SPEAKER_00: all right everybody it's friday we made it molly we made it we made it that's week 44 in the books next week we start again on sunday with week 45 but today the drama around sbf and ftx has reached

SPEAKER_02: a fever pitch he has filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy bankruptcy this is an extraordinary five days in

SPEAKER_04: the life of crypto it really is it's been like watching it's just like been watching uh what's

SPEAKER_05: the name of a short like a mini series and it just it wrapped up on friday just in time so we're going to tell you uh the exciting conclusion of this miniseries drama yeah and of course uh

SPEAKER_00: my favorite segment of the show we live in the future amazon has got a new drone so we're going to talk a little bit about when drones are going to be flying over our heads delivering our coffee and

Chamath Palihapitiya: packages i think it's coming soon and i got some insider information that i'm going to share inside

SPEAKER_05: information coming and then of course we have rachel reporting ending the show with another segment to keep us olds in the know okay boomer gonna be a great episode stick with us this week in

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SPEAKER_04: it's friday for both of us it's definitely friday for me i'm wearing my banana sweatshirt as

SPEAKER_21: in this issue is all the ish it's friday we got one more day to go and then we get the weekend sunday

SPEAKER_05: yeah then we get the weekend sunday it's gonna be great uh nothing about this week has slowed down not even a tiny bit and i know that we previously thought that we were having busy newsweeks but we

SPEAKER_24: were we were wrong we were wrong we apologize to the audience when we said you know this is as busy as

SPEAKER_28: it gets because ftx we another character has emerged to the veranos verse or whatever we're going to call this the we work verse the adam newman verse the cast of characters who have taken incredibly large

SPEAKER_30: companies with incredible promise missions and drove them dramatically off the side of the bridge for us to watch them slowly plummet into the bay and float past alcatraz before sinking like a stone i don't i hate to create a visual here oh my god but the fall from grace from ftx and sam bankman freed sbf has been nothing short of mercurial i mean this is joseph campbell level drama shakespearean yeah i interviewed the dude three weeks ago at this private conference he sat there with his leg bouncing up and down and thought okay you know i know a lot of people who have tics and uniqueness to

SPEAKER_10: them and was everybody in the room just like yeah we're about i mean because that's what's so remarkable

SPEAKER_12: right is the the the shift from everybody being like yep we're all in on this guy there's no way any of this is anything but on the up and up and phenomenal and there are billions of dollars in this guy's bank account and it's and it and we can expect this to remain this way for all time and then literally

SPEAKER_05: three weeks later he is out the the breaking news that we thought we were actually done with this story but there seems to be at least for the moment a little bit of a wrap-up for us to end the week on which is that ftx has filed for bankruptcy not particularly surprising news except that the speed is unbelievable and it tells you that i was

SPEAKER_37: going to say yeah i mean we went from selling oopsie my bad to bankruptcy in the course of

SPEAKER_28: five days this started sunday night right yeah wow 32 billion dollars to bankruptcy let's just pause

SPEAKER_11: for a second in five days in five days monday he tweeted everything is fine yeah tuesday there was

Jason Calacanis: a takeover attempt because everything was super duper not fine yeah wednesday everything was gonna be

SPEAKER_05: okay because of the takeover and that was all in process by the end of wednesday i believe the

Jason Calacanis: takeover had fallen apart right thursday the takeover has fallen apart sbf is seeking rescuers

SPEAKER_05: right trying to figure out if somebody will put in some money hail mary he's also reassuring people which we will come back to that everything with ftx us is fine by friday he's declared bankruptcy and the bankruptcy includes the sister company alameda research the 130 other affiliated companies because he's been on such a big buying spree and ftx us is also verifiably not fine that

SPEAKER_51: has all happened in the span of five days it's crazy so yeah i oh and he has stepped down by the way

SPEAKER_05: he has stepped down as the ceo not surprisingly of ftx he has been replaced this is just even more insane by john j ray the third a quote restructuring expert who is notably the guy that

SPEAKER_53: enron brought on during its liquidation process and he did manage to help return 20 billion dollars to

SPEAKER_11: enron creditors oh my lord now here's the thing that's that's a history book you want to be in

SPEAKER_55: i hate to say i told you so to everybody but i told you so like there has to be a core amount of value in whatever asset you are trading if you are trading an asset worth nothing eventually it's going to

SPEAKER_28: evaporate because there's no there's no fundamental value there and you will run out of buyers for whatever the object is that's being traded the object's core value matters and i don't understand why this was so hard for people to understand if this was tulip meaning there was a core value at some

SPEAKER_11: point which was a tulip it was a freaking flower there was a flower field of them yeah even they

SPEAKER_28: were super pretty okay but tulips come from bulbs from the best of my understanding and my mom god

SPEAKER_00: lover would get a a bag of bulbs she would purchase them they had value to her and in front of the

SPEAKER_63: brownstone in brooklyn i'd watch my mom plant her bulbs and then they would bloom and she got

SPEAKER_30: incredible joy from them there was somebody in the world my mom who loved planting these bulbs to see these tulips rise and the tulips created massive joy now this is the simplest thing in the

SPEAKER_00: world a flower when we look at these tokens and we've had these people on the pot we had tara luna we ate doh kwan on the program and even another object a a a a hydrogen powered truck to deliver beer we had um right melton trevor melton trevor melton thank you so you you look at the core value of these

SPEAKER_67: things and in both cases a little suspect hey where's the truck oh the truck is being pushed down

SPEAKER_37: the hill by gravity okay so when you look at the core object molly you go okay that that core object doesn't work yeah oh the badger he's going to make his own little truck compete with the cyber truck and the f-150 with the electric f-150 okay wow bold entrepreneur but it also does not exist it's just

SPEAKER_67: a prototype made in the lab it's it's it's not a it's it's not a real object it's it's an idea that this object may future exist it's like somebody making like a tulip out of clay right this is what

SPEAKER_62: the tulips gonna look like and so that's i think the underlying lesson here for everybody is at some

SPEAKER_67: point you have to look what what is the core asset here and the core asset here was the trading that never made sense to me and um yeah i'm just glad to see this all flush out i think if we can just erase this entire period of nonsense from the system get rid of the people who were investing in

SPEAKER_28: it get rid of the people who were you know trying to find bag holders get the bag holders edge re-educated to like hey maybe buy some shares in a company of a product you use and love like okay you

SPEAKER_67: love disney you love amazon you you love the facebook go buy their shirts you happen to be person who loves a headset go buy that because at least you can use that product it makes some

SPEAKER_04: investment decision based on the product yeah value i i wish that i could say that we will

SPEAKER_05: erase that you know it's interesting because we will erase parts of this episode no doubt we'll move on and there will be a show about it and everybody's already casting this guy in line i mean first of all he is in some trouble i think we can probably quite definitively say he okay yeah he's

SPEAKER_24: probably gonna i'll make the prediction based on my judgment this dude's going to jail but you're

SPEAKER_05: at full stop what is remarkable is that this still encompasses the in no way is this contained to the crypto world or even these exchanges right institutional investors we will eventually find out the extent to which institutional investors have all been a part of this ecosystem without a doubt right they've done that like cnbc tours they've been pumping this up they've been saying because we have financialized the entire american economy we are totally fine with products that do not exist other than as financial tools the list of them is endless and he splashy cashed money around to all these various politicians like you had you know somebody made the point i think matt stoller's been tweeting about this all day he made the point that like sbf the current sec chair was appointed by a politician who took five million dollars from sbf all of these like the republicans who were big crypto pushers took money from various crypto billionaires lots of democratic candidates took money from sbf like this this it's not a like it's not a thing you can put in a box and make go away it's like gonna have altered the landscape of the us kind of financial world all right everybody on the phone today is open phones

SPEAKER_84: founder darina kuya welcome to the program darina thanks jason great to be here now what mistakes do most founders make with phone numbers in their startups great question first one is they use their

SPEAKER_88: personal phone number for their business and it's an easy mistake to make because you don't necessarily think about it much you know you incorporate your company you put your phone number there's all these forms you fill out it very quickly goes from being your personal number to being the number for the company and when that happens there are all these data aggregators and all kinds of services that take your number and put it everywhere yeah suddenly now there is this uptick in spam text messages it's the worst yeah and people just wonder like how are others getting my number well let me tell you you put it in different places and it kind of snowballed from there so that's the first mistake yeah the second which is initially as a founder you're the sales person you're the only sales sales rep and then you hire a first sales rep and sometimes founders let that person use their personal phone number oh no that number the data everything that happens is just fully belongs to the sales rep

SPEAKER_84: and if that person leaves you lose the entire history with your customers yeah and then what if that sales executive goes to a competitor exactly yep okay everybody twist listeners can get 20 off any plan for the first six months at open phone just go to openphone.com twist if you got an existing

SPEAKER_96: number they'll put it right over for free head to o-p-e-n-p-h-o-n-e.com twist today for 20 off may

SPEAKER_99: i add a point to this molly yes when we start talking about the obvious when people start doing stuff

SPEAKER_103: offshore well yeah i mean and they just happen to love living in the place that is the most lenient in terms of securities laws or whatever you know it could be that they like the weather possibly uh-huh maybe but the weather in san diego is i from what i understand is the best weather on the planet and all

SPEAKER_00: los angeles right behind it and you know norcal is not not too not too shabby if you like a little bit of variability you have a little mediterranean climate it's delightful just open your eyes people

SPEAKER_30: one of the weird things that i am making a big note of every time we have one of these boom bust cycles i take a little bit of notes for myself and purposefully diluting yourself not looking at the objective reality and the signs to me this is one of the most pernicious interesting assets of human

SPEAKER_28: nature the ability to look at a collection of facts and because you're making money on the way up and you have a j trade on if you will and you're saying you know what i made this trade i bought tsmc because the acquired fm guys talked me into it in the face of china saber rattling that they're going to take over taiwan right and i'm like well i believe they're not going to and i am going to

SPEAKER_63: suspend disbelief and i i literally now that i am a tsmc the taiwan taiwan semiconductor shareholder it is impacting my thinking about what's going to happen in china because i place that bet right the

SPEAKER_28: people who place these bets like i'm just thinking i don't want to single out anybody but chris dixon you know made this his chosen bet and to watch chris dixon who's a very smart individual

SPEAKER_67: who i respect you know for his body of work as an entrepreneur certainly um i mean he was number one on the midas list i understand not that anybody cares about that but like what is chris dixon thinking in terms of hey i i raised billions of dollars and i'm deploying billions of dollars into this at some point you have to start rolling back that that that thinking right and the dissonance has come in like well did i fund companies that set up in panama and bvi and here and they never delivered a product and they didn't have boards of directors and you know all this stuff is just shocking to me and that's why as we do our investment team meetings the itm twice a week two hours i'm really doing my darndest to try to every time people get caught up and excited to then you know maybe show the other side of the argument and just say hey here are some heuristics for investing in companies right mm-hmm just some ideas for you um what what what is real the other thing that's very real is prism

SPEAKER_28: and uh good segue good segue this is the greatest moment in the history of uh streaming on the

SPEAKER_37: internet here is martin shrelly also known as farmer bro for those who are listening on something called up only i guess this is like an online um bro show i think it's i don't know if it's for criminals or grifters but it's a bro show i don't know what the topic is but i think it's a streaming show on like a twitch kind of situation and uh top right molly in center state with you know people give me harder time about like my comb over you know whatever but uh floppy-haired martin shrelly

SPEAKER_00: with a crazy uh comb over looking kind of svelte coming out of jail um next to do kwan in front

David Friedberg: of a halloween pumpkin patch for your pleasure some in for some advice perhaps unsolicited from martin

SPEAKER_125: shrelly to do kwan of luna it's good to be here hey doe um i just want to let you know jail's not that bad it's um it's always fun it's not the worst thing ever you know so don't don't fret if that i

SPEAKER_37: hope it doesn't happen but if it does happen it's not that jail is not that bad i'm gonna go ahead and

SPEAKER_28: say your mileage may vary your mileage may vary because my worldview on prison is not based on martin screlly and what he says it's based on what i saw on the tv show oz and uh based on that i'm

SPEAKER_00: going to say not delightful so i don't think you should commit crime and then go to jail i mean

SPEAKER_12: listen we haven't been there it tells you that you've been there no i said we haven't been there we don't i mean just saying he's he's boots on the ground here he's a he's on the ground reporter holy i

SPEAKER_05: mean yeah clearly by the way that uh that consequence did not seem to matter i keep looking at this financialization though like that you know there are lots and lots of research pieces and articles being written about the financialization of the u.s economy that that the financial industry represents like 25 of the american economy while employing only four percent of the people these are things that are in fact not they're just services they don't produce any goods and they make tons and tons of money like it doesn't surprise me at all and i i'm so obsessed with this in part because for example i'm very interested in you know as an investor tools that incentivize climate finance because one of the things that we need to get these solutions out is a crap ton of money

Jason Calacanis: and this is all very lucrative the financial sector makes a ton of it so it doesn't actually so when i

SPEAKER_05: put my kind of like spock hat on i can really see how chris dixon yeah would think why wouldn't this be an incredibly investable space one banker went to jail after 2008 but everybody made tons of money like financialization makes money and so if you looked at it through that lens if you didn't think oh this is all about creating a new currency this is be like no this is a new mechanism for creating financial tools that will generate tons of value i'm in i'm all in yeah it also requires you to ignore the many many times over the years that the whole system has collapsed but you know and

SPEAKER_28: you know here's the thing i here's where yeah so i i think that's a good steel manning of like chris dixon like being attracted to the space and other venture capitalists who have got obsessed with it

SPEAKER_36: great right financial products important these ones are better awesome so they got paid twice i still think they got paid twice because they got token handouts yeah i think

SPEAKER_00: the token handouts the bag holding the selling of shares i think then you have to take all that

SPEAKER_37: enthusiasm and then put it on the silicon valley playbook where we give people milestone based financing and we hold our shares for a decade and we play the long game and those are the two things where i think this got perverted this ability to create shadow and a shadow security system outside of the secs jurisdiction to be flipping coins and you know i don't know that chris dixon was flipping coins but i know coins were being flipped by many parties and that they invested in companies where coin flipping and securities laws were quite obviously you know missing flaunted maybe i guess is the most generous way they just decided their interpretation of securities laws was we can create a security gary against are saying no you can't they're saying yes we can right they they do the test they find a lawyer who you know yes mans them to death and okay we got some lawyer who says we're in the clear that we paid a million and a half dollars to to make some bs statement when you know a normal law firm would have charged fifteen thousand dollars for the same work okay put it all aside um

SPEAKER_28: you know why did these companies need so much money why did they need to get all this money before

SPEAKER_67: right they built the products and this is where vcs need to look take a deep look in the mirror this we're like a chris dixon needs to take a deep look in the mirror again i'm not singling him out but if you want to be the number one guy in the space you have a leadership position you chose chris dixon chose to be the leader in the space by raising the most money by beating everybody else's term sheets okay if you want to be a hot shot you want to place the hot bets you want to be number one on the list you know well you're going to have to make sure that those companies behave in a certain fashion

SPEAKER_153: which is to ship product you can't give people 500 million dollars 300 million dollars when they don't

SPEAKER_67: have a product or the product's not launched you got to keep people on a milestone based um reward system here i'm referring to myself as well i don't want a two billion dollar fund right now i want to build my little 150 million dollar fund launch fund for jason calacanis at launch.co if you if you're a qp and you want to talk to me about the fund i want to earn trust in the community deploy the capital intelligently i think we need to look at the vcs who made some of these bets and say what were you thinking let's do a post-mortem here how would you do better the next time i think the lps are going to be infuriated after this i think lps are going to look back on this and look at billions of dollars just incinerated and they're going to hold people accountable uh and they're going to say

SPEAKER_155: take me through this take me through it just what what happened here or not maybe they just maybe

SPEAKER_73: they all got their they flip some bags and they're in good shape i don't know i mean i i think we

SPEAKER_05: have to i've been saying this for months now like i think we have to at some point take a hard look at the get paid twice factor here if vcs also got tokens i said this on like with derek thompson i've said it on this show if they also got tokens even if they had a lockup period at some point they were able to sell the tokens were liquid at some point ft not so much but you could also see why a vc would be like oh i'm totally going to invest in the exchange because the exchange itself is a product even if the underlying token is still kind of i know vinnie took issue with my characterization of

SPEAKER_163: it as invented but it still was fundamentally invented manifested manifested that's a good one that's a

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SPEAKER_10: that's ashore.co twist to get 20 off your first spv and now we're just waiting for the other dominoes to

SPEAKER_04: fall like i think one of them tether may be unpegged from the u.s dollar oh god i i hate to like

SPEAKER_155: block fi halted trading i hate to be excited about another person's demise but man i hope tether goes

SPEAKER_169: to zero yeah you do though you do because like i really the fact that these guys are on the lab like they don't live in america they don't do interviews they refuse to do a proper audit like it's just all i

SPEAKER_172: find it and then they're going on cnbc and kind of like trying to like you know spin it to do to debo

SPEAKER_63: i'm just like yeah yeah i'm like devo a little upset at me because she felt like i you know with

SPEAKER_00: the whole ligament johnson thing uh the the fake things that i i didn't have her back enough i i thought i did i don't know if you heard that all in episode where i said listen my contemporaries

SPEAKER_67: were uh my my uh compatriots were like oh journalism sucks blah blah blah blah they can't even get a story right i was like you know live journalism is a little different oh i did hear that yeah you know

SPEAKER_28: like when you're doing live journalism the public deserves to get live journalism and live journalism

SPEAKER_63: you could be punk in the moment we all understand that somebody can run up to a microphone and say

SPEAKER_67: baba buoy mm-hmm and then you have to have your producers as you're doing live unravel that stuff in real time it's just the nature of it right which she did and she did a great job with like she

SPEAKER_177: yeah apologized on air and on twitter she did the right thing i mean let's just let's just say i don't

SPEAKER_04: have any yeah thing nice to say about their thoughts about journalism especially considering the sources

SPEAKER_55: well here's the thing i just say you if you do live journalism you're gonna get punked mm-hmm you don't judge people on the fact that other people are trying to deceive them if you do investing if you

SPEAKER_181: do investing you can get punked like don't talk to me about journalists exactly that's what i'm saying i'm drawing that specific conclusion like you cannot say that somehow journalists are getting everything wrong when vcs keep pumping up sbf over and over and over correct like don't even we can all get punked

SPEAKER_28: we can all get punked we can all get punked now what matters is when you do get punked do you own it

SPEAKER_55: and debo i just want to put it out there i just want to make sure i for a second time i'm going to defend her and all live news journalists we want live journalism to exist as a practice there was a terrible one where like they did they got the local and listen i get it it's funny like in a juvenile south park or actually the simpsons remember they would get people to say silly names when you sound them out on the overhead speaker that i get it it's juvenile i find it

SPEAKER_28: hilarious at times it's completely inappropriate at times there was like this um airplane crash or something at sfo and they read the names of the asian pilots or passengers and they were all super racist stuff yeah yeah they they these poor anchors who are reading live from a teleprompter we all know that's the social contract that they're teleprompter readers the writer got punked the person who wrote them got punked the audience laughs the trollers laugh then they have to apologize yeah it's part of life like people can trick other people deception's part of life you did deirdre posted did the right thing

SPEAKER_67: she just owned it and she's you know what i'll tell you why even respect her more she took a screenshot she took the tweet down and said i gotta take the tweet down because it's incorrect but i'm taking a screenshot of it and replying it to my apology and i'm making a video apology and i'm explaining you

SPEAKER_00: know what happened and and she like she's she super owned it so i just i don't want to make sure yeah here's this clip a second time me defending her as she should because i do not see yeah the same

SPEAKER_05: introspection about theranos or we work or yeah we're the people who invest yeah well actually i did see

SPEAKER_195: sequoia owned it right they wrote that letter they did own it i would say sequoia defended it and did

SPEAKER_05: a good job communicating with their lps about the reality of the situation they put a lot of good math in there did sequoia own getting punked by this guy no yeah okay so right like if we want vc to exist and vc can get fooled by founders we want journalists to exist and journalists can get fooled by fast

Jason Calacanis: moving information so everybody maybe needs to back the hell off each other yeah stand down for a second

SPEAKER_67: and just assess the situation well there are some lazy investors who don't do diligence and there are some lazy journalists who will print whatever comes in from a hotmail account exactly right those things do exist in the world and then there's other people who will be super diligent about it and i think we always figure this out when we see people's reaction to it speaking of reactions to it a friend of the pod logan bartlett who is going to be on this podcast when molly and i take a vacation i want to make a short list of like people to do to sit in i know like we get a vacation tell me more well ski season's coming up i would like to you know maybe do a couple i like to bag a couple of great founder interviews for you all so let's totally do that it's a mountain also uh yeah although

SPEAKER_73: i don't know how that works for 16 hour days friend of the pod logan bartlett i was on a couple weeks ago on his great podcast cartoon avatars and i like a person who this is if you really want

SPEAKER_67: to build a great relationship with me if you tell me you were inspired by me oh my god that to me

SPEAKER_208: that's like you're not you're like totally a bestie no the 20 minute vc guy and uh logan

SPEAKER_67: parlor 20 minutes he was like harry stabbins was like oh jason gallicata is on my podcast this week

SPEAKER_75: i want to let you know you inspired me when i was in elementary school and i started listening to this speaking service i was like excuse me i guess when i was in eighth grade studying in london i listened to this week startups and i started 20 maybe you see and logan bartlett sat on his pod hey

SPEAKER_67: i saw the all-in guys do this and i decided i'd start a pod because i thought maybe i could do that

SPEAKER_216: too and what have i done he asked me for my advice i said don't don't do a podcast i was like don't ask me

SPEAKER_214: well he was talking about doing it for uh logan bartler works at a fund called red point i believe

SPEAKER_219: he's at red point and he's got a cartoon avatar you can search for it um and i was on a couple of

David Friedberg: weeks ago but he's like yeah no i think it's like a good idea to like increase deal flow blah blah

SPEAKER_23: it's like yeah be careful i don't know if it's increased sax's deal flow or not so just be careful what your spicy takes but he had a spicy take i want to see what you think of this one yeah

SPEAKER_55: logan bartlett tweeted it's kind of hard not to think about how differently sbf would have been covered the last two years if he had been giving to giving the republican causes oh making us be intellectually honest what do you think spicy good take not for you spicy or not spicy i think it's

SPEAKER_05: spicy yeah okay and then jenny left court responded and said imagine if sbf was a woman i haven't seen the is this the end of the boy boss articles which made me laugh great oh that's super spicy i give that

SPEAKER_169: three jalapenos we have to have like a spicy scout like that's out of four spicy i give logan one

SPEAKER_226: spicy one chili pepper i give jenny two and a half chili peppers yeah i mean that is spicy so here's

SPEAKER_05: what i respond i wrote this in our i wrote this in our signal chat super early this morning in response to this because like yeah absolutely big rich guy democratic donor which is not something you hear about you don't usually hear about a lot of like new tech entrepreneurs for example coming in giving to democrats so i am certain that that created a little bit of a like he's a good guy vibe um or the media wanting to see him as a good guy there were also for there's got to be a four spicy mom

SPEAKER_11: come on there's got to be a spicier one this producer hold on hold on i'm gonna get there okay

SPEAKER_05: there were also lots of journalists out there making money on twitter or on crypto sorry um oh there were yeah i'm sure right like you you saw and i really do think and i wrote this in our signal that the constant being trolling on twitter every time you said a single negative thing about crypto no matter what it was yeah that is like that ends up like playing the refs you get to the point where you're just like you know what it's not worth it for me to be skeptical of the rise of something that looks

SPEAKER_202: a lot like a ponzi scheme because if i'm skeptical about this in public i will start to get like death

SPEAKER_37: threats from trolls it is a little psyops this is the this is the brigadoons brigadier brigadating and it works they're brigading you the brigadoons and it works because so you eventually my replies off

Jason Calacanis: it's not even just that it works on journalists all the journalists are on twitter they're all getting yelled at if they ever say anything critical about crypto or like the other guy and at some point they stop saying it which is bad for news and they might even find themselves getting nudged

SPEAKER_53: in the opposite direction because if you have a message shouted at you enough times you start to

SPEAKER_11: think well maybe there's something to this this is i'm starting a new segment which i know was not

SPEAKER_55: spicy enough for you but these were spicy but as far as i'm concerned i didn't need a glass of milk for either of these takes these were spicy takes but i could have i could have a second bite of the same spice he's going i'm looking for spicy on the way out like you want hot ones you want the 10th wing and hot ones you feel the next day spicy you know i'm saying i want the spiciest of spicy on these takes i want i can't breathe spicy there there must be people i mean of course there are yeah

SPEAKER_04: of course there are um matt solar had a good piece too about how all of the how all of the times that

SPEAKER_05: that various members of the media like boosted this and i i really do think that the skepticism went away because of the trolls and the boosting happened as some sort of like like you said psyop situation i mean honestly we can i think all agree that the biggest chili pepper in the room right now is

SPEAKER_73: easy yeah he's pretty spicy that dude's spicy he's like i'm gonna sell mine buy your firm no i'm not

SPEAKER_53: gonna buy your firm i'm gonna dance on your grave yes and then and then he's like i'm gonna issue some business lessons for you like your business lessons are like i would say if you um you should avoid

SPEAKER_05: businesses and exchanges and products that are not profitable or survive by selling their own tokens or give high incentives for locking your tokens or have a large total supply but only a small circulation

SPEAKER_12: supply and involve loans and then he says that's ftx aside i mean that kid is ice cold he's ice cold

SPEAKER_37: the spiciest take of course comes from rachel reporting oh as always look so this is like the sbs tweet uh we'll pull it up here i'm sorry that's the biggest thing i up and i should have done better

SPEAKER_262: and rachel our retweet of this is this sounds like he's about to dump his college girlfriend because he wants to go and spring bake with those strings attached well playing rachel you didn't even tweet that way yet but you go you can do that from the twi startups account it's like the twi startups account

SPEAKER_55: to be the spiciest of takes i'd like it to be three or four do not tweet rachel unless you can get

SPEAKER_28: to that three or four caliber i need a glass of milk coughing filled the next day wake up yeah i want

SPEAKER_55: i want to you know when i know i've eaten too much you know when you wake up at like 2 a.m

SPEAKER_209: from the spicy food and you're just like please god oh yeah i'll never eat that dish again just make

SPEAKER_271: this end my stomach and my throat are on fire please make it end spicy are we ready for cool stuff are

SPEAKER_274: you still looking for spicy takes well yes yes i just don't even know if i want to talk about

SPEAKER_30: the communal living in oh the polycule i mean if they're all poly i'm cool with it like great live

SPEAKER_11: your life but if they're poly running a ponzi if it's a poly ponzi it's a poly ponzi if it's a poly

SPEAKER_10: ponzi it's just all straight up i mean this story has everything i'm just i have two tabs open

SPEAKER_278: this story has everything like this story has everything a ceo with an acronym for a name

SPEAKER_279: who lives in the bahamas in a poly relationship with 10 people 10 people step on doing this one

SPEAKER_280: it's too much no it's you know totally nobody stop i can't take this story i just also want to thank

SPEAKER_211: you refreshing it i just want to congratulate jonah hill on his second oscar for this one because he's

Jason Calacanis: definitely jonah hill runner but what about the guy from parks and rec john ralphio he literally is

SPEAKER_53: ralphio he literally plays ben schwartz i mean he's just it's incredible here's some best of john

SPEAKER_73: ralphio hmm he does look oh my god this is he take i can't even i can't even read that one out loud

SPEAKER_211: this is all the popcorn them spiciest yeah i'm gonna i'm not willing to read this one out at the

SPEAKER_73: end of today's show notes if you if you content pack enough we're going to link to four chili peppers when we have four chili peppers and the two of us are not comfortable reading it we'll just link to it in the bottom of the show notes last of the show notes look for the four chili peppers we're going

SPEAKER_165: to link to this all right everybody i wanted to take a moment to thank our friends at microsoft today we

SPEAKER_291: have lahini aranachalam with us she's a senior director of platform and growth at microsoft she actually created the microsoft for startups founders hub welcome to the show thanks jason thanks for

SPEAKER_294: having me so tell us a little bit about the founders hub why did you create it yeah so we built founders

SPEAKER_293: hub based on the feedback from hundreds of founders we spoke to founders at all stages of their journey so ones that were just starting out with an idea to those that had actually built successful companies just to better understand what their challenges and pain points were as they were building their businesses and we found three challenges that kind of rang true regardless of where they were in their journey the first one was that founders need access to coaching and advice to get to that next milestone the next is that they need to accelerate the time it takes to actually build an mvp or their second product or their next set of features and of course founders need capital to actually keep them afloat as they continue to build their companies and so microsoft for startups founders hub is a digital platform built to help founders with these challenges thanks so much lahini if you

SPEAKER_165: would like to check it out go to the microsoft for startups founders hub and they have no fundraising requirements open to anybody if you're a founder they want to they want to support you takes five minutes to apply and startups can get up to six figures of benefits instantly sign up for the microsoft software startups founders hub today at aka.ms slash this week in startups my favorite section of this

SPEAKER_00: podcast i have a couple but i really love we live in the future amazon is launching a new smaller more quiet delivery drone that can fly through light rain let's take a look they've spent almost a decade

SPEAKER_226: by the way amazon you know we we keep seeing them work on drones here's your new design of a drone for

SPEAKER_10: delivery huh looks slightly different than a regular drone oh it's a video of a 3d rendering so okay

SPEAKER_00: so just to give you broad strokes what amazon has sort of been doing here this one's going to be for delivering packages less than five pounds in as little as 30 minutes uh after an order it goes in they've had lots of delays we know that uh they had that famous 60 minute piece this new drone is called mk30 start being used in 2024 it's going to replace the mk272 model going to make deliveries in lockford california and college station texas this year i want to get the populations of those two places because i have a feeling that these drones are going to work wonderfully as we've talked before

SPEAKER_37: in like the country slash burbs you know the suburbs when you're on a quarter acre and then there's like farmland and there's something in between i'm going to call it like you know when people have

SPEAKER_05: five ten acre lots like you see in texas a lot yeah like sort of sparsely popular um that's yeah

SPEAKER_37: sparse like sparsely pot it's not dense not dense so the suburbs are too dense row houses are too dense

SPEAKER_00: there's too many people per acre but when you get out to like you know hey there's a people have five ten acres each and exactly correct college station 120 000 pop uh waco texas 139 these are like i think the towns where this is going to work um and five pounds is just perfect because i'm going to guess that's like two-thirds of things order are going to be in that range five pounds or less you get your coffee two three pound bag of coffee perfect for this and really i was talking to somebody who's deep in the delivery game i'm not going to say which company it is but one of the top five delivery companies i was talking to you just last night and uh they are very very bullish on this 2025 2027 time frame like three four years from now and they're investing heavily in it and i wouldn't say

SPEAKER_37: who but the reason is because the capex it turns out cars for delivery the capex is really high because it's it's a car these drones are going to cost low thousands of dollars they're going to cost nothing to maintain and if they can keep them in the air which when's the last time oh so anyway and these are going to cost low thousand right so these are going to cost one let's just put them at three or

SPEAKER_00: four grand each i'll put my four grand a self-driving car is going to be a hundred these are going to be

SPEAKER_37: literally four percent of the cost you can buy 25 of these for the cars these are going to also

SPEAKER_226: they fly like a crow so they do direct line when's the last time you heard molly a story of a drone

SPEAKER_67: falling from the sky and killing someone i haven't heard that story in a long time or just a drone falling from the sky yeah remember those stories 15 20 years ago just 15 years ago i don't know if

SPEAKER_28: it's ever killed anybody but there's been a lot of there was like drones falling from the sky

SPEAKER_05: united states i was looking up 2022 ceo tom walker by the way because remember we had him on i have a reminder in my phone to like check in with him after six months because it was so he was talking about air delivery and one of the things he told us on that episode was that it it is like 70 or 75 percent of packages are five pounds and under i mean it was like a massive number right of the

SPEAKER_30: actual packages these things are so safe when i was at burning man they were doing drone shows

SPEAKER_00: of like the burning man flying and they had the the burning man which is the the wicker kind

SPEAKER_37: of wood man walk across the playa in drones people feel so safe about these they were replacing firework displays with fleets of three or four hundred of them if you can put three or four hundred of them in the air molly and have them dance around in close proximity to each other certainly they can deliver some coffee certainly they can get you some shaving cream you know or whatever yeah so i think it's

SPEAKER_226: time for us as a society to just say society needs to be much cooler and we need to live in the future i want everybody to collectively say uh they should just do a vote in the town do we want to risk somebody getting hit in the head with the drone to live in the future yeah and if over 75 say yes i

David Friedberg: want to live in the future just like you know gay marriage just like cannabis regulation let's just

SPEAKER_226: live in the future man come on we're all going to be gone soon let's have cool stuff now yeah

SPEAKER_05: the faa has been just stone cold standing in front of drone delivery and rollout and frankly like if they could just get out of the way it could get safer faster there's only i just found out actually that in north dakota university of north dakota in grand forks has a um really well-known aerospace program and it apparently has become quite a hub we should go on a field trip and watch some drones because it has beyond line of sight testing because that's one of the faa regulations right now is that you can't fly a drone further than you can see it oh that's why they picked these towns right because

SPEAKER_37: we had the guy yeah tom walker i'm obsessed with him by the way here's what these drone shows look like

SPEAKER_00: i'm not sure which drone show this is but i mean look at this molly yeah they're amazing the a's have been doing them instead of fireworks nights and it's incredible face yeah oh that i think this is the burning man one i think i saw this one i might have imagined it um but i think i did see the

SPEAKER_329: mask i just say i just say um they're insane look at it rotating now oh my god and the eyes are starting

SPEAKER_12: to glow that is trippy yeah it looks like that big um it looks like the what's wrong with my brain you

SPEAKER_103: know the big blue man from the comics oh uh you're thinking of like other manhattan yeah mr manhattan is

SPEAKER_36: that from uh yeah yeah mr manhattan watchman yeah yeah you could be thinking of galactus no i'm thinking

SPEAKER_335: also very large it's the europe's planet like his face would take up the whole sky when he looks at

SPEAKER_05: planet earth so let's go nerds in here am i right anyway let's go on with you let's live in the future and then let's have rachel tell us what the future actually looks like because she knows what the

SPEAKER_334: kids are doing these days yeah we got rachel we got rachel reporting okay boomer coming up next

SPEAKER_344: all right enjoy everybody okay boomer i understood the assignment thank you so much owen roe for joining me today on this segment of okay boomer owen is one of my twitter friends which feels like there are so many of them now um when i first got this job i feel like i increased like the amount that i was tweeting just because of how active um jason and molly are over on twitter and our friendship was one of the results of that and i'm very very happy about it um owen for those of you who don't know um it feels like everybody should know you because you're all over my twitter page is a 19 year old product designer at stacked which is a watch to earn web 3 streaming platform so thank you owen super happy to be

SPEAKER_349: here big fan of the show so yeah well it's nuts that you are a product designer at stacked and you're only 19 but what's even crazier is the fact that this isn't like your first job um you were like a working professional when i was 19. i think i was working like at a boutique or i was a server in state college pennsylvania um one of the two and both of them not as cool as being a product designer um at least to me and i know previously you were an art director which is so cool at an esports discovery platform called e-fuse um where you helped manage and really just deal with that creative unit and you were also a graphic designer at the esports organization evil geniuses so i've seen a lot about the world of esports lately my roommate got a steam deck and we've been loving it it's a big big apartment fave but it really got me thinking about the people that create these games and you were actually the one that brought to light how working in this industry is a little um it's a little spicy and ever since i read a piece you put out about why you left the esports industry i've seen a ton of other people talk about their similar experiences and how they were treated

SPEAKER_355: and that's kind of what i want to cover today yeah um i mean i don't regret working in esports by any means yeah um so i don't want to portray it like it's a it's a bad thing um but i think there are some

SPEAKER_356: complications that are unique to the esports industry that most startups really don't deal with um because it's weird too like esports teams a lot of people think of it as kind of like a niche like subculture kind of thing but i mean these companies are commanding tech start evaluations um with a fundamentally like different approach because they're not making a product they're not banking on exponential growth really for like users or anything they're not it's just a totally different like business model um and it's also compared to traditional sports a lot i think that's the most obvious uh analog that already exists but it's not really comparable to traditional sports either because it's a lot harder to monetize an esports fan obviously traditional sports are mostly in person esports isn't it's like a online native thing so there's kind of this weird ecosystem that arises where these games are put out by publishers the publishers act as gatekeepers for pretty much everything

SPEAKER_349: so it's a very um fragile relationship i would say got you and what made you decide to get i guess your first role over at evil geniuses in this esports uh world or even was that even like your first role i did some stalking and that's as far back as i could go

SPEAKER_365: um i mean i'd say it's my first like legit role uh because i'd been working in esports working in

SPEAKER_356: esports since i was like 13. um i was doing a lot of like unpaid work for relatively big orgs i guess not as big as eg but i kind of worked my way up over the years i just built my resume built my following

SPEAKER_349: um that eventually coalesced into my role at eg yeah got you and how did your experience at eg prepare you for your role at efuse like was your experience of both companies um like the same like do you think a lot of people in esports experience the same thing that you did or do you think that that's something

SPEAKER_356: that's really like company to company oh man uh i mean it's hard to say i think there are certainly uh some teams are better than others in terms of i mean i guess just the culture compensation all that stuff they all basically act like they go with the pace of tech startups

SPEAKER_365: so you're not going to get like a comfy like fang kind of thing going on where you kind of just like relax all day that does not happen in esports uh the issue is that in esports you're also not getting there's a lot of practices that uh i don't know i don't want to say are like predatory because

SPEAKER_356: at the end of the day it's like on the individual to figure it out and take deals that are um beneficial for them um but you might get locked in a position where there's like a perpetual contractor type of situation where you're kind of an employee but you're in like limbo um so you don't get benefits or

SPEAKER_365: anything like that that's super common i think that's way more common than people realize even

SPEAKER_361: yeah tsm i was just exposed to that yeah the washington post actually had this like whole

SPEAKER_349: investigative uh piece that they did exposing tsm for having permanent contractors um which basically means you don't have any benefits and the financial incentives are pretty poor um but i highly recommend anybody that is really interested in diving into how people that are behind the games that you really like or esports competitions dive into that question post article because that was crazy to me that was i think i actually found that article though even from your um your tweet where you screenshotted a longer post that you had so thank you for bringing that to my attention um can you kind of describe what

SPEAKER_381: permanent contractors are and why these companies decide to hire on these permanent contractors

SPEAKER_356: yeah so i'll use a i guess an example i'm familiar with so if i was doing work for eg for example eg is not one of these orgs i can say that for sure if i wasn't in high school at the time i would have worked

SPEAKER_365: for them full-time but i had to settle for contract work let's say they weren't that way let's say they were a little more predatory they don't want to pay me benefits or anything basically what they would do

SPEAKER_356: is they would kind of string you along and tell you okay just like three more months two more months then we'll start to talk about it okay and that just keeps on going indefinitely so there's no real end in sight they have relatively high churn because it's like okay if you need a designer like if they're not a very team-oriented company they can just burn through freelancers over and over and over people are just kind of content with that it's a very like passion-driven space so it's kind of like a big opportunity to make two grand a month working for whatever esports um so people are willing to put up with a little more but yeah basically just a perpetual path to full-time employment that really

SPEAKER_385: doesn't lead to full-time employment yeah if you're going to give advice for somebody that was really interested and passionate about the esports space and wanted to work in it then what advice do you

SPEAKER_349: have on finding a job that isn't a permanent contractor and permit contractors these are people that are doing like engineering work too right not just people that are doing i don't know like one of the people that are playing in the competitions like these are these are the people

SPEAKER_384: behind the scenes right yeah it's mostly people behind the scenes i would say and how do how do

SPEAKER_381: people get jobs that aren't as permanent contractors in esports i think it's really important to um i guess

SPEAKER_356: identify a company with the kind of culture you're looking for that can be hard in esports because it's not like tech where there's like tons and tons of different places you can look at there's maybe like 20 top level esports teams so everyone kind of knows each other and that's also the thing too like you want to build connections i know that's very like basic advice that's like okay just build connections but really it is like a pretty small community so you got to get familiar with everyone

SPEAKER_365: you gotta you gotta do your research your due diligence gotcha that makes sense and why did you

SPEAKER_349: decide to make that pivot a way to watch to earn web3 streaming um web3 being i feel like another industry that it seems like similar to esports where it's just like blowing up but it's fairly new to work in it and it's kind of a lot of my friends even that work in web3 to be honest are contractors

SPEAKER_394: um and it's great because they're a lot of my friends that work in web3 are nomadic um they do make

SPEAKER_349: a ton of freaking money at least they were a year ago when i met a bunch of them when i was at miami hack week because that's honestly where i know most people um were working in web3 and like my network um why did you decide to go from esports which feels like a new a new category um if not new at least growing to web3 another new kind of growing category yeah so i guess when i was looking

SPEAKER_356: at what i would do next following ethuse there was one thing i was really sure on and that was that i wasn't going to work in esports anymore as much as i love it i just wanted to be in tech i grew up

SPEAKER_365: super into sci-fi and everything like technology to me is like vitally important it's it's especially as a zoomer as a gen z kid like this has defined my life i just need to be there i need to be on the ground floor yeah and so i wasn't even really attracted to web3 in particular there are elements of web3 that i really really love but there's also a lot of work to be done yeah and when alex came to me to join stacked it was just like it regardless of the web3 label um it was the most

SPEAKER_356: compelling business that i could be a part of so yeah just really good fundamentals good team

SPEAKER_344: and that's what was most appealing to me do you find it difficult um to navigate like this world of working at companies where there's not super there's not like a a glass door for tech startups

SPEAKER_349: oftentimes you know what i mean i mean i'm sure there's not a glass door that's really giving a lot of information on esports you're only 19 and you're fresh in your career and even younger than most people who are even doing a career in tech what are some problems that you faced that you think

SPEAKER_372: are unique to being extremely young in this career oh man that's a really good question

SPEAKER_356: so not many people know this but i actually hid my age for like six years on the internet wow okay

SPEAKER_365: yeah wow that's crazy yeah even my friends like i literally people that i would call in discord with every day they had no idea how old i was did they ever ask or did you just okay so they just didn't ask yeah i i was selectively telling them certain details yeah yeah yeah and i wouldn't even tell them

SPEAKER_356: like i was very very careful about this i wouldn't tweet about things that implied i was in a certain grade in school like um if i tweeted about a pre-algebra test or something it'd be like oh dude

SPEAKER_365: dude we figured it out like we know your age and i think that was just paranoid on my part but the reason why i did that is because i mean obviously like if you're like 15 people are less inclined to

SPEAKER_356: take you seriously i don't blame them either i'm not gonna say that's like some cognitive bias that's wrong

SPEAKER_365: on their part because it makes sense but yeah really just kind of keeping it on the low uh flying under the radar a little bit just contributing here and there yeah yeah i totally get that and um

SPEAKER_349: it's so crazy that you were able to hide it for six years that is super interesting mostly because i feel like a lot of people at least in the tech space when they are young and they are like absolutely killing it and they know they are that feels like almost like a badge of honor like when did you decide

SPEAKER_372: that you know what maybe like showing my age might be more beneficial to me in my career than hiding it

SPEAKER_356: that is also a really good question and that's interesting too because for me that's such a

SPEAKER_365: foreign i feel like i see 14 year olds that are founders now and i'm like oh my god like oh my god yeah this is coming from a 19 year old yeah which yeah i guess i'm already ahead of the game but like to them it's like oh man 14 i can't even imagine like going on twitter and

SPEAKER_356: founding a company like that's crazy to me but i guess in that sense um probably when i was like 16 17 it was like relatively late in the high school which i started really owning it wow okay yeah felt

SPEAKER_402: like i was in like the clear at that point and how did you get to being paid in the esports world

SPEAKER_349: where were you like a professional gamer at one point or um did you just like message like a bunch of companies on twitter like find them on discord or reddit or something like where where's this path

SPEAKER_356: it was a very uh slow and steady progression i would say because i started in like june of 2016 kind of i was in like the call of duty space which led into esports yeah and i didn't get a you know like a full-time wage i guess until probably like 2019 so it was like a three-year process of just building my resume and kind of building a network within the space and eventually it kind of just

SPEAKER_410: coalesced how do you build your resume i guess like in this space yeah i mean i think twitter is like

SPEAKER_356: the most powerful tool for doing this kind of thing because it's one thing to be good at a particular like skill set in my case designing but that only gets you so far like raw talent is only one part of the equation the other half is people need to know you exist yep and no matter how skilled you are if they don't know you exist you're not going to go anywhere and twitter is pretty much the ideal solution uh i think for that problem even better than linkedin by far my personal opinion uh some

SPEAKER_427: people would disagree with me on that but i think twitter is ideal i don't think so i think a lot of

SPEAKER_349: people are realizing i got um i got this job i know that i think about it off of twitter um jason posted that he was hiring and another person commented my name and that is like how i found out about the job that's how i found they're like oh this like position reminds me of rachel and he like added me and this is like i said i didn't really use twitter um before i got this job and it was like one of those one-off things where i think i had like 20 or 30 followers on twitter at the time and i barely checked the app i liked it for um i think i mostly used it for news because i graduated around the uh election i graduated in 2020 and so it was like a really interesting place like obviously like seeing on twitter and all the politicians like flocked over there um and so i remember i was like checking it mostly for that and when i got that job um i think it's so interesting afterwards like how my perspective of twitter changed like i used to almost treat it like i'm like oh like i don't want to spend that much time on instagram um i don't see like much of a benefit and now i'm like dang like the community building on twitter is a much different thing it's cool to see that the esports world um sees that too i think a lot of different worlds kind of connect over on twitter as a platform and it's really unique in that way unlike linkedin where people aren't necessarily connecting on linkedin and it's you you know what i mean like i'm not you get linkedin connections but i'm not um out here like cold messaging people i don't really even check my linkedin that much honestly i i mostly check my twitter um and it's funny you mentioned modern warfare because i know modern warfare has been blowing up as of recently in particular call of duty modern warfare 2 i saw just surpassed like one billion dollars in revenue like that that is insane where do you see the future of esports going like i had i had no idea there was this much money this quickly in esports um and by the way this is like it had one billion dollars so for people that aren't nerds this game was released on right before halloween like october 29th or october 28th so it has been like it was like the first 10 days where it surpassed one billion dollars in revenue like that's crazy what's the future of esports considering

SPEAKER_356: there's this much money in it yeah it's really interesting because um there's so much money in gaming and i think that kind of goes without saying it's just such a cultural cornerstone i know like

SPEAKER_365: i was in high school when fortnite was really blowing up and that was just like that was a whole different era you had people posting on their snapchat stories like their fortnite wins people go to school and talk about like ninja um so that was crazy as an esports team though you're kind of at the bottom of the trickle down of all that cash okay it's really hard to monetize

SPEAKER_356: like an esports viewer um because there's only a handful of ways you can really do it it's like merch sponsorships uh that's pretty much it like partnerships just random other stuff um i think this might actually be a place where nfts come in handy okay i mean it kind of combines like the merch aspect like you can represent a team you can provide utility in the sense that you can give like tickets or discounts on uh certain events or whatever right like it almost acts like a premium membership kind of thing um so it's hard to say i think a lot of esports teams are even gonna maybe leave like competitive esports and move towards content creation instead like going all in on youtubers and streamers

SPEAKER_349: i'm not even that into gaming and the only reason i know about um call of duty modern warfare 2 isn't even because like i i don't play it i've never played call of duty anything but they um are advertising like nuts so not only do i see them in buses in on new york like literally wrapped but i kept getting youtube video um ads for modern warfare and i was like this is how much money do these people have like this is this is insane like their ad budget must be it seemed like the only other person where i think that is like athletic greens has so many ads in the same way where i'm like where what the heck like am i missing something and that's how i looked into it and i do see a lot on like my tick tock um for you page and recommended to me on youtube i do see a lot of people that are gaming and watching and my roommates will put it up on our tv and i kind of walk around the house and do dishes or whatever but we never put up like ornaments like live streams of ornaments or streams of tournaments and i know those are a thing and i know they're really big my brothers who are uh four years younger than me and two years younger than me are still in college and love like watching them and they're because they're in college like sometimes people like even have like events that they can go to but those just aren't being watched um i feel like as much as streamers

SPEAKER_356: yeah uh i think i think streamers have like better margins like as a as a business it just makes more sense to invest in content creators rather than like a pro esports team um i know like obviously i don't

SPEAKER_365: know numbers um but what i do know is that players in these esports teams get paid a disproportionate

SPEAKER_356: amount a yeah a lot of money it just makes more sense i think i think streamers and content creators just offer more tangible return in general and they're more accessible it's just you don't need

SPEAKER_427: to know context to understand someone is funny on the tv like it's it's going to be fun to watch

SPEAKER_349: regardless i don't remember who this person was but i remember i watched them a lot i want to say his name is donkey that i used to watch as a streamer and he was just one of those people that's funny when you like listen to it in the background so i used to have it on a lot and um i was like this is so interesting because like you're watching this person play and like you said you weren't watching tournaments and to me it almost felt like if you were a professional soccer player and you were juggling like a soccer ball and just talking about soccer that would make you more money than if you went and played at a soccer game you know what i mean and maybe that's not a great comparison but i remember when i was watching his videos i was like this guy isn't even doing this in like a super competitive like setting or he's just making i don't even like no i'm because i wasn't even watching i was just listening to him being funny um i don't even know if he was good i have no idea he was just like a funny person and i'm like this is it's weird because um it's a sport so it is entertainment but it's almost at a different level of entertainment um or at a totally different category than regular sports and i almost wish the term sports would be like dropped because a lot of the people that i watch as streamers as somebody who doesn't game so they already have to be insanely popular um are comedians so that is my i don't know if it's a hot take but i want e sports people that are streamers to be in a category of comedy rather than like sport yeah no i actually think

SPEAKER_448: that's a great point and i don't really think that's a hot take i think it was misfits gaming

SPEAKER_356: group they they own like three franchises in like call of duty league overwatch league and i think lcs they might have dropped their lcs spot something like that and i think the reason why they they dropped their spot they're actually pulling out of all these franchises they're very very expensive to get in it's like 30 million dollars just to compete that's not even the field of team or whatever that's like each by the way so that's probably like a hundred million dollars just in franchise spots and that's that's like literally zero other business expenses that's just the ability to compete and they're pulling out of that and the reason why is like okay so it's just not profitable um it makes more sense to go in on content creators and like you said content creators are like if you have a funny person you don't need to understand how to play league of legends because if they're funny it doesn't matter yeah and so i don't know just bigger audience bigger appeal i know like dream really blew up

SPEAKER_394: in the last couple years when dream dream oh my gosh another internet rabbit hole to get into

SPEAKER_349: if you're interested in all this stuff dream was in the news recently like a few months ago so that is a great rabbit hole basically nobody knew what dream looks like and now people know what dream looks like and the reason dream showed what they looked like was because they had like a friend visiting and he never like met a friend in person right like it was something crazy like that um really interesting seeing esports and like and on and on the midi and um even like you said like you hit your age so i think it's a i don't know if that's very unique to esports or just having a life on the internet because there's obviously a bunch of like anon accounts on different platforms but i think the people that do it very very well are in esports and another one of our producers actually just told me some stats that i think are pretty nuts from syracuse back in 2018 so in the nba 63 million people view games for the mlb that number is 79 million and for esports that number is 84 million so a ton of people watch it and then the number one spot for people watching sports would be the nfl and that would be 141 million so blowing everybody out of the park but it's crazy that esports has more views than the mlb the nba the nhl um mls like that's that's intense yeah i'm gonna be honest

SPEAKER_365: i don't even know how to play like football like i literally have no idea like esports to me like i grew up with this stuff this to me is my my sports i think that's still pretty unusual like even for gen z kids i think it's becoming more and more like mainstream it's almost unanimous now um but it's not really at

SPEAKER_356: the point where like you know it's not like the whole family gathers around to watch the league of legends world championships not yet at least i think we're probably on the way there yeah but yeah that is

SPEAKER_456: so interesting like seeing like 10 years from now how kids will be with sports because out of two

SPEAKER_349: roommates one of them watches like football on tv and stuff like that and the other one the one that got the steam deck um like hooks up his steam that like plays video games and that's like his thing and it is really really interesting and we are all me and my roommates are almost 25 and so i guess we're definitely still indoctrinated into like traditional sports is like what you do with your free time whereas like there's people dribbled here and there um who do focus on esports like my other roommate that will be crazy like imagine going to a bar for example and seeing esports happen rather than you know just the one-off like i think at in state college pennsylvania um i went to one viewing that they had for sports and it was like something super silly i don't even know what it was it was like mario kart or something like that but it was like a giant tournament and so it was like streamed but it was one time in college and then another time they the same bar went and they said like everybody bring

SPEAKER_372: your own devices and that was like a little networking thing for people that were really interested in like

SPEAKER_349: gaming and outside of like those two times i actually can't name any other time in college that a company or any other organization like really really did support the gaming community which is interesting because um obviously it needs a lot more work in the field work with employees and i'm wondering if more people learn about the industry um earlier on and like spoke to more people if people that worked there would be more equally treated i think compared to other industries within tech how do you think we can make the change of getting people out of those permanent contractor roles that's a really good

SPEAKER_355: question that i've honestly thought about a lot over the last few years i'm not really sure there's a good

SPEAKER_356: solution outside of just you know esports is just growing up basically it started as a purely passion industry and i use the word industry pretty loosely because it was like uh you know it's like youtube videos and just random random people kind of just making it work and it's it's grown up a lot and even in the last like few years i think it's gotten a lot better like when i started in esports in 2016 it was pretty much unfathomable that i would be able to work in esports at all like full-time as a graphic designer uh but it just steadily kind of progressed i think there's a lot of investor money flowing into the space and it's kind of i don't want to say evened it out because it hasn't at all it's disproportionately affected the the pro players they reap all the rewards um but that's not to say it's it's all bad you know it's like i made three hundred dollars a month in 2017 i made three thousand dollars a month in 2019 yeah working for an esports scene like it clearly has improved yeah so i think it's just a matter of one it's a natural cycle esports is just maturing as time goes on two just more awareness surrounding it in general i think the primary driver of the esports employee employer conflict is really just the fact that a lot of the people that are working in esports got in when they were super young like including me and so this is basically what they grew up with

SPEAKER_355: like they don't know they're completely oblivious to how it compares uh to the rest attack for example

SPEAKER_356: they they don't have the concept of a high paying fang job in their head they don't see that even startups startups are much they're they're much more preferable to work in uh in terms of compensation the amount of responsibility you take on all that stuff uh compared to your average startup esports team so i think it's really just as the community grows more cognizant that'll start to change got

SPEAKER_372: you that's gonna be exciting it makes me happy to hear that you said and it can acknowledge like yeah

SPEAKER_349: things have gotten much better because that's always a good time and let's just hope things continue to go up because i feel like in 2020 in particular and during lockdowns and things like that when people had a lot more time to gain they did and i can see a lot more people going into this industry and shining the light on um what permanent contractors are and that you don't want to be a permanent contractor i think is really important because like you said kind of like you don't know what you

SPEAKER_372: don't know so excited to see what this industry does in the future and oh and if people wanted to

SPEAKER_364: connect with you where could they find you follow me on twitter owen underscore row and that is r-o-e

SPEAKER_356: row i would link something else too but to be honest twitter is all i really use it's all you really need

SPEAKER_431: so follow me there amazing thank you so much owen thanks so much for having me on all right thanks

SPEAKER_05: for listening everybody and happy weekend you did it and shout out to all the veterans out there it is veterans day oh thank you for all that you have done thank you for your service i know that sounds trite but oh it's sincere you know in a week when i think we feel like democracy rose to the occasion yeah sure it's because of the work that you have done so thanks everybody you know yeah we have to

SPEAKER_00: fight the good fight here in america um and everybody here has to do their part and then keeping the world safe and we live with the illusion uh here as americans for decades at a time that our safety is just ensured and then things like 9 11 happen other terrorist attack wars other countries being evaded partners of ours and all of that is because we have service men and women around the

SPEAKER_305: world ensuring that democracy and freedom and the freedom of human beings and the human spirit humanity itself is ensured by these people who volunteer they opt in to protecting us and i take it uh incredibly seriously that i get to do what i do only because those people have opted in in another lifetime we

SPEAKER_11: would have to do our tours it would be us yeah and it's members of my family it's very you know

SPEAKER_05: it's really we talk a lot i and rizdal and i would talk about this a lot the divide the civilian military divide most people don't have anyone in their family in the military most you know i mean it's just a remarkable divide and so i think it's easy for us to become un aware right like i have a cousin in the navy who i'm worried about all the time it's terrible yeah and i'm grateful that he's

SPEAKER_305: doing what he's doing right and you know i have uh uh family members who are in you know agencies uh you know military related agencies and they disappear for periods of time and come back can't talk about what they're doing uh but we know what they're doing is dangerous yeah a deadly serious and my lord what an incredible track record we have we always feel safe because of the dexterity and the effort of these individuals it's that's the other thing we don't we not only have an incredible military we have the greatest military and we have the most peaceful uh you know uh uh record going on here

SPEAKER_73: for a couple of years of maintaining order and if we didn't maintain this order on the planet there's a lot of dictators and despots who will be running amok it's not always perfect the the leaders uh you know who who command uh our military uh they don't make perfect decisions but i think overall uh you know as imperfect as our leaders can be at times the people who are actually executing uh out there on the front lines that that's that's that's as close to perfection as you're going to get i mean i have a

SPEAKER_305: friend of mine uh john mckeown we went to high school together man but what they what they do on the front lines the stories he's told me incredible incredible the dexterity the excellence just the pure raw excellence of these individuals is just next level and it really is great that we can feel this level of safety because they're out there doing it shift after shift anonymously quietly humbly but with

SPEAKER_226: that like extreme ability i am just always in awe when i see what they can do and they do it fast and effective i mean it's just it's inspiring it really is inspiring so thank you from the bottom of our hearts and you know we don't take it for granted that we get to you know live this cushy life because you're out there protecting the herd right yeah we're out there protecting the herd we're all the sheep here we get to graze here in the united states and enjoy this incredible safety they're out there

SPEAKER_04: protecting us from the wolves thank you thank you seriously seriously and and we will be back at our cushy jobs on sunday with another episode of vc sunday school a really interesting beefy conversation

SPEAKER_05: about corporate venture and this should you take that money or not should you take that money or not and what should i think if you already took that money it's a good it's a good conversation yeah and of course we got it this week in climate startups segment that i think you're gonna love so we'll see

SPEAKER_501: you on sunday everybody enjoy your restful saturday catch up on some episodes this week if you need to rest up this we're sprinting towards the end of the year we really are coming soon bye bye