think. I don't have inside information anymore.

SPEAKER_04: I did when it was a private company. But as a public company, I don't know anybody over there anymore. But they're going to race there. Did you guys see this column deck for the-

SPEAKER_752: I heard about it this morning.

SPEAKER_408: Yeah. All right. So here's the background. There is a person named Dr. Aaron Ping D'Souza. He's the CEO of this, maybe.

SPEAKER_04: Or Sarah Cohn, who's opinionated, spirited, I'll use the word, venture capitalist, who's blocked me on Twitter. And she and he may or may not be the CEOs of this company. One of them's the CEO. And their deck leaked to MIT.

SPEAKER_372: And it's a pretty good idea, I think. Get a bunch of influencers to invest $100,000 and get 500 of them or 250 of them to fund the company.

SPEAKER_114: So it'd be like starting Facebook over and saying, Oprah, Obama, whoever, use this social network and give us 100K. Which CAA had a Twitter clone.

SPEAKER_03: I forgot the name of it. But Endeavor or CAA had a Twitter clone. You can look it up, Nick. The CAA Twitter clone. And they were paying their, you know, stars, their talent to tweet it. But the thing that was particularly deranged about this was this slide.

SPEAKER_114: Where? This looks like a mess.

SPEAKER_754: This is embarrassing.

SPEAKER_114: It's so embarrassing and deranged. So when you're fundraising, you have a pipeline.

SPEAKER_372: These are your targets. And in this deck that they're sending to people, they say they have Peter Thiel and Rob Hayes, who's Rob Hayes is a friend of mine. Peter Thiel's been on the pod. Rob Hayes has been on the pod.

SPEAKER_114: I'm not sure. And then they put that those two are committed for the founding columns. The idea is a column is like a newspaper column. That they have a meeting scheduled with one person. They're in discussions with Mark Benioff.

SPEAKER_210: And they have an intro to LDC and Arianna Huffington and Kanye and Nicholas Berggruen. And then they need an intro to Bill Gates and Michael Dell and Aaron Sorkin. Who's on it?

SPEAKER_240: Come on. And Obama, one word. And DVF, which is Diane Ruff.

SPEAKER_761: Are they called Jeremy Clarkson on that?

SPEAKER_114: Anyway. And then they have founding launch partners, Social Impact Capital, which is.

SPEAKER_762: This is real?

SPEAKER_04: Literally, this would be like, it's so deranged and bizarre that they're sharing who they want

SPEAKER_03: to be their investors and partners for this in their deck. It looks so corny and deranged.

SPEAKER_712: And talk about scaring off your people who are already committed.

SPEAKER_767: Yeah. That's not good. Not good at all.

SPEAKER_114: I mean, these are the, when you have just four founders watching, when an investor asks,

SPEAKER_03: I get this question a lot from people I invest in, young founders. When they ask you who you're talking to, they're probing. You're not obligated to tell them who you're talking to.

SPEAKER_04: You can say, yeah, you know, we've got meetings with the usual suspects. We've had a lot of inbound. And so we're doing two weeks of meetings. And then we're going to ask people to have their term sheet in, in the third week of February. And then we're going to go to our board and the founders are going to discuss the term sheets and we're going to make a decision by March 1st. That's our process. We'd love to have you participate in. Is there anything? They say, oh yeah. So, so who's on the short list? And you say, you know, we, we obviously wouldn't tell people that we're talking to you. We want to keep that private for all parties, you know, but you know, usual suspects. We met with everybody. That's how you answer that question.

SPEAKER_52: Putting it in your deck of who your targets are is so thirsty. Is that the word the kids are using, Nick? Thirsty? Yeah, that's a good one. Thirsty. They're so thirsty and deranged.

SPEAKER_775: I think this is a try hard.

SPEAKER_777: I'm trying too hard. TTH. Yes. But thirsty is what came after TTH.

SPEAKER_140: Oh, see, you're hipper than me. I'm totally boomering out right now. You are, but you're not a boomer.

SPEAKER_202: You're Gen X. I tell anybody says, okay, boomer to me on Twitter, and this has been proven. I will, if you say, okay, boomer to me, I will say, okay, snowflake. And then I block you.

SPEAKER_93: Okay. So my kids say it to me all the time. Do they really? Now they're retort. Cause I'm not a boomer. That's a joke. Mom. It's a state of mind.

SPEAKER_297: Exactly.

SPEAKER_93: Yes. It's now a state of mind.

SPEAKER_297: Wait, how old are these kids?

SPEAKER_93: They're teenagers.

SPEAKER_297: Oh, okay.

SPEAKER_782: That's 14, 16, 17. Here's the thing.

SPEAKER_04: There are ramifications. That's one of the great things about parenting. There can be ramifications to behavior.

SPEAKER_786: Has London okay-boomered you yet?

SPEAKER_210: Oh, London. My daughter has not okay-boomered me.

SPEAKER_788: I get it almost every single day. But she is the- And I'm pretty hip. And I get okay-boomered all the time.

SPEAKER_350: Now they lose their-

SPEAKER_114: The biggest mistake I made with my daughter was I taught her how to negotiate. Oh.

SPEAKER_789: Of course you did.

SPEAKER_114: And that was the stupidest thing I could have ever done. That was very unwise. Because she's like, can we talk? And I'm just like, here we go. Oh, no.

SPEAKER_790: Here we go.

SPEAKER_791: Sit down, dad.

SPEAKER_114: And she's like, you know, I saw the It trailer and it was very scary two years ago. But I'm two years older and I'm not actually scared of the trailer because I watched

SPEAKER_350: it on my iPad. So I kind of feel like I should see It.

SPEAKER_380: And I'm like, I know you feel like that, but I am not going to parent-teacher meeting saying I let you watch the most gory, insane, horrific flick about murdering and eating children

SPEAKER_42: by a deranged clown. Sorry, London.

SPEAKER_512: Yeah. Imagine me trying to moderate screen time on video games.

SPEAKER_42: Oh, cool. Yeah. Oh, you don't have the high ground. They're like, mom.

SPEAKER_799: No moral high ground.

SPEAKER_800: Mom, this is paying for my trust fund.

SPEAKER_777: The more I play- Yes, mom. The more I get paid. I'm working right now, mom. I'm doing user testing. Absolutely. I'm doing research for you.

SPEAKER_93: Yes, they are. They're doing market research is what I'm hearing lately.

SPEAKER_114: Oh my God. So anyway, I like the idea column.

SPEAKER_03: This is an idea that's been out there for a long time. I tried to find somebody and I love the idea of getting 250 creators together.

SPEAKER_93: Didn't Paul Allen try to come up with something like this?

SPEAKER_03: It's possible.

SPEAKER_93: I was like dating myself, but I feel like a long time ago he wanted to do something like this.

SPEAKER_03: What people wanted to do was, here it is.

SPEAKER_372: This is my tweet. The idea is great. And I got pitched this for YouTube competitors when that was happening. And the idea for the YouTube one was get 20, and I talked to Casey Nistat about it who was on the pod and other people. And I said, do you think this is viable? And they're like, well, we're not going to leave YouTube. Nobody's leaving YouTube. But I was like, what if you got 250 YouTubers together, ask them to put $25,000 into this company, and they get 80% of the shares, and then 20% is kept by the management team to hire great managers, and it's a parallel YouTube universe that you can promote. And then if it goes public, they own 1% each or 2% each. This could be amazing. If it was 80 of them, let's say, and they each owned 1%.

SPEAKER_95: We'll just make the intro to Obama, because he's going to be in.

SPEAKER_114: Well, I think the targets are deranged.

SPEAKER_95: The check writes itself.

SPEAKER_114: The other thing about the target list here is it's so thirsty, and it's such a flex to be like Obama and DVF.

SPEAKER_210: These people are not digital natives.

SPEAKER_325: I love that they're putting it on everybody else. So get on that, potential investor. I need my intro to Obama.

SPEAKER_821: Yeah, that is implied. What do you have for me? This clearly was leaked.

SPEAKER_325: I'm just not sure I believe that it's real. It's so crazy. Some of those names, though, they're controversial names. Is that the idea? Yeah, go on. And I'm not because I'm kidding.

SPEAKER_340: I think it's controversial, but... Oh, I forgot to mention this.

SPEAKER_408: The guy, Dr. D'Souza, who's the CEO, or maybe Sarah Cohn is the CEO.

SPEAKER_825: She claims she's the CEO, so that bodes well for the investment when the two founders don't know who the CEO is.

SPEAKER_163: One of the CEOs has a venture fund that's funding it, which is also bizarre when a VC decides they're going to be CEO of a company they're funding.

SPEAKER_04: That's a huge red flag. But D'Souza is the guy who architected Peter Thiel's takedown of Gawker, which I loved the takedown of Gawker because they were doing such horrible things to gay men and outing them and revenge porn and all this horrible stuff.

SPEAKER_372: I don't like the idea of being able to sue publishers into oblivion. I'm sure you have strong feelings on this.

SPEAKER_398: Very strong feelings on that. But I mean, okay.

SPEAKER_372: But he's the guy who architected it.

SPEAKER_114: He came to Peter and said, did you know that I could, if you gave me 10 million bucks, manage a bunch of lawsuits because there's so many people disgruntled who can't sue Gawker? But if we did that, they would have like a dozen lawsuits that they wouldn't be able to fight and eventually they would go bankrupt and then we could buy it.

SPEAKER_93: And I think there was, I think the pitch had a call to social good as well. It was, if you don't do it, who's going to fight for these people?

SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that was Peter's like, Peter's like, only I can defend myself and spend millions of dollars fighting this.

SPEAKER_366: Um, yeah, it's, I wouldn't, you're right. I don't like seeing publications sued out into oblivion.

SPEAKER_107: I have to say Gawker in the court case just made it very hard to like them.

SPEAKER_304: It's just like, is there anything you wouldn't print? So, um, if somebody was like 12 or something, you know, for goodness sake.

SPEAKER_832: Oh my God, that absurdist answer.

SPEAKER_04: I know the guy who said that and I felt bad for him because he was clearly being absurdist. They're like, is there an age at which you wouldn't publish a, you know, a sex tape?

SPEAKER_114: And he was like, obviously. And then he made a joke. He's like eight years old.

SPEAKER_837: But you never make a joke in court. Like just generally speaking in court, not the time for jokes. Yeah.

SPEAKER_838: The lawyers wanted to like crawl under the table.

SPEAKER_837: I don't know who briefed this person. Like, don't make jokes. Here's your standard answers. And certainly pedophilia jokes.

SPEAKER_839: Pedo jokes. Yeah.

SPEAKER_423: Off limits.

SPEAKER_839: Yeah. Probably not a great place.

SPEAKER_423: They might even get you sued for defamation. All roads lead back to Elon Musk.

SPEAKER_839: All right. Rob, he won. He won. He did win. He beat pedo guy.

SPEAKER_841: Because I love it. He was like, it's a playground talk.

SPEAKER_839: I'm sorry, not pedo guy. Don't sue me pedo guy.

SPEAKER_715: I mean, not pedo guy.

SPEAKER_842: It's a new playground talk.

SPEAKER_715: When I say pedo guy, I mean creepy guy.

SPEAKER_842: Doesn't everybody know that?

SPEAKER_178: That's what I meant.

SPEAKER_92: So obvious.

SPEAKER_178: It was an interesting legal argument, I have to say. I was surprised by that verdict.

SPEAKER_92: Well. It played to jurors common sense. I thought it was actually brilliant.

SPEAKER_114: Yeah, when Elon was like, I'm not suing him for saying that I should make love to my submarine,

SPEAKER_04: which is what he told me. He should not take it literally on Twitter when two 12-year-olds are making fun of each

SPEAKER_42: other. This is not actionable.

SPEAKER_93: What I thought was hilarious was that we say this all the time in South Africa.

SPEAKER_848: Hello.

SPEAKER_31: Oh, good grief.

SPEAKER_848: Yeah. Very common insult in South Africa.

SPEAKER_107: Yeah. As a journalist, I have to say the thing that just when it first came out, that he'd sent

SPEAKER_68: an email to a journalist saying, this is off the record. It is never off the record unless you and the journalist agree it.

SPEAKER_850: Even that, it's a handshake.

SPEAKER_851: Even I didn't know that until that whole thing came out. Oh, wow.

SPEAKER_837: So understand, that's a handshake.

SPEAKER_851: That's not normal.

SPEAKER_837: So if you tell a journalist something that is so juicy that they're willing to burn you on it, or if you told them about a crime or something, they're going to- That's the one time you could- There's an exception. There's an exception.

SPEAKER_366: I think ethically, that's the one time you could burn someone if there was a serious crime involved. A serious crime.

SPEAKER_854: But if they said like-

SPEAKER_178: I've never broken off the record, but then again, I don't do a lot of background briefings and I don't like doing off the record because if you're not prepared to put your name to

SPEAKER_68: it, I'm not prepared to print it.

SPEAKER_437: But can't you take the offer records off and then go source it somewhere else?

SPEAKER_107: You can, and it's useful for that sometimes. But one thing, a trend we've seen, and Apple pioneered this, and a lot of tech firms have

SPEAKER_96: done it, is when you go to a PR for a comment, they will say, right, well, we can give you just a, we have no comment, but we can talk to you on background. And that's really divisive because it's basically saying, this is the narrative we want to tell you, but we're not going to put our name to it. And yeah, in certain cases, you can source it from outside, but nine times out of 10, it's just, we don't want to make a public record, but here's our take on it.

SPEAKER_178: Maybe you'd like to, yeah, on background, maybe you'd like to add that into your piece. And I'm sorry, if you don't, if you're not prepared to put your name on it, it shouldn't

SPEAKER_304: be printed.

SPEAKER_408: All right, wrapping up here, the UK and France have digital taxes. France, UK, and other EU countries want to limit tech giants' ability to avoid taxes. They argue taxes should be based on where digital activity takes place, not where the

SPEAKER_380: firms are headquartered. US has threatened to impose retaliatory tariffs on 2.4 billion in French goods, including champagne and cheese after the tax passed in July 19.

SPEAKER_304: Well, they announced a whiskey tariff as well, and I immediately went out and panic bought

SPEAKER_859: because, you know, it's like, I'm half-scored, so you can't get by without that. Not with Burnside coming up.

SPEAKER_319: Panic bought, is that really your cover for buying two cases of Jameson, really? It's my story, and I'm sticking to it. France has agreed to delay the tax. Oh, the French surrendered? Shocking. Shocking. The French have agreed.

SPEAKER_863: Sorry to the French fans.

SPEAKER_304: My favorite French joke, why is the Champs-Élysées lined with trees?

SPEAKER_107: It's so the German army can march in the shade.

SPEAKER_222: France has agreed to delay the tax until the end of 2020. Reproachment was a result of conversations between Trump and President Macron on Monday.

SPEAKER_28: Yeah, the UK will cave, too. Of course. They've got a trade deal coming up.

SPEAKER_107: I'm torn on this because I think the tech industry is…

SPEAKER_869: But you like unions, so of course you are.

SPEAKER_107: No, no, I think the tech industries have made a rod for their own back in that, yes, a certain amount of tax avoidance is expected, but they've really been taking the piss with us in Europe. I mean…

SPEAKER_245: This is where people are using the service.

SPEAKER_68: Yeah, but I mean, they're paying… If someone like Amazon, for example, is selling a billion dollars' worth of goods in the UK and paying maybe under $100,000 in corporation tax, you can't help feeling that there is something out of kilter there.

SPEAKER_775: Well, what are they getting? What's the corporation getting from paying the tax in another country? They're doing business in the UK.

SPEAKER_93: But the whole purpose of tax is there's an exchange. I'm paying a tax because you're providing me something. I mean, some infrastructure, something. There's some benefit. There's some trade here. My employees are in school. They drive on the streets. The police are there.

SPEAKER_106: So when I use up your resources, then, okay, I'm going to pay some tax for that.

SPEAKER_68: Amazon drives on the road, so why not pay their fair share for that?

SPEAKER_93: But this is somebody sitting in like… So if there's an app and someone's getting revenue from the app in France, what's going to happen is the consumers are going to pay for this. The corporations aren't going to say, like, you know what? You're right. Let me pay way more in taxes and not pass that along to the consumer.

SPEAKER_68: Which is why these sort of bills are now being floated, and they are severely flawed bills. But this is exactly why these sort of bills are being…

SPEAKER_163: It should be something reasonable.

SPEAKER_04: They should just come up with something that says, like, listen, if you make a billion dollars on advertising in Europe, you pay something. Like, 2% of the top line, you know, to the EU countries or whatever.

SPEAKER_107: The double Irish and the Dutch tax dollars, they have been stretched to the absolute limit, and people are getting really, really angry.

SPEAKER_114: Well, how do people perceive the Irish doing this? Because everybody, Ireland let people put their headquarters there for background and not pay any taxes or pay 1%.

SPEAKER_304: Yeah, or pay ridiculous. And then when the…

SPEAKER_879: Or even a flat number, I think.

SPEAKER_96: Yeah, when the EU actually went through and said, you know, this is unlawful, they actually…

SPEAKER_107: The Irish government fought for Apple not to pay taxes. It was that serious. And people actually… My favorite story, U2, were famously headquartered in Ireland because of the artist thing.

SPEAKER_96: And then when that got taken away, they moved to Denmark… They moved to the Netherlands, sorry. And The Edge gave the most fantastic rock and roll quote, which was, who wouldn't want to be more tax efficient? And you're like, yeah, play that guitar. There you go, fighting the man. Yeah, rock and roll.

SPEAKER_684: Sunday, bloody Sunday. Yeah, really. Wow, we've come so far.

SPEAKER_883: Ah, indeed.

SPEAKER_163: Yeah, it's… Jurisdictions have the right to offer better tax incentives. That's part of the game. That's right. But they're…

SPEAKER_775: They want the companies there.

SPEAKER_03: You know what the stupid thing is with these companies is, the companies should be self-aware enough to know that paying no taxes… Yeah.

SPEAKER_885: …is not sustaining.

SPEAKER_163: Yeah, and the optics are so bad, that on an optics basis, to just do it so efficiently that you pay no taxes, it's just ridiculous. There should be some self-awareness about that and just say… Absolutely. You know, listen, I'm Jeff Bezos. I'm the richest guy on the planet. I'm going to make sure Amazon pays its fair share or…

SPEAKER_93: But what's fair share? Isn't that the… That's tough. That's going to be some minimum. That's what's tough. There should be a minimum. At the moment… Yeah, I philosophically agree. It's like, just when you get into the specifics, it's tough.

SPEAKER_273: It's like, what is fair share? What's the… I'm self-aware, but I'm still delivering shareholder value.

SPEAKER_755: Even if you're losing money, you should say 1% of top line.

SPEAKER_163: Even if I've lost money that year, I pay 1% of top line. Just something to have skin in the game.

SPEAKER_273: And shareholders are okay with that?

SPEAKER_03: I think that they should be because they're literally building guillotines on Market Street here in San Francisco. I mean, you have the two candidates that are leading the pack are Warren and Bernie for a reason. I mean, they want to come to Silicon Valley and chop our heads off. Or not me, but people with more money than me.

SPEAKER_512: I don't know. It'll get to you. To pay for their plans, it's going to get to you.

SPEAKER_93: I know, eventually. There's no way they can pay for it with the people they're talking about. But it's really great to say, like, tax those people. Not you. Those people.

SPEAKER_28: Yeah, I mean, this is the problem I have with Bernie. But I mean, it's just, I think it comes back to, I cover financials.

SPEAKER_107: You know, we're just coming into the end of the financial results week, and I'm sick of covering financial stories. I bet. But at the same time, when you go through them and you look at the figures and you see how much tax these companies aren't paying, it's a really bad look. And it will. That's the thing I'm talking about. Yeah, that's the kind of thing that leads to populism and burn the bridges.

SPEAKER_350: That's why I don't understand Trump's tax break was, like, completely unnecessary and the debt was going out of control. So why don't we, instead of doing another tax break, why don't we just pay down the debt a bit? Or wouldn't it be a little bit more fiscal?

SPEAKER_306: I'm conservative when it comes to fiscal stuff. And I... All right, let's talk about the election. The debt's just exploded. But yeah. Oh, no. Here we go.

SPEAKER_899: Oh, no. I am wearing my mic.

SPEAKER_03: I am for Mike. I like Mike. I'm all Mike Bloomberg. I'm all in. Mike Bloomberg is at 13% or 14% in the trading markets where people are putting dollars, which

SPEAKER_241: tells you something. And then he shot up to 7% or 8% and then 13% in some polls. Mike's going to win. You heard it here first.

SPEAKER_904: Trump's going to win.

SPEAKER_241: I'm assuming... No. I think Trump's going to lose to Burnt Blumen.

SPEAKER_904: I think Trump is going to win. Yeah. Okay?

SPEAKER_887: I think Trump wins in a landslide.

SPEAKER_904: Wow.

SPEAKER_887: It's going to be embarrassing.

SPEAKER_210: Really?

SPEAKER_887: Yes. Your boy Mike's going to get smashed.

SPEAKER_210: Really?

SPEAKER_887: Yes.

SPEAKER_210: Why? Why do you think that?

SPEAKER_93: I think that we're on the coast, so I don't think we get it. I don't understand how much people feel like he speaks for them. And all the stuff about the impeachment is just calling more and more and more votes for him.

SPEAKER_437: Well, here are the odds. Party nomination odds plus 900, which means if you bet a dollar, you get nine.

SPEAKER_03: Correct, Nick? President election odds plus 16. You bet a dollar, you get $16. Pretty good bet.

SPEAKER_68: I've got to say, you're the first person I've met who was considering voting for Mike Bloomberg. No one seems to like him.

SPEAKER_241: I think when he gets into the debates, people are going to appreciate him. He's smart. He is the most qualified of anybody. There's nobody more qualified.

SPEAKER_04: 12 years as New York City's mayor. He did a great job running Bloomberg. Amazing job. Correct. I just want the most qualified person.

SPEAKER_93: But that's not who's going to win. You just asked who was going to win.

SPEAKER_909: Yeah.

SPEAKER_93: I think politics are...

SPEAKER_909: Who are people voting for here?

SPEAKER_775: No, you know, you're never going to get anybody's honest answer. Everyone's going to lie to you. Really? That's what happened last time. Yeah. Everybody lied.

SPEAKER_398: That's what happened in the UK election last time as well. I was like, oh, no, no, I wouldn't vote for Boris at all. Okay. My taxes are coming down.

SPEAKER_174: No, they didn't. There were clearly so many Trump voters who didn't admit they were Trump voters. And so everyone's going to pretend they're not a Trump voter now.

SPEAKER_03: I know a non-zero, a non-one number of people in Silicon Valley who, if faced with Warren or Bernie, and these are as left as left comes people, say that's too far left.

SPEAKER_04: And I would vote for Trump if forced to vote for Warren or Bernie because I don't want to send the remaining a capitalist society as opposed to going that far into the socialist sort of realm or wealth tax plus banning the billionaire's rhetoric. They just think – or splitting up tech companies.

SPEAKER_241: They just think it's too much. It's overreaching and they would hold their nose and vote for Trump.

SPEAKER_38: But if there's somebody who's a more centrist candidate –

SPEAKER_241: Biden.

SPEAKER_38: Yeah. I actually think if it's Biden and Trump –

SPEAKER_920: He's just such a pillock. I mean, I'm sorry. I'm going to need some translation. Sir Charles, pillock. He's drunk. We're going to say that that's drunk. He's so drunk all the time. Sir Charles, it's doofus. Such a doofus.

SPEAKER_924: Thank you.

SPEAKER_107: It's just, you know, I mean, he got caught nicking Neil Kinnock's speeches. He's been lying about what he's doing. Charles, nicking? Stealing, sorry.

SPEAKER_929: Okay, nicking. Got it.

SPEAKER_107: And I know people who would like to vote for Bernie or Warren or, you know, other candidates. But it's just they look at Biden. It's like Hillary mark two.

SPEAKER_631: And Trump will beat him like a red-headed stepchild. It's just he's going to lose against Trump.

SPEAKER_933: I think you just got canceled on Twitter. I mean, I know Kristen and I, we both got canceled in the first segment. You took your three segments with it.

SPEAKER_02: Congratulations. The gingers are going to be on Twitter and they are not a forgiving bunch. You are screwed. They're going to cancel.

SPEAKER_181: Well, I mean, it's the one thing I would say in in favor of Warren and Bernie is that you've got to sort out the health care system in this country.

SPEAKER_68: Absolutely. Because we would love to hire in this country, but we can't afford to because the medical premiums are so high.

SPEAKER_93: It's crazy. But then you need to handle lawyers.

SPEAKER_231: I totally agree with you. But it's like we solve these problems in the most ridiculous way, but we have a completely out of control system.

SPEAKER_163: We're paying the most and getting the least. Yeah. Correct. And this is where I think somebody like Bloomberg can actually be super effective because he might come out and say, you know, here's something reasonable that we can all agree on.

SPEAKER_04: That brings us closer to, you know, getting more value per dollar we spend.

SPEAKER_405: Do you think anything reasonable is going to win?

SPEAKER_163: That is the rub. You know, here's the thing. I thought Biden was going to trounce him because it was looking so good. But I think Biden's son, Hunter, is so dirty and corrupt that there's going to be two or three things.

SPEAKER_807: Yeah, I don't think Americans really understand what's going on, but they think it's...

SPEAKER_210: Oh, 100. There's nobody more corrupt than the Trump family. Yeah. Like, I think that, like, the Madoffs look at them as, like, you know, like, the clear path to being more just in life. Right. Yeah.

SPEAKER_319: That's their, like, model for maybe redemption is being as corrupt as the Trumps.

SPEAKER_181: But it's putting America at a serious competitive disadvantage.

SPEAKER_163: Do you know anybody who ever... What's the most... You've been on boards of companies? No. Okay, you have people who are boards on your company. Yes, of course. And you know all about boards. You've heard of different friends who are on boards. I used to be a lawyer. Okay, what is the most a board member ever got paid, in your experience? In cash or and or the cash equivalent in stock over whatever number of years? Cash for going to board meetings.

SPEAKER_262: I could only think of a couple cases where it's even millions.

SPEAKER_163: Yeah, in stock.

SPEAKER_262: Correct. Never in cash.

SPEAKER_163: Have you ever heard of cash compensation for a board?

SPEAKER_93: It has. It's like sometimes it goes through peaks and valleys. It becomes the thing du jour.

SPEAKER_161: 25K, 50K.

SPEAKER_93: It's de minimis. It's so small what they make.

SPEAKER_161: It literally would be like 25 or 50K.

SPEAKER_163: And you get travel. I've been on boards where they paid for business class travel for me. Very nice.

SPEAKER_93: And late stage, you might get paid a little bit more. But this is not...

SPEAKER_163: Talking about 25, 50K. A year? Maybe 100?

SPEAKER_93: 100 grand.

SPEAKER_163: I got offered 100 grand recently to be on a board. I won't say what it is. And considering it, I don't know. I don't need the money. But it's kind of stupid to not take it, I guess. And it was kind of intellectually interesting.

SPEAKER_954: Yeah, you like the company. Yeah.

SPEAKER_163: It was 100 dimes. And I need money because I got three girls. I got expenses. A lot of college to pay for.

SPEAKER_408: Anyway, yeah, that to me, the Hunter Biden thing is tragic because Joe Biden, I think,

SPEAKER_163: would have won. And I think the Republicans got what they wanted, which was to just hammer home exactly how corrupt he is. And if one of my kids... And people think he's creepy. Yeah, there's that too.

SPEAKER_262: He's got a creepy factor.

SPEAKER_163: He's got a little creepy factor. He does like to put his hands on people.

SPEAKER_262: It's like smelling people. He just does weird things.

SPEAKER_60: Or there was a video of him tapping somebody on the chest to disagree with him.

SPEAKER_381: A little too physical. He looked a little aggressive.

SPEAKER_304: As a foreigner or an immigrant to this country, this is what I find so bizarre. Yes, you're right. He is creepy and he is touchy. But we've got Mr. Grabham by the **** as the president.

SPEAKER_957: Oh, sorry.

SPEAKER_190: I couldn't say... Okay. Oh, we're going to have to go ahead and beep that one. Okay.

SPEAKER_408: Trying to keep ourselves on iTunes. I'm sorry, Tim Cook.

SPEAKER_959: My apologies.

SPEAKER_408: Apologies to Tim Cook. All right. Well, as we wrap up here, we're going to have a quick call in from Ben Horowitz, wanted to call in and give his view on the column deck because I just got a text from Ben Horowitz that he was going to call in because he's considering he was on the column deck. Okay. So can we get Ben on the line?

SPEAKER_963: All right.

SPEAKER_04: Well, we couldn't get Ben on the line. I don't know what's going on. He just texted me, so I apologize. But we'll have Ben on the next show.

SPEAKER_408: He, you know, obviously a big fan. He actually wrote a really nice tweet about the show. So thank you, Ben, for that. All right. But I think we talked about everything. Let's all get back to work. Ian Thompson on the Twitter, I-A-I-N-T-H-O-M-S-O-N. And he is over at the Register. Great publication. Read it every day. And of course, Kristen Dumont is from Machine Zone. If you are into games, casual games on your phone, more than casual, right?

SPEAKER_766: Mid to hardcore, remember?

SPEAKER_380: Mid to hardcore, right. What's the line again between casual and mid to hardcore?

SPEAKER_775: Essentially, it's strategy.

SPEAKER_380: I've been playing Polytopia.

SPEAKER_93: Can everyone play it or can only smart people play it?

SPEAKER_372: Ah, the onboarding time.

SPEAKER_93: Yeah, to learn the game is intense.

SPEAKER_372: Yeah, that's what I-

SPEAKER_93: It's not like two minutes or less and you pick up the whole game.

SPEAKER_512: These games take a lot of time to learn them.

SPEAKER_163: And is it revealed complexity where you give people like little educations during the game? Correct. That's what I found with StarCraft is I've started- All of a sudden, this guy had like these crazy robots going against me. I was like, how do you make those? And I had to look it up.

SPEAKER_423: And then you get curious. Then you get hooked. And deeper and deeper you go.

SPEAKER_350: And then I was like, I'm a 49-year-old man with three kids and 200 investments. What am I doing here? I'm playing a game. Makes you smarter. You know what it does?

SPEAKER_372: I find before I go to bed, if I play a game and like listen to a podcast and just have a cup of tea,

SPEAKER_241: it kind of winds me down for the evening. It's more interesting than watching a TV show I'm finding. That Calm app changed my life. Oh, yum yum. Really?

SPEAKER_967: Tell me more.

SPEAKER_106: Literally, I mean, I never, I cannot sleep, period. That Calm app is awesome.

SPEAKER_437: All right. Thank you for that. And Calm is hiring a creative director. And I'm not an investor.

SPEAKER_319: And I own five or six percent of the companies.

SPEAKER_758: Oh, you do? Oh, yeah. It's my second biggest investment. My God, it's fantastic.

SPEAKER_215: Like no more Ambien, nothing. It's like, it is unbelievable.

SPEAKER_372: If you're taking Ambien or other Lunesta or any of this stuff, I think, I don't know this, but you should do research and consult with your doctor because I think Ambien and Lunesta are horrible for your brain.

SPEAKER_262: You're taking them off the market. And it's terrifying.

SPEAKER_107: I took it once for a trip for a flight back to London. I've done that. Yeah. The next day, I was supposed to meet someone for lunch. It was 11 o'clock.

SPEAKER_178: I'll have a cup of tea and then get moving. Woke up at three o'clock, drool coming down my face, just blanked completely. I just fall asleep. It's horrifying stuff.

SPEAKER_106: It's kind of scary. I've taken it to travel and then I started to hear rumors about it. And it's actually quite scary. So I tried melatonin, all kinds of stuff. It doesn't matter.

SPEAKER_215: There's some sort of tea you can drink. Nothing, nothing, nothing.

SPEAKER_899: I've done the Ambien thing on flights and then I know people who've done the Provigil

SPEAKER_350: or Mondafil, which is the anti-narcolepsy drug. Yeah. And I just met an artist. I'd say top 30 music artists in the world right now. Top 20 maybe even. Behind Elon. They. Behind Elon, yeah. And they were on Provigil permanently. And I was like, you need to check with your doctor. Like that's not a good thing. And they were, they, I'm not going to reveal the gender, said that it helped them with their ADHD or something.

SPEAKER_163: And I was like, wow, people who are famous can get whatever they want, but don't take Ambien, Provigil, or Lunesta without talking to your, getting multiple doctor recommendations. My understanding is these things are doing weird stuff to people's brains.

SPEAKER_977: Yeah. As are the SRIs. It's really altering the chemistry of the brain.

SPEAKER_899: So nobody knows.

SPEAKER_03: And I, I'm in my school and they are very, the teachers don't do this, but the consultants are like, yeah, your kid's not writing perfect penmanship.

SPEAKER_350: I'm like, who cares?

SPEAKER_980: Yeah.

SPEAKER_350: Like they're going to be typing anyway. Like, is this a big deal? And there are, there are parents, I have, I know a parent who put their kid on one of these SRIs and Ritalin or whatever. And they're like, yeah, it's amazing. Like they went from like not being good at math to being ahead in math and now they're writing. And I'm like, is that worth messing with your child's brain chemistry to be six months

SPEAKER_216: ahead instead of six months behind or have the penmanship? And schools are now enforcing, you know, this kid has ADHD, therefore it must be on Ritalin.

SPEAKER_28: And you're like, yeah.

SPEAKER_93: And who's the school to say that anyway? Exactly. It's so dumb. Especially, I mean, I have a little girl, but my boys, I used to fight this fight at school all the time. They actually have a ton of energy. And the thing you do when they're misbehaving is then you bench them so that they can't go out and recess, which is the very thing they need to do. They need to go run around.

SPEAKER_241: Yeah. So I think schools are now adapting for them.

SPEAKER_512: I think schools are built for a completely different way to learn.

SPEAKER_241: And they're adapting now where the kids with ADHD, they're saying, go ahead and go for a run in the yard. They're actually encouraging them to do that.

SPEAKER_305: Like go for a walk around the building and come back, which is easy to do in California. We have these nice outdoor schools, but harder to do in the Bronx. Yeah.

SPEAKER_512: Well, not to plug your call map. I'm telling you, that thing is, there's nothing has worked and that thing is unbelievable.

SPEAKER_437: Okay. I agree. It's amazing. All right. Anything else? I got everything, right? Nick, we're good.

SPEAKER_04: All right. We'll see you all.

SPEAKER_03: And thanks. Sorry to Ben Horowitz. Apologies again, but we'll get you on the next pod because we're just running out of time and you're not picking up your phone. So I'll see you at the Warriors game and we're going to keep the news round table going. Bye-bye.