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

Samoth, did you go down to the Breakthrough thing this weekend?

The Breakthrough Prize was amazing.

It's like observing exotic animals in their natural habitat. Well, a friend of mine who you hung out with down there called me last night to give me the breakdown on all the individuals he saw and what was going on with them.

I mean, he's like, I don't even know how Nat and I keep getting invited to this, but like, to say we were outclassed is an understatement.

The people at that thing were — what is this? Break the rewards?

The Breakthrough Prize, yeah. Yeah, I couldn't make it. I got invited too. So incredible. Okay, first of all, shout out to Yuri and Julia. It is incredible. There were two moments where I cried. This woman goes up on stage to give an award to the people that had made this investment in cystic fibrosis.

Yeah.

And she says, my child was born with cystic fibrosis, and then my second child was born with cystic fibrosis, and then my second child died. She said that I just burst into tears. And then you present an award to the person that actually is helping them stamp out the disease. We celebrated the people that found the gene that caused Parkinson's and then, yeah, I mean the people at that is pretty incredible.

It's in LA, right? They did it in Los Angeles?

Yeah, I mean like look, Yuri Milner and Julia Milner, Zuck and Priscilla Chan and, and Wojicki and Sergey Brin. Those six people are the ones that organized this breakthrough prize and I think it's just, a modern version of the Nobel, which tries to really shine a spotlight on people doing really groundbreaking work in physics and math and life sciences. And so you get people that have just done things that are just very practical and are very real. And I think what they do is they make, frankly, these kinds of achievements much more high level in the sense that you're bringing together people from Hollywood and people from Silicon Valley and the awareness is up and it's just incredibly well produced. And yeah, it's really a cool thing to be a part of. But I mean, seeing some of these people are very intimidating. I sat beside Vin Diesel.

Oh, really?

That was super cool. He is a super nice guy. And on the other side of me, Someone that actually sax knows, Toby Emerick, who's, was the chairman of Warner Brothers. So just talking to these guys was super cool.

Moving it to Los Angeles was a great move. Yeah, it's just, I was invited. I couldn't make it. So sorry. And thank you to Julia and Yuri for inviting us again. But it's really great that they're giving it the celebration it deserves and making it, you know, like, dare I say, sexy and cool and hip. to be a scientist and solve the world's biggest problems. I think it's just so awesome. And you're right, Sergey Brin, Anne Wojcicki, Sack and Priscilla and Julia and Yuri.

Are the founders of the Breakthrough Prize. The craziest thing is they give a youth breakthrough award. So the Breakthrough Prize is this beautiful globe, and then the junior winner gets like a smaller version, very appropriate. And it was a video of this kid in India who had won it a few years ago and then went off to MIT and then graduated. And then the video is of him coming back to Bangalore because his sister had won it this year and he presented it to the sister. And all I could think of was, this is an incredible achievement by like a 16 year old. And literally at the same time, my 16 year old was like, Dad, the.

Chicken tenders from DoorDash have arrived. I was like, you get my, I can't find my chicken fingers.

Let your winners ride.

Rain Man David Sacks.

And instead, we open sources to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it.

Love you, West.

Queen of Kin Wah. Dad, I said get me the spicy fries, not the regular Cajun fries.

The girl that wanted- Freeberg did something with Yamanaka factors. So it's like, it's really incredible and inspiring. But fortunately, don't worry, my, my 16 year old was able to get the chicken tenders and everything was fine.

Oh, okay. Good.

Yeah.

Sure. You called rerouted it.

I called, can't get his chicken tenders. What do we do?

Hilarious.

By the way, the other, the other thing I'll say is the person that performed is really amazing. Charlie Puth. And, and the reason I say it is, if you Google Charlie Puth, this guy, he's a young guy in his early 20s, I'm guessing, he is so talented. There's all these videos of Charlie Puth where he'll make a random noise, like he'll clink a Coke bottle with a fork, and then he'll record it, and then he'll put it into these digital editing tools, and then he'll make like a entire five minute song using that as the base. Like, as the basic building block. The guy is so talented. Anyways, it was a very cool event.

Fantastic. How are you doing, Saks? You okay, buddy?

I'm good. Let's get started.

There it is, folks. We're back. It's gonna be a hell of a show.

Let's go. I got to do. Don't waste time with your pointless banter.

It's why people tune in, it's the banter. It's a Vanter, bro. How you doing, Freeberg? What do you got?

A little scene from the movie Her.

Wow. We're off to a strong start here. Look at all these contributions. I got a shrug from Freeberg. I got a grumpy let's get started from Sachs.

I don't talk about my backgrinds.

Let's go. Anything good on the menu tonight, Shamath? I just want, I'm coming over for poker. I wanted to know if there's any- Octopus.

Oh, so the Greek comes back.

And you get the octopus on the plate.

You get the octopus. I think that Sean missed you.

Yeah.

He did. By the way, Sean experimented with some Greek cheese that you grill.

That was pretty delicious.

That made me back up.

Halloumi. Halloumi.

What is a plural of octopus?

Is it octopi?

Yeah. Aren't they like sentient creatures or something? Halloumi. Yeah. You know what? It's interesting you bring that up. I had a grilled octopus stand at one of our events, and somebody who is a conscientious consumer of calories, lobbied me to take the grilled octopus off of the menu. I wouldn't say who. For what?

Wait, what?

I got lobbied very strongly.

Not only is it deeply wrong to eat all the animals that you people eat, and you will one day realize it, or your children, or your children's children will realize it, but octopus in particular have the IQ of four to eight year olds. They can actually sign, they can communicate, they can solve problems. You can watch YouTube videos on this. It's pretty incredible. They're amazing creatures. It's also why in the movie the Arrival, the future alien race is made out to be cephalopods because they're the most advanced creature that's likely to become a civilized form if humans didn't exist.

I have a one word reaction to that.

Yum.

Delicious.

Yummy. It's the IQ that makes it taste so good.

Oh my God.

That's dark.

That's dark. You're saying the IQ is like the spice?

Yeah, it's kind of like the fat content.

You know, it's kind of like the marbling.

It's the marbling. It's the marbling of it.

That's dark.

I don't know.

Oh, oh yeah, by the way, thanks guys.

Yeah, I'm fine. Yeah, I'm great. I'm feeling great. Yeah, the tooth is healed.

I got the implant.

You look like you've been eating well. Just only things with above 120 calories.

Are you off the Wagovii or the, what do you call it?

Well, no, no. You know what I did was I got off the Wagovii so I could eat more animals. And now I'm getting back on it because I feel so terrible about how many- I was in Austin, I ate everything. Jake, I'm eating bison. Yeah, go ahead.

If you eat high IQ foods, does it make you smarter?

Absolutely, absolutely. This is why the Greeks invented so many things. We invented math, plumbing, cities, democracy. All the great things the Greeks created comes from the fact that we ate so many high IQ creatures. Correct.

Are you able to be vegetarian? Were you able to find good vegetarian or veggie options in Austin?

Who are you talking to me? Yeah. I mean, I see a vegetable, I push it away. I'm like, wait a second.

Jake, I was on a seafood diet in Austin. If he saw the food, he ate it.

It's not a joke, but it's not inaccurate. The barbecue in Austin is so spectacular. Terry Black's beef ribs I had with a friend of ours, man, they're just dynamite. And then the Salt Lick brisket, Franklin's brisket, I mean, it is just extraordinary.

Shout out to all my barbecue folks there. And sorry for triggering. Every mammal that wasn't buttoned down, Jake.

The big guy, the thing that's been barbecue sauce and The thing that took out the rib was the bison. I'm sorry, I was away. Apologies to the audience. It took out a tooth, you know.

As far as I feel, worth it. What does a bison rib taste like?

Does it taste like beef? Man, it is, it's, the beef ribs are very tender. The bison's got a little more chew to it. It's a little more texture. Yeah, and they let this thing go at the Salt Lick for like 12 hours, and they're just barbecue sauce in it forever. It's a little chewy. And so that's what took out the tooth. But great job, Freeberg, on moderating. Episode was fantastic. Yes, I was chomping on the bit, quite literally, sax, to talk about some stuff. Chopping on the bit to the point that I shattered a tooth. But I am back and I have so much energy. I missed you guys. I actually missed y'all. Freeberg, so much good stuff happening with the summit. And I'm delighted that John is doing all this work. You're doing all this work. And I and just sit back and enjoy it. So tell us, is there an update on the summit?

Yeah, you're just collecting your coupon. But yeah, we had within 72 hours, I think we had more applications than we have seats, but we are still leaving applications open and in the next week we'll start to respond to people. So basically, if you're interested in going to the summit, sign up now, get your applications in this week.

Apply early is the key.

Yeah, because it's going to be done in order of when it's received and they're going to start processing applications this week. We'd love to get everyone that wants to show up, show up. And if you went in the past, your registration window is wrapped up this week. So, that's a real thing.

So alumni automatically get in?

Alumni automatically are in.

Okay. And then tell us about the scholarship because I'm getting bombarded and everybody who's an up and coming all in fan.

We're going to announce it in a couple of weeks. So no plan yet, but we'll still do scholarships because I think they were super successful and helpful to people that otherwise couldn't afford the ticket. I know it's expensive this year, but the reason was we actually spent a lot more per person last year than people actually paid for their tickets.

It's less than 10.

So yeah, we're trying to get the price so that we can make the same break even. and we're going to have scholarship tickets with the balance.

So should be honest. I saw a couple speakers come in.

There's two more.

Not talking about it yet. Not talking about it. Come on. Just can we just tell the two.

Speakers who said yes?

Come on. Give the audience something. Not yet.

We'll do big and I think it's going to be awesome in a week.

In a week, we'll announce a bunch together. Listen. Well, one thing I don't want to wait on is today's docket because it is unbelievable. Welcome, everybody, to episode 175. That's right. It's episode 175 of your favorite podcast and the largest and most listened to podcast in the world, officially. Episode 175 of the All In podcast starts right now. And, oh, I got so many feelings about this one.

Is that the largest, most listened to podcast in the world?

I'm manifesting. Oh, you're manifesting. I'm manifesting, Chamath. Just like, just like Bill Murray, there's the world's greatest poker player.

And then we watch Robo roll over him.

Is that a new word that narcissists use for lying?

Manifesting?

No, it's just like, you know, the world's greatest poker player. And then we see Phil Hellmuth get dominated by Jason Koon.

Just so you know, tonight is a murderer's row and Hellmuth is flying back. You saw the lineup.

I'm very excited to see what happens tonight. Is Jason Koon coming or no? Yeah. I mean, Koon and Robel and then.

The world's greatest Hellmuth playing is so great to watch. It's like a meta ego battle. It is.

And those, you know what's interesting? Two of those three guys are like the most humble guys you would ever meet in your life. Am I correct?

In your life, just, you could not be more low-key and self-effacing than Robb and Co. For how good they are.

And if you were honestly going to rank the three of them in a high-stakes cash game, could you just handicap it for the audience? Because we are in a, we're in a lucky position, you and I, to play with these three epic players in the world. break down how they play in a home game, you know, like ours.

So I would say the most dynamic range would probably be Robel, because Robel has the most experience playing super, super high stakes cash. I think Kuhn is the most precise.

And.

Like true to GTO, hard to exploit. I mean, Khun is impossible to exploit. Impossible.

Doesn't- no mistakes.

No mistakes.

No mistakes.

Robel knows how to gamble in certain spots. Khun knows how to be unexploitable. And the third player's Phil Ivey.

And the third person is Helmut. And Helmut just loses his mind.

It is so- Now, the thing with Hal Muth is he's capable, unlike anyone I've ever seen, of folding in spots that are, and he's correct, by the way. I've seen Hal Muth fold ace king in spots that none of us would ever do it. I've seen him fold kings in spots that are basically impossible. So Hal Muth is able to get these soul reads on people that I think are amazing.

Yeah.

But look, the higher and higher the stakes get, the more and more I think Robel will be comfortable and, and Khun will just go to a playbook that he knows and trusts.

I am, I'm so excited to be back at the game tonight. All right, listen, the docket is so great this week. We got a great classic all in docket. I want to start with Google firing 28 employees who were involved in this protest at their offices. We didn't think that this would happen. We were having a discussion on the group chat. On Tuesday, about a dozen employees engaged in sit-ins at the company's offices in Sunnyvale and New York City, protesting the conflict in the Middle East between Israel and Palestine. And so they took over, literally took over the offices of the CEO of Google Cloud, and nine employees were arrested after refusing to leave. The protest was organized by a group called no Tech for Apartheid. and they posted a bunch of clips of this sit-in on X. Those 28 employees were fired on Wednesday after a quick investigation. The VP of global security was pretty direct and candid. I mean, this is based. They took over office spaces, defaced our property, and physically impeded the work of other Googlers. Behavior like this has no place in our workplace. and we will not tolerate it. If you're one of the few who are tempted to think we're going to overlook conduct that violates our policies, think again. So what were the protests about? Google is involved in a project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion cloud contract with Israel's government. Both Google and Amazon are involved in the project, which was announced in 2021. Google has denied it was doing work for the military, saying it was working with departments like finance, healthcare, transportation. There's a lot of details to this, but Let's start with you, Freeberg, since you were a Googler and we've been talking about the culture of Google, putting aside what the protests were about, how do you feel about protests in the workplace? We've talked about it before here with Coinbase and others. And then is this a distinct change in tone that I'm hearing from Google that they've had enough of social activism at the, office.

I mean, yeah, there's obviously a line crossed in the view of security, but I think you could look at this two ways. You could look at this as being a culture of entitlement that let folks feel that are employees, that they have permission to stage sit-ins and behaviors like this because Google is so infinItely tolerant in giving employees the space and the room to do whatever they want to do, and all of their wishes and demands can be met and will be met if they demand it strongly enough. That's one way to look at this and that that culture manifested this behavior. Another way to look at it is that these people feel so deeply, strongly and passionately about the issue at hand that they were willing to risk their jobs and arrest, and they cared so deeply about an issue that they think no one's paying enough attention to that they're willing to put themselves and sacrifice themselves for it. So I want to be empathetic to that point of view as well. But I do think that there's a belief that there may have been this kind of entitlement culture where anytime Google employees ask for stuff, they get it. Someone told me the other day how TGIFs at Google now, where they do these all hands and people get to ask questions. this person is kind of executive level. They were so sick and tired of how every question is all about employees asking for more things that they want. So it's like, when are we going to get this bonus? When are we going to get this gym? When are we going to get this? That's so much of the orientation of being an employee at Google is all about what Google can do for me and how I can get more. And that becomes what you ask for. It's like you give a kid something, you give them candy, they're always asked for candy. And I think that there is certainly an element of that culture kind of being frothed up over the years at Google. But I do think that this is an issue that people care very passionately about right now, and you're seeing it all over the place. So certainly- In the same week we.

Had the Golden Gate Bridge get shut down, the Bay Bridge gets shut down as well. Shamath, your thoughts on these protests and then obviously the entitlement issues. that Freeberg alludes to specifically at alphabet slash Google.

They're two separate things, and I think it's important to deal with them individually. Groups of people in society in a democracy should have a right to protest. That's absolutely fundamental, and I think they can raise a lot of issues that could otherwise get swept into the carpet. When that stuff impedes the public functioning of society for other people, Then I think there's a responsibility for law enforcement and other people to act and make sure that that is better managed. So shutting down an entire bridge is not only disruptive, it can be really dangerous.

Of course.

And it can hurt your cause because then people dislike the cause because it hurt them.

Right.

Typically what happens is you're supposed to file for a permit to protest. And when you get that, there are areas that are cordoned off and then people are allowed to express their views. That's a really healthy form of democracy. Going rogue like this will only blow up in people's faces because the folks that are somewhat sympathetic will eventually get burned by this experience and turn against them. So that's one set of issues. I think that's just people going rogue. And I think that you can't be tolerant of that kind of chaos. There should be organized protests, but not disorganized chaos. Law enforcement needs to get a control of that. Inside of a company, I think this is different. It's this weird thing that I see, which is like what I would call like left on left violence. It's like left leaning people creating all of these distractions and demonstrations inside of left leaning organizations for not being left leaning enough. And so it's kind of like a little bit nutty because I think it actually shows how totally naive these employees are. and what basic business understanding they have. The first and foremost being that they are at will employees. These are not people that are contracted players in the NBA or are part of a union, okay, where you have guaranteed employment through some mechanism or some arbitration process to even be let go. The fact that you don't even understand that you are at will means that you are there because you want to be there and Google allows you to be there because they choose for you to be there. And at any point, if either of you break a covenant, you can be gone. That kind of stuff, I think, is very distracting and it just belies a poor understanding of what you're there to do. Google is a for-profit business and they are in the business of generating maximum profit on behalf of their shareholders. They are also incentivized to do that in a way that achieves a mission and a set of values that the majority of their employees agree with. And the fact that a small cohort of people can try to hijack and sabotage that overall direction, I think is very misguided.

Sachs, I don't know if you have any opinions on this. I didn't see anything in the docket. I'm not sure if you have any strong feelings here, but your thoughts on Google employees and the protest, putting aside, you know, the nature of the protest, this could be for BLM, this could be for Trump's indictments, you could, You could be protesting any number of things, but the protesting at work issue and then Google specifically, which we talked about with the Gemini issues and, you know, this stuff bleeding over into product. I think Freeberg said it really nicely. Hey, are, are people actually focused on products at Google anymore, or is the whole place just focused on social issues that have nothing to do with their waning, apparently, product set?

Well, Google had no choice but to fire these employees. They were being disruptive and they were trespassing, and Google has a business to run. So this is what any business would do, and I don't think they deserve either credit or blame for taking the action they took. In terms of the protesters themselves, I think that in the fullness of time, we may come to think of them in a slightly different light. And some of this reminds me a little bit of another war, the protesters in another war, the Vietnam War, where they were very disruptive. In some cases, they trespassed. In some cases, they got arrested. They were easy to make fun of in terms of what they looked like. They were sort of unkempt, unshaven, all the rest of that stuff. They were hippies. And at the time, people were, I'd say, very dismissive of them or actually antagonistic. They were seen as giving aid and comfort to the enemy, and they were sort of demonized. But now in the fullness of time, we look back on that war and realize that they had a point. In fact, maybe they were right. In fact, maybe their actions were justified. And I think that how we view these protesters at Google can't just be judged now. I think it's gonna have to be judged in the fullness of time based on how we perceive this war in Gaza. And I want to make two points about why I think this war will eventually be viewed as Israel's Vietnam. The first is that in Gaza, Israel faces a guerrilla style force, and they're in a quagmire. And if you read the latest news that's coming out of Gaza, what you'll hear is that after Israel has supposedly cleared an area like Gaza City or Khan Yunis, they then move south, Hamas has popped back up again. This whole idea that they can clear an area has been proven false. It's like playing whacK-A-Mole. They basically hit Hamas in one area, Hamas disappears down the tunnels, they come back in a different area. And this is why you're seeing a lot of articles now in Haaretz, which is an Israeli newspaper, saying the war in Gaza is already lost. You had the Wall Street Journal last week run an article saying that Israel is winning every battle, but losing the war. which is again, shades of Vietnam here. And you gotta understand, the Wall Street Journal is the most pro-Israel of all the major mainstream publications. I don't think the Wall Street Journal has ever written a truly critical article about Israel. And they describe this whacK-A-Mole dynamic. You also have the general Gadi Eisenkopf, who's a member of the war cabinet. He's a member of the sort of war government. in Israel came out and said that we can degrade Hamas in Gaza, but we cannot destroy it. And he said, anyone who's telling you that we can destroy Hamas is telling you a tall tale. And that was, I think, in a pointed reference to Netanyahu's claim that they would destroy Hamas in Gaza. So you've got shades of Vietnam in terms of it being this unwinnable war. I think the second aspect of a similarity to Vietnam is just the huge number of civilian casualties. You'll recall that in Vietnam, the Viet Cong tried to grab us by the belt buckle. They knew that America had superior firepower, so they tried to get in close, use ambushes, booby traps, snipers. And in response to that, the Americans used immense amounts of firepower and bombing to try and subdue the Vietnamese. And 3.4 million Vietnamese were killed in that war, according to Robert McNamara. The second thing that happened is the rules of engagement in Vietnam got extremely loose. You took a bunch of scared American kids, many of whom were conscripts, you drop them in a jungle, pretty much because they feared ambushes, they shot anything that moved. And then finally, I think partly to justify this, you had a dehumanization of the Vietnamese that they were seen as somehow kind of subhuman. In 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 watch Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece, Full Metal Jacket, which was based on books about Vietnam, you can see these dynamics very vividly. Now, turn to Gaza. All you gotta 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, the rules of engagement have gotten very loose. A week or two ago, you had the deaths of those seven aid workers from the international kitchen organization. And there's an article in Haaretz 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 Palestinians. You can see this in a lot of the videos have 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 light 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.

Jayka, 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 nobility 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 Greenpeace and other environmentalists did to stop whaling. I'm sure you are aware, Friedberg, with your passion on the subject. those people went to jail in Japan for boarding Japanese whaling ships. Like, those are really intense protesters. But then to your point, Shamath, you know, you can really hurt your cause. Climate 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 resigning by sit-in. If they want to do that, that's fine. I do think there is something to Google enabling all this, to your point, Friedberg, over time. And listen, they were parodied 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, you know, 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 like shutting down the Golden Gate Bridge, like you should get a fine for doing that, I believe. And the fine should be based on whatever that costs to shut that bridge down. And that's got to be a serious fine. And you're right, Chomsky. People, if there's an emergency situation, somebody's.

Got to get to a hospital or something. That'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 gonna 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 probably have to check that their badges work.

To Sacks' 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 discrete, 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 discrete 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. It'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 y'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, you know, 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? Would 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 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 frankly depend on what is the alternative in that moment. So I don't think anybody of us are going into go and 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, into a thing that you either agree or disagree with. So 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 honest answer.

Okay. Sachs, any closing thoughts here?

Well, I think Chamath brings up an interesting point about why didn't the processors just focus on the war itself rather than Google doing business with Israel? My interpretation of that is they're trying to create a nexus to themselves, meaning they're employees of Google, they're trying to create a reason for them to stage the sit-in at Google. Otherwise, you know, if they just grab picket signs and were 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. And I did see some comments by the Googlers who got fired saying that they thought they were being treated unfairly by Google. 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 Yeah, that's really important.

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. Yeah. And I'm accepting it.

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 Nimbus is. The odds that it gets canceled are less than zero and everybody will move on. And it will not add to the drum beat, as Sack said, of people that may be eventually on the right side of this issue, theoretically. I say theoretically because that stone is still 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 glommed onto was it was happening inside of a company in real time and there was video of it.

Mission accomplished for them. We're talking about it here as the top story. And, If that was their, if they wanted to raise awareness, they succeeded and they should just own their firing because they knew they would get fired, I think. All right, there has been a ton of chaos and the culture wars continue over NPR. A couple of things happened simultaneously this week that are worth discussing. Catherine Maher was named NPR'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. She officially started in March. Okay. She formally worked at Wikimedia Foundation. Those are the people who run the Wikipedia, obviously. NPR'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 stated mission from their website on April 9th, Uri Berliner, an editor who's been with NPR for 25 years, wrote an op-ed for Barry Weiss's Free Press Front of the Pod, explaining how NPR lost America's trust by going hard left and becoming close minded. He said, quote, An open minded spirit no longer exists within NPR, and now predictably, we don't have an audience that reflects America. Last Friday, Maher put out a statement calling his actions profoundly disrespectful, hurtful, and demeaning. this Sunday, conservative activist Christopher Rufo, he's the person who exposed former Harvard President's Claudine Gay's plagiarism. He's a vocal critic of LGBTQ stuff at schools, started reposting old tweets from Maher, this new CEO. Her tweets are super far left. Trump's a racist, yada, yada. There's an interesting clip of her talking at Ted, talking about how truth is a bit of a distraction that prevents people from getting things done. People have gotten pretty inflamed about that clip. And then on April 16, Berliner was suspended for five days without pay. Wrapping this all up, Berliner 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 I cite in my free press essay. Sachs, your thoughts?

I mean, this just seems like a dog bites man 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 NPR. It's always been liberal, okay? This is not some recent capture of an institution by- 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 Marr, tweeted or said that you can point to that seem kind of woke and kind of crazy woke, but they're just actually pretty standard. I just don't see the breaking news here. If they end up firing Catherine Marr, they're going to hire someone just like her. I mean, they're going to have the same views. NPR has always been left of center. And the only change that's happened is that the left has now become woke. And so it's become obsessively focused with the ideas of white supremacy and white privilege. And she simply reflects that.

I agree. It's like a tempest in a teapot. 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, Chamath, 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. I don't think anybody cares.

I had one thing, which is I do think that the government should not be funding this anymore. I 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 NPR can't be funded with either private donations or private subscription.

This is just to give people some back of the envelope math. NPR'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 100 million bucks. The programming fees is what the local radio stations play 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? 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. Look, Jake, I agree with you. 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.

There's a little like hiding of the money here.

But there's so little at stake here. I think that's why it's so contentious.

Nobody should 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 in any event, what's good for the gander?

The next tempest in a teapot is Humane's AI pin getting barbecued by our modern day Walt Mossberg, Marques Brownlee, who 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. It's basically a pin 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. And the device is now in the hands of reviewers. It's pretty innovative and Marques 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. And really interesting interface. It does obviously voice. It connects you to an LLM on the back end. So if you want to know, you know, some piece of information, it can answer those questions for you. But Marques showed it just absolutely failing at a bunch of tests, being overpriced, and he called it the worst product he's ever reviewed. He's very thoughtful and methodical, but the title is obviously a bit link baiting. As a co-founder of Engadget, 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.

I 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 these 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. Now, obviously there are some entrepreneurs 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 here is a deep tech investment is very likely to fail because you spend so much money before you even know. And at that point, you have less money and you can't really make the necessary iteration to get there. 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, therefore this person is likely to 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, Freeberg. That is the best point is 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, Friedberg?

And 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 pin, 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 iterate to get there. And we can't just take the first V1 and say that's it.

Chamath, your thoughts? Any other hysterical at this point?

The other half of Silicon Valley are running in and saying, this thing's a piece of s***. What are you talking about? It doesn't f***ing work. So it is a really interesting kind of, you know, debate. Yeah, Rorschach test on what's going on.

What do you see in this inkblot of a product?

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 Tech Crunch or. Yeah. Getting upset because a product failed, some other random product that had nothing to do with his, I think is laughable. I 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 sadder today in O'Hara when you walked into the office to manage your team? Okay, so there you go. There's your answer.

Nothing matters. Your feeling on this?

Yeah, I mean, I'm having a hard time understanding all the controversies this week. I mean, reviewers are going to review, protesters are going to protest, and NPR.

Presidents are going to NPR. Here we go.

I mean, what's going on? Everyone's just doing.

Everyone's doing their job.

Yeah.

Here's an idea for the Humane team. 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 elitists will eat octopus.

Here we go.

Absolutely. Oh, so delicious.

So delicious. High IQ foods.

We should create a new category. High IQ foods. Yeah.

What are the other high IQ foods? Acorn-fed beef.

Yeah, for sure. High IQ.

Pigs. Very high IQ. I saw that cow playing chess before. He was served for dinner.

Actually, I was having a pulled pork sandwich from Bucky's, and it helped me solve Wordle for the day before I ate it. So I got Wordle in two tries. Oh, I'm so sorry. Oh, that one landed. I didn't want that one to 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, Jason.

Here's the theme, Jason. The problem is that I think people right now, the real Rorschach 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 you.

I don't wanna 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. They 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 dumber. It's because I'm so overworked right now. I don't have time to have an.

Opinion on this stuff.

Shobha's got a CEO job and now he's got to work. 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 reviewer. What's his name? Mark, Mark, Marquez, Brown, Marquez. I never heard of him.

If you're on YouTube, he's kind of like the new Walt Mossberg. He does 20, 30 minute videos. They get millions of views. Yeah. He's huge. 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 bent 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. So my guess is the product just isn't ready for prime time, but everyone wants to kind of like, they want their reviewers to take it easy on them or something because they are being innovative and they're breaking new ground in this, this area of wearables. But the reality is in the real world where you want to charge people for your product, customers don't have mercy points.

Nope. If the car breaks down, the car breaks down. And by the way, Marquez 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. And you know what? Reviewers exist in the world to inform customers. about what products and services they should buy, and then they should inform you to make a better product, period, full stop. There is 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?

Okay, it's a wearable. It's a square. It has a projector on it. You 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 questions.

Yeah, the primary function is like a chat AI assistant that sits on you and has a camera. And so you can- Camera is taping-.

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 overview. 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 reviewer, the results are actually wrong because it's a hallucinating model. The voice to text translation is wrong. There's a lot of things that are wrong about it. So 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 gets very hot.

So there's also a situation, and it's 700 bucks.

Other than that, how is the player, Mrs. Lincoln?

And by the way, most importantly to you, Chamath, it will screw up your fabrics. If you wear this with a Laura Piana sweater, it's going to 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 and it will ruin your sweater.

And doesn't answer the questions that you asked.

Yeah. 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 a 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 the projector thing that it does. And it definitely does some interesting things.

It's some really cool, interesting features. It's just like it's not quite there yet.

Who invested in it?

Let's not make fun of it. Let's make fun of the investors. Who invested in it? Sam Altman, shout out to Sam. It's coming out of the program, I think. Yeah, listen, the concept I think is good. Wearables are going to provide some distinct value 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. 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. When I'm doing weights, I started doing weights now. That's why I look so buff, folks. subscribe to the YouTube channel to see. And I do my sets and I log them all with my, 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 Chamath, where I could see my speed and all that stuff. But you're saying something totally different. That's, that's utility. Of course you'll find a device will give you utility. I, I thought you were saying something.

Else, which is everybody's going to have wearables and I want to take the exact opposite side of that. Yeah. 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 wrist for a workout. And I think that that's valuable or heart rate, a glycemic monitor so that you could, 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 sub, like 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 bet, which is I think that humans are getting so sick and tired of being, of only communicating in these very rigid ways. Like 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 gonna come back and bite them in the ass. And so I think the pendulum is gonna 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 were meant to be. And I, and I think that in that devices like a glucose monitor or a band has value, but I don't think it's gonna be this interface where you're sign languaging it while you're at Coachella. I think you're gonna rip the devices off and actually be at Coachella without any devices.

Did any of you guys read Jonathan Haidt's book? Anxious Generation. It is unbelievably awesome.

It touches on all of it.

I have not read yet, Ian. 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 Haidt. I cannot tell you how important it is.

Sax, any closing feelings here? You have a 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. 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 it's trying to do is reduce your dependence on your phone by creating this new projection surface. And, 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.

Yes.

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 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 gonna have is that that pendant we'll compete with the Apple Glasses and all the other wearables that are gonna be created to suck in all this information, this computer vision from the world. Nonetheless, 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, 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 world, all these conversations and video with these devices? I think it's a quick way to get yourself punched in the face. I 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 massive privacy things recording.

Your entire life with a pendant, man. No, thank you. this is why I said what I said. I do think Sachs is right that ultimately you'll have some kind of brain interface because I do think a chip implant 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. And so the idea that we're kind of already in a quasi surveillance state and now we're going to increase that by n factorial to the number of people, I think is very depressing. It is depressing.

And, you know, in Jonathan Haidt's 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 lockers. No, no, they don't do that.

They do it in my kids. It's actually, Jason, these special pouches?

Pouches. Yeah, so those are the pouches. Comedians use like, Chapelle at his shows.

Chapel uses it, Kvin uses them. Yeah, exactly. And they are 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 like the pouch you can't get access to. You have to go buy the locks.

In the lo a lock device, yeah.

And then I saw that my son last week had it actually in a 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. So the love is trying to do a lot to try to teach these kids not to be so dependent on this.

They should ban these devices at schools 100%. And then at the poker game tonight, we should make people stack their phones and charge somebody $1,000 whoever takes the phone first.

Let's do it tonight. Let me give a shout out to one of my favorite sci-fi book series is called Nexus by Ramez Naam. And it's kind of this like 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 know, you talk about this idea of recording your whole life through a pendant. Well, 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 a first person view of whatever conversation you've been in, you know?

Yeah. So.

There's a certain, look, this is pretty far off, but there is maybe a certain inevitability to that. And we're gonna have to figure out how to deal with the private sector.

There was a Black Mirror episode on this exact idea. Yep.

Yeah, you have the DVR of your entire life. Yeah. And it is gnarly to think these things will exist. And I think humanity's gonna have to make a decision, I think, to fight this or embrace it. I 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. 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 net negative and a drag on the entire night.

Absolutely. 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 door. I gotta say, those are the best.

Nights of my life.

Those are the best nights, yeah. They're incredible. And 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. I deleted TikTok about a month ago.

It's been liberating.

I 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. Yeah, sucks. And so, fortunately, I just stopped using YouTube.

It just shows you how 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.

It kicks ass.

By the way, I wouldn't give another shot.

I miss TikTok.

TikTok, I miss you. Yeah, whatever. It's, that's going away. I miss you. Another incredible book. I think we should book this speaker for All In Summit. Bad Therapy, why the kids, aren't growing up. Abigail Schrier. This book is incredible. And if you read these two books, 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 the, gonna be the, the topic of our time. All right, let's keep going down this incredible docket. Very important issue for us to talk about. Silicon Valley startups having a bit of a, R and 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 Acme 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 amortize 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, start quotes, profits, air quotes.

Profits, correct.

Yeah.

And this is absolutely brutal. And a lot of companies took a wait and see approach, hoping Congress would fix the issue in January, a bipartisan tax bill that would reverse this change as passed in the House. But the bill has stalled in the Senate and we gotta get this thing fixed cuz it's gonna 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 wanna pass. Sort of no reversal has happened. Freeberg, you highlighted this for us, very important topic. Thank you for doing so. as our great contributor here. What are your thoughts on it?

This became law in the 2017 Jobs Act, as you highlighted. And basically it means that companies, not just like 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 taxes as if you made 800 grand in profit. And a lot of these small companies don't have that cash. So 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, 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.

But Freiberg, they know basic math. Congress knows basic math. How do they How do they- what.

Was the close 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. 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. So they use 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 in a couple of years, you know, nudge, nudge, wink, wink, we're going to 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. And 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 1,800 a year in 2023, 1900. in 2024 and $2,000 in 2025 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. And 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. They're not venture backed. They're just people running their business. And now they're going to 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 going to write a check.

They're going to borrow money. They're going to go to the bank, borrow money, or they're going to incur penalties with the IRS because they don't have the cash to pay the tax bill because 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 it's R&D? Like, okay, so if I sneak some- Apparently it's a software.

Yeah.

There's all this writing in the, if you get audited by the IRS, they have the ability to basically capture everything. So 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 that 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 get in trouble. 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? If I put a new filter on it? I'm not a tax attorney, but my understanding is most of the stuff is and captured. And that's why it's hurting everything from defense to life sciences to lab equipment to startups that make software to everything. And Congress can't get out of its own way where this bill passed, by the way, bipartisan in the House, then it went to the Senate, and now it's getting taken apart in the Senate, and now it's stalled out and everyone's freaking out that it's stalled out past April 15th. And it's actually going to 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. Because 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 repealing this, they're leaving in the fact that if you invest in R&D outside the US, you have to amortize it over 15 years. So let's say that you're a US developer and you hire people offshore.

Yeah.

You got to basically amortize the offshore stuff over 15 years, which means you'll never make a profit. You're always going to have to pay taxes.

We're 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 merge in 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, D.C. or you're involved in our government, please solve these two issues. You gotta figure out a way to allow companies to be bought and sold. You gotta figure out a way. to fix this tax issue, or else we're gonna 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.

It also an illustration of just how hungry we are for tax revenue in this country. It's only gonna grow. And I'm not sitting here complaining about taxes. The Trump tax cut that he put in place in 2017 added one and a half trillion dollars 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 going to eat into innovation, which is supposed to drive, get us out of the problem, the spiral that results from this debt. So it really highlights like just the challenges that are going to emerge, particularly in a decade ahead, because we have all of the spending that's coming in front of us over the next decade. and how we're going to start to demand more and more tax in all these weird ways that can really hurt industry.

Unintended consequences are very real. Shamatha, were going to say something?

Well, doesn't it mean though that if you run it at breakeven 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. But if the business is growing, you're always going to be in a hole.

Right. Right.

So if your revenue is growing and your OpEx 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 R&D then?

Yeah.

And maybe you just move things to COGS and just be done with it.

I mean, but remember, 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 GAAP financials. Yes. 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. That's quite different than how you present your corporate financials to investors. And that's really where people get screwed is you don't have that sort of discretion that you do. in kind of sharing your financials with investors. This is not financial or accounting advice.

Get great representation. I just hope Congress resolves this because.

It'S, you know, 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. Tons of sites like DraftKings, FanDuel, 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, Jonte 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 gonna hit five threes in the game, or LeBron's gonna score under 30 points. You're just betting on unique things that could happen, and then you can parlay them together. You can put multiple bets together, and it automatically gives you a price, and you can do really, you know, deep wagers doing this. The 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 himself 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 DraftKings, because they have all the data, tipped everyone off because Porter was the biggest moneymaker on March 20th. This led to an NBA investigation. DraftKings will 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. DraftKings canceled the bet. 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 DraftKings. Chamath, you owned a NBA team for a little while and you watched as David Stern, for a decade, you watched 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 joined the ownership group of the Warriors, I 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 true sports book, that's the only time it's tolerated. The thing with all of these sites, FanDuel and DraftKings 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 report it back to the leagues so the leagues know how to look at it. Because 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 betting, meaning the really smart money guys, and everybody else is a square, and most of retail is a square, okay? They're gonna 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.

So compare that to Chamath, 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 refs, and it has spilled over. So the NBA has had to deal with an example where one of the refs were, I think he was betting on some games. Tim Donaghy, and then he was point shaving. So this has been going on for a long time. It moved into the realm of it being automated with algorithms looking out the fact that this kid didn't have anybody on his team that explained. that DraftKings and FanDuel are going to send this data to the NBA is inexcusable because maybe the kid would not have done it.

Do you agree with the lifetime ban or do you think there should be-.

Yeah, it has to be lifetime.

Has to be. For the NBA to have integrity. Has to be. Yeah, it's really- and what do we think about this becoming legal in the US and people- the other thing 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. Folks are relatively still flush with cash. There's lots of free cashflow. 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 lawyer who became totally addicted playing like a bingo app, right, and lost her entire life. So these forms of gambling and addiction are just going to skyrocket, I think, because you have these apps that are really I mean, 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 betting, 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've figured out how to deal with this. This is what I'm going to tell you. The last thing I'll say on this is when I was in high school, so in the early nineties in Ontario, in Canada, they introduced sports betting as a way of generating revenue for the government. 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. 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. I think it's going to be a big problem.

And I will tell you, Sachs, 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 generated last year. up 44.5 from 2022. The league is printing money from this. All the leagues, the NBA 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 bettors obviously love it. It's more fun, it's making the games more engaging and the media is loving this. All of the podcast, Bill 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 these shows.

Jake 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. Yes. I think DraftKings 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, we're locked in. It's like, it's like the new, it's like the new Air Jordans. Sachs, 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, net net, as a society, you take away from the emergence of sports betting and this next generation being so addicted to it?

Well, I think cannabis is the right analogy. I think adults should be allowed to bet on sporting events or just like they're allowed to drink or, you know, smoke pot or engage in other mild vices. Some people handle it responsibly and some don't. It's probably on a societal basis, it's 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, you place 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. Chamath, 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 probably made three bets since then. Both, all three were like on the Super Bowl. 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 too. Sack, do you ever place any bets? You're not a wager on the stuff either, right? Yeah, you ever bet on chess? Is there any guarantee?

No one bets on chess because it's so obvious who's gonna win. There's a very precise rating system.

Correct, yeah.

So in poker, 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 'cause 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 any given hand, you can believe that you're the winner. And so there's a lot of gambling in poker, even though it is a skill game in chess, like that just doesn't work. I 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.

Sax, what's your rating?

1400.

I'm a little better than that. I'm like, I'm probably more like 1600.

Last time I played it was 1400. I stopped playing him because he would just, 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.

How do you get better at that?

Freebird, do you have a rating? I don't want to talk about it.

He doesn't want to talk. But what's your rating?

Are you still upset about the octopus stuff?

No?

Oh, okay. What's your, but what's your rating? Have a real question. It's too personal a question. Do you never share information where people.

Can actually like root through you? Yeah, be careful, dude. Come on. What is it?

Ask me other questions.

Just don't ask me about my chess rating. Don't ask me about my chess rating.

Ask me anything else.

What is the best way to get better?

Should I get a coach or something, Sachs? What's the best way to get better?

The chess.com 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 you how to spot tactics or- that's all tactics.

That's probably half the game.

Yeah. Like, you learn how to do a night fork or something like that, how to do pins.

You just need to spot tactics quickly.

Is really the key.

My puzzle rush scores are pretty good.

Oh, you're over a thousand? No, no, you play, it's like how many you can get in a certain period of time. And it gets sequentially harder as you complete the puzzles and you have to like, A limited period to do it.

So 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. And 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-.

Have you spent time, Sacks, studying openings and studying specific lines? I don't even know if I'm using the right language here.

Openings is right, yeah.

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. I would say that depending on where you are in your development, that may not be the most pressing thing for you to do. You know, I think you probably do want to just know a few basics of a few of the most common openings, but there's probably other things for you to learn first. You don't need to memorize a bunch of complicated lines.

I think it's really cool that kids are learning this. I know this may be a counter or a contrarian view, but I think kids having access, you know, or young adults having access to sports betting poker is kind of a good thing because I, you know, if controlled, because they're learning about odds and gambling and framing it, I, with my 14 year old, I'm doing an allowance. And then I decided to do an investment club. And so I'm putting a hundred dollars every month into like a Robin Hood 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 they want to join it, let me know because I'm going to do like a, with the cousins, like a zoom call every month where we just talk about stocks. And then I'm going to have them actually buy it so that they can be prepared for the real world and how companies are going. But how do you think about your kids, Chamath? Because you, 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, was that the, yeah.

I mean, I ran a, I ran a little blackjack game where the rich kids could play and I 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 came pretty decent at blackjack and I would go, they would, there would be these, what's called charity casinos. So casinos in Ottawa, Ontario were illegal, but if they were to raise charity for various charities, they were allowed. And so my friend and I would show up at these things and just run them over.

Anybody else run an illegal business as a kid? I'll tell you about mine. After Sack, do you run any illegal.

Businesses as a kid?

No comment. Come on, it's statute of 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. Oh, by the way, I'll tell you, I had a bad debt situation in my oh, really? Lunch game. You know, I used to, 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 so I gave him up to two bucks.

And how many boxes of Ziti did he go down? And one lunch, he lost 80 bucks. And it took me three months to get paid. It was the worst- Are six boxes of Ziti? I had, no, $80. I had to, no, I know. I'm just doing a soprano.

I had to, I had to sweat this guy for three months to get my $80.

He was rich, too. His parents were rich. What do he do?

Did he have to do your term papers or something? Did he have to do your essays.

And clean your bike?

I wouldn't have gotten this. Come on, Saks. Give it up.

What was your.

What was your scam? You were running. Let's move on. I had two scams. Freeberg.

You have a scam when you were.

Running, when 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. like electronics equipment, computer equipment, and then I would like sell it. So I would then like post other ads. I basically did ad arbitrage as a way to think about it. So I would go and find people selling stuff that I thought was like underpriced, but then I would buy it. There was nothing to fix. You would just, it was underpriced. And then I knew like the better market to go sell it and make more money.

So then I'd buy like all these.

Like old, like, 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 in. No wonder you wound up at Google. I had. I had two really good scams when I was a kid. The first was this guy owed 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. So this guy who was in the mob owed my dad some money and for the vig, he gave him a copy of the Empire Strikes Back on VHS. And I was like, what? This is before it was out. They had recorded in the movie theaters in 1984 or something, 83, whenever that came out. And it was a really bad copy. So my dad comes home, he gives me the 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 McKinley Junior 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 Empire Strikes Back? And I said, what do you mean? I don't know what you're talking about. He's like, I heard you got Empire Strikes Back. He kept his mouth shut. I looked him dead in the eye and I said, Are you interested? The teacher goes, yeah. How much are they? I said, 30 bucks, but I'll give you one for 10. And he said, okay, pulled out 10 bucks. I sold my math teacher.

I kid you're not, the Empire Strikes Back for 10 bucks.

Can you do this whole thing again.

But in the Christopher Walken voice?

I'm not gonna do, but give me.

The other one I did. No, it's the Joe Pesci 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 Tape card, and they'd say, Give me my card back.

But I would just show them 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 grinded out fake IDs with a buddy of mine.

All right, that was mine. That was mine.

Oh, Saks is in the fake ID business too?

Harvard Graphics. Saks, what were you using? I was using Harvard Graphics. Well, this was in the day of- Photoshop, page layouts- Holograms, and it wasn't.

It just wasn't that hard to- yeah.

You know, cops. So we just made like boards or whatever and Polaroids. So we did it for ourselves and.

We did it for friends. Yeah, same. Here's the thing about the fake ID business. The bouncers were like, if you've got money, show us any piece of paper.

They don't give us plausible deniability.

We have plausible deniability.

We just wanted plausible deniability.

Exactly. That was the, that's the key to the racket. Could you put McLovin in University of Hawaii? Yeah.

Actually, well, it's kind of funny is sometimes the bouncers would go, what's your name? And you'd be like, you'd be stumped because you didn't remember what your name was.

He was so drunk, you don't even remember.

Mine was like, Raj Patel.

Or they'd ask you, what was your birthday? And you don't remember what's on your ID. Yeah, because you don't know what's on your ID.

I don't remember. I don't remember.

I had one drink.

No, the key in the fake ID game is to use your month and day that's yours, and then change the year.

Yes.

That's the key.

That's the key. All right, so I'll give you the second one.

Do it in the Christopher Walken voice.

So my friend, his brother had a DeLorean. He, I can't do it, I can't state it. Anyway, this kid, who I grew up with, I shouldn't say, anyway, his name was beep that out. He lived up on 13th Avenue. I go to his house. His brother's got a DeLorean. It 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, you know, 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 had it in 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? I said, sure. How many copies you want? He's like, how many can you make? I was like, well, floppy disc costs four bucks. He's like, I'll give you 10 bucks.

A copy of chess master. I said, fine.

I go, my friend, we go steal floppy disks from the store. So we didn't wanna pay the four bucks for them.

Not the three and a halves, the.

Five and a quarters. These are five and a quarters. 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 disks out of the sleeve at Staples or whatever, dumps them in there. We make copies of it and then we were selling Chessmaster for 10 bucks a pop. at scale and giving them to the guys on 13th Avenue who were then reselling them for 20 bucks. This is when Chessmaster was like a hundred dollar product. Shout out to Chessmaster. That was my second scam business.

This is some degenerate.

Yeah. And that's not even the best one. I'll give you the best one. This is the best. And I'll give you the last scam we ran. There were parking permits in the late eighties 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 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 out Pearl Paints, like the same color orange and that lamination kit. And 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, your sultan of science, the exceptional David Friedman. Your chairman dictator, from Off-Pavement, Hapatia. The Rain Man, yeah. David Sachs. I am. you're a world's greatest moderator. Jay Cow, we'll see you on episode 176. And hopefully in September at the all-in Summit. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

We'll let your winners ride.

Rainman David Sack.

And instead, we open sources to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it.

Love you, queen of kin. Besties are bad. That is my dog taking a shit.

In your driveway sex.

Oh man.

My abtator will meet me at the place. We should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy because they're all just this, it's like this like sexual tension that they just need to release somehow, you know?

We need to get Murkies our back.