Video URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1M7XlYySnM
[Music] what's up man how are you thanks for having me john my pleasure to be here it's always interesting to meet somebody that you only know from their tweets you know i only know you from your tweets which i found very interesting and then i started reading your book or listening to your book where another person reads it and i've seen some interviews with you so i thought it'd be fun to have you in there cool a little chitchat great thanks for having me joe my pleasure so you just got back from ukraine yeah i know i'm totally throwing a wrench in the agenda no we're supposed to talk about cancellation or whatever but yeah i for a bunch of reasons i just up and went to poland and ukraine to see what was going on there so this was just your own idea to just take a trip not totally one of the gigs i have i have a gig at a dc think tank and one of my colleagues who's done like real in the field correspondent work before proposed a trip and a bunch of people expressed interest and i'm basically the only one who didn't wimp out and and went with them so it's just you and this one guy and we had you know drivers and fixers and stuff because i don't speak any slavic languages and you basically need it to sort of navigate that world and also in a wartime economy regular transport doesn't work so you need to get around somehow and so we did have we tended to have a driver usually so what is that conversation like so when someone says hey let's go to ukraine yeah like what was the goal was it just to see it firsthand was it to get is there any information that you can get when you're on the ground that would sort of clarify the situation for you yeah i mean we can get into this but i think the view that you see of ukraine from the united states i think is so blinded by both american domestic political you know priorities and the whole the whole kaleidoscope that is the twitter experience i felt you have to go there
to see the real thing and um you know it's it's history with a capital h in the sort of you know francis fukuyama sense of you know this is this is a real this is a real invasion the likes of which we haven't seen in europe in whatever 70 plus years and it's just something that i've lived in europe i have an eu passport so i feel a little bit european in that regard so i think i engage with the story a little bit differently maybe that americans do and so i felt i just had to go there and see it for myself so when you went there was this idea related at all to business to your oh no no no so this was just for your own edification well i did i i i am doing a story so there's um there's a publication that i occasionally put stories to called tablets a jewish magazine um the israelis are doing a bunch of stuff on the polish border to get jews out and so there's a whole jewish angle to the story and then also just so i have a sub stack which i should probably plug i guess the pull request uh what is it the the pull request poll p-o-l yeah p-u-l it's like a nerdy term yeah yeah yeah p-u-l a pull request is like when a coder is actually coding a piece of software it's like they request that the main codebase pull from them and so it's like saying hey read my [ __ ] and like integrate it with your [ __ ] oh and so in some sense it's like it started as a similar to my book like i so i i've worked in tech for a long time i've had a whole career in the advertising industry i was an early member of facebook's ads team which is what the book is about which we'll probably get to and um the thought was i wanted to give a perspective on tech from the insider perspective rather than the outside perspective and from there it's gone into religion culture and then now even geopolitics as my interests kind of meander through the world so um so you went there partly to write about it for your substance but i mean the only reason you can justify going right because again and this is it's funny this is one of the things i almost if it hadn't been for this and also this other consideration i probably would
have pushed on to keeve actually um really yeah yeah yeah but but your producer like i emailed him from ukraine and he's like dude like i'm here like it's hard to get out like can we do this dude during zooming he's like no absolutely not and i briefly considered i i wasn't really gonna do it but i briefly considered just going to kiev and then pulling the power move of like i'm in kiev i cannot leave we have to do it well we would have to do it another time yeah exactly exactly but i didn't want to run the risk of that and i wanted to do the show and so i i started hauling us back it would be interesting to have you on zoom with bombs going off in the background though would it suck if you died on zoom while we're in the middle of our podcast it would suck but i have to say from from the cold hearted you know marketing perspective it'd be great for engagement not for you not for me you're going to capitalize on that yeah so how how many days were you over there for i was there about a week and a half so i spent a lot of time on the polish border so um getting to the serious side of the story which i know we're joking sort of gal's humor but it's a very serious story there's a whole refugee situation going on so about about 10 million ukrainians the u.n has declared are displaced and that means either internally they've moved around ukraine or externally they've left and so a quarter of the country is basically a refugee at this point wow i i know and it's like it's like day 25 or day 26 what is the entire population that's about 40 million so we're talking about 10 million people that are holy [ __ ] over 3 million of which have left ukraine at the last count which is a big number wow and most of them are crossing the border with poland which is the country to the west of it um or romania or slovakia some of the other countries mostly poland and so the trip actually started i flew into warsaw and my first experience of like this is not normal little disneyland europe you go to the warsaw train station which tends to be determinist for a lot of the refugees that come across the border and you know it's it's basically a refugee camp the
the upper floor of the train station um is taken over by families and you know every family has like a blanket maybe half the size of this table and um one of the interesting things about the ukrainian refugee situation is that it's almost all like i'm talking like 80 90 percent women and children the ukrainian government doesn't allow any male from the age of i think 18 to 60 to leave and also many ukrainian males are just volunteering they don't want to leave they want to fight for their country and so whether you're in you know the warsaw train station or whether you're standing as i was standing many times at the actual border watching them walk across it's literally you know a mother in her 20s and 30s with like two or three kids in tow maybe a cat and a carrier with like a little rolly bag and that's it just just picture an unending stream of that walking across the border they're walking because usually they don't well some of them probably did walk to the board of the most desperate ones they usually don't walk they take some conveyance either a train or bus but getting those through the border is basically impossible so they literally abandon however they got there and just walk across how many people are there that are like you that are observing and just witnessing there's a there's a good number of journalists um particularly in the western part of ukraine which is relatively safe you know it wasn't like i was there with bullets flying around me or anything like that you know i was joking with friends like you know i don't know that this is any more dangerous than walking across san francisco's tenderloin to be honest in the scheme of things so it wasn't like that dangerous so but there's a lot of journalists in the western part there are there are some journalists who are in the dangerous parts isn't sean penn there i think yeah i think he's been there this entire time yeah wild yeah but but there's like teams from npr new york times cnn who are doing like real war reporting which i was not doing i know a journalist was killed recently there was more than one yeah there was um
yeah there was a guy who uh i think producer who worked for fox news and then there was a former new york times journalist who was killed and they were on the front line in kiev which is indeed very dangerous and so when you were there you didn't have a specific goal other than to just kind of get a visual and experience it and sort of see for yourself what was surprising i so be clear i did have a goal um as a side thread to me i'm i'm converting to judaism so there's a jewish side to my life and what the israelis are doing so ukraine has something like over 300 000 jews and then you know the plight of what the jews are going on there i think was was one specific intent but you're right that broadly i didn't have a specific intent what what surprised me the most two things i would say um one is again the scale of it like it's it's literally millions of people of leaving and i think again coming from the us europe has reacted to this crisis in a unified just like all-consuming way that i think obviously you don't see here because we're not next door to it but if you if you go to this again let me paint you a picture and i've got a bunch of photos that i'll be posting on my sub stack this week and next week you go to a borders check checkpoint the polish police will only let you go so far unless you're actually crossing which i did eventually you've got this constant stream of again mothers with rolly bags and kids and then you've got basically a refugee camp there of everything from polish boy scouts to jose andres that spanish chef who has all these food programs he has a major presence there every every stop there was basically his world food kitchens whatever it's called serving up food and then those who are ill get tended to and then they have buses going to another larger refugee camp and then there they try to find rides for them and sort of sort sorted out and what's fascinating is that you know the polish state has pretty good state capacities a lot of firefighters police soldiers like there's a lot of but but the actual care for refugees like the food the chocolate bar the kid gets
is mostly or almost exclusively volunteers and ngos and there isn't that much top-down organization like you go there and it's like it's like every little ngo or every little tribe that has some refugees that are coming out like for example the jehovah's witnesses are there so you walk across and there's somebody holding a sign that says jw.org they're not proselytizing i interviewed them they're not proselytizing they're just there for other jehovah witnesses that are coming across and hoping to help them um once again you've got some jewish charities that are helping the jews are coming across everyone i talked to somebody whose child had cystic fibrosis and they have a foundation and they're helping because a lot of the you know people are infirmed and those are the ones hardest hit by war because you've got a you know a 24-hour train ride you've got someone who's ill and needs medical care how do they get out right that can often be difficult so i think that's one big surprising thing and then the other surprising thing was in ukraine itself like i've been in conflict zones before like the west bank north ireland the indian pakistani border you know places where things are a little bit spicy but never in in a country at war and i think you know war in the united states certainly in my life here right has not been a direct experience the u.s has wars we're involved in a bunch of conflicts now your life and my life don't really change right we don't know what that is um we don't have we've never had that experience ukraine is having like you know what klaus switz would call total war the all the resources of the society are motivated towards one goal which is kicking out the russian invaders right and that means that everybody in that society is either fighting at the front lines everyone volunteer every male's volunteered basically supporting those fighters somehow trying to source war material and stuff which is very difficult to source is volunteering in some capacity or is a refugee again a quarter of the population is displaced and so all of society has one goal in mind and it's literally fighting the war
there's very little normal commercial activity um and again i've never experienced that except through history books or films about world war ii well i don't think anybody has right it's such a strange time because it's a time where you're seeing history play out in a way that we didn't think was going to happen again we didn't think there was going to be a a country that like a large superpower that invades another country and you're seeing it on 4k cell phone video broadcast from thousands of phones and all these different viral clips that that you can view online it's so surreal it is it's it's unbelievable um i just thought peace came out that um in kharkov which is a city in the east that's i think ukraine's second largest city it's been encircled and besieged and shot at for weeks now um civilians are basically living in the subways taking shelter and they've been there for weeks and they're just living in the subway it's too dangerous to go up top or the i mean the real if we're rattling off the set of atrocities that are basically happening there's a city called mariopol which is on the sea of azovs on the coast and it's strategically important because it's in between two russian fronts and uh the russians are literally destroying the city they've shelled um a drama theater where people had taken refuge in they've they've bombed the maternity hospital a lot of photos of that came out people are experiencing hell they're i mean there's literally dead bodies in the street and they don't bury them because it's too dangerous to go up top and try to bury them so they just let them rot on the streets it is hell on earth that's happening there um and again as you said it's happening you know it's the first twitter war in which you can actually see these videos in real time and it's and it's not that far away from europe i mean no it's very close it's right there i mean you go from poland which i was in a town called uh shimashell which is a little train junction close to the border very cute very pretty had a little craft brewery you can go there and feel totally within the like euro-american liberal realm of craft beer and
normalcy and legal rights and you know you go a few tens of kilometers east and you are living in a very different world wow yeah yeah it's it's so hard to wrap your head around when you're over here that's right imagine going over there and then coming back here must seem even more surreal it is you know it's it's funny humans can so adjust to things so in so i spent a lot of time mostly in la viv which is a beautiful little town western part of ukraine it used to be considered the safe city in ukraine because it was relatively untouched by the war the night after i left actually the airport got hit with cruise missiles but but before then it was still a fairly open city there'd be airaid sirens every night people would tend to ignore them like i got all freaked out the first time it was like three in the morning and the hotel actually has a basement and they actually have like little beanbag chairs and stuff in there for guests like to hang out in the basement as the airaid sirens go off i did it the first time then i'm like second time like ah come on what are the chances so i just went back to sleep um and again it it sounds crazy but you just get used to that and then coming back it's like wow everything i came back to san francisco and i went to a little hipster coffee shop and you know the little hipster conversations are happening next time it's like and like literally 24 or 48 hours before it was like it started it's like whoa this is weird it's what is normal now seem weird it is weird how humans can adjust right like i didn't go unfortunately for the reasons i mentioned but like i understand that in kiev which is much closer to the front lines and is much more in the [ __ ] people have also settled into some sort of routine right um you know one of the first scenes i saw when i got to la viv and i was a little freaked out right because i was like scared to go to ukraine like because once you cross that border again it's like who knows what's gonna happen i don't speak the language different currency
transport is broken down you're just like there with your little backpack in the western edge of war zone i get there and there's like a couple making out on the street i'm like oh look normal human life continues it's like well life finds a way i think it was you that i've read a quote about you were talking about sebastian younger's book yeah tribe yeah which i loved it's an amazing book but they were talking about which conflict was it were the people sorry sarajevo where they missed it yeah because and i've talked to guys who've served overseas and they have similar stories where there's something about coming back here and hurt locker kind of touched on that a little bit it's like there's something about those experiences of heightened existence where every day is like legitimate life or death and then you come back to the dull grade drone of corporate life and traffic and and they legitimately miss conflict zones yeah it's like that scene in her locker when he goes to buy cereal and he just has her meltdown because he can't deal with what serial to choose i i know it's weird i'll paint you another scene on sunday i was there again walking around life seems normal but then it gets weird fast a bunch of high school kids kind of horsing around you know sunday sunny like what are they doing just like a pile of dirt they're filling up sandbags and piling up sandbags around the statues of lions the lion is a symbol of the city and so they were like singing patriotic songs everyone's doom-scrolling telegram to see the most recent news like oh czech republic promises more aid in the war against the russians or whatever one cheers and then they go back to like filling sandbags and piling up around these statues and it's like man it's kind of weird to have high school kids who can't join you can't volunteer you have to be 18. and so instead they're doing other things like filling sandbags and it's just yeah the the strangest part about this is not just that it's all playing out on social media but it's playing out in social media and it's in it's in a country that used to be connected to
russia just a few decades ago the they all used to be together in the soviet union you know 40 years ago or whatever it was 30 years ago so it's like to watch this all happen on the news and then to be there live what was different about the coverage that you're seeing on mainstream media in the united states versus being there live is there anything any distortions that like clear distortions that we're being that we're seeing here yeah and it's funny coming back it like it really pisses me off i told myself i wouldn't get angry on your show about it because a lot of the twitter rhetoric around the supposed bioweapons labs or you know the ghost of kiev or some of the early memes that happened in the war that were proven to be you know like many online memes not true or exaggerated or whatever or like you know what what would have trump done or not done or how does hunter biden's laptop play into all this and i know those are terribly important signifiers in the american political conversation they're completely meaningless on the crowd in ukraine nobody cares about bioweapons labs no one cares about people get obsessed about what the state department did or didn't do in the revolution that happened in 2000 early on in ukraine and again i think one of the luxuries that we have here in the united states and you know and it is a luxury and it's good in some sense that we have it is the is that we take the outside world and we project it onto our own like domestic political neuroses right and we and we almost think that the outside world is downstream of our domestic political process and that's that's just not true i mean it's true in some cases right and certainly the us has impact on the world overseas but it's just not the case that a lot of the twitter rhetoric you see is is remotely meaningful um that's at a high level another thing i think it missed is like the level like the surprise that met everybody and like i i'll admit i i knew very little to nothing about ukraine before this it's just not a region of the world that
i know much about i don't speak a slavic language i speak other languages in other parts of the world so to me it's very novel together and i have to say i went there with a good helping of ignorance but one thing once i got there i realized man the ukrainians are super nationalistic they see this as their national project right this is this to them is like a nationhood birthing moment like they are committed to remaining free of of russia and i i i'm not a military guy i'm not gonna make predictions about the war i just don't see how the russians can hold such a country um it's huge by the way it's like the size of texas and east to west it's longer because it's kind of a flat country so it's a big country i don't think the russians came with enough guys to sort to actually control most of this country i think most of the country it's funny i was talking a hacker dude like a nerd dude who is like denial of service attacking a lot of russian websites and trying to knock him down there's a whole cyber war going on right you know he's just like this nerdy kid who's like on the anonymous chat channels and like doing all this stuff and he's telling me this whole nerdy walkthrough of how he does it and at the end he just looks at me with a steely glance and goes we will win my fixture my translator lev who um young gal you know university student studying computer science like a college student right very carefree very charming very positive she would enter conversations the same way we will win right there's a level of commitment there that i think the rest of the world certainly putin has underestimated in terms of the ukrainians so do you think that he thought he was just going to go in there and it was going to be like crimea they would sort of roll in and everybody would sort of give up and they would control the state that seems to be the case that it was supposed to be a decapitation exercise in which you know keeve isn't that far from the border i mean it's right it's a few tens of kilometers they would just roll in take out the current government kill zolensky or whatever sideline them
and that would be the end of it and that is absolutely not what's happening when you see the trucks rolling in very obviously on these roads and then you see these guys with missile launchers standing on the sides of the road shooting at the trucks like who planned this this is a terrible place did you think that they were just going to see the trucks and go well we don't want any part of this let's just get out of here it seems like a crazy plant like if you're expecting any sort of resistance that seems like suicide just drive on a very obvious straight path where there's things to hide behind where people are hiding behind it launching missiles at uh armed carriers i mean that seems to be the current ukrainian strategy you don't see a lot of counter-offensive they're not taking back cities because that would require a lot of armor that they don't have but you see a lot of bloodletting and of basically hitting their supply lines behind the front lines in exactly the way that you're saying you've got a bunch of trucks coming with fuel and food and they just annihilate the entire column they just take out the entire column i had mike baker on who was a former cia operative the other day and he was trying to lay out what he knows about it from a foreign policy perspective from his years of service and he was the way he was laying it out was not pretty when he was talking about the the possibilities and the options like how it could possibly play out what what do they think on the ground like do they have an idea of what what could happen or how it could happen i wouldn't claim to know what the russians are thinking i'll say this though no i mean the ukrainians oh how do they think it's going to play out did they do they think there's going to come a point in time where there's enough losses well russia has to decide to either escalate to a nuclear option or leave i think the ukrainian on the street just thinks that they're going to hold out forever and that the entire nation is unified and they're just not going to give in i think that's what the thought
is and by the way who came up with the genius idea the whole ukrainian mud thing by the way having traipsed around western ukraine is real what is that um there's actually a russian name for it that i won't try to pronounce because i'll mispronounce it but there's actually a russian name for mud season in ukraine because it's a very fertile place like it produces enormous amount of of wheat and other crops and um it's just very muddy and so when you have the winter thaw right the ground is this like completely consuming mud that if you step in it you're sucked into your ankle and if you you might wonder like why the russians on the road it seems like totally dangerous because they'll get stuck in the mud otherwise right just oh jesus yeah yeah there's all these videos of like a column of like four t-72s you know up to their tank tracks in mud and they just can't get them out because the mud is that thick and holy [ __ ] it's going to be mud season for for months now right up until summer until it dries out it's a very gray like at night it gets super [ __ ] cold but then it heats up during the day and the mud just turns into ooze and so you can't get off the road right so what the [ __ ] are the russians going to do i don't know i read an article that was saying that they need at least a minimum of 500 000 people if they really wanted to occupy ukraine right so they would have to take 500 000 people out of russia and move them to ukraine to start running things and you'd have to run everything you got to run the utilities you have to run the government you have to run everything and that's more than 2x what they currently i think their original strike force them like 200 000 soldiers so they need a lot more people i think what they're probably going to do and again i'm not a military guy but they're clearly trying to consolidate in the east and join some of their thrusts on some of what they already control between crimea and the donbass which has had a separatist movement for a long time they're obviously trying to coalesce that and i think they're less obsessed with taking kiev in which
they've made no progress that's i stare at the map every day now for weeks and that's that seems to be what's going on but like you said there's always the the odd chance they use either chemical nuclear weapons i think biden yesterday publicly said that the russians are considering chemical weapons i mean that could be a propaganda deploy or whatever but it's in the air um and yeah you get a sen there's a strange sense that the government is about to throw our administration under the bus i get this weird sense that like as more things come out and you know more ridiculous kamal harris videos where she's saying things that make no sense and and biden the the laptops coming out and all this stuff you almost get this like weird sense where they're trying to just re-calibrate and come up with a new strategy opinion running things in the united states like i'm looking at how this is all playing i'm like there's no clear when when he's saying they're about to use chemical weapons or nuclear weapons like what does that mean and what what are the what happens if that happens and then you've got trump saying what i would do i would show them strength and what i would do they wouldn't [ __ ] around with me and you're like this is terrifying like th this our whole situation doesn't have any bright paths there's not like this is what needs to be done you know and this is how the ukrainians can uh bring about peace this is how we resolve this thing between russian ukraine there's no clear path yeah there seems to be no vision there um internally what i can say is that um the the peace you know the sort of the the conversations that have been happening between the ukraine and the russian government is something that's that's followed a lot israel has tried mediating there and so the fact that russians are even at the negotiating table um again i think that the ukrainians are very pragmatic they're not they're not foolhardy but they're definitely
thinking well we could you know we could come to an agreement at the end of this so that could be one resolution to it but then you're still next door to some people that killed tens of thousands of civilians that's right over nothing that's right and then you know the old question of does ukraine join the eu nato i mean that's this is a whole separate threat but i i find it interesting that so many in the u.s i've got i've got a piece coming out and barry weiss's by the way she says hi by the way i love her yeah i know she's been on your show at least once right a couple dumbs couple times yeah yeah so i'm doing a piece for for her based on a twitter thread that's coming out tomorrow um one thing i've i've i don't know how much politics you want to talk about joe but um one thing i've been um disappointed by is that in in the right in the united states right much much like the left right historically really thinks the us can do no no good overseas and at the same time the us is responsible for everything that happens overseas right and so the thought that and you know it could be like metaphorical or literal ptsd about the more recent wars like iraq and afghanistan but um the thought that you know the u.s shouldn't get involved at all and literally can have no positive impact on affairs on the ground in ukraine i find to be very very disappointing and disheartening it's weird that the right wing is the one that's turning kind of anti-us why do you think that is well i mean i think i think some of them like the new right and i don't know what is that what is the new right well i hate naming names because i hate getting into these flame wars um but then you write is like and are you familiar with the national conservatives or the netcon conference people like um surabamari no patrick dineen oh um you know you should have one of them on your show on these days i'm sure they'd be happy to come on um the you write i think is various things it's it's deeply
conservative typically christian right they're super anti-woke right because bloke is like what the whole battle is about um and i they had a conference last year the national conservative conference that i went to people like rodrigo speak there against sarah marie et cetera they look to a traditionalist mode of thought and they feel that um much of modern vocalists crt the pronouns gender all that stuff they think is just you know dangerous degeneracy and we need to abandon it and and some of them and i don't want to speak for them or pretend to speak for them but some of them seem to have at least sympathies for putin's russia right and the fact that he seems to he's anti-woke in some sense that he stands against much of what they dislike about the liberal west that's far far past anti-woke he's anti-gay right i mean it's not it's not just anti-woke it's like there's a what what they're doing over in russia is very different yeah right and the weird thing is even if you are i'm not like a traditionalist conservative although i do have an interest in religion even if you if you did support that like russia isn't that right their church attendance rate is lower than ours their birth rate is even lower than ours like all the ills of modernity in terms of like society falling apart and not having kids and all that stuff that the trads are obsessed with russia suffers from that as much if not more than the west right so to what degree is putin's russia some sort of counterweight to the west i i don't see it i think it's a larp and it reminds me of um i went to berkeley grad school right and again i was not exactly your typical berkeley hippie lefty right and a lot of the my parents are cuban exiles reflecting that's all you need to hear as soon as you talk to people that have fled cuba those are the most republican [ __ ] people and most patriotic people in america that's right oh yeah oh yeah i would you know i was definitely that when i when i was there even now to a certain degree you know they go on about
cuban healthcare and this and that and they're living in berkeley in some like hillside home that's worth a million dollars right and eating in an alice water restaurant it's like bro plain savannah's right there buddy if you want to go live in cuba like off you go yeah and i would say the same for those who lionize you know putin's rush is like bro plane to moscow is right there um but of course they're not talking about the reality of it it's it's a symbol it's a signifier and a domestic you know it's like all these hollywood stars that threatened to move to canada but never did yeah it's like it's a romantic narrative it's romantic narrative that's just it's kind of fake and normally i'd be like who cares but again if you realize the level of human catastrophe that's going on in ukraine in my opinion polluting the discourse around that in a country that could impact that um i'm disappointed by it well there's a thing that happens with the right and with the left where they look at whatever position that the opposite is taking whatever the opposition is taking and they find some way to justify the the you know the opposition of that they they it's it's blind faith in the ideology and you know they use it to ju and they they have these narratives that they all stick to that they know aren't accurate and to say that the other side has a point about anything is to concede some ground to what they think is the enemy right and it's [ __ ] wild tribalism it's it's so strange to watch play out because it's not as soon as you withhold information or distort information because it doesn't suit your narrative then you're living in fantasyland correct and this is one thing that i've seen from both parties from the far left and the far right right and it's it's bizarre to behold because we live in a day where there's unprecedented access to information and yet people are willing to put themselves inside these narrow blinders and adhere to whatever these ideologies subscribe whatever these ideologies prescribe and whatever they whatever the thing is that you have to say in order to signal to the tribe that
you are one of the you know absolutists you're you're there on board you're you're an asset you're you're a part of the right team it's bizarre to see because it's it's really just an advanced form of tribalism enhanced by echo chambers right and it's anti-tribalism you have to be against certain things right so there's this whole meme about the current thing being ukraine because a lot of the people who are part of the kind of liberal borg that supported crt or blm or choose your your woke thing that you hate right are now flying the ukrainian flags and being pro-ukraine right i think it's a little bit it's a little bit of a projection like i don't think it's as in your face as a lot of the work stuff was in the past but sure it is the case that some people have swapped their like other one cause for this cause but it doesn't matter man the ukrainians are still on the right like are you actually an independent thinker are you really just a contrarian [ __ ] right and i think it turns out a lot of voices were not independent thinkers they were just contrarian [ __ ] and so now they've just contrarian themselves into another position without really thinking about it and again like it wouldn't matter if it's just twitter [ __ ] but it's actually like a real war going on yeah that's why it pisses me off well there's there's a weird narrative that you know ukraine is filled with nazis yeah like how many nazis are over there i don't know i i i do believe that i've read on multiple in multiple channels that there is some sort of a problem that they have over there with neo-nazis but that doesn't mean the whole country is filled with nazis and that doesn't mean it makes sense that putin entered right and and invaded and it also it's not the reason why he invaded it's not like he invaded to stop nazis right invaded to control another country right it's a little ironic to try to notify a country whose president and defense minister are both jewish right right right and uh but yeah i mean the the nazi thing in the eastern part of the country is real i mean it's not it's not
the convention but um again i think it's one of those sub-memes in the ukraine thing that gets played up for internal purposes that isn't terribly impactful on the ground when you see people talking positively about russia and positively about putin like and and haven't actually been there like how infuriating is that it drives me out like i said it was like it's like debating hippies about cuba 20 years ago in berkeley it's like dude you're you're talking about an invention like an illusion that you have has nothing to do with reality like that's the weird thing both on left and right the people who actually [ __ ] on america the most and think and think that it's like the shittiest place on earth in my opinion are typically the ones that could never live outside of it are the ones that literally you cannot imagine anywhere else except the american construct right but that's also one of the beautiful things about america is that it allows people like that to form those illusions oh sure i mean they're free to have whatever dumb opinions yeah because you have the freedom to be stupid right you really have the freedom to be delusional and if you want to have the freedom to be incredibly creative and innovative and be a groundbreaking person in whatever industry you choose to advance in you also have to have the freedom to just follow stupid ideas to their [ __ ] event horizon yeah and that's one of the things that makes america kind of cool [ __ ] yeah it really does i mean as as as dumb as people you have to have all of it and you you have to have a lot of that stupid [ __ ] thinking and cult cult-like existences they they have to be there just so you can realize how to take some of your french press please have some it's good stuff dude your coffee game joe is incredible at this place between the turmeric latte and this stuff and then french breasts amazing black rifle coffee it's good [ __ ] oh it's a black rifle that is yeah um so i mean how much has this changed your thoughts about i mean you know people have you have priorities in life you have
things that you think are important and you have to you have this view of the world and then this breaks out and then you go over there and that seems like one of those things that would be a just a complete paradigm shifting moment for someone to experience the horrors of what's actually going on there on the ground yeah so what is that like when you come back and how do you sort of integrate that into this i mean you're a guy who's been a part of startups and tech and you're part of facebook and you wrote this crazy book sort of like burning it all down a little bit a little bit a little bit exposing it a little bit well maybe maybe not that's not even a good way to say it maybe just your own perspective about what that experience is like and it's not entirely flattering what's it like to like now i mean those things seem sort of semi-trivial that's right yeah in comparison right all the things we worry about seem pretty like i think i tweet joke that like zelensky wished that pronouns were his country's biggest problem or that college swimmers were like the burning issue of the day rather than how to source enough like tourniquets so that his soldiers don't lose their limbs um you know it's weird i came back and like i know it's weird to say but getting to your point i'm glad you cited sebastian younger and tribes um i almost missed it because it's so i was like i almost want to go back it's funny i interviewed two people from my step stack uh one guy andre liskovich who's a former uber guy he's ukrainian and he went back when the war started and as many people are he's now like a sorcerer for uh the ukrainian military source not weapons but everything else basically night vision goggles body armor and he's living in uh i won't say where he lives doesn't matter a town close to the action and uh he's he's sourcing stuff for the military another another friend of mine actually former facebook product manager another tech startup dude is in an ambulance crew outside of kiev wow and uh you know he had a very successful startup he doesn't need to be doing this and he you know it hit him hard the ukrainian
cause and he's there and uh his life i mean he he is really risking his life um but that's that's what he's doing wow hundreds of thousands of ukrainians have gone back to fight i mean think about what it would take the sense of loyalty and duty and self-sacrifice it would take for you to go back to the war zone you're already outside you're going back to fight there's a thing about the experience of being a person that was a part of the soviet union that is transferred down to your progeny it's it's it it has to be there's an experience about the history of russia the history of the soviet union if you follow like from world war one and world war ii and just it is a long long history of horror horrible conflict and they're they're prepared for it far more than anyone in the united states like if the united states got invaded by canada you know i mean let's just like maybe mexico excuse me we're invading yeah yeah canada would be very polite about their invading but if like the cartels controlled mexico to the point where they said you know what we have enough military we have enough money we've been selling people fentanyl for so long we're just gonna [ __ ] take over new mexico and take over nevada and take over arizona like how much how many people would fight i mean how many people would flee how many people would stand their ground how many how many mayors and how many world boxing champions like the klitschko brothers who are both and lomachenko too is one of the best boxers alive there's there's so many people that are over there that are these prominent public figures that have flak vests on yeah you know and they're they're over there with bulletproof vests and and they're [ __ ] armed to the tits and they're fighting yeah it's it's a different world you know russia has this long history and the soviet union has this long history all of those countries that were a part of the former soviet union have a long
history of war a long history of conflict yeah and i think that's why a lot of these countries are helping out the ukrainians right because russia was the big bully that dominated that part of the world for many decades and here they are trying to crush another country or in miami for example downtown a lot of the buildings have the ukrainian flag colors and it's like what the hell does miami have to do with ukraine well a lot of cubans whose company you know whose country was behind the iron curtain and was kind of crushed behind the soviet russian boot and they're like what the hell i i think you're definitely on to something there's something about people that come have some sort of tragic history to their family either directly experienced or subconsciously through their family that like like we were on there like my family's had three sets of passports in three generations like there were spanish immigrants to cuba the revolution came they all fled the united states like this business of like leaving with nothing like my father used to lecture me about coming to this country with like literally nothing but three three things in his pocket and so i think that marks you even though i didn't directly experience that to be clear i was born in this country but i think that that marks you in a way and you understand it could also like all we have are like faded photographs of life in cuba and a lot of these ukrainian refugees they're going to go through that exact same experience i'm in the middle of rereading malcolm gladwell's book outliers and there's a part of that about conflicts in the south and honor cultures there's a part about these people that came over from europe and from the uk that were herders and there are these these hurting families and tribes who established these communities in appalachia and all these uh sort of mountain areas who murdered each other at a scale that's one he was talking about there's this one area where there was no more than fifteen thousand people they recorded a thousand homicides
like this is wild [ __ ] and how this mother was saying to this son who was involved in this family feud with this other family they had been murdering each other back and forth he was screaming in agony and she said shut up and die like a man like your brother did and so the guy closes his mouth and just winds up bleeding out and dying in silence because his mother was screaming at him because she wasn't she was so accustomed to people dying from gunshots that her own son dying in front of her the real problem was him being a [ __ ] right which is [ __ ] wild right and sebastian i mean what what sebastian younger talks about in tribes in in in these people that develop these intense bonds with people that they're in conflict with you know that these these states of humanity that occasionally exist when people are in extreme situations where life and death is a daily experience it changes everything it changes the fabric of reality and what it doesn't have when we don't have that for whatever reason is this is the grossest part about humans there's a certain section of society that seeks conflict in the most preposterous ways right and as our societies become softer and softer we get angry and upset about some of the dumbest things possible whether it's pronouns or whether whatever it is that's the the current you know outraged du jour there's we're [ __ ] weird like human beings are very weird that we almost exist in our best state when we are in some sort of life or death scenario yeah i don't know if you've read uh fukuyama's book end of history which is very mischaracterized generally but he has a final chapter in which he has a quote that i think about that more or less expresses what you're saying which is you know humans will struggle for the sake of struggle and if um you know democracy and liberalism won in the previous generation then they'll fight against democracy and against liberalism nothing else for the sake of struggle
because they refuse to live in a world in which heroism in some form is impossible right and that was people mischaracterized that book as he they thought he predicted some sort of liberal democratic utopia he didn't at all in fact he warned that we would tend to revert to non-liberal and non-democratic ways of being just to recapture that feeling and i i do think that there's something about liberal and i mean like little liberalism not like the left of the political spectrum to be clear i think there's something about liberalism that needs an illiberal antagonist to keep it in check it's only when you're fighting against some outside liberal force that in some sense you can maintain the discipline that it takes and without that it tends to degenerate into fights over pronouns or whatever before ukraine happened you know i was talking with a friend of mine about some preposterous woke [ __ ] and he goes we need a good war and i was like he was like half joking and now you know we were chuckling about he goes we need a good war we need some of these blue haired people to see [ __ ] rockets flying into schools and go hey this is the real conflict now now we're all united together and let's let's abandon some of this nonsense that we've been [ __ ] squabbling over fukuyama says the exact same thing in the last chapter it'd be good for a liberal democracy to have a war every generation if you look at israel for example they have a lot less of this because they do have these wars every generation i have a good friend of mine who is my kickboxing coach back in the day his name is shooky shout out to shuki he lives in israel now and uh he was in america for a while he's an israeli he was uh coaching at um majiro gym in um it was in um where were we in the valley tarzan i think it was and he i went to dinner over his house once and you know his wife and his kid are there and he's playing bongos and they're cooking and he's like everyone's dancing i go you're so happy and i go i meet so many israelis that are like so they love to like sing and dance and party it's like a real live version of the zohan you know i go what is it and he goes
when you're in israel he goes every day you could die he goes you don't know what's going to happen like palestine and israel have been this constant conflict you're surrounded by all these arab states and he's like when you any day you can die everybody just party party party you just when you're alive you're happy and i'm like that's a strange state that seems like we have this yin and yang of life and it sounds so cliche to say but without some sort of antagonist without some sort of problem some sort of real thing to rise against people find nonsense to squabble over correct and his thing was like this is all [ __ ] [ __ ] party party party like life and death is the real issue and his his thoughts about israel was when you're over there man it's real life and real death and the [ __ ] you're dealing with here is traffic i hate my job you know i hate being fat you know i hate that you know what i mean it's like these nonsense problems yeah it's like god i wish we were wiser i wish but i mean i don't think we're really fully there yet i mean if you wanted to look at the human race as a like a graph of progress there's not that much time from the vikings to us that's right from killing people with axes from the time when someone showed up on your shore with a boat it was a [ __ ] disaster right it wasn't like oh tourists they're hopping off the cruise ship no it was [ __ ] meaningless like no it's murder and rape is what it is that's what's on the menu that's all that's on the menu right and that's what people did forever that's all they did god didn't yeah and here we are with too much food and too much time on our hands yeah i mean that's one of our biggest problems we have too much food people eat too much i know it's crazy that is one of the biggest problems the biggest health problems in our country is obesity which comes directly because of poor food choices and too much food how do we get on diet from ukraine i don't know but it's it's it's a conflict thing it's it's all of like of lack of con like with an in an absence of you know idle hands are the devil's
playground that's that's a real thing and it's not just simply you know oh like boys who are bored find a way to light buildings on fire that's that's part of it too but it's like there's something about not having a real problem to fight you need [ __ ] problems you need conflict and you either create your own [ __ ] or you're gonna find something out there in the world that pisses you off and it's gonna represent what the enemy is because it's ingrained in our dna we have this sort of pattern where we seek out opposition we seek out problems yeah there's a german philosopher named carl schmidt who was a nazi unfortunately but um his his political theory was that the friend enemy distinction is the core distinction in human political life and defining what is the friend and what is the enemy yeah and if we and if we don't understand that or recognize that in some sense we're fooling around it's so strange that we can't get past that and we have some tools that'll allow us to recognize that but they're not widely distributed you know whether it's psychedelics or whether it's you know people that recognize like physical culture and having like like a strenuous activity schedule in terms of like physical exercise is really important for to alleviate anxiety and keep people calm and relaxed and i mean that's why we were talking about this recently that's one reason why they invented football they invented football to give people something to do that like it was a facsimile of war right right back when the thought was that we would get an urbanized society we'd get weak and yeah and and effeminate and so we need this sort of i guess they were right [Laughter] religion could also help by the way i think religion could be a factor in life i think that's there's definitely a god-shaped hole in the middle of liberalism and i think a lot of people um ex i think i think there's a conservation of religion religion never goes away
taboos never go away they just change and um the thought that there's some over i think it was um walter benjamin or knows william james who defined religion as the thought that there's some overarching order to which human society should converge right there's there's some sort of abstract thick order to the world that we should be sort of building towards and that just in its courses in the most high-level way is religion and that never goes away i think for most humans you are converting to judaism yes are you doing this for a relationship um yesterday i was thinking of wearing uh a keeper but i decided i decided not to uh a yamaka like ben shapiro i think i would have been like the only other guest i ever did um i'm not that observant actually um yeah so i uh people ask about that i've got three jewish kids and you know i think religion is kind of like chickenpox like you have to get a case of it when you're a kid otherwise you're gonna get like this life-threatening case of it later and so i wanted them to be raised with some sort of religious tradition particularly in a society i think this is particularly bad in san francisco and like california which is where i've spent my life for the past 15 20 years particularly in a world in which like corporations are the only functional organizations that you see anymore right like everyone lives not not all over america to be clear but in in some parts live completely atomized and dissociated from any organizing thing other than a company and i just don't think it's normal even though i've spent my entire professional life inside these organizations i don't think it's normal and i wanted to see something else and the the baby mama to my third kid who's jewish basically said look if this kid goes to synagogue you're taking him so you convert and so i called her bluff and i converted and i think what i figured out now and oh man i hope she doesn't see this she's probably not going to see it i figured out that their level of religious practice is like the average of zero and me and so as long as i keep on going up they're going to be more or less the midpoint and so now they're
like they went to like purim purim is this kind of very holiday kids uh holiday that was last weekend they actually celebrated that which is good um and so yeah and then aside from that i think it's intellectually interesting judaism is a very bookish to be a jew is to sit around on a thursday and discuss dense texts and come up with arguments about what they mean which to me sounds like a good time i know it's a little strange but that's uh that's what being a jew is so yeah that kind of signed up for it and it's it's been interesting so and you just so you had a relationship with a woman who's jewish and she raised two different women two different women three kids you got you got a taste you you have a thing that you like you have like a specific type you know i don't know if i'd phrase it that way joe but yeah you could you could you could yeah you have uh there's is what you like you like jewish ladies um so when that's the case if the mother's observant the children wind up being raised as jewish and that's the thing about jews um that the family raises the children based on the mother's religion correct that that's the formal religious definition most of the time yeah i have an uncle that that converted my uncle sal converted to judaism he married a jew yes married jewish women raised his children jewish and um you know it was interesting watching him because i was young at the time i was like i think i was seven or eight when he was going through this and so it was interesting to watch you know like he had to take classes yeah and go through the whole deal like getting a master's degree it's ridiculous you talk to the rabbi and then it's like dude when do i graduate he's like oh here's another 10 books to read and just keep on going it was like doing a phd it was complex yeah yeah and so how do you have the time to do that it seems like it was kind of my coveted project to be honest the branch of judaism i'm in is not totally against using electronics on shabbat and stuff like some some of the some of the actual ceremonies are
actually live streamed and so you can participate even remotely ben shapiro told me he has to keep the lights on on friday yeah they're there on saturday i'm like what yeah that's cheating it's funny i've interviewed him we've talked about this he so he's modern orthodox and what that means is it's kind of like what what trump's son-in-law was he's you know like hardcore full-on jewish but he's you know obviously he's integrated with modern society he's not living in a separate society but the shabbat thing yeah there's there's this restriction and as soon as i mention anything jewish there's gonna be like 100 rabbis in my mentions commenting on this but that's the nature of judaism um there's a restrictions around lighting a fire on on saturday and electricity has been mapped to the to the fire restriction and so you've probably never had this experience i don't know if you've lived in new york but if you go to a hospital in new york after sundown on friday you'll get in the elevator and it's like you push the buttons they don't do [ __ ] the thing stops at every floor because you can't you can you can use a thing that's been left on that would work even if you did nothing but you can't make it work it's really complex and so you can get it on plugs that's ridiculous because you're using the [ __ ] elevator take the goddamn stairs if you're so committed 10th floor okay well take the stairs people can do it well in miami like real estate for the lower floor condos is more expensive if it's like a jewish build because you have to go up the the higher stories so come on it's kind of silly here's the other thing i would say when people talk was like what the [ __ ] is this like this religion thing they think is crazy the one thing that's weird about talking about religion to secular people is that like the model for religion in this country right is christianity typically not not just christianity protestant christianity not just protestant christianity evangelical protestant christian like if you're not a practicing christian and you've got like christianity thrust in your face it's like some televangelist or somebody or
somebody wants to ban a book in texas and so like somehow that that becomes the expression of religion and society and for obvious reasons judaism is very different right um in judaism like the wonky term would be orthopraxic like a jew is as a jew does so like if you're like ben shapiro and you and you don't [ __ ] flip the light switch on saturdays and you follow the kosher laws you do all this that is being a jew like you don't necessarily need to believe in god or have like a deep faith relationship there's no jesus obviously right and so it's more a practice a lifestyle and a community more than anything else and it's less about your personal relationship like it just doesn't matter i think there's a default setting that people have to adhere to some sort of orthodoxy yeah of course and i think that's one of the reasons why when you look at highly educated like tech people for example it's a great example um i think there's a reason why they've adhered so strongly to this like sort of hardcore version of progressive thinking which you would call woke right it's permeated these atheist communities and i don't think that's that's not a mistake i mean that's that seems very clear that human beings have this default setting to follow the this scaffolding of morals and ethics and behavior and it doesn't necessarily have to make sense like the elevator thing doesn't make sense well neither does a lot of the [ __ ] that people on the left adhere to like the the [ __ ] transgender swimmer thing that doesn't make sense like there's reasons why we have males versus females competing but there's this line that people will draw like that's a woman and they'll just say that flat out hardcore they start distinction they start making these distinctions that are based on this rigid ideology rather than based on facts and reality but they'll say it and they'll say it from a position where you know hey i'm an atheist you know i'm i'm fact based i believe in trusting the science except for some things and though it's really like a religion i think you're picking up on that's
exactly right i mean i think i've been in silicon valley for over a decade now it's saturated with religion actually and you know they'll laugh at you trying to keep coach or whatever and then they'll go on for six [ __ ] hours about their weird little keto diet or whatever that they're following religiously yeah um you know it's funny i interviewed a berkeley professor sociologist named carolyn chen wrote a book called work pray code that's kind of a sociological take on this and she mentions how so many people come to startup life and are formerly religious but then adopt this new religion and it's very much one of self-actualization a lot of sort of you know white person buddhism layered on top of it um you know a lot of um linkedin posting about hustle porn about you getting more productive and it there's there's deep religiosity there also porn support i know yeah i hate it it's what it is i know it is also boring it's hustle forward god there's so much of that there's so much of that on instagram it's kind of cute on twitter now too it sucks i just really if you over post hustle point i just mute you yeah i'm just done with it hustle board is such a weird thing to do but i guess sometimes i do it here i guess sometimes i i talk about like motivation and like what what's necessary to achieve success but i think i do it based on my personal experiences and what i've learned that i think that you could tell people i think there's a lot of hustle porn that's just like people saying things because they think that it's gonna resonate with folks and it's gonna get them a lot of likes and it's gonna you know like they haven't really done anything there's a lot of i haven't done anything but i'm gonna show you how to do things people yeah which is a weird part of they're called they're called venture capitalists that's what they're called the hustle porn community there's so much of that though god there's so much of it can i ask you a question yes please people who have done very well i asked this question to mark andreessen about the web the guy who basically invented the browser and the web as we know it um
so i'll ask you the same question did you think this the joe rogan experience would get as big as as as it has no [ __ ] chance i still don't believe it it doesn't make any sense because you you have like over 10 million downloads which and i'd love to address this if you want to talk about your show and stuff too but that that's more down that's that's greater viewership than all the big network shows put together right like it's you have an enormous audience yeah so but you you never thought that would happen when you started this i've done nothing to try to promote this show i mean really i've never gone on another show and said please please watch my show i've never taken ads out anywhere i've never done anything we've existed like jamie and i have existed in this strange vacuum while this show has sort of propagated and it spread its way through the world and we haven't done anything different and i haven't done anything different in terms of the way i do it other than get better at it get better at communicating get better at listening get better at you know researching topics and asking questions and you know i think generally it's a skill i think it doesn't seem like it's a skill because it's something that everybody does we all have conversations but there's a skill to having conversations that are pleasing to the ear and that it's similar to a lot of other art forms that once you start sort of unpeeling it you get a better sense of what it is and over the many many many hours that i've done this you've gotten better at it but i don't understand we've had this conversation too recently why the [ __ ] hasn't anybody else done it like this that doesn't make any sense to me like what i'm doing is not that crazy like why is it so popular i don't i really don't know i genuinely don't know and i it's shocking to me like when back in the day when we first started when it first started getting big i remember uh me and um i think it was brian redband he goes do you know how many downloads that last episode got and i'm like how many and he's like it's just two million
and there was like this pause in the room i go what i go two million what the [ __ ] and we were laughing because we were basically at the time especially the early days we would uh fill this volcano back up with pot vapor you know what a volcano is do you know what volcano is volcano is this machine jamie show him a volcano a volcano is a machine for people who think joints are too mild and it's this preposterous machine that fills up this giant plastic bag with thc mist and then you pop it off the machine and i've done that before like the big plastic bag that you just said yeah gray plastic yeah i've done that it's like that's it right there and then you suck all the [ __ ] thc vapor out of that plastic bag we would just be obliterated i'd be in the middle of a conversation forget exactly what i was talking about i didn't had no idea what we were talking about that was my experience with that too i got thrown out of my mind when i did that that was what we were doing and then you know started having conversations with different people like i had graham hancock on and i was like this is great me and duncan were talking to graham hancock and like wow this is amazing i can't believe him you know i'm meeting him we're talking about ancient civilizations and all of his research and and then once it became more popular people started seeking it out in terms of like i'd like to be a guest like okay you know but it was totally organic like the whole thing happened organ like there's no way i would have ever said i know one day this is going to be something that like fox news supports and cnn hates and the the [ __ ] the world talks about the the nonsense ramblings of a comedian slash cage fighting commentator like this is going to be a real real [ __ ] cog in the wheel like what no never not a [ __ ] chance never thought about it you never go further than when you don't when you don't know where you're going sometimes well i i do have this thing where i'd like to keep doing things and get better at them i get obsessed with stuff and in a sense i've sort of applied a lot of that i've done other
aspects of my life whether it's martial arts or comedy and i've sort of applied that to this thing in some weird way so it naturally fits within my personality because i've always been curious as to why i think the way i think why i behave the way i behave and what what i can optimize what i can make better about who i am and how i how i make my way through life and then when that gets applied to this i sort of just sort of took the same pattern of thinking about the way i think about all kinds of things and applied it to conversations and applied it to like why do people think the way they think like what like you like what's it like for you and ukraine i'm a genuinely curious person so when i have these conversations with people i think that's one thing that does help the listener out is that they they really do understand that i'm not asking you this question because it's my job right like uh we could quit right now we already did an hour we could just go home i'm curious i'd like to keep talking i enjoy it genuinely and when i think when someone has a genuine enthusiasm for anything whether it's making pottery you know whatever you watch a youtube video about someone who makes hand blown glass if someone's really into it i'm fascinated i'm fascinated by people that are genuinely into things well i think that's what comes across joe i mean you make it look easy but it's um you know i host a small podcast and it's hard interviewing people and you make it look so seamless and perfect and i think but i don't it's it is easy it's just my personality yeah but i really think that it's just luck i think that's a giant part of it is that my personality just was the right shape to fit into a hole in you know in media it was just oh that fits but it's just other than that i was just the guy who asked annoying questions you know if you like had me on a radio show like and there was some guy in a radio show i was always like well why do you do this like what is that what is the thing that you know and entices you to get up in the morning what's your motivation like what what
did you want to do when you first started like those questions are because i want to know why i do what i do so i'm always interested when i see someone as exceptional or interesting or intelligent i always want to know like what's going on inside your head like is it similar to mine i'm trying to build a map of thinking of the world like when i'm looking at my own life i'm like how different am i than this guy like what what does he do that maybe is significantly uh different or or better that i can maybe apply to my own way of thinking i i think that almost that honesty comes across joe i think that's part of why your show is successful oh thank you i think a lot of it's dumb luck too we don't want to admit it but it's true a lot of people [ __ ] yeah good man i could easily have been born in sarajevo i could have easily been born the congo you know we're who you are right now is uh there's so many factors that are outside of your control you know just your genetics you know i i came from a creative family you know my my uncle that i told you converted judaism he's an artist my his brother is an artist you know there's a lot of people in my family that are like these uh very outside the box thinking people my parents were hippies so there's a lot of that in my past that sort of helped me think about things as someone who really not willing to subscribe to these patterns of behavior and thinking and just activities that everybody else thought were either significant or mandatory i was not interested in that for whatever reason i felt like there's other ways like this is these people are miserables like i remember thinking that when i was a kid like looking at people living their lives doing things they didn't want to do constantly and i'm like there's got to be someone out there that's doing what they want to do like where are those folks how come i don't know any of them like where are then you see them in an interview or you read about them in a book like okay they exist you know you read a biography or someone who sort of navigated their way through the river of life and avoided the rocks and and made
their way to the waterfall like okay so it's possible how do you do it who's that guy how did he do it how many people told him no how many people told him to [ __ ] off how many people told him he's a loser there has to be a lot you know and the this small percentage of people that do find a way to be happy and do something for a living that they really enjoy doing to me that was exciting like okay there are there are folks out there that are doing something that they they really enjoy and the difference between that and i think there's really there's a lot of value in doing something you don't like doing because like you i had a lot of jobs that i [ __ ] hated when i was a kid and i think those were really important to me i think doing construction i drove limos i did a lot of [ __ ] that i delivered pizzas did a lot of [ __ ] that i didn't enjoy doing and i think there's something in doing those things that builds up like a a muscle of not english not just of discipline but of like the the ability to find a way to keep going when you don't want to do stuff and then you could apply that sort of dis this is kind of a discipline thing but it's just a grind a grind of mentality right yeah you can apply that to things you enjoy right yeah i know i think that's important my parents forced me to like do rowing when i was in high school i was like a little pudgy kid who was very bookish my mother was a librarian i was definitely not the athlete type um you know rowing's the ultimate grind is doing the same thing over and over again i know i know it's the ultimate grind and that just really beat the [ __ ] out of me and it was a pretty competitive team like we won state one year and stuff and it was just like hours a day six days a week and it was just like that that really made like a man i guess out of me in the sense that i went from this you know little schlubby weak lazy kid to like makes sense if you think about a person who would be like a champion rower or a champion cyclist cyclist maybe even more so because you're doing it on your own
like you're doing the same thing everybody else is doing left right left right you're literally attached to a wheel right so it's not like you can be creative in how you optimize the wheel or use your body and some sort of expressive way that's unique to your personality no left right left right it's just taking pain it's just the grind yeah the ultimate grind and so people that do that like have you ever met lance armstrong no fascinating character interesting guy because like i feel like lance armstrong would be [ __ ] competitive at any goddamn thing he did whether it's his pencils more sharp than yours or you know what i'm saying like it's like that mindset to just go left right left right left right get across the line quicker than anybody when you apply it to days and days of riding like the tour de france that's a crazy mindset if that that dude could apply that [ __ ] to anything but in a lot of ways i bet it probably trips you up because it probably keeps you from being calm you're probably always looking to like [ __ ] get on the bike go you know have you had him on the show yeah yeah i had him on the show i had him on the show after i had jeff novitskiy on the show who's one of the guys that helped take him down jeff dyvitsky also works for you though right yeah yes clearly yeah he hates jeff novitskiy right um well first of all he mean he's got a point in some ways because the whole goddamn sport was dirty but what they found in lance was a poster boy for a dirty sport like if you took away all of his accomplishments and he said hey you know you won the tour de france but since you know you've admitted that you took performance-enhancing drugs and by the way they never caught them you know that they never caught them so he made his way through this all but he had teammates that got caught and the teammates ratted him out and then he had lawsuits against the teammates and it was very messy business but if you took away him being first place and you say okay we're going to give first place to
the next person who didn't test positive ever for performance and answering drugs you got to go to 80 like a number 300. no really legitimately they're all dirty it's a dirty business it's like bodybuilding like if you look at the mr olympia guys if they took away steroids there's no one on that mr olympia stage no one you got to go way down the like i mean maybe there's some freak of nature that's like 32nd place or something like that who just eats oats and [ __ ] does squats but most likely not if you want to be like that giant butterball turkey looking ultra veined muscle dude you have to take steroids that's what they do so if you want to pretend that these guys are all taking you know [ __ ] creatine and some [ __ ] that you could buy in muscle and fitness okay go ahead pretend pretend whatever you want but that's not real so if you want to pretend that lance armstrong he won tour de france because he was cheating go ahead and pretend because that's not why he won because like bill burr has a great bit about it he's like he was the best psycho they're all [ __ ] psychos but he was our psycho he was the best out of all the psychos and they're all doing drugs but he was just he with that said he won while they were all cheating maybe he was better funded maybe uh the people that he was involved with were more scientific about their application but random question do you think jeff bezos is on steroids a hundred percent oh really i i have no opinion i really don't know but i'm just curious okay a thousand percent really yes he's not i want to say steroids he is on hormone replacement therapy in my opinion because he gained a significant amount of muscle mass deep into his 40s if you look at him now he looks great by the way i take testosterone replacement so it's not i'm not demonizing it i don't think it's bad i think it's wise if you want your body to perform well i think you should get regular blood work you should do it from a very good doctor that understands hormone replacement therapy you should be very smart about it you shouldn't take too much of it but if you want your body to perform well it wards off diseases better it keeps your
immune system healthier the more muscle you have and the stronger your body is the healthier your body is i mean to a point and to get to this bodybuilding range where you just look obscene but what he looks like now is a healthier way better way stronger version of what he looked like when he's totally ripped he looks weird great yeah he looks great the idea that that's bad is like okay well what's good is it good to get fat well no you shouldn't say that because you're fat shaming okay right you get fat shame that's bad but if you muscle shame that's okay the guy looks [ __ ] great yeah he's doing something he's gone totally miami the shirts the women the instagram feed the shirts see people use that one image that was a disco party do you know that the the with him with the glasses of the heart-shaped glasses with his bombshell girlfriend yeah that was he had they had a disco-shaped uh disco themed party rather for new year's that's why he's wearing that silly shirt but i like that shirt i thought he looked like i thought i was pretty good at it actually well you're cuban it's like yeah get a gold chain bro like a rolex [ __ ] ridiculous car i can't afford all that yeah yeah he should wear it all the time [ __ ] yeah where where all that [ __ ] wear tight shirts i think he looks great i love jeff bezos i mean i don't i'm not a fan of some of the things that i hear about working at amazon you know how much of those are true i don't know i never i haven't looked deeply into the anti-union practices i haven't looked deeply into the way they force workers to like there was an article about workers that while the tornado was coming to kentucky right they couldn't yeah they weren't allowed to leave which to me sounds like [ __ ] insane and they died i mean they yeah that's that's [ __ ] insanity if that's true i don't know if that's true because there's narratives that get distributed after a horrific event that oftentimes aren't accurate because they they sell good and it's good click bait i don't know if that's true you know it's a hard company in terms of like the what i've heard about if you're one of those people working on the floor and someone you know orders a french press and you know
you have like 35 seconds to get that into a box or you have a string you're peeing in like a little bottle because you don't want to take a pee break and that sounds insane but you know i mean if you're paid well and you understand that that's the job when you go into it and it's a really competitive environment it's a good job in terms of like health care and how much compensation you get i don't know i don't know so i can't comment on the business as a whole but when i look at billionaires and how i like billionaires to behave there's two i really love i love elon cause he's [ __ ] crazy and he lives in a 50 000 house and he has people driving around everywhere he doesn't own anything he doesn't own any houses and he's one of the richest man on earth and then jeff bezos who's balling out of control they have to take a [ __ ] bridge apart because he wants to get his giant yacht through it he makes the yacht so big that they can't get it through a bridge the place where they're building his yacht there's a bridge you have to get out that way to get to the ocean i think it's the netherlands oh right i heard about this you see the shipyards yes so they have to dismantle a bridge to get his yacht i'm like the option to dismantle a bridge is not available for very many people right you know that's i just think it's hilarious i think if there's a guy who's a super baller out of control guy who used to be a nerdy dude who drove a tiny honda like there's a video of him from 1999 where he's worth already worth a couple billion dollars and he's driving this honda around and the the interviewer asks him like you're worth billions of dollars why are you driving this honey goes this is a perfectly good car to go from that to being this you know cliche i love cliche sometimes i enjoy them speaking of elon there's a ukraine connection i don't know if you know he's shipping all these starlink units yes um i do know that and it's funny i have a starlink unit from my house out in the sticks in in northern nevada and i took my starlink with me to ukraine thinking
like you never know you might get stuck with that internet if the russians bombed this or that i ended up donating it to this fixer dude um because his internet was weak but he's they're it's a big deal like the ukrainians are like yes super elon because they're bringing all these units and you know connection to the outside world is a major part is major challenge in a war zone obviously well the other part is that he's offered to fight poop would you mediate that like better i told him that i would i texted him i said dude i'll facilitate your training i'll i'll set up your training i'll get you the best people i would establish who would you bet on without without training who would you bet on would you bet on putin or would you it's hard to say elon is much bigger he's a big guy have you ever met even never met him now he's he's about six too he's wide he's a big person you know i don't know how much physical activity he's involved with but i do know he enjoys martial arts he had a match with a sumo player at one point in time he's crazy he's a wild dude but he's so [ __ ] smart that i feel like if you could get him training he would pick things up very quickly he would probably have like a few moves that he would focus in on and dial them in very quickly and and probably get very good i don't know we haven't had very many martial arts conversations so i don't know the full extent of how because sometimes when people learn some things when they're a kid that those things surprisingly apply very well as they get older they don't forget some things you know if you have some jiu jitsu experience when you're younger and some guy grabs you in a bar there's certain instinctive things that are going to happen because of your training i don't know how much he's got of that but i do know that if he had training he's younger he's much bigger putin's smaller than me you know he's not he's not a bunch of judo supposedly oh he's a black belt in judo putin's a legitimate black belt and jude i've watched putin train i've watched videos of him training and i can see the difference between someone who is you know like maybe a casual person with a rudimentary
understanding of the in a legitimate black belt he's an absolute legitimate black belt what is it he took away his black belt what is that no that's a they gave him an honorary taekwondo black belt um yeah it's yeah it's not i don't believe he has that's kind of silly you know that's like someone that's like bill cosby getting a phd and calling himself dr cosby because they gave him an honorary phd you know that's because he was doing that you know speaking of canceled people yeah well that's more than cancelled that's where the kids that's that's some real shame yeah yeah i think um i think i'd bet on elon i really do especially if you gave him time if he gave him time to train and do it correctly and i would set him up with the best people i would say i would say might have you made that offer to him yeah sure i'm sure yeah we've had a conversation yeah i said i would set him up with uh all of his training he's like how epic would that be i'm like [ __ ] yeah yeah the world is so nuts that's not i mean it doesn't seem likely but neither did it seem likely would be on the verge of world war iii three months ago that's right three months ago we were worried about vaccines and you know whether or not you'd have to wear a mask on an airplane and now we're literally on the verge of a nuclear war and one of the things that mike baker was saying to me was that you're dealing with hypersonic weapons now that can change paths very quickly in the middle of the air it's not something like oh you see the the missile being launched you see where it's headed it's headed to san francisco it'll be there in 15 minutes or whatever it is it's not that anymore now they're moving faster than the speed of sound and they can take like hard angles in the middle of the sky and you can't predict where they're going and the russians used one in ukraine recently a couple days ago did they really yeah these are or so they claimed no they claimed to use a super hypersonic wow that's crazy
that's terrifying that that kind of thing is terrifying and then you apply a nuclear warhead to something like that it's really terrifying and the thing that he was saying is that we used to have this concept of mutually assured destruction that we would know that the russians are launching at us and we would have a certain amount of time to decide to counter attack and then the world would be [ __ ] he's like that's not the case anymore the a missile would launch so quickly and would hit us before we had any option to retaliate and that's something that needs to be understood russia launched hypersonic missiles due to a low stockpile sources say the leading theory in western assessments of the hypersonic missile attack is that russia's number of precision guided munitions are dwindling fast why would that be the case well the theory is that their their actual internal production of it is is very poor i mean just recently the only tank man just today that the only tank manufacturer in russia announced that it's stopping production because it can't source components so hold on go back up there it says they launched them because it's the only thing that they can get through with absolute certainty oh i see so they're saying that all of their weapons they're running out of all kinds of weapons so they use the hypersonic missile because it's one of the things they know can land so um russia said that it shot uh kh-47m2 can you say that kinzhal kinzhal kinzhal hypersonic missiles at a weapons depot in western ukraine on friday though it remains unclear if it was actually the target still president joe biden confirmed russia's use of the weapons on monday stating that russia's military launched them and oh so this is biden saying that because it's the only thing that they can get through with absolute certainty who knows where the fog of propaganda is thick yup who knows but if he really did use that and they showed that it's not just a concept that it's a real thing that they have and they have access to and they can arm with a nuclear warhead that's the my fear is that they launch
one nuclear warhead and say go okay now what right you know because that that would be the move the would the move would not be launched nuclear warheads at china or or rather at the united states and in in china does the same thing we just [ __ ] get blown the smithereens the move would be one nuclear warhead and go to ukrainian cities and go now what are you gonna do right exactly you know and everybody go hey hey hey hey hey hey hey you know if one if you're in a gang war and one person gets shot you might be able to have a ceasefire like this was the the discussion um that malcolm gladwell was happening having an outliers about these appalachian cultures where they were just cons like the you know the hatfields and the mccoys these people that were constantly feuding and killing each other like there were certain times where they had tried to come to the negotiating table and that at a certain point too much blood but it's built that's the worry you know the my worry is they launch one nuke yeah i mean yeah that would be a real challenge to the west right in the west i mean that's kind of what we did in world war ii right that's right yeah although what people forget there is that the firebombing campaign of japanese cities was caused more death actually than the although obviously nuclear weapons are from a symbolic perspective huge but they were basically incinerating japanese city after japanese city yeah even outside of the nuclear weapon thing yeah but that again that was total war that's when civilizations were going to war with each other and yeah destroying them in some sense it's it's wild that humans still participate in that and you gotta wonder like how much of that if we all spoke the exact same language how much of that would be different it would be very difficult it's it's more difficult to demonize people who speak exactly like you do use the exact same language had the exact same values i mean that that was the that was the point behind esperanto this invented
language that got a little bit of traction the thought was if everyone spoke the same language it would lead to world peace because it'd be better understanding yeah so is that you know that's the tower of babel right i think we'd find even more ways to kill each other do you think so that's yes yeah i'm not such an optimist well i mean look at what's going on in america between the left and the right i mean there are some times in the struggle in america like when trump was president that was really concerned that we could conceivably get to a point where people would justify a war against the opposite party yeah did you ever feel like that there's a lot of civil war talk yeah and uh it was weird that like a lot of people on the red state side will almost be looking forward to because oh we've got all the guns and we're the tough guys i'm like societies that have actually gone through real civil wars like spain or like the yugoslavia nobody comes out that's not a good idea it's a crazy it's a crazy idea that that said i do wonder when i get in like silicon valley bold prediction mode like i think the nation state as we know it which is a relatively recent invention by the way like what we call a nation state is a definite post enlightenment post-printing press sort of thing is uh you know i'm not so bullish on it i don't know if we can not just the u.s but just broadly the notion of a nature state i i think the internet demolishes a lot of consensus and the amount of consensus necessary to keep you know a nation stated in a country of 330 million spanning four time zones is very very difficult the problem with the alternative is people are terrified of this concept of uh one world government yeah rightly so i mean if you look at the way china is able to control its population with social credit scores and just overwhelming surveillance and totalitarian government we're terrified that that could be applied globally yeah it seems like it could be especially if you have digital currency that
is uh centralized it's like if the government has the ability to veto purchases or decide that your social credit doesn't allow you to do certain things because you've done the wrong thing or you said the wrong thing yeah i mean those are some of the objections to the sanctions being levied on russia right if the west can just like turn you off right like what does that mean that's actually dangerous right i mean like in the russian people are they really responsible for what putin's doing it seems like they're under the control of a dictator what if they get they they don't have access to medicine you know what if they don't have access to goods and services and all sorts of things that have nothing to do with them yeah i mean looking at it from the ukrainian perspective though they didn't have a choice i mean they provoked there's an unprovoked total war that they've declared like a real total war yeah in the ukraine and so in some sense why shouldn't the sanctions be totalizing um yeah well it's interesting too the the attack on the oligarchs or the the sanctioning the oligarchs that's interesting to me yeah because that's really the first time in our lifetime that we've ever seen some of the richest men in the world terrified to lose everything right we're getting their yachts seized reports around the world getting their jets seized um real estate seats flying to dubai flink to israel yeah and like where are they going to go and what how much access to their money will they have you know is it all going away can you take it all away like where is it who has it where is it do they just like log into their schwab account like that level of life is so beyond my understanding that i don't even understand what that what that would even look like right and like what what investments are safe when you're an oligarch fleeing for turkey or somewhere wherever you're going to uae wherever you're going like what
what do you do like there was a abramovitz yacht um that is uh outside of turkey right now that just recently changed its status to waiting for instructions like so it's like kind of moving around and it they everybody knows where it is so like you know where this guy is so what is what's what happens do they eventually do someone come in does the coast guard come in and take his boat like who ha who's going to take that thing is that what they're going to do and then what does he do if it goes into port it will if they're within 12 miles right any port well no no i mean the country would have to want to seize it so what if he goes to dubai right or what if he just never docks right if he just stays in international waters with right and he can just get resupplied from boats that come out to him can they get gas to a boat and then oh yeah sure that's how they do it expensive but he could do it yeah well he's got a lot of money out here i mean the head of this uh organization called sea shepherd i know you're familiar with that yes yeah right um you should have that guy on here but he he used to live at sea because he claimed that he would get extradited because he's considered a pirate in some countries and so he would be 12 miles off at sea all the time well they're always catching people wailing right you know yeah it's i used to support them i used to buy their t-shirts they have cold t-shirts yeah i have a jacket yeah they look super [Laughter] um so do you think that there that's going to be effective to sanction the oligarchs and do you think they actually have any legitimate leverage over putin well for putin it seems like it right they've frozen the central bank's reserves overseas as i understand it and so their ability to part of the reason why that tank you know factory has to shut down is that they can't buy parts right like you they have right the ruble isn't necessarily worth much how how do you actually go out and buy parts from the
west which they need as inputs i mean they're an extraction economy they sell raw materials they don't manufacture that much from and so it seems like those i mean it seems like this is really a war between which can last longer ukrainian nationalism or the russian economy right it's basically that's basically the war that's going on how do you think it plays out if i were a betting man i think the most likely outcome is some form of stalemate i don't think the russians can take ukraine i just don't think it's possible they're not they're not going to they haven't encircled they can't encircle kiev they'll take more cities in the east potentially ukrainians will suffer there'll be tens of thousands of civilian deaths it'll be a horror show um and they'll have to come to some sort of uh they'll have to come some sort of deal the ukrainians have to promise oh we're not going to join pinky swear we're not going to join nato for the next 10 years zelensky stays in office they're not going to demilitarize because when the original request is a russian saying you have to get rid of your military and then the local in-house russian media will spin it as a putin victory and that'll be that that's what you think that's probably the most likely outcome did you ever your wildest dreams think that he was going to invade ukraine oh no i i don't even know that region of the world very well like i wouldn't even have you know conjured the thought oh yeah pressure's gonna invade now it's uh it's interesting how many people switch from being vaccine experts to being foreign policy experts yeah something i never do [ __ ] i don't know about i don't post about i don't covet post i don't like i find the media conversa like the meta conversation about these things interesting but the thing itself like an opinion about covet you will never get out of it but it's just fascinating how these people pivoted from one cause to another like and then completely ignored the other cause like it's gone that's gone now i mean i think it's a legit criticism again i don't think it invalidates the ukrainian cause but it's true that there's a certain type of person who
like just switches their little thing that they're obsessed about no that's what i'm fascinated by i'm not i mean definitely doesn't invalidate the ukrainian cause that's the sick one of the most significant causes of our lifetime but i'm glad we agree you think that okay oh yeah i mean it's it's terrifying to me i think about it all the time i thought about it last night before bed and i had to meditate to get it out of my head because i'm like like there's nothing i do about this right now i'm about to go to bed and i'm thinking about what what does it look like if we legitimately have world war three like am am i prepared you know will my family be safe what do we do you know those thoughts like for whatever reason at night time those are when i have to fight those off the most i have the same problem like the most stressful [ __ ] like right when i'm going to bed it's like why the [ __ ] am i right why now yeah it's weird because i think there's something about when you know you're going to be your most vulnerable because you're literally unconscious that during that time is when you start assessing all the possible risks you know that's when you check the locks on the door yeah you always think that someone's going to come into the house while you're asleep you don't think someone's going to come in the house while you're awake right and it's sunny out you know it's like like when people smoke marijuana during the day time most the time even if you're paranoid it's not that bad but if you're paranoid at night there's something about at night being high at night is [ __ ] scary because the paranoia is accentuated by the natural paranoia that you have from the fact that it's dark out there's a thing that human beings have about the dark that i think is related to being in our past being preyed upon by big cats like we're worried about things we can't see we're worried about losing one of our senses you know like even in my own [ __ ] yard if i let my dogs out at night you know and i'm out there with them i'm like looking around like you
never know you never know what's out there you know could be some [ __ ] predator that made its way through my fence and it's in my yard yeah it's scary i um after this book this chaos monkeys thing that uh caused some trouble for me at apple um i uh cause like i'm a very like ambiguous media personality i often joke that like i'm not really a narcissist i just play one on the internet right it's like i'm forced to do like all these shows and like highlight my life even though at some level i'm a recluse so i bought five acres of these islands off the northwest of seattle called the san juan islands these gorgeous islands you've never been to them you should definitely go i've heard of it oh it's it's in the summer it's paradise on earth so one of the islands orchestra like i bought a few acres of land not that many just random land nothing beautiful or gorgeous or anything and like started homesteading it like chopping down trees laying it out putting up a teepee a yurt solar system all that [ __ ] macgyver [ __ ] and i did that for off and on a couple years after after thinking that when i first got there like you know book the book thing came came out it was a bestseller for a month like a big deal a lot of media for like a month or two i'm disgusted by it after a month or two and so i literally showed up at this place i i like the first advanced check like i bought this land right so i show up with like a backpack and like i guess this is me now like i just showed up in the tent and like i'm in the [ __ ] woods and this is it now and remember those first couple nights like you started firing the whole thing and like the fringes of like what you can see on the fire and the light it's like i don't know like i had a gun with me like and like this island is not dangerous like there's really not much to fear but you're yeah you're there in the sticks and it's like you're alone and were you worried someone was gonna target you what do you mean target me because of the book oh no no no no no not really no so you have the gun just dude because you're [ __ ] in the middle of the woods and there's like the cell phone doesn't work there's no contact in the outside world you just
don't know just in case a pirate shows up on your island there's a small math problem oh there's a little bit of a little bit of that on the island it's not quite paradise so meth hasn't a bass boat to visit you what what kind of problems well tell everybody about your book like what was oh the premise of your book and you know i should've brought a copy of it damn i didn't i i didn't think of it um it's available where all fine books are sold book was called chaos monkeys which i can explain the title if you want if you want me to explain it but basically long story short phd student drop out of the phd go to work at wall street wall street blows up i come back to tech right or back to tech i never worked in tech but i gone to school in berkeley and i'd seen kind of the first tech bubble so i was kind of vaguely aware of it joined tech join ad tech do my own startup tiny little company not a big success gets sold to twitter i end up at facebook a year before the ipo as one of the early members of the ads team so if you go like browse for [ __ ] on the internet and you see that same pair of shoes inside your instagram feed or whatever i created the very first versions initial not what's there now versions of that so a lot of the i was the first like product manager for ads targeting so like how user data gets turned into a successful ads campaign is what i was responsible for in a very formative period in the company's history and so i was there again not that terribly long but it was a lot happened the company went grew in size enormously and figured out how to make money like i didn't know how to [ __ ] make money the ads the ads as every members used to suck and now everyone's like ads are either creepy or crappy there's no in between so it went from crappy to creepy um it was a big team a lot of people did stuff to make that happen so the book is about that like how do you start a company how do you raise money the inner workings of silicon valley i went through this famous incubator thing
called y combinator when you say crappy to creepy do you mean invasive yeah yeah in the sense of like oh this is like totally relevant to like oh i was literally just searching for this thing and here's an ad for it let me ask you about this because we've talked about this multiple times in the podcast sometimes you're having a conversation oh god the microphone thing is that real no it's not real no no i mean i don't believe them do you see no no you were just talking about something the other day i haven't searched for it at all okay and i got an ad for it something me and you were talking about what was it i if i remember right i couldn't remember but it was something we're talking about after the show six hours later i'm getting an ad for it here's what i'd bet on one of you two either searched or went to some website not only one of us what so if i do he gets an ad yeah that potentially yeah how uh the term of art is called lookalike audiences what that means is so some retailer knows that you dump a bunch of money at whatever rei cabela's pick your favorite retailer whatever you two are buds and you interact a lot on whatever social media platform if i'm cabela's say just decided example i'm like okay i know this guy is worth whatever two thousand dollars a year get me more people like him and companies like facebook or other companies can say ah well guess what he talks to this dude a lot who by the way whose profile kind of looks like yours and so you'll get targeted for something that you did yeah i get that but we have very different online things you know i look sneakers and stuff he's looking at hunting and whatnot the thing that came up i wish i could i normally take a screenshot when these things happen because i'll share it with the person yeah like look what just popped up on my phone this was outside of that yeah this is one of those things i go all right we need to talk about this but again i know there's uh okay so let me defenses to it but this was let me address the question it's funny there's a there's a planet money show about this
in which they talked to various people who had this experience try to figure out how it actually happened i was i was a guest on it but let me address the problem so imagine imagine i mean let's say let's say mark zuckerberg is listening to your conversations and gets like a live stream of your phone all the time what fraction of the time do you think you're actually mentioning something commercially interesting that would be worth like targeting against like how often do you say hey i'm flying to boston next week and i need a flight in the hotel on a taxi and you say it in some structured way that would be easy it it's pretty rare right and the amount of i mean think about the amount of data you'd have to you'd be on a constant phone call basically to zuck it would eat up your network like crazy and then the fraction of the times versus you just like going to [ __ ] kayak and like entering boston and using that data and so it i'm not saying it's technically impossible and in some future world who knows but it would be difficult and even if you manage to do it there isn't one of the things one of the chapters in my book i i understand you're listening to a chapter called the narcissism of privacy which comes off maybe more snarky than i mean but privacy is a right and people have a right to it obviously but i think one of the sort of misleading things when you think about companies like facebook is that like facebook wants to know the thing that you least want them to know which is like your personal conversation with your loved one or whatever when it comes to commercial data that actually helps target ads there's very little very little of what you do or things that you wouldn't think of are what they want not necessarily what you would like what you would not want facebook to know right but what concerns people is the idea that your microphone is picking up keywords that they have accounts with so whether it's uh cell phones tires whatever it is then you see an ad for it it would be more possible than like the smart speaker systems you have at home for example right that that
wouldn't be so hard to do stuff like that probably wouldn't be hard to do that makes sense and so how would they target you for an ad with that well again if you said something well structured that would be easy to tease out and if that's connected to the same account that's connected to your gmail or your google search or amazon yeah or amazon then they would show you the ads yeah yeah so like a lot of what happens that's actual targeting is like data joining so getting back to the cabela's example like i understand you're into hunting so maybe you shop at the local cabela's or the bass pro shop um they'll have your phone number and email for all the [ __ ] you buy online and what they want to do is like find you online and sell you because it's the [ __ ] deer hunting season sale or whatever and they try to and so what they'll do is they'll upload that list of emails to facebook and say oh this is the this is the deer hunting group and then they'll show you ads based on your actual buying history so that sort of thing absolutely does happen yeah that makes sense yeah that absolutely that completely makes sense yeah um so that's the creepy so that's the question from crappy to create creepy yeah that's that's creepy and it pays for the internet that if it has if there's any saving grace to this is that it pays for the services that most people wouldn't be willing to pay for otherwise it wouldn't exist otherwise interesting is that it became one of the most valuable commodities in the world and people just sort of gave up access to it because they didn't understand it was valuable when it first started being implemented when people first started using gmail or they first started you know searching for things on google or using facebook they never thought they were giving up access to something that's insanely valuable that would create not just some of the biggest companies the world like facebook and apple and google but also some of the most influential companies that have ever existed that's right there's never been a company that has the kind of input on social policies or on the way the world functions like facebook has there ever been a single individual company that has the kind of
to put on my facebook page a little bit i mean if you go back to the world of walter cronkite and like three tv networks and creating consensus around things like vietnam or other events i think there's precedence it may not be it may not have been within one software company in the sort of way that you're talking about but was there a media establishment that manufactured consent are on certain social issues i i would i would say yes yeah that's true but i think the difference is that they were in some way shape or form connected to the government and we don't think that facebook is but maybe they are well they respond to like warrants and stuff when it comes to policing online behavior and i get into that a little bit in the book yeah they definitely you know they do a lot of good protecting like child molesters and stuff and yeah taking them off of facebook and also i think people have to understand the sheer volume of stuff that goes on to their network every day right so it's managing its scale exactly you're obviously a very bright guy who's who've been very thoughtful about this but one of the things that's hardest to convey to people who are on the outside looking in is like you open any dashboard at a company like that and every number is in the billions like billions of posts billions of people billions of photos like even if they were trying to be like best effort it would be very difficult to police a lot of what people want them to please like we looked up the data on youtube about the amount of data amount of videos that get uploaded to youtube daily and it's astounding right i forget what the number is but then let's see see what it is find out do this daily but it's one of those things where you go okay how would you manage that who how many people would you have to hire to watch that how many people would you have to hire to watch every video that's being uploaded on youtube every day you would have to have millions and millions of employees whose sole job is to watch nonsense yeah how you do it you try scaling it with software so one of the things i did at facebook and i get into in the book a
little bit um i was briefly the product manager for the team that policed ads so it's a smaller problem the big problem you're talking about but you know people run ads there's also like an ads creative policy like you can't run ads with like naked women and stuff at it right right and they're you know and it was not as big as facebook post but it was still a scale problem what you do is you you have a certain set of humans to do like the things that only humans can do well and then you scale their efforts with software so if the guy tries to upload the exact same ad twice or the exact same video twice even if he changes the contour slightly or he changes the shading so it's not like literally the same file you have smart software that actually picks it out and like prevents them from doing it right and so i mean that's how they do it because they i mean even facebook and google can't afford to hire millions of people to review these ads or the videos so but the problem is when you do have humans that do it and then it's subjective yeah like my friend kyle kalinski got banned from twitter today and i don't know if you know who he is but he has a great progressive uh political talk show the kyle kolinsky show and he also has uh another podcast he does with crystal ball and you know really bright guy very well-read open-minded you know the whole deal this is all he writes he writes 2015 was seven years ago and then he has a gif of a guy's head exploding you know like just he's just like realizing my god time has flown he got banned for that he got locked out of twitter and they're saying that it's uh you know that fake um that image of a fake head blowing up it's like from a i think it's from scanners the movie scam yeah it's so silly it looks fake it's like a guy's head and then like his brain yeah yeah just the whole head explodes they said that depicted images of torture or murder or some you know extreme gore right like what that that that [ __ ] standard head exploding gif that everybody's been using from the beginning of time that's that's enough to get you blocked from [ __ ] twitter now
my view has always been that facebook and all these companies should not be in the business of actually judging truth for people and that they're in my opinion they're over policing and i've written a lot about this after the election 2016. eventually burned me out so much i went back to texas just drove me crazy but i just don't think you know there's there's hate speech standards in the united states which which are are pretty narrow relative to other countries free speech norms and some people might not like that but that's the nature of the first amendment in this country and i think it's a well-defined standard that has done this very well for decades and i don't see why obviously legally the first amendment doesn't apply to private companies but at least morally or spiritually i think it should apply and that should be the standard in my opinion i couldn't agree more but one of the things that drives me crazy about the left is that so many people on the left seem to want them to take a stand of being the moral police and they they say well you know you're you are allowing these extremist groups to thrive and they're recruiting people and this or that and and so they use it as a justification but the problem is once you do justify banning people because of an ideology you don't agree with it's going to move further and further down the line to the point where things that you do agree with and you think should be fine are now worthy of getting banned for and that that is happening right now we're seeing that happen yeah i think people have forgotten that you have to design laws and systems such that imagine your worst enemy where implementing it right and that changes things right that was when the uh the what was the ndaa the national defense authorization act came into play and obama said you know it was indefinite detention of people without trials and obama was like well i'll never use that okay then don't [ __ ] make it a law right because what if someone comes along after you and then who comes along after him trump trump like hey buddy like you know like there's a guy who is a critic of putin that just got
sentenced today to uh i believe is a lot yeah nine years he's already been following me all right he had yours added to his sentence yeah yeah like that kind of thing like the the the bridge between that kind of thing and the ndaa is not that far like this ability to criticize someone is very important and as soon as you restrict that ability or restricts people's ability to communicate or say controversial things or say things that you don't agree with you're getting close you're bringing those things together and it's [ __ ] dangerous it's really dangerous when you start doing that because it's just it keeps moving it doesn't stop if you don't have an absolute line of free speech then you decide what should and shouldn't be censored and as soon as you do that then it becomes subjective then it becomes you can apply all sorts of logic and and reasons why someone who you don't agree with should be removed from the conversation and you could do so with in bad faith you could do so because it's going to cost you financially or it's because it's politically uh uncomfortable whatever it is dude i think this has made people lose their minds right like network computers that make people lose their minds the reality is that like freedom of speech people don't actually want free like they say they do but they don't right like once their enemy like gets a platform yeah it like goes out the window and getting back to our talk about religion i think liberalism requires a certain religious belief in certain rights and we have a our nation is defined by a sacred document that's adjudicated by this like rabbinical court called the supreme court and all our political struggles end up being religious uh struggles almost because we do have this sort of creed or religious belief in our in our country and i think you really have to maintain that civic religion alive to have things like the the level of freedom the speech that the constitution implies i think we've lost that civic religion we've lost that faith in the united states yeah it needs to be it needs to be
something that both sides a spouse that's something that both both sides talk about openly and agree to because we are a community whether we disagree about certain aspects of our laws and the way we communicate or whatever that's fine but we should have some rigid rock-solid fundamental principles that we apply to communication into rights and if we don't do that we're we're just we're losing our perspective we're losing the thing that made this country so exceptional this exercise in you know in in self-government it's a it's a unique place and as soon as you start [ __ ] with that and limiting freedom you know like you see like knuckleheads on television say they think that maybe the first amendment the second amendment need revision like okay by who by you by your your minds right your your ideology yeah yeah this is what i love getting back to the judicial thing that's what all about judaism like you've got the ten commandments you've got this is the torah like you have to point to some document and say we agree on this this is like the metaphysical belief that we all like this we need to have like a core moral foundation that nobody disagrees about and then on top of that you can layer you know thousands of years or in our case hundreds of years of conversation but i think we've lost those moral foundations like you said there's people who want to abolish the first and second amendment when you say that apple you got a lot of trouble with apple what kind of trouble did you get with apple oh god are you talking about because it's like this weird random thing with apple so overshadowed every other thing i've done in the world and it's weird like the driver who drove me for the airport he's like oh are you like going on rogan cause i guess it's the same company or whatever and um it's like yeah i think i think i'm going on because this thing with apple and then he had his deal with spotify he's like oh wait you're the apple guy so it's like i've been knowing oh so he knew yeah yeah yeah yeah or she knew but
yeah um she knew sorry i'm sexist i assume it's a male driver so what what happened yeah okay so i did this book thing i became like a you know media talking head wrote for wired magazine and other outlets and you know did the whole media thing blue check thing drove me completely crazy because i i don't really think i'm suited to it i went back to tech i worked for a big founder's phone company called branch metrics building a new ads platform that was interesting for a year and a half two years and then i went to apple because apple's also building an ads platform my career for better or worse has been turning human eyeballs and data into money in various forms it's what i do it's what i know how to do i know how to create an ad system there aren't that many people who know how to do that yeah apple is creating an ad system that's not a secret anymore um you'll see ads if you scroll down on your search on your on your on your iphone and uh you know so i was working at apple and like you know in some sense i'm getting a little older i wasn't doing another startup it's not retirement exactly but you're working for a big company right and you know like i changed my linkedin to reflect the fact that i worked at apple which i did um and then what happened which we've now seen in many companies and i was the first of this at apple there was like a slack mob that you know kind of conjured itself and objected to the fact that i wrote this book you know what five six years ago now that at the time again to be clear was hardly a secret bestseller list npr book of the year wired book of the year not to like toot my own horn but like right it's about a secret as christmas [ __ ] day at this point like it's not a secret they knew about it like they my references they asked about it because it's a little unusual to hire like a writer and a place that's very discreet like apple whatever um so yeah and they hired me whatever and then yeah there was a slack mob i can't talk too much about it because a lot of it's under nda but i can talk
about what's public you know apple management panicked um and as a result of the whole mob thing they kind of fired me and that was the end so when you say a slack mob what do you mean by that so slack for those who aren't familiar it's like this tool that is almost like a version of like in-house corporate facebook that you post there's message threads it's us it's a collaboration tool so it's people that worked for apple that disagreed with you being in the company because of chaos monkeys right which you know as i've described what pisses me off most about it is that in some sense they among all the rest of it they mischaracterize the book because you know there's a couple passages in there a little salty right it's like it's a work of literary non-fiction told in the voice of like a michael lewis or hunter s thompson or a tom wolf so it's not like a dry business book it's like oh look a crazy tech guy doing this crazy thing but it was told in a certain literary voice and uh you know fast forward five years some of the jokes yeah we're a little crude and we're a little a little salty nothing crazy salty it might be trying to be entertaining i'll try to be entertaining because the book's got to [ __ ] sell right and so but to be clear 99.9 of the book is about entrepreneurship how silicon valley works the internal you know culture at these companies how the ads world works like we talked about targeting like it's about that it's not about one of the salty jokes is about dating in san francisco and what's that like like literally it's like it's like a one paragraph comment on it that's quoted out of context i was actually praising the mother of my first kid saying oh this woman's amazing unlike these other women that i went dating with like which is a conversation we've all had like oh dating in this city so hard whatever it was that sort of joke basically but of course it misses the context that i'm like i'm like pro like i'm pro this woman that i'm in love with and it's so great that i'm not like dating these other women or whatever right right that was the statement but they took that out of context and a few other little comments here and there ignored all the
rest of the book which again most of it's about life inside facebook and startups and whatever has nothing to do with an apple cave apple cave i know of what two plus trillion dollar company caved and i think you know we can talk about this cancellation thing if you want to but one of the key aspects of this cancellation mobs right or these cancellation crews as i call them is that they're the politics are often deeply unpopular i think something like one percent or less of apple employees signed whatever petition it was to fire me like nobody like this mob was a very vocal but small minority inside the company and yeah apple just freaked out and and you know i this is publicly known freaked out and and uh fired me like within a day i wonder what would happen if apple said [ __ ] off to those people is that possible at this point do you think they've reached oh yeah well most of them got by the way after the fact most of them got fired the leaders of the slack mob actually really yeah yeah yeah there's an app that doesn't message back out to you go hey i can't talk about that but uh i mean about the the firing the other employees that that's publicly that's been reported that's public um other companies have shown a lot more moral leadership than apple has um one example is coinbase so you're probably familiar with crypto company led by brian armstrong and not too i guess a year and a half ago right before the rpo he basically said too much politics slack mobs are happening all this bullshit's happening look if you don't like it we're here to do work you don't like it here's a nice little severance package door is over there right five percent of the company took it and the company's doing fine and that's the end of that right well i think that there's a real thing that people love to do today where they consider themselves an activist right and part of being an activist is if someone says something that you don't agree with you can get them fired and it's a weird kind of activism because you know it's not it's not necessarily active it's you know it's it's mob mentality you're you're
deciding that you want someone to suffer because they have an opinion that's different than yours or that they say something that you think is important and you can feel good while doing it like you're literally in a mob but you can feel a sense of moral righteousness it's like exactly it is just the greatest moral treat well that is twitter i mean in so many ways that that's a large part of what people like to do that people find gross about twitter and i don't get it like i i'm just allergic like that mob mentality i just i just can't do it i just because you're not a loser right because most of those people that do that are truly unexceptional people that's why they want to do it and a lot of the people that they attack are exceptional and that's uh just natural human nature people that have an inclination to mob up and gang up on people for things like that like generally speaking they're failures or at least not exceptional they're not what they would like to be they're not anything that's uh standing out of the or they're not like they're not exceptional it's not they're not unique outliers where they're really out there kicking ass that's not it's not the kind of people that do that it's kind of people that are you know that there's a culture in today in society there's a lot of people that think that they deserve more than they're receiving and they look at other people that are doing really well and for whatever reason they decide that that person doesn't deserve it and part of it is because they're not it's not like you see someone doing well and you go wow how the [ __ ] did he make it whatever but you instead you say how did he make it we need to attack him we need to take him down and those people are almost entirely losers yeah and there's a lot of losers out there but when you see a loser's text on twitter it's the same font they use the same language you don't know their background you don't know what they're doing in their own life
they like you see their words you don't know what's the motivation behind it and those words carry a similar meaning and a similar impact to a person who's like rational and compassionate and you know it's a weird time when it comes to communication you know what would solve this bringing back dueling that's what because robbing somebody of their livelihood i think is actually a major affront like you're literally what i use to fee you know feed my kids and like pay for housing you're robbing me of that for some moral crusade like you you gotta square up and you know you gotta you gotta either face off for 40 paces or go into the ring like that's a major upfront and you shouldn't just be able to do that anonymously playing this little video game called twitter well it's kind of a verbal assault it's in some ways it's it's in this you're attacking you are doing something with i mean you're doing something with language where you're attacking someone and it's one thing if you're going after someone you know you're exposing a criminal who's like stealing money from people and you found you know you're a journalist you found this like loophole where someone's like robbing old ladies out of their retirement fund but if you're just trying to cancel someone because you don't like the jokes they wrote in a book about tech about their own life and you want to get them fired from a job that has literally nothing to do with nothing to do with it yeah and there's no actual behavior at this company which is one thing that i want to clarify so what do you are you can you talk about that are you in a lawsuit or can you uh yeah no no need to no need to yeah it's um what is it like being in those companies like whether it's facebook or you know any any sort of tech company for someone on the outside we we look at it and we say like how are those [ __ ] places run because it's like i've had a good friend who was a big executive at google and now she works at another large tech company and the way she described it to me she's like it is utter madness it's utter madness and the lunatics are running the asylum to a certain extent
because there's a lot of people the company that she works for now so a lot of people that are inside the company that legitimately are mentally ill and they consider themselves activists and they have to placate them because there's a certain percentage of the population of the people that work for the company and they're the loudest and they oftentimes don't get work done and when confronted they they talk about their activism right and like she's like listen you are here for you know x amount of hours a day this is your [ __ ] job you're not an activist right and don't think that if you're complaining about other things that this company does that you doing that is a part of your job because it is not yeah i mean i think the companies are somewhat to blame because they've done the whole like bring the real self to work thing right and again what is that there there's this philosophy among like the hr there that like and if you're being cynical about it it's engineered to get the most productivity out of you like the real the real self to you like if you work at some of these companies particularly again to answer your question i think it depends what stage of the company you join if you're talking about big companies like apple google facebook now um it it's a campus it's a lifestyle they do your laundry for you they feed you there's like they do your laundry they can't yeah yeah there's like apple does your laundry i'm not sure about apple because we were never in office because it was still under covered but facebook had had laundry i'm sure google does yeah whoa yeah it's it's weird it's you join i mean it's a strained analogy but it's kind of like a cult and there's like a massive amount of corporate culture like i described this slot in cows monkeys who said that who said that quote that every successful startup is a cult i think it was keith or boy i think from founders fun and he the thing is he's right he's right like facebook was a cult and i joined it and that was a happy member of it it was very powerful everyone sacrificed themselves for the sake of the facebook empire and its emperor did it change your
own personal thinking while you were there in the cult oh yeah did you subscribe to kool-aid oh yeah i totally bled blue i still do do a certain thing absolutely because again it's a formative experience like some of the most impactful professional work i did was there like it or not making taking facebook ads from like the shitty stupid little ipad offer ads on the right to like literally the thing you just looked at or bought which i know sounds cringy whatever that changed everything i was one of many to be clear it wasn't just me but that changed everything about that company and was super impactful inside the industry like how much of an impact did it have when apple came along and in introduced these restrictions yeah you're talking about att which is like the ads transparency thing for those who don't know if you've got an iphone like you you download an app and suddenly there's like this opt-in that apple is showing you saying hey do you want to share your data with these people that's hugely impactful what that does is so why does that matter so apple controls this they create the hardware and the software and all of it right right at the end of the day seen from apple's point of view facebook as powerful as it seems is just another app in the app store right which was always zuck's fear which is why he wanted to build a phone apple can say look facebook you can't you don't get to track users as well as you used to you can't track joe rogan down or like anonymously your device id you can't do that anymore you only get a certain level of granularity how much tracking were they able to do that before that well i mean an infinite amount they would track you individually i mean whether it's worth doing or not it's another matter but they would get the individual device id from your phone and so they would know who you are in terms of that phone what does that entail like again you know you if if you go to if you go to cabela's and buy a thing then you go to some you're playing a casual game and they show you an ad you playing that game and you buying
that thing in cabela's can be individually joined in a very precise way and if you remove that and say oh you can't track joe rogan's phone you're tracking a hundred thousand people at a throw then they bucketize you they put you in a bucket that isn't quite as precise as before and what that translates into is fewer clicks fewer sales like the effective amount of money that either the advertiser makes or the publisher that's showing the ad mix goes down now is this for the end user for the person who has the phone is it beneficial that they've instituted these policies good question um if you get a warm fuzzy feeling inside knowing you're not being individually tracked yes but other than that not particularly but it also doesn't give up the access to your data that's this very valuable commodity for facebook right um so here's the tricky thing about data right one of the one of the many misconceptions that i try to address in the book about how facebook works is it's often not facebook data that's being used to target you because if you think about facebook right it's like you're posting random photos you're engaging with content but a lot of your commercial activity like booking airplane flights shopping for [ __ ] doesn't happen on facebook facebook doesn't know about that strictly speaking so how how do they solve that problem that like we got to show him [ __ ] shoe ads and facebook doesn't know [ __ ] about what shoes you like right so part of this is what i described in the book and what i helped build in the early stages there's a way of joining you joe rogan facebook you to cabela's you in some relatively data safe way that that lets cabela show you an ad for those shoes facebook doesn't necessarily know all the cabela's [ __ ] because cabela's doesn't want to let facebook know that [ __ ] because they don't trust facebook right and so a lot of the stuff that's going on isn't like oh facebook knows everything about you it's like no
facebook knows who you are on every device because you tend to use facebook everywhere maybe not you but other people and so that means that they can join you very well to all the other commercial activity you do and you use facebook a lot so they have lots of opportunities to maybe show you an ad so that's really facebook's strength but getting back to your original question how does apple [ __ ] that up well it [ __ ] it up because it doesn't know who you are on that device at the individual granular level anymore and so it can't talk to cabela's and say oh that guy who will look for these weird things like show them this ad that can't happen anymore is it in any way negative for the person who's the end user good question um because maybe you would want to seize those those ads because this is something that you're actually interested in purchasing i mean in the happy case but let's face it i mean in the happy cases if you're a person who's you know you have full control over your urges you're not a person who's just like you know you don't you can't afford something but you buy it anyway because you're [ __ ] crazy and you saw the ad and you can't help yourself because we know that there are people like that out there right so in the best case scenario is it better i would think so but isn't that like what you do as a business i i think the status quo is a lot better than the like stupid punch the monkey ads he used to run those ads in like display band you probably don't remember them but like in yahoo.com back in the day to be like a little moving target and then like punch the monkey like you can either see that [ __ ] or you can actually see an ad that maybe has a chance of being relevant in instagram feed so yeah that you can give anything up to have those relative ads no in fact i mean you gain things right like a lot of services wouldn't exist if they weren't paid for via ads so like the reality is if facebook's ads start sucking more i.e the amount of money they make for ads goes down they're just going to show you more ads so do you think that android phones handle it better because android phones allow more of
those things in yeah super wonky question i wasn't expecting this wonky yeah no no no it's good i think i love talking about it but um the model that google and apple have are somewhat different um apple is a fully you know vertically integrated thing they create literally the chips and the software you're looking at google's a little bit different you can buy android phones made by all sorts of manufacturers their model in general tends to be a little bit more open to third parties and so there's a whole ads ecosystem in google where i could [ __ ] fill this wall or a whiteboard with all the little boxes all little companies that like get together to show you a single ad and so google is a little bit better about being more open to the outside mind you they still use monopoly power in various ways like they're not saints but apple has a more closed mode approach to it and that's why they're building an ad system because they want to make money in ads but they're not going to go the google route they're going to build more than likely i mean not that i have deep insight into it anymore but more than likely they're going to build it themselves because they have a more closed vision of it that how they think about data privacy here's another thing we want to geek out one direction apple's going that's kind of interesting is that a lot of the data for your iphone's going to live on device like in other words for the past 20 plus years of internet we've had this model where like you do [ __ ] on a phone data goes into the cloud weird [ __ ] happens and you get shown a page or an experience a lot of that's changing right like probably most of what you do on a phone is through an app it's not a browser anymore it's like the code is running on your on your phone you're producing data on that phone like why shouldn't the computation and all the [ __ ] that happens happen on the phone these phones are actually pretty powerful right um and so a lot of things are moving in that direction for a bunch of reasons one of the reasons actually is privacy and you know apple and other companies have made
public statements about this like oh it's more private like what's the ultimate opt out my date is on this phone you know i do i take it i throw them to the [ __ ] lake their data's gone right while like opt-out and deletion when the data is in the cloud and a bunch of third parties have it you never really know right right but if you keep the data on the phone it is better in many ways right it also feels creepier right one of the things apple did recently i don't know if you followed the story they launched a system to catch what's called csam which is a child sexually explorative material which you can kitty porn basically and they launched a system that would it's complicated but would scan photos on your phone basically yeah i heard about that which is weird right and it's funny because it is that on device paradigm it's like okay like if you've got the you've got the photos from what i recall they would only scan photos that were that were going to get sync to icloud anyhow but but but they were doing what's called looking at the hash of the image on your phone so it was it was code running on your phone and people felt very you know it felt like that was an intrusion and people kind of basically revolted about it i'm not sure if they discontinued the program or not but well the problem is like what if you have a a photo of your son naked in a kiddie pool laughing in your backyard and he's two was that kitty porn right there's a couple things that could go wrong here right how does the false positive like right an innocent person getting would you get flagged right one is you've got a photo that just happens the way it would typically work is there's a database of you know child exploited material and they look for it on your phone and they do what's called hashing the image what basically that means is like decompose this complicated image into like a simple string that could be easily compared right and say like this is the image now if you've got an image that happens to map to that then you could have a collision in that space and it's like oh
it's kitty porn but it's not or you just have a random image the way these images work like a lot of researchers found like a random image of a dog would actually map to this other thing right so there's lots of ways of getting it wrong and of course apple assured people that they wouldn't get it wrong because of this and that but it's scary right like getting maligned as being like a kiddie porn guy when it's just like a picture of your kid or even like a random picture that that is scary and what's also scary to people is the idea that someone could hack into your device yes and implant some sort of questionable material oh yeah like [ __ ] i'm in i'm in this high school group with people i went to high school with and whatsapp and you know it's a bunch of [ __ ] bros from miami and they post all sorts of stupid [ __ ] that i would not normally share or like want on my phone but like what's that by default saves those images or to iphoto and so you can imagine the sort of [ __ ] they post and like it ends up in like my photos real and apparently it's like dude what the [ __ ] like don't do this like that that sort of thing could happen yeah yeah and someone could send you so like if you i have some really ridiculous friends they can send you something that's actually illegal right yeah it's a problem the flip side of it just to take the other side of it is like dude like there's a lot of [ __ ] kitty barn a lot a lot of uh child sexual exploitation that you would like someone sent me this article about 108 people that got arrested for child sexual exploitation and four of them were disney employees and my friend was like i can't believe how many [ __ ] pedos are out there and i'm like i bet there's a lot more than we think a lot more yeah it was that little island i lived on orcas island this idyllic little island the guy who ran the bagel shop got arrested in an fbi sting they were in some either telegram or signal group passing around this sort of material and the fbi [ __ ] showed up on some island northwest like arrested dude in the middle of this business and you know i
was curious because it's like a local okay so i went and read the federal indictment which is public record you can go read it i would not advise reading it by the way because i think part of what they do is they include details and materials in the indictment to make the person look as guilty as possible and so they describe the images which are disgusting obviously i know it's just it's worse than you can imagine i wouldn't advise anybody going and seeing it or like even reading about it it's the most revolting thing you can possibly imagine it's like yeah that [ __ ] should go to jail should absolutely go to jail so it's a moral trade-off yeah yeah and there's a very bizarre argument that somehow or another seeing those images keeps people from actually performing acts of violence on children yeah but that is a [ __ ] shifty argument and there's another even shifty argument that cgi versions of child pornography are should be acceptable because it's like a you know a way that they can get it out of their system or whatever it's yeah it's it's just [ __ ] that it's real is this [ __ ] that that's a real like hidden sort of secret part of our society that there are people out there yeah like i have a friend who almost had his child kidnapped the other day like someone was trying to lure his kid literally into a van dude that's when the [ __ ] glock comes out oh my god it's so scary it's so scary he was at a park and luckily he pays attention what happens if you don't and then the kid's gone and you have no way to find them and they're gone forever like what like how many houses are there to search how many people are there to look at how many how far did they drive with your kid they've got these like tracking watches for kids that you can put on them so you can know where they are christ yeah and that's when the government says all you need is a chip just take a chip and we're gonna put a
chip in your child and we'll find your child everywhere man this went dark pretty fast dude when you start talking about child exploitation that's some of the scariest [ __ ] in our society the fact that we have this first world super advanced like the most progressive society on earth essentially you know the the most freedom the most and that they're still without you know the our moral foundation our ethics or 21st century like as advanced as we can in terms of the way we feel about people's rights and it's still still there's people out there that want to do that to children yeah it's dark it's dark especially for people like you and i who have them who have children oh yeah when you have kids suddenly changes everything any aggression or violence towards children literally fills you with the most murderous rage instantly my friend jim brewer said that best he's you know we were talking once he said um i now understand murder he goes i never understood murder like why would anybody want to kill somebody but if you want to harm my kid i get murder because i understand it yeah and he's a very peaceful guy it's um it's a part of uh you know you're always going to have when you have a spectrum of behavior you're always going to have the worst on some end of the spectrum it's going to be the worst possible scenario of what kind of human exists yeah and that's when someone will step in and say well you want that censored right and you go of course but isn't that different yeah i mean i think the the free speech standard in the us that like you know imminent lawless action like if you're actually like browsing a crowd to like go kill somebody or do something illegal that that's where the state should step in right there's actual physical harm or crime and doxxing and things along those lines yeah um so we were talking about google phones like yeah is how significant is the difference to the
end user if you have like say an android phone versus a apple phone in terms of privacy there is the issue of encryption like imessages are encrypted but someone could hack into your icloud and gain access to your imessages yeah right yeah i mean from the privacy perspective i'd probably say apple's probably a better phone if you're totally paranoid about it for like for example google still for most advertisers makes available that unique device ideo is talking about like they don't have the att thing and so if you're really paranoid about that apple's probably as much as you know i've had a rough history with that company what if you're using something like whatsapp or you know uh signal or something like that that has i'm not a crypto expert but whatsapp in theory is end to end encrypted that means that literally from your phone to their phones encrypted and even facebook they can see the traffic certainly but they supposedly can't actually read um what you're writing and then supposedly is not a good word well i by contrast signal which i use a lot is open source and so the world has looked at the code that in theory at least is running on the on the phones and so there it's in theory safe in theory in theory in theory yeah yeah i use signals well i do yeah i don't you know i never know you know edward norton or at edward norton that's hilarious edward snowden snowden uh recommended it so i'm like okay listen to that guy if anybody knows about privacy dude the reality is my life is so boring that like you know even the fbi was seeing everything you know what what would they like what would happen yeah but that's that's an argument my friend used when the nsa was uh caught spying on people like what are they good what are they gonna find like it's not the case that's not the point the point is it's human beings that have access to your data and they shouldn't so people shouldn't be allowed to just read your email especially when it's a national security agency and they can put you in jail that's in the government they have guns but in jail like exactly my privacy when it comes like somebody trying to sell me shoes like i don't give a [ __ ] right but when it comes to
the government a different story but you have to look at it as a perspective in perspective like think about how the apple employees targeted you for things taken out of context in your book yeah what if someone takes things out of context in your emails and uses that as evidence of your piece of [ __ ] in a trial where they're trying to convict you and they trying to sway the jury that's where it gets sketchy right yeah but you know there's this like tourism and startup life that like for most companies it's not a technical problem that's a problem it's a human problem and those problems are actually harder to solve technical problems have some solutions right so do you think that like the technical solutions to human problems are just like prophylactic i mean they're helpful like i use signal and i like it but at the end of the day you have to believe in rule of law and honest courts and that's that's the real solution to it i i think one thing you can criticize i think tech for is that they have it's a solutionist mentality that thinks that there's literally a technical solution to everything and i don't buy that actually i think yeah you're using an apple phone but you i used to be android but then funny when i was getting the apple job i bought a pile of apple [ __ ] as part of my due diligence and so that's the phone that i bought when i got the offer did you think about switching back no i mean i don't hate the company that much no no no but i mean is it a different experience is it a better experience for you in terms of like knowing that they they don't give you the targeted ads and no like what's better to you i like the android i think the pixel phone is a fine phone i think people who [ __ ] on android phones coming from the iphone world are like kind of dumb a little bit like i don't think they haven't used a recent phone they're just different a lot of what i do is is on the google stack like calendar and gmail and stuff which integrates really nicely with android a lot of apple software and services historically i think haven't
been quite as good although that is changing so i don't know i i could probably go either way i think people who like switch and like oh this sucks it's just like it's just muscle memory they just haven't cussed them too yeah yeah yeah yeah there's certain things about apple phones that i like and certain things about android phones that i like do you use both yeah i have a samsung and i have a an iphone oh cool yeah there's uh you know the innovations come out quicker on android phones they do actually yeah like i have an android fold one of those ones like if i want to watch a video it's [ __ ] like a little tablet yeah it's pretty dope you know um but it's it's also funny that people get upset when they get a green text like shut the [ __ ] up yeah who gives a [ __ ] that's like the stupidest [ __ ] thing to be a snob about you you don't like the color of the text oh god guess what and the android phone doesn't show up that way it could be all kinds of different colors it's customizable and then and then again if you're using signal which i like to use signaling absolutely it's only in the us people still use text like overseas is mostly whatsapp or signal or whatever else that are actually even use texting yeah they do that too because it's more um it's it's cheaper it's cheaper yeah that's why that's why whatsapp took off virally overseas because texting could be expensive in these countries and it was essentially free while in the us they always had like the 300 texts a month like it was functionally free and nobody cared about it that wasn't that big a deal do you think that privacy and this this thing that's going on where apple is sort of cutting off the stream of ad revenue that used to exist do you think that that's going to shape in many ways the future of how cell phones integrate into networks and systems huge way i mean there's a bunch of reasons for doing it right from the vibe that i got in my brief time there like i think people like tim
cook and senior management like care about privacy like it's not just like a [ __ ] line that said strategically it totally benefits them the fact that they have tighter control of the data on that phone that only they make right so it happens to line up very nicely and yeah i think i think the bat part of the reason why i joined like why would you join like a big slow company when you're like this tech entrepreneur guy or whatever google and and apple are going to define that future in mobile right and i think people like or players like facebook are going to be second fiddle they're just going to be apps in their ecosystems and so yeah that's i think it's going to change the way that and this business if this on-device thing takes off that's going to change the way a lot of things work how are they going to implement that it'll just be it'll be slowly and like like well this child filter thing right like they'll just deploy code that lives on your phone and that the data lives on your phone and like the ad system eventually will probably move in this direction as well if i'm reading the tea leaves correctly and so that what that means is like when you browse again you're shopping for cabela's [ __ ] or whatever on your [ __ ] phone that date just doesn't leave the phone and cabela's targets you on the phone with an ad experience on apple and your date and your data never left the phone or so how would they know that you're browsing for cabela's yeah i mean there's there's a lot of complicated tricks about it like um what's called differential privacy federated learning there's a lot of little clever hacks because you might ask like well but then how do you train models like how do you know like how do you train from like a million phones right to know that like a guy who does this should see that ad like how do you collectively learn it because an individual is not going to generate enough data on one phone there's clever hacks around that that try to collect that information in relatively privacy safe ways come up with a model that says oh if he's looking for x show them why
but then have your data never leave never really leave the phone and do it that way it's a very different way of engineering things yeah because i was talking to a friend and we were you know discussing privacy and gps and they were saying you should never use uh waze and never use google maps you should use apple because apple destroys all the data and i'm like yeah but you also don't get as good of an experience right you want to know where the speed traps are that's how they know where the steer traps are because everyone reports it well not only that where the accidents are what's the best route to get around the traffic they're far superior like you know waze was acquired by google right but waze is far superior right and it's so superior they've set up cops in certain areas of new jersey where they don't allow people to drive through the neighborhood that don't live there because so many people were routing traffic through their via waze that was causing these traffic jams and these like sleepy communities because people figured out you could [ __ ] speed right through this neighborhood and some people were violating speed limits and so then they just started implementing cops you know and putting these stops with like you can't drive here unless you live here which is kind of sketchy because you're supposed to be able to just drive wherever the [ __ ] you want if it's an open neighborhood right here's one thing i would say about privacy here's another thing i think people kind of misperceive it a lot of the privacy is also like your buddy there who's like don't use waze even though it's convenient people think about privacy in these very absolute ways as an absolute right and i think in reality people are very smart about it it's actually a commodity that they trade for other things right so you trade some privacy for security right like the fourth amendment like you don't have absolute privacy from the government if you're dealing drugs they can kick in the [ __ ] door assuming they actually have a judge's warrant and we all kind of collectively agree to that because we think well
that's an okay compromise or we trade some privacy for convenience it's like okay sure waze knows where i'm going but i know where the [ __ ] speed trap is and that's pretty cool or you know i posted about this interview i'm giving up some of my privacy but in exchange for community because people will see it and they'll engage with it whatever so i think a better way of thinking about privacy is not in absolute terms and like this paranoid thing it's like okay am i getting value for my privacy right like is what i'm giving up like is that worth it for what i'm getting right and often it's not true it's like no this just sucks and you're just using your data and like [ __ ] that but very often it's like yeah like you know i think people are very good at judging that i think people are smarter than people think do you think most people even consider it i think it's a small percentage of people that are even paying attention to [ __ ] so many people are just using stuff there's probably fewer people talking about it than than you then you would get a twitter and there's probably even fewer people who actually know how it works but i don't know i don't know i don't think people are that dumb and i think you know one of the interesting things about the whole anti-facebook media cycle like from 2016 is that if you were to look at like the usage data for facebook like you wouldn't be able to see where that backlash happened like people didn't actually stop using facebook or they might have stopped using it for other reasons because they got bored of it and they moved to instagram or whatever but was there an actual for all this tech backlash did people actually use amazon less or facebook less particularly after covid with you know people being locked in all the rest of it did people actually revolt against tech or is that just an impression in some journalists in some commenter's mind i think it's mostly the latter actually but that impression does have an influence on the stock price right doesn't it maybe i mean to the extent that it impacts revenue well what what caused uh meta or facebook what caused them is it
turning it into meta like what caused a stock crash the stock has significantly dropped right i think there's there was a few things in that earnings release you're talking about the one last quarter one of it was that i think growth slowed down which is the first time in facebook history and it's because of this implementation that apple oh no i don't think it was that i think privacy no no i think it's just um it's funny i kind of warn about this in the in the coda to to to the chaos monkeys dude facebook has more users than like christianity right most people on the internet are on some facebook property either facebook instagram or whatsapp right and so at some point you run out of humans like you just don't have growth anymore that is a crazy statement facebook has more users than christianity yes who the [ __ ] would have ever predicted that 20 years ago isn't that wild how long has facebook been around it hasn't even found it in the mid arts i think 2004 2005. my god what a crazy statement so in less than 20 years something has arisen with more users than christians and christ [Laughter] that's bonkers man that really is it's really crazy you think about it that way i think they're pushing three billion users have you met zuckerberg yep no how is he i don't know him personally well to be clear um but the book opens in the meeting where i'm pitching a lot of this crazy targeting stuff in his luck meeting because he had to approve it because it was a big step um you know he's he's he seemed to me very somewhat cold and aloof but definitely in charge like the wimpy dweeby character in like the social network or that movie or whatever that wasn't the vibe i got from him in the meetings i was in maybe he decided to toughen up after that movie oh i'll show them dude he's like he's like an alpha male nerd like he's not and he used to have like these challenges for himself like learn chinese or do this or only eat meat that he shot himself like you would have these like nietzschean quests yeah like
and so i've seen him speak chinese like in in china supposedly it's good yeah yeah they go crazy because he is good at it like wow no he's clearly an exceptional mind right it's it's clear you know it's really interesting but also the burden of responsibility of running a company that is deeply rooted in who knows how many countries it is now and so many people when they buy phones in these other countries facebook is default installed on the operating system or whatsapp yeah wild and he's only like 38 or something how old is he a little younger than me yeah he's like in his late 30s yeah what the [ __ ] man imagine imagine trying to navigate that world and keeping your [ __ ] together you'd be cold on the louvre too i mean i guess i'd imagine i saw him on lex friedman's podcast and he seemed much more normal in communicating with lex than i think i've ever seen him anything it's more he seemed more comfortable you know he i think he freezes up a little bit in public speaking like a lot of his all hands he'd have a weekly all hands he didn't come across as charismatic i mean there's a scene in the book that i mentioned one chapter we got to experience vanity fair remember google plus i know everyone [ __ ] forget but at one point google plus was like a big deal and it was the first time that like google that facebook faced like an existential crisis from another tech incumbent company went [ __ ] bonkers nuts he gave a speech almost like a roman senator on the senate floor of like you know google must be destroyed and all this and uh it was kind of pretty inspiring actually so he can definitely have his moments yeah google must be destroyed well he quoted i think it's uh cato the elder a famous roman center and he would end all his speeches with uh cartago linda carthage must be destroyed it's in the context of the piano course and so he just randomly cited that and the implication was clear and just to give an idea of how crazy facebook was like
the same day there was a printing like a silk screening poster lab in the company they literally printed that phrase with like a roman helmet and it appeared all over all over facebook and then everyone stole the [ __ ] posters they're all gone i'd like struggle to find a photo because vanity fair wanted a photo of it and i couldn't find it because i didn't manage to steal one of the posts a friend sent me a photo before it got stolen to the [ __ ] thing that's how crazy that's how crazy facebook was i know it's laughable it's a joke but what was his argument for destroying google plus like why do you think it was such a threat was a competitive threat obviously that's all it was but it wasn't it was janky and it sucked my friend who was working at google at the time while this was going on she was telling me like oh this is going to take over it's going to be amazing like this is clunky and shitty this is a terrible experience the thing is to defeat an existing incumbent you can't just be like 10 or 20 better you have to be like 300 better yeah and it wasn't anywhere near that it wasn't as good it wasn't even as good but but look at the risk though right google has so many other touch points gmail youtube and they were plugging it with the [ __ ] g plus button everywhere oh yeah which is basically a monopoly behavior like you're using your advantage in one market to take over another market which is exactly what microsoft did with the browser so the threat the thought was they were going to do that with facebook but it's amazing how bad it was but it still didn't work and you know with all that input all that influence still sucked yeah kind of shocking yeah at the end of the day for all that struggle like he declared like seven day work weeks like balls out the whole [ __ ] thing end of the day it just died seven day work weeks to kill google plus oh yeah man they would serve meals on the weekend oh christ there's a scene there where i go to like facebook on sunday full parking lot i go to google empty it's like oh okay i see i see who's really quick and taking this for real at the time again facebook is different now i imagine but at the time you know this wasn't that early like i
wasn't that early employees like 2010 or 11 11. and it still felt like a startup in the sense that it was hyper motivated people were like super [ __ ] hardcore posters on the walls everyone wearing the same [ __ ] i mean i almost compared to communist cuba it's like our great leader our great system of values posters on the wall everyone dressed the same way what was the the dress i mean my uniform they had this i forget who makes it it might have been like american apparel it was like this little fleece thing some people had hoodies some people had like the facebook branded thing and i would wear like a regular shirt and like pants or whatever but you think that people they they definitely tailored their wardrobe to fit in i think it just became the default they'd have these things called hackathons where you spend like an all-nighter hacking on [ __ ] and you'd get a t-shirt for that and it was like a badge of honor and you'd collect them because there'd be one like every month or two and so people would wear that you know a lot of swags like i was part of a team there was like an ads product that had like a logo everything had a code name so there's like an owl on it to you to wear it like the owl shirt or whatever i know there's there's a phrase from paul graham who writes all these blog posts about tech and he runs this thing called white combinator and he said if you brought back lenin from the grave and brought him onto the campus of a large tech company right and he saw the posters on the wall the great leaders the uniforms he would think that communism had won that literally this is it the dream came alive it's all true and then of course you would show them like the bank accounts of the various people and like well not not so fast vladimir wasn't quite the soviet union um but yeah it was it was and obviously it's not like living in cuba obviously like there's real struggles there not at all of course but but it felt definitely felt that way yeah is there um the distribution of wealth in those companies oh yeah what is that like
excellent point dude yes the best questions joe it's amazing that's that's that's exactly one of the issues right because the way these companies work right like how early you are in the company defines your wealth and how what fraction of the equity you get because the real money's in the equity like the salaries actually aren't that high i mean they're they're healthy but they're not crazy it's the equity where you really make the real money right and the fraction you get frankly of like the cap table of like the pie changes by orders of magnitude like literally within like and the value of it a year or two of joining so if i had joined facebook like two or three years before it would it would have changed the entire picture so what does that mean like say we're at facebook you're my boss right you could even have you could be my boss and maybe you you joined later because you're just a more senior person you came laterally right i'm worth whatever x million like a [ __ ] ton of money because i've been here since like the very founding and i'm doing the same job as you maybe even more junior job and i'm worth like a fortune and you're not so like what is that conversation like i you know i go to i go you know scuba diving in honduras on the weekend on a private jet and you went and saw a movie in mountain view and we come back hey so joe what'd you do on monday and it's like how's that convo go right because this guy is living in a different world than you and everyone kind of knows it but you can't talk about it because obviously it's like super corrosive to morale but that that's so if everybody knows it is it publicly discussed is it disclosed like how do they know how much money these other people have no you don't no it's not public nobody ever knows but they kind of know that it's a different world i mean there's websites you can go at like like for big companies see what the comp levels are so you can sort of get an idea but if you're talking about the early stage of a company and it's so variable right like i came
in what's called an aquahire what that means is like they acquire a company but really they're just buying you so it's just like a nice hiring offer um and the numbers there can vary by a lot and if you just get hired via like a college [ __ ] recruitment fair it's totally different and then again if as time goes on and facebook shares go from five bucks to 50 suddenly a 2x different in stock has a major or even more has a major difference wow so is there a bunch of resentment inside the the company because of that is there a call to adjust i didn't get that feeling again you don't know necessarily right it's a bit of blind man's bluff there's no way to actually know the pay delta so i don't think there's a lot of resentment there um i mean in theory the reward should vary with the risk but i'm not sure it's true like to be honest if i were giving startup advice joining as an early employee at a startup i mean now startup wages are pretty good so you're not taking such a big financial risk but to be honest like the fall off in the upside between like a founder and like a you know early employee is massive it's by orders of magnitude potentially and it's like you're taking the same [ __ ] risk it's like day one of the [ __ ] company right and like are you actually get filth you know filthy rich if it becomes google of course everybody gets rich in a google facebook scenario reality is most companies don't right they they either fail most fail or they have like a middling outcome like the company sells for a certain amount it's like okay it's a healthy outcome but it's not like everyone including the [ __ ] dog walker got is millions like no no that's why it's fascinating when a person like zuckerberg exists right where one person does develop a company that does manage to become [ __ ] insanely enormous yeah it's hard for me to imagine what the world looks like through his eyes your entire world grab i mean i've seen it through the eyes of
founders of smaller companies and even there like i've known people who have found nothing facebook size but you know a few hundred few hundred people worth a billion or more on paper they're worth maybe 100 million or something and it's weird they become like the sun of a solar system that revolves around them right from everything from their executive assistant to their therapist or the person who walks their dog to all their work life they're at the center of this of this thing and the whole world revolves around them and it kind of warps warps the perspective and in the case of zuck it must be even more so but it warps perspective for famous people you know like it's like my wife had a conversation with me the other day we were talking about something and i i thanked her for bringing it up and she and because we had like a candid conversation about i go thank you i need to talk about that i need to hear that from you and she goes you know nobody talks to you right like what do you mean she goes nobody really talks to you like i see how people talk when you're not there and i see how people talk when you're around like everybody like gets weird when you're around right and i'm like yeah i guess i guess i kind of know that but i don't know that i mean i know it but that's my life you know that's my my experience is i have to be aware of it but i have no reference point it's like these european folk tales where the king dresses as a commenter and goes talk to his people joe you've got to just get a really good disguise and go out there and talk to your bros and see what they say i should probably get some makeup like some artificial nose and [ __ ] like they can do it like you saw the werewolf out there if someone could make something like that they could make some wild [ __ ] are you um currently involved in tech now are you just doing your your blog and your sub stack what do you yeah what are you up to yeah i've got a few things going on i wear a few hats so i've got the the sub stack deal uh the subside guys are great and they gave me like a pro deal to like take it seriously it's a full-time thing and so it's like a book advance they you
know they front you money and then you drive subs um and that's been interesting um i've got a podcast show on this app called colin that's kind of like clubhouse remember remember clubhouse which was like the social audio i do because naval was trying to tell me that it was going to take off i'm like you're out of your [ __ ] mind and it did during covet right like he was saying i'm so high on this i like because he was an investor obviously i think he wanted me to talk it up as well but i got on with tim dillon and we did it after a podcast once and i was [ __ ] all over it i was like this is crazy he's like well it's private i go this ain't private i go someone's gonna [ __ ] put this online literally an hour after we did it it was on youtube it's like come on man this is the [ __ ] internet i do think there's something to like unscripted social audio that's different than like a podcast right like sure conversations with people yeah right yeah like you just decide randomly out of nowhere to have a phone conversation with uh lex friedman and you guys both upload it right yeah for sure definitely yeah twitter spaces does it there's this app called call in backed by this guy davidson could those spaces still exist yeah yeah if you go to top of twitter you should see all right so that's a thing like where people are talking on the phone like that i didn't know that that was even going on yeah it seems to have a decent amount here's the question how come no one has figured out an alternative to twitter i mean i know getter existed but then when i got on getter one of the first things that i noticed is that getter imported all of my twitter followers and tried to pretend i had 9 million followers on ghetto i'm like how is that you don't even have nine million users how is this correct this is shenanigans correct um how come no one's figured out another twitter because because of network effects like all these twitter alternatives are always some like right wing thing when you where it was like unfettered conversations whatever but it's like
dude like a i don't think the censorship on twitter is that bad for most people that's such that they would actually switch because of that if you're somebody really on the edge maybe and also like you want the opposing side there to make fun of like that that creates the spark that creates the tension who wants to sit in a totally right wing to it i wouldn't no i don't want to do that but but i don't also don't like do you know what the babylon b is yeah yeah did you see that they got financial [ __ ] twitter hilarious they got banned from twitter for saying rachel levine is the man of the year right i saw that and they won't even take it down which i salute them i mean that's a [ __ ] ballsy move because they're going to lose their twitter account because and they're saying you know like it's true but it's it's not true that she's the man of the year i mean it's true that it's a biological male but the fact that they have the balls to say we're not deleting this you know i'm like i i support that but i don't support them getting banned for that that's a [ __ ] joke like you can't crack a joke web 3 solves this joe decentralized decentralization do you think that that is something that would be adopted universally by a large amount of people we'll see i mean in general i'm kind of pro-wept through i think i think it's a fascinating thing and i hope to actually move into that direction myself for the yeah non sure um it's funny i don't feel like i'm a total crypt like as you can tell like i don't talk about things that i don't feel i'm a domain expert i always feel like i'm on thin ice but i'll i'll do it uh and possibly run the risk of of crypto bro rage um so web web 3 is interesting i'm sure your listeners have heard of like bitcoin and like maybe ethereum and stuff and like that's those are interesting like financial applications of it which is totally valid and cool but if you can imagine a bigger vision of that of decentralization as you're describing why is it called one way i get it it's
like what is web3 like why is it called web3 like what the [ __ ] is web 2. like what is web one right so web 2 is like everything we know it's like facebook twitter it's like it's like these gated platforms in which you know if if babylon b pisses off the [ __ ] twitter people then like they just get thrown out the platform they don't own anything right in many ways what the web three people want to want to recreate is web one which we're both old enough and some of your listeners i'm sure old enough to remember like email ftp telnet like core protocol http like the web right these are core protocols that aren't defined by like facebook or twitter saying this is the way the world works like no we agree that this is the pro like when you send an email this is what the actual document needs to look like for you to receive a valid email and there's no way to kick anybody off email you can't be i mean gmail might say i we don't want to give you a gmail account anymore but email as such is not shut down for you you can still send email right and so web3 in a trustless environment like with not people necessarily agreeing in direct ways coming up with a way to recreate a way to say like hey i wanna i own this thing like an nft like a picture of an ape say i own this thing and like the world thinks i own this thing and it's not a function of suspies or an auction house or whatever saying that i own this thing in theory that's how it should work so that that's the idea so you imagine like a web3 version of twitter how does it work you post a [ __ ] thing it exists in the blockchain this thing called a blockchain which is basically a public database that we all agree on everyone maintains via various mechanisms we have to get into and that's it and then i can have in the same way like email just works i have an app that sits on top of it that like reads that and renders it to me in some twitter like way but there's there's no twitter that can just say babylon b you don't exist anymore or donald trump get off of twitter right that's the goal interesting and you think that that's uh possible to implement large scale like to have the whole country adopt it like
what would it take do you think it would take some sort of sense or egregious censorship thing like i think donald trump being kicked off twitter was a step in that direction where so many people were so furious that the idea that you could take a sitting president and remove them from your social media platform that this could like you needed something along those lines maybe even more egregious like you said about privacy i think i think those aspects to your average person who isn't living on the edge and posting like weird crazy [ __ ] isn't that convincing i think for web 3 to take off and to be clear up my career has not been in like consumer internet it's been like on the back end like monetizing the usage but if i were to bet on this there has to be something new and cool that web3 enables that just doesn't exist that's going to drive that adoption you're not going to you're not going to convince people to leave twitter for like the new web3 version of twitter just because oh there's less censorship going on right i don't think that it's really like top of mind issue for most users what's interesting is twitter still allows pornography right i do i see when i search for random names that collide with the pornstar's name i see porn i don't know if it's legal i don't think it's allowed but you don't think it's allowed i mean it was for a long time right is it okay yes i mean for a long time they i mean there's no way they don't know that porn stars are going to post pictures of them [ __ ] i mean they just do like if you if you have if you follow porn stars and you click on their feed you see a lot of sex that seems to be still allowed but a fake exploding head will get you kicked off you're still talking about that guy yes calling rachel levine the man will get you kicked off but you could watch people jizz into each other that's fine wow right yeah although i think most people don't want point in their twitter experience but yeah well some people obviously do and they must have drawn some line i think it was probably during jack's
tenure because jack was a very pro free speech pro first amendment sort of a guy and he wanted the option he he was advocating for the option of a wild west version of twitter right where you'd have a twitter that's censored and moderated but another twitter that's just like [ __ ] get crazy yeah and no one else on board was you know interested in that option i don't think or at least not enough to actually get it moving yeah i mean that's a lot of what motivates 3 is that like that crypto libertarian aspect of tech that just wants to like total freedom yeah the most minimalist thing which you know i think it's powerful and yeah i think we should have it i think as time goes on that's going to be more attractive to people i believe you think so yeah that's what i would hope do you think gen z cares about that i don't give a [ __ ] about gen z but the people who are alive are not just gen z there's a lot of people that aren't gen z that are you know millennials and even gen x that are that are aware of the problems and the pitfalls of allowing social media companies to dictate discourse to decide what's acceptable and not acceptable to say yeah i agree you look like you have to pee do you no no no just checking most people when it gets around three hours they start squirming and i always wonder i it starts filling the back of my head like this guy might have to use the bathroom i do not have to pee okay good um but i want to thank you for being here man i really enjoyed our conversation cool i enjoy your twitter too do you okay that's that's how this started right yeah you followed me yeah yeah reading twitter you're very sensible guy you say a lot of things and i'm like guy's got balls he says things that i agree with he says you're smart i appreciate that thank you jeff my pleasure uh so tell people your social media and one more time your stubs sub stack is the poll report the the pull request dot com request there's a link on my twitter profile go to twitter antoniogm is where i'm at on twitter i'm on this app called call in as well also pull requests what is colin colin is this clubhouse thing that i mentioned this is social apps um but you can find links to all that stuff on
twitter twitter is really the place dms are open you can dm me although we'll see all right good luck your dms are not open i take it joe no no no no well i might have to change that though yeah well thank you very much okay appreciate your time all right bye everybody [Music] you