Google fires protestors, NPR chaos, Humane's AI Pin, Startup tax crisis, sports betting scandal

26:20In any event, if you watch movies about Vietnam like platoon, which was made by Oliver Stone, who was a GI in Vietnam, or if you watched Seenley Kubrick's Masterpiece Fullmetal Jacket, which was based on books about Vietnam, you can see these dynamics and play very vividly. Now, turn to Gaza. All you got to do is look at the miles and miles of video to see. It looks like a lunar surface. I mean, even in the words of Joe Biden, there's been indiscriminate bombing there. In terms of the rules of engagement,

26:52the rules of We go to it go you at the desk of seven aid workers from the international Kitchen organization and there's an article in Horat's recently about the kill zones have been set up pretty much If you come within a certain invisible perimeter of Israeli troops, you can be shot I mean those are the rules of engagement and this is why there were three Israeli hostages who escaped and they were running towards Israeli troops and yelling in Hebrew and they still got shot and again this goes back to the rules of engagement being very loose. And then the final piece of it is you do have this dehumanization going on of the Palestinian.

27:27You can see this in a lot of the videos I've been posted by IDF soldiers. So, look, I think that these protesters, their actions are going to be judged in the fullness of time. I think there are actually good reasons to believe that Israel's war in Gaza, it's shades of Vietnam. And I think that over the long term, people may regard these protesters in a different right now they're just seeing as being disruptive and annoying and interfering, but if this war ends up being Israel's Vietnam, which I think it's on track to be, again, I think that people may in time give these protesters a little bit more credit.

28:05Jacob, what do you think? Interesting question, you know, putting aside what they're protesting about, I think they knew or some number of them knew they were going to get fired, so I think they're kind of resigning by sit in. And I think, yeah, there could be no ability to that. If you do not want to participate in supporting things in the world, you do not have to work at Google and you can protest and you can get fired. And we've seen some pretty intense protests. I don't know if you guys are aware of like what green piece and other environmentalists did to stop whaling. I'm sure you are aware of free bird.

28:40Was your passion on the subject. Those people went to jail in Japan for boarding Japanese as well in ships, like those are really intense protesters. But then to your point, Shamaaf, you can really hurt your cause. Climbing activists have been throwing paint on works of art. I don't know if you've seen that. And that's just infuriating. Like I have no tolerance for people destroying works of art or attempting to get attention. Here, it is benign to sit in an office and get fired. So I just consider it residing by sit in. If they wanna do that, that's fine. I do think there is something to Google enabling all this to your point, Friedberg, over time.

29:19And listen, they were parityed on Silicon Valley, the TV show because of how coddled and entitled people are. So there's a bunch of things going on at the same time. And if you want to do these intense protests, you have the right to do them. And history will judge you over time. But you need to be able to pay the price. In this case, the price is getting fired. In the case of shutting down the gold and the gay bridge, you should get a fine for doing that, I believe. And the fine should be based on whatever that cost to shut that bridge down. And that's got to be a serious fine. And you're right, Tremoff, if there's an emergency situation, somebody's got to get to a hospital or something.

29:59That's what I always think about when I see those things when you block streets and stuff or you block airports or you block these throughways. There's a lot of just normal everyday people trying to live their life who are probably very sympathetic to what you stand for, but when you disrupt their everyday lives and or threaten their physical security, they're not going to think that that's worth it. I'm also shocked that these people actually came to an office. I mean, these Googlers, I don't think they've actually been to an office before. They're probably going to check that their page is working.

30:29To Saoxas, to Saoxas Point, I actually would have had more respect for these people if they actually protested the war. But they didn't do that. They had a very discreet specific claim, which was that they wanted to dissolve a business deal that Google had to provide cloud services to the state of Israel called project Nimbus. And I think that's such a discreet thing that it's hard to understand that those 28 people would have even enough knowledge of what that is, but it sounds like a cloud hosting deal. Well, what's hosted there? And it could be any number of things. And I suspect if it's a billion dollar a year deal, it's many things.

31:07It's probably like the Israeli DMV. Is that really what you want? And I think that it would have been much of a more powerful thing to do to protest the actual war if that's what they cared about. You know, dovetails nicely with the discussion you all had last week about, would you back a not a defensive but an offensive weapons company, a technology company? And it seemed like you all had reservations on if you would not back a defensive one. anybody I think reasonably would back a defensive dome or interception of bombs coming in. That's an easy one. But going around the horn here, how many of us would back a company making missiles or bombs that blow people up or mines?

31:53Would you back a robot that had weapon systems on it? I think if you want to summarize what we said last week, it's like there are all kinds of businesses is where you'll end up investing in it. And over time, as it morphs, some of us will be faced with some of those decisions. And it'll, it'll frankly depend on what is the alternative in that moment. So I don't think anybody of us are going into going build a nuclear bomb. But you should not be naive that if you're building nuclear reactors, you could end up being in a situation where that thing gets licensed into a thing that you to either agree or disagree with.

32:32So this is my point is I think that those kinds of answers or those kinds of questions are missing the nuances and the nuances are very important. So it's impossible to answer this question in a thoughtful way, I think, would be my honestness. Okay, Saks, any closing thoughts here? Well, I think, Chamath brings up an interesting point about why didn't the protests just focus on the war itself rather than Google doing business with Israel? So my interpretation of that is they're trying to create a nexus to themselves, meaning their employees of Google, they're trying to create a reason for them to stage the sit -in at Google.

33:11Otherwise, if they just grab picket signs and we're on the street, it would just be much less newsworthy. So I think they were just trying to create something newsworthy here and it's kind of worked in the sense that we're talking about it, other people are talking about it. So that's my interpretation of that is they were just trying to elevate the issue in a slightly novel way. But look, I think that they should be willing to pay the price of getting fired or getting arrested. I mean, if you're going to engage in that kind of civil disobedience or protest, you should be willing to accept the price.

33:42And I did see some comments by the Googlers who got fired saying that they thought they were being treated unfairly by Google. Well, I think that's the wrong attitude. I think the attitude is, hey, this cause is so important to me that I'm willing to accept the price of being fired, saying that you don't deserve to be fired for disrupting the workplace. That is kind of an entitled attitude. So I think they should have just said, yeah, we did this on purpose because it's really important cause. They should say I'm proud to get fired because that's how much I believe in it. My stock options at Google are less important than this issue to me.

34:16Yeah, and I'm I'm I'm I accept him. I think they would have gotten just as much press if they actually protested the war I think in a week from now everybody will forget what project nimble says the odds that it gets canceled are less than zero and Everybody will move on and it will not add to the drum beat a sack said of people that may be Eventually on the right side of this issue theoretically may I say theoretically because it That's that that stone is totally yet to be overturned on that topic. So I think that they missed the mark And I think that the part of the press that people Glondonk to was it was happening inside of a company in real time and there was video of it.

34:55Mission accomplished for them. We're talking about it here as the top story. And you know, if that was there, if they wanted to raise awareness, they succeeded and they should just own their firing because they knew they were going to fire it. All right. There has been a ton of chaos and the culture works continue over NPR, a couple of things happened simultaneously this week that are worth discussing. Katherine Mar was named MPR's new CEO back in January. I'm going to have to give a little bit of a timeline here before I get comments from the boys because there's a little setup. And so she was named the CEO back in January.

35:32She officially started in March. Okay. She formally worked at Wikimedia Foundation, those are the people who run the Wikipedia, obviously. MPR's mission, if you don't know, is to create a more informed public. One challenged and invigorated by a deeper understanding and appreciation of events, ideas, and culture. That's their state and mission from their website on April 9, Erie Burliner, an editor who's been with MPR for 25 years, wrote an op -ed for Barry Weiss's Free Press, Friend of the Pod, explaining how MPR lost America's trust by going hard left and becoming close -minded. He said, quote, an open -minded spirit no longer exists within NPR.

36:09And now, predictably, we don't have an audience that reflects America. Last Friday, Mar put out a statement calling his actions profoundly disrespectful, hurtful and demeaning. The Sunday conservative activist Christopher Rufo, he's the person who exposed former Harvard President's Claudine Gays plagiarism, he's a focal critic of LGBTQ stuff at schools, started reposting old tweets from Martin, this new CEO. Her tweets are super far left from Saraje's diaudiata. There's an interesting clip of her talking at Ted, talking about how truth is a bit of a distraction. And that prevents people from getting things done.

36:50People have gotten pretty inflamed about that clip. And then on April 16th, burlinner was suspended for five days without pay, wrapping this all up, burlinner, then resigned after 25 years, saying, quote, I cannot work in a newsroom where I am disparaged by a new CEO whose divisive views confirm the very problems that NPR cite in my free press, SA, SACs or thoughts. I mean, this just seems like a dog bites man's story. I mean, what is the novel revelation here? The person running NPR is a liberal. I mean, I'm kind of with you, but... What took 25 years to resign? I mean, all you have to do is listen to MBR.

37:32It's always been liberal, okay? This is not some recent capture of an institution by the law. So why is it going so crazy viral right now? Why has this become the topic of the moment? Well, apparently there are some quotes that this new CEO, Catherine Mark tweeted or said that you can point to that seem kind of, and kind of crazy woe, but they're just actually pretty standard. I just don't see the breaking news here. If they end up firing Catherine Mar, they're going to hire someone just like her. I mean, they're going to have the same views. MPR has always been left of center, and the only change that's happened is that the left has now become woe.

38:15And so it's become of obsessively focused with the ideas of why supremacy and why privilege. And she simply reflects that. I agree. I was like a tempest in a teapot. Like newsflash. NPR is woke and left leaning. I mean, I guess maybe that's somebody who was there for 25 years, wrote the expose is interesting or I don't know. Chimab any thoughts on this one and why it's taking up so much headspace for people. I don't think it is. I think it's taking up a lot of headspace amongst breathless journalists. I don't think it matters to the public at large and I think anybody cares. Has had one thing, which is I do think that the government should not be funding this anymore.

38:55I think NPR at this point is mostly funded by private donations, but it got started with government money and the government still funds it. And given that it is this left institution at this point and really always has been there's simply no reason for the government to be funding one side of the political debate that way. So I think there is maybe an issue there in terms of reminding people that hey this is like government funded why and there's no reason why MPR can't be funded with either private donations or private subscription. Yeah, this is just to give people some back of the envelope math.

39:32MPR's budget is like 320 million. It's a dollar per American and they get a bunch of programming fees and some corporate sponsorship. The corporate sponsorship is like a hundred million bucks. The programming fees is what the local radio stations play of them. Net net, this is costing like maybe, I don't know, 30 cents in American. And if you just swap out, and this is the way I like to look at these to be objective, if you were saying this was funding Fox News or I don't know Ben Shapiro and Daily Wire, how would you feel about it? You'd be like, well, why is the government funding that? But they should just cut NPR and all this public broadcasting stuff loose over the next year or two, wind it down and let them fend for themselves in the new media landscape.

40:11Look, the jk algorithm, they could easily substack it. NPR is not going to go away. Just create subscriptions and you're fine. Yeah, I mean, it's only like, they're down to whatever. It's very hard to find the numbers as a little like hiding of the money here, but they're so little at stake here. I think that's why it's so contentious. Nobody cares. should not be funding one -sided ideological institutions on either side of the political debate. And you're right, if this was funding going to daily wire or something like that, people would be up in arms. So, any event, what's good for the gander?

40:42The next tempest in a teapot is Humane's AI pin getting barbecued by our modern -day Mossberg, Marquez Brownlee, who is an awesome YouTuber. I love his reviews. And it's created a bit of a social media Rorschach test here, getting a lot of fields from people in Silicon Valley. Let's just tee this up here. Humane is a hardware startup that you may have heard of. They make an AI powered wearable computer, especially when you put on your chest. It's about the size of a pack of cigarettes, maybe half the size of it. Founded by two Apple execs back in 2018, raised a quarter of a billion dollars or so.

41:19And the device is now in the hands of reviewers. It's pretty innovative and Marquez talks about how innovative it is in his review. It will let you talk to it. It's got a camera on it. We'll show it here on the screen. If you're not subscribed to the YouTube channel, just go to YouTube right now and you'll see us playing the video of it. Search for all in. really interesting interface. It does obviously voice. It connects you to an LLM on the back end. So if you want to know So, you know, some piece of information, you can answer those questions for you. But Marquez showed it just absolutely failing out of bunch of tests, being overpriced, and he called it the worst product he's ever reviewed.

42:02He's very thoughtful and thoughtful, but the title is obviously a bit link -baiting as a co -founder of Engagement. I can tell you, if you want to get a lot of clicks, just say something is the best or the worst ever and you can get 10 times the views. The pin according to him doesn't do anything better than a smartphone, it's slow, it doesn't work. It's often wrong, it's 700 bucks, the battery sucks. So many different ways to go with this. Everybody is talking about it on X and in the media. Where do you stand on this one, Friedberg? Both on how people are responding to it in the tech industry as being like anti -tech anti -innovation versus, hey, it's just a reviewer giving his candid feedback on a product that's clearly not ready for prime time.

42:54I think there's a lot of issues. One is just the challenge of deep tech, more specifically in this case hardware investing. You have to invest a lot of capital before you even have your first product and then you don't really know how well it works until you've already burnt through a lot of capital. I mean, this is one of the stunning stories of a startup that has raised a quarter billion dollars. And then they come out with their first product and it turns out it needs a lot of work because it doesn't do anything that consumers really are compelled by as evidenced by the review. So I think it highlights that challenge and why that market finds particularly in this environment, it to be so hard to get capitalized.

43:40Now, obviously, there are some hundred pioneers like Elon who can take that capital and drive to the outcome, spending hundreds of millions of dollars before you get your first rocket into space, and you have a lot of failings along the way. But the general tone of here is a deep tech investment is very likely to fail because you spend so much money before you've known at that point you have less money and you can't really make the necessary iteration to get So it's a tough data point for other deep tech companies that need to raise a lot of capital. Then I think it brings up the point about ex -Apple people that there's a degree of confidence because people come from Apple and a degree of hubris in the employees that come from Apple that says, I have worked at the best hardware company in the world.

44:30Therefore, this person is like a succeed and it turns out that when you don't have all that built -in infrastructure for testing and optimization, all of that built in distribution, all of the feedback systems that Apple has engineered into their business model for so long. Maybe you missed some of the data around what makes a product great or not before you launch. I think that's your key point, Freiburg. That is the best point. If these folks come from Apple, they're used to unlimited resources. And what you don't see is all the product Apple doesn't release, right? They never release their car, correct, Freiburg?

45:01and they get to... Well, I think then there's also this question about like, where is the value in the product? Because they thought, hey, if we have AI on a pen, it'll work without the consumer feedback about whether or not people are willing to sit around and wait for 12 seconds to get an answer to a question. And then it brings up this other really important point, which is half the people in Silicon Valley are running breathlessly into the conversation saying, do not disparage a startup that's working really hard at getting their first product, right? It'll destroy the motivation of other startups that need to kind of iterate to get there And we can't just take the first V1 and say that's it Tremont your thoughts your last star What's that?

45:42The other half of Silicon Valley running in and saying this thing's a piece of shit. What are you talking about? It doesn't work. So it is a really interesting kind of You know, the bait. Yeah, a workshop test on what's going on? Oh people what do you see in plot? of a product And neither of those two cohorts, I think that incredibly motivated, dedicated entrepreneurs don't even know that this is happening and don't care. Got it. In other words, the reviewers are going to review products and you just got to plow ahead and make a better product. The idea that in 2009, 10 or 11, right, that when all the rockets weren't working, you know, and Elon was back against the wall that he was reading TechCrunch or getting upset because a product failed some other random product that had nothing to do with his I think is laughable.

46:35I think no great entrepreneur cares. I don't think Freeberg is going to change what's happening at a hollow based on what is this thing called? Humane. Right. Freeberg, have you changed? Have you made decisions? Are you sad or today? No, hollow when you walked into the office to manage your team? Okay, so there you go. There's your answer. Sacks, you're failing on this. Yeah, I mean, I'm having a hard time understanding all the controversies this week. I mean, reviewers are gonna review. Protesters are gonna protest and NPR presidents are gonna NPR. Here we go. Yeah. What's going on? Everyone's just doing their job.

47:10Here's an idea for the humanity. Be thankful somebody took the time to review your product and give you candid feedback and incorporate it back into your product and make it work. And irreverent only this will eat octopus. Here we are. Absolutely. So delicious. So do high IQ foods. We should create a new category. High IQ foods. Yeah, what are the other high IQ foods? We acorn fed beef. Yes, for sure, high IQ. Pigs, very high IQ. I saw that cow playing chess before he was served for dinner. I was having a full work sandwich from buckies and it helped me solve wordle for the day. before I ate it.

47:50So I got word only two tries. Oh, I'm so sorry. I didn't want that into land. Yeah, I mean, okay, let me ask this question. Do we think the world? Let's say this thing did respond. Here's the theme. Here's the theme Jason. Here's a theme Jason. The problem is that I think people right now, the real Worshack test is if you are so easily distracted, you probably don't have enough to do. Right. That's the entitlement is that you don't have enough work on. I don't want to call it entitlement, but I think the reality is that if you get caught up in all of these silly little fake battles or decisions, I think what it really means is that you're not busy enough and or you're not working on something that matters enough to you because when either of those two things are true, people tend to be, tend to have blinders on and they are super focused and they just don't have an opinion.

48:45They don't care. Like, honestly, many of these topics today, I really don't care. And it's not because I'm better or worse or smarter or dumb. It's because I'm so overworked right now. I don't have time to have an opinion on this stuff. Tremor's got a CEO job and now he's got to work. No, but and I think that anybody else trying to do their job well is probably in the same category. I hadn't even heard of this review or what's his name? Mark Mark, Mark, Mark has brown. Mark has brown. I never heard of them. If you're on YouTube, he's kind of like the new Walt Mosper. He does 20, 30 minute videos.

49:16They get millions of views. Yeah. I don't know that he makes or breaks a product, though. By the way, he does not make or break a product. The product makes or breaks itself. Yeah, look, when I was running companies, I wouldn't care about what one reviewer said. I would care about the totality of the reaction to the product, which would include customers as well as reviewers and so forth. So I don't think there's any point getting too bad out of shape about one review. I think what's kind of happening in terms of the reaction here is that people want to give this company like Mercy Points for being innovative.

49:52So my guess is the product isn't ready for prime time, but everyone wants to kind of like they want the reviewers to take it easy on them or something because they are being innovative and they're breaking you ground in this area of wearables. but the reality is in the real world where you want to charge people for your product, like customers don't have mercy points. Nope. So if it breaks down, the car breaks down. And by the way, Mark has got a little bit of heat just a month ago because he reviewed the Fisker. The Fisker is just a piece of garbage car. He said it's the worst car he's ever reviewed.

50:25And you know what? Reviewers exist in the world to inform customers about what products the services they should buy and then they should inform you to make a better product, period, full stop. There was an easy solution to this, by the way, which Apple did. They released the Vision Pro as a developer kit. They put a bunch of caveats on it and said, hey, we understand. This is high priced. It's a developer kit. This is in beta. What humane should have done is they should have said, this is the humane beta for developers. I still don't know what it is. What is this? It's a square. It has a projector on it.

51:01You put your hand out. It projects a little screen that shows you Like a computer screen and you can talk to it. Well the primary function is like a chat AI assistant that sits on you and has a camera And so you can see it's taping everything that it sees it doesn't do that by default, but it could but sorry Let me just give the quick over you and basically you ask it questions and it can go get the answers the problem is That it has to go make a request to the internet run an AI model and come back So it takes like 12 seconds to get results Most of the time according to the review or the results are actually wrong Because it's a lot of suck the voice to text translation is wrong There's a lot of things that are wrong about it.

51:43So it takes a long time It's clunky and then the battery burns out every two hours and it gets super hot because of the way they get it to magnetically stick to your clothes So it's very hot so there's also at a $700 bucks. Other than that, how is the play that you've missed is Lincoln? And by the way, most importantly to you, Chimoff, it will screw up your fabrics. If you wear this with a Laura Piana sweater, I would drag your sweater down. Hold on, I was never attached to a $6 ,000 sweater. Yeah, it's basically what you're telling me is it's an overpriced device that could give you first -degree burns.

52:15And it will ruin your sweaters. It doesn't answer the questions that you ask. Yeah, basically. But then do I think the questions or do I have to say it out loud? So it looks like I'm talking to myself. You look like a lunatic. Yes, you're walking around like that crazy person talking to yourself. That was the other thing he said is like when you're in a crowd and there's a voice around, you can use your hand and hand gestures to control it and do things with a projector thing that it does. And it does. It's some really cool interesting features. It's just like, it's not quite there yet. Who invested it?

52:43Let's not make fun of it. Let's make fun of the investors. Maybe who invested it? Sam, I'll shout out to Sam. I'm going on the program, I think. Yeah. Listen, the concept I think is good. Wearables are going to provide some to stay balanced when they work. Because you don't have to take your phone out. And so the idea behind wearables, like your watch, is, you know, like there are some things I do on my watch now where I don't take my phone out. I have the other side of this. Yeah. I'll take the other side of this. When you're done. Yeah, yeah. I use Fitbit, company we invested in, and it puts all my workouts on my watch.

53:16When I'm doing weights, I started doing weights now. That's why I look so buff folks. Subscribe to the YouTube channel to say. And I do my sets and I log them all with my watch. I don't have to take my phone out. That's like the first thing and then when I'm skiing, I can see each run. I showed you slopes. I'm not an investor in. Trim off where I can see my speed and all that stuff. But you're saying something totally different. That's utility. Of course you'll find a device will give you utility. I thought you were saying something else which is everybody's gonna have wearables and I wanna take the exact opposite side of that.

53:46Yeah, I don't know that everybody will have wearables, but I do find a couple of little things that work for me I totally get that you know the use of an accelerometer or whatever in a watch or in a band that you wear on your risk for a workout And I think that that's valuable or heart rate glycemic monitors so that you get all of that stuff makes super sense for you as an individual, but that's not an experience where you're engaging with it to to replace some other social interaction. That's just you getting utility as you live your life. What I'm saying is the idea that you start to rely on a device as your interface into the world, I would take the exact other side of the bed, which is I think that humans are getting so sick and tired of being, of only communicating in these very rigid ways.

54:35Like I'm telling you, like if you look at our children's generation, They don't know how to make eye contact. They don't know how to talk. And I think it's going to come back and bite them in the ass. And so I think the pendulum is going to swing in the other direction where it's like, okay, enough of this stuff. Let's actually look each other in the eye and talk to each other the way that humans are meant to be. And I think that in that, devices like a glucose monitor or a band has value, but I don't think it's going to be this interface where you're sign languageing it while you're at Kachala.

55:04I think you're going to rip the devices off and actually be at Kachala without any devices. Did any of you guys read Jonathan Hades book, Anxious Generation? It is unbelievably awesome. I hate it. I am not right. Yeah, I do. I stop what you're doing and just listen to the audiobook on your walks on Audible. This book is super important and awesome. The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Hades. I cannot tell you how important it is. Sax, any closing feelings there? You have to take any hot takes? Well, I would slightly disagree with you guys about this device. So first of all, I think that humans are becoming more and more cybernetic.

55:37like we're getting more and more immersed with computing power. And I agree, it creates this anxiety and all these problems. But on the other hand, I think it's an irreversible trend. So I think that I would not bet against things that make us more cybernetic. I think the problem here is that this company is trying to do two difficult things. The first thing is it's trying to capture everything that's happening in the world around you to feed it into an AI model, so it can make you smarter. The other thing is trying to do is reduce your dependence on your phone by creating this new projection surface.

56:09And, you know, in my experience, when you try to do two hard things, you actually square the complexity, and you square the difficulty as opposed to adding it. So I think of these two things, the one that sounds interesting to me, is taking in all the information from the physical world, and putting it in an AI model that can be helpful to you. But I see no reason to replace the phone. I think it should just work with your phone. The problem they're going to have is that that pendant and we'll compete with the Apple Glasses and all the other wearables that are gonna be created. It's sucking all this information, this computer vision from the world.

56:44Nonetheless, I do think that is the opportunity. It's not replacing the phone. It's layering a new platform on top of the phone that can kind of, you know, again, give you that terminator mode in the real world. And that was a complaint about this device specifically was that it was detached from the phone. I understand why they wanna make it standalone, alone, but and then this opens up all the privacy. Let me ask the panel here. What do you think about this concept of recording the entire warhold of all these conversations and video with these devices? I think it's a quick way to get yourself punched in the face.

57:15I mean, we saw that with Google Glass. People showed up at bars in San Francisco and parties with these Google Glass things on and literally got punched in the face. Well, this is not a privacy thing. Recording your entire life with a pendant, man. No, thank you. This is why I said what I said. I do think SACs is right that ultimately you'll have some kind of brain interface because I do think a chip in plant of some kind is very valuable. But what I'm also saying is that I think that that will actually lessen the social acceptability of these visible devices that are constantly getting in between you and another person.

57:51So the idea that we're kind of already in a quasi -surveillance state and now we're going to increase that by, in fact, boreal to the number of people, I think is very depressing. It is depressing. And, you know, in Jonathan Hitz book, he talks about phone lockers for schools and the transformative power they have had. When you go to a school, there are some schools now, high schools, where the students put their phones in specific, they do it in my kids. It's actually Jason, these special pouches? Spouches. Yes, and those are the pouches, comedians use like chappelle, and his shoes. Shabell used it, Kevin uses them.

58:25Yeah, exactly. And they're great. And then what the school now also teaches the kids, at least our school, which I found really interesting is the graduated form of that is they actually now allow you to put it in a envelope because they're training the kid. It's like the pouch you can't get access to. You have to go back to the box. It's a long time. Unlock device. And then I saw that my son last week had it actually in a white envelope and he had to close the envelope and just keep it with him as like a way of graduating from the prison form of keeping the phone away to like, you know, having it in your pocket.

59:00So the levels are trying to do a lot to try to teach these kids not to be so dependent on this. They should ban these devices at school. So 100%. And then at the poker game tonight, we should meet people stack their phones and charge somebody $1 ,000 to ever take the phone first. Yeah, I agree with that. Let's do it tonight. Let me give a shout out to one of my favorite sci -fi book series is called Nexus by as NAMM and it's kind of this cyberpunk, futuristic series. But what he talks about is when we have this brain computer interface, you'll be able to upload your memories. And so you talk about this idea of recording your whole life through a pendant.

59:33Well, eventually you'll be able to record your whole life based on just through your eyeballs. And you know, you'd be able to upload in theory every first person view of whatever conversation you've been in. So, you look, this is pretty far off, but there is maybe a certain inevitability to that. And we're going to have to figure out how to deal with the prior investigation. There was a Black Mirror episode on this exact idea. Yep. You have the DVR of your entire life. And it is gnarly to think these things will exist. And I think humanity's going to have to make a decision, I think, to fight this or embrace it.

1:00:08I think we should fight it. I think it's gonna ruin like social existence. And it's already ruined poker games, et cetera, when everybody's on their phone. It's ruined dinner parties, when everybody's on their phones. The constant distraction is just horrific and it's having a horrible impact on this generation. I'll double down on what you're saying. It is so lovely to be able to have a dinner where everybody just talks to each other and looks each other in the eyes. Yes. And then when you have a handful of people always on their phone, it's depressing. It's actually not even neutral. It's a negative and a drag on the entire night.

1:00:40Absolutely. I am trying to come up with ways to remove these devices from the social settings. I mean, I've been to a couple of parties with high profile people where they have everybody check their phones at the Allianne door. I got to say those are the best nights of my life. Those are the best nights. They're incredible. And, you know, no offense to people who are addicted to their phones. I am to a certain extent. I put my social media at one hour on my phone. My Lord, it is hard to do less than an hour of social media in our job positions. You know, I deleted TikTok about a month ago. It's been liberating.

1:01:14I was a slave to that app. I couldn't believe how much TikTok I was consuming after it was gone, because I couldn't find anything to replace it. And then I stumbled into the fact that YouTube has YouTube shorts, and there is a lot of that content, but it's terrible and the algorithm is really bad. And so fortunately, I just stopped using YouTube. It just shows you how much the algorithm is such a key component of that TikTok experience because I had the same experience. Shorts serves up garbage. Garbage Instagram serves up garbage. And then TikTok is just like right into your brain. Kicks ass.

1:01:51It kicks ass. By the way, I won't give another shot. I missed it. I missed TikTok. I missed you. Yeah, whatever. It's that's going away. This is another incredible book. I think we should book this speaker for all in summit bad therapy Why the kids aren't growing up? Abigail Shryer This book is incredible and if you read these two but every parent Read these two books and we need to have a conversation on it as parents here Everybody read these two books These two these are my two top choices for the all in summit I think it's like that going to be the the topic of our time All right, let's keep going down this incredible docket.

1:02:26Very important issue for us to talk about. Silicon Valley startups having a bit of a R &D tax problem. Thanks for putting it on the docket here, freeberg. It's a bit inside baseball, but very important topic. Let's say, a company like Acne Corporation generated a million bucks in revenue, and they spent a million bucks on their software developers last year. Let's say they had, I don't know, five developers getting paid 200 grand each. Well, traditionally, this company would pay nothing in income tax, right? They spent a million. They deduct that million from the million dollars in revenue that came in and Everything's good, but due to the tax cuts and jobs act of 2017 Starting last year a provision kicked in forcing companies to advertise their R &D expense over five years So in this hypothetical situation the Acme Corporation Would amortize 200k a year and pay income tax on the 800k in profits This is brutal obviously Profits, their quotes, their quotes.

1:03:20Their quotes, profits, correct. And this is absolutely brutal. And a lot of companies took away and see approaches, hoping Congress would fix the issue in January of bipartisan tax bill. That would reverse his changes past in the House, but the bill has stalled in the Senate. And we got to get this thing fixed because it's going to sink a lot of startups. Maybe people will start putting their companies in other countries. But it's attached to this child tax credit, which Republicans don't want to pass. So no reversal has happened. Freeberg, you highlighted this for us. Very important topic. Thank you for doing so as our great contributor here.

1:03:58What are your thoughts on it? This became law in the 2017 Jobs Act as you highlighted. And basically it means that companies, not just tech companies, but life sciences companies, defense companies are pushing Congress to change this law because you can't actually deduct the expenses that you use to run your business. You have to only deduct them over five years, 20 % a year. So like you pointed out, if you're making a million dollars, but you're spending a million dollars, you made no profit. But you got to pay tax as if you made 800 grand in profit. And a lot of these small companies don't have that cat.

1:04:35So venture capital -backed companies and public companies that are profitable, they can afford to do this because they have large balance sheets. So it doesn't affect them as much as it does. The literally hundreds of thousands of small businesses that work in the life sciences sector, the defense sector, the tech sector that are struggling this year to make the tax payments that are required under this law that went into effect last year. And Congress promised that they were going to repeal this law leading up to April 15th, which happened obviously a few days ago and make it retroactive to 2023, but they didn't.

1:05:09But free, they know basic math, Congress knows basic math. How do they, how do they, what, what, what was the intent here? Yeah. So the original intent was that this was one of the ways you guys know, whenever you pass a bill, it gets run through the OMB and the CBO that figures out what's the budgetary cost of the bill. Yeah. And one of the ways that they made this work, this bill, the 2017 Trump tax and jobs act, you guys may remember in that bill, they also made it impossible to deduct entertainment and dining expenses when you take people out to dinner anymore. That sucks. And they did all those things to make up some of the money they were using for basic general tax breaks for companies.

1:05:46So they used this as a way to say, like, look, in a couple of years, we're going to kick in this R &D expenditure thing, and it'll trigger a lot more revenue for the federal government. It'll create a lot more taxes and a lot more revenue. So that was the idea. And everyone was like, yeah, okay, sure, we'll do that. Great. It makes the accounting work. And then a couple of years, you know, and I just don't know, I don't know, I don't know, we're gonna come back and repeal it. Except Congress has stalled out, there's this ineptitude where anytime someone tries to pass a bill in Congress, someone else says, I want to get money.

1:06:15And so the Democrats showed up and said, we want this child tax credit thing to show up, which basically was passed during COVID and they want to extend it going forward. And the child tax credit says that you can get a check for 1800 a year in 2023, 1900 in 2024 and $2 ,000 in 2025 for having for each child you have. And the Republicans in the Senate are saying wait a second for people to get this thing. We want to make sure they're working. We want to make sure it's not as retroactive. So now there's this big debate about how big the child tax credit should be. And that's keeping this R &D thing from going through.

1:06:51And meanwhile, I've gotten tons of emails from CEOs of tech companies that are breaking even. These are not tech companies that are making a ton of profit. They're not public. like they're not venture backed, they're just people running their business. And now they're gonna have this huge tax bill even though they didn't make any money this year. And it's crippling businesses around the country and what do they do? They're gonna write a check, they're gonna borrow money. They're gonna go the bank, borrow money or they're gonna incur penalties with the IRS because they don't have the cash to pay the tax bill.

1:07:19Cause they don't have any profit. They didn't make any money. If they just ran the business break even, which a lot of these companies do is just make a little bit of money or break even. And then they've got this huge tax bill and profits they didn't actually have. They got to go figure out how to write a check. And also, how do you define R &D? I was talking to an accountant. He's like, yeah, I don't know if that's R &D. I'm like, you don't know who it's R &D? Like, okay, so if I meet some piece of software. There's all this writing in the, if you get audited by the IRS, they have the ability to basically capture everything.

1:07:47So like, let's say you're a mobile app developer and you make a million dollars a year, but you spend a million dollars a year on your developers. Okay. They're going to count that, they have the ability to count that as an R &D. So the accountants, the tax accountants tell you, book it all as R &D because otherwise you could get audited and actually get in trouble because anything that involves the development of technology now is considered R &D. Again, a company working in life sciences as a research company doing lab work can kind of get it. But if I do bug fixes, is a bug fix R &D? If I make a new feature and an application this year, does it have to be amortized over five years?

1:08:21Am I put a new filter? I'm not a tax attorney. My understanding is most of the stuff is getting captured and that's why it's hurting everything from defense to the life sciences To the lab equipment to startups that software to everything And Congress can't get out of its own way where this this bill passed by the way By part is in the house then it went to the Senate and now it's getting taken apart in the Senate Now it's stalled out and everyone's freaking out that it's stalled out past April 15th And it's actually gonna hurt a lot of small businesses in this country and here's the other problem is it actually limits our ability to invest in innovation in this country.

1:08:57Because now you're better off, there's no other country in the world that does this. Every other country in the world tries to incentivize investment in innovation, and here in the US we're basically saying, no, we're going to tax you for investing in technology development and innovation. And the other thing that's actually not being talked about is even in this bill where they're repeal -iness, they're leaving in the fact that if you invest in R &D outside the US, you have to advertise it over 15 years. So let's say that you're a US developer and you hire people offshore. Yeah. You got to basically advertise the offshore stuff over 15 years, which means you'll never make a profit.

1:09:35You're always going to have to pay taxes. I mean, how are we trying to kill innovation in this country? And the two things they got to solve is this one? And then M &A, we got to have a better solution for allowing companies to be bought and sold in this or emerging this country. These two things are putting a lot of headwinds on the startup ecosystem and on the venture and the risk -taking capital ecosystems. If you're in Washington, DC, or involved in our government, please solve these two issues. You got to figure out a way to allow companies to be bought and sold. You got to figure out a way to fix this tax issue.

1:10:15or else we're going to kill a lot of startups. And these are the companies that pay a lot of taxes. And these are the capital gains that fund a lot of states' treasuries. Well, it's also an illustration of just how hungry we are for tax revenue in this country. It's only going to grow. And I'm not sitting here complaining about taxes. The Trump tax cut that he put in place in 2017 added $1 .5 trillion to the federal deficit. So tax cuts in general are not great when you're spending a lot. But it does highlight just how much we are spending at the federal level and the demand for tax revenue and that demand causes This counter cyclical problem, which is now we're gonna eat into innovation Which is supposed to drive get us out of the problem the spiral that that results from this debt So it really highlights like just the challenges that are gonna emerge particularly in a decade ahead Because we have all of this spending that's coming in front of us over the next decade and how we're gonna start to demand more and more tax and all these weird ways that can really hurt industry.

1:11:14Unintended consequences are very real. Shem off you, we're gonna say something. Well, doesn't it mean though that if you run it at break even and without a lot of growth, by year five, you'll be back to where you were. So you really have to cover the taxes in years one through four. That's right, if the business, but if the business is growing, you're always gonna be in a hole. Right. Right, so if your revenue is growing and your op -ex is growing, you're always gonna be in a hole. I think Jason mentioned it earlier and I think it's the key thing which is what is our end even. Yeah. And maybe you just move things to cogs and just be done with it.

1:11:49I mean, remember businesses and you guys know this like when you look at a public company's financials, what you're seeing is their gap financials generally accepted accounting principles. And that's the way that you present the financials of a business. That's different than the way you present financials to the IRS. you don't have a lot of discretion in your tax financials. Your tax financials are actually quite different than your gap financials. So when you file your taxes, there's a lot of rules on what you are allowed to deduct and aren't allowed to deduct. It's quite different than how you present your corporate financials to investors.

1:12:23And that's really where people get screwed. It's you don't have that sort of discretion that you do in kind of sharing your financials with investors. So this is not financial or accounting advice. Get great representation. I just hope Congress resolves this because it's yes. Super important. All right, sports betting has gone mainstream. If you don't know, two out of three college students have placed a bet in the last year since the Supreme Court struck down the Amateur Sports Protection Act. 38 states have legalized sports betting. I think that's a great thing, but we're starting to see some weird behavior because of it.

1:12:54Tons of sites like DraftKings, Fandall, ESPN, Bet, Bet MGM, all of these have broken out. But this week, we started to see some weird behavior. the NBA banned a 24 year old player, John Tay Porter for life after a scandal. This one is bizarre and interesting. Porter was bench player for the Toronto Raptors averaging about 14 minutes per game. It's important. On these gambling apps, you can do all kinds of prop bets. For those of you who don't know, prop bets could be things like Steph is going to hit five threes in the game or LeBron's going to score under 30 points. You're just betting on unique things that could happen but then you can far lay them together, you can put multiple bets together, and it automatically gives you a price, and you can do really deep wagers doing this.

1:13:44The NBA found out that Porter was telling people to bet his unders for points and rebounds during certain games, during those games, he'd play a few minutes, then check them out, self out of the game with an illness, quote unquote. Technically, the bet would still count since he played the game, but everybody who bet his unders would win. Normally, nobody would notice this, of course, because he doesn't play that much. He's a bench player. But draft kings, because they have all the data, tipped everyone off because Porter was the biggest money maker on March 20th. This led to an NBA investigation.

1:14:18Draft kings won't give you a leaderboard of the biggest bets, and they saw that somebody placed an $80 ,000 bet that Porter would hit the unders on a bunch of different categories. Crazy outlier bet. Draft kings canceled the bet. that the NBA found that Porter separately placed dozens of bets on NBA games using his friends accounts, winning a whopping $22 ,000. And this idiot now is banned from the NBA, allegedly, allegedly, allegedly, but obviously the NBA has the receipts with draft kings. Tremoth, you own a NBA team for a little while and you watched as David Stern. for a decade you watch as David Stern who was absolutely opposed to gambling and then Adam Silver embraced it tell us from your front row seat your thoughts on wagering in the NBA and wagering writ large Okay, look I remember when I I joined the ownership group of the Warriors.

1:15:20I had to file this enormous document. And one of the things that they really dig into is whether you've bet before and they make it really, really clear that it is completely not allowed to bet. And the only way that you can bet is if you're betting on non -basketball and if you were in Vegas and you go to a casino and a troop sports book, that's the only time it's tolerated. The thing with all of these sites, Fandual and Draft Kings is they did deals with the leagues, where part of the feature is that when there is really crazy asymmetric betting on something that's obscure, they reported back to the leagues, so the leagues know how to look at it.

1:16:02Because typically what happens is, if you're talking like a very well -contested basketball Jason, you have a relatively balanced book, right? And what the goal is is to figure out where are the sharps bedding, meaning the really smart money guys, and everybody else is a square, and most of retail is a square. Okay, they're going to lose their money. And so the goal is to always find out where the sharps are going. But there are some of these bets, and in this case, this is why they found out when you have something being bet that's very obscure in size, these apps immediately go back to the league and say this just happened.

1:16:37So compare that to Tremoff, what would happen previously before sports betting was legal in the US. Before what would happen is like, all of these bookies would be able to have relationships with some of these players. Sometimes they would also have relationships with some of the reps and it has spilled over. So the NBA has had to deal with an example where one of the reps were, I think he was betting on some games. Tim Donahee, yeah. Tim Donahee and then he was point shaving. So this has been going on for a long time. and it moved into the realm of it being automated with algorithms looking out.

1:17:12The fact that this kid didn't have anybody on his team that explained that draft kings and fendul are going to send this data to the MBA is inexcusable because maybe the kid would not have done it. Right? Do you agree with the lifetime ban? Or do you think this should be? Yeah, yeah, it has to be left. Has to be put as the B .A. to have in custody. Has to be. Yeah, it's really. And what do we think about this becoming legal in the US and people, the embracing? I'll say, well, the other thing I'll say, and I mentioned this a few weeks ago, everything is being gamified. You have an entire population that seemingly in America, consumer spending still goes up.

1:17:54Folks are relatively still flush with cash. There's lots of free cash flow. know, there are new and more aggressive forms of stimulus constantly coming down the pike, whether it's student loan forgiveness or something else, right? Governments are inventing new and new ways of buying votes. That's going to put more and more money in people's hands. That means a larger and larger percentage of it will bleed into these kinds of things. And it's not just sports gambling. There was an article in the Wall Street Journal about this woman who's a well -respected who became totally addicted playing like a bingo app, right, and lost her entire life.

1:18:31So these forms of gambling and addiction are just going to skyrocket, I think, because you have these apps that are really incredibly well engineered to get you super hooked. And then the adrenaline rush and the dopamine rush of actually winning money is a thing that for some people, they can't turn off once they feel it for the first time. We know some of those people and you know, it's It's hard for them to control their sports banning, blackjack playing, other things. They just, they get too into it. They get too into it. They get just, you know, but other societies, other Geos, Australia, New Zealand, and the UK, they've had this for a while, so they figured out how to deal with this.

1:19:10This is what I'm gonna tell you, the last thing I'll say on this is, when I was in high school, so in the early 90s in Ontario and Canada, they introduced sports banning as a way of generating revenue for the government. But what I will tell you is that my entire high school, all the boys, not the girls, we became instant gambling addicts. We were figuring out how to put bets on. Most of it was betting in hockey because that's the sport that we all knew the best growing up in Ottawa. But it was all day every day. It consumed us. And I think when you look inside of these apps, you're seeing a lot of young men with a lot of free cash and a lot of time getting sucked into the gamification of this thing.

1:19:51I think it's going to be a big problem. And I will tell you, Zach, I'm interested in your position on this because there is a whole system, an ecosystem emerging here. The states are getting massive amounts of revenue. $11 billion dollar generate last year, up 44 .5 % from 2022. The league is printing money from this. All the leagues, MBA will generate $167 million from betting this season up 11 % year over year. the sports books obviously killing a draft king's got a $20 billion market cap and better is obviously love it It's more fun. It's making the games more engaging and the media is Loving this all of the podcast bills Simmons ESPN You can't watch a game you can't hear sports commentary without this being integrated and it's being integrated at a very fundamental editorial level They're asking the host of the show's check out their spend and what they're betting on and they're doing something very smart which is they're paying huge endorsement deals to the players as well.

1:20:47Yes. I think Draft Kings did something with LeBron. This is genius because when you get that ingratiated, you'll never get ripped out. Because if they become a huge part of the off court revenue model for these players. No, we're locked in. It's like the new, it's like the new air Jordans. Sex, what do you think about this just in terms of on a societal basis and the United States? You know, it's sort of like cannabis. You know, it's, this is a new thing for Americans to have access to, there's a lot of weird behaviors going on edge cases. But what do you think NetNet as a society you take away from the emergence of sports betting and this next generation being so addicted to it?

1:21:25Well, I think cannabis is the right analogy. I think adults should be allowed to bet on sporting events, or just like there are a lot to drink or smoke pot or engage in other mild vices. Some people handle it responsibly and some don't. It's probably on a societal basis is probably not a great thing, but it's something you allow to happen because of personal freedom and hopefully people use it responsibly. Freeberg, you have any thoughts? You place any bets freeberg? Are you placed any bets on sports? I'm curious. I do not. You do not. I don't place bets on sports, but I love playing cards because it's social.

1:22:02Tremont, do you do any sports betting now and again? Maybe on the Super Bowl, you get once in a while? You place a bet? A wager? When I got admitted to the ownership group of the NBA, I stopped and I've probably made Three bets since then both all three were like on the Super Bowl Mm -hmm at a casino which so it was legal when I was still an owner and I've not done it since and I've refused to download these apps because I love sports and I think that if I added this to it I just don't think it would be good for me so I don't want to do it. That was my exact take -to So you're not a wager. You have a bet on chess.

1:22:44No, I'm not bet on chess because it's so obvious who's going to win. There's a very precise rating system. And poker is very different because you can have players at the same table and you know who are the great players and who are not the great players. But still, in any given hand, the underdog can win because you can basically suck out or whatever, there's a significant luck component on every single hand. Over the long term, you believe that the luck kind of evens out and you reach your expected value, but on a given a hand, you can believe that you're the winner. And so there's a lot of gambling and poker, even though it is a skill game in chess, like that just doesn't work.

1:23:23I mean, if I play Magnus Carlson or any 2000 rated player, I'm just never going to win. So there's no point in betting. Sacks what's your rating? 1400. I'm a little better than that. I'm like, I'm probably more like 1600. Last time it was 1400. I stopped playing them because I would get to the middle game with Sacks. I get like 30 moves in and then he would just smash me. I'm like 800 or something. Free bird, free bird, you ever rating? I don't want to talk about it. It doesn't want to talk. But what's your rating? Are you still upset about the octopus stuff? No. Oh, okay. What's your rating? It's too personal a question.

1:24:02It's too personal a question. Do you never share information where people can actually like get you from you? Yeah, be full. Oh, dude, come on. What is it? Ask me other questions. Just don't ask me about my chest rate. You're reading. Don't ask me about my chest rate. What is the lowest rate? What's the best way to get better? Should I get a coach or something, Saks? What's the best way to get better? The chest on a calm app has very good lessons on it too. It's actually quite good. Yeah, you could get a coach and that would definitely help. There's also these exercise you can do called puzzle rushes that teach how to spot tactics which is how it's probably half the game.

1:24:35Yeah. Like, do you learn how to do a night's work or something like that? How to do pins? You just need to spot tactics quickly. It's really tricky. My puzzle rush scores are pretty good. Over a thousand? No, no, you play. It's like how many you can get in a certain period of time. How many? And it gets it gets sequentially harder as you complete the puzzles and you have like a limited period to do it. But yet you feel shame. You feel shame. If you want to get better at chess, I've watched a lot of chess videos on YouTube. And there's a very good series by John Bartholomew called Climbing the Ratings Ladder.

1:25:08And for each level of elo ratings, he has a series of videos. So like, I don't know, if you're like at 1200, there's a whole series for 1200s. And he'll play a bunch of games against 1200s, showing what they typically do wrong. And you can learn from it. It's actually, it's a good series. Have you spent time sacks like studying, like openings and like studying, like specific lines? I don't even know if I'm using the right language here. Um, opening is right. I haven't spent a ton of time studying them, but I'm certainly familiar with a number of the most common openings. So I guess, yes, I guess on some level, I've studied them.

1:25:48I would say that depending on where you are in your development, that may not be the the most pressing thing for you to do. You know, I think you probably do wanna just know a few basics of the most common openings, but there's probably other things for you to learn first. You don't need to like memorize a bunch of complicated lines. I think it's like really cool that kids are learning this, I know this may be a counter or a contrarian view, but I think kids having access, or young adults having access to sports banding poker, It's kind of a good thing because I, you know, if controlled because they're learning about odds and gambling and framing it.

1:26:28I, with my 14 year old, are doing an allowance and then I decided to do an investment club and so I'm putting $100 every month into like a Robinhood account and we're going to do like two meetings every month, one to buy a new stock and one to examine our existing stocks and I'm just starting an investment club. So if anybody's kids are in that age group and and they wanna join it, let me know cause I'm gonna do like a, with the cousins like I assume, call every month where we just talk about stocks. And then I'm gonna have them actually buy it so that they can be prepared for the real world and how companies are going.

1:27:02But how do you think about your kids, Jamal? Cause you got to do this gambling when you were young. Didn't that help you ultimately as an adult? I mean, I ran a casino in my high school. Was that the, Yeah, I mean, I ran a little blackjack game where the rich kids could play and how was the house and I would make a few extra hundred bucks a week nice And that was great because like you know between that and my job at Burger King it really helped And then I would go and take that and I actually am pretty decent at blackjack and I would go They would they would be these what's called charity casino So casinos and auto Ontario were illegal, but if they were to raise charity for of various charities they were allowed.

1:27:45And so my friend and I would show up at these things and just run them over. They anybody else run an illegal business as a kid? I'll tell you about mine after. Sack to run any illegal businesses as a kid. No comment. Come on, it's that's real limitations. What did you do? You must have been running some scams. Come on, tell us. I'll tell you my two scams after you tell us yours. Well, by the way, I'll tell you, I had a bad debt situation in my lunch game. You know, I used to let people bet up to a buck. Okay, so four or five guys up, you know, 25 cents, 50 cents or a dollar and one guy he like demanded an expanded credit line And I gave him up to two bucks and how many boxes of ZD did he go down and one lunch he lost 80 bucks And it took me three months to get paid it was the worst experience is a ZD.

1:28:30I had no $80. I had to I had to swap this guy for three months to get my $80 He was rich too It's parents rich. What do you do? Do you have to do your term papers or something? Do you have to do your essays, clean your bike? I wouldn't have gotten this guy. Come on, Zach, give it up. What was your scam you were running? It was a move on. I had two scams. Freeberg, you have a scam when you were running? You were a kid? Any scams? I used to go to the recycler newspaper. Do you guys remember that? Yeah. The recycler. And I would buy used electronics equipment and computer equipment. And then I would sell it.

1:29:07So I would then like post other ads. I basically did add arbitrage. It's a way to think about it. So I would go and find people selling stuff that I thought was like underpriced. But did you see it? And I would buy it. There was nothing to fix. It was underpriced. And then I knew like the better market to go sell it out and make more money. So then I'd buy like all these like old like a broken receiver, this disc man and a receiver, good speakers that I knew were good, but they were like deeply discounted. I drive around in my white van. I pay people cash. I'd load it up and then I go sell it to like other people by putting ads and no one's like a flipper.

1:29:39No wonder you wound up at Google. I had I had two really good scams when I was a kid. The first was this guy. Oh my dad some money for backgammon. My dad was a backgammon shark. And he would play in his bar when I would show up at six in the morning. My dad would be playing blackjack with guys. They would get, you know, in deep with him. And so this guy who was in the mob, oh, my dad's a money. And for the VIG he gave him a copy of the Empire Strikes Back on VHS. And I was like, what? You know, this is before it was out. They had recorded in the movie theaters in 1984 or something like that, whenever that came out.

1:30:14And it was a really bad copy. So my dad comes home, he gets with a copy, we watch it, it was incredible. It's like, thanks dad. And I got my friend to bring over his VHS. I made 10 copies of it. I go to school in McKinley, June and High School in Brooklyn. And I sell them for 30 bucks a pop. Oh my God. Selling like hotcakes. And then I get pinched. math teacher says what's going on with these empireshraks back? And I said, uh, what do you mean? I don't know what you're talking about. It's like I heard you got empireshraks back. It can't be mouth shut. I looked them dead in the eye and I said, are you interested?

1:30:48The teacher goes, yeah, how much are we? I said 30 bucks, but I'll give you one for 10. And he said, okay, pull that 10 bucks. I sold my math teacher. I kid you're not the empireshraks back for 10 bucks. Can you do this whole thing again, but in the Christopher Walken boys? I'm not gonna do. Well, give me the other one I did. No, it's a Joe Pashy voice. Do this one in the Christopher Walken voice. And so the name of it was Jason's Hot Tapes. And so I made a business card and laminated Jason's Hot Tapes and I would hand it to people and I'd hand him the Jason's Hot Tap card and they'd take me in my card back.

1:31:19But I would just show him that I had a card. Oh, that reminds me. I was also in the fake ID business. Ooh, say more. Yeah, I don't know. I would get granted out fake IDs with the buddy in mind. All right, that was mine. That was mine. Oh, Zach, is it the fake ID business, too? I was using Harvard graphics. That's what were you using? I was using Harvard graphics. Well, this was in the daily use before, I'll go grams and it just wasn't that hard to, you know, cops, so we just made like boards or whatever and polar rights. So we did it for ourselves and we did it for friends. Yes. And here's the thing about the fake ID business.

1:31:51The bouncers were like, if you've got money, show us any piece of paper. They we have plausible, they knew. They knew. They knew. They only wanted plausible deniability. That was the key to the rack. Did you put Mick Love in in University Hawaii? Yeah. Actually, well, it's kind of funny. Sometimes the bouncers would go, what's your name? And you'd be like, you'd be scum because you didn't remember what the song was. You look so true, I don't even remember. I'm like, I'm in there. I was like, I knew I was like, see, my mind was like, Raj Patel. My name was Raj Patel. What's up with Sal? Or they'd ask you, what was your birthday?

1:32:32And you don't remember what's on your ID? You know what's on your ID? I don't remember. I don't remember. I don't remember. The key, I had one drink. Now the key in the fake ID game is to use your month and day that's yours. And then to change the year. That's the key. That's the key. All right, so I'll give you the second one. This one is for walking voice. So my friend, his brother had a delorean. He, I can't do it, I can't say stated. Anyway, this kid, who I grew up with, what should I say? Anyways, name was beep beep beep beep that out. He lived up on 13th Avenue. I go to his house. His brother's got a Delorean.

1:33:14It was incredible. And we're in junior high school, and I'm talking to his brother. And I go into the garage, and there's all Delorean parts on the wall. And I said, why do you have all these parts? And he said, oh, you know, There was a DeLorean that fell apart and we picked up the pieces. They had stolen another DeLorean because DeLorean stopped producing and they just chopped it up. But he hadn't his garage. So anyway, we're playing chess master at the time and I had hacked a copy of chess master. It was very easy to do. And the guy said, you got chess master? Can you get me more copies of that?

1:33:48I said, sure, how many copies you want? He's like, how many can you make? I was like, well, floppy discourse for a box. He's like, I'll give you 10 bucks to copy a chess master. I said, fine. I go, my friend, we go steal floppy discs from the store. So we don't want to pay them four bucks for them, not the three and a half, the five and a quarter. These are five and a quarter. And we go into the store and we take the flyer and I hold the flyer open and I hold it behind my back and my friend takes the discs out of the sleeve at stable, whatever. It's obviously in there. We made copies of it and then we were selling chess master for 10 bucks a pop at scale and giving them to the guys I'm 13th Avenue who would then reselling for 20 bucks.

1:34:26This is when chess master was like a hundred dollar product shout out to chess master Well, that was my second game business. This is some degenerate And that's not even the best way the best I'll give you the best one. This is the best and I'll give you the last game we ran There were parking permits in the late 80s in Manhattan They were hard to get but they were legit if you had a parking permit in your window for the fire department police You know, you could park in Manhattan in a lot of different areas. And so we went and we took a picture of these. Then we got on PageMaker or whatever, and I went down to Canal Street and I bought at Pearl Payne's like the same color, orange, and that lamination kit.

1:35:11And we got on Photoshop. I kid you not, we held the picture up and we tried to figure out the fonts they used. And we made a copy of the placards to park. And then we sold those for like 50 bucks and people used them and they wouldn't get tickets They worked. So we sold police placards that had to be super illegal in 1988. All right everybody. Four. You're a Sultan of science the exception to Freedberg your chairman dictator from off -py Hopetia the rainman. Yeah David Sacks. I am Your world's greatest moderator. Jacob. We'll see you on episode 176 and hopefully in September at the all -in summit Bye bye

1:36:20Oh man, my hamlety ass will meet me at once. We should all just get a room and just have one big hug or two because they're all just just like this sexual tension that we just need to release that house. What your, that beat, what your, your beer beat. Beat, what? We need to get merch. I'm going on, lilin'

1:36:46I'm going on, lilin'