SPEAKER_00: i think as americans we should be very proud of the fact that technology companies and the citizenry and by and large our representatives are in alignment that privacy does matter i think we can take that win despite sax's tweet and the pile on that i experienced this weekend the fact is we are nowhere near what is going on in the three buckets you have dictatorships on one side

SPEAKER_01: you have free countries on the other and then there's a a little bit of gray in the middle you

SPEAKER_00: got france clearly is going to be in that middle uh you have the monarchies uh in the middle east they believe in some amount of you know encryption some places don't um you know and it's just going

SPEAKER_04: to be a jurisdiction thing this week in startups is brought to you by vanta compliance and security shouldn't be a deal breaker for startups to win new business vanta makes it easy for companies to get a sock to report fast twist listeners can get a thousand dollars off for a limited time at vanta.com twist open phone create business phone numbers for you and your team that work through an app on your smartphone or desktop twist listeners can get an extra 20 off any plan for your first six months at openphone.com twist and lemon.io hire pre-vetted remote developers get 15 off your first four weeks of developer time at lemon.io twist hey everybody welcome back to this week in startups

SPEAKER_00: i'm your host jason calacanis uh we're about to hit 2 000 episodes of this podcast in 14 years and alex i'm not tired i love doing it and having you here to do the news of me twice a week three times a week has been a fresh air it's really reinvigorated the show so uh here we go any uh anything big this

SPEAKER_10: weekend personally any any uh big stories breaking that you're watching well the biggest story that's

SPEAKER_12: breaking is uh my my next my next kids doing uh seven eight days so um that's pretty big yeah i'm actually

SPEAKER_15: kind of glad we had this one enormous story that's consumed our attention because it's been such a beautiful and distraction for me to not be worrying about like do i know how to swaddle do i recall how to have an infant so um yes not that i'm saying i'm in favor of people being arrested but the pavel duroff story that we're going to start with has been big story electrifying also everyone uh if you want to know what else is on the show today we're talking about a massive new secondaries fund the future of ibm and other tech companies in china but jason clearly clearly the biggest story from the last 24 hours last 36 hours has been the arrest of pavel duro best known i think in the west for his helping found uh telegram a mostly encrypted chat application got arrested in france so first of all when did you first uh catch the story in your eyes so i mean over the weekend you know this has been

SPEAKER_00: a big uh breaking story because it's dramatic flying into france on a private jet getting picked up for um a lack of moderation which to me is like a very nebulous term i just assume that the french language and english you know there might be something mixed up because and you know in a breaking news situation like this i always like to be thoughtful uh be demure be thoughtful not like these other girls um uh you know who fly off the handle and start you know sharing things uh but in all seriousness like in a breaking news context you and i know uh there's going to be a lot of cards that are going to turn over and in fact the actual charges came out moments ago so we're going to talk about that but this triggers a lot of uh side discussion so i think today you know we should really open up

SPEAKER_29: the aperture of this discussion because there's international relations here there's a russia angle

SPEAKER_30: because he's russian um and he started his career uh you know in russia and there's a putin connection

SPEAKER_29: there's a freedom of speech uh issue here um and then there's this peculiar nature of the french um he's and also the pavel's got a couple of passports he's a pretty larger than life figure

SPEAKER_34: right now um and there's a big discussion of which is more important the sovereignty of the individual or the effectiveness of our uh law enforcement because if you give people the ability to talk

SPEAKER_35: privately at scale across the world not just talking to people in the you know around your kitchen table or whispering and somebody's here we're talking about a global network then there's a really important conversation around um you know some of the most nefarious illegal activities and and how those impact society and then does a society want to enable at scale end-to-end encryption that cannot be

SPEAKER_00: crack or do they want to give a back door to law enforcement so you could do things like i don't

SPEAKER_40: know stop a terrorist attack or human trafficking or fentanyl so you know it's a lot of feelings here

SPEAKER_00: i think and and um it's a it's it's perhaps this will become like one of the main i think this will

SPEAKER_42: be the story of the rest of the year if i'm being honest pending the u.s election dropping some sort

SPEAKER_15: of you know news bomb on the technology industry i think that's probably right so to give people a little bit of context before the charges dropped and we're going to get those in just one second um jean michael i'm gonna ruin the french here everybody i'm sorry but berna god uh who's the general secretary of the office of minors or offmen in france said that pavel dura uh this is actually from his linkedin and i'm using a machine translation everybody so if it's slightly off uh blame google pavel durov the founder and ceo of the messaging app telegram was arrested saturday at the heart of this issue is the lack of moderation jason's point and cooperation of the platform particularly in the fight against pedophilia so let's go to the charges jason and these just came out uh before we went live and we have them in both french and english um i'm just going to quickly run through these uh just interrupt me whenever you want to jump in okay yes sir the judicial investigation was opened against person unnamed on charges of complicity webmastering an online platform in order to enable an illegal transaction refusal to communicate this is a relatively long one complicity in the possessing of pornographic images of minors complicity in distributing offering or making available pornographic images of minors complicity in acquiring transporting possessing offering or selling narcotic substances back to the fentanyl point and then fraud criminal association laundering of proceeds providing cryptology services aiming to ensure confidentiality without certified declaration and a whole bunch of other stuff which jason i think if we boil this down it is essentially what you said here's a service that offers encryption and people use it for stuff and it seems that the company's level of cooperation with french authorities was less than was hoped for or expected and so pavel got snared in this and was then arrested when he landed in

SPEAKER_25: france because i don't think they're saying pavel is doing each of those individual things but his platform was being used ergo he is um complicit so what we're talking about now is the french rules

SPEAKER_29: around encrypted services and the owner of those services so other services like signal i think whatsapp has

SPEAKER_49: end to end encryption there's other and uh i message has end to end encryption so there is one issue of

SPEAKER_00: end-to-end encryption and then there's another issue of giving information at the request when there's a

SPEAKER_35: legal issue so he clearly is not cooperating with them everybody knows telegram very good for groups

SPEAKER_40: i keep getting added to all kinds of crypto ico spam groups oh my gosh those are the worst the worst um where and my favorite part about them in the peak was they were called pump pump pump and then people

SPEAKER_35: would get in there and they would coordinate pumping a coin with absolutely no awareness that the person running the group had probably already bought their coins a week ago and then was clearing them out as you pump pump them and they were telling you hold hold hold while they sold sold sold so my

SPEAKER_00: question then becomes how is this different than other encrypted services let's take i message and tim cook when tim cook or apple executives are in france right now and people are using i message i'm assuming with some level of encryption um or other services are they also going to get picked up next so that that's sort of the next shoe to drop um and why are the french going so yeah that's my first question why are the

SPEAKER_56: french going after him well he is a french citizen so to understand pavel and how he built telegram we

SPEAKER_15: should probably go back a little bit to his days in russia he's a co-founder of the contact which is probably the best known uh russian originated social network i want to say and he ran into quite a lot of trouble with the kremlin there were takedown requests eventually he sold his stake was kind of forced out of the company there was a little bit of nuance there about how he got forced out we don't have time to go into that but essentially back in russia in 2018 there was a law called the yarovaya law and it meant that you had to store voice and text communications for a certain period of time and also critically store encryption keys with the russian fsb which is their security service he said no and then um had to leave and then left the country i think at that point he became a citizen of saint kitts and since then he's become a citizen of france and also the uae now in the french case jason just because i hated to do a lot of research this is interesting uh did you know that you can get a french passport if you are a quote emeritus foreigner um this is a way in which some uh very powerful and influential people can get french citizenship without having a french uh background i.e in a territory or in the nation itself or parents thereof so essentially he got a really special passport to france so recently as of 2021 he was in good keeping in france right and so that's that's what i kind of struggle with is what changed in the last three years um that led to what seems from what i understand now to be a relatively quick reversal of his favor and fortunes in his adopted

SPEAKER_63: well one of his adopted home countries i'm a little perplexed by that yeah that was so confusing to me

SPEAKER_65: because it's pretty well established that in france um you have to give access you have to maintain the

SPEAKER_00: keys the encryption keys as opposed to say the individuals having the encryption keys you have to hand over the keys to authorities and give them a back door essentially if they requested but if you're running a service where you don't keep the keys as you just explained in the russian example then you can't do that so i guess i don't have the keys if i'm understanding technically what's going on here and the request because we're reading into this in a breaking news atmosphere then he doesn't have he's saying i don't have the keys they're saying you're supposed to have the keys you're supposed to maintain

SPEAKER_29: the keys but that's that's not how it works with this end-to-end encrypted encryption and you're supposed to my understanding was they allowed end-to-end encryption um so i guess this is perhaps

SPEAKER_15: the beginning of the end of end-to-end encryption i hope not but it's just worth like remembering how long we've been having this conversation now this was called the crypto wars before the invention of cryptocurrency which has taken the word crypto and kind of taken it onto its own we could call it the encryption wars but it's it's absolutely a long-term push and pull between you know the public wanting to have secure communications both for payments and also for chat and the government wanting to be able to stick its nose into everything and just you know rewinding the clock back to snowden i think we all learned just how voracious even countries with relatively strong first amendment style protections can be when it comes to collecting all this information now in the case of uh the european union i was surprised to see a report from the eff from march of this year there was a quote milestone judgment um in which the european court of human rights ruled that weakening encryption can lead to the general indiscriminate surveillance of the communications of all users and violates the human right privacy so to me there seems to be precedent even inside the eu itself that encryption should be allowed which throws further confusion onto what's going on with pavel and telegram and france

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SPEAKER_15: to reactions in a second but jason uh how how closely have you been tracking um the russia ukraine war and

SPEAKER_78: i'm not asking that implicitly i'm asking that honestly well i mean it comes up uh because one of my

SPEAKER_00: besties on the all in podcast is pretty enthusiastic about uh that topic and so you know to a certain extent i keep up to date on it but um i know that ukraine has made some incursions into russia of late russia has been over 900 days and unable to defeat the proud uh people of ukraine uh during their illegal invasion murderous uh you know invasion uh that they uh obviously some people feel like russia was provoked i think that's nonsensical if you're provoked that doesn't give you the right to murder your neighbors and i i believe in the free sovereignty of countries so long way of saying i keep probably more up to date to it than the average person but i've never been to ukraine i've never been to russia i am not a student of the entire history there so you know some humility as well

SPEAKER_22: um well we can buy you a copy copy of christianer kings 3 and you can rewrite history as much as you want

SPEAKER_15: um video game jokes aside uh telegram is a very popular channel for uh russian communication and also just for information getting out of uh russia and the ukraine area so if you track um military bloggers open source intelligence you end up reading through a lot of telegram uh materials and i i raised that because france has been a pretty robust ally of ukraine since it was invaded and i i wonder you know if there's a if there's a national security element to this in some way because it does seem a little bit strange that a encrypted application of which there are many including from meta and apple and other major tech companies that the eu does not mind fining billions of dollars when they break the rules right um is getting caught up in this now the fact that pavel had flown in from azerbaijan you can read into that whatever you want there's other bits of rumor and gossip that haven't been confirmed that i'm not going to share here because i don't feel

SPEAKER_22: confident in the sourcing but i wouldn't be shocked if there was something involving national security

SPEAKER_26: interesting so yeah that's not a tinfoil hat that's just informed speculation this is a popular app

SPEAKER_84: france is supporting ukraine russia obviously uh and this person is a dual citizen of russia france or

SPEAKER_15: quad quad says i mean like okay he's got more passports than you know i mean if i lost a finger i'd have the same number of fingers on one hand as he has passports which is an impressive feat

David Friedberg: all right honestly but then again if my country of origin was russia i also would like to have a

SPEAKER_00: second or third passport so we are now in you know a very weird situation one of the i would say maybe it's six or seven major encrypted apps is being penalized in france why because you can be certain that the encryption used in google messaging whatsapp facebook messenger imessage signal or skype even i guess has end-to-end encryption i believe you know is similar to telegram therefore is everybody else going to get picked up and i know x formerly twitter was adding end-to-end encryption i believe i'm in the beta of it so in dms i did test it with a couple of friends um and it's in there so

SPEAKER_47: this all just looks a little confusing we'll have to cover it over time right yeah i just feel like

SPEAKER_56: we're missing something like there's there seems to be some piece in this saga that doesn't quite add

SPEAKER_15: up and you know telegram responded to this news by saying that they abide by eu laws including the digital services act which only applies to companies of the largest size they say telegram ceo travels frequently in europe and that it's quote absurd to claim that a platform or its owner are responsible for the abuse of that platform i mean that that is that is exactly how i see this and so it just it's i wonder what else is going to shake loose but uh there has been some commentary and i want to start let's go let's go around the horn yeah yeah let's start with uh the french president we have um his tweet from earlier today saying that and uh i'm quoting the english uh language version here france is deeply committed to freedom of expression and communication to innovation and to the spirit of entrepreneurship and then he goes on to say that in a state governed by the rule of law freedoms are upheld within a legal framework to protect citizens and their fundamental rights and then essentially the arrest of the president of telegram on french style took place as part of an ongoing judicial investigation it is in no way a political decision and then the judges will rule not a lot of new context there but i think it was good for the french president to at least say you know look i'm not doing this because this is a vendetta okay there's an ongoing investigation so that to me

SPEAKER_00: means the fact that he felt it necessary to put that out means he wanted to squash the concept that this is a political thing as opposed to simply a legal issue around illegal activity which they pointed out in that press release so either there's a conspiracy at work here as we're sort of looking at or this is just people are using this for some pretty heinous stuff and we want to stop the heinous use of this and we're going to force people who use these and this is the first one we're going to do it to to give us a back door now if we were to look at the wider issue of freedom of speech individual sovereignty private communications in the united states which i spent the weekend getting dunked on by david sax's uh followers because i said hey listen it's absurd to think here in the u.s that you know all the services are going to be shut down just because tick tock is and then now people are saying like oh my god look sax got it right um this is france not the

SPEAKER_29: united states and in the united states i took a look a long hard look and maybe we could pull up

SPEAKER_103: sax's tweet i tried to figure out has there been an instance of any instance of the united states government now we're moving out of france um so yeah here's the tweet you know he said on april 24th

SPEAKER_29: that tick tock had and he has a line through it then telegram x rumble the truth is tick tock has not been banned and trump did an executive order to ban tick tock and then biden passed legislation

SPEAKER_00: that was voted on and approved to give a window of time before tick tock it needs to divest this seems to me to be completely different than what's happening here with telegram or the freedom of speech issues that were exposed at twitter or at facebook where the fbi and people inside those private companies uh decided that they would collaborate you know on uh either silencing voices or getting rid of voices they felt were dangerous let's put that aside for a second

SPEAKER_105: in the united states there has there been any instance of the united states government shutting down

SPEAKER_00: private communications and encryption and then have there been instances of the united states being extremely frustrated that they cannot get through these encryption services so i'm just putting that up there so we can level set because this is a nuanced discussion now it's there's a bunch of mega lunatics who follow sax and who love to dunk on me because i have this thing called nuance but i

SPEAKER_103: think the nuance here is so important it's so important in the story because this is one instance in france and tick tock is a completely other instance tick tock is the concerns around tick tock are they have

SPEAKER_29: spied on americans already and they have government officials on the board and they refuse to divest so this is a very unique situation that we have them our number one foreign adversary

SPEAKER_103: is has been spying on americans and it has been proven they have spied on americans right this is just a fact and that there is a bipartisan law for them to divest that has nothing to do with biden or trump it has to do with our government in one of the few bipartisan

SPEAKER_29: efforts saying we need to stop i mean we need to stop the russia i'm sorry the chinese from having access to 100 million americans and we know that they're spying already on them and we know the algorithm could bend public views so on a bipartisan basis republicans and democrats agree tick tock no bueno

SPEAKER_112: but take us through america here and and what we can look at in terms of how encryption is looked at

SPEAKER_114: on american soil yeah so this is a recurring thing and you're right it's not partisan the strong

SPEAKER_15: encryption at rest in motion essentially end end encryption has been a point of conflict throughout our history um just to pull some uh some things here that i think are are pertinent uh the fbi director comey back in 2014 was complaining that uh quote we've gone too far by offering essentially anybody end-to-end encryption um we've also seen in the case of tick tock two consecutive administrations to your point at least at one point in time being in favor of that and i bring up both of those again because it underscores that the government would like to have more power uh the government it's an entity it has incentives it wants to have access to more information and there's a lot of people that are on our public payroll who are you know hired to keep us safe and they would like to have more information and it's hard to say no the kids should be at greater risk first we can have greater freedom but that's what it comes down to you almost get tired of this because it comes up you know every couple of years but the way the argument tends to go is something bad happens there's some data that's protected and then either we need to for the case of national security or to protect the kids we need to have an encryption backdoor and this always sounds very reasonable to people who don't build encrypted products and services but as apple pointed out in the wake of the san bernardino case building an insecure system to allow for third-party entrance even if it's via secure backdoor just for the fbi creates an insecure system and therefore you either have encryption or you don't and consistently here in the us we have managed to beat back the government and preserve our right to have encryption encrypted products but as recently as 2020 three us senators i think it was cotton blackburn and one um and graham put out a bill that would essentially force encryption to be weakened so this is a recurring issue i i just again don't understand why it's this moment in time in which an indian encrypted chat application got busted by one particular government and not even a supranational government like the european union bloc it was just france so i still feel like we're missing something but we have defended the right to encryption here in the us and without it we don't have e-commerce privacy etc so to me you know we'll do this again in three or four years jason but it's another example of here come the governments

SPEAKER_60: once again wanting to break down the you know the doors of encryption um this specific case of pavel

SPEAKER_40: we'll figure out as time goes on you know listen i am sympathetic to law enforcement they have a tuck

SPEAKER_00: job they want to protect you i think that's the overwhelming majority of the driving force here you have an fbi agent a cia agent you know local law enforcement and there's a horrific we'll take the most intense uh terrorist attack so we have two instances of that recently there was the pensacola in 2020 florida um and the fbi requested apple's help to unlock two iphones and then there was san bernardino you pointed out i think that was 2015 according to my notes um and apple refused and said hey you know if we do a backdoor for this it's gonna be a backdoor for everything so either and the the real backdrop here is encryption's gotten easier you used to be able to do this kind of encryption but you had to have keys you needed to be technical to do it then we abstracted away all the technology and you just downloaded signal telegram my message was built in and so that everybody has it by default i can tell

SPEAKER_29: you how humans in the 90 percent of cases if we had san bernardino god forbid at or 9 11 on a regular

SPEAKER_00: basis which is to say more than once in a lifetime for 9 11 and more than once every call it 10 years for something like san bernardino you know it seems like those happen every 10 years or so

SPEAKER_105: so if those things happened every year i can guarantee you that 90 of people would say build the back door that's how strongly most people feel about their own privacy and when those things

SPEAKER_00: aren't occurring i think 90 of people would say uh i want my privacy i don't want back doors uh so i think the public flip-flops on this issue based upon how secure you feel at this very moment i think maybe 10 of people are principled enough to say i would rather have and this is this is you know the long and short of it i would rather have people die in san bernardino like events or god forbid or 9 11 uh you know

SPEAKER_40: dozen people or thousands of people i'd rather have that and have my privacy i'd rather have that every

SPEAKER_00: year and maintain my privacy and uh i think that's the reality of the situation is most people don't care about their privacy um until uh and would be willing to give it up to be safe just like people were willing to absolutely have everything scanned and have their you know i don't know if you've had this experience going through but you know back in the day when we had some intense uh tsa moments i i have to tell you the sweep up you ever get to sweep up your leg and it i've yeah and then the inside

SPEAKER_35: kind of watch it because you know i'm 53 they're not hanging they're hanging a little bit lower these days i hate to make it graphic but i've had my nuts whacked many times and i'm willing to have my

SPEAKER_00: nuts whack to make sure somebody doesn't put a bomb you know in their shorts um and i'm willing to have

SPEAKER_128: somebody look at a silhouette of my junk on one of these scanners so that's the reality of it um how

SPEAKER_25: do you feel so i opted out of the new scanners for a couple of years and made them pat pat me down

SPEAKER_15: me too me too yeah i used to i was a wrestler in high school and middle school so me getting getting manhandled doesn't really bother me too much just to be totally honest i people have different preferences thereof but uh i just i was so annoyed by the intrusion into my privacy that i just wanted to make it harder on the system even though i know i'm just making some 14 an hour guy who just wants to make his car payment you know do extra work but it just it felt like the need to stand up a little bit and i i say that because that's my take here if we give up on encryption we are moving towards a world in which every single thing you do is by default public forever and i just don't think that's exactly the way that i would like to live my life and jason to be honest i i'm an incredibly boring person if you read my group chats with my friends you'd be like i'm bored nothing in there is particularly spicy or interesting we joke a little bit but that's it i just think that i have a right to be able to essentially close my door in my house and also to close my digital door and so to your point about are people going to be willing to say i'll take the risk to have more privacy i will say yes to that now and also yes to that in the wake of the next catastrophe that comes along i just think it is the right way to go and i do think that it's one of those if you lose it you'll never get it back type of things so we're fighting this recurring issue and you know just for everyone out there is listening this is not a partisan issue people on all sides of the american political spectrum occasionally wish to break encryption and they say things like well the tech people should just take harder you know they should just make it even more secure but also less secure they just want a magic key that does not exist to solve this and it's not how it works folks but it's not how it

SPEAKER_103: works right if you use multiple devices and apps to run your business you need open phone open phone simplifies your communications with one simple app an open phone has rethought what a modern business phone can be what's magical about open phone is that it works through a simple elegant app right on your existing phone or you can even use it on your desktop i know because we use it here at launch and our sales team loves it and you know what those phone numbers those discussions all those text messages we need those to be on launch phone numbers we don't want those on people's personal phones where if they leave the company it's distracting it's annoying to your sales team as but one example and we love having a shared number for customer support as well we do a little round robin where different people can pick up the one phone number so customers have one number but we can have that phone call go to multiple people on the team so we you know can just have somebody pick up the phone quicker it's that simple answering the phone quickly is a best practice and it makes people love your product or service open phone is already super affordable at just 13 a month my lord that's affordable but twist listeners can get an extra 20 off for any plan the first six months that's incredibly generous just head over to openphone.com twist and what if you have an existing number with another service that you hate well open phone will port them over at no extra cost easy peasy lemon squeezy so head over to openphone.com twist and get a free trial and get 20 off i think as americans

SPEAKER_00: we should be very proud of the fact that technology companies um and the citizenry and by and large

SPEAKER_01: our representatives are in alignment that privacy does matter and um i think we can take that win

SPEAKER_00: despite sax's tweet and the pile on that i experienced this weekend the fact is we are nowhere

SPEAKER_01: near what is going on in the three buckets you have dictatorships on one side you have free countries on the other and then there's a a little bit of gray in the middle you got france clearly is going to be in

SPEAKER_00: that middle uh you have the monarchies uh in the middle east they believe in some amount of you know encryption some places don't um you know and it's just gonna be a jurisdiction thing just like a lot of topics folks drugs abortion right to choose you know guns yeah i was talking to one of my daughters

SPEAKER_29: about guns and she's like i wish we lived in a country that didn't have guns i said me too but it's

SPEAKER_144: not changing so your choices are move to australia or the nordics and have no guns or you know be an american and you're gonna have guns yeah this is the way it is the guns out of the nation there's too

SPEAKER_47: many of them and the second amendment's pretty high up it's number two it's kind of hard to change you start reading the list and you get to it pretty quickly you had a question for me though i i i before i cut you off i just wanted to clear i wanted to get it off my chest here because i i'm actually proud of america writ large tech everybody has seemed to aligned with privacy good it's great news it makes me incredibly happy take the win we still have to beat back the occasional

SPEAKER_15: group of senators or house members when they introduce yet another one of these bills but we'll just keep doing and we'll keep winning you though so my stance here is definitely encryption is worth it it's a human right you can you privacy is a human right encryption enables that so we must have it where do you stand on the balance between encryption and security because you you set it up but

SPEAKER_29: then i don't think you gave us your yeah i mean i'm a personal thing i'm for encryption i'm for

SPEAKER_00: privacy um and i am for law enforcement having uh with subpoenas with judges having other tools in order to make this happen and there are other tools if you look at the january 6 i'm not gonna use the word insurrection i'm just gonna say rioters the oath keepers um the proud boys

SPEAKER_29: all of their signal um chats were in their um you know guilty verdicts when they went to court and

SPEAKER_01: they said it very clearly they were there to carry out an insurrection they were there to take over the

SPEAKER_29: government they were there to overturn the election now they could be dipshits ineffective lunatics

SPEAKER_103: you know fine you can have that argument but all of their stuff was uncovered and they their intent was very clear you can't connect it to trump sure fine i don't think trump told them to to do it explicitly but they did want to do it now you have to ask yourself well how did they how do they have their signal how do they have all their encrypted stuff pretty simple folks you have somebody who joined the proud boys who is in law enforcement or you have somebody who's in the proud boys that law

SPEAKER_29: enforcement got to and said hey come here buddy we got you we got you on the heroin we got you on the opioids we got you on this we got you on that here's what you're going to do for us you're either going to jail for 20 years for the opioids or you're going to take this phone and you're going to take your other

SPEAKER_103: phone and you're going to take a picture of your signal or a screenshot or whatever you know pretty straightforward the comments on the screen it's going to go away in an hour you can just take a picture of it so law enforcement has a lot of opportunities they could put a little camera up there and then three other ones on the bookcase and when you have your phone out it can see over your shoulder pretty clearly so they have lots of ways law enforcement to with a subpoena with a warrant to get your

SPEAKER_00: information and your friends in your group chat when you're doing stupid stuff are going to flip so

SPEAKER_33: law enforcement still has a lot of options and so i'll go and by the way how many terrorist attacks since 9 11 have been thwarted thwarted and how many have occurred the number of people who have died

SPEAKER_105: in terrorist attacks on u.s soil has been less than bee stings today the number of people who will die with bee stings this week is much bigger than the number of people who have died since 9 11 a terrorist

SPEAKER_00: attack which means we should be so proud of law enforcement and they don't actually need to crack signal in order to do their jobs i don't think they need it it would be nice i'm sure but they don't

SPEAKER_15: need yes so we can have to your point of secure nation and strong encryption now on the point you brought up about someone being part of a group leaking things and so forth there was a really interesting article in 2020 from wired and that essentially people were like look i don't know if telegram is compromised or if it's just completely full of uh russian state agents but people were getting picked up um before doing things that they had talked about in telegram so there was some concern about

SPEAKER_35: that again so we're speculating we don't we don't have tinfoil hats on but we are speculating here i mean i've always believed the tour network um you know yes is compromised i think it was built by i think bitcoin and tour there is a non-zero chance that those projects satoshi is the cia okay tour was built by the cia or fbi you you might think i'm crazy but do can you tell me alex that

Chamath Palihapitiya: you think it's a zero percent chance that they have either compromised or created those two things

SPEAKER_15: no tour tour tour i i'm not going to cope with it all i'm just in my head imagining how many heads in the world of cryptocurrency would literally explode if it turned out that it was the government

SPEAKER_35: government the government compromised it in year one let's say like let's say that the government

SPEAKER_00: knows the this is satoshi these are the two other people they went to them and said hey this is going to be the greatest honeypot of all time we don't need a back door we're just going to monitor it we're going to sweep 40 of the coins so if this thing does blow you know anything's possible here and if you look back at the history of the cia you know you look back at the history of musad fbi everybody in between mi6 like their capabilities are strong yes your capabilities are

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SPEAKER_00: so independent of you know this issue of encryption the united states has done an amazing job law enforcement's done an amazing job the public uh and so have our representatives and you know there's been a couple of

SPEAKER_29: failures on the margins i think of private companies and maybe we should talk about private

SPEAKER_188: company failures uh i think lava comes up but you had another point perhaps well yeah we'll get to

SPEAKER_15: lava a bit in a second but i just i'm annoyed by the the kind of bad faith takes about the situation because people were popping off pretty quickly um with their own political priors as the jumping off point about what's going on what happened without knowing and you know i i get that everyone on social media are not journalists and so they just kind of do whatever they want and that's fine and you could even argue that social media rewards people who are first and wrong if they're allowed um but i i do think the conflation of different issues around the world to make a political point that matches up with your own views is a little bit cheap and a little bit hacky especially about an issue that matters so much to me which is freedom of speech so i just i just want to say let's all do our best here you know

SPEAKER_08: i've enjoyed coming to your ted talk thank you no i mean partisans will take any piece of information

SPEAKER_00: put it into their partisan filter and then try to get a a win from it i think what we're trying to do here is maybe have a nuanced discussion the fact is france very different than the united states united states let's go through the instances where the government has actually shut stuff down because i

SPEAKER_35: i'm acting in good faith and a person of nuance and somebody was a former journalist said i wonder what i'm missing so i asked chat gpt and i asked the lazy web on twitter two best places for me to go to collect some information and the overwhelming feedback i got of things the government has shut down

SPEAKER_105: explicitly were back page and silk road and then i got a couple of people who said lava bit

SPEAKER_00: uh under duress shut down those are the only three i don't know if you found any in the research of things being shut down but let's talk about those and how those are distinctly different than

SPEAKER_15: i message or whatsapp sure so silk road was the i'll go ahead and say infamous uh early crypto marketplace for the buying and selling of various things it was the place to get drugs for a long period of time um it was also the place you could get a hitman and uh eventually ran afoul of the law i mean to me if you're running ebay for drugs uh you're going to get in trouble and that's nothing to do with free speech that has to do with just breaking the law and i think we learned a lot about back to your point about bitcoin being a honeypot which is that not everything in the world of web 3 is actually entirely anonymous so to me that does not fit into the rubric that you mentioned

SPEAKER_00: yes the the silk road was a marketplace on the dark web explicitly to do illegal things there was no

SPEAKER_103: legal platform nature to it you could say it was a platform a marketplace is i guess a platform but if it was for legal things it would be etsy and craigslist and ebay those legal things exist in

SPEAKER_00: the world are amazon third party sellers why would you go through the dark web to now if you feel drugs should be legal and decriminalized which i do in almost all cases except for the super drugs fentanyl and meth i think those drugs should be in a different category i think the other one should be regulated decriminalized cleaned up and otherwise made um you know less dangerous for people who are addicted and

SPEAKER_132: you know whatever we could have and i think it should all be reclassified as well uh no complaints there

SPEAKER_197: yeah the most i mean the dark web people were putting hits on people i think that was proven

SPEAKER_29: so and and hacking people so you could go on those and like literally say i want to harass this person

SPEAKER_00: put a dead fish on their doorstep for a bitcoin you know and people would do that uh it was it was a

SPEAKER_15: wild time it was also very early on in the in the in the web3 era if you will so not really something

SPEAKER_19: that's talked about too much lately then there was back page uh which was essentially prostitution ads and prostitution is probably illegal in the united states and it got shut down now there is a lot of

SPEAKER_15: arguments to be made from sex workers that uh i'm going back into my memory bucket here that shutting down back page led to less safe working conditions for sex workers and it's perfectly valid argument to make um but that doesn't have to do with what the law is and the law says no and it got shut down and again not really free speech if you're committing felonies so that to me is not a good example lavabit is i think the the one that does stick out to me as a possible point of weight so if you go back in time edward snowden he used that service for email so when he dropped all of his documents the ceo of the law of the email service got a couple of knocks on his door as you might expect

SPEAKER_00: so lavabit was a secure email service like what's the one that all the journalists use protonmail so

SPEAKER_90: if you use protonmail if i have encryption on my side you have encryption nobody can get that message

SPEAKER_15: correct that's my understanding of how it works and it's why i chose to use it so i really hope that we have that right but what happened was he essentially lawyered up and was like whoa you know i'm gonna try to figure out what's going on here and then the sheer weight of government expectation about what he would do what he had to do but how do you get to follow up was so great he said i'm not going to do it i'm out and then later on i think was relaunched in some capacity but essentially the government leaned on a very small company and it decided to just fold and evaporate versus try to comply with the um the demands uh that is that is a disappointment i think because think about the other people on that service and the possible cyber security issues and just freedom of communication and so forth that that makes me sad to go back through it and reread um i hope that we do better in the future but there's not a history here to your earlier point of encrypted applications being banned in the united states and so to me it has not happened tick tock is not a reasonable example one tech executive being arrested in france does not mean that this entire experiment in human communication is over and it means nothing to do with rumble which was thrown in there for

SPEAKER_29: reasons that confuse me well i think they're on the right i think partisans who care very much

SPEAKER_00: about their political party winning on both sides obviously um i think on the right feel under assault because of what happened on twitter with the shutting down of a lot of right wing and

SPEAKER_29: that's a private company if a private company decides they want to have real names as one example like linkedin does or facebook requires real names um or if they don't want people talking

SPEAKER_00: about politics which threads has said any political discussion is going to be downranked by the algorithm and then in other places it might you know x might be upranking uh political discussions uh okay those are just private company choices that hasn't to do with your individual sovereignty um now it is could you could consider it censorship but it's private censorship in the same way a private company might say you're

SPEAKER_40: not allowed to come in here and stand up on the restaurant table and i was just about to say yeah you

SPEAKER_215: know give your speech about whatever you know um so there's a pizza store near my house and they have

SPEAKER_119: the community wall they have um i live near universities there's like join a study and

SPEAKER_15: poetry reading and you know a play from some kids and you know local magazines and such uh that's not a free speech forum because they are allowing that space for people who don't abuse it but if they take down requests for hits on that i think if i said i'm gonna kill the mayor of providence and put a poster up that offering fifty dollars i'm pretty sure it wouldn't last they might take it down so you would be censored the man would be censoring you yes there's a conflation of corporate power and private corporate power and public government action that i think is particularly pernicious because people blend the two to confuse people who aren't familiar with the distinction and that to me is poor stewardship of an audience now jason you and i could say that we think that private companies should have different moderation approaches that they should have less active algorithms and that they should let people have more unweighted discourse on their services but i believe the market would tell us to go build our own dang service as opposed to complaining about what someone else is doing because you know what meta wants to do it wants to make money lots of it yeah i think

SPEAKER_00: that's the beginning and end of it and then you know they this was tried in florida they did this social media censorship law sb 7072 that i think made its way to the supreme court and got a bunch of

SPEAKER_29: legal challenges it may have gotten sent down to a lower court but you know they they wanted to define

SPEAKER_00: at scale social networks as having a different private company rule set right so once you hit x number of users you can't ban somebody interesting um because you did see people disappear you could take somebody you know independent of how you feel about him i knew him when he was an independent journalist milo yiannopoulos who kind of went he went kind of i mean i knew him when he was like a guardian he might have worked at tech crunch for a hot minute uh back in the day but he i met him once yeah back in

SPEAKER_29: london he was a tech journalist in london you know and and was considered like you know flamboyant and and effervescent and cheeky then he went like full nazi and was like you know got a little bit strange

SPEAKER_00: there towards the end and then somehow wound up with kanye but he was banned across all platforms now

SPEAKER_29: there is something to that which i am sympathetic to which is if you could be banned on youtube twitter facebook uh rumble you know linkedin everything sure you have no voice in the world i'm also sympathetic

SPEAKER_01: to those platforms not wanting to have somebody i'm putting him aside who's a nazi on their platforms

SPEAKER_00: and and substack had to deal with this substack is a free speech platform they really care about free

SPEAKER_40: speech but then somebody was like hey i'm going to search for the word nazi or white supremacy and i'm going to find the long tail of like i don't know five newsletters they found i think casey found

SPEAKER_29: like five newsletters that were yeah kind of nazi kind of white supremacist and he took his custom

SPEAKER_15: somewhere else i mean he made a business decision based off a business decision private companies deciding when to do business with one another of their own free will based on the rules and policies of the other company is not free speech it is business but how do you feel about the at scale

SPEAKER_35: censorship and like nuking of a person this happened trump this you know in the in the most canonical

SPEAKER_40: example he was taken off of twitter facebook and youtube i mean that's kind of like a death sentence for a political candidate and you know looking back on that do you have any thoughts on it oh i mean the

SPEAKER_15: general concept worries me because one concern that i have and this brings up you and our favorite topic antitrust and lena con but it does seem that they're in the hands of just a handful of corporations there is an enormous amount of control over what people see and consume and just to put this into kind of gen z gen a is it gen a generation alpha sure why not sure let's do let's go with that the kids and the younger kids they use youtube like television yes so youtube is essentially cable all in one platform which means that it has enormous power and it does concern me that people can be bounced off these platforms because it's not like you can go to youtube and knock on the door and be like hey can we sit down and have a chat about this no you got bounced by an algorithm that just said no to you and there's no customer support so it does seem to be a bit too powerful and that's why you know i like uh more competition in the marketplace more space for ideas i go beef with

SPEAKER_60: rumble other than the fact that so far it's been a terrible business but um and their martyr complex is pretty frustrating but it's good pr for them so i kind of get it no but it worries me but yeah you

SPEAKER_00: know what should what should happen with trump do you think if you if you were in charge what would you have done you have january 6 occurs people are pretty scared like hey this could have been

SPEAKER_40: you know many people could have died instead of like the one woman who died

SPEAKER_00: um you know those police officers well they they kind of died afterwards suicides or or other issues but not in on that day but you know when i talked to a number of law enforcement in my family they said hey you know we should have just unloaded you know like when people start beating up cops you unload the clip

SPEAKER_119: i'm amazed that people got away with what they got away with there because i've seen people shot for

SPEAKER_00: uh one thousandth of a percent of that you know like literally you'll have people go into their like pocket and the police are like take your hand out of your pocket you refuse to take your hand out of your pocket you get shot pretty straightforward like cops gotta protect themselves here you got cops being beaten crushed in the door and they don't unload i was like whoa that is some incredible thank god but like some incredible um you know restraint thank you so you know i thought the trump thing should have been a temporary ban i think it should have been like a whatever 30 day cool off like let's figure out what happened here and i i don't the permanent ban i thought was weird how do you permanently ban the president or former president you know without a trial or whatever i just thought it should have been like hey maybe 30 days we have a cool off and we talk about it

SPEAKER_15: 30 days for inciting an insurrection as mitch mcconnell kind of detailed in romney uh 60 days for i mean i don't you end up with a weird hierarchy or if i was in charge of it i would have just said he's very annoying and i don't want him on my service but this goes back to the point of it's a little weird that single points of power have so much control over the discussion and that's why i'm in favor of more free platforms around the internet to prevent corporate powers which we have

SPEAKER_40: less redressed to telling us what we can and can't say uh because youtube by the way i mean they're so powerful that i think they had to take a deep look in the mirror when this one mentally disturbed woman got her videos demonetized she bought a gun she drove to the youtube campus in san bruno and she shot the place up and she killed some people so with great power comes great responsibility and this idea that you can just turn people's accounts off turn off their monetization i think that's a big

SPEAKER_00: major learning for these platforms which is hey you're kind of turning off an entire person's life if you turn off their account like this and in the case of a mentally disturbed person you know they they might come and do something incredibly damaging and dangerous so it just proves how powerful these

SPEAKER_56: platforms are we have to move on but one thing that's also by bipartisan is the uh people want to

SPEAKER_15: diminish section 230 protections for companies this allows them to essentially decide what is possible and not possible on their platforms and ironically it's bipartisan from two different angles but there is a an attempt to limit corporations abilities to make decisions like this to me that's the that that's that's uh a cure that's worse than the illness if that makes sense

SPEAKER_262: yeah but um we'll talk about that let's go lightning round we've got some good data here to go

SPEAKER_15: through and as we wrap up so yeah first up we're talking about secondary sales jason the news item is that g squared has raised 1.1 billion dollars for its new secondary fund okay four billion dollars under management the quote that stuck out to me was from larry ashbrook do you know him i do not i do not know g squared oh all right then well here we're both learning then so larry said that he can quote buy shares in the secondary market at about a 30 discount to a company's value and at 70 to 80 discount to the prices paid back in 2021 basically rolled up a whole bunch of money he's going to go out there and buy stakes from you and other vcs uh to me is the amount of money here at play

SPEAKER_203: 1.1 billion dollar funds enormous especially if you're buying discounted stakes so thoughts this is

SPEAKER_29: uh a great sign that the market is in the late stages perhaps even uh past the end of the bottoming out when people see an opportunity like this that they can and the greed is there you know there's

SPEAKER_00: blood in the streets things are marked off 70 from their peak 30 from their recent valuations that means an opportunity has emerged and people want to start buying and you know we saw that two years ago when i started j trading i was like this makes no sense like uber at 20 facebook at 90 like

SPEAKER_29: these valuations don't make sense to me this feels once in a lifetime and i just took uh you know a

SPEAKER_00: little bit of money and uh just started buying up shares didn't make it entertaining here on the

SPEAKER_40: podcast and then i but my goal was always to hold them for tenure to see how they would do and see if i was good at buying at the bottom and sure enough i beat nancy pelosi in the mark the point is that's

SPEAKER_35: what's happening here some smart person is saying the opportunity to invest in the next set of new companies that might be great but i see another opportunity that i think is better so instead of 1.1 billion to the next cohort of companies like i'm doing and many vcs are doing he's saying the last

SPEAKER_00: cohort of companies i can you know do a little bit of math and kick the tires and find some great opportunities in the last vintage or the last two vintages and i think that's wise because i'm looking at the last two or three vintages and our first two funds and saying you know what there's some winners in here that are undervalued and i'm not getting secondary offers for them and the only secondary offers i see anecdotally are from employees who need to sell so i will get an email

SPEAKER_29: sometimes hey do you want to increase your position in x y and z and i say okay who's selling what are they sounds oh it's common share i say okay it's not preferred it's common okay those common shares are coming from an employee okay what are they selling for and then i look at what the preferred price is and i'm like oh that's interesting thanks for the information put it in a spreadsheet i have it just

SPEAKER_112: for my own knowledge and um you know we're not buying anymore i'm certainly not buying common because

SPEAKER_00: that's behind the preference stack but yeah here is a great opportunity and i think an even better opportunity might be for the companies to buy back these shares you know if it's that low why not raise money as a company and say we're going to get we're going to raise some money to buy back some

SPEAKER_112: shares right and then clean up the cap table so lots of opportunities this is a very bullish sign for me for private market companies and inspires me to keep working on the twist500.com really

SPEAKER_56: really interesting yeah and just a last data point here these have become a lot more popular so if you

SPEAKER_15: go back to 2013 there's about 28 billion dollars worth of trades in the secondary market that rose to about 134 billion according to william blair in 2021 and they were expecting this year to come in roughly the same so lots of transactions lots of private kind of capital in motion something to keep an eye on and to me jason this is just the ipo market is trash people are desperate for time or money and uh time's running out so we'll see what happens next two other firms doing it is stepstone

SPEAKER_00: and industry venture so those two are two of the other big names stepstone industry ventures are are pursuing this strategy as well very smart okay next next up is uh just the end of

SPEAKER_15: uh a big project for the ibm in china we have talked about the china trade and how that country was at one point the leading light of venture capital for a short period of time and since then has turned away from capitalism and a market economy and has seen things shift dramatically we have a chart here of ibm's revenue in china that i think is incredibly illustrative of the dynamic for american business uh jason the blue bars are their business in china on a percentage basis and then the gray is their overall growth so ibm is growing again but in china it seems one of its sharpest declines and essentially this comes down to china trying to buy more domestic and so ibm's yanking a thousand jobs out of the nation that's a lot that's a big decoupling but here instead of it being geopolitics it seems to be just a straight business decision we're not doing well we're out

SPEAKER_279: yeah and and the i think a lot of these are r d jobs from what i read research and development so

SPEAKER_00: you know it makes also sense on a geopolitical basis um reading into the tea leaves here a little bit perhaps if you're doing r d in china maybe the government wants you to do that a little bit more domestically or in other locations where you're not have where you have maybe a little

SPEAKER_283: more respect of ip intellectual property so you know the decoupling continues um we probably coupled a

SPEAKER_29: little too much uh with china and created too many dependencies so investments over there no vcs no private equity investment and now we're seeing the next shoe to drop which is you know services businesses and research and development they're gonna they're gonna be out manufacturing's leaving

SPEAKER_112: um so you know the india and vietnam are the big beneficiaries there and iphone 15 or i know iphone 14 was being made in india i think 15 is going to be made there i kind of got laughed at on all in when i said they're gonna move this all to india and it's like it's actually happening um and india's a thriving growing country that's you know pretty i mean it's not a perfect

SPEAKER_29: democracy by far but it's a much more functional democracy but it is a democracy yeah yeah yeah so

SPEAKER_83: which is very different than how china works very different than how china works where you know if you were investing in all these education companies or alibaba's financial group and you know you can

SPEAKER_112: just have the whole thing just go away um like russia did to pavel with his business like your business

SPEAKER_29: can be seized or shut down just like that so who's investing in a market where some god king can come in and just be like it's hard enough with competition coming in you know and fighting the competitors or incumbents to have the government come in and just pull the plug that's kind of rough

SPEAKER_15: on the on the india point actually they're now going to manufacture the next iphone pro series i think before they were doing the lower tier iphones now i think they're expanding into the highest tier as well which means that if the chinese market closed tomorrow that they would still be able to at least for a time keep making iphones which is something that i don't think people five years ago thought was possible at all but it turns out where there's a will and a couple hundred billion

SPEAKER_63: dollars in the bank jason there's a way shockingly enough i'm just reading here some notes um 25

SPEAKER_284: of the world's iphones are built in india now wow yeah now i think a lot of those to your point

SPEAKER_40: were the earlier generation but you know the fact that the gap between the new it the latest and greatest

SPEAKER_00: and the at scale ones it's closing speaks volumes and um this is where you know we do need to think about the decoupling there are there are good aspects to decoupling because there was too much dependency like being able to get masks and drugs and stuff like that out of china during the pandemic

SPEAKER_29: that's a little troublesome and ships if they invade taiwan but also the dependencies uh the code dependencies can make for a good marriage we're like hey all right we have a mortgage and we have

SPEAKER_00: three kids like we shouldn't get divorced we should we should try to stick this out and go to therapy i'm afraid right now this uh this could lead to hey just straight up it feels like we're in a divorce with china like it's irreconcilable differences i wonder if that is good for society um would be better that businesses were maybe still functioning in china but i think it's largely china's

SPEAKER_56: decision yeah i i don't think it's us i mean america i mean we only ended up so overly coupled

SPEAKER_15: because so many international businesses wanted to do business there because it was efficient and cheap and high quality and all those things and it turns out that's not going to last the way this was put to me um i forget where i read this but someone said it was never going to last that the entire world put its manufacturing on one coast of an autocratic nation and when you think about it that way yeah that was never going to last lasted for a long time now two quick things to get to our last story here one india going back to the point about encryption don't forget they've been in a fight with whatsapp about the encryption in that service so another another country another government another democracy doing some stuff and then also uh in china this week there was the world robot conference and here's the stat that blows my mind cnvc reported that beijing claimed 27 humanoid robots debuted at the event which was a record now we've talked about on the show for the twist 500 companies like one x and figure and attronics and cobot and these other companies that are building humanoid robots we've also talked about china evs industrial over capacity and production and it seems that what we have seen in evs jason is now being replicated to some degree in humanoid robots but personally i'm kind of excited because if there's that many new ones that's a lot of competition and competition yields great results

SPEAKER_84: so bring on the robots i think this is going to parallel the what we saw with the darper challenge

SPEAKER_00: people don't know the darper challenge fence industry here in the us put a challenge out for self-driving it was comical and bad it was kind of laughable and when you watch optimus or humane or any of

SPEAKER_188: these robots with the exception of boston dynamics doing backflips you know it does feel like you're

SPEAKER_40: dealing with like uh a drunk toddler and it's gonna just like the self-driving cars look like a drunk

SPEAKER_00: toddler was driving them and as we go from drunk toddler to sober toddler to teenager distracted teenager to focus adult professional you know with a cup of coffee in them um you know the world's going to get a lot better and you know the self-driving we're seeing i use fsd every day number of interventions for me probably one every 20 minutes um it's not bad and uh you know when it's a highway

SPEAKER_35: it's zero now highway also is high stakes because you're going fast and if you get an accident you're

SPEAKER_40: dead so it's pretty good that it's perfect and you know i'm only talking about teslas here and then you

SPEAKER_00: know when you get to weird lecterns or unmarked roads or you know in a city people doing weird stuff that's when i find myself disengaging is i get into some weird you know area um and it's not clearly labeled or it's a three-way stop and i think that's just time i think it's just time and getting those

SPEAKER_35: edge cases ironed out but i was very very it's not on the docket today but i'm very encouraged that uber did a cruise deal um and that's a big deal uber has waymo already and uber has the byd

SPEAKER_00: dlm still a shareholder in uber i mean i have i did sell some uh with tomasi yosh some back in the day

SPEAKER_29: but i'm still long because i do think once this technology hits full deployment which is going to take a decade i'm sure you also have to build the cars uh i think the market for ride sharing goes from one less than one percent of rides we calculated 250 million a week less than one

SPEAKER_103: percent of rides in the united states i think it grows to 20 percent so then your question is

SPEAKER_29: if it does grow to 20 percent in 20 years like let's say it adds a percentage point every year which would roughly be double you know it's from for now um how much of that does uber capture versus the competitors and if it captures any amount of it it's going to be a huge business i mean if it goes from one to five percent and the other fifteen percent goes to other players uber's still a huge like a ginormous business a business for the agent so i i do think it's a trillion dollar company and i

SPEAKER_112: do think tesla waymo and byd will become trillion dollar companies i think there'll be five trillion dollar companies in soft driving i honestly believe that um and young people don't seem to

SPEAKER_304: want to have driver's licenses so well that's wow man don't get me started about that that means they're too friendly with their parents i could not wait to get the hell away from mine that you know

SPEAKER_00: what parents are giving their kids uber um teenager accounts now they have a teenager account so when your kid gets in the car you can um see your child going somewhere you get alerts that they got dropped

SPEAKER_40: off safely all that stuff and then those rides i believe are automatically recorded and then the

SPEAKER_35: recording is done so if somebody were to start talking to your child it would be recorded on both their phones right so there's like this um agreement that if you pick up children and you want those rides i think you have to somebody will correct me but i think there's a lot more monitoring and

SPEAKER_19: that's fine because you're in someone else's car you're part of a service but i mean when i was 16 17 i wanted to get in my car and drive out of my parents line of sight yes because once i was

SPEAKER_160: out of their line of sight they didn't know what i was doing i was what was your first three

SPEAKER_15: uh i had a i had a roughly 10 year old bmw 318 ti which is the little hatchback bmw little teeny four-cylinder engine tinted windows it was so much fun that i i was i mean because once you can go away you can leave and then you don't have to be there anymore your parents can't tell you what to do

SPEAKER_178: that's what i don't get about kids these days is uh they're like friends with their parents like what

SPEAKER_279: that blows my mind yeah well they're not part of it here let me show you uh here i'll show you my

SPEAKER_29: first car i should go buy this car let's see let's see 1973 mustang grande hardtop with vinyl so that was vinyl that leather it's like vinyl and it was mustard gold um kind of color and that's a 351 cleveland it's all you see the front of the car yeah it's as big as the rest of the car

SPEAKER_103: yeah it's all engine and when you would hit the gas on this thing man the front of the car went up

SPEAKER_330: it was so powerful rear wheel drive i presume yeah i mean it was there's a 351 cleveland and it was

SPEAKER_112: bonkers uh and yeah there is 351c four barrel i think mine came with a two barrel and i just upgraded it to a four barrel but yeah so there's a two three um incredible car uh i should buy one i mean i always wanted to have a convertible version of it it was beautiful the 1970 and 1973 was the end of the muscle car era questions we'll do one or two yeah so the the two that are most interesting to

SPEAKER_19: me um one's from austin hill one's from jb they bring up two other companies that might fit under the rubric of shutdowns and so i'll just throw these at you and get your feedback so austin says kick messenger k-i-k uh was shut down by the u.s government it was a vc-funded canadian company and it was sued but i think it was sued over its cryptocurrency work and then i think if memory serves they shut down the messaging app to focus on the crypto side of things so i don't think that falls jason under your rubric of shutdown for encryption purposes no i don't think it was um i

SPEAKER_35: think they did have a legal battle but that was with the sec over kin so they were doing the shenanigans and that i mean and to just do a callback you know we don't know how pavel was making money but he was making a fortune from telegram apparently and so if money is flowing and illegal activities are

SPEAKER_00: occurring and the government connects those in some way fairly or unfairly that kind of changes things so keep that in mind and i think that's where the silk road and the back page stories might be interesting parallels here we have to wait for the court cases and the details but if pavel was benefiting from these horrible things they're alleging were occurring and those people were paying in some way or he was monetizing in some way and they can connect those that's the big problem as i said that would be that

SPEAKER_15: would be huge and then uh the other idea that jb brought up was uh dark wire which was the fbi's encrypted cell phone company but that was the fbi creating a fake encrypted app to catch criminals that wasn't them shutting down a legitimate app so to me related still interesting still interesting yeah well very interesting yeah yeah here's the thing if anyone comes to you online offered to do something bad for you don't say yes because it's probably the government trying to trap you now i have lots of thoughts about entrapment but that's not this conversation uh and then finally to jacal uh right is right at the end here uh what is the real reason do you believe is why tell ah i'm gonna translate jason what do you think is the real reason why telegram's ceo was arrested well i think we've kind of hit that as best we can i mean i think we i think i'm gonna go with you that there's

SPEAKER_29: more to the story here than meets the eye because we are a little confounded about why now

SPEAKER_00: and the confusion as to what's happening being illegal or not so there's something else at play is what my spidey sense says based on our 50-minute discussion of the entire space what do you think

SPEAKER_15: hard agree there's going to be more that comes out about this uh there's a lot of interesting things national security baton token which is the telegram associated cryptocurrency lots of things to dig into as long as strong encryption makes it out the other end i'm happy if pavel is innocent then may

SPEAKER_25: he also walk free and quickly uh but guys i think we need to wait about 24 more hours and then we'll have a lot more information because every single newsroom is working on this if we're thinking about

SPEAKER_40: this like a hand of poker which is kind of how i look at everything in life um it's that bad the

SPEAKER_00: addiction you know the whole cards was him being arrested those are our two cards we know those he was arrested by the french coming off his plane for this moderation issue the flop were the charges that just came down and we're just sort of examining the flop right now right so we got to put those two things together what are our whole cards what's the flop the turn in the river will come out during the case if there is in fact the case there's going to be a turn there's going to be a river there's two more cards and those two could have a dramatic impact on what's happening here and we'll be here

SPEAKER_40: for you uh subscribe to this week in startups on youtube hit the bell we go live two or three times a week we're trying to get to three times a week because we know you love when alex and i do news

SPEAKER_00: go to twist500.com and look at those 500 private companies uh we're going to do some sort of an event around them uh and we're gonna have a really fun time uh building out that list we're trying to add you

SPEAKER_40: know uh you know a couple dozen companies a week uh to twist 500 and there's a newsletter for twist 500 in the mornings at three in the afternoon will be paid we're going to try to profile all those so we're looking for a full-time journalist researcher here uh over time hopefully in austin to be in an

SPEAKER_112: office with me if you're interested email alexw at launch.co and send a writing sample yeah more to

SPEAKER_56: come on that uh actually i just finished our media plan jason and uh everybody will be live later

SPEAKER_15: this week we have some special stuff coming up see you then bye bye