SPEAKER_01: Okay, ready. It is a big Wednesday show today. We needed a day to breathe and now we're getting into it.

SPEAKER_00: Okay. So we knew there'd be a lot of ramifications.

SPEAKER_03: Now that we know the Roe V Wade, uh, document that was leaked, uh, is obviously, uh, real and who knows what type of version it is. The fallout has started and big tech and business is going to be severely impacted by that. Everybody from Amazon to Google are currently responding, uh, to this and we're going to break it down. Uh, and as well as some serious privacy concerns with data brokers tracking who's actually going and selling data on who's going to abortion clinics.

SPEAKER_05: Yep. And then don't worry.

SPEAKER_07: There's a little bit of a tech chaser, which is earnings news earnings from Uber, lift and Airbnb. It is so interesting. This was actually, I mean, it's a shame about all this other news that's so emotionally

SPEAKER_08: devastating because it was a fascinating earnings season. Fascinating earnings day.

SPEAKER_03: Airbnb, Uber, crushing it, lift, uh, getting crushed. We're going to talk about network effects and how network effects compound to the winners

SPEAKER_13: and costs then hit the losers. And it's pretty dramatic. It's going to be a great show.

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SPEAKER_18: All right, everybody. Welcome to Wednesday. Yes, you made it to the third day of the week.

SPEAKER_19: Here we are. We're climbing. We're almost at the summit, Molly. This week has been a month. This week has been a month.

SPEAKER_03: It has been. And for the, for the ladies in the audience, we, we are going to talk about it. Uh, there is obviously a lot of business and tech, uh, response to the leak of the, um, Supreme Court statement on Roe v. Wade. Potentially the leaks been confirmed, but Molly, why don't you just catch everybody up in the audience?

SPEAKER_22: Maybe if like me, maybe they don't even know the history of Roe v. Wade as much as maybe they need to, because we just all thought this was settled and we didn't need to know every detail. And now we find ourselves kind of needing to understand this a little bit better because what we took for granted, we can apparently no longer do for granted. Yeah.

SPEAKER_07: So on Monday night, uh, and yes, we're talking about this Wednesday because we sort of needed a day to digest and see what the fallout was going to be from this leaked. What it was, was a leaked draft on Monday night. Politico published a leaked draft of, uh, a potential Supreme court decision to overrule Roe versus Wade. This is the decision that, uh, passed in 1973. So since 1973, abortion has been legal at the federal level. It has been a constitutional right for the women of America. Um, this obviously has been a battle the whole time. And this leaked draft suggests that the Supreme court is in fact poised as soon as June or July to undo that federal precedent. Now, as a result, if that draft becomes a formal decision, there are 13 us states that have what are known as trigger laws on the books. Like should this, you know, that basically say if abortion ever becomes, if this decision is overturned Roe V Wade, then it will immediately become illegal in this state to some extent.

SPEAKER_27: Actually, when I was growing up, Montana had a trigger law like this related to the federal speed limit. Montana was such a don't tread on me state that they had written into the books that should the, the federal speed limit ever be lifted. There would immediately be no speed limit in Montana. And I bring this up because I was working for the associated press then. And one of my jobs was to call the sheriff's office every night and get the fatality traffic fatality reports. And this was like maybe a year after this happened. And so I would call, they would give me the fatality reports, which just went up and up and up and up and up day after day after day. And it was always like out of staters coming to Montana and speeding through like the Audubon and bring this up because should these laws go into effect in these 13 states? And there are about 28 other US states that are poised to in some way restrict or outlaw 28 total US states poised to restrict or otherwise outlaw abortion.

SPEAKER_07: Um, you can expect adverse effects, including women dying from, you know, efforts at illegal abortion. Anyway, since this leak has come out, obviously there has been a massive uproar on social media and in the real world. There have been protests in front of the Supreme court last night. There were protests in Los Angeles that were getting very scary in terms of like DHS crackdown on protesters.

SPEAKER_31: Yeah. I mean, and to be clear, you know, it, it took a day or two to just make sure this was real. Right.

SPEAKER_13: Right. Right. And the courts did, uh, make a statement about like, Hey, they're going to investigate the leak and everything like that. And now, and I think it's always good with this breaking news because it broke Monday night very late. Yep. Um, I think it may have been after midnight. It was like late on the way.

SPEAKER_01: Yeah, exactly. It was like nine or 10 Pacific. Right.

SPEAKER_03: So, you know, it does take a day or two to grok this, but it does seem like, uh, tech.

SPEAKER_36: And business, uh, overall, uh, and, you know, tech misses a business, uh, is now going to become a big part of the story. Uh, because. Yep. If you're a company and you've got employees in various states, um, you want to protect your employees ability to choose now. And Tim Urban actually shared, um, a pretty good graphic of like, what's going on here? Because I think people maybe don't, you know, it's kind of a movie. It was Tim Urban.

SPEAKER_38: Tim Urban is from wait, but why he's actually doing a keynote at, uh, he's the number one Ted talk on YouTube. Oh, okay. Number three Ted talk ever. He does wait, but why, which is a really like great, um, you know, metrics type site.

SPEAKER_36: And if you pull this up, you know, you can explain exactly what's going to happen here.

SPEAKER_38: And it's pretty devastating. Uh, this infographic was, you know, like, I think really good. The current situation, we have federal protection.

SPEAKER_36: All women can have an abortion. Okay. Yes, we get that. Now there'll be no federal protection. And to Molly's point, we're going to see various groups of women in the United States have different rights when it comes to getting an abortion.

SPEAKER_38: There'll be some women in states where abortion remains legal. Like I think New York, California, some of these places actually have those triggers, like you were talking about.

SPEAKER_42: Opposite triggers, basically. Yeah. Reverse triggers like, Hey, our trigger is going to be, it's going to be in our constitution. Right? So I think people are going to start. Uh, and, and that is, I think the argument, the Supreme court, if this is document is correct, is trying to make that it should be a state. Mm-hmm .

SPEAKER_45: So federalism versus states rights has for, for a long time has been a big debate. Uh, you know, and this one felt like it was settled as a federal kind of situation, but you're going to have the second group of people. Some, so there'll be women in some states where abortion is illegal and they're going to have, if they have the means, they're going to just travel to another state for the procedure. Mm-hmm . So, and then you have the third group of women. They're going to be, uh, in states where abortion is illegal and they don't have the means to travel and they're not going to be able to get an abortion. And they're going to maybe seek out abortions that are dangerous and illegal. And this is going to be, we're going to have a lot of women dying.

SPEAKER_48: Uh, and it's really, truly scary and dystopian. Mm-hmm .

SPEAKER_07: It's also, um, this, and this, uh, graphic points out that what is not on the table so far is a federal ban on abortion. Not quite to handmaidens' tale. Not quite to handmaidens' tale. However, so there are a couple, let's start with the tech industry response to this, and then we can talk about sort of the potential downstream effects of this draft opinion, at least as written. And what it could mean, and then also what it means for this. Oh, okay. Yeah, go ahead.

SPEAKER_36: Oh, I was going to say, and maybe it would be good for you to just show that the overwhelming, this chart also in the yellow bar chart on the bottom left. Yeah.

SPEAKER_54: It makes it super clear. Like bring this back.

SPEAKER_36: Yep. Yeah.

SPEAKER_45: 70%. Uh, this is as of August 19 from Pew surveys, which are, I think considered kind of the gold standard surveys. The surveys are not perfect, but when surveys are overwhelming, you, you kind of get it. Right. Like this is unchanged. Americans are against an overtone of Roe v. Wade and have been for 30 years. Like this is like a rug pull of rug pulls, you know, um, this is, I mean, I keep calling it.

SPEAKER_31: The majority of Americans do not want this. Right.

SPEAKER_07: To be clear. This is a minority rule theocracy, right? Like that is what this law is about. There's no policy reason for this whatsoever. This is like a minority of Americans who for religious reasons object to this procedure and are willing to force women to give birth against their will or jail them if they don't. Like, let's be super clear about what we're talking. And this is, I don't know that I can remember in any democracy, but certainly in America the last time, like these are rights that women have had for 50 years. This is not a like, this is not a denial of rights the way that gay marriage was for a long time or an infringement or a speech moderation or whatever. This is a literal removal of rights that have been guaranteed for two generations. Now that is a remarkable situation. And that's why you're seeing, I think so much of response, even though this was expected based on the judges that were appointed. It was 100% like if you were a woman in America in 2016, you have been waiting for this moment to come and everybody told you you're overreacting and you were like, you just wait.

SPEAKER_69: Yeah, I mean, here, here we are.

SPEAKER_03: And I think the foot to the folks who predicted it would happen. You got it right. You got it right. And for the folks who gave the benefit of the doubt, you got suckered straight up.

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SPEAKER_38: If you trusted that, uh, you know, these recent, I think Trump pointed three, um, folks to the, to the court, uh, during his tenure. Um, if you believe them when they said, like, they felt Roe was settled. Um, I think you got, uh, rug pulled. I think you got duped.

SPEAKER_36: So now listen, I, nobody is saying they want more abortions to happen in the world. And I understand people can debate when life happens and, you know, that's all true.

SPEAKER_03: I, I think just for the purposes of our discussion here, the majority of people want something in the country. And, uh, a minority doesn't, and it's, you know, healthcare. Yes.

SPEAKER_38: And so I guess, you know, I, I would say, yeah, probably we do not want to delve into at what week should abortion be allowed?

SPEAKER_81: You know, an important discussion to be sure for scientists and other people to have. But for our purposes, it's not the point, right?

SPEAKER_07: Not the point here. Yeah. The point is the removal of rights and the trickle down effect that is likely to occur. I mean, literally, I don't just want to keep saying this. It is taking a right away. That is a big deal. And I think gets really real when you start actually taking people's rights away.

Jason Calacanis: When did that happen? When did that, has that happened in our lifetime? So I was trying to, I was trying to like do a little historical research because I was like, has this ever happened?

SPEAKER_07: That a democracy has just like reverse, like put the truck in reverse. Yeah.

SPEAKER_22: And the last time, tell me, I couldn't, I couldn't find this either. And I listened to all the talking heads and they, they couldn't come up with it either.

Jason Calacanis: So I think that the last time it happened that I could find might actually be in America after reconstruction, interestingly. So like after the civil war, there were federal troops in the south to ensure equality, basically.

SPEAKER_07: Right. There was this sort of that there was a brief period during reconstruction when like black people were participating in the economy at a high level, holding public office, voting. And all that time there were federal troops in the south, effectively, like making sure that that happened. And then they left. And then it all went sideways. Right. You had Jim Crow laws come into effect. You had things like the Tulsa massacre where an entire wealthy part of Tulsa was just like wiped out in literal air raids by private civilians. And then you essentially had a return to segregation in the south.

SPEAKER_63: That's the only time I could think of us just going like backwards in time.

SPEAKER_38: So now would be a good time to look at text reaction to this.

SPEAKER_36: Uh, and I think this is going to be, I think very analogous to what Putin just experienced, which is a large portion of companies are going to proactively. It can be no pressure needed to be applied here. Mm hmm. Uh, or, or little pressure will be need to apply and be, be applied because, uh, I think tech wants to do the right thing here.

SPEAKER_45: I think there's a lot of women, uh, working in key positions at these companies. And I think a lot of people, uh, have daughters, mothers, sisters, and female friends. Uh, and so Amazon is going to, and they, they came out with this instantly. Amazon is going to reimburse us employees who travel for abortions and other treatments. I guess they put the other treatments in there so that it's not just for this one thing, but, you know, covers a couple of things.

SPEAKER_101: So that to me, that seemed to me to, you know, be, uh, they're doing it for abortions specifically, but they wanted to not make it specifically for abortions. So they came out early on Tuesday.

SPEAKER_104: So good on Amazon. So just think about that as a statement.

SPEAKER_07: Yep. I mean, they were right there, like very immediately in the morning. Um, and then since then we've seen Yelp's chief diversity officer, Miriam Warren, rolled out a similar policy actually in mid mid. April Yelp had already rolled that out because Texas increased abortion restrictions with that law that, that by the way, and this is, this is notable when we get to our data privacy conversation. Texas is law, uh, means anybody who aids and abets, they say in an abortion can be held civilly liable and soon. Yep. So as, uh, women across America start to spin up, uh, an abortion underground railroad, there is a whole question of liability that's introduced by that Texas law, which lots of other states are trying to copy.

SPEAKER_27: Uber and Lyft, uh, when those laws came out, had pledged at the time to cover driver's legal expenses if they are caught up in Texas and evidently Oklahoma, Oklahoma's provision on abetting abortions.

SPEAKER_07: Like Apple match group Bumble have said they'll cover employee expenses for out of state abortions. This is, this is pretty big. I mean, it's a, it's a healthcare corporate issue and it's going to be really hard to stay out of it.

SPEAKER_27: And then yesterday vice, uh, motherboard vices motherboard published an investigative piece where they purchased aggregated user data from a data broker safe graph, which is selling location data on the open market, including that of people who visit abortion clinics.

SPEAKER_07: And now if we find ourselves, Lord, this is a big, if sort of, but if we find ourselves in the situation in six months, we're up to 28 U S states have outlawed abortion.

SPEAKER_27: Then the question of data privacy and operational security is going to be a big one. Right.

SPEAKER_110: A big one.

SPEAKER_03: Well, cause yeah, there's 23 states that could ban it. Um, and there's other states that will restrict it. I think.

SPEAKER_113: Yeah. 13 will ban up to 28 total will restrict in some way, but yeah.

SPEAKER_115: I'm just trying to get, I'm just trying to get educated on this. So, you know, we, I think. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03: It's moving fast. It's yeah. Um, this is one or two steps away from the next shoe dropping.

SPEAKER_45: Um, so yeah, if they want to take a stance where like you help somebody get an abortion as an Uber driver, a doctor, a nurse, a counselor, a psychologist, a, a priest, or, you know, a parent, a parent, like all of a sudden you're getting arrested.

SPEAKER_38: Like this is a crazy, uh, dystopian, uh, vision here. Uh, but you could subpoena, uh, phone data and you could subpoena like this broker selling it.

SPEAKER_121: Okay. That's just seems.

SPEAKER_123: On the open market. Just go buy it. They classify planned parenthood as a brand that can be tracked.

SPEAKER_13: Well, and here is important to note. You're not getting the person's email address in their name. You're getting a cookie that could, you could put an ad against them.

SPEAKER_38: Um, so it's, I would think anonymized data. It's just location data. So you could make a group on an ad network and then show them an ad. But that also means that data could exist, not anonymized in some database somewhere.

SPEAKER_45: Obviously there's all kinds of ways to track people. So this is probably anonymized data, but you can still reach that user, which means, you know, there's all kinds of ways to track who went to an abortion clinic and then who did searches for abortion. Yeah. So now is Google going to have people search histories, uh, track. I mean, this is gonna get to, um, a pretty crazy.

SPEAKER_38: Yeah. Outcome here. Uh, but I think now we're going to start to see, uh, states. States that embrace this, uh, are perhaps going to lose business. And I think people are going to start voting with their pocketbooks. And so this idea, oh, you know, Florida, Texas, great open states, great places to build businesses, et cetera. You know, I think you're going to start to see some folks question. Maybe I don't move to Austin. Maybe I don't move to Miami. Maybe I don't want to support those. Maybe I don't want to open an office there. Uh, and so this is a level of. You know, second and third stream downstream effects.

SPEAKER_03: That are going to create even more chaos and division in this country.

SPEAKER_125: Yeah.

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SPEAKER_127: Consult with a qualified legal investment or tax professional.

SPEAKER_07: And I know that there is a debate on, for example, another show that you do about how much companies should engage in these conversations with their employees. But the fact is it's unavoidable, right? They're like, especially at a point like this where we're literally changing the legal fabric under which this country has operated for 50 years. And it and it's health care and it's fundamental. And it's like these bands that, you know, don't take into account whether the pregnancy could kill the mother, whether it's rape or incest. Like there's no universe in which you're going to be able to separate this from your business. And we are going to increasingly fracture, especially by the way, like as this opinion has written now. And we talked a little bit about this, I think, in the live stream yesterday.

SPEAKER_27: As it's written now, it essentially undoes the 14th Amendment right to privacy.

SPEAKER_07: Like the way that Alito wrote this draft opinion effectively says if the rights were not written into the Constitution by the slave owning white guys, then they they don't qualify for protection. He literally is like, this is not a deeply rooted tradition of rights. And that could then apply to, you know, there are legal scholars all over Twitter saying the next thing that's coming is gay marriage. The next thing that's coming is the right to contraception. But the thing that comes after that is businesses being able to do whatever you want, because it's about a right to privacy.

SPEAKER_36: Yeah, I mean, this is the, you know, again, back to the minority of people dictating for the majority of people what happens is makes this a qualitatively and quantitatively very different. Then I want to talk about Trump at work. I want to talk about immigration at work. I want to talk about BLM at work. You know, you, those are, I'm not going to say niche issues.

SPEAKER_38: In some cases, they might be like some immigration issues might be niche. It might only matter to some small percentage of people. This is, you know, healthcare fundamental right issue.

SPEAKER_45: I think people are going to look at it very differently. Um, I don't see how you avoid this discussion at work. If people are going to make a decision to even come to work at a company, you know, uh, based on this, it's, it's, this is going to be super challenging. Um, again, healthcare is attached to employment in our country. So that's a really good point.

SPEAKER_138: There's no way not to address it. There's no way.

SPEAKER_07: I mean, this is literally taking like, this is like you, I'm trying to think of the corollary, but in terms of removing a guaranteed right. It's, it's just stunning. It's unprecedented. And it probably like a lot of other shoes could and will drop after that because it's basically like somebody on somebody put it, you know, this is a way to undo anything that you find distasteful. Yeah.

SPEAKER_36: I mean, and, you know, to the all in discussion with Brian Armstrong, uh, which I think was two episodes ago, you know, Brian famously said, listen, we're here to do one mission at Coinbase.

SPEAKER_42: You can talk about political issues if you want with your coworkers, just not on the corporate Slack, do a separate meeting, start your own signal group, whatever's your jam. You can go talk about it, but at work, we're not going to talk about this stuff anymore. And you can opt in or opt out to being at an organization that's politically active or not. I think that's fine, right? The private companies.

SPEAKER_138: And if it gets everybody more focused, fine. Um, I think that's fine, except that I don't want to hear praise from that, from people who are like, we're for unrestricted free speech.

SPEAKER_07: I think those are intellectually contradictory positions. Um, like you cannot say that you have to have an absolute right to free speech on a platform run by a private company, but then unabashedly praise the guy who shut down all the free speech at his company. Because what it sounds like is that the speech you don't want to hear is the stuff about black people and trans people.

SPEAKER_27: So I think. Sorry. Okay.

SPEAKER_148: I, I, I.

SPEAKER_149: I'm, I'm radicalized by this situation. So, but that's what I was shouting. Intelligent. Intelligent people.

SPEAKER_22: I like you to have a voice and explain your position Molly, actually. Yeah. Because, um, I think those are contradictory.

SPEAKER_38: I could see it be contrary. I could see, uh, I, I understand that. I think it's a reasonable argument.

SPEAKER_42: I think the counter argument would be, um, we're not restricting your speech to this. Uh, you know, you can have that speech. Just not while we're working. So during the eight hours we're paying everybody, we don't want to have these discussions, whether it's, you know, who should be the mayor, the president, BLM, immigration, Ukraine. We just want that off the table for the eight hours we're working when we're off the clock, by all means, go ahead and do it.

SPEAKER_45: Um, so I think that would be their counter argument. Um, but it does seem.

SPEAKER_154: But I don't think that's any different from me saying, I don't want to be bombarded by disinformation or harassment on Twitter.

SPEAKER_27: Could you please moderate that? It's a company. Right.

SPEAKER_156: One gets my choice. Yeah.

SPEAKER_07: And the response is it's my choice to work at Coinbase or it's my choice to be at Twitter. Right?

SPEAKER_01: Like both of the, they're effectively the same argument. Yeah. And what it starts to sound like is there's just some speech we like and some speech we don't.

SPEAKER_38: I think there, there could be cases where that is the truth, uh, where like a free speech discussion at work might be like encouraged and a discussion about BLM or immigration might not be or Ukraine. Um, so yeah, I think people could be selective.

SPEAKER_03: I think what they did at Coinbase was just say, just no, nothing but financial economic freedom. Uh, and I'll take him on his word that that was the intent.

SPEAKER_36: Um, but you know, it, I, I, I'm trying to be as open as I can to everybody's position.

SPEAKER_42: Um, you know, at this point in my life, they're like, we've, when I look at this and I'm like, should it be a federal decision or a state's decision? It's like, okay, I, I get your argument. The S states have power in the United States or whatever, but this has been for 50 years of federal issues.

SPEAKER_03: So why would we do this now? Like, right. I get it.

David Friedberg: Maybe 50 years ago, that could have been a fine discussion, but for 50 years, we did it this way.

SPEAKER_03: Like a lot's changed in 50 years. Like you really think this is the right way to execute on this? I do not think that this is the right way to execute on this. So I think we're going to look back on this as a real tipping point.

SPEAKER_168: It does feel like a moment in time.

SPEAKER_121: I agree.

SPEAKER_07: I really do. I think, cause the thing it's the, it's like, you know, to your point, it felt so hypothetical and not possible. And you did have, you know, you did have Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett assuring Susan Collins that, you know, it was settled law. And, and I think that what we're going to now face is the potential coming true of these predictions and who's acting in good faith and who isn't. I think that, you know, I, I applaud and respect the, the willingness and the desire to take things at face value and engage in these conversations honestly. Hmm. But I also feel like only one side is doing that. Like, I don't hear any minds getting changed on the other side, you know? And I'm like, yeah. It's pretty cynical.

SPEAKER_175: Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03: Pretty cynical. What just happened? I think like for these people who were elected to, you know, basically put out there that they felt that was settled and that for it potentially to flip.

SPEAKER_38: Like, listen, there's a lot of cards that are going to turn over between then and now. And we, I think the leak is also on the table. Technically, how did the leak happen? So I have a lot of questions about how does a document inside the Supreme Court leave the Supreme Court?

SPEAKER_81: I know this is a geeky IT thing, but shouldn't they be on a closed network where documents can't leave and there's cameras everywhere and everybody logs into their computer with a very specific, uh, login that's tracked and every behavior is tracked. So if somebody exported this document, like how does a document leave the building at the Supreme Court?

SPEAKER_177: Who is in charge of IT? I'm only, I know. I mean, this is so easy to solve.

SPEAKER_07: I'm only smiling because I, of the small familiarity I have with federal IT budgets, which are basically like zero. I mean, they're literally working on like one, like windows 95 up in here in the federal government, but also like probably they just walked out with it or took pictures of the documents.

Jason Calacanis: They operate on a lot of paper.

SPEAKER_121: I know these, I mean, now they're going to, I think the way the Supreme Court is going to have to work is when you come in there.

SPEAKER_45: Like the building is a skiff in it in and of itself. Uh, you know, these rooms where you can't bring devices in like nobody should be allowed into the Supreme Court to bring their phones, devices, laptops, the computers in there, stay in there. The documents never leave there. If you work on the documents, you're in there. The document, there's no floppy disks. There's no thumb drives. No documents are allowed to leave any of the machines there. Um, cause here is the document. Now, does this document look like it was printed and then exported to a PDF? I don't know if any forensic has been done, but it's obviously an inside job. Like this wasn't like a justice left it on a subway. You know, like sometimes that happens. Like there was a famously some NBA coach left their playbook during a Nick series, like in a, in a cab. And then somebody found the playbook and was like, should I give this to the opposing coach? This was a scanned. So they, somebody, this feels like somebody got a printed copy and then scanned it.

SPEAKER_07: I don't know the forensics on this, but, um, what is interesting though, is that there, there isn't that existing OPSEC in the security in the Supreme Court because there hasn't ever needed to be. Got it. Right. Like, I think this is, this is not unprecedented. There have been leaks about the, about decisions before, but to, but it is very, very, very unusual and a huge deal because there has been such,

Jason Calacanis: traditionally like this is a tipping point in a lot of ways. One is the potential erosion of a lot of rights that this could be just the start of, but two is like, you know, I, I, I think a lot of us have felt cynical about the direction of the Supreme Court.

SPEAKER_07: You know, five of the sitting justices were appointed by presidents who did not win the popular vote. Like it's been increasingly a minority rule, an elected body. Yeah. And Congress has been so dysfunctional that we've outsourced our lawmaking to this unelected body that is made up mostly of people who were placed by presidents who didn't win the popular vote. So like problems, but this is like the end of that institution. This is like, you could still believe if you had ever wanted to be a lawyer. Like I thought about going to law school. My dad's a judge.

SPEAKER_27: You could still believe for a really long time that, that the, the sheer importance of the work that happened at the Supreme Court was itself sacred. That the being there was moderating because you really understood the law and you opened yourself to every argument. And I spent my whole life believing in the Supreme Court.

SPEAKER_191: It just felt like they would do the right thing.

SPEAKER_164: Yeah. And now it feels like they will not do the right thing.

SPEAKER_38: I think this is where, you know, the reaction to this is, you know, and, and maybe it's a good thing, you know, like maybe the fact that we now question the WHO, like who's paying their budget exactly. Okay. Ch who China's paying part of the budget. Maybe they don't want to embarrass China. Okay. Like we, we need to just re-examine every group and figure out.

SPEAKER_36: Are they trustworthy or not? Uh, and yeah, you know, is the Supreme Court trustworthy or not?

SPEAKER_42: Is the New York times trust every institution, Harvard, just pick something that you looked at and said, I believe in this. It's Harvard. I believe in it. It's the Supreme Court.

SPEAKER_36: I believe in it's the world health organization. Okay.

SPEAKER_141: There, there are humans running organizations. Humans are imperfect. We should, you know, definitely.

SPEAKER_36: I'm not saying. Don't trust anybody, but you certainly would want to trust and verify like that.

SPEAKER_45: This is a, a sound establishment. It just doesn't feel that way now. It's sad. Cause you're going against the majority of Americans.

SPEAKER_81: Yes. And that is. Which to be fair.

SPEAKER_113: Brown versus the board of education, like the desegregation rulings, the civil rights rulings also went through, went against a majority of Americans.

SPEAKER_27: Yeah. So there's that.

SPEAKER_07: But I think the fact that there was this leak and the fact that these judges seem to have been placed in some cases specifically for this purpose does suggest that there's a lack of faith internally. And whoever leaked this, like they've lost the faith right in the sanctity and the reasonableness of this organization. And that's sort of, that's a hard thing. Cause it felt like this was like the last bastion.

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SPEAKER_06: And I think we talked about this on the live stream yesterday, but it's such a but not in the episode because we did a little preamble about our initial reactions to it. One of the reasons possibly to subscribe to youtube.com slash this weekend and click the subscribe alert button is because we'll talk a little more freely on the live stream before we do a formal episode.

SPEAKER_36: Sometimes the reaction to the Republican Party based on this is going to be so brutal to them.

SPEAKER_03: Like this is like they, the dog chased the car and now the dog is got a mouthful offender.

SPEAKER_38: And it's like, oh, now I'm being dragged by a car down the road and I am biting metal. This is not comfortable. Like what have I done?

SPEAKER_36: It's like, you shouldn't have caught the car. Yeah. Not a good strategic move. Like you want, what did you win here?

SPEAKER_22: Republicans. Okay. See the deck. You, you flipped Roe v. Wade. Now 50% of the voting. I mean, I, I don't know what the percentage of women who vote versus men. I think it's slightly more women vote.

SPEAKER_207: So, I mean, this is going to be disastrous.

Jason Calacanis: I think it is. I mean, this is a very moderate, exactly.

SPEAKER_07: Like this is a moderate, this is a center to center, right country. We do not elect radicals to national office. Very often the house is its own clown show. And it's, and let's be clear, right? Like it's so these states are so gerrymandered, like they have constructed such a ridiculous house. I mean, the fact that like a Marjorie Taylor Greene is in no danger of losing her seat. None. Tells you everything you need to know about gerrymandering these states, but we don't, but like if the Republican party just continues to put forward more and more and more conspiracy theory, spouting election, denying rights, taking away candidates, like. It's a really good strategy. Go for it. Go for it party.

SPEAKER_213: Go crazy.

SPEAKER_45: I mean, and I said this to all into sacks and, you know, we had these discussions. I was like, cause he does not believe it should have been overturned. He, he was very clear about that. Like, I think that people in the Republican party who would like to win and would like to see a more purple. Kind of thing happen.

SPEAKER_36: Maybe pull over some moderates to the Republican party, like that effort, which was really working well. Uh, I think for Republicans saying like, Hey, less tax. Okay. Don't hate billionaires. Like there was this whole Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders. Um, moment that what they, I guess they call democratic socialists or is what they call themselves or. I think it's.

SPEAKER_217: Elizabeth Warren does not. Bernie does.

SPEAKER_38: Bernie does. Okay. So, but I think people put them into that bucket, uh, where it's not socialism, but socialist Democrats, I think that turned off a lot of moderates and myself included.

SPEAKER_42: Not that I'm running into the, I consider myself an independent to be clear.

SPEAKER_36: But I think a lot of people were kind of like, oh yeah, Texas is kind of cool. Miami is kind of cool.

SPEAKER_81: Yeah. Descent is kind of cool. Like, yeah. Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_42: Maybe this is like, uh, maybe the, the leftist. Now this is like the right going super crazy. So now it's like even more, we need a third party of rational actors to just go after the, the purple moderate majority in this country. We're like, just leave it alone. Like there's bigger things for us to work on. Oh my Lord.

SPEAKER_45: This is going to be a distraction for the next number of years. A generation.

SPEAKER_101: Literally putting the country into a civil war over this.

SPEAKER_07: Yeah. I mean, this will, this will break us as a country like this. It already has right. Mission accomplished seeds of division. So where's like mission accomplished. Putin. Yeah.

SPEAKER_225: I mean, honestly, I mean, yeah, I mean, it, the chaos agents are at work.

SPEAKER_27: The chaos agents are at work and they have succeeded because we will not as a country we will be an ungovernable clown show for a minimum of a generation. Like, cause who's coming together over this?

SPEAKER_07: You're just going to decamp to your little States and live in your silos and, and, and never the twain shall meet. And the, the agents of division will keep going.

SPEAKER_229: We already have this with gun rights.

SPEAKER_45: I mean, if you look at gun rights and how they're executed at a state by state level, you know, New York, you can't have a gun.

SPEAKER_38: And in Austin, I was at dinner and somebody pulled up their shirt and had a Glock in their waist at dinner with me.

SPEAKER_230: In Ohio.

SPEAKER_63: Now you don't even have to have a license. You can open carry any weapon with no license. Sure. Fine. So crazy.

SPEAKER_42: This is, I think now you're going to have to, when you decide what state you live in here as an American, you're going to have to take out like a, make a pro con list.

SPEAKER_81: Like mom always said pros and cons. You put some pros and cons over here. It's gonna be like pro. Uh, yeah. Low taxes. Con. Everybody's carrying a gun. Pro, you know, like low taxes. And if your kid is gay, they probably won't be able to get married in that state in a couple more months or years.

SPEAKER_235: Yeah.

SPEAKER_81: Pro low housing costs on your gay kid is going to potentially be beat up, ostracized or murdered. Mm hmm. Pro. Right. Low taxes.

SPEAKER_07: I'm super glad. Like I am super glad to hear you say this because all the conversations about Miami and Austin, I'm like, wow, it must be really nice to be able to ignore everything about the political environment in that state.

SPEAKER_240: I think I have a, I have a challenge for business.

SPEAKER_45: I have a challenge to that. I am encouraging people to go to Austin. I'm going to encourage people to go to Miami and Florida because I think the influx of Democrats there is going to turn those states purple. And I think that's why Beto did so well. And like, uh, it's conceivable a Democrat could be the governor of Texas. Um, so I kind of like it. I like. Yeah. Uh, Democrats going there. I understand like, it's also like you're voting with your dollar literally to pay taxes in that state and to participate and live there.

SPEAKER_42: So you're voting with your time, your money, your very existence geographically, at least. Uh, you know, this is a big. Yeah.

SPEAKER_07: Yeah. Stacy Abrams has made this argument about Georgia too. Like, don't pull your businesses out of these states. Don't move away from them.

SPEAKER_01: Like stay and try to make change from the inside. And I think there's a lot of value to that. That is very true.

SPEAKER_244: It's the argument we constantly have about China. Do you engage with China? Like Apple, Tesla and others are doing.

SPEAKER_38: And that has made them dependent on us, made us dependent on them.

SPEAKER_42: That interdependency in the engagement argument means change will happen in that country. And Apple can say, listen, our factory workers are jumping off the building. We need to have people on the ground. We want to have a certain level of, um, rights for factory workers. And Tim Cook visits those factories, took it seriously. I don't know if you remember, like. Yeah. Yeah. It was a huge story. Five or 10 years ago. The story of like suicides at Apple factory specifically. Mm-hmm. So to Tim Cook's mind, Hey, listen, we're there. We're on the ground. It's a different country. They have different sets of rights, but hey, uh, people aren't killing themselves. We know they have a good standard of living. The middle class is growing. And if you look at the poverty chart, which I think I sent to our group chat, I think, and actually I tweeted it. You know, the iPhone and Amazon and the engagement of the West in China has reduced abject, like serious poverty in the world dramatically.

SPEAKER_45: Hundreds of millions of people are no longer in the bucket of like severely poor in the world because of iPhones. Right. Amazon basics.

SPEAKER_42: Does it mean that Wuhan, uh, it doesn't mean that, um, the Uyghurs are still not being tortured, right? So you have to keep these two things in your head.

SPEAKER_81: They're running.

SPEAKER_45: Well, a concentration camp and slave labor and three or 400 million people have come out of poverty. Okay. Like on a moral basis, I'm no philosophy major here, but I don't know how to resolve that. I just know that for me personally, I couldn't engage with China for that reason. But I can understand people have a different opinion.

SPEAKER_07: Yeah. And the logical conclusion of that too, is that businesses, if businesses can make change on that level and do an overall good, then they will have to engage politically as well. And then that Disney and Apple will have to take into account their future, you know, employee bases and say, yeah, we actually, we, we are a company that will stand up for human rights. We are a company that will say abortion is healthcare. And if you need to get one in another state, then where you live, we will pay for that. Like there isn't any universe in which companies, especially since citizens United gives them the same rights as people in our democracy.

SPEAKER_01: Then there's no universe in which they get to sit this out and say, sorry, it's just work.

SPEAKER_45: And look at this, look at this chart, Molly. I think just as I brought it up anyway, back up again. Yeah. You look at extreme poverty, extreme poverty, which I am not sure of the definition, but it was living under a certain number of dollars a day, I think is how they said it.

SPEAKER_36: And you just look at South Asia, East Asia and Pacific, just absolutely plummeting over the last couple of decades. And obviously, sub Sahara, Africa, not plummeting, right.

SPEAKER_03: But now factories are moving that the Chinese actually building factories.

SPEAKER_259: I mean, thinking about taking over Africa.

SPEAKER_45: Yeah, so okay. Now, you're less than $1.90 a day, I guess, is the new definition used to be under $1 a day. Obviously, it's a moving target.

SPEAKER_38: If you're listening, what you see is like, you know, a billion people coming out of poverty. And that's what globalization did. So there are some hard truths here, um, that people, uh, and, and some tolerance for ambiguity and some cognitive dissonance all occurring.

SPEAKER_81: When you look at the metrics, globalization and engaging dictatorships and engaging authoritarian regimes quite paradoxically has resulted in less suffering. Absolutely full stop. Yep. So now you have to ask yourself, if we didn't engage, what would it look like? Would there have been more change?

SPEAKER_45: Would there have been a civil war? I mean, these are all, we talked about alternative history the other day too. This is that my love of it. This is that like, so if I made the decision to not engage China because of the human rights stuff, maybe I keep 400, 500 million people in poverty longer. Right.

SPEAKER_263: Now, maybe they then have a civil war and then the whole country flips.

SPEAKER_45: You, you, nobody is, you have to be humble enough to realize nobody has the answer here. No. Um, but we should be studying it and talking about it.

SPEAKER_05: There's short term and long term thinking about this too, right?

SPEAKER_07: Suffering.

Jason Calacanis: Well, about the suffering and also the, the effects. Like one of the big criticisms.

SPEAKER_06: Explain that to the audience. Cause you and I were talking about this privately. I think it's kind of an interesting topic. We're talking about this privately.

SPEAKER_07: There's, I mean, there's, there's it as a concept generally, right? Short term thinking versus long term thinking, long term globalization lifts all boats. A hundred percent. That was always the sort of like Obama doctrine and he got a lot of. Clinton. And there, and a big part of the Trump populace and Clinton before that. And a big part of the Republican and American and Trump populace backlash to that is because in the short term, some boats sink. Those boats are in, you know, manufacturing areas in the United States or all of the areas that have been economically devastated as a result of globalization.

SPEAKER_268: So if you want to Japan, our factories went to China, our factories went to Mexico, Mexico. And they took our jobs as they say on South Park. Right. And we didn't lose factory jobs.

SPEAKER_07: And we did lose factory jobs because there are short term impacts to long term thinking. And so it like it's like all about sort of manage. And I think that big knock on Obama is that he was such a like up here thinker about globalism, just like long term. This is better for the world. And what is better for the world is better for the United States. There's long term global security when more and more people come out of poverty because people fight over scarcity.

SPEAKER_30: Yep. And the perception of scarcity.

SPEAKER_38: Yeah, I mean, it's if if you don't know, how are you going to feed your family next month, next week, today, tonight, like it's a different.

SPEAKER_03: Those are all very different levels of fear, right?

SPEAKER_36: And Americans who feel fear of Americans are not feeling putting aside all the statistics that people can make up of this, like, and it was kind of a bogus one that they don't have $400 kind of situation. Some of those things have been debunked because those were surveys, not actual reality.

SPEAKER_191: In some cases, we actually did that survey that came from marketplace. It did. Yeah. Well, I mean, it was a survey, right? So we can explain that.

SPEAKER_253: It was a survey.

SPEAKER_07: So there were plenty of people who said, yes, in an emergency, I couldn't come up with $200 or $400. Right.

SPEAKER_27: There's real scarcity in America. Right. And then there is perceived and planted and propagandized scarcity. And that one became. Right. The fear of the other. Right.

SPEAKER_42: Coming to take your job. But that $200, I think they perceive they couldn't come up with it. In some cases, some cases, people had $1,000 on their credit card. So they could. Right. Right. Or they could have asked the family. So anyway, mission accomplished. Inside the point.

SPEAKER_27: Really good discussion. Right. There's real scarcity or there's perceived scarcity. And as a result, there is conflict.

SPEAKER_81: The idea that an American would starve in 2022 to death is quite farcical.

SPEAKER_42: I mean, maybe not children because children, you can be malnourished and that kind of stuff.

SPEAKER_114: I know. Careful. Careful. Like that's how our lives get. Careful. You could be malnourished. You could be malnourished and food insecure.

SPEAKER_81: Food insecure. Now, food insecure is different than starving to death in Africa because you literally cannot find 500 calories. True.

SPEAKER_42: Food insecure here might be defined as eating bad food might be defined as 1500 calories a day, not 2000. Whereas in Africa could be, I didn't eat for three days. You know, I'm, I'm sustaining myself on 500 calories. There are people in the world sustaining themselves on much less than the two and the 2000 calories.

SPEAKER_45: Um, so this is where like politics and people with agendas. Like I, I just love when I actually have the metrics in front of me. It's like how many calories do people have to eat? And there are some countries where people have 1200 or 1400 calories a day to eat. Yeah. Uh, and that, that's truly like, okay, how do we get them more calories?

SPEAKER_48: We should really talk about that.

SPEAKER_27: So let's see as many as 6% on and declining, uh, of Americans have very low food security.

SPEAKER_290: I don't even know what that means, but well, very low food security, food insecurity. Um, so yeah, we'd have to find the definitions of very low, very low foods.

SPEAKER_07: Anyway, yeah, there is legitimately hunger in America. There is also, there are also plenty of people with plenty of junk food and cable and whatever, who believe. There's no famine in America. We're not having a famine here. Right. But there are plenty of people who believe that some other is coming to take what they have. Sure. And that is the root of like a lot of the conflict that we're seeing today. And so the question is, how do you manage both? How do you like deal with the longterm without sacrificing people in the short term? So that's the conversation we were having right now. You gotta just say stuff. Yeah.

Jason Calacanis: You have to figure out how to do some version of both. You have to.

SPEAKER_38: Well, and I think, you know, looking to the government to solve all problems, obviously you'll be quite disappointed, uh, because these are people generally speaking of low moral character who only care about staying in office and are grifters in many cases.

SPEAKER_36: Yeah. So I have very low, uh, respect for and love of politicians. Generally speaking, like ever since I met some of the top politicians who were like, tell me what your positions are so I can support them. Like literally one of the highest profile politicians in the world said that to me, but they wanted to understand.

SPEAKER_59: Tell me your position so they can, so they can support them. Literally said it that way.

SPEAKER_42: And I was like, what if my, I just thought to myself, like, what if I, my position is like horrible. Right. It was really weird. Uh, the way it was phrased to me. Uh, but. That's terrifying.

SPEAKER_01: I mean, we don't even have time to get into like money and politics and gerrymandering and blah, blah, blah. Like there are a million things that are happening here, but the first company you did in the climate syndicate is doing one little short term thing.

David Friedberg: Yeah. Just one little device solving one little problem. That could be the start of, you know, it could, could, could change forever. One of the biggest polluting, uh, sources in the world. Yeah, exactly. But it all starts with a little sensor and a little bit of software with a half dozen people, you know, somewhere in an office grinding it out.

SPEAKER_59: Uh, and so that's one of the great things we can solve, you know, solving, uh, a small problem that, you know, a lot of people are having could reduce a lot of suffering. It's true.

SPEAKER_41: You know, if everybody was 10% happier right now, like if you could come up with a device that made the entire world 1% happier in aggregate, that's a lot more happiness.

SPEAKER_27: Yeah, it's yes, totally. I have a friend actually, who says over and over not to derail us because we should talk about earnings, but I have a friend ourselves this episode.

SPEAKER_07: Well, I have a friend actually, who says that one of the most dangerous principles enshrined in the creation of America is the part of the Declaration of Independence that says the pursuit of happiness. Mmm. Love it. Because it's if you think you have an inalienable right to the pursuit of happiness, then anything that makes you unhappy is in your way and it becomes this like Asimov's third law thing. You know, like the third law says the robots have to protect humans at all costs. Yes. So then the robots eventually figure out that the only way to protect humans is to off humans because they're constantly killing themselves. Yeah. So like if you think you have an undeniable inalienable right to happiness, then everybody around you is basically a threat to that. And it just becomes this like destructive, like zero sum game. Oh. Like if I'm happy, you're unhappy. Yeah. It's just really, it's just really interesting.

SPEAKER_64: Luckily the rest of the Declaration of Independence and everything.

SPEAKER_138: It's a very interesting philosophy bomb, but yes, the rest of it is good. Well, the rest of it is also to protect you from infringing on everybody.

SPEAKER_38: So if my view of happiness is you don't get to have a gun or you don't get to practice your religion. Sorry. Or you don't get to have abortions. Sorry. Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_64: Which a, yeah. Oh God. Exactly.

SPEAKER_175: Because it was a tale of two cities, uh, in the Uber and Lyft race. Uh, luckily I bet on the right horse. I was going to say, damn. Like what a 24 hour period it's been. Um, my Lord, I, it's like a rollercoaster.

SPEAKER_81: I don't, I have never seen two companies diverge like this. Not since Google and Yahoo. Good one. Yeah. It was a pretty good divergence.

SPEAKER_59: I'm trying to think of another divergence. I guess Mac and apple back. I was going to say way back. Apple and Microsoft. When Apple went out, it was about to go out of business and go bankrupt and Microsoft was printing money.

SPEAKER_42: So let's break down what happened here. Lyft and Uber reported their quarterly earnings. So we're going to do them Tuesday and Wednesday at the market close, I guess for both. And then Uber moved up their earnings.

SPEAKER_45: I've never seen that happen from tonight, Wednesday to early this morning, crack of dawn before the sun came up.

SPEAKER_182: Explain what happened with Lyft first, because Lyft everybody knows is a fraction of the size of Uber and doesn't have the eats business and isn't as global. So let's break down that.

SPEAKER_149: And as a result earnings were, let me put it gently. Lyft reported Q1 results.

Jason Calacanis: Let's start with the like, okay news. Yeah. This is great news. Actually. This is great news. Actually.

SPEAKER_07: Top line 44% year over year growth. Lyft reported revenue of $875 million in the quarter. Almost a billion dollars made that quarter. Fantastic. That was up 44%, as I said, year over year. However, it was paired with a net loss of $196.9 million. They're shrinking 53% year over year. And the active riders, this is almost like shades of Netflix here. Active riders were 17.8 million missing expectations by about 200,000 riders. Got it. Not a massive miss, but still. Sales and marketing was Lyft's fastest growing cost. That was up 61% year over year, suggesting that two things. One Lyft is very desperate to advertise to people and get new customers. And also a key part of that is driver retention costs. Yeah. Keeping the drivers on the platform.

SPEAKER_59: I guess they mix that into the marketing promotion classes. I guess so. Paying for the drivers and doing advertising and spiffs, spiffs being basically payoffs to get you to drive for them.

SPEAKER_03: So bonuses join and get 500 bucks. And, uh, and as a result, I guess their stock went down 30% or something to something huge. This is what happens in a network effect business folks. Um, you know, uh, and I guess we should tell the Uber side of the story, but when you have a network size business, what can very quickly happen is the network that wins gets into an accelerating spiral of growth and profitability. And then the one that's losing, and I'm not just saying this cause I happened to have picked the right team and I'm dunking or anything.

SPEAKER_45: I've, I've dunked enough over the last decade, but this is just a great business lesson.

SPEAKER_225: Yeah. Uber reported their Q1 results. Let's go through that.

SPEAKER_00: And then we'll talk about what's happening to the two businesses in terms of drivers. I suspect. Yeah.

SPEAKER_05: And let's talk about the moving earnings up.

SPEAKER_07: So what happened after this lift report was that their stock, I mean, their stock started tanking like crazy. It was such a disaster. This was a great tweet. Connor Sen wrote Uber's pulling out the old, we're not Lehman move up the earnings announcement playbook, which I feel like we should explain a little bit. Much like Netflix's miss caused the whole streaming industry. Right. To suffer massive stock losses. As soon as Lyft's stock started tanking, Uber probably was like, Oh crap. This is what I'm assuming. And I'm, I guess I'm, I think I'm right.

SPEAKER_27: That Uber was like, we have to hurry up and report our earnings so that people don't think that this entire industry is a dud. It's not the sector.

SPEAKER_341: It's not the sector.

SPEAKER_342: Yeah. It's just them. Wow. And we're doing fine.

SPEAKER_343: Uber is doing fine.

SPEAKER_03: And to, um, if you to back to network effects, which is what this really is about for founders who are listening, network effects become compounding and they become more and more vicious, you know, to the person who doesn't have the network effect and the gains just start accumulating. We saw this with Facebook and what they did to my space, you know, or Microsoft at the time with sales of Windows PCs versus Macs back in the day. Uh, or the iPhone versus Nokia and Motorola would be another one where. Right. Network effects. And then the network effects of Android also, um, sort of solidified that, but Uber, uh, reported Q on results of 6.85 billion.

SPEAKER_36: Uh, revenue up 136%. That's more than double seven times.

SPEAKER_59: Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03: Yeah. That's always been the case that they were a magnitude bigger. Yeah. Um, now they had a loss, uh, because of declines in grab Aurora and DD stakes. Remember grab went public.

SPEAKER_36: Uh, and I think, um, uh, Brad Gerson, our friend of the pods, um, you know, was a SPAC that Aurora is their self-driving spin out and DD, which was then moved to the Hong Kong stock exchange.

SPEAKER_06: When Xi Jinping decided no more, uh, embracing the West stock markets or the stock markets of the West, I should say.

SPEAKER_45: So that was 5.3 billion of their net loss. In other words, marking that stuff down has nothing to do with the core business.

SPEAKER_27: That's a really big order of magnitude of loss compared to lifts, but okay.

SPEAKER_36: Well, no, but you have to understand, it has nothing to do with the core business, which doubled, it has to do with their stakes in. So, you know, if zoom owned a piece of Peloton or actually the, the, um, the better analogy would be Amazon owning the Rivian piece.

SPEAKER_19: Like Amazon writing down the Rivian investment is like, does that have anything to do with Amazon?

SPEAKER_351: It has nothing to do with Amazon, right? Exactly. Yeah.

SPEAKER_45: Yeah. It's a lot. Because DD piece was worth. I think 10 billion and it got probably cut 30, 40, 50%. Yeah. I'm guessing that is, especially it's all DD.

SPEAKER_07: And then when it, in terms of their fundamentals, monthly active platform consumers were up 115 million. That's up 17% year over year, down 3% quarter over quarter. Those are total users between the eats business and the rides business. And then in terms of that, all important piece drivers, the key to the whole fricking thing. Yeah. Quote, our driver base is at a post pandemic high and more engaged on Uber than on other platforms. Right.

SPEAKER_03: So what's really happening here, um, to explain it again is if Lyft is losing drivers to Uber Eats, uh, Uber, DoorDash and other, and Amazon, I think has freelance drivers too.

SPEAKER_38: If they're losing people to, you know, that business, they've got to spend more to get drivers on the platform, which means they're less profitable and they're running out of money. Mm-hm. And if they don't have as many drivers, then the wait times are going up. If the wait times are going up, people are picking Uber. Yep.

SPEAKER_42: If they're picking Uber, the drivers who are not locked into any platform, remember, they usually have two phones rocking at the same time and they're switching, or they have one phone and they're switching between apps.

SPEAKER_36: So because they're independent contractors, uh, you know, back to that whole, like, do people get to choose how they work?

SPEAKER_38: They can choose. Yeah. They get to choose. They have the freedom to choose. They can, they'll look at the rides coming in and say, well, I have to wait 20 minutes for a ride, you know, pick a, pick a geo. If I gotta wait 20 minutes for a ride for Lyft, that's 20 minutes of not getting paid. If I have to write 10 minutes for Uber, I'm just gonna, the liquidity of the marketplace. Liquidity means like how fast it moves. Yeah. A buyer and a seller, a seller of a ride, a buyer of a ride. If that liquidity is, you know, vibrant, uh, a more briber on Uber than Lyft. Mm-hm. All the users and drivers, supply and demand move.

SPEAKER_182: Oh, that's like the debt spiral they're in at Lyft. I think they have to get sold now. I think Postmates has to buy them. Oh God. Somebody has to buy them.

SPEAKER_90: You're probably right.

SPEAKER_07: Well, because here's what I think is actually the, the super genius move, the super genius part of this, that, that Uber most likely did not even see coming when they invested in eats, which was smart because food delivery makes sense. Yeah. Is that the, if I'm a driver, I would much rather in general, but specifically during a deadly pandemic drive food around than people. Mm-hm. And so I bet, and I don't, I'm sure they don't break it out, but I bet that part of the reason that driving is up on Uber overall. Yeah. Is that even if people aren't taking cars. Mm-hm. And they're probably taking them more, they're clearly taking them more now because pandemic is receding and whatnot. But if you can be driving food around, you're not worried about your safety as much as when you're driving people around. So there's just something very appealing. Yeah. I bet as a driver about a platform that just lets you drive, you know, Chinese food around.

SPEAKER_36: Well, not only did you nail it, um, I, uh, saw Dara at the, um, at the worst game the other night, we talked and I asked him how the business is going. It's great. You know? And I said, how's your return? Yeah, it's doing great. And, you know, we got drivers on both platforms doing both, you know? Mm-hm.

SPEAKER_38: So that's obviously a big focus of what they're doing. So said another way, you might come onto the platform Molly and only want to deliver food. You don't want somebody in your car. Yeah. Then, well, if you're in the app and it offers you an airport job and it pays 70 bucks and there's no Uber Eats jobs right now. Hey, you might take one or two. Yeah. You might try it.

SPEAKER_42: I think that's what's happening. I think the Uber Eats people are becoming livery drivers as well, ride sharing drivers as well. So you get two swings at the bat.

SPEAKER_01: Cause that unease might be receding. They're like, okay, I feel better about this now. I can make a lot of money.

SPEAKER_07: Right. Once you're in, it's like a gateway drug. Once you're in for food, you're probably in for people.

SPEAKER_38: And it's the pandemic's over. We're now in an endemic. So I think we just have to start using the word endemic.

SPEAKER_42: Endemic. So like, let's just take the wind. The pandemic's over. It's an endemic now, at least here in America. I mean, China with the zero COVID policy might be radically different, but it's an endemic here. People are not wearing masks. Uber drivers don't have to wear masks. People aren't wearing masks on flights and, you know, putting aside people who are immunocompromised.

SPEAKER_45: The country is acting as if this is an endemic now. Yeah. And then that's the guidance everybody's been given. So let's just start using the word endemic. Right.

SPEAKER_07: And people probably do feel safer overall, but also it's just a competitive advantage to, for Uber to have had this option the whole time. And Lyft never built that out, right? Yeah. They were all in on rides. Yeah. And so your suggestion that a Postmates, who owns, boy, doesn't Uber own Postmates? Who could buy Lyft? DoorDash?

SPEAKER_59: I guess DoorDash could buy Lyft possibly. I don't know that they would need to, it'd be worth it for them.

SPEAKER_81: So that's the problem is like anybody who's an up and coming there, the, you, you might be buying into a business that is receding and then it drags your strong business down.

SPEAKER_42: So that's the, that's the challenge.

SPEAKER_45: If you were to buy it, you would have to be investing in. So it'd have to be someone like Amazon who had a thesis on how to like really invest in the business because the business is trending down. You might need to go in there and do layoffs, shut down cities, and then be prepared to invest a couple of billion dollars a year in losses to catch up to Uber. Right. So it would be like, oh yeah. Yahoo's got value as a business. Do we try to catch up to Google? It's like, it's not gonna happen. Right. And then people did try to invest in the Nokia's and the. You know, Motorola's and the, you know, other smart app phone makers. And it just didn't work. Blackberry comes to mind, right? Like remember Blackberry was like gonna try to do a revival and. Oh, over and over. They tried like four or five times.

SPEAKER_08: It didn't work. Right. I went to so many sad Blackberry events. Like now we have this square phone. Like, oh God, you guys are killing me. Yeah.

SPEAKER_375: I mean, I wish I had, I wish I had a keyboard phone, man. I loved it. I loved my trio. I have my trio 350.

SPEAKER_354: Love it. So good. So let's talk about Airbnb where. Oh, what a great person.

SPEAKER_07: Earnings are interesting, but there's so much more interesting afoot. We have prediction time. Yeah. So, okay. So first of all, Airbnb crushed it. Yeah. Uber Q1 yesterday on Tuesday beat expectations on revenue gross booking value and nights booked. Boom, boom, boom. Uh, revenue was one and a half billion dollars up 70% year over year, 80% over 2019, which is not a shock. The 2019 part.

SPEAKER_230: So they have 1.5 and Uber had 6.8. Yeah. Just to give it the scale for the business. Yeah.

SPEAKER_326: Okay. Wait, Uber had, wasn't 6.8 the loss. No, no, no. Yeah.

SPEAKER_380: 6.8 billion.

SPEAKER_07: Yeah. Top line revenue. Yeah. Airbnb. Wow. That's a, that's an interesting. Just pointing it out.

SPEAKER_114: Comparison. Yeah.

SPEAKER_382: I don't own Airbnb. I do own an Uber.

Jason Calacanis: To be fair. Like, hmm.

SPEAKER_07: Well, and actually they both had pretty rough years, but again, Uber had freaking food delivery. That like, that little decision, which was not little was it saved the whole ship.

SPEAKER_344: Talk about a path dependency question. If they didn't have that.

SPEAKER_384: Antifragile is the term you're looking for. That is the term I'm looking for. You're so smart. Antifragile.

SPEAKER_38: No, I mean, it's antifragile. It's totally true. In chaotic times, does your business do better? And it turned out if it rains and people don't want to go out, they Uber eat. Yeah.

SPEAKER_19: And if it's beautiful out and they want to have a couple of drinks and sit outside and enjoy some ramen and have some sake or some beers. They Uber eat. They take an Uber.

SPEAKER_70: Or they take an Uber. Right.

SPEAKER_19: Totally. They're tired and they got a family and everybody's whining and they don't want to get in the car. They take do a read. So it's like, you can't lose. You can't lose.

SPEAKER_07: Yep. Yeah. Well, anyway, Airbnb also could not lose. Nights and experiences booked were 102.1 million up 59% year over year up 26% over 2019 gross booking value was $17.2 billion. That's up 67% net loss was $19 million, basically break even. And then, and Brian Chesky had a really interesting thread.

SPEAKER_38: Before you go to that thread, I think just the quality of the revenue here and not having

SPEAKER_03: any competitors is now just to, to thread this to two stories together, network effects. Yeah. The network effect of Airbnb does have a competitor.

SPEAKER_36: Um, it's called VRBL, I guess.

SPEAKER_38: And then there's home away, I guess. And yeah.

SPEAKER_36: And then there's, um, hotels in the world and then there's hotels are starting. I saw with Bonvoy, which is the married and the, I have a lot of points on Bonvoy. They have like a million points. Bonvoy is now doing like their own getaways.

SPEAKER_45: So they are including inventory. When you search down, if you notice that, like you can rent a home. So you search for a hotel in Palm Springs and I guess Bonvoy, that group of hotels now also

SPEAKER_38: has some inventory of their own. That is Airbnb like. Interesting.

SPEAKER_03: But they don't have a, there's no Lyft to Uber. There's no door dash to Uber Eats. Yeah. Analogy here. 100%.

SPEAKER_38: And which means I think that they can be more profitable now as opposed to Uber, which

SPEAKER_230: will, or door dash, which that, that war has to settle down.

SPEAKER_63: And the other thing that is, you know, again, with the pandemic effect, the other thing that's so interesting about Airbnb and a lot of this thread was about rebooting the business.

SPEAKER_01: I mean, they took such swift, decisive action with the layoffs. And full disclosure, Mike's husband was laid off from Airbnb, like right after the pandemic started. Couldn't have worked out better. They were incredible.

SPEAKER_63: They gave them six months or something like that. I don't know. Something like that. I mean, they gave him, they gave them unbelievable severance.

SPEAKER_07: Brian Chesky was out there like, Hey, does anyone want to hire these people? Yep. And then because the, the name recognition of Airbnb, it was so good. And these people were laid off through no fault of their own. Everybody. I mean, he was, he had a new job. Like as soon as he wanted one, basically it was not, it was, they really, really took care of the people that they laid off.

SPEAKER_01: They also acted incredibly quickly, like, okay, get to it. I mean, it was just like a phenomenal leadership exercise.

SPEAKER_164: Looking at the layoffs, um, I found a website that just tracks layoffs, layoffs.fyi. I don't know. I've never heard of this, but I just did a search for it.

SPEAKER_372: And I was looking at this at the beginning of the pandemic.

SPEAKER_45: According to this website, you know, they laid off 1900 employees, 25%, uh, which back in May 7th, 2020, just, uh, two years ago, almost exactly, uh, to the day, they laid off 1900 employees, 25%. That's a major one in four people. It was huge. Yeah. The minimum was 14 weeks of base pay and 12 months of health insurance. Um, and, uh, uh, they let them keep their apple laptops.

SPEAKER_07: Uh, yeah. And remember this. And again, this was like seeing the writing on the wall. That was, if you remember like March 11th is essentially when everything shut down in the U S. And by May, Airbnb was like all hands on deck, pulled the fire alarm, laid off 25% of the staff, completely rebooted the business. And then ended up, you know, in something I think no one saw coming, enabling the future of remote work. No bigs.

SPEAKER_36: Yeah. And so this is brilliant. I don't know if we talked about it on a previous show, but my take on it was, you know, if you're going to talk the talk, you got to walk the walk. Yeah. They're telling people to do staycations, uh, and to, to be, you know, nomads and to live their best life and enjoy and leverage remote work. Well, how do you do that? You put your house on Airbnb. Cause there's no way to swap houses. You were talking about it before in our private chat, kind of hard to swap houses. So what do you do? You put your house on the market. You rent it, you get the money. And then you go find a house that you want to rent in Palm Springs for two months.

SPEAKER_42: And you let somebody rent yours for two months and you hope it works out.

SPEAKER_63: And so you're stealing my prediction. House swap is actually my prediction because. Well, he teased that there was going to be some massive change.

SPEAKER_07: His last tweet said on May 11th, we'll introduce the biggest change to Airbnb in a decade. The only hint that he gave in the list. So then he was like, check our letter to investors for like a hint. And the hint said that there would be a completely new way to search, which caused us to wonder, well, okay, are you going to be able to search for office space? Are you going to be able to lease?

SPEAKER_110: Maybe they become like a landlord. And then I was like, do they have house swap? Because that would be amazing. I would swap.

SPEAKER_42: There used to be house swaps on Craigslist was a category. So Airbnb was kind of born out of the couch surfing movement on Craigslist where people would and house swap on Craigslist.

SPEAKER_36: And I've seen it with groups of friends of mine where they're like, Hey, I'm going to be gone for the month of August. Does anybody want my house for August? And people kind of do that.

SPEAKER_45: And then, uh, I rented a, um, uh, I rented this like really beautiful house in Spain, uh, on the top of the hill. And the guy, I was talking to the guy and he's like, you know, I want to come to America. Would you give me your house for a month and I'll take your house for a month. I'll take your house for a month. And I was like, that's actually not bad.

SPEAKER_59: Uh, not a bad idea. Yeah. I guess there's home exchange, which is a community. Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_416: There's sort of, has anybody used home exchange.com? Let us know.

SPEAKER_326: I'm curious if that works. Also shout out to Peter not a bomb in the chat who said, we B and B, which really made me laugh a lot. We B and B. Yes. We B and B. Yes. We B B and B.

SPEAKER_422: We B B B and B.

SPEAKER_423: We B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B. Yes.

SPEAKER_426: Yes. Oh my God. Biggest change in a decade. Adam Newman should buy home exchange and make it. Oh, no.

Chamath Palihapitiya: We exchange. We home, we, we, we, we, and B. We, we, we. Oh, that's not right.

SPEAKER_431: i wish i hadn't said that out loud rachel you tricked me that's the crossover and uh breaking

SPEAKER_36: news while we're here uh chairman powell uh has uh as predicted uh raised the feds uh rate by 50

SPEAKER_22: basis points have a percentage point is what basis points mean one basis point i'm sorry uh 100 basis points equals one percent so when they say 50 basis points what they're saying is half of a percent uh so one two hundredth in this case uh of a dollar yeah the biggest hike in two

SPEAKER_138: decades yeah so they're really um and this was expected it was and so i don't know what the

SPEAKER_36: market reaction here is uh but uh let me head over to that that means nasdaq is probably going to be down a little bit or it kind of expected it so maybe i can't believe they wouldn't have prices

SPEAKER_64: in everybody knew it was going to happen the only you would think it would be priced in yeah

SPEAKER_36: might actually be trading ahead uh you know it might trade ahead because um people like okay that's confirmed and we got that out of the way so qqq um which is a an index of uh an index fund for

SPEAKER_06: the basically tech stocks is up 0.64 basis points so you can look at qqq as an indicator or the overall

SPEAKER_27: nasdaq so uh that features are up that features are up smp features are up nasdaq features are up

SPEAKER_326: yeah yeah i mean basically this is coming and they're just relieved it wasn't 75 like they just

Jason Calacanis: were like okay okay you did what you said you were gonna do we're cool well i mean there is an

SPEAKER_38: argument like bouncing along the bottom of the stock market you know it stocks off in some case

SPEAKER_36: tech stocks off 40 50 60 70 percent there will be a buying opportunity at some point uh and so at some point you know it's these stocks will look really good you know looking at a stock like uber if i had a if i didn't already have such a big position i'm not giving financial advice here

SPEAKER_45: when you see a company growing like this and starting to hit basically break even profitability airbnb falling into that bucket again this is kind of like i think their amazon moment where people will start to perceive these companies differently people are like amazon can never make money amazon's printing money you know uh facebook will never figure out mobile advertising or mobile and the stock was like down at 15 remember that it like was trading below the ipr price and all of a sudden boom and ricocheted back and they're like oh they figured it out it's like oh really smart people with a business with majority of the market share figured out how to make the rides a little bit more expensive or figured out how to make them you know like they really didn't think zuck would figure out how to make a mobile app i mean come on of course he's going to figure it out at some point it's

SPEAKER_365: true it took a year i mean yeah it was close but well i mean he basically outsourced it and they were making react they weren't making native apps so i mean a react app is fine if you're like j crew or

SPEAKER_449: something but if you're if your whole business and the whole experience is in the app you probably need to get that right with the native app so i thought it was everything today i believe that we

SPEAKER_07: did and we are well over an hour thanks for hanging with us in our politics talk noties and it's not going to be every day it's not going to be every day but it's super super important and i yes for one i'm grateful that we can have an honest conversation about it yeah and listen if and reasonable people

SPEAKER_229: will disagree and the part of the idea is to have a great conversation and learn from each other and be

SPEAKER_169: more informed that's right and so and unreasonable people will have their own states to live in

SPEAKER_81: and unreasonable people will be screaming and blocking each other on twitter and then here we are just trying to have a reason here we are just trying to just trying to understand the world

SPEAKER_327: understand the world a little bit more jinx buy me a coke like buy me buy me one of the new cokes that

SPEAKER_81: elon's working on i want to have one of those new coca-cola so we can really take on the show with

Jason Calacanis: there's enthusiasm not that all of my references are about saturday night live but there's a very funny kelly ripa one where she's like a little bit of crack cocaine like talks about what's in her

SPEAKER_121: shampoo oh really that's pretty good actually yeah it's just a little bit of like keep it going

SPEAKER_03: ah just you know i i i i believe the world is trending towards justice and positivity but

SPEAKER_22: there'll be bumps in the road and setbacks so this too shall pass progress and i just like to say you

SPEAKER_63: dumb mofos hell had it all no fury you had it all you could have been no fury like you could have kept winning and winning and winning and all you had to do was be the party of small business and low taxes winning you could have won for i mean who's who's against that yeah help business and keep taxes low

SPEAKER_19: balance the budget but no no you had to go in a time machine and literally tell a bunch of women

David Friedberg: who are now in positions of power and you can't push them around like you used to be able to in the 50s

Jason Calacanis: and men like we keep saying women but like oh yeah i'm pissed off i have three daughters today howard stern was like if men got pregnant there would be an abortion clinic on every corner give you like

SPEAKER_235: starbucks be like freaking starbucks absolutely don't even venti yeah come on in we'll give you

SPEAKER_36: we'll make you a mocha and by all means come into uh you know we'll have a consultation in the back room here and figure out what you need and we'll get you whatever you need yeah it would be it would be seamless and this is such utter uh and it has to stop and uh that's my personal position turning point i believe is a turning point yeah it is a sad sad turn of events but uh women are not going to take this standing down and neither are the men who support them uh myself included so i don't know what the action item is going to be for us molly uh you know and uh this pod is you know uh not here to like take positions but me personally like tell me what i'm supposed to do here to help like yeah voting donations whatever needs to happen here i'm all in so you know somebody tell me where to

SPEAKER_45: write a check like am i am i writing a check to planned parenthood is there you gotta go more local

SPEAKER_114: i got a list for you i mean we gotta do something here like there are local organizers who are

SPEAKER_169: organizing to politically fight this or just to help women organizing to help women also to

SPEAKER_07: politically fight this there are a couple like really interesting again not to derail us but there are a couple really interesting laws that have been proposed in some of these states that are like oh okay well if you're going to outlaw abortion then there has to be a corresponding statute that provides for the care of this child for the child's entire life so pay for the child

SPEAKER_469: yeah for the job take care of the kid okay you tell me if you really care yeah yeah exactly all

Chamath Palihapitiya: right everybody a great show we'll see you tomorrow bye bye bye bye