#1795 - Antonio Garcia Martinez

The Joe Rogan Experience by Joe Rogan Park Gas by Night All Day! What's up, man? How are you? Thanks for having me, Joe. I'm very pleased to be here. It's always interesting to meet somebody that you only know from their tweets. I only know you from your tweets, which I found very interesting, and then I started reading your book, listening to your book where another person reads it, and I've seen some interviews you. So, I thought it'd be fun to have you in there. Cool. Thank you.

Have a little chit chat. Great. Thanks for having me, Joe. My pleasure. So, you just got back from Ukraine? I know. I'm totally throwing a wrench in the agenda. No, it's not a wrench. We're supposed to talk about cancellation or whatever, but yeah, for a bunch of reasons, I just up and went to Poland and Ukraine to see what was going on there. So, this was just your own idea to just take a trip?

Not totally. One of the gigs I have, I have a gig at a DC think tank, and one of my colleagues who's done like real in the field correspondant work before proposed a trip, and a bunch of people expressed interest, and I'm basically the only one who didn't winp out and went with them. So, it was just you and this one guy? And we had drivers and fixers and stuff, because I don't speak any Slavic languages, and you basically need it to sort of navigate that world.

And also, in a wartime economy, regular transport doesn't work, so you need to get around somehow, and so we did have, we tend to have a driver usually. So, what is that conversation like? So, when someone says, hey, let's go to Ukraine. What was the goal? Was it just to see it firsthand? Was it to get, is there any information that you can get when you're on the ground that would sort of clarify the situation for you?

Yeah, I mean, we can get into this, but I think the view that you see of Ukraine from the United States, I think is so blinded by both American domestic political priorities, and the whole kaleidoscope that is the Twitter experience. I thought, you have to go there to see the real thing, and it's history with a capital H in the sort of, you know, Francis Fukuyama sense of, you know, this is a real invasion, the likes of which we haven't seen in Europe in whatever, 70 plus years.

And it's just something that I've lived in Europe, I have a new passport, so I feel a little bit European in that regard, so I think I engage with the story a little bit differently than maybe that Americans do. And so I felt I just had to go there and see it for myself. So, when you went there, was this idea related at all to business to your... Oh, no, no, no. So, this was just for your own edification?

Well, I did. I am doing a story, so there's a publication that I occasionally put stories to call tablets, a Jewish magazine, the Israelis are doing a bunch of stuff in the Polish border to get Jews out. And so there's a whole Jewish angle of the story. And then also just, so I have a sub-stack, which I should probably plug, I guess, the pull request. What is it? The pull request? Pull. Yeah, PUL. PUL. It's like a nerdy term. Yeah, yeah, yeah, PUL.

A pull request is like when a coder is actually coding a piece of software. It's like, they request that the main code base pull from them. And so it's like saying, hey, read my shit and like integrate it with your shit. Oh, yeah. And so in some sense, it's like, it started as a similar to my book. So I've worked in tech for a long time. I've had a whole career in the advertising industry. I was an early member of Facebook's ads team, which is what the book is about, which we'll probably get to.

And the thought was, I wanted to give a perspective on tech from the insider perspective, rather than the outsider perspective. And from there, it's gone into religion, culture, and then now even geopolitics as my interest kind of meander through the world. So you went there partly to write about it for your sub-stacks. But I mean, the only reason you can justify going, right? Because again, and this is, it's funny, Joe.

This is one of the things I almost, if it hadn't been for this and also this other consideration, I probably would have pushed on to Keeve, actually. Really? Yeah, yeah, yeah. But you're a producer. I emailed him from Ukraine. And he's like, dude, like I'm here. Like it's hard to get out. Like, can we do this during Zoom? And he's like, no, absolutely not. And I briefly considered, I wasn't really going to do it.

But I briefly considered just going to Keeve and then pulling the power move of like, I'm in Keeve. I cannot leave. We have to do it. We have to do it another time. Exactly. But I didn't want to run the risk of that. And I wanted to do the show. And so I started hauling ass back. It would be interesting to have you on Zoom with bombs going off the background though. Or it's suck if you died on Zoom while we're in the middle of the podcast. It would suck.

But I have to say, from the cold-hearted marketing perspective, it'd be great for engagement. Not for you. And not for me. I'm like, you're going to capitalize on that. So how many days were you over there for? I was there about a week and a half. So I spent a lot of time on the Polish border. So getting to the serious side of the story, which I know we're joking, sort of Giles Hummer. But it's a very serious story. There's a whole refugee situation going on.

So about 10 million Ukrainians, the UN has declared our displaced. And that means either internally they've moved around Ukraine or externally they've left. And so a quarter of the country is basically a refugee at this point. Wow. I know. So how many people are there? It's like day 25 or day 26 of the... What is the entire population? That's about 40 million. So we're talking about 10 million people that are refugees. Holy shit. Over 3 million of which have left Ukraine at the last count.

Which is a big number. Wow. And most of them are crossing the border with Poland, which is the country to the west of it. Or Romania or Slovakia. Some of the other countries is mostly Poland. And so the trip actually started fluid to Warsaw. And my first experience of like, this is not normal little Disneyland Europe. You go to the Warsaw train station, which tends to be the terminus for a lot of the refugees that come across the border. And it's basically a refugee camp.

The upper floor of the train station is taken over by families. And every family has like a blanket maybe half the size of this table. And one of the interesting things about the Ukrainian refugee situation is that it's almost all like... I'm talking like 80, 90 percent women and children. The Ukrainian government doesn't allow any male from the age of I think 18 to 60 to leave. And also many Ukrainian males are just volunteering. They don't want to leave. They want to fight for their country.

And so whether you're in the Warsaw train station or whether you're standing as I was standing many times at the actual border watching them walk across, it's literally a mother in her 20s and 30s with like two or three kids in tow. Maybe a cat in a carrier with like a little rolly bag. And that's it. Just a picture and an ending stream of that walking across the border. They're walking because usually they don't... Well some of them probably did walk to the border the most desperate ones.

They usually don't walk. They take some conveyance either a train or bus, but getting those through the border is basically impossible. So they literally abandoned however they got there and just walk across. How many people are there that are like you? They're observing and just witnessing. There's a good number of journalists. Particularly in the western part of Ukraine which is relatively safe, you know, it wasn't like I was there with bullets flying around me or anything like that.

I was joking with friends like, you know, I don't know that this is any more dangerous than walking across San Francisco. It's tend to be on this in the skew of things. So it wasn't like that dangerous. But there's a lot of journalists in the western part. There are some journalists who are in the dangerous parts. Isn't Sean Penn there? I think he's been there this entire time.

Wild. But there's like teams from NPR and New York Times, CNN, who are doing like real war reporting, which I was not doing. You know, a journalist was killed recently. There was more than one. Yeah. There was a guy who, I think producer who worked for Fox News, and then there was a former New York Times journalist who was killed. And they were on the front line in Kiev, which is indeed very dangerous.

And so when you were there, you didn't have a specific goal other than to just kind of get a visual and experience it and sort of see for yourself. What was surprising? So it'd be great. I did have a goal. As a side thread to me, I'm converting to Judaism. So there's a Jewish side to my life. And what the Israelis are doing. So Ukraine has something like over 300,000 Jews. And then, you know, the plight of what the Jews are going on there, I think was one specific intent.

But you're right that broadly, I didn't have a specific intent. What surprised me the most? Two things, I would say. One is again, the scale of it. Like it's literally millions of people of leaving. And I think, again, coming from the US, Europe has reacted to this crisis in a unified, just like all-consuming way that I think, obviously you don't see here, because we're not next door to it. But if you go to this, again, let me paint you a picture.

And I've got a bunch of photos that I'll be posting on my subs deck this week and next week. You go to a border's checkpoint. The Polish police will only let you go so far, unless you're actually crossing, which I did eventually. You've got this constant stream of, again, mothers with the early bags and kids. And then you've got basically a refugee camp there. Of everything from Polish Boy Scouts to Jose Andres, that Spanish chef, who has all these food programs, he has a major presence there.

Every stop, there was basically his world food kitchens, whatever it's called, serving up food. And then those who are ill get tended to, and then they have buses going to another larger refugee camp. And then there, they try to find rides for them or sort of sort it out. And what's fascinating is that, you know, the Polish state has pretty good state capacity.

There's a lot of firefighters, police, soldiers, like, there's a lot of, but the actual care for refugees, like the food, the chocolate bar, the kid gets, is mostly, or almost exclusively, volunteer as an NGO's. And there isn't that much top-down organization. Like you go there and it's like, it's like every little NGO or every little tribe that has some refugees that are coming out. Like, for example, the Jehovah's Witnesses are there.

So you walk across and there's somebody holding a sign that says, JW.org, they're not proselytizing. I interviewed them. They're not proselytizing. They're just there for other Jehovah Witnesses that are coming across and then hoping to help them. Once again, you've got some Jewish charities that are helping the Jews that are coming across.

Everyone, I talked to somebody whose child had cystic fibrosis and they have a foundation and they're helping, because a lot of the, you know, people are affirmed. And those are the ones hardest hit by war, because you've got a, you know, a 24-hour train ride, you've got someone who's ill and needs medical care. How do they get out? That can often be difficult. So I think that's one big, surprising thing. And then the other surprising thing was in Ukraine itself.

Like I've been in conflict zones before, like the West Bank, North Ireland, the Indian Pakistani border, you know, places where things are a little bit spicy, but never in a country of war. And I think, you know, war in the United States, certainly in my life here, right, has not been a direct experience. The US has wars. We're involved in a bunch of conflicts now. Your life and my life don't really change, right? We don't know what that is. We've never had that experience.

Ukraine is having, like, you know, what a Klauswitz would call total war. All the resources of the society are motivated towards one goal, which is kicking out the Russian invaders, right? And that means that everybody in that society is either fighting at the front lines, everyone involved, every male is volunteered, basically.

Supporting those fighters, somehow trying to source war material and stuff, which is very difficult to source, is volunteering in some capacity, or is a refugee, again, a quarter of the population is displaced. And so all of society has one goal in mind, and it's literally fighting the war. There's very little normal commercial activity, and again, I've never experienced that, except through history books or films about World War II. Wow, I think anybody has. Right.

It's such a strange time, because it's a time where you're seeing history play out in a way that we didn't think was going to happen again. We didn't think there was going to be a country that, like, a large superpower that invades another country, and you're seeing it on 4K cell phone video, broadcast from thousands of phones and all these different viral clips that you can view online. It's so surreal. It is. It's unbelievable.

I just saw a piece came out that in Carchov, which is a city in the east, that's, I think, Ukraine's second largest city. It's been encircled and besieged and shot at for weeks now. Civilians are basically living in the subway, taking shelter, and they've been there for weeks, and they're just living in the subway. It's too dangerous to go up top.

Or, I mean, the real, if we're rattling off the set of atrocities that are basically happening, there's a city called Mariopo, which is on the Sea of Azas on the coast, and it's strategically important because it's in between two Russian fronts. And the Russians are literally destroying the city. They've shelt a drama theater where people had taken refuge in. They've bombed their maternity hospital. A lot of photos of that came out. People are experiencing hell there.

I mean, there's literally dead bodies in the street, and they don't bury them because it's too dangerous to go up top and try to bury them, so they just let them rot on the streets. It is hell on earth that's happening there. And again, as you said, it's happening, you know, it's a first Twitter war, in which you can actually see these videos in real time. And it's not that far away from Europe. No, it's very close. It's right there.

I mean, you go from Poland, which I was in a town called Psymishel, which is a little train junction close to the border. Very cute, very pretty, had a little craft brewery. You can go there and feel totally within the like Euro-American, liberal realm of craft beer and normalcy and legal rights. And you go a few tens of kilometers east, and you are living in a very different world. Wow. Yeah. It's so hard to wrap your head around when you're over here. That's right.

Imagine going over there and then coming back here must seem even more surreal. It is. It's funny. Humans can so adjust to things. So I always spent a lot of time mostly in Leviv, which is a beautiful little town, western part of Ukraine. It used to be considered the safe city in Ukraine, because it was relatively untouched by the war. The night after I left, actually the airport got hit with cruise missiles. But before then, it was still a fairly open city.

There'd be air raid sirens every night. People would tend to ignore them. Like, I got off freaked out the first time. It was like three in the morning, and the hotel actually has a basement. And they actually have little bean bag chairs and stuff in there for guests, like to hang out in the basement as the air raid sirens go off. I did it the first time, and then I'm like, second time like, come on, what are the chances? So I just went back to sleep.

And again, it sounds crazy, but you just get used to that. And then coming back, it's like, wow, everything. I came back to San Francisco, and I went to a little hipster coffee shop, and the little hipster conversations are having next to me. It's like, and like literally 24 or 48 hours before, it was like air raid sirens. It's like, whoa. This is weird. It's like, what is normal now, Steve, weird. It was weird how humans can adjust, right?

Like, I didn't go, unfortunately, for the reasons I mentioned. But like, I understand that in Kiev, which is much closer to the front lines and is much more in the shit, people have also settled into some sort of routine, right? You know, it's funny, one of the first things I saw when I got to live in, and I was so little freaked out, right, because I was like scared to go to Ukraine. Like, because once you cross that border again, it's like, who knows what's going to happen?

I don't speak a language, different currency, transport is broken down. You're just like there with your little backpack in the Western Edge of a Warzone. I get there and there's like a couple making out on the street. I'm like, oh, look, normal human life continues. Life finds a way. I think it was you that I read a quote about. You were talking about Sebastian Younger's book. Yeah, yeah. Tribe, yeah, which I loved. It's an amazing book.

You were talking about which conflict was it where the people, Sarajevo, where they missed it. Yeah. And I've talked to guys who've served overseas, and they have similar stories, where there's something about coming back here in the Hurt Locker kind of touched on that a little bit. It's like there's something about those experiences of heightened existence, where every day is like legitimate life or death.

And then you come back to the dull, gray drone of corporate life and traffic, and they legitimately miss conflict zones. Yeah, it's like that scene in Hurt Locker when he goes to buy cereal. And he just has a meltdown because he can't deal with what cereal to choose. I know it's weird. I'll paint you another scene on Sunday I was there again walking around. Life seems normal, but then it gets weird fast. A bunch of high school kids kind of horsing around, you know, Sunday, sunny.

Like, what are they doing? Just like a pile of dirt. They're filling up sandbags and piling up sandbags around the statues of lions. The lion is a symbol of the city. And so they were like singing patriotic songs. Everyone's doom scrolling telegram to see the most recent news. Like, oh, check, Republicans, promises more aid in the war against the Russians or whatever. When cheers, and then they go back to like filling sandbags and piling up around these statues.

And it's like, man, it's kind of weird, down by school kids who can't join. You can't volunteer. You have to be 18. And so instead, they're doing other things like filling sandbags. And it's just, yeah. The strangest part about this is not just that it's all playing out on social media, but it's playing out on social media and it's in a country that used to be connected to Russia just a few decades ago. They all used to be together in the Soviet Union, you know, 40 years ago or whatever it was.

30 years ago? So it's like to watch this all happen on the news. And then to be there live, what was different about the coverage that you're seeing on mainstream media in the United States versus being there live? Is there any distortions that like clear distortions that we're seeing here? Yeah. And it's funny. Come me back. It really pisses me off.

I told myself I wouldn't get angry on your show about it because a lot of the Twitter rhetoric around the supposed bio-weapons labs or the ghost of Kiev or some of the early memes that happened in the war that were proven to be like many online memes, not true or exaggerated or whatever. Or like, you know, what would have trumped on or not done? Or how does Hunter Biden's laptop play into all this? And I know those are terribly important signifiers in the American political conversation.

They're completely meaningless on the crowd in Ukraine. Nobody cares about bio-weapons labs. No one cares about people get obsessed about what the State Department did or didn't do in the revolution that happened in 2000 early on in Ukraine. And again, I think one of the luxuries that we have here in the United States, and you know, and it is a luxury, and it's good in some sense that we have it, is that we take the outside world and we project it onto our own like domestic political neuroses.

And we almost think that the outside world is downstream of our domestic political process. And that's just not true. It's true in some cases, right? And certainly the US has impact on the world overseas. But it's just not the case that a lot of the Twitter rhetoric you see is remotely meaningful. That's how to high level. Another thing I think it missed is like the level, like the surprise that met everybody. And like, I'll admit, I knew very little to nothing about Ukraine before this.

It's just not a region of the world that I know much about. I don't speak a Slavic language. I speak other languages and been other parts of the world. So to me, it was very novel to go there. And I have to say I went there with a good helping of ignorance. But one thing I once I got there, I realized, man, the Ukrainians are super nationalistic. They see this as their national project, right? This is, this to them is like a nationhood birthing moment.

Like they are committed to remaining free of Russia and I, I'm not a military guy. I'm not going to make predictions about the war. I just don't see how the Russians can hold such a country. It's huge, by the way. It's like the size of Texas. And east to west, it's longer because it's kind of a flat country. So it's a big country. I don't like the Russians came within of guys to actually control most of this country.

I think most of the country, it's funny. I was talking to a hacker dude, like a nerd dude who is like the Nile of Service attacking a lot of Russian websites and try to knock him down. There's a whole cyber war going on, right? You know, he's just like this nerdy kid is like on the anonymous chat channels and like doing all this stuff. And he's telling me this whole nerdy walkthrough of how he does it. And at the end, he just looks at me with a steel glancing goes, we will win.

My fixer, my translator LaVive, who, young gal, university students, studying computer science, like a college student, right? Very carefree, very charming, very positive. She would enter conversations the same way. We will win. There's a level of commitment there that I think the rest of the world, certainly Putin, has underestimated in terms of the Ukrainians. So do you think that he thought he was just going to go in there and it was going to be like Crimea?

They would sort of roll in and everybody would sort of give up and they would control the state. That seems to be the case, that it was supposed to be a decapitation exercise in which, you know, Keeve isn't that far from the border. Right. It's a few tens of kilometers. They would just roll in, take out the current government, kill Zelensky or whatever sideline him and that would be the end of it. And that is absolutely not what's happening.

And you see the trucks rolling in very obviously on these roads. And then you see these guys with missile launchers standing on the sides of the road shooting at the trucks. You're like, who planned this? This is a terrible, like, did you think that they were just going to see the trucks and go, well, we don't want any part of this. Let's just get out of here.

It seems like a crazy point, like if you're expecting any sort of resistance that seems like suicide just drive on a very obvious straight path where there's things to hide behind where people are hiding behind it, launching missiles that arm carriers. I mean, that seems to be the current Ukrainian strategy. You don't see a lot of counteroffensive. They're not taking back cities because that would require a lot of armor that they don't have.

But you see a lot of bloodletting and of basically hitting their supply lines behind the front lines and exactly the way that you're saying you've got a bunch of trucks coming with fuel and food and they just annihilate the entire column. They just take out the entire column. I had Mike Baker on who was a former CIA operative the other day and he was trying to lay out what he knows about it from a foreign policy perspective from his years of service.

The way he was laying it out was not pretty when he was talking about the possibilities and the options like how it could possibly play out. But what do they think on the ground? Like, do they have an idea of what could happen or how it could happen? I wouldn't claim to know what the Russians are thinking. I'll say this though.

Not me and the Ukrainians. How do they think it's going to play out? Do they think there's going to come a point in time where there's enough losses? Well, Russia has to decide to either escalate to a nuclear option or leave? I think the Ukrainian on the street just thinks that they're going to hold out forever and that the entire nation is unified and they're just not going to give in. I think that's what the thought is.

By the way, who came up with the genius idea of the whole Ukrainian mud thing? By the way, having traipsed around West New Canaan is real. It's what is that? It's actually a Russian name for it that I won't try to pronounce it because I'm mispronounce it. But there's actually a Russian name for mud season in Ukraine because it's a very fertile place like it produces an enormous amount of wheat and other crops.

It's just very muddy. When you have the winter thaw, the ground is this completely consuming mud that if you step in it, you're sucked into your ankle. You might wonder why the Russians on the road seems totally dangerous because they'll get stuck in the mud otherwise. Oh, Jesus.

Yeah, yeah, there's all these videos of a column of four T-72s up to their tank tracks and mud and they just can't get them out because the mud is that thick. It's going to be mud season for months now until summer until it dries out. It's a very gray night to get super fucking cold but then it heats up during the day and the mud just turns into ooze and so you can't get off the road. So what the fuck are the Russians going to do?

I don't know. I read an article that was saying that they need at least a minimum of 500,000 people if they really wanted to occupy Ukraine. So they would have to take 500,000 people out of Russia and move them to Ukraine to start running things and you'd have to run everything. You got to run the utilities, you have to run the government, you have to run everything.

And that's more than 2x with it currently. I think they're original strike for some like 200,000 soldiers so they need a lot more people. I think what they're probably going to do, and again I'm not a military guy, but they're clearly trying to consolidate in the east and join some of their thrusts on some of what they already control between Crimea and the Donbass which is how to separate this movement for a long time.

They're obviously trying to coalesce that and I think they're less obsessed with taking key even which they've made no progress. I've stared at the map every day now for weeks and that seems to be what's going on. But like you said, there's always the odd chance to use either chemical and nuclear weapons. I think Biden yesterday publicly said that the Russians are considering chemical weapons. I mean that could be a propaganda ploy or whatever, but it's in the air.

You get a sense, there's a strange sense that the government is about to throw our administration under the bus. I get this weird sense that like as more things come out and you know more ridiculous Kamal Harris videos where she's saying things that make no sense and Biden, the laptops coming out and all this stuff. You almost get this weird sense where they're trying to just recalibrate and come up with a new strategy for running things and the United States.

I'm looking at how this is all playing. I'm like there's no clear. When he's saying they're about to use chemical weapons or nuclear weapons, what does that mean? And what happens if that happens? And then you've got Trump saying what I would do, I would show him strength and what I would do, they wouldn't fuck around with me.

This is terrifying. Our whole situation doesn't have any bright paths. There's not like this is what needs to be done. And this is how the Ukrainians can bring about peace. This is how we resolve this thing between Russian Ukraine. There's no clear path. Yeah, there seems to be no vision there. Internally what I can say is that the peace, you know, the sort of the conversations that have been happening between the Ukraine and the Russian government is something that's followed a lot.

Israel has tried mediating there. And so the fact that Russians are even at the negotiating table. I think that the Ukrainians are very pragmatic. They're not full hearty. But they're definitely thinking, well, we could come to an agreement at the end of this. So that could be one resolution to it. But then you're still next door to some people that killed tens of thousands of civilians over nothing. That's right.

And then the old question of does Ukraine join the EU? NATO? I mean, that's... This is a whole separate threat. But I find it interesting that so many in the US, I've got a piece coming out in Barry Weiss. She says hi, by the way. I love her. Yeah, no, she's been on your show at least once, right? A couple times. Yeah. So I'm doing a piece for her based on a Twitter thread is coming out tomorrow. One thing I don't know for how much politics you want to talk about you.

But one thing I've been disappointed by is that in the right in the United States, right, much like the left, right, historically, really thinks the US can do no good overseas. And at the same time, the US is responsible for everything that happens overseas. And so the thought that... And it could be like metaphorical or literal PTSD about the more recent wars like Iraq and Afghanistan.

But the thought that the US shouldn't get involved at all and literally can have no positive impact on affairs on the ground in Ukraine. I find it to be very, very disappointing and disheartening. It's weird that the right wing is the one that's turning kind of anti-US. Why do you think that is? Well, I mean, I think some of them like the new right. What is the new right? Well, I hate naming names because I hate getting into these flame wars.

But the new right is like, I don't know, you're familiar with the national conservatives or the NACON conference. People like Sraba Mari, Patrick Deneen. You know, you should have one of them on your show in these days. I'm sure they'd be happy to come on. The new right, I think, is various things. It's deeply conservative, typically Christian, right? They're super anti-woke, right, because woke is like what the whole battle is about.

And they had a conference last year, the National Conservative Conference that I went to. People like Rod Rehr speak there, again, Sraba Mari, etc. They look to a traditionalist mode of thought and they feel that much of modern localists, CRT, the pronouns, gender, all that stuff, they think is just, you know, dangerous to generosity and we need to abandon it.

And some of them, and I don't want to speak for them, but pretend to speak for them. But some of them seem to have at least sympathies for Putin's Russia, right? And the fact that he seems to, he's anti-woke in some sense that he stands against much of what they dislike about the liberal West. What's far past anti-woke? He's anti-gay, right? I mean, it's not, it's not just anti-woke. It's like there's a, what they're doing over in Russia is very different.

Yeah, right. And the weird thing is, even if you are, I'm not like a traditionalist conservative, although I do have an interest in religion, even if you did support that, Russia isn't that, right? Their, their church attendance rate is lower than ours. Their birth rate is even lower than ours. Like all the ills of modernity in terms of like society falling apart and not having kids and all that stuff that the tribes are obsessed with.

Russia suffers from that as much if not more than the West, right? So to what degree is Putin's Russia some sort of counterweight to the West? I don't see it. I think it's a larp. And it reminds me of, I went to Berkeley grad school, right? And again, I was not exactly your typical Berkeley hippie lefty, right? And a lot of my parents are Cuban exiles who fled people.

That's all you need to hear. As soon as you talk to people that have fled Cuba, those are the most Republican, African, and most patriotic people in America. That's right. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I was definitely that when I was there, even now to a certain degree. You know, they go on about Cuban health care and this and that. And they're living in Berkeley in some like hillside home that's worth a million dollars.

And eating in an Alice water restaurant. It's like, bro, Plains of Van is right there, buddy. If you want to go live in Cuba, like off you go. Yeah. And I would say the same for those who lie in eyes, you know, Putin's Russia like, bro, Plains of Moscow is right there. But of course, they're not talking about the reality of it. It's a symbol, it's a signifier and a domestic, you know, it's like all these Hollywood stars that threatened to move the Canada up and never did it.

It's like it's romantic narrative. It's romantic narrative. That's just kind of fake. And normally, it'd be like, who cares? But again, if you realize the level of human catastrophe that's going on in Ukraine, in my opinion, polluting the discourse around that in a country that could impact that I'm disappointed by. Well, there's a thing that happens with the right end with the left where they look at whatever position that the opposite is taking, whatever the opposition is taking.

And they find some way to justify the, you know, the opposition of that. It's blind faith in the ideology. And, you know, they use it to judge. And they have these narratives that they all stick to that they know aren't accurate. And to say that the other side has a point about anything is to concede some ground to what they think is the enemy.

And it's fucking wild tribalism. It's in so strange to watch play out because it's not as soon as you withhold information or distort information because it doesn't suit your narrative, then you're living in fantasy land. Correct. And this is one thing that I've seen from both parties, from the far left and the far right. Right. And it's, it's bizarre to behold because we live in a day where there's unprecedented access to information.

And yet people are willing to put themselves inside these narrow blinders and adhere to whatever these ideologies subscribe, whatever the ideology prescribe. And whatever they, whatever the thing is that you have to say in order to signal to the tribe that you are one of the, you know, the absolutist, you're there on board, you're an asset, you're a part of the right team. It's bizarre to see because it's, it's really just an advanced form of tribalism enhanced by echo chambers.

And it's anti tribalism. You have to be against certain things, right? So this is whole meme about the current thing being Ukraine because a lot of the people who are part of the kind of liberal board that supported CRT or BLM or choose your, your woke thing that you hate, right, are now flying Ukrainian flags and being pro Ukraine.

Right. I think it's a little bit, it's a little bit of projection. Like I don't think it's in your face as a lot of the woke stuff was in the past. But sure, it is the case that some people have swapped their like, one cause for this cause. But it doesn't matter, man, like Ukrainians are still in the right. Like, like, are you actually an independent thinker? Are you really just a contrarian asshole?

Right. And I think it turns out a lot of voices were not independent thinkers. They were just contrarian assholes. And so now they've just contrarian themselves into another position without really thinking about it. And again, like it would matter if it's just Twitter bullshit, but it's actually like a real work going on. Yeah. That's why it pisses me off.

Well, there's a weird narrative that, you know, Ukraine is filled with Nazis. Yeah. Like, how many Nazis are over there? I don't know. I do believe that I've read on multiple, in multiple channels that there is some sort of a problem that they have over there with neo-Nazis. But that doesn't mean the whole country is filled with Nazis. And that doesn't mean it makes sense that Putin entered and invaded. And it also, it's not the reason why invaded.

It's only he invaded to stop Nazis. Right. Invaded to control another country. Right. It's a little ironic to try to do not to fight a country whose president and defense minister are both Jewish. Right. Right. Right. And, but yeah, I mean, the Nazi thing in the East or part of the country is real. I mean, it's not. It's not invention. But, again, I think it's one of those sub-memes in the Ukraine thing that gets played up for internal purposes that isn't terribly impactful on the ground.

When you see people talking positively about Russia and positively about Putin, like, and haven't actually been there. How infuriating is that? It drives me nuts. Like I said, it was like, it's like debating hippies about Cuba 20 years ago in Berkeley. It's like, dude, you're talking about an invention, like an illusion that you have as nothing to do with reality.

Like, that's the weird thing. Both on left and right, the people who actually shit on America the most and think that it's like the shitties place on earth. In my opinion, or typically the ones that could never live outside of it are the ones that literally you can't imagine anywhere else except the American construct. Right.

But there's also one of the beautiful things about America as it allows people like that to form those illusions. Oh, sure. I mean, they're free to have whatever dumb opinion. Yeah, because you have the freedom to be stupid. Right.

You really have the freedom to be delusional. And if you want to have the freedom to be incredibly creative and innovative and be a groundbreaking person in whatever industry you choose to advance in, you also have to have the freedom to just follow stupid ideas to their fucking event horizon. Yeah. And that's one of the things that makes America kind of cool. Yeah.

It really does. I mean, as dumb as you have to have all of it. And you have to have a lot of that stupid fucking thinking and cult, cult like existences. They have to be there just so you can realize how to take some of your French press. To your coffee game, Joe is incredible.

Yeah, I mean, the term, like latte and this and that French press amazing black rival coffee. It's good shit. Oh, it's a black rifle. That is. Yeah. So, I mean, how much has this changed your thoughts about? I mean, you know, people have.

Priorities in life, you have things that you think are important and you have to you have this view of the world. And then this breaks out and then you go over there. And that seems like one of those things that would be just a complete paradigm shifting moment for someone to experience the horrors of what's actually going on there on the ground.

So what is that like when you come back and how do you sort of integrate that into this? I mean, your guy who's been a part of startups and tech and part of Facebook and you wrote this crazy book sort of like burning it all down a little bit, a little bit, a little bit exposing it a little bit. Well, maybe maybe not that's not even a good way to say maybe just your own perspective about what that experience is like and it's not entirely flattering.

What's it but it's alike to like now? I mean, those things seem sort of semi trivial. That's right. Yeah. In comparison. Right. All the things we worry about seem trivial. Like I think I tweet joke that like the lenski wish that pronouns were his country's biggest problem or that call it swimmers. We're like the burning history of the day rather than had a source enough like turnik it so that his soldiers don't lose their limbs.

You know, it's weird. I came back and like I know it's weird to say but getting to your point. I'm glad you cited Sebastian younger and tribes. I almost missed it because it's so I was like I almost want to go back. Funny. I interviewed two people for my stepstack. One guy, Andre Lyskiewicz, who's a former Uber guy. He's Ukrainian and he went back when the war started and as many people are.

He's now like a sorcerer for the Ukrainian military source not weapons but everything else basically night vision goggles body armor and he's living in. I won't say where he lives. It doesn't matter. A town close to the action and he's he's sourcing stuff for the military. Another friend of mine actually former Facebook product manager. Another tech startup dude is an ambulance crew outside of Kiev. Wow.

And you know he had a very successful startup. He doesn't need to be doing this and he you know it hit him hard the Ukrainian cause and he's there. And his life. I mean he is really risking his life. But that's that's what he's doing. Wow. A hundred thousand of Ukrainians have gone back to fight. I mean think about what it would take the sense of loyalty and duty and self sacrifice to take for you to go back to the war zone. You're already outside. You're going back to fight.

There's a thing about the experience of being a person that was a part of the Soviet Union that is transferred down to your progeny. It's it has to be. There's an experience about the history of Russia, the history of the Soviet Union. If you follow like from World War One and World War Two and it just it is a long long history of horror, horrible conflict.

And they're they're prepared for it far more than anyone in the United States. Like if the United States got invaded by Canada. You know I mean it's just like maybe Mexico is a better. Excuse me we're invading. Yeah. Yeah. Canada would be very polite about their invading. But if like the cartels controlled Mexico to the point where they said you know what we have enough military. We have enough money.

We've been selling people fentanyl for so long. We're just going to fucking take over New Mexico and take over Nevada and take over Arizona. Like how much how many people would fight. I mean how many people would flee how many people would stand there ground. How many how many mayors and how many world boxing champions like the Klitschko brothers were both and Loma Chanko too is one of the best boxers alive.

There's so many people that are over there that are these prominent public figures that have flak vests on. Yeah. You know and they're over there with bulletproof vests and and they're fucking armed to the tits and they're fighting. Yeah. It's it's a different world. You know Russia has this long history and the Soviet Union has this long history. All of those countries that were a part of the former Soviet Union have a long history of war.

A long history of conflict. No. And I think that's why a lot of these countries are helping out the Ukrainians right because Russia was the big bully that dominated that part of the world. Yeah.

And here they are trying to crush another country or in Miami for example downtown a lot of the buildings have the training flag colors and it's like what the hell does Miami have to do with Ukraine. Well a lot of Cubans who's come but you know whose country was behind the Iron Curtain and was kind of crushed behind the Soviet or Russian boot.

And they're like what the hell I think you're definitely onto something there's something about people that come have some sort of tragic history to their family either directly experienced or subconsciously through their family like. Like we were on the like my families had three sets of passports and three generations like there were Spanish immigrants to Cuba the revolution came they all fled the United States.

Like this business of like leaving with nothing like my father used to lecture me about coming to this country with like literally nothing but three three things in his pocket. And so I think that marks you even though I didn't directly experience that to be clear I was born in this country. But I think that that marks you in a way and you understand it could all like all we have are like faded photographs of life in Cuba.

And a lot of these Ukrainian refugees they're they're going to go through that exact same experience. I'm in the middle of rereading Malcolm Gladwell's book outliers and there's a part of that about conflicts in the South and honor cultures. Yeah. There's a part about these people that came over from Europe and from the UK that were herders.

Yeah. And there are these these herding families and tribes who established these communities in Appalachia and all all these sort of mountain areas who murdered each other at a scale. That's what he was talking about. There's this one area where there was no more than 15,000 people they recorded a thousand homicides. Like this is wild shit and how this mother was saying to this son who was involved in this family feud with this other family they had been murdering each other back and forth.

And she was screaming in agony and she said shut up and die like a man like your brother did. And so the guy closes his mouth and just winds up bleeding out and dying in silence because his mother was screaming at him because she wasn't she was so accustomed to people dying from gunshots that her own son dying in front of her.

And so the real problem was him being a bitch, which is fucking wild. And Sebastian, I mean what what Sebastian younger talks about in tribes and in these people that develop these intense bonds with people that they're in conflict with. And so you know that these these states of humanity that occasionally exist when people are in extreme situations where life and death is a daily experience.

It changes everything. It changes the fabric of reality. And when he doesn't have when we don't have that for whatever reason is this is the grossest part about humans. There's a certain section of society that seeks conflict in the most preposterous ways. And as our society has become softer and softer we get angry and upset about some of the dumbest things possible whether it's pronouns or whether whatever it is that's the current you know outrage to sure there's.

We're fucking weird like human beings are very weird that we almost exist at our best state when we are in some sort of life or death scenario. Yeah, I don't know if you've read a Fukuyama's book end of history, which is very mischaracterized generally, but he has a final chapter in which he has a quote that I think about that more or less expresses what you're saying, which is, you know humans will struggle for the sake of struggle.

And if you know democracy and liberalism one in the previous generation, then they'll fight against democracy and against liberalism. Nothing else for the sake of struggle because they refuse to live in a world in which heroism is some form is impossible.

And that was people mischaracterized that book as he they thought he predicted some sort of liberal democratic utopia didn't at all. In fact, he warned that we would tend to revert the non liberal and non democratic ways of being just to recapture that feeling. I do think that there's something about liberal and I mean like little liberalism not like the left of the political spectrum to be clear. I think there's something about liberalism that needs an e-liberal antagonist to keep it in check.

It's only when you're fighting against some outside liberal force that in some sense you can maintain the discipline that it takes and without that it tends to degenerate into fights over pronouns or whatever. Before Ukraine happened, you know I was talking with a friend of mine about some preposterous woke shit and he goes, we need a good war. And I was like, he was like half joking and now we're chuckling about he goes, we need a good war.

We need some of these blue haired people to see fucking rockets flying into schools and go, hey, this is the real conflict. Now we're all united together and let's abandon some of this nonsense that we've been fucking squabbling over. Fukuyama says that you've got the same thing in the last chapter. Be good for a liberal democracy to have a war every generation. If you look at Israel for example, they have a lot less of this because they do have these wars every generation.

I have a good friend of mine who is my kickbox and coach back in the days named Shuki, he lives in Israel now. And he was in America for a while. He's in Israel. He was coaching at Majiro Jim in the valley, Tarzan I think it was. And he, I went to dinner over his house once and his wife and his kid are there and he's playing bongos and they're cooking and he's like, everyone's dancing.

And I go, you're so happy. And I go, I've meet so many Israelis that are like so, they love to like sing and dance and party. It's like a real life version of the zohan. I go, what is it? And he goes, when you're in Israel, he goes every day you could die. He goes, you don't know what's going to happen. Like Palestine and Israel have been this constant conflict. You're surrounded by all these Arab states.

And he's like, when any day you can die, everybody just party, party, party. You just when you're alive, you're happy. And I'm like, that's a strange state that seems like we have this yin and yang of life. And it sounds so cliche to say, but without some sort of antagonist, without some sort of problem, some sort of real thing to rise against. People find nonsense to squabble over. And his thing was like, this is all bullshit.

Fucking party, party, party. Like life and death is the real issue. And his, his thoughts about Israel was when you're over there, man, it's real life and real death. And this shit you're dealing with here is traffic. I hate my job. You know, I hate being fat. You know, I hate that, you know what I mean? It's like these nonsense problems. Yeah. It's like, I've got to wish we were wiser. I wish, but I mean, I don't think we're really fully there yet.

I mean, if you wanted to look at the human race as like a graph of progress, there's not that much time from the Vikings to us. That's right. From killing people with axes from the time when someone showed up on your shore with a boat, it was a fucking disaster. It wasn't like, oh, tourists, they're hopping off the cruise ship. No, it was fucking maniacs. It's like, no, it's murder and rape is what it is. That's what's on the menu. That's all that's on the menu.

And that's what people did forever. That's all they did. God. Yeah, and here we are with too much food and too much time in our hands. Yeah. I mean, that's one of our biggest problems. We have too much food. People eat too much. I know. It's crazy. That is one of the biggest problems that biggest health problems in our country is obesity, which comes directly because of poor food choices and too much food.

How do we get on diet from Ukraine? I don't know, but it's a conflict thing. It's all of lack of con... With an in-absence of, you know, idle hands of the devil's playground. That's a real thing. And it's not just simply, you know, like boys who are bored find a way to light buildings on fire. That's part of it too.

But there's something about not having a real problem to fight. You need fucking problems. You need conflict. And you either create your own bullshit or you're going to find something out there in the world that pisses you off and it's going to represent what the enemy is. Because it's ingrained in our DNA. We have this sort of pattern where we seek out opposition. We seek out problems.

Yeah, there's a German philosopher named Carl Schmitt, who was a Nazi, unfortunately, but his political theory was that the friend enemy distinction is the core distinction and human political life. And defining what is the friend and what is the enemy. And if we don't understand that or recognize that in some sense, we're fooling around. It's so strange that we can't get past that. And we have some tools that will allow us to recognize that, but they're not widely distributed.

You know, whether it's psychedelics or whether it's, you know, people that recognize like physical culture and having like a like a strenuous activity schedule in terms of like physical exercise is really important to alleviate anxiety and keep people calm. And relaxed. And I mean, that's why we were talking about this recently. That's one of the reasons why they invented football. They invented football to give people something to do that looks was a facsimile of war.

Right. Right. Back when the thought was that we would get an urbanized society, we get weak and and and feminine. And so we need this sort of. I guess they were right. Religion could also help, by the way. I think religion could be a factor in life. I think that's there's definitely a god shaped hole in the middle of liberalism. And I think a lot of people. I think I think there's a conservation of religion religion never goes away. Taboos never go away. They just change.

And the thought that there's some over. I think it was them Walter Benjamin or no, William James, who defined religion as the thought that there's some overarching order to which human society should converge. Right. There's some sort of abstract thing order to the world that we should be sort of building towards. And that just and it's, of course, in the most high level way is religion. And that never goes away. I think for most humans.

You are converting to Judaism. Are you doing this for a relationship? Yes. Funny. I was thinking of wearing a keeper, but I just say I decided not to. A Yamaka like Ben Shapiro. I would have been like the only other guest that ever did. I'm not that observant actually. Yeah. So I people asked about that. I've got three Jewish kids. And you know, I think religion is kind of like chicken pox.

Like you have to get a case of it when you're a kid. Otherwise, you're going to get like this life threatening case of it later. And so I wanted them to be raised with some sort of religious tradition, particularly in a society. I think this is particularly bad in San Francisco and like California, which is where I've spent my life for the past 15, 20 years. Particularly in a world in which like corporations are the only functional organizations that you see anymore.

Yeah. Like everyone lives not not all over America to be clear. But in some parts live completely atomized and dissociated from any organizing thing other than a company. And I just don't think it's normal. Even though I've spent my entire professional life inside these organizations, I don't think it's normal. And I wanted to see something else. And the the baby mama to my third kid, who's Jewish basically said, look, if this kid goes to synagogue, you're taking them so you convert.

And so I called her bluff and I converted. And I think what I figured out now, and I mean, I hope she doesn't see this. She's probably not going to see it. I figured out that their level of religious practice is like the average of zero and me. And so as long as I keep on going up, they're going to be more or less the midpoint. And so now they're like, they went to like Purim. Purim is this kind of very holiday kids holiday that was last weekend. They actually celebrated that, which is good.

And so yeah. And then aside from that, I think it's intellectually interesting. Judaism is a very bookish to be a Jews to sit around on a Thursday and discuss dense texts and come up with arguments about what they mean, which to me sounds like a good time. I know it's a little strange, but that's a that's what being a Jew is. So yeah, that kind of signed up for it. And it's been interesting.

And you just so you had a relationship with a woman who's Jewish and she raised two different women, two different women, three kids. You got to you got a taste. You have a thing that you like. You have like a specific type. I don't know if I'd phrased it that way, but yeah, you could you could. Yeah, you have there's what you like. You like Jewish ladies. So when that's the case, if the mother's observant, the children wind up being raised as Jewish.

And that's the thing about Jews that the family raises the children based on the mother's religion. Correct. That's the formal religious definition. Most of the time. Yeah, I have an uncle that that converted. I wrote my uncle, Sal converted to Judaism. He married a Jewish woman, married Jewish women, raised his children to Jewish. And you know, it was interesting watching him because I was young at the time. I was like, I think I was seven or eight when he was going through this.

And so it was interesting to watch. You know, he had to take classes and go through the whole deal. It's like getting a master's degree. Tradicious. And you talk to the rabbi and then it's like, dude, when do I graduate? He's like, oh, here's another 10 books to read and just keep on going. It's like doing a PhD guy was complex. Yeah. Yeah. And so how do you have the time to do that? It was kind of my COVID project, to be honest.

The branch of Judaism I'm in is not totally against using electronics on Shabbat and stuff like some of the some of the actual ceremonies are actually livestream. And so you can participate even remotely. It's bench period told me he has to keep the lights on on Friday. Yeah. So they're on Saturday. I'm like, what? Yeah, yeah. It's funny. I've interviewed him. We've talked about this. He's so he's modern orthodox. And what that means is it's kind of like what what Trump's son-in-law was.

He's, you know, like hard-cool full on Jewish, but he's, you know, obviously he's integrated with modern society. He's not living in a separate society. But the Shabbat thing. Yeah, there's there's this restriction. And as soon as I mentioned anything Jewish, there's going to be like 100 rabbis in my mentions commenting on this, but that's the nature of Judaism. There's a restrictions around lighting a fire on on Saturday. And electricity has been mapped to the to the fire restriction.

And so you probably never had this experience. I don't know if you've lived in New York, but if you go to a hospital in New York after sundown on Friday, you'll get an elevator and it's like you push the buttons. They don't do shit. The thing stops at every floor because you can't you can you can use a thing that's been left on that would work, even if you did nothing, but you can't make it work. It's really complex.

And so you can get on the plagues. That's ridiculous because you're using the fucking elevator. Take the goddamn stairs if you're so committed. Ten floor. Okay. Well, take the stairs. People can do it. Well, in Miami, like real estate for the lower floor condos is more expensive. If it's like a Jewish build, you know, because you have to go up the higher stories.

So, it's a mod. It's kind of silly. Here's the other thing I would say. People talk about what the fuck is this like this religion thing? They think it's crazy. The one thing that's weird about talking about religion to secular people is that like the model for religion in this country, right, is Christianity typically not just Christianity, Protestant Christianity, not just Protestant Christianity, evangelical Protestant Christianity.

Like if you're not a practicing Christian and you've got like Christianity, you're dressing your face. It's like some televangelist or somebody or somebody wants to ban a book in Texas. And so like somehow that that becomes the expression of religion and society. And for obvious reasons, Judaism is very different, right?

In Judaism, like the wonky term would be orthopraxic, like a Jew is as a Jew does. So like if you're like Ben Shapiro and you don't fucking flip the light switch on Saturdays and you follow the kosher laws, you do all this. And then you're like, this is being a Jew. Like you don't necessarily need to believe in God or have like a deep faith relationship. There's no Jesus obviously, right?

And so it's more a practice, a lifestyle and a community more than anything else. And it's less about your personal relationship. Right. It just doesn't matter. I think there's a default setting that people have to adhere to some sort of orthodoxy. Yeah, of course.

I think that's one of the reasons why when you look at highly educated, like tech people, for example, it's a great example. I think there's a reason why they've adhered so strongly to this, like sort of hard core version of progressive thinking, which you would call woke. Right.

And I think that's permeated these atheist communities. And I don't think that's not a mistake. I mean, that seems very clear that human beings have this default setting to follow the scaffolding of morals and ethics and behavior. And it doesn't necessarily have to make sense. Like the elevator thing doesn't make sense. Well, neither does a lot of the shit that people on the left adhere to.

And transgender swimmer thing that doesn't make sense. Like there's reasons why we have males versus females competing. But there's this line that people will draw like that's a woman. And they'll just say that flat out hard core. They start distinction.

And they're saying these distinctions that are based on this rigid ideology rather than based on facts and reality. But they'll say it and they'll say it from a position where, hey, I'm an atheist. I'm fact based. I believe in trusting the science. Except for some things. And it's really like a religion.

I think you're picking up on that's exactly right. I mean, I think I've been in Silicon Valley for over a decade now. It's saturated with religion actually. And you know, they'll laugh at you trying to keep kosher whatever and then they'll go on for six fucking hours about their weird little kiddo died or whatever that they're following religiously.

You know, I interviewed a Berkeley professor sociologist named Carolyn Chen wrote a book called Work Pray Code. That's kind of a sociological take on this and she mentions how so many people come to start a life and are formerly religious but then adopt this new religion. And it's very much one of self actualization.

A lot of sort of white person Buddhism layered on top of it. A lot of LinkedIn posting about hustle porn about you getting more productive in it. There's deep religiousity there and hustle porn. Yeah, I hate it. I know. It is also porn. It's hustle. God, there's so much of that. There's so much of that on Instagram. It's kind of cute on Twitter now too. It sucks. I just really is.

If you over post hustle porn, I just mute you. Yeah. I'm just done with it. I'll support is such a weird thing to do. But I guess sometimes I do it here. I guess sometimes I talk about like motivation and like what's necessary to achieve success.

But I think I do it based on my personal experiences and what I've learned that I think that you could tell people. I think there's a lot of hustle porn that's just like people saying things because they think that it's going to resonate with folks and it's going to get them a lot of likes. They haven't really done anything. There's a lot of I haven't done anything, but I'm going to show you how to do things. Which is a weird part of what they're called venture capitalist.

The hustle porn community. There's so much of that though. God, there's so much of it. Can I ask you a question? Yes, please. People who have done very well. I asked this question to Mark and Dresden about the web, the guy who basically invented the browser and the web was we know it. So I'll ask you the same question. Did you think this that Joe Rogan experience would get as big as it as it has? No fucking chance. I still don't believe it. It doesn't make any sense.

Because you have like over 10 million downloads, which I'd love to address this if you want to talk about your show and stuff too. But that's more down. That's greater viewership than all the big network shows put together. You have an enormous audience. But you never thought that would happen when you started this. I've done nothing to try to promote this show.

I mean, really, I've never gone on another show and said, please, please watch my show. I've never taken ads out anywhere. I've never done anything. We've existed like Jamie and I have existed in the strange vacuum while this show has sort of propagated and spread its way through the world. And we haven't done anything different.

And I haven't done anything different in terms of the way I do it other than get better at it, get better at communicating, get better at listening, get better at researching topics and asking questions. And, you know, I think generally it's a skill. I think it doesn't seem like it's a skill because it's something that everybody does. We all have conversations.

But there's a skill to having conversations that are pleasing to the ear and that it's similar to a lot of other art forms that once you start sort of unpeeling it, you get a better sense of what it is. And over the many, many, many hours that I've done this, we've gotten better at it. But I don't understand, we've had this conversation too recently.

Why the fuck hasn't anybody else done it? Like this, that doesn't make any sense to me. Like what I'm doing is not that crazy. Like why is it so popular? I really don't know. I genuinely don't know. And it's shocking to me. Like when back in the day, when we first started, when it first started getting big. I remember me and I think it was Brian Redbend. He goes, do you know how many downloads that last episode got? And I'm like, come out of here. And he's like, this is two million.

And it was like this pause in the room. I go, what? I go two million. What the fuck? And we were laughing because we were basically at the time, especially the early days. We would fill this volcano bag up with pot vapor. You know what a volcano is? Do you know what a volcano is? Volcano is this machine. Jamie Shoma volcano. Volcano is a machine for people who think joints are too mild. And it's this preposterous machine that fills up this giant plastic bag with THC mist.

And then you pop it off the machine. And you've done that before. Like a big plastic bag. It's a gray plastic bag. Yeah, I've done that. It's like, that's it right there. And then you suck all the fucking THC vapor out of that plastic bag. We would just be obliterated. I'd be in the middle of a conversation, forget exactly what I was talking about. I didn't had no idea what we were talking about. That was my experience with that too. I got stunned out of my mind.

That was what we're doing. And then, you know, start having conversations with different people. Like I had Graham Hancock on. And all like, this is great. Me and Duncan were talking to Graham Hancock. Like, wow, this is amazing. I can't believe him, you know, I'm meeting him. We're talking about ancient civilizations and all of his research. And then once it became more popular, people started seeking and how in terms of like I'd like to be a guest.

Like, okay. You know, but it was totally organic. Like the whole thing happened or like there's no way I would have ever said, I know one day. This is going to be something that like Fox News supports and CNN hates and the fucking the world talks about the nonsense ramblings of a comedian slash cage fighting commentator. Like this is going to be a real real fucking cog in the wheel. Like what? No, never. Not a fucking chance. Never thought about it.

I'm going to go further than when you don't know where you're going. Sometimes, but I do have this thing where I'd like to keep doing things and get better at them. I get obsessed with stuff.

In a sense, I've sort of applied a lot of that that have done other aspects of my life, whether it's martial arts or comedy and I've sort of applied that to this thing in some weird way. So it sort of naturally fits within my personality because I've always been curious as to why I think the way I think why behave the way I behave and what what I can optimize what I can make better about who I am and how I how I make my way through life.

And when that gets applied to this, I sort of just sort of took the same pattern of thinking about the way I think about all kinds of things and applied it to conversations and applied it to like why do people think the way they think like what like you like what's it like for you and you crown I'm a genuinely curious person.

So when I have these conversations with people, I think that's one thing that does help the listener out is that they really do understand that I'm not asking this question because it's my job. Like we could quit right now. We really did an hour. We could just go home. I'm curious. I'd like to keep talking to you. I enjoy it genuinely.

And when I think when someone has a genuinely enthusiasm for anything, whether it's making pottery, you know, whatever you watch a YouTube video about someone who makes hand blown glass. If someone's really into it, I'm fascinated. I'm fascinated by people that are genuinely into things.

Well, I think that's what comes across. I mean, you make it look easy, but it's, you know, I host a small podcast and it's hard interviewing people and you make it look so seamless and perfect. And I think but it's it is easy. It's just my personality.

But I really think that it's just luck. I think that's a giant part of it is that my personality just was the right shape to fit into a hole in, you know, in media. It was just, oh, that fits. But it's just other than that. I was just the guy who asked annoying questions.

You know, if you like had me on a radio show, like, and there was some kind of radio show, I was always like, well, why do you do this? Like, what is the, what is the thing that, you know, entices you to get up and the more like, what's your motivation? Like, what, what did you want to do when you first started?

Like, those questions are because I want to know why I do when I do. So I'm always interested when I see someone as exceptional or interesting or intelligent. I always want to know like, what's going on inside your head? Like, is it similar to mine? I'm trying to build a map of thinking of the world. Like, when I'm looking at my own life, I'm like, how different am I than this guy? Like, what, what does he do that maybe is significantly different or better than I can maybe apply to my own way of thinking?

I think that honesty comes across Joe. I think that's part of why your show is successful. Oh, thank you. I think a lot of it's dumb luck too. We don't want to admit it, but that's true. A lot of it's like, yeah, good man. I could easily have been born in Sarajevo. I could have easily been born in the Congo. You know, where, who you are right now is, there's so many factors that are outside of your control.

You know, just your genetics. You know, I came from a creative family. You know, my uncle that I told you converted Judaism. He's an artist. His brother is an artist. You know, there's a lot of people in my family that are like these very outside the box thinking people.

My parents were hippies. So there's a lot of that in my past that sort of helped me think about things as someone who really not willing to subscribe to these patterns of behavior and thinking and just activities that everybody else thought were either significant or mandatory.

I was just not interested in that for whatever reason. I felt like there's other ways like this is these people are miserable. Like I remember thinking that when I was a kid, like looking at people living their lives, doing things they didn't want to do constantly.

And I'm like, there's got to be someone out there who's doing what they want to do. Where are those folks? How come I don't know any of them? Like where are I think you see them in an interview or you read about them in a book? Like, okay, they exist.

You read a biography or someone who sort of navigated their way through the river of life and avoided the rocks and made their way to the waterfall. Like, okay, so it's possible. How do you do it? Who's that guy? How did he do it? How many people told him no? How many people told him to fuck off? How many people told him he's a loser?

There has to be a lot, you know, and that this small percentage of people that do find a way to be happy and do something for a living that they really enjoy doing. To me, that was exciting. Like, okay, there are folks out there that are doing something that they really enjoy.

And the difference between that, and I think there's really, there's a lot of value in doing something you don't like doing. Because like, I had a lot of jobs that I fucking hated when I was a kid. And I think those were really important to me. I think doing construction, I drove limos, I did a lot of shit that I delivered pizzas, that a lot of shit that I didn't enjoy doing.

And I think there's something in doing those things that builds up like a muscle of not just of discipline, but of like the ability to find a way to keep going when you don't want to do stuff. And then you can apply that sort of dis, it's kind of a discipline thing, but it's just a grind, a grind of mentality.

You can apply that the things you enjoy. Yeah, no, I think that's important. My parents forced me to like do rowing when I was in high school. I was like, a little pudgy kid. It was very bookish. My mother's a librarian. I was definitely not the athlete type.

You know, rowing is the ultimate grind. It is the same thing over and over again. I know, I know. It's the ultimate grind. And that just really beat the shit out of me. And it was a pretty competitive team like we one state one year and stuff. And it was just like hours a day, six days a week. And it was just like, that really made like a man, I guess, out of me.

In the sense that I went from this, you know, little shlubby, weak, lazy kid. It's like, makes sense. If you think about a person who would be like a champion, rower or a champion cyclist, cyclist, maybe even more so because you're doing it on your own. Like you're doing the same thing everybody else is doing left, right, left, right. You're literally attached to a wheel, right.

So it's not like you can be creative in how you optimize the wheel or use your body and some sort of expressive way that's unique to your personality. No, left, right, left, right. It's just taking pain. It's just the grind, the ultimate grind. And so people that do that, like, have you ever met Lance Armstrong? No.

Fascinating character. Interesting guy because like, I feel like Lance Armstrong would be fucking competitive at any goddamn thing he did, whether it's his pencils more sharp than yours. You know what I'm saying? Like, it's like that mindset to just go left, right, left, right, left, right. Get across the line quicker than anybody. When you apply it to days and days of riding like the Tour de France. That's a crazy mindset. If that dude could apply that shit to anything.

But in a lot of ways, I bet it probably trips you up because it probably keeps you from being calm. You're probably always looking to like fucking get on the bike. Go, you know, have you had him on the show? Yeah, yeah, I had him on the show. I had him on the show after I had Jeff Navitsky on the show was one of the guys that helped take him down. Jeff Navitsky also works for you.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, he hates Jeff Navitsky. Because well, first of all, he, I mean, he's got a point in some ways because the whole goddamn sport was dirty. But what they found in Lance was a poster boy for a dirty sport. Like if you took away all of his accomplishments and he said, hey, you know, you won the Tour de France. But since, you know, you've admitted that you took performance enhancing drugs. And by the way, they never caught him, you know, that they never caught him.

So he made his way through this all. But he had teammates that got caught and the teammates ratted him out. And then he had lawsuits against the teammates. And it was very messy business. But if you took away him being first place and you say, okay, we're going to give first place to the next person who didn't test positive ever for performance enhancing drugs. You got to go to eight. You're like a number of players.

No, really legitimately, they're all dirty. It's a dirty business. It's like bodybuilding. Like if you look at the Mr. Olympia guys, if they took away steroids, there's no one on that Mr. Olympia stage. No one. You got to go way down the like, I mean, maybe there's some freak of nature. That's like 30 second place or something like that who just eats oats and fucking does squats. But most likely not.

If you want to be like that giant butterball turkey looking ultra vain muscle dude, you have to take steroids. That's what they do. So if you want to pretend that these guys are all taken, you know, fucking creatine and some shit that you could buy in muscle and fitness. Okay. Go ahead, pretend, pretend whatever you want. But that's not real. So if you want to pretend that land star Armstrong, he won toward the front because he was cheating.

Go ahead and pretend because that's not why he won because like billber has a great bit about it. He's like, he was the best psycho. They're all fucking psychos. But he was our psycho. He was the best out of all the psychos and they're all doing drugs, but he was just he with that said he won while they were all cheating. Maybe he was better funded. Maybe the people that he was involved with are more scientific about their application, but random question. Do you think Jeff Bezos is on steroids?

100% I have no opinion. I really don't know, but I'm just curious. A thousand percent. Yes. He's not I want to say steroids. He is on hormone replacement therapy, in my opinion, because he gained a significant amount of muscle mass deep into his 40s. If you look at him now, he looks great. By the way, I take testosterone replacement. So it's not I'm not demonizing it. I don't think it's bad. I think it's wise.

If you want your body to perform well, I think you should get regular blood work. You should do it from a very good doctor that understands hormone replacement therapy. You should be very smart about it. You shouldn't take too much of it. But if you want your body to perform well, it wards off diseases better. It keeps your immune system healthier.

The more muscle you have in the stronger your body is, the healthier your body is. I mean, to a point into this body building range where you just look obscene. But what he looks like now is a healthier way better way stronger version of what he looked like. He looks great. He looks great. The idea that that's bad is like, okay, well what's good? Is it good to get fat? Well, no, you shouldn't say that because you're fat shaming.

You could fat shame. That's bad. But if you muscle shame, that's okay. The guy looks fucking great. Yeah, he's doing something. He's gone totally Miami. The shirts, the women, the insides and the feet. The shirts see people use that one image. That was a disco party. Do you know that the with him with the glasses with the heart shaped glasses with his bombshell girlfriend. That was he had they had a disco shaped disco themed party rather for New Year's.

That's why he was wearing that silly shirt. But I like that. I think I know. I think it did actually wear it all. Well, you're Cuban. Yeah. Yeah, get a gold chain. Like Rolex. Yeah, he should wear it all the time. Fuck yeah, we're all that shit. We're tight shirts. I think you look great. I love Jeff Bezos. I mean, I don't.

I'm not a fan of some of the things that I hear about working at Amazon. You know, how much of those are true. I don't know. I haven't looked deeply into the anti-union practices. I haven't looked deeply into the way they forced workers to like there was an article about workers that while the tornado is coming to Kentucky. Right. They couldn't know. Yeah, they weren't allowed to leave, which to me sounds like fucking insanity.

Yeah, that's that's fucking insanity. If that's true, I don't know if that's true because there's narratives that get distributed after a horrific event that oftentimes aren't accurate because they sell good and it's good clickbait. I don't know if that's true.

You know, it's a hard company in terms of like the what I've heard about if you're one of those people working on the floor and someone orders a French press and you know, you have like 35 seconds to get that into a box or you have a stripe. You're peeing in like a little bottle because you don't want to get a break and that sounds insane.

Yeah, but you know, I mean, if you're paid well and you understand that that's the job when you go into it and it's a really competitive environment, it's a good job in terms of like healthcare and how much compensation you get. I don't know. I don't know. So I can't comment on the business as a whole.

But when I look at billionaires and how I like billionaires to behave, there's two I really love I love Elon because he's fucking crazy and he lives in a $50,000 house and he has people driving around everywhere. He doesn't own anything. There's an only houses and he's one of the richest men on earth and then Jeff Bezos who's ball and out of control.

They have to take a fucking bridge apart because he wants to get his giant yacht through it. He makes a yacht so big that they can't get it through a bridge. The place where they're building his yacht. There's a bridge. You have to get out that way to get to the ocean. I think it's another one. Oh, right. I heard about this. Get the shipyard. Yes. So they have to dismantle a bridge to get his yacht. I'm like, the option to dismantle a bridge is not available for very many people.

I just think it's hilarious. I think if there's a guy who's a super baller, out of control guy who used to be a nerdy dude who drove a tiny Honda. There's a video of him from 1999 where he's already worth a couple billion dollars and he's driving this Honda round. And the interviewer asks him, you're worth billions of dollars. Why are you driving this Honda? He goes, this is a perfectly good car. To go from that to being this cliche. I love cliche sometimes. I enjoy them.

Speaking of Elon, there's a Ukraine connection. I don't know if you know he's shipping all these Starlink units. Yes. I do know that. And it's funny. I have a Starlink unit from my house out in the sticks in Northern Nevada. And I took my Starlink with me to Ukraine thinking like, you never know, you might get stuck with that internet if the Russians bomb this or that. I ended up donating it to this fixer dude because his internet was weak.

But he's there. It's a big deal. Like the Ukrainians are like, yes, super Elon because they're bringing all these units and you know connection to the outside world is a major part is major challenge. You know, where's it? Obviously. Well, the other part is that he offered to fight. Yes. Would you mediate that like there's a better. I told him that I would text him. I said, dude, I'll facilitate your training. I'll set up your training. I'll get you the best people.

I would establish you bet on without without training. Who would you bet on would you bet on putting over it's hard to say Elon is much bigger. He's a big guy. Have you ever met him? He's about six to his wide. He's a big person. You know, I don't know how much physical activity he's involved with that. I do know he enjoys martial arts.

He had a match with a sumo player at one point in time. He's crazy. He's a wild dude. But he's so fucking smart that I feel like if you could get him training, he would prick things up very quickly. He would probably have like a few moves that he would focus in on and dial them in very quickly and and probably get very good.

I don't know. We haven't had very many martial arts conversations. So I don't know the full extent of how because sometimes when people learn some things when they're a kid, those things surprisingly apply very well as they get older. They don't forget some things. You know, like if you have some jujitsu experience when you're younger and some guy grabs you in a bar, there's certain instinctive things that are going to happen because of your training.

I don't know how much he's got of that. But I do know that if he had training, he's younger, he's much bigger, put in smaller than me. He's not a much judo. Oh, he's a black belt and judo. Putin's a legitimate black belt and judo. I've watched Putin train. I've watched videos of him training. And I can see the difference between someone who is, you know, maybe a casual person with a rudimentary understanding of the legitimate black belt.

He's an absolute legitimate black belt. What is it took away his black belt? What is that? No, that's a they gave him an honorary Takwondo black belt.

That was yeah, it's yeah, it's not I don't believe he has that's kind of silly. You know, that's like someone that's like Bill Cosby getting a PhD and call himself Dr. Cosby because they gave an honorary PhD. You know, that he's he was doing that, you know, speaking of canceled people. Yeah, well, that's more than canceled. That's what the kids. That's that's some real.

Yeah, I think I think I'd been on Elon. I really do. Especially if you gave him time. If you gave him time to train and do it correctly. And I would set him up with the best people. I would say I would say my you made that offer to him. Yeah, we heard conversation. Yeah, I said I would set him up with all of his training. He's like, how epic would that be?

Yeah, I mean, the world is so nuts. That's not I mean, it doesn't seem likely, but neither did seem likely would be on the verge of World War three three months ago. That's right. Three months ago, we're worried about vaccines and you know, whether or not you'd have to wear a mask on an airplane. And now we're literally on the verge of a nuclear war. And one of the things that Mike Baker was saying to me was that you're dealing with hypersonic weapons now that can change paths very quickly.

In the middle of the air. And it's not something like, oh, you see the the missile being launched. You see where it's headed to San Francisco. It'll be there in 15 minutes or whatever it is. It's not that anymore. Now they're moving fast in the speed of sound. And they can take like hard angles in the middle of the sky. And you can't predict where they're going.

And the Russians use one in Ukraine recently a couple days ago. Did they really? Yeah, these are so they claimed. They claimed the users super super hyper hypersonic. Wow.

That's crazy. That's terrifying. That that kind of thing is terrifying. And then you apply a nuclear warhead to something like that. It's really terrifying. And the thing that he was saying is that we used to have this concept of mutually assured destruction that we would know that the Russians are launching at us. And we would have a certain amount of time to decide counter attack. And then the world would be fucked.

He's like, that's not the case anymore. The missile would launch so quickly and would hit us before we had any option to retaliate. And that's something that needs to be understood. Russia launched hypersonic missiles due to a low stockpile sources say the leading theory and Western assessments of the hypersonic missile attack is that Russia's number of precision guided munitions are dwindling fast. Why would that be the case?

Well, the theory is that they're their actual internal production of it is very poor. I mean, just recently the only tank man just today that the only tank manufacturer in Russia announced that it's stopping production because it can't source components.

So it's a hold on go back up there. It says they launched them because it's the only thing that they can get through with absolute certainty. Oh, I see. So they're saying that all of their weapons they're running out of all kinds of weapons. So they use the hypersonic missile because it's one of the things they know can land.

So Russia said that it shot a K h 4 7 m to. I said that, Kinzal. Kinzal. Kinzal hypersonic missiles at a weapons depot in Western Eukaryne on Friday though it remains unclear if it was actually the target still President Joe Biden confirmed Russia's use of the weapons on Monday stating that Russia's military launched them. And so this is Biden saying that because it's the only thing that they can get through with absolute certainty.

Who knows where the fog of propaganda's thick. Who knows, but if he really did use that and they showed that it's not just a concept that it's a real thing that they have and they have access to and they can arm with a nuclear warhead.

That's the my fear is that they launch one nuclear warhead and say go, okay, now what? Right. You know, because that that would be the move. The would the move would not be launch nuclear warheads at China or rather at the United States and China does the same thing. We just fucking get blown the smithereens. The move would be one nuclear warhead. And go to Ukrainian city and go now. What are you going to do? Right. Exactly.

You know, and everybody go, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, you know, if one, if you're in a gang war and one person gets shot, you might be able to have a ceasefire. Like this was the discussion that Malcolm Gladwell was happening having in outliers about these Appalachian cultures where they were just conflict. You know, the Hatfields and the McCoy's these people that were constantly feuding and killing each other.

Like there were certain times where they had tried to come to the negotiating table and that at a certain point too much bloodbits build. That's the worry. The war the my worry is they launch one new. Yeah, I mean, yeah, that would be a little challenge to the west right in the west. I mean, that's kind of what we did in World War two, right?

That's right. Yeah, although what people forget there is that the fire bombing campaign of Japanese cities was caused more death actually than the other obviously nuclear weapons are from a symbolic perspective huge. But they were basically incinerating Japanese city after Japanese city. Yeah, even outside of the nuclear weapon thing. Yeah, but that again, that was total war. That's when civilizations were going to war with each other and yeah destroying them in some sense.

It's it's wild that humans still participate in that. And you got to wonder like how much of that. We all spoke the exact same language. How much of that would be different? It would be very difficult. It's it's more difficult to demonize people who speak exactly like you do use the exact same language of the exact same values.

I mean, that was the that was the point behind Esperanto this invented language that got a little bit of traction. The thought was if everyone spoke the same language, it would lead to world peace because it would be better understanding.

Is that you know, that's the tower of Babel right? I think we find even more ways to kill each other. I think so. Yes. Yeah, I'm not such an activist. Well, I mean, look at what's going on in America between the left and the right. I mean, there's some times in the struggle in America like when Trump was president that was really concerned that we could conceivably get to a point where people would justify a war against the opposite party. Yeah.

Did you ever feel like that? There's a lot of civil war talk. Yeah. And it was weird that like a lot of people on the red state side were almost be looking forward to because we've got all the guns and we're the tough guys. I'm like societies that have actually gone through real civil wars like Spain or like the Yugoslavia.

Nobody comes out. That's not a good idea. It's a crazy. It's a crazy idea. That said, I do wonder when I get in like Silicon Valley bold prediction mode, like I think the nation state as we know it, which is a relatively recent invention. By the way, like what we call a nation state is a definite post enlightenment post printing press sort of thing is, you know, I'm not so bullish on it. I don't know if we can not just the US, which is broadly the notion of an

state. I think the internet demolishes a lot of consensus. And the amount of consensus necessary to keep a nation state in a country of 330 million spanning four time zones is very, very difficult.

The problem with the alternative is that people are terrified of this concept of a one world government. Yeah, rightly so. I mean, if you look at the way China is able to control its population with social credit scores and just overwhelming surveillance and totalitarian government, we're terrified that that could be applied globally.

Yeah, it seems like it could be, especially if you have digital currency that is centralized. It's like the government has the ability to veto purchases or decide that your social credit doesn't allow you to do certain things because you've done the wrong thing or you said the wrong thing. Yeah, I mean, those are some of the objections to the sanctions being levied on Russia, right? The West can just like turn you off. Right. Like what does that mean? That's actually dangerous. Right.

I mean, like in the Russian people, are they really responsible for what Putin's doing? It seems like they're under the control of a dictator. What if they get it? They don't have access to medicine. You know, what if they don't have access to goods and services and all sorts of things that have nothing to do with them? Yeah. I mean, looking at it from the Ukrainian perspective, though, they didn't have a choice. I mean, they provoked.

There's an unprovoked total war that they've declared like a real total war that's declared in the Ukraine. And so in some sense, why shouldn't the sanctions be totalizing? Yeah. Well, it's interesting to the attack on the oligarchs or the sanctioning the oligarchs. That's interesting to me because that's really the first time in our lifetime that we've ever seen some of the richest men in the world terrified to lose everything.

We're getting their yacht seized. Yeah. We're getting their jet seized real estate seats to buy fling to Israel. Yeah. And like, where are they going to go? And what how much access to their money will they have? You know, is it all going away? Can you take it all the way? Like, where is it? Who has it? Where is it?

Do they just like log into their Schwab account? Like, that level of life is so beyond my understanding that I don't even understand what that would even look like. Right. And like, what investments are safe when you're in oligarch fleeing for Turkey or somewhere, wherever you going to UAE, wherever you going.

Like, what do you do? Like, there's a, a brahmavit's yacht that is outside of Turkey right now that just recently changed its status to waiting for instructions. Like, so it's like kind of moving around. And it, they, everybody knows where it is. So like, you know where this guy is. So what is, what's, what happens?

Do they eventually, do someone come in? Does the coast guard come in and take his boat? Like, who have, who's going to take that thing? Is that what they're going to do? And then what is it? Well, if it goes into port at will, if it's within 12 miles, right, any port? Well, no, I mean, the country would have to want to seize it. So what if he goes to Dubai? Right.

Or what if he just never dox? Right. If he just stays in international waters with, right. And you can just get resupplied from boats that come out to him. Can they get gas to a boat? Oh, yeah. That's how they do it. Expensive, but he could do it. Yeah. Well, he's got a lot of money out here.

I mean, the head of this organization called C-Shapard. I'm pretty familiar with them. Yes. Right. Right. You should have that guy on here. But he, he used to live at sea because he claimed that he would get extra-dited because he's considered a pirate in some countries. And so he would be 12 miles off at sea all the time. Well, they're always catching people whaling. Right. You know, yeah. It's.

I used to support the Masturbide or T-Shirt. They have cold T-Shirts. Yeah. I'm a jacket. I would. Yeah. They look super cool. Right. It's cool with the trident and the thing. So do you think that there that's going to be effective to sanction the oligarchs? And do you think they actually have any legitimate leverage over Putin?

Well, over Putin, it seems like it, right. They've frozen the central bank reserves overseas, as I understand it. And so their ability to part of the reason why that tank factory has to shut down is they can't buy parts. Right. How do you? Right. The rubble isn't necessarily worth much. How do you actually go out and buy parts from the west, which they need as input? I mean, they're an extraction economy. They sell raw materials. I don't manufacture that much from. And so it seems like this.

I mean, it seems like this is really a war between which can last longer Ukrainian nationalism or the Russian economy. Right. It's basically the war that's going on. How do you think it plays out? If I were a betting man, I think the most likely outcome is some form of stalemate. I don't think the Russians can take Ukraine. I just don't think it's possible.

They're not they're not going to they have an encircle they can't encircle Kiev. They'll take more cities in the east potentially. Ukrainians will suffer. There'll be tens of thousands of civilian deaths. It'll be a harsh show. And they'll have to come to some sort of they'll have to come some sort of deal. The Ukrainians are after promise. Oh, we're not going to join pinky swear. We're not going to join NATO for the next 10 years.

So Lensky stays in office. They're not going to demilitarize because one of the original requests is a Russian saying if they give it to your military. And then the local in house, Russian media will spin it as a put in victory. And that'll be that. That's what you think. That's probably the most likely outcome. Did you ever at your wildest dreams think that he was going to invade Ukraine? I don't even know that region of the world very well. Like I wouldn't even have.

I don't conjure the thought. Oh, yeah, Russia. Fresh is an invade now. It's it's interesting how many people switch from being vaccine experts to being foreign policy experts. See, I never do shit. I don't know about I don't post about I don't COVID post. I don't like I find the media conversation like the meta conversation about these things.

Interesting. But the thing itself like an opinion about COVID you will never get out of it. But it's just fascinating how these people pivoted from one cause to another. And then completely ignored the other cause like it's gone. That's gone now. I mean, I think at the legit criticism. I can I I don't like it invalidates a Ukrainian cause, but it's true that there's a certain type of person who like just which is their little thing that they're obsessed about.

You know, that's what I'm fascinated by. I'm not I mean definitely doesn't invalidate the Ukrainian cause. That's the one of the most significant causes of our lifetime. But I'm glad we agree. You think. Oh, yeah. I mean, it's it's terrifying to me. I think about it all the time.

I thought about it last night before bed and I had a meditate to get it out of my head because I'm like like there's another thing to do about this right now. I'm about to go to bed and I'm thinking about what what does it look like if we legitimately have World War three. Like am I prepared? You know, will my family be safe? What do we do? You know, those thoughts like for whatever reason at nighttime. Those are when I have to fight those off the most.

I have the same problem like the most restful shit like right when I'm going to bed. It's like why the fuck am I right now. Yeah, it's weird because I think there's something about when you know you're going to be your most vulnerable because you're literally unconscious. That during that time is when you start assessing all the possible risks. You know, that's when you check the locks in the door. Yeah, you always think that someone's going to come into the house where you're sleep.

You don't think someone's going to come in the house while you're awake. Right. It's sunny out. You know, it's like like when people smoke marijuana during the daytime. Most of time, even if you paranoid, it's not that bad. But if you're paranoid at night, there's something about at night being high at night. It's fucking scary because the paranoia is accentuated by the natural paranoia that you have in the fact that it's dark out.

There's a thing that human beings have about the dark that I think is related to being in our past being preyed upon by big cats. Like we're worried about things we can't see. We're worried about losing one of our senses. You know, like even in my own fucking yard, if I let my dogs out at night, you know, and I'm out there with them, I'm like looking around like you never know. You never know what's out there.

You know, could be some fucking predator that made its way through my fence. It's in my yard. Yeah, it's scary. I am. After this book, this cast monkey thing that I caused some trouble for me at Apple. I, because like I'm a very ambiguous media personnel. I often joke that like I'm not really a narcissist. I just play one on the internet.

Right. It's like I'm forced to do like all these shows and like highlight my life of no at some level and recluse. So I bought five acres of these islands off the Northwest of Seattle called the same one islands. These gorgeous islands. You've never been to them. You should definitely go. I've heard of it. Oh, it's it's on the summer. It's paradise on Earth.

So one of the islands or like I bought a few acres of land, not that many just random land, nothing beautiful or gorgeous or anything. And like started homesteading it, like chopping down trees, laying it out, putting up a teepee a year solar system, all that fucking MacGyver shit.

And I did that for off and on a couple years after after thing. I remember when I first got to like, you know, book the book thing came came out. It was bestseller for months. Like a big deal out of media for like a month or two.

I'm disgusted by it after a month or two. And so I literally showed up at this place. I like the first advanced check like I bought this land. Right. So I showed with like a backpack. I guess this is me now. Like I just showed up with a tent. And like I'm in the fucking woods. And this is it now.

And I remember that it's first couple nights like you started firing the whole thing and like the fringes of like what you can see on the fire and the light. I don't know. Like I had a gun with like and like this island is not dangerous. Like there's really not much to fear. But you're yeah you're there in the sticks and just like you're alone. And we were so I was going to target you. What do you mean target me because of the book? Oh no, no, no, no, not really. So you have the gun just.

Because you're fucking the middle of the woods and there's like the self-un doesn't work. There's no contact. You just don't know just to case a pirate shows up on your island. There's a small math problem. It's not quite paradise. So math has in a bass boat. What kind of problems will tell everybody about your book? Like what was the premise of your book? And you know I should have a copy of it. I didn't.

I didn't think of it. It's available. We're all fine books are sold. Book was called Chaos Monkeys, which I can explain the title if you want me to explain it. But basically long story short. PhD student drop out of the PhD. Go to work at Wall Street Wall Street. Wall Street blows up. I come back to tech right or back to tech. I never worked in tech, but I got to go in Berkeley and I had seen kind of the first tech bubble. So I was kind of vaguely aware of it.

Join tech, join ad tech, do my own startup, tiny little company, not a big success. Get the soul to Twitter. I end up at Facebook a year before the IPO as one of the early members of the ads team. So if you go like browse for shit on the internet and you see that same pair of shoes inside your Instagram feed or whatever, I created the very first versions initial not what's there now versions of that.

So a lot of the I was the first like product manager for ads targeting. So like how user data gets turned into a successful ads campaign is what I was responsible for in a very formative period in the company's history. And so I was there again, not that terribly long, but it was a lot happened. The company went grew in size enormously and figured out how to make money.

Like I didn't know how to make money. The ads as I remember is used to suck. And now everyone's like ads are either creepy or crappy. There's no in between. So I went from crappy to creepy. It was a big team. A lot of people did stuff to make that happen. So the book is about that. Like how do you start a company? How do you raise money? The inner work ends up Silicon Valley. I went through this famous incubator thing called the white combinator.

When you say crappy to creepy, do you mean invasive? Yeah, yeah. In the sense of like, oh, this is like totally relevant to like, oh, I was literally just searching for this thing. And here's an ad for it. Let me ask you about this because we've talked about this multiple times in the podcast. Sometimes you're having a conversation about something.

Oh, God, the microphone thing. Is that real? No, it's not real. No, no. I mean, I don't believe him. See, no, you're just talking about something the other day. I haven't searched for it at all. Okay. And I got an ad for it. I just something mean you were talking about. What was it? I, if I remember right and I couldn't remember, but it was something we're talking about after the show. Six hours later, I'm getting an ad for it. Here's what I bet on.

One of you two either searched or went to some website, not only one of us. So if I do, he gets an ad that potentially, yeah, how the term of art is called look alike audiences. What that means is so some retailer knows that you dump much of money at whatever. R.I. Cabela's pick your favorite repeller, whatever.

You two are buds and you interact a lot on whatever social media platform. If I'm Cabela's say just a sighted example, I'm like, okay, I know this guy is worth whatever $2,000 a year. Get me more people like him and companies like Facebook or other companies can say, ah, well, guess what? He talks to this dude a lot who by the way, who's profile kind of looks like yours. And so you'll get targeted for something that you did. Yeah, I get that. But we have very different online things.

I look to sneakers and stuff. He's looking at hunting and whatnot. The thing that came up, I wish I could I normally take a screenshot when these things happen because I'll share it with the person. Yeah, like look, just popped up on my phone. This was outside of that. Yeah, this is one of those things I go, all right, you need to talk about this. But again, I know there's.

Okay, so let me let the fences to it. But this was. Let me address the question. It's funny. There was a there's a planet money show about this in which they talked to various people who had this experience, try to figure out how it actually happened. I was I was a guest on it. But let me address the problem. So imagine imagine, let's say let's say Marcus look at is listening to your conversations and gets like a live stream of your phone all the time.

What fraction of the time do you think you're actually mentioning something commercially interesting that would be worth like targeting against like how often do you say, hey, I'm flying to Boston next week and I need to flight in a hotel on attacks and you say it in some structured way.

It's pretty rare, right? And the amount of I mean, think about the amount of data you'd have to be on a constant phone call basically to suck it would eat up your network like crazy. And then the fraction of the times versus you just like going to fucking kayak and like entering Boston and using that data.

And so I'm not saying it's technically impossible and in some future world who knows. But it would be difficult. And even if you managed to do it, there isn't one of the things one of the chapters of my book. I understand your listening to a chapter called the narcissism of privacy,

which comes off maybe more snarky than I mean, but privacy is a right and people have a right to it. Obviously, but I think one of the sort of misleading things when you think about companies like Facebook is that like Facebook wants to know the thing that you least want them to know, which is like your personal conversation with your loved one or whatever.

When it comes to commercial data that actually helps target ads, there's very little very little what you do or things that you wouldn't think of are what they want, not necessarily what you would like. What you would not want Facebook to know, right? But what concerns people is the idea that your microphone is picking up key words that they have accounts with.

So whether it's cell phones, tires, whatever it is, then you see an ad for it. It would be more possible in like the smart speaker systems you have at home, for example. Right. That would be so hard to do. That would be so hard to do. That makes sense. And so how would they target you for an ad with that?

Well, again, if you said something well structured, that would be easy to tease out. And if that's connected to the same account that's connected to your Gmail or your Google search or Amazon or Amazon, then they would show you the ads. So a lot of what happens that's actual targeting is like data joining. So like getting back to the cabalist example, like I understand you're into hunting. So maybe you shop at the local bellist or the best brochure.

They'll have your phone number and email for all the shit you buy online. And what they want to do is like find you online and sell you because it's the fucking deer hunting season sale. And they try to and so what they'll do is they'll upload that list of emails to Facebook and say, oh, this is the this is the deer hunting group. And then they'll show you ads based on your actual buying history.

So that's what a thing absolutely does happen. Yes, that makes sense. Yeah, that absolutely makes sense. Yeah. So that's the creepy. So that's the crepey. Yeah, that's that's creepy. And it pays for the internet that if it has if there's any saving grace to this is that it pays for the services that most people wouldn't be willing to pay for otherwise or wouldn't exist otherwise.

What's interesting is that it became one of the most valuable commodities in the world. And people just sort of gave up access to it because they didn't understand it was valuable when it first started being implemented when people's first started using Gmail or they first started searching for things on Google or using Facebook.

They never thought they were giving up access to something that's insanely valuable that would create not just some of the biggest companies in the world like Facebook and Apple and Google. But also some of the most influential companies that have ever existed. That's right. There's never been a company that has the kind of input on social policies or on the way the world functions like Facebook. Has there ever been a single individual company that has the kind of.

To put on my Facebook handle a little bit. I mean, if you go back to the world of electric con kite and like three TV networks and creating consensus around things like Vietnam or other events. I think there's precedent. It may not be it may not have been within one software company in the sort of way that you're talking about. But was there a media establishment that manufactured consent around certain social issues? I would say yes.

Yeah, that's true. But I think the difference is that they were in some way shape or form connected to the government. And we don't think that Facebook is. But maybe they are. Well, they respond to like warrants and stuff when it comes to policing online behavior at the end. I get into that a little bit in the book. Yeah. They definitely. You know, they do a lot of good predicting like child molesters and stuff and take them off of Facebook.

And also, I think people have to understand the sheer volume of stuff that goes on to their network every day. Right. So it's managing at scale. Exactly. You're obviously a very bright guy who's been very thoughtful about this. But one of the things that's hardest to convey to people who are on the outside looking in. Is like you open any dashboard and a company like that and every number is in the billions. Like billions of posts, billions of people, billions of photos.

Like even if they were trying to be like best effort, it would be very difficult to police a lot of what people want them to police. Like we looked up the data on YouTube about the amount of data, amount of videos that get uploaded to YouTube daily. And it's astounding. I forget what the number is. But the see what it is. Find out what is daily. But it's one of those things where you go, okay, how would you manage that?

How would you have to hire to watch that? How many people would you have to hire to watch every video that's being uploaded on YouTube every day? You would have to have millions and millions of employees whose sole job is to watch nonsense. Yeah. How you do it, you try scaling it with software. So one of the things I did at Facebook and I get into the book a little bit. I was briefly the product manager for the team that police adds.

So it's a smaller problem, the big problem you're talking about. But you know, people run ads. There's also like an ads creative policy like you can't run ads with like naked women and stuff at it, right? And they're, you know, and it was not as big as Facebook posts, but it was still a scale problem. What you do is you have a certain set of humans to do like the things that only humans can do well. And then you scale their efforts with software.

So if the guy tries to upload the exact same ad twice or the exact same video twice, even if he changes the contour slightly or he changes the shading. So it's not like literally the same file. You have smart software that actually picks it out and like prevents them from doing it. And so I mean, that's how they do it because they even face where Google can't afford to hire millions of people to review these ads or the videos. But the problem is when you do have humans that do it.

And then it's subject to the judgment. Yeah, like my friend Kyle Kalinsky got banned from Twitter today. And I don't know if you know who he is, but he has a great progressive political talk show, the Kyle Kalinsky show. And he also has another podcast that he does with Crystal Ball and you know, really bright guy, very well read, open-minded, you know, the whole deal. This is all he writes. He writes 2015 was seven years ago. And then he has a gift of a guy's head exploding.

You know, like just Jesus is like realizing, my God, time is flown. He got banned for that. He got locked out of Twitter and they're saying that it's a deput, you know, that fake, that image of a fake head blowing up. It's like from a, I think it's from scanners, the movie scanners. It's so silly. It looks fake. It's like a guy's head and then I get brains. Yeah, it's just the whole head explodes. They said that depicted images of torture or murder or some, you know, extreme gore. Right.

That, that, that fucking standard head exploding gift that everybody's been using from the beginning of time. That's, that's enough to get you blocked from fucking Twitter now. My view has always been that Facebook and all these companies should not be in the business of actually judging truth from people. And that they're, in my opinion, they're over-policing. And I've written a lot about this after the election 2016.

Eventually burned me out so much I went back to tech because it just drove me crazy. But I just don't think, you know, there's, there's hate speech standards in the United States, which, which are, are pretty narrow relative to other countries, free speech norms. And some people might not like that, but that's the nature of the First Amendment in this country. And I think it's a well-defined standard that has done this very well for decades.

And I don't see why, obviously, legally, the First Amendment doesn't apply to private companies, but at least morally or spiritually, I think it should apply. And that should be the standard, in my opinion. I couldn't agree more. But one of the things that drives me crazy about the left is that so many people on the left seem to want them to take a stand of being the moral police.

And they say, well, you know, you are allowing these extremist groups to thrive, and they're recruiting people, and they're listening to that. And so they use it as a justification. But the problem is once you do justify banning people because of an ideology you don't agree with, it's going to move further and further down the line to the point where things that you do agree. And you think should be fine are now worthy of getting banned for.

And that is happening right now. We're seeing that happen. Yeah, I think people have forgotten that you have to design laws and systems such that imagine your worst enemy we're implementing it. Right. And that changes things. Right. But that was when the, what was the NDAA, the National Defense Authorization Act, came into play, and Obama said, you know, it was indefinite detention of people without trials. And Obama was like, well, I'll never use that.

But okay, then don't fucking make it a law. Right. Because what if someone comes long after you, and then who comes long after him? Trump Trump. Like, hey, buddy, like, you know, like there's a guy who is a critic of Putin that just got sentenced today to, I believe, is a lot. Yeah, nine years. He's already been. I'm not funny. Yeah, and Obama had it. He has added to his sentence. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like that kind of thing, like the bridge between that kind of thing and the NDAA is not that far.

Like this ability to criticize someone is very important. And as soon as you restrict that ability, or restricts people's ability to communicate, or say controversial things, or say things that you don't agree with, you're getting close. You're bringing those things together, and it's fucking dangerous. It's really dangerous when you start doing that. Because it's just, it keeps moving.

It doesn't stop. If you don't have an absolute line of free speech, then you decide what shouldn't shouldn't be censored. And as soon as you do that, then it becomes subjective. And it becomes, you can apply all sorts of logic, and reasons why someone who you don't agree with should be removed from the conversation. And you could do so in bad faith. You could do so because it's going to cost you financially, or it's politically uncomfortable, whatever it is.

Dude, I think this has made people lose their minds. Like network computers have made people lose their minds. Look, the reality is that like freedom of speech, people don't actually want freedom. They say they do, but they don't. Like once their enemy gets a platform, it goes out the window. And getting back to our topic about religion, I think liberalism requires a certain religious belief and certain rights.

And our nation is defined by a sacred document that's adjudicated by this like rabbinical court called the Supreme Court. And all our political struggles end up being religious struggles almost because we do have this sort of credo religious belief in our country. And I think you really have to maintain that civic religion alive to have things like the level of freedom of speech of the Constitution applies.

And I think we've lost that civic religion. We've lost that faith in the United States. Yeah, it needs to be something that both sides espouse. Yes. That's something that both both sides talk about openly and agree to because we are a community. Whether we disagree about certain aspects of our laws and the way we communicate or whatever, that's fine. But we should have some rigid, rock solid fundamental principles that we apply to communication and to rights.

And if we don't do that, we're just, we're losing our perspective. We're losing the thing that made this country so exceptional, this exercise in, you know, in self-government. It's a unique place. And as soon as you start fucking with that and limiting freedom, you see like knuckleheads on television say that they think that maybe the First Amendment, the Second Amendment need revision, like, okay, by who? By you? By your minds? Your ideology?

Yeah. This is what I look getting back to the Judaism thing. That's what I love about Judaism. Like, you've got the 10 Commandments. You've got this as a Torah. You have to point some documents and say, we agree on this. This is like the metaphysical belief that we all, like, we need to have like a core moral foundation that nobody disagrees about. And then on top of that, you can layer, you know, thousands of years or in our case, hundreds of years of conversation.

But I think we've lost those moral foundations. Like you said, there's people who want to abolish the First and Second Amendment. When you say that Apple, you've got a lot of trouble with Apple. What kind of trouble did you get with Apple? God, I'm talking about it because it's like this weird random thing with Apple is so overshadowed every other thing I've done in the world.

And it's weird like the driver who drove it to the airport. He's like, oh, are you like going on roguing? Cause I guess it's the same company or whatever. And it's like, yeah, I think I'm going on because this thing with Apple and then he had his deal with Spotify. He's like, oh wait, you're the Apple guy?

I've been out of the house. He knew. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But yeah, I'm she knew. Sorry. I'm sexist. I assume it's a male driver. So what? What was happening? Yeah. Okay. So I did this book thing. I became like a media talking head wrote for wired magazine and other outlets and you know, did the whole media thing blue check thing drove me completely crazy.

Cause I don't really think I'm suited to it. I went back to tech. I worked for a big founders fund company called Branch Metrics building on your ads platform. That was interesting for a year and a half, two years. And then I went to Apple because Apple is also building an ads platform. My career for better or worse has been turning human eyeballs and data into money in various forms. It's what I do. It's what I know how to do. I know how to create an ad system.

There aren't that many people who know how to do that. Apple is creating an ad system. Does not a secret anymore. You'll see ads. If you scroll down on your search on your on your on your iPhone. And you know, so we're going to Apple. And like, you know, in some sense, I'm getting a little older. I wasn't doing it at the start up. It's not retirement exactly, but you're working for a big company. Right.

And you know, like I changed my LinkedIn to reflect the fact that I worked at Apple, which I did. And then what happened, which we've now seen in many companies. And I was the first of this at Apple. There was like a slack mob that. You know, kind of conjured itself and objected to the fact that I wrote this book, you know, what, five, six years ago now.

That at the time, again, to be clear, it was hardly a secret bestseller list, MPR book of the year, a wired book of the year. Not to like to my own horn, but like, right. It's about a secret as Christmas fucking day at this point. Like the thought of secret. They knew about it. Like they, my references, they asked about it. Because it's a little unusual to hire like a writer in a place that's very discreet like Apple, whatever.

So, you know, and they hired me and whatever. And then yeah, there was a slack mob. I can't talk too much about it because a lot of it's under NDA, but like I'm talking about with public, you know, Apple management panicked. And as a result of the whole mob thing, they kind of fired me. And that was the end. So when you say a slack mob, what do you mean by that?

So slack for those who aren't familiar, it's like this tool that it's almost like a version of like in house corporate Facebook that you post. There's message threads. It's used. It's a collaboration tool. So it's people that work for Apple that disagreed with you being in the company because of chaos monkeys.

Right. Which, you know, as I've described what pisses me off most about it is that in some sense they, among all the rest of it, they mischaracterized the book because, you know, there's a couple of passages in there. A little salty, right? It's like it's a work of literary nonfiction told in the voice of like a Michael Lewis or a hunter's Tom Sinner, Tom Wolf.

So it's not like a drive business book. It's like, oh look a crazy tech guy doing this crazy thing. But it was told in a certain literary voice. And, you know, fast forward five years, some of the jokes, yeah, we're a little crude and we're a little, a little salty. Nothing crazy. Salted my brain. I'm trying to entertain it. I'll try to be entertaining because the book's got a fucking cell. Right.

And so, but to be clear, 99.9% of the book is about entrepreneurship, how Silicon Valley works, the internal, you know, culture at these companies, how the ads world works. Like we talked about targeting. Like it's about that. It's not about one of the salty jokes is about dating in San Francisco and what's that like.

Like literally, it's like, it's like a one paragraph comment on it that's quoted out of context. I was actually praising the mother of my first kid saying, oh, this woman's amazing. Unlike these other women that I went dating with, like, which is a conversation we've all has like, oh, dating in the city so hard, whatever. It was that sort of joke, basically. But of course, it misses the context that I'm like, I'm been like pro, like I'm pro this woman that I'm in love with.

And it's so great that I'm not like dating these other women or whatever, right? Right. That was the statement. But they took that other context and a few other little comments here and there, ignored all the rest of the book, which again, most of it's about life inside Facebook and startups and whatever has nothing to do with Apple caved Apple caved. I know of what two plus trillion dollar company caved. And I think, you know, we can talk about this cancellation thing if you want to.

But one of the key aspects of this cancellation mobs, right, or this cancellation coups, as I call them, is that the politics are often deeply unpopular. I think something like 1% or less of Apple employees signed whatever petition it was to fire me like nobody like this mob was a very vocal but small minority inside the company. And yeah, Apple just freaked out and, and you know, I this is publicly known freaked out and fired me like within a day.

When would happen if Apple said fuck off to those people? Is that possible at this point? Do you think they've reached this? Oh, yes, well, most of them got by the way, after the fact most of them got fired, the leaders of the Slack mob actually really. Yeah, this is this is this is back out to you. Go ahead. I can't talk about that. But I mean, lost about the firing the other employees that that's publicly that's been reported.

Right. That's that's public. Other companies have shown a lot more moral leadership than Apple has. One example is Coinbase, so you're probably familiar with crypto company led by Brian Armstrong. And not to I guess a year and a half ago, right for their IPO. You basically said too much politics slack mobs are happening all this bullshit's happening. Look, if you don't like it, we're here to do work.

You don't like it. Here's a nice little severance package doors over there. Right. 5% of the company took it and the company's doing fine. And that's the end of that. Right. Well, I think that there's a real thing that people love to do today where they consider themselves an activist. Right. And part of being an activist is if someone says something that you don't agree with, you can get them fired. Right. And it's a weird kind of activism. Right. Because it's not it's not necessarily act.

It's you know, it's it's mob mentality. You're you're deciding that you want someone to suffer because they have an opinion that's different than yours. Right. Or that they say something that you think is a good feeling. You can feel good while doing it. Like you're literally in a mob, but you can feel a sense of moral right.

It's like it is just the greatest moral treat. Well, that is Twitter. I mean, in so many ways that that's a large part of what people like to do that people find gross about Twitter. And I don't get it. I'm just allergic like that mob mentality. I just I just can't do it. I just because you're not a loser. Right. Because most of those people that do that are truly unexceptional people. That's why they want to do it.

And a lot of the people that the attack are exceptional. And that's just natural human nature. People that have an inclination to mob up and gang up on people for things like that. Like generally speaking, they're failures or at least not exceptional. They're not what they would like to be. They're not anything that's standing out of the order. They're not like.

They're not exceptional. It's not they're not unique outliers where they're really out there kicking ass. That's not there's not the kind of people to do that. It's kind of people that are, you know, that there's a culture today in society.

There's a lot of people that think that they deserve more than they're receiving and they look at other people that are doing really well. And for whatever reason, they decide that that person doesn't deserve it. And part of it is because they're not, it's not like you see someone doing well and you go, wow, how the fuck did he make it? Well, whatever. But you instead, you say, how did he make it? We need to attack him. We need to take him down. And those people are almost entirely losers.

Yeah, and there's a lot of losers out there. But when you see a loser's text on Twitter, it's the same font. They use the same language. You don't know their background. You don't know what they're doing in their own life. They like, you see their words. You don't know what's the motivation behind it. And those words carry a similar meaning and a similar impact to a person who's like rational and compassionate and you know, it's a weird time when it comes to communication.

You know what, it's all this bringing back dueling. That's what it was. Because robbing somebody of their livelihood, I think is actually a major affront. Like you're literally what I used to feed, you know, feed my kids and like pay for housing. You're robbing me of that for some moral crusade.

Like you got to square up and you know, you got to either face off of 40 paces or go into the ring. Like that's a major affront. And you shouldn't just be able to do that anonymously playing this sort of video game called Twitter. Well, it's kind of a verbal assault. It's in some ways. It's in your attacking. You are doing something with, I mean, you're doing something with language where you're attacking someone.

And it's one thing if you're going after someone, you know, you're exposing a criminal who's like stealing money from people and you found, you know, you're a journalist, you found this like loophole where someone's like robbing old ladies out of the retirement fund. But if you're just trying to cancel someone because you don't like the jokes they wrote in a book about tech about their own life and you want to get them fired from a job that has literally nothing to do with it.

Yeah. And there's no actual behavior at this company, which is one thing that I want to clarify. So what are you? Can you talk about that? Are you in a lawsuit or can you? Yeah. No need to. No need to. Yeah. It's what is it like being in those companies, like whether it's Facebook or, you know, any any sort of tech company for someone on the outside, we look at it and we say, like, how are those fucking places run?

Because it's like, I've had a good friend who was in a big executive at Google. And now she works at another large tech company. And the way she described it to me, she's like, it is utter madness. It's utter madness. And the lunatics are running the asylum to a certain extent because there's a lot of people the company that she works for now.

So a lot of people that are inside the company that legitimately are mentally ill and they consider themselves activists. And they have to placate them because it's a certain percentage of the population of the people that work for the company. And they're the loudest and they oftentimes don't get worked on. And when confronted, they could they talk about their activism.

And like, she's like, listen, you are here for, you know, X amount of hours a day. This is your fucking job. You're not an activist. And don't think that if you're complaining about other things that this company does, that you doing that is a part of your job because it is not. Yeah. I mean, I think the companies are somewhat to blame because they've done the whole like bring a real self to work thing. Right. And again, what is that?

There's this philosophy among like the HR there that like, and if you're being cynical about it, it's engineered to get the most productivity out of you. Like the real the real self to like if you work out some of these companies, but again, to answer your question, I think it depends what stage of the company you join. We're talking about big companies like Apple, Google, Facebook now. It's a campus. It's a lifestyle. They do your laundry for you. They feed you.

They do. They do your laundry. They can't. Yeah. Yeah. There's like Apple does your laundry. I'm not sure about Apple because we were never in office because it was still under COVID. But Facebook had had laundry. I'm sure Google does. Yeah. Whoa. Yeah. It's it's weird. It's you join. I mean, it's a strained analogy, but it's kind of like a cult. And there's like a massive amount of corporate culture. Like I described this lot in Kazmaki.

Who said that? Who said that quote that every successful startup is a cult? I think it was Keither boy. I think from Founders Fund. And the thing is he's right. He's right. Like Facebook was a cult and I joined it and that was a happy member of it. It was very powerful. Everyone sacrificed themselves for the sake of the Facebook empire and its emperor.

Did it change your own personal thinking while you were there in the cult? Oh, yeah. Did you subscribe? I still do. I totally blood blue. I still do. Do a certain thing. Absolutely. Because again, it's a formative experience. Like some of the most impactful professional work I did was there. Like it or not.

Making taking Facebook ads from like the shitty stupid little iPad offer ads on the right to like literally the thing you just looked at or bought, which I know sounds cringy, whatever, that changed everything. I was one of many to be clear. It wasn't just me, but that changed everything about that company and was super impactful inside the industry. Like how much of an impact did it have when Apple came along and introduced these restrictions?

You're talking about ATT, which is like the ads for transparency thing for those who don't know. If you've got an iPhone, like you download an app and suddenly there's like this opt in Apple is showing you saying, hey, do you want to share your data with these people? That's hugely impactful. What that does is. So why does that matter? So Apple controls this. They create the hardware and the software and all of it. Right.

At the end of the day, seen from Apple's point of view, Facebook as powerful as it seems is just another app in the app store, right, which was always X fear, which is why he wanted to build a phone. Apple can say, look, Facebook, you can't you don't get to track users as well as you used to. You can't track Joe Rogan down or like anonymously your device ID. You can't do that anymore. You only get a certain level of granularity. It's how much tracking were they able to do that before that?

Well, I mean, an infinite amount they would track you individually. I mean, whether it's worth doing that's another matter, but they would get the individual device ID from your phone. And so they would know who you are in terms of that phone. What does that entail? Like again, you know, if you go to if you go to Cabellas and buy a thing, then you go to some you're playing a casual game and they show you an ad,

you playing that game and you buying that thing in Cabellas can be individually joined in a very precise way. And if you remove that and say, oh, you can't track Joe Rogan's phone, you're tracking 100,000 people out of throw, then they bucketize you. They put you in a bucket that isn't quite as precise as before. And what that translates into is fewer clicks, fewer sales, like the effect of amount of money that either the advertiser makes or the publisher that showing the ad makes goes down.

Now, is this for the end user for the person who has the phone is it beneficial that they've instituted these policies? Good question. If you got a warm fuzzy feeling inside knowing you're not being individually tracked, yes, but other than that, not particularly. But it also doesn't give up the access to your data that is very valuable commodity for Facebook. Right? So here's a tricky thing about data, right?

One of the one of the many misconceptions that I try to address in the book about how Facebook works is it's often not Facebook data that's being used to target you. Because if you think about Facebook, right, it's like you're posting random photos, you're engaging with content, but a lot of your commercial activity, like booking airplane flights, shopping for shit doesn't happen on Facebook. Facebook doesn't know about that, strictly speaking.

So how how do they solve that problem that like we got to show him fucking shoe ads and Facebook doesn't know shit about what shoes you look. So part of this is what I described in the book and what I helped build in the early stages. There's a way of joining you Joe Rogan Facebook you to Cabela's you in some relatively data safe way that that lets Cabela show you an ad for those shoes.

Facebook doesn't necessarily know all the Cabela shit because Cabela doesn't want to let Facebook know that shit because they don't trust Facebook. And so a lot of the stuff that's going on isn't like, oh Facebook knows everything about you it's like no Facebook knows who you are on every device because you tend to use Facebook everywhere maybe not you but other people.

And so that means that they can join you very well to all the other commercial activity you do and you use Facebook a lot so they have lots of opportunities to maybe show you an ad so that's really Facebook's strength but getting back to your original question, how does Apple fuck that up?

Well, it fucks it up because it doesn't know who you are on that device at the individual granular level anymore. And so it can't talk to Cabela's and say, oh, that guy who's will look for these weird things like show it in the sad that that can't happen anymore. Is it in any way negative for the person who's the end user? Good question.

Because maybe you would want to see those those ads because this is something that you're actually interested in purchasing. I mean in the happy case but let's face I mean in the happy case and that your person who's you know you have full control over your urges you're not a person who's just like you know you can't afford something but you buy it anyway because you're fucking crazy and you saw the ad and you can't help yourself because we know that there are people like that out there right.

So in the best case scenario is it better. I would think so but isn't that like what you do is business. I think the status quo is a lot better than the like stupid punch the monkey ads. You used to remember those ads and like display band. I probably don't remember them but like in the day to be like a little moving target into like punch the monkey.

Like you can either see that bullshit or you can actually see an ad that maybe has a chance of being relevant in Instagram feed so yeah that you give anything up to have those relative ads.

No in fact I mean you gain things like a lot of services wouldn't exist if they weren't paid for via ads so like the reality is if Facebook ads start sucking more I the amount of money to make Brad's goes down they're just going to show you more ads so do you think that Android phones handle it better because Android phones allow more of those things in super wonky question was expecting this wonky.

Yeah no no no it's good I think I love talking about it but the model that Google and Apple have are somewhat different. Apple is a fully you know vertically integrated thing they create literally the chips and the software you're looking at. Google is a little bit different you can buy Android phones made by all sorts of manufacturers their model in general tends to be a little bit more open to third parties and so there's a whole ads ecosystem in Google where I could

fucking fill this wall or whiteboard with all the little boxes of all the little companies that like get together to show you a single ad and so Google is a little bit better about being more open to the outside mind you they still use monopoly power in various ways like they're not saints.

But Apple has a more closed mode approach to me that's why they're building an ad system because they want to make money ads but they're not going to go to Google route they're going to build more than likely I mean not that I have deep inside into it anymore but more than likely they're going to build it themselves because they have a more closed vision of it. How they think about data prives here's another thing really on a geek out.

One direction apples going this kind of interesting is that a lot of the data for your iPhone's going to live on device like in other words for the past 20 plus years of internet we've had this model where like you do shit on a phone. Data goes into the cloud weird shit happens and you get shown a page or an experience a lot of that's changing right like probably most of what you do on a phone is through an app it's not a browser anymore it's like the code is running on your on your phone.

You're producing data on that phone like why shouldn't the computation and all the shit that happens happen on the phone these phones are actually pretty powerful right. And so a lot of things are moving in that direction for a bunch of reasons one of the reasons actually is privacy and you know Apple and other companies have made public statements about this was like oh it's more private like what's the ultimate opt out.

My data on this phone you know I do I take and I throw into the fucking like their data's God right while like opt out in deletion when the data is in the cloud and a bunch of third parties have it. You never really know right right but if you keep the data on the phone it is better in many ways right it also feels creepier right one of the things Apple did recently I don't

if you follow the story they launch a system to catch what's called csam which is a child sexually exploitive material which can be put on basically and they launch the system that would it's complicated but would scan photo on your phone basically yeah I heard about that which is weird right and it's funny because it is that on device paradigm it's like okay like if you got the photo from our recall they would only scan photos that were going to get synced to iCloud anyhow but but they were.

Doing what's called looking at the hash of the image on your phone it was it was code running on your phone and people felt very you know felt like that was an intrusion and people kind of basically revolt about it I'm not sure if they discontinued the program or not but well the problem is like what if you have a photo of your son naked in a kiddie pool laughing in your back yard needs to.

To that kiddie porn right just a couple things that go wrong here right how does the false positive like right and innocent person getting we get flagged right one is you've got a photo that just happens the way we typically work as a database of you know child exploited material and they look for it on your phone and they do what's called hashing the image basically that means is like decomposed is complicated image into like a simple string that could be easily compared right and say like this is the image now.

If you've got an image that happens to map to that then you could have a collision that space and it's like oh it's kiddie porn but it's not or you just have a random image the way these images work like a lot of researchers found like a random image image image of a dog would actually map to this other thing right so there's lots of ways of getting it wrong and of course apple assured people that they wouldn't get it wrong because of this and that but it's scary right like beginning the line is being like a kiddie porn guy when it's just like a picture kid or even like a random picture.

That is scary. It's also scary to people is the idea that someone could hack into your device yes and implant some sort of questionable material like fucking I mean I'm in this high school group with people I went to high school with and what's that and you know it's a bunch of fucking bros from I mean they post all sorts of stupid shit that I would not normally share like right on my phone but like what's that by default saves those images or to a tie photo and so you can imagine the sort of shit they post and like it ends up in like my photos real and apple is like what the fuck like.

Don't say this shit like that. That's what I think it happened. Yeah. Yeah and someone could send you so like if you but I have some really ridiculous friends making send you something that's actually illegal right yeah.

It's a problem the flip side of it just to take the other side of it is like dude like there's a lot of fucking kiddie porn a lot a lot of child sexual exploitation that you would like someone sent me this article about 108 people that got arrested for child sexual exploitation and four of them were Disney employees and my friend was like I can't believe how many fucking pedals are out there and I'm like I bet there's a lot more than we think a lot more.

Yeah it was that little island I lived on orcas islands I did look little island the guy who ran the bagel shop got arrested in an FBI sting they were in some either telegram or signal group passing around the sort of material and the FBI fucking showed up on some island in the

Northwest like arrested dude in the middle of this business and you know I was curious because it's like a low okay so I went and read the federal indictment which is public record you can go read it I would not advise reading it by the way because I think part of what they do is they include details and materials in the indictment to make the person look as guilty as possible

and so they describe the images which are disgusting obviously I know it's just it's worse than you can imagine I wouldn't advise anybody going and seeing it or like even reading about it it's the most revolting thing you possibly imagine it's like yeah that motherfucker should go to jail yeah absolutely go to jail so it's a moral trade off yeah and there's a very bizarre

argument that somehow another seeing those images keeps people from actually performing acts of violence on children yeah but that is a fucking shifty argument and there's another even shifty argument that CGI versions of child pornography or should be acceptable because it's like a you know a way that they can get it out of their system or whatever it's yeah it's it's just fuck that it's real it's this fuck that that's a real like hidden sort of secret part of our society that there are

people out there yeah like I have a friend who almost had his child kidnapped the other day like someone was trying to lure his kid literally into a van did that's when the fucking glad comes out oh my god it's so scary it's so scammy was at a park and luckily he pays attention but what happens if you don't and then the kids

gone and you have no way to find them and they're gone forever like what like how many houses are there to search how many people are there to look at how many how far did they drive with your kid you got these like tracking watches for kids that you can put on them they're gonna be the same Christ yeah and that's when the government says all you need is a chip just take a chip and we're gonna put a chip in your child and we'll find your child

everywhere yeah this went dark pretty fast dude but when you start talking about child exploitation that's some of the scariest shit in our our society yeah the fact that we have this first world super advanced like the most progressive society on earth essentially you know the the most freedom the most and that they're still without you know the our moral foundation our ethics are 21st century

like as advanced as we can in terms of the way we feel about people's rights and that's still still there's people out there that want to do that to children yeah it's dark it's dark especially for people like you and I have them who have children oh yeah when you have kids suddenly

changes everything any aggression or violence towards children literally fills you with the most murderous rage instantly my friend Jim Brewer said that best you know when we were talking once he said I now understand murder he goes I never understood murder like why would anybody want to kill somebody but if you want to harm my kid I get murder he goes I understand it yeah and he's a very peaceful guy it's it's a part of you know you're always gonna have when you have a

spectrum of behavior you're always gonna have the worst on some end of the spectrum it's gonna be the worst possible scenario of what kind of human exists yeah and that's when someone will step in and say well you want that censored right and you go of course but isn't that different yeah man I think the the free speech in the US that like you know imminent lawless action like if you're actually like browsing a crowd to like go kill

somebody or do something illegal that that's where the state should step in there's actual physical harm or crime and doxing and things along those lines yeah um so we were talking about Google phones like yeah is how well how significant is the difference to the end user if you have like say an Android phone versus a Apple phone in terms of privacy there is the issue of encryption like I I messages are encrypted but someone could hack into your iCloud and gain access to your

iMessages yeah right yeah for I mean from the privacy perspective I'd probably say Apple's probably a better phone if you're totally paranoid about it for like for example Google still for most advertisers makes available that unique device the deal was talking about like they don't have the ATT thing and so if you're really paranoid about that Apple's probably as much as you know I've had a rough history with

that company I would have used in something like WhatsApp or you know a signal or something like that that has I'm not a crypto expert but WhatsApp in theory is end to end encrypted that means that literally from your phone to their phone to encrypted and even Facebook they can see the traffic certainly but they supposedly can't actually read what you're writing and when supposedly is not a good word well I by contrast signal

which I use a lot is open source and so the world has looked at the code that in theory at least is running on the on the phones and so there it's in theory save in theory in theory in theory yeah yeah I use signals well oh do you yeah yeah I just you know I never know you know Edward Norton or Edward Norton outsellers Edward Snowden Snowden recommended it so I'm like okay well listen to that guy if anybody knows about privacy

do the reality is my life is so boring that like even the FBI was seeing everything you know what what would they like what would happen yeah but that's that's an argument my friend used when the NSA was caught spying on people like what are they what are they going to find I'm like it's not the

Kate that's not the point the point is it's human beings that have access to your data and they shouldn't so some people shouldn't be allowed to just read your email especially when it's a national security agency and they can put you in jail that's it in the government they have guns but you know

like exactly my privacy when it comes like somebody trying to sell me shoes like I don't give a fuck right but when it comes to the government different story but we have to look at it as a perspective in perspective like think about how the apple and poise targeted you for things taken

out of context in your book yeah what if someone takes things out of context in your emails and uses that as evidence of your piece of shit in a trial where they're trying to convict you and they trying to sway the jury that's where it gets sketchy right yeah but you know there's this like

tourism and startup life that like for most companies it's not a technical problem that's a problem it's a human problem and those problems are actually harder to solve technical problems have some solutions so do you think that like the technical solutions to human problems are just like

prophylactic I mean they're helpful like I use signal and I like it but at the end of the day you have to believe in rule rule of law on honest courts and that's that's the real solution to it I think one thing you can criticize I think tech for is that they have it's a solutionist mentality

that thinks that there's literally a technical solution to everything and I don't buy that actually I think yeah you're using an apple phone I used to be Android but then it's funny when I was getting the apple job I bought a pile of apple shit as part of my due diligence and so that's

the phone that I bought when I got the offer do you think you're all switching back no I mean I don't hate the company that much no no but I mean is it a different experience is it a better experience for you in terms of like knowing that they they don't give you the targeted ads and

like what's better to you I like the Android I think the Pixel phone is a fine phone I think people who shit on Android phones coming from the iPhone world are like kind of dumb a little bit like that I think they haven't used a recent phone they're just different a lot of what I do is

is on the Google stack like calendar and Gmail and stuff which integrates really nicely with Android a lot of Apple software and services historically I think haven't been quite as good although that is changing so I don't know I could probably go either way I think people who like switch and like

oh this sucks it's just like it's just small memory that you haven't cost them to yeah that's it yeah yeah there's certain things about Apple phones that I like and certain things about Android phones that I like do you use both yeah yeah I really I'm Samsung and I have an iPhone I use cool yeah there's uh you know the innovations come out quicker on Android phones they do actually yeah like I have an Android fold one of those ones like before I want to watch a video it's fucking like a little

tablet yeah it's pretty dope you know um but it's it's also funny that people get upset and they get a green text like shut the fuck up yeah who gives a fuck it's like this stupidest fucking thing to be a snob about you you don't like the color of the text oh god guess what and the Android phone

doesn't show up that way it could be all kinds of different colors it's customizable and then and again if you're using signal which I like to use signal I just say it's only in the US people still use text like overseas is mostly WhatsApp or signal or whatever else they're actually

even use texting yeah they do that too because it's more um it's it's cheaper yeah that's why that's why WhatsApp took off our early overseas um because texting could be expensive in these countries and it was essentially free while in the US they always had like the 300 text a month

like it was functionally free and nobody cared about it so it wasn't that big a deal what do you think that privacy and this this thing that's going on where Apple is sort of cutting off the stream of ad revenue that used to exist do you think that that's going to shape

in many ways the future of how cell phones integrators and networks and systems huge way i mean there's a bunch of reasons for doing it right from the vibe that I got in my brief time there like i think people like Tim Cook and senior management like caribou

privacy like it's not just like a bullshit line that said strategically it totally benefits them the fact that they have tighter control of the data on that phone that only they make right so it happens to line up very nicely and yeah i think i think the about part of the reason why i

joined like why would you join like a big slow company when you're like this tech entrepreneur guy whatever google and and apple are going to define that future in mobile right and i think people like our players like facebook are going to be second fiddle they're just going to be apps

in their ecosystems and so yeah that's i think it's going to change the way that and this business if this on device thing takes off that's going to change the way a lot of things work how are they going to implement that it'll just be it'll be slowly and like like while this child

filter thing right like they will just deploy code that lives on your phone and that the data lives on your phone and like the add system eventually will probably move in this direction as well if i'm reading the tea leaves correctly and so that what that means is like when you browse again

you're shopping for kabelis shit or whatever on your fucking phone that day just doesn't leave the phone and kabelis targets you on the phone with an ad experience on apple and your date and your data never left the phone or so how would they know that you're browsing for kabelis

yeah i mean there's there's a lot of complicated tricks about it like um what's called differential privacy federated learning just there's a lot of little clever hacks because you might ask like well but then how do you train models like how do you know like how do

you train from like a million phones right to know that like a guy who does this should see that ad like how do you collectively learn it because an individual is not going to generate enough data on one phone there's clever hacks around that that try to collect that information in a relatively

privacy safe ways come up with a model that says oh he's looking for extra than why but then have your data never leave never really leave the phone and do it that way it's a very different way of engineering things yeah because i was talking to a friend and we're you know discussing

privacy and GPS and they were saying you should never use uh ways and never use uh google maps you should use apple because apple destroys all the data i'm like yeah but you also don't get as good of an experience right because you want to know where the speed traps are because how they know where the speed traps are because everyone reports it well not only that where the accidents are what's the best route to get around the traffic they're far superior like you know ways was acquired

by google right but ways as far superior right and it's so superior they've set up cops in certain areas in New Jersey where they don't allow people to drive through the neighborhood that don't live there because so many people were routing traffic through their via ways that was causing these

traffic jams and these like sleepy communities because people figured out you could fucking speed right through this neighborhood and some people were violating speed limits and some then they just started implementing cops you know and putting these stops where like you can't drive here

unless you live here which is kind of sketchy because you're supposed to be able to just drive wherever the fuck you want if it's an open name road right here's one thing i would say about privacy here's another thing i think people kind of miss perceiving a lot of the privacy is all it's

like your buddy there who like don't use ways even though it's convenient people think about privacy in these very absolute ways as an absolute right and i think in reality people are very smart about it it's actually a commodity that they trade for other things right so you trade some privacy for

security right like the fourth amendment like you don't have absolute privacy from the government if you're dealing drugs they can kick in the fucking door assuming they actually have a judge is warrant and we all kind of collectively agree to that because we think well that's an okay

compromise or we trade some privacy for convenience it's like okay sure ways knows where i'm going but i know where the fucking speed trap is and that's pretty cool or you know i posted about this interview i'm giving up some of my privacy but in an exchange for community because people will see it and they'll engage with it whatever so i think a better way of thinking about privacy is not an absolute terms and like this paranoid thing it's like okay am i getting value for my privacy right

like what is what i'm giving up like is that worth it for what i'm getting right and often it's not true it's like no this just sucks and you're just using your data and like fuck that but very often it's like yeah like you know i think people are very good at judging that i think people are

smarter than people think do you think most people even consider it i think it's a small percentage of people that even pay an attention to shit so many people are just using stuff just probably fewer people talking about it than you then you then you get a twitter and just

probably even fewer people who actually know how it works but i don't know i don't know i don't think people are that dumb and i think you know one of the interesting things about the whole anti-face book media cycle like from 2016 is that if you were to look at like the usage data for Facebook

like you wouldn't be able to see where that backlash happened like people didn't actually stop using Facebook or they might have stopped using it for other reasons because they got bored of it and they moved to instagram or whatever but was there an actual for all this tech backlash the people

actually use amazon less or facebook less particularly after covid with you know people being locked in and all the rest of it did people actually revolt against tech or is that just an impression in some journalist in some commenters mind i think it's mostly the latter actually but that

impression does have an influence on the stock price right doesn't it maybe i mean to the extent that it impacts revenue um well what what caused uh meta or Facebook what caused them is it turning it into meta like what causes stock crash um the stock has significantly dropped right i

i think there's there was a few things in that earnings release you're talking about the one last quarter one of it was that i think growth slowed down which is the first time in Facebook history who is because of this implementation that apple oh no i don't think it was that i think no no i

think it's just um it's funny i kind of warned about this in the in the kota to to the cast monkeys did facebook has more users than like christianity right most people on the internet are on some Facebook property either facebook and instagram or whatsapp right and so at some point you were

not a human it's like you just don't have growth anymore that is a crazy statement facebook has more users and christianity yes who the fuck would have ever predicted that 20 years ago isn't that wild how long is facebook been around it hasn't even 20 found it in the mid-Ottes i think

shoot 2004 to s5 my god what a crazy statement so in less than 20 years something has arisen with more users than christian christian that's bonkers man that really is it's really crazy and you think about it that way i think they're pushing three billion users have you met zuckerberg yep no how

is he i don't know him personally well to be clear but the book opens in the meeting where i'm pitching a lot of this crazy targeting stuff in a zuck meeting because he had to approve it because it was a big step you know he's he's he's he seemed to me very somewhat cold and aloof but

definitely in charge like the wimpy dweebe character and like the social network or that movie or whatever that wasn't the vibe i got from him in the meetings i was in maybe decided tough and up after that movie show them did he's like it he's like an alpha male nerd like he's not and he

used to have like these challenges for himself like learn chinese or do this or only eat meat that he shot himself like we have these like nichian quests yeah like and so i've seen him speak chinese like in in china supposedly it's good yeah yeah they go crazy because he is good at it like wow

no he's clearly an exceptional mind right it's it's clear you know it's really interesting but also the burden of responsibility of running a company that is deeply rooted in who knows how many countries it is now and so many people when they buy phones in these other countries facebook is

default installed on the operating system or what's that yeah wild and he's only like thirty eight or something hold a little younger than me yeah he's like in his late 30s now what the fuck man imagine imagine trying to navigate that world and keeping your shit together you'd be cold and

a little too i mean i guess i'd imagine i saw him on lex freedman's podcast and he seemed much more normal in communicating with lex than i think i've ever seen him anything it's more he's seem more comfortable you know i think he freezes up a little bit in public speaking like a lot

of his all hands he'd have a weekly all hands he didn't come across as charismatic i mean there's a scene in the book that i mentioned one chapter we got an extra bit of vanity fair remember google plus i know everyone fucking fucking yeah but i one point google plus like a big deal

and it was the first time that like google that facebook faced like an existential crisis from another attack incumbent company went fucking bonkers nuts he gave a speech almost like a roman senator on the senate floor of like you know google must be destroyed and all this and it was kind

of pretty inspiring actually really so he can definitely have his moments yeah yeah google must be destroyed well now he quoted i think it's uh kato the elder a famous roman senator and he would end all his speeches with uh katago linda as the carthage must be destroyed is in the context of

the punicors and so he just randomly cited that and the implication was clear and just to give you an idea of how crazy facebook was like the same day there was a printing like a silk screening poster lab in the company they literally printed that phrase with like a roman helmet and it appeared

all over it all over facebook and then everyone stole the fucking posters they're all gone i'd like struggle to find a photo because vanity fair wanted a photo of it and i couldn't find because i didn't manage to steal one of the poster friends sent me a photo before it got stolen the fucking

thing that's how crazy that's how crazy facebook was i know it's it's laughable it's a joke but what was his argument for destroying google plus like why do you think it was such a threat as a competitive threat obviously that's all it was but it wasn't it was jenky and sucked my friend

who was working at google at the time with this is going on she was trying to tell me like oh this is gonna take over it's gonna be amazing like this is clunky and shitty is a terrible experience the thing is to defeat an existing incumbent you can't just be like 10% or 20% better you have to be

like 300% better yeah and it wasn't anywhere near that it wasn't as good it wasn't even as good but but look at the risk though right google has so many other touch points gmail youtube and they were plugging it with a fucking g plus button everywhere oh yeah which is basically a monopoly

behavior like you're using your advantage in one market to take over another market which is exactly what microsoft with the browser so the threat the thought was they were going to do that with facebook but it's amazing how bad it was that still didn't work into it mean with all that

input all that influence still sucked yeah kind of shocking yeah at the end of the day for all that struggle like he declared like seven day work weeks like balls out the whole fucking thing end of the day it just died seven day work weeks to kill google plus oh yeah man they would serve

meals in the weekend oh christ there's a scene there where I go to like facebook on sunday full parking lot I go to google empty it's like oh okay I see who's I see who's really just looking taking this for real at the time again facebook is different now I imagine but at the time

you know this wasn't that early like I wasn't that early employees like 2010 or 11 11 and it still felt like a startup in the sense that it was hyper motivated people were like super fucking hardcore posters on the walls everyone wearing the same shit I mean I almost compared the communist

cubits like our great leader our great system of values posters on the wall everyone dressed the same way what was the the dress I mean my uniform they had this I forget who makes it it might have been like american apparel it was like this little fleece thing some people had hoodies some

people had like the facebook branded thing and I would wear like a regular shirt and like pants or whatever but you think that people they they definitely tailored their wardrobe to fit in I think it just became the default they'd have these things all hackathons where you spend like

an all nighter hacking on shit and you get a t-shirt for that and it was like a badge of honor and you'd collect them because it'd be one like every month or two and so people would wear that you know it's a lot of swacks like I was part of a team there's like an ads product that had like a

logo everything had a code names just looking an owl on it to you to wear like the owl shirt or whatever I know I it's there's a phrase from Paul Graham who writes all these blog posts about tech and he runs this thing called white combinator and he said if you brought

back London from the grave and brought him onto the campus of a large tech company right and he saw the posters on the wall the great leaders the uniforms he would think the communism at one that literally this is it the dream came alive it's all true and then of course you would show them

like the bank accounts of the various people and like well not not not so fast Vladimir right isn't quite the Soviet Union but yeah it was it was and obviously it's not like living in Cuba obviously like there's real struggles there that are not at all of course but but it felt definitely

felt that way yeah is there um the distribution of wealth in those companies oh yeah what is that like excellent point did yes the best questions you know it's amazing that's that's that's that's exactly one of the issues right because the way these companies work right like how early

you are in the company defines your wealth and how much fraction of the equity you get because the real money's in the equity like the salaries actually aren't that high I mean they're healthy but they're not crazy it's the equity where you really make the real money right and the fraction

you get frankly of like the cap table like the pie changes by orders of magnitude like literally within like and the value of it a year or two of joining so if I had joined Facebook like two or three years before it would it would have changed the entire picture so what does that mean like say

where it Facebook you're my boss right you could even have you could be my boss and maybe you joined later because you're just a more senior person you came laterally right I'm worth whatever x million like a shit ton of money because I've been here since like the very founding and I'm

doing the same job as you maybe even a more junior job and I'm worth like a fortune and you're not so like what is that conversation like I you know I go to I go you know scuba diving and Honduras on the weekend on a private jet and you went and saw a movie and mountain view and we come back

hey Sergio would you do on Monday it's like how's that combo go right because this guy is living in a different world than you wow and everyone kind of knows it but you can't talk about it because obviously it's like super corrosive to morale but that that's so if everybody knows it is it

publicly discussed is it disclosed like how do they know how much money these other people have they just know you don't know it's not public nobody ever knows but they kind of know that it's a different world I mean there's websites you can go at like like for big come see what the

comp levels are so you can sort of get an idea but if you're talking about the early stage of a company and it's so variable right like I came in what's called an aqua hire what that means is like they acquire a company but really they're just buying you so it's just like a nice hiring offer

and the numbers there can vary by a lot and if you just get hired via like a college fucking recruitment fair it's totally different and then again if as time goes on and Facebook shares go from five bucks to 50 suddenly a two x different in stock has a major or even more has

a major difference wow yeah so is there a bunch of resentment inside the the company because of that is there a call to adjust I didn't get that feeling again you don't know necessarily right it's a bit of blind man's bluff there there's no way to actually know the pay delta so I don't think

there's a lot of resentment there um I mean in theory the reward should it should vary with the risk but I'm not sure it's true like to be honest if I were giving startup advice joining as an early employee at a startup I mean now startup wages are pretty good so like you're not taking such a

big financial risk but to be honest like the fall off in the upside between like a founder and like a you know early employee is is massive it's by orders of magnitude potentially and it's like you're taking the same fucking risk it's like they want the fucking company right like are you

actually get fill you know filthy rich if it becomes Google of course everybody gets rich in a Google Facebook scenario reality is most companies don't right they they either fail most fail or they have like a middling outcome like the company sells for a certain amount it's like okay

it's a healthy outcome but it's not like everyone including the fucking dog walker got his million like no no that's why it's fascinating when a person like Zuckerberg exists right where one person does develop a company that does manage to become it fucking insanely enormous

yeah it's hard for me to imagine what the world looks like through his eyes your entire world grab I mean I've seen it through the eyes of founders of smaller companies and even there like I've known people who have found nothing Facebook size but you know a few hundred a few hundred people

worth a billion or more on paper they're worth maybe a hundred million or something and it's weird they become like the son of a solar system that revolves around them right everything from their executive assistant to their therapist or the person walks their dog to all

their work life they're at the center of this of this thing and the world revolves around them and it kind of warps warps its perspective and in the case of Zucker must be even more so but it warps perspective for famous people you know like it's like my wife had a conversation with

me the other day we were talking about something and I thanked her for bringing it up and she and because we had like candid conversation but I go thank you like I need to talk about that I need to hear that from you and she goes you know nobody talks to you right what do you mean she goes

nobody really talks to you like I see how people talk when you're not there then I see how people talk when you're around like everybody like it's weird when you're around right and I'm like yeah I guess I guess I kind of know that but I don't know that I mean I know it but that's my life you

know that's my my experience is I have to be aware of it but I have no reference point it's like these European folktales where the king dresses as a commoner and goes talk to his people you've got to just get a really good disguise and go out there and talk to your bros and see what

they say let's probably get some makeup like some artificial nose and shit like they can do it like you saw the werewolf out there and someone can make something like that they can make some wild shit are you currently involved in tech now are you just doing your your blog and your

sub stack what do you yeah so yeah I've got a few things going on I wear a few hats so I've got the the sub stack deal the sub stack guys are great and they gave me like a pro deal to like take it seriously it's a full-time thing and so it's like a book advance they you know they

front you money and then you drive subs and that's been interesting I've got a podcast show on this app called call in that's kind of like clubhouse remember clubhouse which was like the social audio thing I do because no vol was trying to tell me that it was going to take off I'm like you're

out of your fucking mind and it did during covid right like you saying I'm so high on this I like because you're an investor investor I think you wanted me to talk it up as well but I got on with Tim Dylan and we did it after a podcast once and I was shit all over it I was like this is

crazy and he's like well it's private I go this ain't private I go someone's gonna fucking put this on line literally an hour after we did it it was on you do like come on man this is the fucking internet I do think there's something to like unscripted social audio that's different than like a

podcast right like sure conversations with people yes yeah like you just decide randomly out of nowhere to have a phone conversation with Lex Friedman and you guys both upload it right yeah for sure definitely yeah Twitter spaces does it there's a zap called calling back by this guy David's

actor spaces still exist yeah yeah if you go to top of Twitter you should see all right so that's a thing like where people are talking on a phone like that I didn't know that that was even going on yeah it seems to have a decent amount of a decent question how come no one has figured out an

alternative to Twitter I mean I know getter existed but then when I got on getter one of the first things that I noticed is that getter imported all of my Twitter followers and tried to pretend I had nine million followers on getter I'm like how is that you don't even have nine million users

I was just prox this is shenanigans correct yeah um how come no one's figured out another Twitter because because of network effects like all these Twitter alternatives are always some like right wing thing when you write it was like unfettered conversations whatever but it's like

dude like a I don't think the censorship on Twitter is that bad for most people that's such that they would actually switch because of that if you're somebody really on the edge maybe and also like you want the opposing side there to make fun of like that that creates the spark that

creates the tension who wants to sit in a totally right wing tweet I wouldn't no I don't want to do that but but I don't also don't like do you know what the Babylon B is yeah yeah did you see that they got funny and shit Twitter I know they got banned from Twitter for saying Rachel Levine is

the man of the year right I saw that and they won't even take it down which I salute them I mean that's a fucking ballsy move because they're gonna lose their Twitter account because in they're saying you know like it's true but it's it's not true that she's the man of the year

I mean it's true that it's a biological male but the fact that they have the balls to say we're not deleting this you know I'm like I I support that but I don't support them getting banned for that that's a fucking joke like you can't crack a joke web web three solves this Joe decentralized

decentralization do you think that that is something that would be adopt universally by a large amount of people we'll see I mean in general I'm kind of pro web through I think it's I think it's a fascinating thing and I hope to actually move into that direction myself do you just for the yeah

non sure um it's funny I don't feel like I'm a total crypto like as you can tell like I don't talk about things that I don't feel I'm a domain expert I always feel like I'm a thin ice but I'll I'll do it and possibly run the risk of crypto bro rage um so web web three is interesting you

you I'm sure your listeners have heard of like Bitcoin and like maybe Ethereum and stuff and like that's those are interesting like financial applications of it which is totally valid and cool but if you can imagine a bigger vision of that of decentralization is you're describing

why is it called one way I get at it's like what is web three like why is it called web three like what the fuck is web two like what is web one right so web two is like everything we know it's like Facebook to it's like it's like these gated platforms in which you know if if Babylon be pisses

off the fucking Twitter people then like they just get thrown out the platform they don't own anything right right in many ways what the web three people want to want to recreate is web one which we're both old enough and some of your listeners I'm sure old don't remember like email

fdp tell net like core protocol hdp like the web right these are core protocols that aren't defined by like Facebook or Twitter saying this is the way the world works like no we agree that this is the product like when you send an email this is what the actual document needs to look like for you to

receive a valid email and there's no way to kick anybody off email you can't be I mean Gmail might say I we don't want to give you a Gmail account anymore but email as such is not shut down for you you can still send email right and so web three in a trustless environment like with not people

necessarily agreeing in direct ways coming up with a way to recreate a way to say like hey I want to I own this thing like an NFT like a picture of an ape say I own this thing and like the world thinks I own this thing and it's not a function of suspects or an auction house or whatever saying that

I own this thing in theory that's how it should work so that that's the idea so you imagine like a a web three version of Twitter how does it work you post a fucking thing it exists in the block to this thing called a blockchain which is basically a public database that we all agree on

everyone maintains via various mechanisms we have to get into and that's it and then I can have in the same way that like email just works I have an app that sits on top of it that like reads that and renders it to me in some Twitter like way but there's there's no Twitter that can just say

Babylon be you don't exist anymore or Donald Trump get off of Twitter right that's the goal interesting and you think that that's possible to implement large scale like to have the whole country adopt it like what would it take do you think it would take some sort of sensor a

gregious censorship thing like I think Donald Trump being kicked off Twitter was a step in that direction where so many people were so furious that the idea that you could take a sitting president and remove him from your social media platform that this could like you needed something along

those lines maybe even more egregious like you said about privacy I think I think those aspects to your average person who isn't living on the edge and posting like weird crazy shit isn't that convincing I think for web through to take off and to be clear out my career has not been

like consumer internet it's been like on the back end like monetizing the usage but if our to bet on this there has to be something new and cool that web three enables that just doesn't exist that's going to drive that adoption you're not going to you're not going to convince people to leave Twitter

for like the new web three version of Twitter just because oh there's less censorship going on right I don't think that it's really like top of mind issue for most users what's interesting is Twitter still allows pornography right I do I see when I search for random names that collide with the

point stars name I see porn I don't know if it's legal I don't think it's allowed you don't think it's allowed I mean it was for a long time right okay yes I mean for a long time they I mean there's no way they don't know that porn stars are going to post pictures of them fucking I mean

they just do like if you if you have if you follow porn stars and you click on their feed you see a lot of sex that seems to be still allowed but a fake exploding head will get you kicked off here we still talking about that guy yes calling Rachel Levine the man will get you kicked off

but you can watch people jizz into each other that's fine wow right yeah although I think most we probably don't want porn in the Twitter experience but yeah well some people obviously do and and they must have drawn some line I think it was probably during jack's tenure because jack was a

very pro free speech pro first amendment sort of a guy and he wanted the option he he was advocating for the option of a wild west version of Twitter right where you'd have a Twitter that's censored and moderated but another Twitter that's just like fucking get crazy yeah and no one else on board

was you know interested in that option I don't think or at least not enough to actually get it moving yeah I mean that's a lot of what motivates web 3 is that like that crypto libertarian aspect of tech that just wants to like total freedom yeah the most minimalist thing which you know I think it's

powerful and yeah I think we should have it I think as time goes on that's going to be more attractive to people I believe yeah yeah that's what I would hope do you think Gen Z cares about that I don't give a fuck about Gen Z but the people are alive not just Gen Z there's a lot of people that aren't Gen Z that are you know millennials and even Gen X that are that are aware of the problems in the pitfalls of allowing social media companies to dictate discourse to decide what's acceptable

and not acceptable to say yeah I agree you'll go you have to be do you know no no no no just checking most people when it gets around three hours they start squirming and I was wonder I it starts filling the back of my head like this guy might have to use a bathroom I do not have to pee Joe okay good but I want to thank you for being here man I really enjoyed our conversation cool I enjoy your Twitter too do you okay that's how this started right yeah you followed me yeah yeah yeah

really very sensible guy you say a lot of things and I'm like guys got balls he says things that I agree with he says you're smart I appreciate that thank you Jeff my pleasure so tell people your social media and one more time your steps substack is the pull report the pull request dot

on quest the poll work out there's a link on my Twitter profile go to Twitter Antonio GM is where I'm at on Twitter I'm on this app called calling as well also pull requests what is calling good calling is this clubhouse thing that I mentioned this is social app but you can find links

to all that stuff on Twitter Twitter is really the place the DMs are open you can DM me although we'll see all right good luck with that yeah your DMs are not open I take a job now no fuck no well I made it to chase that but yeah well thank you very much okay thank you time all right bye everybody