Does Silicon Valley Run Washington? with former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo

22:20Rising tide raises all ships. K-shaped economy is AI will make companies more productive because they will need fewer workers, So the shareholders, people who own stock, will gain wealth, while the working class and or white-collar folks who don't own as much stock and now lose their jobs will become more impoverished. And I think that's probably true. Okay, so no middle class, effectively, is what it's saying. And the shape of our economy— I wouldn't say zero middle class. I would say the wealth gap gets more dramatic. More K-like than— More K-like than— Than you like or whatever. Yeah, meaning there becomes a divergence between the wealthy who are getting more wealthy because companies are more productive and spending off more profits, and people who don't own stock and aren't shareholders who are increasingly jobless with fewer opportunities.

23:10That's, of course, very bad. Yes, you're saying this so matter-of-factly, but it is very bad. It's very, very bad. Very scary. And will have profound implications for our society that we're not doing anything about right now, which is worse than the implications, initial implications of the K-shaped economy are the implications for not doing anything about it. See, now they're going to not like people that are dissimilar to you, because now people like you, because you think there should be some kind of Band-Aid to deal with this case. Well, I don't look. And so people will immediately say like, oh, you can't have universal basic income.

23:42There's tons and tons of possible solutions to this. But the fact that we're not even talking about it and that there's almost seems to be zero policy discussion around it. And instead, it's, you know, we have to have more liberal, I don't know, crypto markets and whatever markets is sort of like, well, that's probably going to cause problems down the line not doing anything or thinking about this right now. It's particularly surprising because Silicon Valley has never had more access to Washington. and they have said that they want to run it like a business. And they have all talked about, and some of them have even piloted UBI initiatives like Sam Altman in Oakland.

24:19But even with Elon - Except that they're not running it like a business because you would never run a company the way we're running the government now at the craziest deficits we've ever had. I mean, it's actually funny. When you're on boards of companies and they start using debt to finance the company's operation, board members and investors are like, whoa, whoa, whoa, don't take on too much debt. Let's be clear, we're not running the government like a business right now, even though a lot of the Silicon Valley people who are currently involved in the administration would like to say they are, we're running extraordinary deficits.

24:51So what does it reveal to you that a bunch of very alarm-raising Silicon Valley humans are now in Washington, D.C.? People like AI crypto czar David Sachs, the Elon Musk who was running Doge for a minute, Emile Michael is the Under Secretary of... at the Pentagon, at the Department of War, and previously was the Chief Business Officer of Uber. So you have these people from the Valley in Washington, D.C., and yet there is very little prophylactic or other planning happening for the case-shaped economy. Excellent use of the word prophylactic, by the way. That was great. You have a remarkable vocabulary, which I appreciate.

25:29English is my second language. Slightly racist that you felt the need to point out that my English is good, Dick. But I didn't know that English was your second language when I said it. No, no. It was just a random compliment. Thank you. So what does it reveal to you about these people who for so long lamented that this country wasn't being run right, and if only they could be there, and now they're there. How are they doing? Give them a grade. Give Silicon Valley a grade. For its involvement in Washington, like F. It's super self-serving. It's unfortunate because there are lots of policy discussions and discourse to be happening, And instead, I feel like, I mean, all you need to do is go on Twitter and you see people yelling at each other, specifically some of the people you mentioned yelling at each other.

26:10Like, OK, look, there's discourse and a conversation to be had around all of these topics. But it ends up just being performative yelling at other people because they're on the wrong side of the trade, if you will. So who's like running the ship right now? Who's the daddy? Is it Trump? Is it Elon? Who's the daddy? Who's the daddy? Of what ship? Like this Silicon Valley, Washington situation that's happening right now. I don't think it, I don't think. Who's benefiting more? I mean, who's benefiting more are people who are investing in the companies for which, well, regulatory policy is being, you know, the floodgates are opening.

26:46crypto, obviously, the prediction markets, obviously with the CFTC basically granting them a very liberal license to do. One would have to look at and say, is sports betting, which DraftKings and FanDuel are jumping up and down about because those guys had to be like, wait a minute, we had to go state by state by state and get approval to do sports betting across the country. And these guys would just go to the CFTC, which is a federal authority and have been granted free reign to go do whatever they want. So I think the people who are benefiting are precisely the folks from Silicon Valley who've gone to Washington on our getting Washington to give them free reign to do whatever they want.

27:25And of course, the defense companies as well. You've got everything from these Silicon Valley investors who've poured money into the new primary defense contractors like Anderil and Saronic and others. Okay. Let's do a little lightning round on all things Silicon Valley. And then I want to come to this question of who's in charge. Okay, a fuck, marry, kill.

27:46Ready? AI edition. Open AI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind. Marry, Google, DeepMind, have intercourse with Anthropic, and kill open AI. Okay. Okay. Another fuck, marry, kill. Twitter, threads, or blue sky?

28:05I love all God's children, Naima. Come on, you know this. kill threads. You're going to marry Twitter. You're going to marry Twitter. No, I feel like that would be too sappy. But you're not going to marry Boosguy. That's so sad. I don't know. That's why I paused on the last one. I would just do... Let's just do an all kill round.

28:32Let's do the Pete Hegseth round. Fuck kill. No, we're going to come back to this. because actually, it's like Twitter is always dying, but totally unkillable somehow. And we're going to get back to that. The year I took over Twitter, this is a true story, 2010, we had been on the cover of two magazines. A magazine was a thing that you held in your hands, like a webpage, but physical. And it described current events that you bought at a store. So Twitter was on the cover of two business magazines in 2010, one of which it was hanging itself, and one in which it was exploding. It was like the little bird was hanging itself?

29:09Yeah, so I went up to Gabriel Strickland and I was like, goal for 2011, no dead birds on the national magazine covers. Low bar. But it's always been that way with Twitter. Like, oh, it's not. And then you took it public for$14 billion. $36 billion. But who's, I think it was$36 billion. No, you took it public for like$14 billion. And it grew it to$37 billion. I'll give you an extra billion. $36 when I left. Anyway, it's always been the way of it with Twitter. It's still relevant. I mean, investors and VCs and founders are on it all the time. Yeah. And we'll come back to this. But let's keep going with this lightning round.

29:45Is the metaverse over yet? Because I would like it to be. The metaverse is over. Yes, it's over. Meta had made a big play into the metaverse. They changed the name of the company. Yes. And then they probably want to change the name of the company to Facebook AI or something AI right now. Scale or whatever. Well, they've pivoted entirely. I think they've thrown out much of the investment in the metaverse. Okay. Discarded, maybe, is the better word. Yes, another fuck, marry, kill. Sam Altman, Dario Amadei, and Elon Musk as business leaders. As business leaders, as business leaders. So it will make a PG.

30:20So it's like, who would you want to co-found a company with that's marrying? Who would you want to advise that's the fucking? And who would you want to fire? I would advise Dario. I think Ilan is going to be build whatever he builds will be the next great thing. So you're going to co-found. You're going to marry him. Yeah. Look, for all his... So you're going to kill Sam Altman? You've given me three things and then you're like, wait, you're going to kill Sam Altman? There's only one thing left. Okay. Tell me about Ilan. Fuck marry and get advisor shares. It's kill. You're going to only do... You got to pick one.

31:01That's the whole point of FMK. Yes, but explain this, because you don't like Elon. What are you saying that for? I just think that he's like a flawed person. He unfollowed you on Twitter. No one likes anyone who unfollowed them on social media. I love plenty of people who unfollowed me on social media. I think he's like a crazy guy. He's obviously like different than lots and lots of people. I don't dislike him. I just think he's like crazy. But you still, you respect him. Yeah, look what he's done. I mean, this guy's running like five companies, including Neuralink and Hyperloop. I mean, I was running one company.

31:39I was working like 90 hours a week. I would wake up at 2 in the morning and want to like smash my head together. Like, oh my god, how are we going to like solve this problem? Oh, no. And then he sleeps like, him and Max from Affirm, they sleep like four hours, three, four hours a night. I need like, I sleep like nine hours a night. We glorify these qualities. You think there are things to glorify them? As a society, as a culture. Yeah, that's fair. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, this is amazing. He's up at, he sleeps in the office and blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah. Like, this is my problem, by the way.

32:12I happen to like Walter Isaacson, but this is my problem with his books, like the Musk biography, the Jobs biography. These guys are not the myth, you know? Their books are written. they gloss over all the troubling aspects of the personalities. And then people, I mean, I remember, this is a great story, trying to get Jeff Bezos to join the board of Twitter in 2011. And he's like, I don't know, man, I don't really let my people join boards, but it's an interesting enough conversation that we'll do it. And Jack and I meet with Jeff and we start talking about strategy. And Jack says, well, Steve Jobs, who was live at the time in 2011, Steve believes the most important part about strategy is saying no.

32:51You have to say no to most things. And it's the job of the CEO to be like the editor in chief. And Jeff looks at him and goes, oh, yeah, well, I like to do everything. Big laugh. My team has to talk me out of stuff all the time. And he just goes, you know what? There's lots of ways to be successful. Like, you can't read these books and think, okay, I got to go do that because that's the Elon way or the Bezos or the Steve Jobs way. Because these books are myths and then people end up buying into it. And, you know, I should only sleep three or four hours. This is one one-thousandth of the person's personality, and there are lots of other things that you don't understand.

33:25So it's simplistic. Yeah, I think it's simplistic. But then people laud it, and so people try to copy it, and like, okay, if I want to be one of the best, and they try to go, you're not going to be successful trying to be someone you're not. Yeah, they put on a black turtleneck and show it. Yeah, they do. Blood World of Thanos, for example. They literally put on the outfit of the person and think, Like, I'm going to go, and you're getting, you know, the book is giving you one one-hundredth of the story. So, you helped write some of the story in Silicon Valley, the TV show. Yeah, I was more in the room for, like, would this really happen, you know?

34:01But, yeah, I would pitch ideas, and they would go, yeah. My favorite was Alec Berg, the showrunner of Silicon Valley. I would pitch it, I would gain the confidence to pitch an idea, and Alec would go, yeah, or alternatively. He was like, oh, he's being nice to me. That's nice. So this is like after you leave Twitter in 2015, you become a consultant to the Silicon Valley TV show, which is probably in season two or three at that time. It's in season three. And in fact, Mike Judge and Alec Berg go to Richard Plepler, who's running HBO at the time. Mentor of mine. Oh, amazing. He's fantastic. He's fantastic.

34:37And they say, hey, we want to bring Dick Costolo into the writer's room to advise. And Plepler's like, you know, damn it, you guys, you know, I hired the writer from Arrested Development. I got you Letterman's head writer. I got you one of the guys from 30 Rock. You're like, more, more, more. You're like, now we want Dick Costolo to come. And Alex's like, no, no, no. He like wants to just do it for free. And right away, Plepler's like, he is very funny. He's very funny. You actually, you know, all of your success in entrepreneurship and operations and investment is actually filling a hole in your heart because you were once doing Second City with a bunch of SNL stars, right?

35:17I showed up to Second City the same day Steve Carell did. He and I showed up there the same day after college. And then dramatically different pods. You're like Gwyneth Paltrow in Sliding Doors, the two of you. Well, to be fair, he auditioned for SNL a couple times too and didn't get it either. He just stuck with it and became extraordinarily successful. Did you audition for SNL? Yeah, twice. Are you going to? You don't know how the story ends? Do you remember seeing me at 30 Rock anywhere? I wasn't alive then. You weren't alive back then during the Carter administration or whenever you auditioned?

35:54No, that's true. That it might have been. But there is a sense that people in Silicon Valley feel extremely misunderstood, maligned by modern media. Yeah. I think that's nonsense. Gosh, it may be Oscar Wilde who said this. I'm misattributing it maybe. But there's a great old quote to theater actors in the UK and London at the time saying, like, you know, these actors, if the press about them is great, they cut it out, they read every word, they, you know, put it on the mirror in the backstage in the green room. And, you know, if the press about them is bad, they're like, this idiot doesn't know anything.

36:33Like, you know what? You can't do one and not do the other, right? And I think that there's a lot of that in Silicon Valley. When the press was lauding these people, they weren't saying, like, well, you know, Kara really doesn't know what she's talking about. They were, like, happy to be on the front page of the New York Times, and then the moment there's negative press about them, they're like, well, these people are, this is, you know, the mainstream media doesn't know anything about what's really going on. Like, hey, man, you got to be able to take a punch. And also, don't put the Wall Street Journal article in a frame above your desk if you're then going to turn around two weeks later and say, well, these people don't know what's really going on.

37:12If Silicon Valley were to be remade today... Yeah, there's actually, there was a WhatsApp thread about this by some of the folks and the writers of Silicon Valley about, like, how would we relaunch this, you know, if we were to relaunch it? Is it like the show Audacity, which has just come out in AMC? A little bit. That AMC show Audacity is kind of like a more dramatic Silicon Valley. The challenge that was generally agreed upon by the folks in the writer's room from Silicon Valley about today was, when Conan O 'Brien was at the Harvard Lampoon in school, he was like, the one thing we couldn't figure out how to satirize was the National Enquirer, because it was already so far like crazy.

37:56You're like, how do you satirize the thing that's as far crazy as it can be? And the general consensus was, it's gotten beyond the ability to satirize it. How would you satirize some of the things that are happening in Silicon Valley? So it now has to be like a drama. Yeah, like, there's people are like, one of the people is, you know, at Doge at the time, Alana's deciding what we're going to cut from government while running six companies. How do you satirize this stuff? But he, for example, was not a character in the original. No. I will tell you a funny story about the characters in Silicon Valley.

38:29So there's a VC in the show Silicon Valley named Russ Annaman, who starts his own tequila company called Tres Comas Tequila for being a billionaire. Three commas. Oh, I remember that. That's Mark Cuban, right? Based on? It's partially based on Mark. I actually adore Mark and think he's great. And it was only partially based on him. But then the funny part about it was I would have a bunch of people coming up to me and going, Russ Hanneman's supposed to be me, right? And I was like, no. Also, you realize he's a horrible human being, right? Like, this is like a bad guy. He's like out to screw everybody.

39:03And the VCs who would come up to me in real life would go, yeah, but I have that that art in his, that car, that Lamborghini, I have that car. Like, it's not you. Also, he's supposed to be a bad guy. You don't want it to be you. But they all wanted it to be based on them. It's like that constant seeking fame, et cetera, glory. But Mark Cuban is not a bad guy. No, Mark Cuban's great. The bad parts of that guy came from Sean Parker. I don't think that's true either. No? No. The funny thing about, so we would go, the writers would go interview CEOs in Silicon Valley. And they would say like, you know, and we thought, they all thought rather that this was the funniest thing ever.

39:41They would go interview CEOs and it could be anything. It could be Jeremy Stoppeman at Yelp, it could be whoever. And they would, you know, it could be Benioff at Salesforce. And they're like, tell me what the purpose of your company is. And they would say, it doesn't matter what the company was. Yelp is local reviews. Didn't matter what the company was. They would say, we're changing the world. and the writers would go, are you changing the world? Or is this like, you know, where to get a good bagel? Or wash.io, where to do laundry. Yeah, exactly. Are you sure? I think the DocuSign CEO literally at the time said, well, we're changing the world.

40:15And they were like, or do you just sign things in email now? And that's not, it was like, think of how dramatically we're changing nature. I mean, the lack of self-awareness was endlessly funny to them. It was so comic. I mean, I remember because I was studying in Silicon Valley at the time, in Palo Alto, at a small school in Palo Alto, called Stanford. Are you one of those people that goes, where'd you go to school? Oh, Palo Alto. No, no, I say Stanford. But there was, at that time, there was like Silicon Valley had a problem problem. Because they were like, we're going to fix the dry cleaning problem.

40:46We're going to fix the parking problem. Everything was a problem, and they were going to fix it all. Now, I feel like Silicon Valley thinks there's a podcasting problem, because they have come in to fix it. all in being the key one. Yeah, okay. So if you were to make Silicon Valley, the TV show again, who are the characters in 2014 that were looming large but were missed in Silicon Valley, the TV show? Oh, wow, that's a great question. Cliffhanger will be right back. Who are the characters in 2014 that were looming large but were missed in Silicon Valley, the TV show? You have to say the social media folks.

41:28I mean, Evan Spiegel and Jack... Mark Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg. It wasn't really about them yet. You know, it was about startups and Google. Hooli is obviously... Who were the characters that were captured in the show? The crazy, you know, the Hooli CEO with his guru, and Peter Gregory is the Peter Thiel character. Okay. Gavin. Gavin, the Hooli CEO, what's his name, running the accelerator that the boys are a part of. Those characters were captured beautifully. But who are they? They're amalgamations of CEOs, right? They're a combination of Larry Ellison with his Zen Kyoto garden and his home in Silicon Valley that one can see when one flies over.

42:20And Mark Benioff and his Buddhist beginner's mind, but also living in Hawaii half the year. I remember I had – Mark asked me to have – I hope this isn't talking out of school. Mark asked me to have lunch with him one day at Boulevard, the French restaurant that's below the old Salesforce offices at the time, before there was a tower. And I went to go have lunch with Mark at Boulevard. It's this very nice French restaurant. Yes. And to set the scene a little bit, Mark Benioff is the founder. Founder, CEO of Salesforce. And Salesforce building is this very phallic building in downtown San Francisco.

42:55Didn't exist at the time. Okay. This is pre-phallic building. Okay. Okay. Two phallic characters, no phallic building. Got it. Keep going. French food. I walk in, and Mark comes in, and he looks like he's just come off a 13-day bender. He's like, hair is a mess. He's wearing this short-sleeve Hawaiian shirt that looks like he picked off his floordrobe in his closet. And ratty jeans. And he comes in, he's like, hey, how's it going? And I looked at him, I was like, what's the matter with you? He looks and is like, what? I'm like, it's a nice fresh restaurant. You actually work in this building. Coming in in a short-sleeved Hawaiian t-shirt.

43:37But that's his vibe. I know, but like, that's what was so funny about Silicon Valley. These people were like caricatures. You know, my dad used to call it like nouveau pour. You know, there's like nouveau riche, and then there's all these guys. Like, I once, in the coffee shop on campus of Stanford, a friend and I bought a guy coffee, or offered to buy a guy coffee who would come to our meditation class or something, and he was wearing a necklace, some ripped sweatpants. Ended up that he was Adam from Scout. The guy was worth like$7 billion. And we were like students buying him coffee because we thought he was homeless.

44:15I was behind Pierre Omidar and Sergey Brin at a tech conference one time, and they got to the front of the line for lunch, and neither of them had money to buy the sandwich. They're like, do you have 10? They only take cash. Do you have 10? They're both like, no. Pears like, can I pay with PayPal? Yeah. That was kind of what we were all making fun of in the show Silicon Valley. Yes. So now as you look around it, why did you miss the characters that were missed, like the big social media characters? Was it just like a generational thing? I'm not calling you old, But why was it telling the stories of the people who had been the Padres 10, 15 years ago versus the people who were up and coming then, like Mark Zuckerberg?

44:57Because Social Network was made during this time. So it wasn't like we didn't know they were the characters. Yeah. But it's the same thing as when the Department of Justice goes after someone for being a monopoly. They're always fighting the last war. You guys are going after Microsoft? This company over here is going to be, you know, what about this company? Now you're going after Google? What about this Facebook thing over here? You're just always sort of... The stuff that's about to happen, you just don't really see it yet. And the impact of social media and how both manipulative it can be and how it can force people or send people down these anger holes, it wasn't what was going on at the time.

45:36Maybe also the material. I don't know that Mark Zuckerberg, before his glow up, was as watchable as he is now. Fair. Right. Who do you think has the best Silicon Valley glow up? Is it Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos? There's a lot of plastic surgery going on right now. Really? Which is funny and ironic because remember, you go cut to 10 years ago, the whole ethos was, we don't wear fancy clothes, we don't drive fancy cars, we don't care about that stuff, we care more about the life of the mind. It was very Barton Fink. It's all more about the life of the mind. And now it's with the watches and the clothes and the plastic surgery.

46:16It's called looks maxing. I know what it's called. Okay. I know what it's called. Clavicular. Who do you think you're talking to here? I know who clavicular is. Okay, good. All right? Yeah. Jeez. You're part of the manosphere. You have a podcast now. I'm not part of the manosphere. You're a white guy with a podcast. Don't manosphere me. Don't paint me with a manosphere brush. You know what the problem with the manosphere is? What? There's this weird sense... It's too small.

46:43No, that's not it. Okay, okay, good. There's this weird sense that, like, to be a badass, you have to be like, you know, ignore things like introspection. Marc now, Andreessen, has this... I would like to have this discussion with him, actually, because he can't possibly believe it's true, and I'll tell you why. But he's on to this, he's on this, like, introspection is, I mean, I'm summarizing, but introspection was only created 400 years ago, and it's created by these man-be-pambi egalitarians who are losers. Yes, and this is Marc Andreessen behind Andreessen Horowitz, massive venture capital fund.

47:20I mean, let's... He recently went viral for saying this on a podcast. You don't have any levels of introspection. Yes, zero. As little as possible. Why? Move forward. Go. Oh. Yeah, I don't know. I just found people who dwell in the past get stuck in the past. Go back, before 100 years ago, it never would have occurred to anybody to be introspective. Also, like, Hinduism, some of the precursors in the Dharma to all of Buddhism, the Stoics, Marcus Aurelius and the rest. Yeah, many who are... St. Augustine, all of Buddhism. Like, those are all a lot more than 400 years ago. And also, Mark regularly references Marcus Aurelius who might have written the most introspective peace meditations of all time on things like the Joe Rogan podcast.

48:06So I don't know where, but there's this Manosphere sense that the Oracle of Delphi doesn't say know thyself, but instead says you crushed it, dude. It says know thyself. And self-awareness is a remarkable and powerful force. And I don't get where all this stuff is coming from. There's also like, I mean, you referenced it a little earlier when you said, oh, a lot of founders are different, or Elon is different. There is like this sense of neuro... I want to be sensitive about how to talk about it. No, please. You don't want to talk about it? No, I do want to talk about it. You know, we talk a lot about neurodivergence in our world.

48:41And it seems like, as the kids call it, a touch of the tism, is what the kind of viral language is around this. And it seems like there's more of that in this particular geography, industry, culture around cell combat. I mean, the race to define oneself as neurodivergent right now is remarkable. Should I enter the race? Am I behind? What's your neurodivergency? Is this like not investing in NVIDIA? I don't have one, I don't think. I mean, I said to my friend the other day, I said, it's like there's a neurodivergency, this urgent sense to be neurodivergent. And people getting on stage and climbing over themselves to quickly announce how many, like, you know, atypical, idiosyncratic traits they have.

49:29Because it drives up their valuations. It drives up their promise as founders, right? Also, it's just not true. Like, there are plenty of perfectly normal, well-adjusted kids with good parents who weren't abused, who are great CEOs and founders. There just are. I mean, part of that is like a secular issue, not specific to Silicon Valley, where I do think we're like, kind of in a trauma porn era of our lives. Everything has to be... Everybody's like, you know, what's your trauma? How's your trauma? Be vulnerable. That's a broader cultural phenomenon. The neurodivergence as a leading indicator of success is a Silicon Valley phenomenon.

50:10And... And... But is it inaccurate? No, it's totally... I mean, no, it's not accurate. But of course it's not accurate. There are lots of ways to be successful, and there are lots of backgrounds from which successful people can come. You don't have to be in a race to tell everybody you've been dyslexic since you were two in order to be successful. But it's constant now. I think there's a general over-diagnosis of most of these things in American society. There's this weird sense that the reason that more of American children are diagnosed as autistic is for whatever medical reason. The reason is it's overdiagnosis.

50:48And also, you get to, like, lo and behold, you get to spend more time taking tests if you're diagnosed with one of these things. And so, of course, people in very, very wealthy neighborhoods in America are like, I'm gonna get my kid diagnosed as having X, Y, Z, so they get to take more time on this test. There's definitely a return to diagnosis. I'm so curious, who's in your phone book? Who is, like, the most, like, fuck you person in your phone book? How do you mean? Like, contact that you have. Like, what's a cell phone you have? I know what a contact... by phone book. I know what you meant by that part.

51:19Like, you know, a contact? It's like the yellow pages, but it's digital, Dick. It's in your phone. I know what the phone book is. I meant by what do you mean by who's the most fuck you person in your phone book? Like, what's the craziest cell phone number you have in your phone? The craziest cell phone number? Yeah. Wow. I probably have Kanye's number in my phone from back when I was CEO of Twitter, and he would call about things. Should we call him? No, we definitely should not. Who are the people you regularly trade texts with in Silicon Valley that you think would be good characters for a future Silicon Valley?

51:48That's a great question. Gosh, you know, Susan Wojcicki, I used to, from YouTube, she passed away, of course. She was so great. Susan was one of the best operators, going back to the operator term. She was such a great leader. She was so calm. Again, there you go. Like, normal, calm, smart person who was just an ass-kicker executive. And always just super blunt. like, that doesn't seem right. You'd be like, yeah, you're right, doesn't seem right. I'm more curious about who you think would be good characters this day and age. Who would be good characters in Silicon Valley? That you text with and you're like, oh, I wish we were still making the show because I could put this in the show.

52:28There must be moments like that. I'll tell you who's, I'll put it this way. There are very few other funny CEOs. Very few. Which I think is a problem because I think sense of humor is an incredible ability to connect the dots. People with a sense of humor are people who can, our systems thinkers generally... Aaron Levy has a great sense of humor. Aaron Levy is remarkably funny, the CEO of Box. Oh, yes. I think he might be the only other person I can think of... Besides yourself. Yeah. With a tremendous sense of humor. I love it. Mark Benioff? He's good. Mark doesn't have a great sense of humor.

53:02Mark Cuban has a good sense of humor. Mark Cuban has a great sense of humor. Great sense of humor. Yeah, Mark Cuban has a great sense of humor. I'm gonna tell you a funny Mark Benioff story, which he will be mad about if he sees this and probably will say it's not true. I'm at a CEO dinner. this is years ago now, and Mark is hosting it, Benioff. And he invites the lead designer from Apple at the time, who we will leave the name out because it is a relevant story. And Mark says, I've got two guests to dinner tonight. There's like 12 of us around the table. Two guests to dinner tonight, Janet and my good friend, Joni Ive.

53:34And I hear him say that. And I'm like, I think he's and then Mark and and and he sits over there and nods at Mark and then he proceeds to say during the dinner you know and Joni and I have known each other for blah blah blah years and and I'm starting and I'm going like oh man I think I I think I introduced myself earlier and said it's so great to meet you Johnny and I'm like sitting there like I'm such an idiot I should have like asked beforehand how you pronounce his name. Yeah, because they're good friends. And he's sitting there and like says it 10 or 12 more times. So right after dinner, literally the moment it stops, I march over to him like, I'm so sorry.

54:14Like, I know I said Johnny when I introduced myself. I should have like asked around or asked him. And I'm talking and he just goes, it is Johnny. I was like, why did you say anything? He's like, well, I couldn't, like by the time I was going to, he'd already said it for like the third time. And that's like that, that right there is what the show Silicon Valley was all about. Like, is anyone going to say anything? Meanwhile, I'm sitting there going, God, I'm so stupid. Yes, because it's that constant security. That reminds me also of when Elon, who I've been calling Elon, you call him Elon, when Elon showed up at Andrew Ross Sorkin's deal book and said, my good friend Jonathan.

54:54And Jonathan, like the only reason I'm here is because you are a friend. Like, what was my speaking fee? You're not making any... First of all, I'm Andrew. But, uh, yeah, sorry. It's okay. Yeah, that was there for all of us to see. Okay, would the all-in boys be characters on the new Silicon Valley? Oh, yeah, of course. For sure. For sure. This is precisely what we're talking about. You know, I know all those guys, but, like, the talk in your own book constantly... Chamath referenced the size of his little Chamath. Oh, really? Apparently not so little Chamath. In Twitter, he started talking about it.

55:33How big is it? I don't know. He referred to it by like a snake name. You read it and you don't remember the number? No, he referred to it as like he said, like it's legendary in Silicon Valley. It's referred to. It's where people call it the blah, blah, blah. And I was like, good Lord. That's so disturbing. Okay. Like, what are you doing? Give me one word for each of the all-in guys because you know them. Chamath Palapathia. I'm bad at word association because everything's more complicated than one word. No, it's fine. It's like a bit... Self-promotional. What's the one word for David Friedberg?

56:05Understated. Okay. And David Sachs? Overstated. Okay. And now Jason Calcanis. Jason is Jason. He's like... I don't know what even... How do you refer to Jason? Like... I don't know. He's like always been the same dude since Silicon Alley in New York back in the 90s, pre-earth. During magazine era. During the pre-Cambrian era of the 90s. He's like this always been the same guy, Jason. I feel like for millennial Silicon Valley people, they used to listen to All In, and now they don't. There's been this kind of rejection of All In from the Valley. Is that true? I don't think it's just All In. I think it's this politicization of everything.

56:48Yes. It's just tiresome. It is exhausting. I think everything in America has become political. Dating has become political. Everything. What you eat is political. you know, like sports, the only thing that's not political. You have to have like some politicized hot take. Like it's just tiresome. Yeah. It just is. But it wasn't like Silicon Valley was apolitical. I mean, it actually, it was apolitical. Like in 2010, it felt apolitical. In 2016, it felt left blue. And in 2022, it felt red. It was more, it was better when it was apolitical. It was just better. Like, now it just feels like totally self-dealing.

57:28It just does. Like, I'm going to talk my own book and cloak it in, well, the reason we have to do this for America is like, you're not doing it for America. You're doing it because you're a huge investor in these three companies. And like, if they deregulate all these things and then shut the door behind you, boy, once we're making all this money, then we should regulate it and prevent. It's just, it's these guys talking their own book. I will say this about it and I'll leave it at that. almost every one of these guys that I know says something differently behind closed doors than they do in public about the political state of affairs in the country.

58:02I don't want you to leave it at that. Give me a specific example without naming a person, without naming the person. They all just say one thing and then in public say something else. For example, what do they say? For example, like the current administration, they feel one way about behind closed doors and think XYZ is crazy. And then publicly are like, well, it's the right path forward. Yeah, they're performing fellatio. Yeah, it's performative in service to their portfolio and not what they really believe. So you think the red pilling of Silicon Valley is just politically expedient being buddies with who's in power versus there's a real change in their perspective over time?

58:38I think the one real change in their perspective is that the left became too participation trophy for them. Like, let's stop giving participation trophies to everybody in America. Like, we don't have to do, you know, woke this and woke that and everything else. I do think there was a sense in Silicon Valley that like, okay, like enough is enough. Can we go back to like a meritocracy? Which is, I think, reasonable and fair. And the left does tend to like overcorrect for things most of America doesn't care about. It just doesn't. I feel in the people I know, in my generation of Silicon Valley founders, et cetera, there were kind of three reasons that they really started to sympathize with the right.

59:27And those three reasons, and they went from - You've thought about this a lot more than I have, I can tell. Yeah, but the three reasons I think are Lena Kahn. Yes, I agree. That kind of like the pushback against mergers and acquisitions in the Valley. They, some of them felt targeted, some of them felt, I mean, I'm not putting a valence on any of this. I just want to say what they have reported to me. She's actually a bad human being, I think, in the con. I don't think that's the case. Okay, we can have a discussion about this later. Okay. The second is the pandemic, which is this idea that Elon had as well.

59:59It's like, people need to work, we need to get back to it, the economy needs to keep moving, and the free speech connection that came out of the pandemic, the Great Barrington Declaration, we've had Jay on the show, etc. And the third is this DEI participation thing that you're talking about. These are the three levers. I think that's fair. And so when Elon Musk came in and bought Twitter and he was like, here's a kitchen sink and let me fire half of you. And he was able to do what he wanted. There was a lot of like, okay, but here's like someone big getting bigger, putting people to hard work and grinding them and firing them when there's bloat or complaints.

1:00:34And they saw that as a kind of hero moment. And permission to do the same. Yes. Is that fair? Totally fair. For people who don't know, by the way, I mean, Lena Kahn, along with the UK version of this, prevented Adobe from acquiring Figma for$20 billion a number of years ago, obviously now, on this weird argument that you have to contort yourself into a pretzel to believe that it would have made Adobe a monopoly. I'm sure the people at Adobe were like, we would love to be a monopoly, and wouldn't have, of course and rejected the acquisition. But it wasn't a tech-specific lens. Like, I mean, there were also the Penguin Random House, Simon Schuster.

1:01:17There were a lot of them in it. Correct, that's fair. There was a sense that, like, the big have gotten big. And that was a sentiment of the American public, by the way. That was part of the Biden administration. I don't know. And it's still, like, even now, I think that it's not like that has changed. Like, the Trump administration also. For sure now it's the sentiment of the American public, I think. But I don't think it was at the time. The American public wasn't like, no way Adobe should be able to buy Figma. Like, no, zero people thought that. Literally zero. Dude with sign had that sign.

1:01:43Yeah. There was also this narrative that, like, Washington was running Silicon Valley, that there was, you know, this has been, I think, largely investigated through the Twitter files, largely disproven, but the sense that the social media companies were falling in line with Washington. That was not true. When you were running Twitter, did you get calls from the administration saying, take this down? Yeah, but we didn't do it. So the first time in 2011, I think it was, I'm in my Monday morning, like, meeting with my direct reports, and my assistant comes to the room and goes, I have a phone call for you.

1:02:13And I was like, I'll call him back. I'm like, what are you doing? We're having our Monday morning meeting. And she goes, it's the White House. And my immediate thought, like this goes to show you what a Midwestern born and raised I am. My immediate thought was, I didn't do anything. What are they calling me for? I didn't do anything. I was like, my mind was racing like, what did I do? What did I do? And then I was like, P.S. How do you know it's the White house. Someone you could just call. Does it come up on caller ID? And like, hi, hi. She's like, hey, Dick, it's Valerie Jarrett. Like the president would love you to come to Washington.

1:02:45Anyway, to make a long story short, there was a bunch of back and forth between Washington and the tech companies about like, hey, we want you to take this account down or, hey, we need to know if these, and it was mostly terrorist stuff like ISIS and Al Qaeda at the time. I even had a fatwa against me from ISIS for taking down some ISIS accounts, but we didn't take them down because we were asked to by the authorities. I thought it was where your in-lot is dressed. It was both. It was both. I was wearing a Tom Ford shirt, three buttons down. No, we would get in back and forth with the FBI and the Department of Justice and the administration about, we want to be able to see these DMs because we think it's a terrorist account.

1:03:20And you're like, okay, you need to provide a valid order from a court. You can't just start asking us for account names. And so there was a sense that everyone was falling in line and doing whatever was... That was simply not true. We weren't just, you know, they couldn't call and get access to people's DMs. And you don't think that changed when you left and jacked or came in? I have no idea, but I doubt it, because the legal team was the same and they were very good about... Like, you gotta have a valid court request for these things. We're not just gonna respond to email requests. But, okay, on this question of, like, Twitter's continued relevance...

1:03:55I did an episode of a show a while back, is Twitter gonna go the way of Yahoo Mail? And it hasn't. I have to say, like, despite people's... predictions that it was over and people voting by feet and whatever. Twitter has remained a place for cultural relevance when something newsmaking is happening. Certainly inside Silicon Valley. Inside Silicon Valley. And therefore, more broadly, because Silicon Valley is very rich and powerful and controls a lot of things or impacts a lot. If you're in tech, you and you're a founder or an operator or an investor in tech, you have to at least be on Twitter.

1:04:28You don't have to be tweeting necessarily, but you sure should be on there paying attention to what's going on. You helped build this house. How does it feel to now see it be like a bit of a flamethrower? I mean, you move on from that stuff. You just do. I remember right after I left, this person at CNBC was like, how does it feel to be just referred to as the former CEO of Twitter? I was like, well, my mom doesn't walk around calling me that. So I don't really like... Also, I am the former CEO of Twitter. I quit. I could have stayed in the job and done it if I wanted to. I didn't want to because it was horrible.

1:05:02She calls you a failed SNL star. Yeah. She calls me, remember when you could have been somebody and you failed at that? You've done just fine. Your non-New York residency demonstrates you've done just fine, Dick. No one's worried about you, especially not your mama. I mean, that's very interesting psychological insight into how you move on from companies. I think some people don't, by the way. They get locked in the chair. 100%. It's because they, I mean, I actually think he's an extraordinary human being, Bob Iger at Disney, but look at Iger, he couldn't let go of being CEO of Disney and came back and was there longer than he was there in the first round, a lot longer than he said he was going to do.

1:05:40I remember I was sitting with Peter Chernin, who was on my board at Twitter and was famously the COO at News Corp for many, many years and made the movies Titanic and others. And he and I were sitting in this cafe in Los Angeles, and Iger came in. Peter made some crack like, Bob, what are you doing? You're 70 years old, still running this company. You got a boat here in the harbor you've never been on. And Iger goes, well, Peter, 70 is the new 50. And Sharnan goes, that may be true, but 80 is still 80. I love that. That's a good line. Let's do a bit of a lightning round of major news on Twitter.

1:06:18You love the lightning round. I do. There have been a number of public battles that have been revelatory about Silicon Valley recently. One of which has been Elon Musk has been sued by investors on Twitter. They say that he misled them, that he was fraudulent in presenting the value of Twitter. Those investors have been successful in proving that they were misled, but not that there was a scheme to defraud them. Yeah. This is interesting because Elon has been kind of Teflon. Yeah. Also, he bought the company for$45 billion. So congratulations, right? If you were an investor. Well, they said that they lost money because it could have been worth more.

1:06:51Those people are wrong. I don't care what the decision was, but those people are dead wrong. Another public fight that's played out recently. This is not in the courtroom, but in kind of the newspapers of the world. Open AI and Anthropic. Or really, Anthropic and the Department of War. Sure. But explain the essence of this argument between the AI companies, or really one AI company, Anthropic, and the US government about holding a line. Because it relates to what you were saying earlier. Sure. In brief, it's that Dario and Anthropic are like, look, for example, we're not going to allow Anthropic to be used to kill people without a human in the loop.

1:07:25Basically, Anthropic is holding the line on ways in which our product can be used for nefarious purposes or to kill other people. Do you think that's fine? I do yes for one specific reason, because I think it is specifically appropriate for AI. The argument that the people on the other side of the equation would make is, you don't get to tell companies how to use, you know, Microsoft doesn't get to tell you how to use Excel when you buy Excel. They don't get to say, yeah, but you can't use it for military purposes. Sure, but it's not like something close to AGI and also - It's not agentic, yeah.

1:08:01Yeah, we've also been saying for years, well, one of the things we want to make sure we do when we build AI is keep the guardrails on and make sure it's safe and that it can't go off on its own and start killing people. Well, the moment you can say like, hey, we want to be able to use this thing to harm others without a human in the loop, it's like literally the thing since day one we've been saying. Well, obviously we won't let AI do that. Okay, interesting. The third of these is, I wish we could spend more time on them and run through them, is Elon Musk versus OpenAI, this legal battle, which I think is like four innings of lawsuits, actually.

1:08:36But we're in the discovery phase. We're finding a lot of things, including from OpenAI co-founder Greg Bachman's physical diary, which is some of the greatest bombs in there, including when they're running a nonprofit, talking about how it might go from being a nonprofit company to a B Corp quickly, talking about how he would make a billion dollars. Do you have a physical diary? I don't, but I... I don't either, and I don't think you should. What do you think it is? Now we're seeing why you shouldn't. What do you think it reveals about a very technical online person that he felt the safest place to put his thoughts was a physical diary?

1:09:06With a key, probably. It had like a little key that was like a toy key. Click. No, I think Elon has a point in this argument. I remember vividly Sam Altman being on stage at one of the Allen & Company conferences years ago and saying the reason AI has to be open is everyone has to be able to access it. And Larry Page actually saying, like, that's actually a really bad idea because it can then be in the hands of bad people. And here we are. Sam was arguing long ago that it has to be an open nonprofit company and so forth. I think he said the fruits of it should be open, but the profits should not be or something like that.

1:09:46I'm paraphrasing. It's how we owe the little ways we tangle ourselves into knots. What I meant was, well, look, the profits can't be for everybody. But open AI but not the profits is too long a URL. So we didn't want to get that one. Do you think the debate over AI has moved forward from that fight you witnessed in Sun Valley between Sam Altman and Larry? Well, yeah, they're a for-profit company now. No, but I meant like that kind of debate. Oh, yeah, it's totally moved on. What it's moved on to is we have to do it or the Chinese will beat us and we can't let the Chinese beat us and therefore, insert thing we want to do is justified.

1:10:30Yeah, it's a kind of all thing. The other revelatory thing is these texts between Sam Altman and Elon where Sam says to Elon, you're my hero. It really fucking hurts when you publicly attack OpenAI. Elon responds, I hear you and it is certainly not my intention to be hurtful, for which I apologize, but the fate of civilization is at stake. Overstatement, And understatement. David Friedberg or David Sachs? Overstatement. Overstatement. It's not the fate of civilization. Whether OpenAI is a for-profit company or a non-profit company is not the fate of civilization. Okay. AGI and whether you can like, whether you should be able to use AI without humans in the loop to kill people, for example, is probably bordering on the fate of civilization.

1:11:15Last and most probably relevant. The archetype. No, of these recent things, we're going to get to the archetype. But is this big ruling that has come out of LA, which is like big techs, big tobacco moment, where a jury has found that Meta and YouTube were negligent in platform design and operation, that they hooked their user, foster addiction, risk mental health, and they knew what they were doing to the point of internal emails. Were you surprised by that ruling? I was dismayed by that ruling. And the unfortunate part about that ruling is, look, you can say whatever you want about the platforms and whether and how much horrible they cause in society, etc.

1:11:56But the beauty of previous law had been that the platforms aren't responsible for the content people put on there. Yeah, that's Section 230. The immunity that tech companies enjoy. Section 230. And the reason that's important is because courts had previous, prior to section 230, if you took down something on the platform on Twitter, let's say it was the grossest thing possible, child porn, and you took it down, and then you didn't take down the person who's attacking you in an at reply, then you could sue Twitter and say, oh, see, they edit stuff on the platform. They already obviously, they took down that thing, but they didn't take down this.

1:12:38Therefore, they owe me this much money. And section 230 was, look, you can't start saying once you edit one thing, you have to edit everything because it's impossible. So that was the beauty of Section 230. It made the platforms immune from this. This piercing of it by saying like, we're not suing you for editing stuff. We're suing you for your design choices like infinite scroll that make people addict. Like, okay, now you're just getting back to the platforms are now responsible for the content on the platforms. So you actually look, so you having run one of these companies, Twitter. You don't think there's any merit to the idea that these companies are in the business of profiting off of something that's harmful and known to be harmful?

1:13:22No, I didn't say that. Unlike Big Tobacco or car companies and Zebalt's or... I'm not saying that. I'm not saying that. I'm saying the ruling is opening up a giant can of worms which people are going to regret. But what was the other way? Okay. Because Facebook and YouTube have infinite resources and can defend themselves from all the future lawsuits and pay, I don't know, whatever the people won,$4 million in New Mexico and let's say lots more in California. Who cares? It's a drop in the bucket to them. But the next possible platform, the next startup that tries to take these people on or come up with some orthogonal approach to a new way of thinking about social media cannot fight those battles in court and will lose every time.

1:14:06Or we'll do what Snapchat did in this case and settle because they're like, we don't have the money to go fight this. And so they'll never be able to get as big as that. And it entrenches YouTube and Facebook as the leaders. But you've talked about how there's very little introspection going on with all these stoics in Silicon Valley. Where is the needle for accountability in Silicon Valley? I agree that there needs to be more accountability in Silicon Valley. That's why I find you interesting. And now I will flack your podcast, The Nick Dick and Paul Show, because I do think what's interesting is that you're able to, from a nonpartisan, nonpolitical lens, say, have this nuanced point of view, which is you think Section 230 is philosophically important for the growth of tech and innovation.

1:14:45You also think that tech companies have gotten out of hand. So square the circle for me of how do you get greater accountability in this non-introspective, victimized world? I don't have a simple answer for it. It is certainly the case that all of these platforms cause, you know, obviously tremendous damage to kids and teenagers, and they're not spending time outdoors. They're not spending time with each other and like physical contact with friends. They're afraid to ask out girls in person. Like all of this stuff is due to these platforms. And not just kids, adults too. Yeah, adults too. And it's probably largely responsible along with cable news for the polarization of opinion in the country.

1:15:34And like, I mean, all you need to do is go on one of these platforms and you see the posts that reinforce what you already believe, or you see the posts that incite you to anger because it's the opposite of what you already believe. And you can see by the responses, it's like an anger hole. If you go on most of these platforms right now, you end up leaving angry. So will AI help soften that? I actually think, so there's a great article about this just yesterday, and it was in fact an interesting perspective I hadn't thought about. What AI actually is really good at is a reversion to the mean on answers.

1:16:10When you ask it as the sort of stupidest simple example, if you go to chat GPT or Claude or whatever and say, hey, give me a random number one through 10, it will always reply seven. That's not a random number one through 10. Why does it always reply with seven? Well, because when it goes out and searches the internet for things like the random number one through ten, the most mean result that people type in when they're asked is seven. That's what ChatGPT says. So it's a reflection. And as the answers to political questions or medical questions or on and on and on are the LLM giving you a reversion to the mean answer, you end up with people being convinced out of their polarized opinions into a more moderate view.

1:17:01So one potential solution to the social media polarization is people rely more on AI for what's a different way to think about this, and AI pulling people back toward the middle. We'll see. We'll see if the data in is good or trash, right? That's what it's like, if there's some bias. Yeah, that's an optimistic outlook. It's an optimistic outlook. Okay. I just want to give you, because of this trade that we have for the flack, for the archetype, I'm going to give you one minute to talk about your podcast and pitch it to people, Dick, of why they should listen to it. Our podcast is trying to provide a non-political show that offers discourse about policies in media, technology, and space travel, AI, everything that are happening in the world today without being politicized.

1:17:54And we try to do it in as much as possible an informative and lighthearted way. Yeah, what I like about the Nick Dick and Paul show is that it's like a combination. I think there are a lot of outsider tech podcasts. There's Hard Fork, there's Pivot, there's like the journalist commentary on the thing. And there's the insider, the all-ins, the dark hash. And then there's the, which I quite like, the business case study, the acquired model. I think what you guys have is a combination of inside and outside, because Nick Bilton brings that journalistic. He wrote the book on Twitter. He wrote for Vanity Fair.

1:18:24He brings some of the pushback. And you guys, you know, you and Paul, this guy Paul, supposedly, are on the inside. The supposed person Paul. You guys are on the inside. And I think it's interesting. I liked when you guys were breaking down the worst things invented in tech. And Nick Bilton, you know, hard-hitting journalist, said Postmates or something. DoorDash. What the fuck? His worst tech invention ever is DoorDash. And Paul and I are like, what are you talking about? He's like, well, they charge too much in fees. I'm like, great, don't use DoorDash. Yeah, Nick is no longer, this is why I said former journalist, Nick Bilton.

1:18:51Yeah. By the way, have you ever bought a plane ticket two days before as opposed to three weeks before? The price is different. Surprise, surprise. Okay, Dick, now that I've allowed you to flack your podcast, and I've even helped you pitch your podcast. Yeah, you have. You did. You maybe articulated it better than I did. But you'll learn, Dick. Once you do a few more podcast episodes, you too will be a hit podcast. One day you too can have all the success. And one day I too can run away to a state like Utah to avoid taxes. It's just going to happen for both of us. Oh, God. The archetype, Dick.

1:19:21Yes. Don't take a swig of water right now. The archetype that I'm being asked about is, Naima wants to know, she was like... I didn't want to know, you volunteered. You were like, you know, the Mr. Perfect is not out there. I was like, I have the archetype in my mind for you, the guy. Ready? Yeah. Should I take notes? Well, you'll be able to watch the podcast and hear it. Okay. He's mid-40s. He's tall. He's in shape. He's not like, you know, he's not like a gym rat, but he's like, he runs, he bikes, you know, he's in shape. He's not like ripped, but he's in shape. It's fine. Okay. He's totally confident and secure, but he doesn't have to be the star of the show.

1:20:08Like, he's not the middle at the big dinner party. You're the middle at the dinner party. You can't have two middles at the dinner party. Yeah. You know what I'm saying? You're a middle too. I'm a middle two. He's happy to come to the dinner party. He's perfectly conversational at dinner party, but he's not the middle. He's not the star of the show. So you think my problem has been that I've been dating too many alphas? I don't know if you've been dating too many alphas, but he's confident because you're gonna not... If the person's not confident, you're gonna be like, there's no way. Like, I can't do this poor schmuck who I'm dragging around town.

1:20:42He's well off. Okay. He's successful. He doesn't need money, but he's got a job. I have him. You're not going to like this part. Are you ready? Is he a salaried employee? Oh, my God. I'm teasing. I'm teasing. Keep going. I have him as a senior vice president at Apple. Oh, God. No, I do not like this. Eddie Q, are you single right now? Eddie Q, I want I'm gonna sell you a show. Call me. I knew you weren't gonna like that. What? I just think that's what I got in my mind. What else? I don't know. You were so fucking fired from this podcast. If I could have put your words in my mouth just now, what you would say is, he runs his own world-famous architecture firm and travels frequently.

1:21:32That's interesting. Do you feel like you're well-informed enough to build my archetype on me? I do. Yeah, I do. And the entire archetype is based upon me being a Middler in a Larry David skit. It's not just based on that. But it's largely based on that. I think it's got a lot of weight. There's a lot of weight there. Did you bring any of these people here today? Are they behind door number one, two, three? No, because they wouldn't do that because they have a job and they're confident enough not to have to come to a podcast to meet you. Give me another question about the archetype. You must be curious about your future husband.

1:22:04No, I think I'm okay. You are? I think I know enough. He doesn't have to be an SVP at Apple. I'm just kind of saying that's generally what I'm getting. I mean, nothing is wrong with SVPs at Apple. Well, apparently there is. You're horrified that he makes a salary. No, I don't. The Nepo baby. I don't like Nepo babies. I like a self-made man. I like a self-made man. OK, self-made man and struggling artist are two different things. Who takes a little risk. Dick, I mean, I would love to just kick eject you from the cow high chair that you complained about just now. But I do ask a final question to everyone on Smart Girl Dumb Questions, and that is, of all the things that you have hot takes about.

1:22:37What is the thing that you're dumb about? What is the dumb question you have that you don't know the answer to? Oh, the thing that I'm dumb about is... Wow, that's a really great question. I wish I'd watched the podcast more all the way to the end so that I knew that. It's a funny thing. Dick never listens to my podcast or watches it. It's amazing that we're friends. I'm dumb about so many things. I'm really, really dumb about world history. I'll go to a place and be like, oh, man. What is this here for? And they'll be like, this is where Attila the Hun crossed the mountains and sacked Rome. And I'll be like, Rome was sacked?

1:23:22The Visigoths? Who were the Visigoths? So you think about ancient history the way I think about the 90s. Yeah, they're basically the same. They're the same. Yeah. I travel a lot and I'll go places and be like, what was this for? I'm going to recommend you a book. Okay, I want it. My dad used to read to me out of this book called Glimpses of World History. I need the glimpses. Jawahal Nehru, who was obviously one of the fathers of India, modern India, he wrote 6 ,000 years of human history, largely from memory, while as a political prisoner, he wrote it to his daughter, Indira Gandhi, who would become the Prime Minister of India.

1:23:58And it also had many inaccuracies, and my dad used to read me these letters when I was little. I can't wait. And then it'll be up to you to tell me what the inaccuracies are. You'll be like, oh, that one actually didn't happen. Maybe my dad bod guy is going to read them to you. I'm going to get dad bod guy to call you, read you the letters, okay? Yeah, you'll know him when you meet him. All right, thank you so much, Dick, for coming to the show. Thanks for having me.

1:24:23That's it for this episode of Smart Girl Done Questions. I can't even give you an outro because I am now just going on LinkedIn to find my future husband. He's going to be very LinkedIn. This episode was produced with Desto Wunderad, Melissa Lee Gibson, It was edited by the great Darlena Chiem, mixed and engineered by Johnny Simon. I'm your host, Nahima Raza. We'll see you next week for an all-new Smart Girl Dumb Questions.

1:25:05Thank you.