Jason Calacanis: Hey everybody, it is Thursday. Welcome to this week in startups. We have an awesome show for you

SPEAKER_02: today. Sincerely. So good. It'd be great. It's Thursday. You know what, we're coming down the mountain. We're sliding into the weekend and we got my CBC tech check is here full contact. Deirdre

SPEAKER_05: Bosa is here. And we talk about a wide variety of topics. This is Debo in long form. You don't get her in long form and she crushed it. Dude, it is absolutely fantastic. We talked about her

SPEAKER_07: interview with Sundar Pichai, which she did like in the hour before she came on our show, the crash in the public markets, crypto, free speech and moderating social media. It is a really wide ranging conversation and she can hang. It was great. She's a good hang. And you know what I

SPEAKER_08: really enjoyed when we talked about the tech press and coverage and media and how she prepares for interviews, how you prepare for interviews and how we all look at that and the standoff between the tech press and you know, the people who are building technology in the world. It is a great, I wouldn't even call it an interview. It's like a round table. It's just, you know, tossing the ball

SPEAKER_10: around, chewing the fat. We got to have her on more CNBC. Look out. Look out. She's good on podcast.

SPEAKER_13: We're coming for Debo. We're coming for Debo. It's going to be a great, going to be a great show.

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David Friedberg: for 10% off your order. All right, everybody. So everybody knows Deirdre is the host or co-host of Tech Check, which used to be called Squawk Alley. At some point, they did a refresh. And it seems like you

SPEAKER_08: became the co-host it girl on the show. That was like your coming out coronation, I take it? Or because before that, were you a contributor? How did that all go for you? I was a reporter. So I kind

SPEAKER_26: of I focused on certain parts of tech, tech broadly, and then really dived in on certain companies now as you know, co-host of Tech Check, kind of do it all. Got it. And John Ford, of course,

SPEAKER_29: and hosting and producing probably. And yeah, if I, uh, if I know our time mostly, I think it's

SPEAKER_34: something to discuss here because people were like, Whoa, like you come on to CNBC and she's just like

SPEAKER_38: on you. And I, we had a little on-air thing. We'll throw the clip in here where I was like, Hey, Deirdre, if you're gonna ask me the question, you gotta let me answer. So we had a little like a little

SPEAKER_08: chippy moment. Uh, but it was all in good fun. You know, what's very unique about this company in

SPEAKER_39: this moment in time is we have a generation, really two millennials and Gen Z who are growing up with a level of financial literacy that is greater than any, hold on, let me finish Deirdre.

SPEAKER_41: Deirdre, let me finish. Uh, the issue here is this group of people is, I do think, uh, correct me if

SPEAKER_08: I'm wrong. When you became co-host, I think you did take the approach of I'm gonna be hard hitting. Was that an intentional thing? Did CNBC say, Hey, you know what? We want to be a little more hard

SPEAKER_43: hitting on the show. Maybe people perceive the show as being, you know, a little too, I don't know, cordial, or is that just something you wanted to do?

SPEAKER_45: Well, I want, so everything I do comes back to the audience, right? What do they want to hear?

SPEAKER_47: And I think that they want to hear answers to the questions that are asked. I try to ask questions with them in mind. What do they want to know? What do they need to know here? So, you know, as you, as you guys both know, Molly and Jason, CEO speak and CEO speak. Sometimes they come on with talking points, but you know, I really feel like people can go to the earnings call or they can go to the annual meeting to hear CEO speak or guests. When they come on tech check, I want them to answer a question. And so Jason all in good fun. And I do too, because I know that you can take it as well. And I love hearing your point of view also. So I want to get to it, but that is really how I approach interviews is I'm not there to please the guest or the CEO or the analyst, whoever it is. I'm there to get the answer for the audience. And sometimes that can come off as,

SPEAKER_50: what did you call me? Full contact. Yes. Well, I mean, that is the origin of you coming on the show, because I was like, term of respect from Jason. Debo is a little full contact.

SPEAKER_55: And little did you know, I played hockey for 20 years. So I don't shy away from that.

SPEAKER_56: She's like, get on center. We're like having this DM, she's like, get on center ice. I played hockey. I was like, I'm not going to center ice with you. Let's go.

SPEAKER_59: Okay. So Molly, what about you? Any, any skating skills or hockey skills or sports?

SPEAKER_61: Oh God, no, no. Volleyball though. The spike. Oh yeah. It's not a, it's not an ongoing contact situation for me. It's more a murderous spike right at the end.

SPEAKER_63: Since I have two lady journalists here in tech, um, I'm curious for both of you,

SPEAKER_67: um, do you get professionals? Oh, two extremely accomplished. I see where you're going.

SPEAKER_71: No, I, um, do you feel, uh, people maybe, uh, either guests or the audience hold you to different standards? And is that in your mind when you're like, Hey, listen, I, you know, I need to bring it at a different level. Maybe I don't get the same credit, uh, as you know, Carl does, or J

Jason Calacanis: Cal does or whatever for both of you, Molly. I like how you ask it as, do we feel as opposed to, is that the actual reality, which is sure. Both. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's, it is,

SPEAKER_61: it is the reality show. I don't know if you notice people come on the show and they say, Hey, Jason.

SPEAKER_56: Yeah. And I'm like more accomplished person over here, over here, right here, bro. Podcasting hall

SPEAKER_86: of fame is why I'm a huge fan of Molly too, because she gets straight at us. She doesn't mince words. Um, but absolutely. You should see my Twitter feed, Jason. People are constantly telling me

SPEAKER_26: that I'm interrupting or nagging or something, which you never really see the same for a man, right? It sounds shrill when you're asking a hard question or you're labeled aggressive instead of

SPEAKER_47: assertive. Um, so there certainly is that double standard, but I think that you just, you have to, what I think I always have to be fair and then I'm okay with it. As long as I think I'm being fair

SPEAKER_90: and giving, you know, good questions, not gotcha questions. And I I'm willing to take it.

SPEAKER_07: Yeah. So speaking of which, uh, and CEO speak and trying to puncture CEO speak, we were watching

SPEAKER_94: you this morning on tech check, do your damnedest with one of the toughest CEOs there is to have a fun conversation with Sundar Pichai say that with all respect, right? Like mad business skills,

SPEAKER_98: clearly. Yeah. Um, but let's be honest. He's CEO ambient. I can say that, but I mean, he really is a

SPEAKER_26: hard one to get something out of. How do you approach that? I totally agree. He is so calm and collected compared to, especially some of the other big tech CEOs, but think about the moment that we are in right now. The markets are going crazy. Apple was down 5% yesterday. It's down again today. Some of the stocks are off 80%. They're high. So do we need a Sundar Pichai? Yes. This was the perfect, perfect, perfect moment for him to come on. I thought that he portrayed clarity and consistency, and that is exactly what the market needs right now. You know, I felt I was there to cover IO and there

SPEAKER_47: were some really interesting announcements in terms of future devices, in terms of artificial intelligence,

SPEAKER_26: language processing, the really technical stuff that he really cares about. But I think, you know, my job in that situation was to bring his sense of calm to the broader markets. As we sat down, the Nasdaq just finished down another 3%. So, you know, I had to ask him, what are you doing in this moment? Why or why isn't Alphabet protected? And I think my main takeaway is that there are some companies in this moment who are really going to rise to the occasion. They're going to be able to continue to invest for the long term. And while Alphabet will face its fair share of challenges,

SPEAKER_82: they're one of them. Yes, super interesting answer. I thought he had to that sort of broader question of like, what are you going to do in a downturn? Everybody, you know, we've been talking

SPEAKER_95: on this show about the lemming effect of layoffs and the contagion of the panic. And Sundar just sat there and looked you in the eye and said, we're going to hire 12,000 people, we're going to invest insane amounts of money into our company, invest into the downturn. Unlike they're going to zag while everybody's eggs and loses their head. It seems like. Yeah. Jason, what did you think?

SPEAKER_08: I mean, I thought that was like probably the best part of the interview that came out of the interview because Facebook has a hiring freeze. Uber said, you know, I thought that was by the way,

SPEAKER_107: great scoop on Sunday night. We talked about it on Monday. The, you know, Dara is very sober.

SPEAKER_08: Listen, you know, we, people want to growth. Then they want profitability. Now they want free cash flow. No more like EBITDA mulligans or adjusted EBITDA. Let's just, just throw them, you know, a bunch of cash. Right. And so I thought that was particularly interesting and gave me a little hope for the economy that somebody who had been through it, you have to remember, Google's been around a while. Facebook hasn't, uh, so Google's been through the.com bust and, uh, the great recession. Facebook's been through the great recession. And so, you know, he's got the scar tissue as an executive and he's seen this movie before. If you have the cash reserves, the right thing to do would be to take talent off the market, uh, and to ignore the stock market, knowing you have a money printing machine. If there's any machine that is immune or, you know, to the, to the market swings and

SPEAKER_113: gyrations and recessions, it's the money printing machine of Google search. And Google has what 160

SPEAKER_114: billion in cash and cash equivalents, right? So, but at the same time, you know, one thing he said,

SPEAKER_117: I was trying to get him to talk about some of the rivals, like why can you hire 12,000 people when Meta has to do a hiring freeze when other companies are going to have to lay off. And he says we're

SPEAKER_26: a diversified business. That is true and they are shifting, but we do have to remember that Alphabet, the majority of its revenue is still advertising, right? And advertising can be sort of this canary in the coal mine. We saw that with YouTube, people kind of freaked out last quarter because growth was slower. So it's not that they're immune. It's that they're most immune and

SPEAKER_47: resilient, had a good, yeah, he's more resilient.

SPEAKER_61: Right. And that cloud business though, to your point, that cloud business

SPEAKER_07: still is playing a distant third, right? But behind Microsoft and, and, and Amazon and is not

SPEAKER_122: yet profitable. Is that right? That's right. They're losing about a billion dollars a quarter,

SPEAKER_47: but right. A billion dollars a quarter. It's like pocket change for them, especially when this is sort of a secular strategy, like the pie is going to increase. Google will get there. Um, there'll be a player. They already are a player versus questions around some of the other

SPEAKER_26: smaller guys. So, you know, and I asked with part, the CFO about that almost every time I talk to

SPEAKER_123: her, you're still losing money. What does that mean? Really doesn't mean anything to them because it's only a billion dollars. Yeah. Ah, spring is in the air people. And there has never

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SPEAKER_129: for free. Terms and conditions do apply because they're giving you something for free.

SPEAKER_113: Well, I mean, and this is the challenge, I think of what you do every day versus what we do every

Chamath Palihapitiya: day, right? Like, we're talking about private markets, we've got this luxury of a 10 year arc.

SPEAKER_08: And then when you're a public company, you have analysts, you have a daily or a five day a week check in on your stock for whatever number of hours. And it just changes how you have to communicate. One of the great features of the private market right now is I'm not pulling up a portfolio of 300 private companies. And crying. I mean, I pull up my portfolio of not well public companies. And I'm like, ah, but I'm not we invest when companies are worth five to $25 million. Generally speaking, that's our sweet spot. You know, you can't really lose when you're investing that early in a company because one, you know, company makes up for a lot. Now, if you are a Sundar, you got to communicate to the market. When everybody's panicking and scared, you have to have a lot of 40 to it. I think Bezos had that where he's like, Listen, you guys could say whatever you want. The stock price can go wherever it wants. This is what we're doing. We are building for scale, we want to grow and people didn't believe him for a long time. And I think Sundar has now got that moment where I think he should just ignore the markets and ignore the stock price, and maybe lose 10 billion a year, instead of 4 billion on the cloud computing. Because if you're

SPEAKER_71: bronze, what's silver worth? And we know what gold is worth. I mean, the Amazon web services business is tremendous. Yeah, you did. You did dive into the Elon situation and free speech. I thought this

SPEAKER_113: was one that you could have gone an hour with him. I guess they gave you 20 minutes for 30 minutes.

SPEAKER_137: What do they give you 15 ridiculous? See, this is I hate that. I would have Yeah, see, this is where

Chamath Palihapitiya: your producers and like CNBC has to say, Listen, if you're gonna you need to sit with us for 45 minutes.

SPEAKER_08: If you don't sit with us for 45 minutes, then we're going to tell your story through your competitors, like somebody, some producers got to be like, you know, a little more hardcore.

SPEAKER_26: Okay, well, let me play the other side of this. I, especially with Sundar Pichai, I would have loved an hour, five hours with him, for sure. I would have even just like 15 more minutes to talk about the really interesting stuff. They announced at IO, we had to get right to the point, you know, like I just met Sundar for the first time. And I was like, I know, you don't want to talk about your stock price. But this is what our audience cares about right now. So we got to get into it. I will also say, though, that I've done a 10 minute interview with the Canadian Prime Minister and got a lot across. So you do it, there's such so much preparation put into 10 or 15 minutes with that in mind, that it's never going to be enough time. And that I guess would be like one of the biggest challenges about doing TV versus writing, love to do longer form. But at CNBC, you know what you're getting, you're getting in, you're getting out, and you're not doing your job, like I'm not doing my

SPEAKER_145: job as the interview, if I can't do it in 15 minutes. So try, but I wouldn't.

SPEAKER_07: Yeah, they, what's frustrating is like, there's so much more you want to do. And then someone will come after you later and be like, I can't believe you didn't ask about this. And you're like, you feel free to do a 15 minute interview with a CEO who operates like 77 different businesses. And you want to ask about at least six of like, totally.

SPEAKER_153: But it barely gives you no, I think the audience really likes to hear this. And it's great for you

SPEAKER_141: to come on and talk about it. Because people are like, it's so frustrating that you can't ask the

SPEAKER_08: follow up question about, you know, specific instances of freedom of speech and censorship, you know, an issue there, which Molly's made some very good points about like, you know, is it is it really censorship? Or is this just like a private company? But I thought that what came out of that was very interesting is that Google has one worldview, when it comes to search the law, if it's illegal, let us know, but we are indexing the world's information. And that was made by Google. And that was made by Sergey and Larry's philosophy, right? That's the view want to take

SPEAKER_113: something down, you know, go to the law, we're going to disclose like what legal letters we get,

SPEAKER_08: we're going to have a transparency report. Now you go to something like YouTube, a community site, slightly different than a search engine, because they're not making the content there, they're, you know, and they're hosting it. So it's a little bit different. And they're monetizing it. So they're

SPEAKER_71: acting quasi like a publisher, right? They're promoting stuff, they're hosting stuff. And, you know,

SPEAKER_08: there's a lot of interesting cases, they're like, people do dangerous stunts, and they do hidden camera stuff. Is it illegal? In some cases, but in most cases, no, right? Should they be hosting that stuff? And then having young people, you know, as but one example, David Dobrik, you know, doing that crazy jump with his Model X, then some other kid decided to rent a Model S and do the same street jump and crashed his car could have killed like, you know, a poor family that was walking their

SPEAKER_71: dog or something. And I've, you know, talked to Susan about this. And like, you really, you really got to get this under control. So I'm like, Oh, am I for censorship? Yeah, because I'm like, you're really more like a broadcast like a network discovery, you know, or CNBC wouldn't show that stuff or they would really contextualize it. So I was curious what your thoughts were on that something that came out of your discussion that they do one thing on YouTube, and another distinctly

SPEAKER_26: different thing on Google search. It is a great point. And you could tell that he spends a lot of time thinking about this. So there was something at the very end, I'm not sure how many people picked up on this. But finally, I asked him about open sourcing a social media platform. Is that the answer? That is what Elon Musk, and even Jack Dorsey have talked about doing so that the responsibility is no longer on the CEO, you cannot call them a publisher, if it's open source, because you're letting the audience decide. And I asked him, does that help? Or does it amplify the problems? And he's he didn't give a lot. But if you read between the lines, which we always have to do, he said, it's interesting. And I'm glad that's being discussed. What CEO wouldn't love that to be discussed, right? Because it takes the responsibility off of their shoulders. And the idea of open sourcing, right, you just leave it up to the people who are looking at the content and coding, essentially the site, right? So I don't know, I don't know how far that is off. You probably, Jason and Molly have a better view. What do you think, Molly?

SPEAKER_61: Yeah, well, I think it's really interesting, because YouTube for so long has escaped all of this

SPEAKER_07: scrutiny, right? And YouTube has been employing an algorithm for engagement that has encouraged really dangerous stunts for years. They've had advertiser boycotts over, you know, advertisers who don't want to be put next to terrorist content. And, and somehow, YouTube has managed to sort of like,

SPEAKER_95: walk this line where they take some stuff down. They leave a lot of stuff up. Yeah. They demonetize.

SPEAKER_94: They demonetize. I mean, honestly, I think, you know, in a way, it feels to me like YouTube has figured it out the best because they're like, yeah, what we do is we take away your reach

SPEAKER_147: and your incentive to make money with this stuff. But that took a long time. And nobody's yelling

SPEAKER_117: at them about free speech. That's totally what Senator Pichai would say. He says sort of the

SPEAKER_26: advertiser, the business model works because as you said, Molly, advertisers don't want to be next to dangerous or controversial content. But I don't know, I also kind of think that YouTube, Google gets a free pass, how much of that has to do with what we talked about at the very

SPEAKER_86: beginning of this conversation. Senator Pichai is the most calm, collected CEO. You can say boring, or I'll say it. They go to Congress. Everyone wants to jump on Jack Dorsey, Bezos, even Tim Cook. And,

SPEAKER_26: you know, you feel kind of bad, you know, taking that same tone with Senator Pichai, because he's such an intellectual, such a technologist that I just, do you think that's fair? Do you think they're kind of under the radar? I do a little bit.

SPEAKER_94: Oh, I think they have done, yeah, to be clear, like, I've done many, many interviews with scholars

SPEAKER_07: who are like, here is exactly how people get radicalized via YouTube, right? You, I mean, my, I watch, I sit over my son's shoulder, like my son is 15 years old, is into like, music and cars. And it takes five to seven minutes flat before it's like, would you like to see this

SPEAKER_94: video about how much women suck? Like, wow, it's not that women suck. Peterson, you know,

SPEAKER_182: Jordan Peterson. There's a generation of men who don't know how to interact with women. And,

SPEAKER_185: you know, my heart breaks for them. That's my Jordan Peterson. Thank you.

SPEAKER_186: I've been hearing your questions. We're so good, Jason. I love you more often.

SPEAKER_188: So meta. Here's a problem a lot of startups face. They need cybersecurity, but they don't have the

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SPEAKER_127: upgrade, you can get the first two months free at Saivatar.ai slash twist. That's C-Y-V-A-T-A-R dot AI slash twist for two months free. So it is, you know, the algorithm I think is a big part of this.

SPEAKER_08: I do think that there is something that Larry and Sergey did very specifically. They fired themselves.

SPEAKER_107: This was a strategic, I know this, because I know them, they did something very strategic. They put

SPEAKER_08: themselves as chairman, you know, board members, they don't go to the office. And they're like, I can't get dragged to Washington or in front of you know, whoever in parliament and whatever European country EU because I don't work there. I am a shareholder. If you drag me up there, I'm going to say, I don't know, because I have not been to the office, my key card doesn't work. Like they literally can take that kind of position. And you know what, it's a true position. They don't know

SPEAKER_71: they've delegated a hundred percent, a hundred percent. They do not want to get dragged there.

SPEAKER_113: It's much easier to go for a walk with Sundar and say, this is what we want. And who does Sundar serve at the behest of the board? Who controls the board? Larry and Sergey.

SPEAKER_95: But then Sundar Sundar is like, I'm the CEO of Alphabet. I don't know. And Susan Wojcicki never gets called to Congress. I mean, it just is fascinating.

SPEAKER_08: She will. Yeah. I mean, she will. I mean, I think that was in a way why they made her CEO

SPEAKER_71: was so that you could bifurcate these two things. I know this sounds like a crazy conspiracy or chess board, but it is a chess board and you do have to think these things through. I think the

SPEAKER_210: thing that... It's strategy. It's corporate strategy. It's a really, really good corporate

SPEAKER_71: strategy. I mean, this is where Zuck, I always thought the right move for Zuck was to make himself executive chairperson and then put Cheryl in charge of Facebook and that collection, and then put some wonky person in charge of Meta. And then he could pull strings from, you know,

SPEAKER_213: his kite board in, you know, Kauai or wherever he is on Lake Tahoe, you know,

SPEAKER_217: because that guy needs to stop talking. He needs to stop. I mean, it's, it is, it is challenging. Other people are talking about CEO interviews. When is the

SPEAKER_219: last time Zuck sat down with a journalist? Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, he will, I mean,

SPEAKER_64: he's, he's got a very, he's, he's taken a much smarter route, uh, and perhaps sinister, but

SPEAKER_222: well, going on Lex Friedman and Tim Ferriss and Joe, I don't know if he did Joe Rogan,

SPEAKER_08: but he did Lex Friedman. And did he do Tim Ferriss as well? I think he did, you know, like those folks are so excited about the access, you know, I mean, this is one of the critiques of Karen Swisher, um, is access journalism. Uh, and I don't know that it's, uh, fair exactly, but if you run a conference that costs seven or $8,000 and you need to get Elon or back in the day, Steve jobs, maybe you don't want to totally piss them off and lose access to them, but you have

SPEAKER_71: power. And so there's this very delicate balance of, man, if I lose Steve jobs or Bill Gates, you know, and I'm, you know, what does Kara Swisher make and Walt when they were doing that effect, a million or $2 million each, probably. Uh, and so that's like a real business. And if you get big all-stars there,

SPEAKER_226: it prints money. Trust me, I'm in that business. I know.

SPEAKER_26: Those businesses won't last, right? Because you're not getting like true answers, true content. You're not doing it for the right reasons. Molly, I'm interested in your experience.

SPEAKER_229: No, no, they will last. They will. And they have, you don't need to, you don't need to get the answer. You just need to get the start.

SPEAKER_230: You just need the access. But Molly, I wonder like from your experience as a journalist, I do find that

SPEAKER_26: if you ask tough questions, but they're fair, um, CEOs and guests will come back. They'll kind of, they may not love the question, but they appreciate it, you know? And I think in the end, it makes them look good, but it makes them look more credible if they can sit there and be asked it. So it took me, I would say like a long time to figure that out. Jason, especially when you called me, you know, full contact Boza, right? Some people don't want to be like, I'm still working

SPEAKER_231: on it, man. But I will say like the best people do want that kind of interview because it helps

SPEAKER_07: their credibility in the long run. Yeah. I 100% agree. I think. And you, the audience feels that they can respect you both in a scenario like that. You can tell. And I don't like, I don't think it is good for a journalist in the longterm to sort of say like, yeah, it's cool. I'll have Mark

SPEAKER_94: Zuckerberg on and I will agree to only talk about the metaverse. Yeah. When it's in the middle of the whistleblower scandal. So that's not good for either of them. Like it says, Mark Zuckerberg is

SPEAKER_07: afraid to talk about the real stuff. And this journalist agreed to this like dirty little deal where they're like, I'll just talk about the stuff that they want to make money on in the future and ignore

SPEAKER_94: everything else. Everybody loses. And let me give you an example of that where I turned down an

SPEAKER_117: interview. Actually, I still, you know, wish I had got it, but we could, I couldn't compromise.

SPEAKER_26: Um, Jack Dorsey a few years ago, granted us an interview on square and the condition was no questions on Twitter, not a single one. I said, you know, I'm, I'm genuinely more interested in square than Twitter, but you know, I can't not ask a question. I can't do my job. And so we never did it. And that was the last time I was offered that interview.

SPEAKER_08: Yeah. So, I mean, people don't know this, but it is definitely, it comes into the calculus. And so I think, you know, if you're running events, uh, and it is, you know, it is a business, right? Like, so if you were a journalist, that's one thing, but if you're the business owner, and so it does change. So the business owner is going to think differently. And I think,

SPEAKER_71: you know, if you, again, to Kara Swisher, she's a business owner, like she is a freelancer for the New York times. She owns the event business. She gets a percentage of the, you know, profits of it. So that would be slightly different. Right. And then you do have a, a little bit of cancer. And then some people are just like, you know what, I'm going to opt out and just go direct. So I'm curious how the go direct movement or what you think of that. Uh, because I don't know if it's an, or, but I do know, uh, you know, with the reach we have, as one example, we have the all in summit this, uh, Monday, Tuesday, this Monday and Tuesday, while the press wanted to come. And a lot of the speakers were like, ah, you know, I don't know if I can be as honest and whatever. I was like, well, you know, we have more reach than any tech podcast or most any business or tech podcast. So we hit 26 in the rankings last week. This shows number five, six, seven in the rankings in tech. So we don't need press there. I was like, you know, let's just try releasing to the feed and the press can just get it all at the same time, but no press at the event. And so what is good to know? I'll be like,

SPEAKER_08: well, it was just also a fair thing because the thing is sold out and then, you know, a hundred press and 50 of them, super credible and 50 of them, maybe less, um, want to go. And it's just, there's not room. And it also makes the speakers less honest. So I, I just made,

SPEAKER_34: I didn't mean, it wasn't my call to me. It was kind of a vote. See, that is a problem that you

SPEAKER_248: just said that Jason, less honest. I, but they're not held accountable. Okay.

SPEAKER_250: We're going to ask hard questions. You know that I mean,

SPEAKER_26: but okay. I don't know what your business model is based on. You are climbing the, and let me first say that I love your podcasts, both of them. You're doing such a wonderful job of going direct. I like to hear these long form conversations where, you know, traditional media

SPEAKER_117: may not necessarily have the space or time for, because that business model is different.

SPEAKER_26: Um, but let me give you the example of a Coinbase. Okay. Brian Armstrong made this big thing. Um, when he was building the company, he doesn't want to talk to mainstream or traditional media because he doesn't think that he can, they're going to tell his story. So he went out and told that himself. Now Coinbase is in a world of pain, right? We've seen that stock price decline,

SPEAKER_117: decline. They're getting looped in with all the other crypto companies. Maybe they're the Google of

SPEAKER_26: crypto. I don't know. Maybe they're held to a better standard, but no one really knows that. Like our audience doesn't know because he never talks to us. Where's he getting that credibility? I think over the long run, you need to build a relationship with media, the media that you trust. No one wants a gotcha interview, but that's like what I spent all my time doing is getting to know our guests, our CEO so that they know they're going to get a fair shake. And that helps them in the long term, right? Like, like if Brian Armstrong could say, listen, I want to come on CNBC to just tell my story, tell why we're different than some of the other crypto companies, why Bitcoin's implosion or the stablecoin implosion isn't going to sink us, but he hasn't built that relationship. So does he have the same credibility? And it's very short sighted. And to you, Jason, I would say, you should be held accountable for the all in summit. Why not? Just why not? Why not?

SPEAKER_253: Well, it's going to be accountable because we're going to release all the files. I mean, people will be able to listen to them. So how do you know that the right questions are being asked?

SPEAKER_130: I mean, I mean, would it be number 26 in the rankings that we weren't asking the right questions? I guess would be the way I would say it definitely would be because everybody loves over

SPEAKER_256: a hundred billion dollars, but that doesn't mean it's worth that today. I'm saying if you want.

SPEAKER_107: No, I mean, Brian Armstrong is a good case because we had him on the podcast a couple of weeks ago and I asked him very tough questions about tether and yeah, you know, yeah. So we asked

SPEAKER_08: some pretty tough questions. I think there's something going on in media, you know, and listen, we're all tech journalists. And maybe Molly and I a little bit longer than you did. We were part of the very campy, cordial moment where in the early 2000s, and certainly in the 90s, when I started

SPEAKER_71: coming up and watching Esther Dyson and some of those folks, and I think Molly, you caught some of

SPEAKER_08: this too. It was almost like the press and the tech industry and the venture capitalists were all on

SPEAKER_71: the same team. It was very, very cordial. And it was all just very geeky. Then as tech become became more prominent, you know, there was like more fallout. And obviously, I think Facebook and Uber and that like really contentious time period where companies were behaving badly, or the impact was really huge. I think it's kind of made a lot of tech leaders say, Yeah, I'll go direct. I'll opt out, which is kind of sad for me because I was a former journalist. I don't know what you think Molly about the standoff, because I think that's what we're dancing around here is. Yeah, some folks are just like, I just don't want to deal with the press anymore. I don't feel like they're treating me fairly link baiting headlines, whatever. And then they're like, and I can go direct. So I'll just go

SPEAKER_07: direct. What do you think about this? I agree. I think we are in a standoff and it's a standoff that occurred because there was increased scrutiny, right? There was an increase in questions about

SPEAKER_95: accountability and business model and the dot com crash wiped out a lot of portfolios. And all of a sudden, people were like, Wait, this is an industry that can do real damage. We should start asking more questions. Privacy was becoming a bigger, bigger deal. Yeah. So when you have a response on the tech side, on the business side to say, Okay, our our strategy, then is like, we don't like this. So we're gonna say less. And I think Uber, you know, respectfully, like kicked off that

SPEAKER_07: vibe among these big tech companies, what happens is, then the narrative about the tech store to companies gets more and more and more distorted, because none of them are out there telling journalists the truth. And then as we're just talking to them, just talking, exactly. They're not talking to

SPEAKER_10: them. They have the last time you saw Travis interview. And so we're left to even know about what do people even know about cloud kitchens?

SPEAKER_61: It's just a ghost kitchen. He's a ghost. Yeah, basically, he opted out completely.

SPEAKER_95: And as a result, though, the only way for journalists to construct a narrative

SPEAKER_94: about businesses that have a massive impact on the world, that is why we are doing this work. I just reverted to the we because is is from like, what they say on Twitter, right,

SPEAKER_07: or whatever clues we can get. And so it's like, look, in the absence of any other information, I just have to go on what I see. And then this tech CEO is like, that's totally inaccurate and unfair. And it's like, tell me. Yeah, right. And so with the tech,

David Friedberg: I mean, I'm interested in your your position on this as like, you got to experience like, I think,

SPEAKER_107: and I'm not sure when you started as a reporter, but I would perceive it like, you know, in the 2010

SPEAKER_270: time period, am I right? I was in Asia. Well, that's a whole nother story. But I started as a journalist in China where access is very different. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's better to be in

SPEAKER_79: America at this point. Wow. You've been followed by way worse people than Emil.

SPEAKER_26: Oh, yeah. I have been through it. And I mean, actually, when I came to San Francisco, that was the point where I was like, Whoa, why isn't anybody talking to me? I came here 2016 as Uber was imploding. Nobody would talk to me, right? They said you could be tech reporter. So I came here and I'm like, I'm ready. I'm ready to be the tech reporter, except that nobody will talk to me. Which was good, because you build your reputation. And it took me so many years, right? You asked me, you're kind of like, What were you doing before you were anchor of TechCheck? I was building those relationships and building that reputation that when you come on and talk to me, I'm not looking for a headline. I'm looking to tell your story in a nuanced way over the long term, because you are either a public company or you're going to be a public company. So you need someone who understands this to Molly's point, who will understand your narrative so that investors are huge audience will believe you if you go direct, people know that they're being fed something even if they don't know

SPEAKER_275: what it is, right? They know that there's some other incentive at work, I think. If you like

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SPEAKER_157: code twist for 10% off your next order. I'm hoping the balance can come back. I think

SPEAKER_08: it is coming back. I will say no, I think it is you feel it is. Yeah. Yeah, I feel like we're, we're working through the issue because there was a moment in time where I would, the only calls I got were like bad news calls. And like, especially from the New York Times, it was just like, you know, or even CNBC, you know, and I understand it. Um, because I'm associated with, with like saying Uber, they were like, come on and talk about Uber. Come on. I'm like, listen, you have me on to talk about something else. You know, I don't want to be the proxy for Uber. And, you know, in fairness to the producers, they were like, Okay, let's, let's take these next two hits off from Uber. And let's talk about some other topics, you know, like, because, and then it's when you're, when you're the subject, and the only thing you hear is bad news, bad news, bad news,

SPEAKER_56: problem, problem, problem, you're like, Okay, well, this isn't worth my time. I think that's what a lot of them are like is, I would rather tell my story. And that's the problem, the question

SPEAKER_26: was the problem, Uber, because I know you and I based on this, and I just don't know that there's been really good news on Uber for like, as long as I've been here. Right? Well, actually, I think

SPEAKER_284: it's pretty great news now. I mean, the focus level has been great and doubling revenue. And like, it's trading for one point x times. It's, it's, it's, it's revenue. So I think another time for that conversation, we could do a whole hour on it. But you know, I think at the end of the day,

SPEAKER_107: profit is a real metric, and it's going to be a money printing, it will be a money printing machine,

SPEAKER_08: just like Uber, or just like Google, or Facebook, you know, and Amazon, they're just going to turn

SPEAKER_26: the dial. And that's what people want is it's transparency, they know that they haven't done a good job and telling the story to the market. So they're being transparent. I think that Dara is very good. I love a CEO who will come on TV when his stock is down like 20% shows a lot of great

SPEAKER_47: communicator. Yeah, the story, though, I still have not bought in. I don't know. The goal

SPEAKER_130: post changed. Yeah, well, I mean, time will tell. I think these super apps have proven themselves in,

SPEAKER_157: in, you know, come on. Yeah. Well, you know, it's interesting. I was using Uber to get to my hotel in

SPEAKER_71: Miami here. And then it was like, I need to get some, you know, bottles of water for my hotel room and some food. And then I, you know, hitting Uber Eats while I'm on the way to my hotel. And so this idea that groceries, food, travel, and then experiences hotels, you know, and if you look at

SPEAKER_213: his background, where did he come from? He knows how to book hotels, he knows how to book flights, he knows and then they got the taxi. So I know,

SPEAKER_26: but all you're talking about is a business model to book, you're not talking about a business model that's

SPEAKER_08: innovative or doing something disruptive. Um, well, I think taking out friction and making people's lives easier with this stuff is pretty innovative. And having it all on Expedia. Is that

SPEAKER_242: worth $100 billion? I think it's gonna be it could be where I think it could be worth a trillion if you

SPEAKER_106: put Expedia with travel with food. Yes, I think actually, I would argue that more than Expedia,

SPEAKER_07: he's probably going for WeChat. Like an Uber is nowhere near WeChat yet. Nobody is in America. Nobody is anywhere near that level of super app. And frankly, our regulators might never let them

SPEAKER_26: get there. But if they could, it'd be amazing. I actually think Snap is closest to being a super app than any then I can't really think of anyone else. But really got their own sort of app ecosystem within the app, you can go through different things. So I actually think app is I mean, Snap is closest, but I'm with you, Molly. Nowhere is even close to a WeChat. You can't like book your doctor's

SPEAKER_304: appointment, how do everything to say you're supposed to have your whole life in the app,

SPEAKER_08: if it's really a super app. Yeah, I think if if all of a sudden you woke up one day, and you could send money in Uber to another person, you know, you can split bills now. And when you were in a new city, it said, Hey, do you want to see a show tonight? And it said, Hey, do you want one of these premium reservations? Like open table does, you start to see those things show up? And I think you will.

SPEAKER_95: But I see what Deirdre saying, though, about community, that all is still ultimately booking,

SPEAKER_07: that's just sort of like logistics, which there's probably a lot of money and a lot of big to be taken in logistics. But what you can also build is community and chat and interaction and sharing,

SPEAKER_95: then your your WeChat, like maybe Uber bought Snap.

SPEAKER_311: Hey, I don't know if anybody saw that. Well, if you are also if you look at what

SPEAKER_316: or snap. I think it would have to go your way around.

SPEAKER_08: I think Twitter is on the way going there. If Elon gets it, I mean, you may have seen he wanted to put payments into Twitter. And, you know, according to the leaked documents, again, I have no information. But he did, there was this leaked document that said, Hey, here is

SPEAKER_10: what if we had payments, right? And so if Twitter users could send each other money,

SPEAKER_318: kind of neat, right? Oh, my gosh, you want to be in the FinTech space? I mean, this, this is a space that's just crumbling, because so many companies so much money got into it,

SPEAKER_26: and they all want to be what you're talking about, the one stop shop for everything financial services. And now they're all just getting crushed because users, I mean, like, even like a SoFi,

SPEAKER_322: which has been pretty good at cross selling. Brutal.

SPEAKER_10: So I just got it. I just did a super follow for the first time. I don't know if you guys have seen

SPEAKER_107: that. But somebody who I like was an MBA analyst worldwide while but he's just a commenter. And he always floated around between different people. And he had super follow there. And I just saw it

SPEAKER_08: when I was on the flight. And I was like, Oh, I love that guy. I want to support him. Oh, $2.99 a month. And I'll just give him $2.99 a month. So he does more tweets, because I appreciate him.

SPEAKER_213: So that Patreon being built into, you know, Twitter, I think Elon might pull that string,

SPEAKER_107: and it could be very interesting, very, I would love to see Uber by Twitter, and that would be pretty great. And you'd have all those accounts, right? And just people being able to at mentioned,

SPEAKER_08: imagine I said, you know, at, you know, D underscore Bosa, you know, $10, or I said, at Amnesty International $10 hashtag Ukraine. And I knew that my $10 donation went to the Ukraine

SPEAKER_10: fund by Amnesty International. And Amnesty said, just, hey, at mention us and put

SPEAKER_318: Twitter do that when shouldn't they buy a fintech company like a Venmo or square cash?

SPEAKER_02: When you're good at making apps, and you have over 100 million or three or 400 million credit cards,

SPEAKER_107: whatever it is, sometimes you can just build these things yourself pretty quick, you know, like they built eats, they built the grocery business, and they bought drizzly. So sometimes you buy something like I think they bought drizzly for the licenses more than anything, like the regulatory stuff. But I don't know if you've ordered alcohol on either go puff or Uber, it's a pretty compelling experience as well. And I think they'll get into weed. There's no doubt in my mind, Uber will deliver by a cannabis company and deliver weed as well.

SPEAKER_26: I don't know. I don't know how far we want to go into this. But I use Instacart a lot more, which has a lot of the same things for rides. But they've been able to take so much market share. We'll see. Well, it's interesting how this space the gig economy space as a whole. I'm so curious how this will shake up, especially now with Instacart filing confidentially today, actually, which did

SPEAKER_333: surprise me, sort of. I mean, I guess Instacart probably used IPO now or never.

SPEAKER_191: I, that is a good point, because I think the IPO window could could slam shut during the recession, but I think the IPO window is shut. I already thought it was closed, exactly. I was shocked.

SPEAKER_117: Locked, shut. What are they thinking? Either they have extremely good financials to show that the market is gonna be like, wow, you're the best of these gay economy companies. They do have an interesting advertising business, right? Which they already marked down. But do they also need a lot? I think it would be crazy. Some people have said that they just

SPEAKER_26: desperately need the cash. I'm not sure I buy that. Because if you're going out in this market to find cash, you're going to be very disappointed. It has to be the latter. I think it shows some confidence, maybe their CFO, right? Nick Gianni from Goldman Sachs. He did the IPOs there. So

SPEAKER_47: there's something that he's seeing that's telling him now might be the moment to go public, which is just crazy to most people looking at the markets.

SPEAKER_06: Yeah. Grindr is going to smack. I mean, that's a money printing machine. Grindr at least is a recession proof business in some ways. Like I

SPEAKER_345: might be counter cyclical. If you're depressed and it's a recession, you might want to hook up more.

SPEAKER_95: Exactly. Yeah. I don't, I'm not hearing good rumors about Instacart. I'm not sure that that S1 is

SPEAKER_346: gonna. Spacks don't instill a lot of confidence, but an IPO might. I think the IPO, yeah. Well,

SPEAKER_07: as long as we're talking about the crash, do you have time to talk to us a little bit about crypto?

SPEAKER_347: Is this like the go to zero moment? Oh my goodness. Are you asking me?

SPEAKER_213: Uh-huh. Are you allowed to have an opinion? Or does CNBC say, don't have an opinion? Just

SPEAKER_230: report the facts. CNBC. Okay. And you're like, did someone tell you to be full contact? But no,

SPEAKER_348: no one tells me. Well, no, but I mean, no one tells.

SPEAKER_71: The New York Times just told their reporters get off Twitter and stop having so many opinions,

SPEAKER_47: right? So I've never heard anything like that. But, but for example, when I come talk to you,

SPEAKER_26: I got to clear it and say, okay, can I go on a podcast? Is that okay? And they don't tell me anything what to say. They just see if it's aligned. Um, and, and I do to, to the earlier conversation to going direct, I do love different parts of that. I love that I'm able to come onto

SPEAKER_47: your podcast and have a longer conversation that we can't necessarily have. You're good on a pod.

SPEAKER_358: You're better on a pod. CNBC is going to regret this. You're going to start getting some podcast offers. Bill Simmons is looking for a tech podcast. I understand. So, so with crypto, um,

SPEAKER_26: I've been, what's the word? I'm not, I'm a skeptic, right? Because we, for good reason, there are so many scams in this place, but do I believe in the underlying technology? Yes,

SPEAKER_366: I have made that very clear. I put my son's birthday and Christmas money into Bitcoin and ether. Don't tell him right now. Um, but you know, I do believe over the long run,

SPEAKER_26: I don't know what it's going to look like, but I do think that this technology is extremely important. So no, I do not think it's going to go to zero. Is it going to look completely different? Uh, good chance of that. Are there a ton of scams in the space? Yes. Jason, you and I have been extremely skeptical of tether the stable point. Um, does that mean the whole system is broken? Maybe right now, but will it always be? No,

SPEAKER_47: I, I still believe in the longterm. I don't think it's going to zero.

SPEAKER_63: Speaking of tether, um, they de-pegged, uh, I don't know if I like that word. Um, they

SPEAKER_369: un-pegged? What's the word here? They missed the peg? I like de-pegged. I de-pegged, okay. I just pegged and now it's not.

SPEAKER_117: It sounded like a choice. They did not choose to de-pegged. It was de-pegged.

SPEAKER_08: Okay. I like that. Yes. Yes. It was not in their control. So they went down. I was like, I was like three in the morning because I was on Pacific coast time and I'm here on the East coast. So I'm like up at three in the morning and everybody's like, Hey, Jake, you've been waiting for this. It's 94 cents. And that's like, whoa, that's it has happened, but it's rare. Um, and then they were

David Friedberg: did some announcement that they were moving stuff from one chain to another. And that's after Luna and, um, U S T U S D T T. No, U S T U S T, uh, which is Tara, as opposed to U S D T U S T just

SPEAKER_260: collapsed and Luna collapsed. And we covered that obviously lost. So thanks to your audience. The peg, exactly. That's great.

SPEAKER_08: Kind of like not, it's like your boats out there and it's connected to a mooring and like you disconnected. You lost the mooring and you're lost your anchor. It's kind of like losing the anchor.

SPEAKER_385: To de-peg the way de-pegged it. Let's be clear here.

SPEAKER_386: Yes. It became, it became untethered from the peg.

SPEAKER_107: Oh, hello. Even more confused. I think what's going on here. I gotta be honest is I think, you know, as the tide goes out and we were talking about like Lake Tahoe and some lakes because of the drought

SPEAKER_50: are like Lake Mead is going down Deirdre. And they're like, oh yeah,

SPEAKER_10: we found a body in a barrel from 1980. We can close that case. And the sheriff's like, yep. Happens every time, you know, there's going to be more.

SPEAKER_157: When it recedes, we found all the bodies and like, you know, that's, what's going to happen right now. And if they don't have the reserves and people are redeeming.

SPEAKER_47: Well, okay. Okay. I think there's an important distinction to make here. So if there's, this is a horrible analogy. If there's a body at the bottom of the lake,

SPEAKER_26: that's us, right. That is going to be the algorithmic stable points. Is it going to be tether and some of the other ones that are backed by commercial paper, even though we may not know what that is. I'm not so certain that tether is going to go to zero. I mean, we don't know what's backing it. We don't know what kind of commercial paper, but my guess is that as it went from zero to 20 to 60 to $80 billion in market cap, they're probably cleaning up the back end. Don't you think?

SPEAKER_64: I mean, that was my thesis. Let's fill in the, if it was a scam or a Ponzi, I'm not, you know, who knows if it is the, the, the, um, AG in New York seems to think it is Canada banned them. So you

SPEAKER_34: start having these regulators banning it and having concerns. That's rare. Um, then the CEO and CFO,

SPEAKER_08: like not doing television, you got one person to come on, but the founders, two of them. Yeah. But the

SPEAKER_157: CTO and the CFO, I think who are weird cats and they were really nervous when you interviewed them. Congratulations on that get, um, but this, the two founders, the CEO are offshore somewhere and they

SPEAKER_08: won't come there at a certain point. You have to look at the cumulative evidence and say to yourself, this is distinctly different than Jeremy Allaire in the United States being regulated, doing his own proactive, essentially like showing you the books and saying, we will not hold commercial paper. And they were so squirrely with you when you asked them about Chinese paper. Yeah. And it's like, it's really

SPEAKER_64: hard for us as journalists or commentators to say something's a scam, but I can say these six things

SPEAKER_07: cumulatively do not look good. Well, and that's why it's so important for these CEOs to sit down for interviews with journalists, because when you have all of that, seriously, when you have all of that and you're trying to sort of like figure out, is this real? And then you see an interview and you see a human interaction in which the human on the other end of the hard questions is like, you were squirming on that interview. I don't know which one was the same. You're like, tell us about

SPEAKER_71: that. Tell us how you got it and what your impression was. And then what is your, so how'd

SPEAKER_08: you get it? The impression of it, you're like in the moment, because I thought you did a great job, by the way. Um, and then number three, how do you as a journalist at a prestigious, the most

SPEAKER_71: prestigious, uh, you know, finance network? How do you balance like smoke, fire, you know, all this stuff, but you can't come out and be as maybe as candid as I can. Uh, you have a little bit of a

SPEAKER_08: different benchmark, I think. Um, so yeah, tell us how you, I'm very careful. I wouldn't say I try to be

SPEAKER_165: candid, but I'm very careful because I know what we say on CNBC. That's why we don't cover like penny

SPEAKER_47: stocks, right? Cause you could say something about them and actually move them. So we just have to be really careful. People are trading on information that we're uncovering or bringing with tether Jason.

SPEAKER_410: It's funny because it actually happened one weekend. You were tweeting about tether and I was thinking, what's Jason going on about? Um, and I think I said something to you, like come on CNBC.

SPEAKER_26: And I spent the whole weekend, Jason, reading up, talking to people. I was very nervous actually, ahead of this interview because, um, it was a re it's a really complicated thing. It took me a really long time to understand how, like how it even works. What a stable coin is. I had to talk to so many different people and just go and say, I just don't get this thing. Like, what is it? Um, what is it backed by? Like, how do we not know how many, you know, how much commercial paper could there be in the world that if it's this big, no one knows who they are. So again, once I started asking those questions, it seemed very obvious that like, what is this thing? When I spoke to you, it was funny. I like to, I like to give you some debate, Jason. You were like, this thing's a scam. And I said, well, who cares? Who's using it? You know, crypto native that just need it as a tool. And they liked that line of questioning. Cause I kind of stuck up for saying like, why does it actually matter? It didn't actually. So they thought that I was, you know, a good person to give an interview to, and I didn't, I didn't try to do anything different. I just, when I said, here's all the questions I have, I'm not trying to get you. I just, I can you answer them? And then they weren't answering them. And I said, why aren't you answering these questions? Why did you come on here if you're not going to answer a question? And then they started to get very uncomfortable,

SPEAKER_47: the whole conversation. And I still, I mean, I don't have a, I don't have a bad relationship at all with the tethered people. I welcome them on all the time. I don't think I asked anything that

SPEAKER_366: was unfair. I just asked them for information. It should be really obvious, right? They shouldn't

SPEAKER_07: yesterday. Yeah. Yesterday I gave the example of Bethany McLean at fortune who asked, uh, at an Enron shareholder meeting, like, how do you guys make money? Right. And it was that question. And the piece that she wrote after where she was like, turns out, no one can answer that question. That led to the unraveling. Like it is a hundred percent, our job to ask those fundamentals, like even up to and including why is this so complicated? And it's not our job to sound smart,

SPEAKER_366: right? And sometimes Molly, it's the simplest questions that reveal the most. Yeah. How do

SPEAKER_402: you make money? How do you make money? Why aren't you profitable? Can you be profitable? Like these

SPEAKER_08: are very basic questions. And I think there is something happening in crypto, but we, Molly and I

SPEAKER_191: talked about it on the show. Just, I don't know if it was yesterday or the day before where

SPEAKER_08: if something is so complex that the person who made it can't explain it to you as a journalist, a finance journalist on CNBC, Molly from marketplace, New York times and seen it, Jason Gallaghan is investor in 300 companies. Like we know what we're talking about. We're, we're amongst the most in the know people. And you can't explain to us how the algorithmic, because I had Do Kwon on from Luna and I took like three shots of like, can you explain this to me? And I couldn't get it. And I'm starting to think, am I an idiot? Right? Is this crypto stuff? And you know what? I said to myself, no, this is exactly what happened with the, the default swaps and the

SPEAKER_34: mortgage backed securities in 2008, they were too complex as a way of, um,

SPEAKER_08: obscurifying and obscuring the drift. And so I think that when a, when a crypto project is so complex that it can't be explained, I think everybody's alarm bells should go off. Things in the world are not that complex. And when they are made to be that complex and the person can't explain them to you, I think there, that, that is a potential sign that something's not right.

SPEAKER_213: It could be that something is super complex, but generally it's a red flag for me.

SPEAKER_239: Can I give a counter argument here though?

SPEAKER_213: Sure. Please do. Yes. That's why you're here.

SPEAKER_239: There's so much in the crypto world that I can't understand that. And I'm happy to admit that. And

SPEAKER_26: what I'm told by some very smart people who I do trust in the industry, like a Sean McGuire at Sequoia, right? He has a pretty good view. And I asked him, I said, people are investing in crypto. They don't understand how the technology behind it works. Does that mean that they shouldn't be investing? Like you look at someone buying a share of Apple, right? They understand demand for iPhones. They understand the product. And he had a good point. He said, think about the internet. When it was being built, you couldn't know the average person didn't understand. It didn't mean that it was useless or it wasn't a real business. It was, you can't understand all the technology behind it. We still use it. It is still, you know, a big thing today. So it is really hard to figure out when you have to sort of trust in the technology. We're not engineers. Like you said, we're journalists. But you're also writing those simple questions. You can kind of get to the core.

SPEAKER_304: If you can't answer the very simple ones, it's probably not.

SPEAKER_61: I would say there's a difference between the base layer of technology and the mechanism,

SPEAKER_07: right? Like I don't need to understand the code behind the internet. I don't need to understand how TCP IP works. And I don't need to understand all of the layers. But what I do need someone to be able to say is it connects computers so you can share information. Right? And like,

SPEAKER_61: Well, that was exactly what I was going to say, Molly. Yeah. Yeah. When you talk to Doquan and he can't say, Oh, well, what happens is I invented Luna. I tied it to Terra. As long as Luna has some value, Terra can be worth a dollar. If that goes away, it won't be.

SPEAKER_08: Right. And then there's this anchor thing. Right. Well, and then there's this anchor thing where we're loaning. So you're, you're giving us some Bitcoin to stake it. What define staking? Oh, you're giving 19.5% in interest. Who's giving the interest? Where does that money come from? Because that's venture returns, stock market returns, 7% of VCs return 20% every year. How do you, who took the loan and who's giving that money? And they can't explain it. And it is complex. You know, web three is a collection of like 10 different technologies. You could, you could talk about encryption. You could talk about blockchain. You can talk about distributed technology. There are just so many pieces to it, of course, but Bezos doesn't have to explain to you TCP IP and your web browser and, you know, HTML to explain you one click, you buy a book, it comes to your door. And I think a lot of these crypto folks use the technology as a way of

SPEAKER_113: obscurifying the grift. And we'll see when the tide goes out, what reality is.

SPEAKER_86: They're using the enthusiasm, right? I mean, crypto has just been this mainstream thing, whereas when Terry came out, everyone was like, a lot of people were like, hold on a second and algorithmic stable coin. Like, no, all you need to do is read like Matt Levine, Matt Levine's

SPEAKER_26: newsletter, right? That breaks it down. I was like in the world in a, in a, in the sphere of scammy things, this is extremely, extremely scammy, but there's other people out there who may not be interested. They just want to get in on this crypto gold rush. And those are the people all

SPEAKER_47: three of us are trying to ask questions for, right? Make it as simple as possible so that they don't buy and they know that there's different levels of internet companies or crypto companies.

SPEAKER_07: Well, no one wants to be the person who says, including Do Kwan. And this is what's so interesting about crypto in general is again, there's the underlying technology. And then there's the part that is literally enabled, like you just said so well by enthusiasm by community. And so at the heart of that is if no one believes that Luna is real, oh, it's definitely not. It goes to zero the end, right? He doesn't want to say that he doesn't want to have to come on a podcast and be

SPEAKER_94: like, yeah, the truth is Luna only exists because I made it up. And so as a stake in Tara, it will only work if you believe me. Yes. Like money in the real world, very risky instruments too. Let's

SPEAKER_26: be fair. That is actually how financial instruments work as well. It's if the market believes you, then this will go on forever. I mean, it's only a Ponzi scheme until they actually create something, right? And yeah, Jason, you operate in the startup world. So you know that as well. I mean, you're giving money based on dreams. They have a certain amount of time to achieve that. Yeah,

SPEAKER_07: this is the fact they should just say it like it would be more, it would be more intellectually honest if they just said it. And they were like, there's we believe there's enough enthusiasm and excitement as community cares. And then we can create a whole new transformative financial tool,

SPEAKER_26: but it relies on all of you. Well, Sam Bankman free talks in those terms. And I think that's why he is one of the most credible people in crypto. And a lot of people point care and listen to what he says,

SPEAKER_47: because I do think he's more willing to talk in those terms, more candid, more honest.

SPEAKER_107: Yeah, the challenge for me with crypto is, you know, if you look at what we, what was created in Silicon Valley long before I got here, and long before I started investing 12

SPEAKER_08: years ago, 11 years ago, there was this milestone based investment system, you convince a couple of angels about your dream, friends and family, they give you 100k, they give you 250k, you build some sort of prototype, you're like, Hey, isn't this interesting? You know, I'm Tony Fatale, here's like a nest kind of thermostat thing I'm building up in Tahoe, almost works. And then they give you more money, right? And you get the $2 million check with a million dollar check, then you get the product to

SPEAKER_157: market, you get 100 customers, they give you the $20 million check. What is really inspiring,

SPEAKER_34: interesting and broken about crypto is they're like, Oh, you have this dream, great, let's give

SPEAKER_08: you $100 million to pursue it. And then let's tell everybody in the world that this is the dream, here's the white paper. And everybody can participate in and you're like, that's breaking securities law. You're knowingly doing that. People are not buying this for token for utility, none of them are using it in any utility way, they are all buying it based on pure speculation, hoping it goes to the moon. So you're breaking securities law, somebody got $100 million and put it in Panama, in some foundation that nobody knows the board members of. And when you break the milestone based system, what you're doing is saying, you know what, we're going to give a 12 year old the keys to a Mack truck. Like, what do you think is going to happen? Like, you get your driver's license at 15 or your permit, you can drive during the day with a parent next to you, you can go with an x number of miles of your house. But there's all kinds of controls on this. And I think there are controls in our economy and securities law for a reason. You don't want to have a 12 year old behind a Mack truck or flying, you know, a 747. You learn, you get your license, you pilot a small plane, you get a bigger plane, you go certified, you get tested. We need regulation here. And I think that's what's going to happen this next year. So much money is going to be lost, so much pain. Terribly people are going to commit suicide because they lost their fortune. So much suffering is going to happen that regulators are going to be like stable coins. You want to make your own currency, which countries do? No,

SPEAKER_71: no more of this nonsense. And you got to audit it and you can be this size and you need to have

SPEAKER_08: insurance and you need to act like a bank enough of the Meshuggana play by the rules. And I think

SPEAKER_470: that's what the sec is failing. They have to play by the rules. There's a rule set here for a reason.

SPEAKER_26: Play by the rules. Okay. But the crypto world, I'm sorry, Jason, the crypto world will argue that who's policing traditional finance, right? We talk about money laundering and scams.

SPEAKER_117: And they'll be right about that too. Yes. So I understand what they're saying. The regulators don't necessarily do a good job policing the existing system. And the crypto companies would

SPEAKER_26: argue that they want in because they also again, there's different degrees of this, right? There is Terra USD, there is tether, there is circle. And I think they welcome at least the better ones welcome

SPEAKER_47: regulation so that at least they have that stamp of approval. Stuff's going to get through, of course,

SPEAKER_191: like it does in the traditional system. I hate this argument that like, everybody else is committing crimes. So why don't we get rid of the cops and the justice system?

SPEAKER_34: It's like, well, okay, not fair either. I feel like the crypto people are not sincere in this. They're like, you know, why should the government get to decide? It's like, because people deserve some

SPEAKER_410: level of protection. Because maybe it's more efficient. I'm Canadian, as you know, Jason, Molly,

SPEAKER_117: maybe you don't know. I have to transfer money from Canada to the US on occasion. Why does this take me two days? Why do I have to pay a big fee to a bank? It is,

SPEAKER_26: it's been five years of this. And it just continues to, I continue to be flabbergasted over how inefficient and terrible the system is. Yes, crypto does promise to solve that if the regulators could get their act together or whatever, if the banks want to do it, fine. But that is the technological promise that I do think is worth something. Yes. And I agree with you. That is super valuable.

SPEAKER_07: That's the promise. And that will, when you if you strip it down to the simplicity of that, and then you try to understand Jack Dorsey saying like, Bitcoin could bring about world peace,

SPEAKER_94: it's because there will in there could in fact be a truly equitable access to currency. Yeah,

SPEAKER_07: which is the exact same argument as communism, right? And once you get people, and their motivations, and their greed, and their ability to manipulate existing, you know, new technology to their own advantage, then you have to put into place rules and you have to create centralization. Because at scale,

SPEAKER_61: as soon as humans come in, that whole dream falls apart. Yeah. Yeah. It is. It is about access.

SPEAKER_122: Molly bang on. I like that. Yeah, I mean, it really is about access. I mean, I bought Bitcoin on that

SPEAKER_493: promise. We're thinking about people in, in not developed countries that need this way more than any

SPEAKER_07: of us. I can appreciate that. Reparations and people who are unbanked, but have mobile phones like there is, I mean, that is the promise that I put my own teeny amount of money into Bitcoin on. Because it's like, that is truly transformative. But what happened is became too good of a store of

SPEAKER_95: value. And then everything got financialized around it. We created all these sketchy financial

SPEAKER_10: tools around it. I agree with that. Those poor truckers, those poor Nazi truckers in Canada couldn't

SPEAKER_496: get their Bitcoin. Wow. That was just a little poke. Sorry. She's from Canada. You're triggered by it. I

SPEAKER_288: had no choice but to go there. No, he had no choice. Well, no, there are pros and cons to all of this.

SPEAKER_08: Like you think about the freedom of money and, you know, no KYC and no fees and then the fluidity of it. And, you know, if, if there are some that are anonymous and you really have to think this experiment through, it goes back to the censorship one in the open, which I wanted to double click on before the open version of, of Twitter, the open version of Facebook. Okay. Now you got an open version. Okay. Now Alex Jones is torturing the poor parents of the, you know, the, the, um, kids in, um, remind me of the, um, Sandy Hook, Sandy Hook kids, these poor parents, right? And okay. Now it's a decentralized version. He says even more outrageous stuff. That's a false flag. And these parents, kids aren't dead and they're actors. And there's nobody to stop them because there's no centralization. And it trends even more. And these crazy people are like, I need to give Alex Jones money because

SPEAKER_71: he's saving America from the pizza gate, you know, Clinton's and all this aliens and stuff like that. And it's like, okay, now nobody can stop this maniac. And what, who does he go after, after the

SPEAKER_470: Sandy Hook parents? And then who has people on their doorstep? Because now he's got, he's trending on the decentralized social network that nobody controls. But, but hold on, hold on. If you don't

SPEAKER_47: let this guy speak, we're going really deep now. If you don't let this guy speak, people are going to think there's some conspiracy. At least the craziness is out there on display,

SPEAKER_26: right? If you don't see that at all. And I think this is probably like Elon Musk's argument, right? You build it up. You're not actually creating any discussion. It's like the whole question of,

SPEAKER_117: should Donald Trump be back allowed on Twitter, right? There may be a part of the population that thinks it's being hidden from them. There's a conspiracy that is hiding

SPEAKER_507: what he's saying from 70, 70 million, 70 million people probably believe that Deidre,

SPEAKER_508: you know, like the voters to have that craziness on display and let people make up their minds. I don't know. I'm not saying I think one way or the other challenge of our era. Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_56: It's the problem with, I think Alex Jones is just such a great example. Molly and I talk about him all the

SPEAKER_08: time, because if you take the legal approach, like breaking the law, you know, he is now being sued into oblivion. But that took seven or eight years on a private company in a private company, whether it's YouTube or Twitter or Facebook, you can say, you know what, not for me, I'm the CEO, I own this. I just don't want to be party to somebody saying something so offensive and hurtful to parents going through the most painful thing. Any human can suffer the death of a child. And I just choose not to have that on my platform. And, you know, I choose not to let people send anonymous money to this person. Whereas with President Trump, you know, it's like, well, some number of people voted for him. You know, he hasn't been convicted of January 6 yet, maybe he'll get sanctioned for it. It's a really

SPEAKER_157: difficult, I call it like the modern trolley car problem. Everybody's aware of the trolley

SPEAKER_71: car problem where it's like these great philosophical problems. I like something in between what happened. And the open, anybody can do whatever they want, which is you're sounding

SPEAKER_26: like a tech CEO, Jason, I like the time based ones, it's philosophical, they want somewhere in the middle, but then that ends up being no policy at all. This is why it's so hard. And this is why it's so polarizing, because you cannot have that middle ground at some point, you're gonna have to make

SPEAKER_95: those tough decisions. The reason you can't have that middle ground is because what it leads to is effectively the long history of no rules that allowed for algorithmic amplification that started to financially incentivize more and more and more extreme speech, so that you got to a point where you have you know, we all act like Trump came along before these platforms were toxic and had a moderation problem. They had it all along. And they had it because they were trying to find this middle ground, but also make money by amplifying certain kinds of speech and allowing for the monetization of that

SPEAKER_94: speech. And so then once you got to the point where it was like, Oh, my God, this guy is tearing down to my he's like, literally, he personally responsible, his account is responsible for like, at one point, 80% of the misinformation that was on the web, coming from this one account,

SPEAKER_95: because of this attempt to have this middle ground the whole time. Like, you can't, I don't, I just don't think you can have this argument without the context of all of the kind of failures of moderation that happened, that got us to the Trump nuclear bomb.

SPEAKER_213: Okay, what are the things Deidre that you would improve? Because I think this is where like, we all talk about, okay, chaos, and you know, just anything goes, we probably don't want that.

SPEAKER_71: I secret people putting their thumbs on things and shadow banning people, I think a lot of people would

SPEAKER_08: agree, like, we don't want that. So on a practical basis, two or three things you would do.

SPEAKER_520: And then we just go around the horn to make it feel or to trend it towards, you know, what's good for society and what you think is good for society? Do you have like two or three suggestions?

SPEAKER_239: Honestly, no, this is too hard of a question for me. This is not my job. I do not know because

SPEAKER_26: you say you want one thing, and then you give up another. I really feel for the people that have to do this from the CEOs to the regulators, I do not know what the answer is. The question of free speech is an age old question. I do not know. And I'm not even prepared to say one thing that I want. Like I said, you may give up something else down the road. Personally, though, I do like to see everything. So I don't know. But again, you bring up the example of Sandy Hook, do I want parents to have to relive trauma? Absolutely not. Will I give up some of my views? What I see for that parent? Yes.

SPEAKER_410: But I don't know. How do you decide that on an individual basis?

SPEAKER_07: Yeah, I think I mean, I think you raised the key point, which is that it's really hard. And

SPEAKER_95: anybody who thinks it's easy, including, you know, he long including the elephant in the room, Elon,

SPEAKER_107: he doesn't he doesn't think it's easy. He thinks it's complex. But I think he thinks there's something different to be done. I have actually a couple of feelings on it. I think

SPEAKER_08: the first step is to stop talking about the polarized views of this, and to just start going full transparency, case by case. And that would at least give us a framework. So with Trump, or with Sandy Hook, we never got to see what was happening. I would like to have a log file of all the actions taken. If you look at what, what Facebook did a really interesting thing, they

SPEAKER_71: after the after the advertising thing, there was an advertising thing, they said, here's the Facebook ad manager. So there's a thing called Facebook live ad library, and you can see every ad. So they just played it transparent. I'd like to see every account that was, and I'd like all the academics

SPEAKER_08: to have access to it, every account that was turned off, every action that was taken categorized, and just let those academics or individuals say, Hey, here's the moderation actions going on. And here's how the decisions were made. Let's have a discussion about it. I think that would be a good

SPEAKER_07: first step that we don't know that there was decision, right? Like we also don't, I don't think we should safely assume there was moderation decisions happening all along, right? Like one of the big knocks on Trump was that he had violated the terms of service over and over and over. And it wasn't until the 37th really egregious time that Twitter was like, okay, we have a rule now. And our rule is if you're newsworthy, we don't write like, you can't really be transparent about a

SPEAKER_157: system if that system doesn't exist. Yeah, I agree. And that's why it should be transparent. Cause then you'd say, okay, you're not even making a decision here. There's no decision being made.

SPEAKER_71: And then in some cases, people are like, yeah, uh, you know, I don't, I don't know if ivermectin works or not. And they're banned your account. And you're like, I, I didn't say I'm pro or not. I just said, I don't know. And like, people had their accounts banned for just saying the word

SPEAKER_157: Ivermectin. And it's like, okay, that doesn't work either. In terms of that transparency,

SPEAKER_47: we know that this is an extremely difficult, delicate topic. I don't think Zuckerberg is

SPEAKER_26: doing himself any favors by not talking about it. Right. I mean, I asked what does free speech on the internet mean? He gave a very nuanced, careful answer, but that's helpful. How are you thinking about it? Right? You don't need to have the answers. No one expects you to have the answers or say that you don't have free speech, but how are you thinking about it? And I think that Zuckerberg is putting him his back against a wall by never talking about it because then everything

SPEAKER_08: he does, you don't understand where it comes from. Yeah. Yeah. There is a if you guys haven't seen it, there is transparency report.google.com. And, you know, this, you know, this kind of exists in the

SPEAKER_71: world already. For search, they, they just need to copy what was what's being done already. For Google search where they just like, here's the dangerous sites. Here's why we took them out of the index. Here's what governments are asking us. Here's the subpoenas we get. And they did that. So when they take stuff down, the government can't be like, take this down without sending

SPEAKER_08: them a notice. They're like, send us the notice. We're going to share the notice. Unless it's that, I guess there's a fin record or something where you can have like things taken down or do data

SPEAKER_107: requests without tipping your cards, because that would tell the criminal like you're going after them.

SPEAKER_538: Anyway, listen, it's over an hour with Deidre. She usually gets 15 messages. So great. It's so

SPEAKER_261: great. This is your good long form. CNBC is got to give Deidre a little raise here because Bill Simmons and a bunch of other podcast networks now know that Debo is good in long form. You're good in

SPEAKER_248: long form. I'm just happy to talk to the two of you. Molly, an absolute pleasure. What a delight.

SPEAKER_25: Let's hang out. Jake, how are we friends? Are we friends? I think you're great. I'm just joking. Of

SPEAKER_550: course. You know, I love you. We're besties. I think we're besties after this. We are. So anyways,

SPEAKER_551: we'll see you on tech check soon. I'll give you a hard time. Just kidding. I love it. Let's go on.

SPEAKER_249: Let's do it. I want to talk. I want to talk about Uber. I want to, I want to come on and talk about like this tipping point for Uber. So maybe after all in some, and I'll come on and we'll, we'll talk

SPEAKER_107: about the chances of profitability in the super, maybe, you know, share the super app conversation we had here, which I think is a super interesting one that people aren't talking about. Thank you

SPEAKER_556: both so much for having me. Thank you. Make sure you upload that audio file for us. Cheers. Take care. Bye.