In this episode of the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, I sit down with the author of The Dark Side of the Internet, Alex Blumberg, to talk about his recent trip to Ukraine and why he thought it would be a good idea to go there. We talk about how he got there, what it was like to be on the ground in Ukraine, and what he thinks about the current state of the country. We also talk about Alex's background in tech and his new book, "The Dark Side Of the Internet: A Guide to a Post-World War I Ukraine." Alex is also the co-founder and editor-in-chief of TechCrunch and the founder and editor in chief of The New York Times Magazine. He's also a regular contributor to TechCrunch, and is a frequent contributor to NPR and TechCrunch. This episode was recorded on October 30th, 2019, in Kiev, Ukraine, where he was covering the Ukraine crisis. Alex talks about why he decided to go to Ukraine, why he felt compelled to go, and how he felt it was the best way to get there, and why it was important to see it firsthand. I think you're going to love this episode. If you're a tech journalist, you'll love this one! Check it out! Check out the episode if you haven't already listened to it on Apple Podcasts or wherever else you listen to podcasts. You can find it here: Subscribe to the pod by searching for it. Subscribe on iTunes Learn more about your ad choices and more. Like it? Share it on iTunes and review it on Podcoin Connect with a fellow podcaster! Subscribe in the podCast and become a friend on iTunes Podcasts! It helps spread the word about it's great! And more like it's cool, it helps spread it everywhere else! I'm listening to it more than you can be heard on Podcasts and other places like it can help spread it around the world. Thanks for listening? I'll send it to the word out to the world? Thanks, Joe's ears everywhere else? Thank you, Joe Rogans, Joe Rocha I mean it's a little bit more than that's cool. Joe's got a podcast about it. Thank you for listening and I'll be listening to you, Tom's ears are great, too!
00:00:52.000One of the gigs I have, I have a gig at a DC think tank and one of my colleagues who's done like real in the field correspondent work before proposed a trip and a bunch of people expressed interest and I'm basically the only one who didn't wimp out and went with them.
00:01:35.000Is there any information that you can get when you're on the ground that would sort of clarify the situation for you?
00:01:44.000I 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.
00:01:56.000I thought you have to go there to see the real thing.
00:01:59.000And, you know, it's history with a capital H in the sort of...
00:02:03.000You 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.
00:02:12.000And it's just something that I've lived in Europe.
00:02:15.000I have an EU passport, so I feel a little bit European in that regard.
00:02:18.000So I think I engage with the story a little bit differently maybe than Americans do.
00:02:21.000And so I felt I just had to go there and see it for myself.
00:02:24.000So when you went there, was this idea related at all to business?
00:04:02.000And I briefly considered – I wasn't really going to do it, but I briefly considered just going to Kyiv and then pulling the power move of like, I'm in Kyiv.
00:05:18.000And 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, mostly Poland.
00:05:26.000I flew into Warsaw, and my first experience of, like, this is not normal little Disneyland Europe, you go to the Warsaw train station, which tends to be the terminus for a lot of the refugees that come across the border.
00:05:38.000And, you know, it's basically a refugee camp.
00:05:40.000The upper floor of the train station It's taken over by families.
00:05:45.000And every family has a blanket maybe half the size of this table.
00:05:49.000And one of the interesting things about the Ukrainian refugee situation is that it's almost all, I'm talking like 80%, 90% women and children.
00:05:56.000The Ukrainian government doesn't allow any male from the age of, I think, 18 to 60 to leave.
00:06:01.000And also, many Ukrainian males are just volunteering.
00:06:05.000And 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, you know, 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.
00:06:22.000Just picture an unending stream of that walking across the border.
00:06:25.000They're walking because usually they don't – well, some of them probably did walk to the border, the most desperate ones.
00:06:31.000They take some conveyance, either a train or bus, but getting those through the border is basically impossible.
00:06:36.000So they literally abandon however they got there and just walk across.
00:06:40.000How many people are there that are like you, that are observing and just witnessing?
00:06:45.000There's a good number of journalists, particularly in the western part of Ukraine, which is relatively safe.
00:06:51.000It wasn't like I was there with bullets flying around me or anything like that.
00:06:55.000I was joking with friends like, you know, I don't know that this is any more dangerous than walking across San Francisco's Tenderloin, to be honest, in the scheme of things.
00:07:23.000There was a guy who, I think a producer who worked for Fox News, and then there was a former New York Times journalist who was killed.
00:07:30.000And they were on the front line in Kiev, which is indeed very dangerous.
00:07:34.000And 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.
00:08:14.000Like it's literally millions of people leaving.
00:08:16.000And I think, again, coming from the U.S., 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.
00:08:27.000But if you go to this – again, let me paint you a picture.
00:08:29.000And I've got a bunch of photos that I'll be posting on my Substack this week and next week.
00:08:35.000The Polish police will only let you go so far, unless you're actually crossing, which I did eventually.
00:08:39.000You've got this constant stream of, again, mothers with early bags and kids.
00:08:42.000And 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.
00:09:41.000They're just there for other Jehovah Witnesses that are coming across and hoping to help them.
00:09:46.000Once again, you've got some Jewish charities that are helping the Jews that are coming across.
00:09:49.000I talked to somebody whose child had cystic fibrosis and they have a foundation and they're helping because a lot of people are infirmed and those are the ones hardest hit by war because you've got a 24-hour train ride.
00:10:00.000You've got someone who's ill and needs medical care.
00:10:03.000So I think that's one big surprising thing.
00:10:05.000And then the other surprising thing was I've been in conflict zones before, like the West Bank, North Ireland, the Indian-Pakistani border, places where things are a little bit spicy, but never in In a country at war.
00:10:20.000And I think, you know, war in the United States, certainly in my life here, right, has not been a direct experience.
00:10:34.000Ukraine is having, like, you know, what Clausewitz would call total war.
00:10:38.000All the resources of the society Are motivated towards one goal, which is kicking out the Russian invaders, right?
00:10:44.000And that means that everybody in that society is either fighting at the front lines, 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.
00:10:57.000Again, a quarter of the population is displaced.
00:10:59.000And so all of society has one goal in mind, and it's literally fighting the war.
00:11:04.000There's very little normal commercial activity, And again, I've never experienced that except through history books or films about World War II. Well, I don't think anybody has.
00:11:15.000It'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.
00:11:23.000We didn't think there was going to be a country, like a large superpower that invades another country, and you're seeing it on 4K cell phone video.
00:11:34.000Broadcast from thousands of phones and all these different viral clips that you can view online.
00:11:48.000I just saw a piece came out that in Kharkov, which is a city in the east that's, I think, Ukraine's second largest city, it's been encircled and besieged and shot at for weeks now.
00:11:59.000Civilians are basically living in the subway, taking shelter, and they've been there for weeks, and they're just living in the subway.
00:12:06.000Or, I mean, the real, if we're rattling off the set of atrocities that are basically happening, there's a city called Mariupol, which is on the Sea of Azov.
00:12:30.000I 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.
00:12:36.000It is hell on earth that's happening there.
00:12:38.000And again, as you said, it's happening, you know, it's the first Twitter war in which you can actually see these videos in real time and it's...
00:12:45.000And it's not that far away from Europe.
00:14:28.000Like, I didn't go, unfortunately, for the reasons I mentioned.
00:14:30.000But, 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?
00:15:14.000And I've talked to guys who've served overseas and they have similar stories where there's something about coming back here and Hurt Locker kind of touched on that a little bit.
00:15:24.000It'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.
00:15:44.000Yeah, it's like that scene in Her Locker when he goes to buy cereal and he just has a meltdown because he can't deal with what cereal to choose.
00:16:33.000The 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.
00:16:46.000They all used to be together in the Soviet Union, you know, 40 years ago or whatever it was.
00:16:53.000So 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?
00:17:09.000Is there any distortions, clear distortions that we're seeing here?
00:17:19.000And it's funny, coming back, it really pisses me off.
00:17:22.000I told myself I wouldn't get angry on your show about it.
00:17:24.000Because a lot of the Twitter rhetoric around the supposed bioweapons labs or, you know, the ghost of Kiev or some of the early memes that happened in the war that were proven to be, you know...
00:18:03.000I think one of the luxuries that we have here in the United States, 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 domestic political neuroses, right?
00:18:14.000And we almost think that the outside world is downstream of our domestic political process.
00:18:20.000I mean, it's true in some cases, right?
00:18:22.000And certainly the U.S. 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.
00:19:25.000I was talking to a hacker dude, like a nerd dude, who is like denial of service attacking a lot of Russian websites and trying to knock them down.
00:19:31.000There's a whole cyber war going on, right?
00:19:33.000You know, he's just like this nerdy kid who's on the anonymous chat channels and doing all this stuff.
00:19:37.000And he's telling me this whole nerdy walkthrough of how he does it.
00:19:40.000And at the end, he just looks at me with a steely glance and goes, we will win.
00:19:44.000My fixer, my translator in Lviv, who, young gal, university student, studying computer science, like a college student, right?
00:19:52.000Very carefree, very charming, very positive.
00:19:54.000She would end her conversations the same way.
00:20:18.000That seems to be the case, that it was supposed to be a decapitation exercise in which, you know, Kiev isn't that far from the border.
00:20:23.000I mean, it's a few tens of kilometers.
00:20:25.000They would just roll in, take out the current government, kill Zelensky or whatever, sideline him, and that would be the end of it.
00:20:31.000And that is absolutely not what's happening.
00:20:33.000When 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?
00:20:53.000Like, if you're expecting any sort of resistance that seems like suicide, just drive on a very obvious straight path where there's things to hide behind, where people are hiding behind it, launching missiles at armed carriers.
00:21:09.000I mean, that seems to be the current Ukrainian strategy.
00:21:11.000You don't see a lot of counteroffensives.
00:21:13.000They're not taking back cities because that would require a lot of armor that they don't have.
00:21:17.000But you see a lot of bloodletting and of basically hitting their supply lines behind the front lines in exactly the way that you're saying.
00:21:23.000You've got a bunch of trucks coming with fuel and food, and they just annihilate the entire column.
00:21:28.000I 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.
00:21:40.000The way he was laying it out was not pretty.
00:21:43.000When he was talking about the possibilities and the options, like how it could possibly play out, what did they think on the ground?
00:21:51.000Did they have an idea of what could happen or how it could happen?
00:21:57.000I wouldn't claim to know what the Russians are thinking.
00:22:01.000How do they think it's going to play out?
00:22:03.000Do they think there's going to come a point in time where there's enough losses where Russia has to decide to either escalate to a nuclear option or leave?
00:22:13.000I 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.
00:22:59.000There's all these videos of, like, a column of, like, four T-72s, you know, up to their tank tracks in mud, and they just can't get them out because the mud is that thick.
00:23:07.000And it's going to be mud season for months now, right, up until summer, until it dries out.
00:23:12.000It's a very gray, like, at night it gets 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.
00:23:50.000I 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 what they already control between Crimea and the Donbass, which has had a separatist movement for a long time.
00:24:02.000They're obviously trying to coalesce that, and I think they're less obsessed with taking Kiev, in which they've made no progress.
00:24:08.000I've stared at the map every day now for weeks, and that seems to be what's going on.
00:24:14.000But like you said, there's always the odd chance they use either chemical or nuclear weapons.
00:24:18.000I think Biden yesterday publicly said that the Russians are considering chemical weapons.
00:24:22.000I mean that could be a propaganda ploy or whatever, but it's in the air.
00:24:28.000You get a – there's a strange sense that the government is about to throw our administration under the bus.
00:24:36.000I get this weird sense that as more things come out and more ridiculous Kamala 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.
00:26:41.000I don't know how much politics you want to talk about, Joe, 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 U.S. can do no good overseas.
00:26:54.000And at the same time, the U.S. is responsible for everything that happens overseas.
00:26:58.000And so the thought that—and, you know, it could be, like, metaphorical or literal PTSD about the more recent wars like Iraq and Afghanistan.
00:27:04.000But the thought that, you know, the U.S. shouldn't get involved at all and literally can have no positive impact on affairs on the ground in Ukraine, I find to be very— Very disappointing and disheartening.
00:27:15.000It's weird that the right wing is the one that's turning kind of anti-US. Why do you think that is?
00:27:22.000Well, I mean, I think some of them like the new right.
00:27:54.000Because woke is like what the whole battle is about.
00:27:57.000And they had a conference last year, the National Conservative Conference that I went to.
00:28:01.000People like Rod Dreher speak there, again, Saurabh Amari, etc.
00:28:06.000They look to a traditionalist mode of thought and they feel that much of modern vocalists, CRT, the pronouns, gender, all that stuff, they think is just dangerous to generacy and we need to abandon it.
00:28:49.000And 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, But Russia isn't that, right?
00:28:59.000Their church attendance rate is lower than ours.
00:29:01.000Their birth rate is even lower than ours.
00:29:02.000Like, all the ills of modernity in terms of, like, society falling apart and not having kids and all that stuff that the trads are obsessed with, Russia suffers from that as much if not more than the West, right?
00:29:12.000So to what degree is Putin's Russia some sort of counterweight to the West?
00:30:12.000But 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 it.
00:30:24.000Well, there's a thing that happens with the right and with the left where they look at whatever position that the opposite is taking, whatever the opposition is taking and they find some way to justify the opposition of that.
00:30:59.000It's so strange to watch play out because it's not...
00:31:02.000As soon as you withhold information or distort information because it doesn't suit your narrative, then you're living in fantasy land.
00:31:12.000And this is one thing that I've seen from both parties, from the far left and the far right.
00:31:18.000And it's bizarre to behold because we live in a day where there's unprecedented access to information.
00:31:25.000And yet people are willing to put themselves inside these narrow blinders.
00:31:32.000And adhere to whatever these ideologies prescribe and whatever the thing is that you have to say in order to signal to the tribe that you are one of the absolutists.
00:32:02.000You have to be against certain things, right?
00:32:03.000So there's this whole meme about the current thing being Ukraine because a lot of the people who are part of the kind of liberal borg that supported...
00:32:17.000I think it's a little bit of projection.
00:32:19.000Like, I don't think it's as in your face as a lot of the woke stuff was in the past.
00:32:22.000But sure, it is the case that some people have swapped their, like, one cause for this cause.
00:33:33.000But 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.
00:33:42.000When you see people talking positively about Russia and positively about Putin and haven't actually been there, how infuriating is that?
00:34:06.000Both on left and right, the people who actually shit on America the most and think that it's like the shittiest place on earth, in my opinion, are typically the ones that could never live outside of it, are the ones that literally you cannot imagine anywhere else except the American construct.
00:34:18.000But that's also one of the beautiful things about America is that it allows people like that to form those illusions.
00:34:24.000I mean, they're free to have whatever dumb opinions they want, of course.
00:34:26.000Yeah, because you have the freedom to be stupid.
00:34:28.000You really have the freedom to be delusional.
00:34:31.000And 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.
00:35:16.000So, I mean, how much has this changed your thoughts about, I mean, you know, people have You have priorities in life and you have things that you think are important and you have this view of the world and then this breaks out and then you go over there.
00:35:33.000And 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.
00:35:45.000So what is that like when you come back and how do you sort of integrate that into this?
00:35:49.000I mean, you're a guy who's been a part of startups and tech and you're a part of Facebook and you wrote this crazy book sort of like burning it all down.
00:36:21.000All the things we worry about seem terrible.
00:36:22.000Like, I think I tweet joke that, like, Zelensky wished that pronouns were his country's biggest problem or that college swimmers were, like, the burning issue of the day rather than how to source enough, like, tourniquets so that his soldiers don't lose their limbs.
00:38:28.000Yeah, Canada would be very polite about their invading.
00:38:30.000But 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.
00:39:56.000There's something about people that have some sort of tragic history to their family, either directly experienced or subconsciously through their family.
00:40:04.000Like, my family's had three sets of passports in three generations.
00:40:08.000Like, there were Spanish immigrants to Cuba.
00:41:17.000And 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.
00:41:27.000And she said, shut up and die like a man like your brother did.
00:41:32.000And so the guy closes his mouth and just winds up bleeding out and dying in silence because his mother was screaming at him.
00:41:40.000She was so accustomed to people dying from gunshots that her own son dying in front of her.
00:41:47.000The real problem was him being a bitch, which is fucking wild.
00:41:54.000What Sebastian Junger talks about in Tribes, And these people that develop these intense bonds with people that they're in conflict with, you know, that these states of humanity that occasionally exist when people are in extreme situations where life and death is a daily experience,
00:42:27.000And when we don't have that, for whatever reason, this is the grossest part about humans.
00:42:33.000There's a certain section of society that seeks conflict in the most preposterous ways.
00:42:39.000And 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 whatever it is, the current outrage du jour.
00:42:57.000Like human beings are very weird that we almost exist at our best state when we are in some sort of life or death scenario.
00:43:07.000Yeah, I don't know if you've read Fukuyama's book, End of History, which is very mischaracterized generally.
00:43:12.000But 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.
00:43:18.000And if, you know, democracy and liberalism won in the previous generation, then they'll fight against democracy and against liberalism, if nothing else for the sake of struggle, because they refuse to live in a world in which heroism of some form is impossible, right?
00:43:32.000People mischaracterized that book because they thought he predicted some sort of liberal democratic utopia.
00:43:36.000In fact, he warned that we would tend to revert to non-liberal and non-democratic ways of being just to recapture that feeling.
00:43:42.000And I do think that there's something about liberal, and I mean like little l liberalism, not like the left of the political spectrum, to be clear.
00:43:49.000I think there's something about liberalism that needs an illiberal antagonist to keep it in check.
00:43:54.000It's only when you're fighting against some outside illiberal force that in some sense you can maintain the discipline that it takes.
00:43:59.000And without that, It tends to degenerate into fights over pronouns or whatever.
00:44:03.000Before 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.
00:44:10.000And he was like half joking and we were chuckling about it.
00:44:56.000And he, I went to dinner over his house once, and you know, his wife and his kid are there, and he's playing bongos, and they're cooking, and he's like, everyone's dancing.
00:47:50.000And 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.
00:47:59.000Because it's ingrained in our DNA. We have this sort of pattern where we seek out opposition.
00:48:09.000There'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 in human political life and defining what is the friend and what is the enemy.
00:48:21.000And if we don't understand that or recognize that, in some sense, we're fooling around.
00:48:26.000It's so strange that we can't get past that.
00:48:30.000We have some tools that'll allow us to recognize that, but they're not widely distributed.
00:48:37.000Whether it's psychedelics or whether it's people that recognize physical culture and having a strenuous activity schedule in terms of physical exercise.
00:48:50.000It's really important to alleviate anxiety and keep people calm and relaxed.
00:49:34.000And the thought that there's some over— I think it was Walter Benjamin, or no, it was William James, who defined religion as the thought that there's some overarching order to which human society should converge, right?
00:49:44.000There's some sort of abstract, thick order to the world that we should be sort of building towards.
00:49:49.000And that just, in its coarsest, in the most high-level way, is religion.
00:49:53.000And that never goes away, I think, for most humans.
00:50:13.000I've got three Jewish kids, and I think religion is kind of like chicken pox.
00:50:17.000You have to get a case of it when you're a kid.
00:50:18.000Otherwise, you're going to get this life-threatening case of it later.
00:50:21.000And so I wanted them to be raised with some sort of religious tradition, particularly in a society.
00:50:25.000I think this is particularly bad in San Francisco and California, which is where I've spent my life for the past 15, 20 years.
00:50:31.000Particularly in a world in which corporations are the only functional organizations that you see anymore.
00:50:36.000Everyone lives, 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.
00:50:47.000Even though I've spent my entire professional life inside these organizations, I don't think it's normal.
00:50:51.000And I wanted them to see something else.
00:50:53.000And the baby mama to my third kid, who's Jewish, basically said, look, if this kid goes to synagogue, you're taking him, so you convert.
00:50:59.000And so I called her bluff, and I converted.
00:51:02.000And I think what I figured out now, and oh man, I hope she doesn't see this.
00:51:29.000To be a Jew is to sit around on a Thursday and discuss dense texts and come up with arguments about what they mean, which to me sounds like a good time.
00:51:37.000I know it's a little strange, but that's what being a Jew is.
00:51:40.000So, yeah, I kind of signed up for it, and it's been interesting so far.
00:53:19.000You know, like hardcore, full-on Jewish, but he's, you know, obviously he's integrated with modern society.
00:53:23.000He's not living in a separate society.
00:53:25.000But the Shabbat thing, Yeah, there's this restriction, and as soon as I mention anything Jewish, there's going to be like 100 rabbis in my mentions commenting on this, but that's the nature of Judaism.
00:53:34.000There's restrictions around lighting a fire on Saturday, and electricity has been mapped to the fire restriction.
00:53:41.000And so you've probably never had this experience.
00:53:42.000I don't know if you've lived in New York, but if you go to a hospital in New York after sundown on Friday, you'll get in the elevator, and it's like you push the buttons.
00:54:09.000Well, in Miami, real estate for the lower floor condos is more expensive if it's like a Jewish build because you have to go up the higher stores.
00:54:20.000When people talk, it's like, what the fuck is this religion thing they think is crazy?
00:54:25.000The 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.
00:54:31.000Not just Christianity, Protestant Christianity.
00:54:34.000Not just Protestant Christianity, evangelical Protestant Christianity.
00:54:37.000Like, if you're not a practicing Christian and you've got, like, Christianity thrust in your face, it's like some televangelist or somebody or somebody wants to ban a book in Texas.
00:54:45.000And so, like, somehow that becomes the expression of religion in society.
00:54:49.000And for obvious reasons, Judaism is very different, right?
00:54:57.000So if you're like Ben Shapiro and you don't fucking flip the light switch on Saturdays and you follow the kosher laws and you do all this, that is being a Jew.
00:55:04.000You don't necessarily need to believe in God or have a deep faith relationship.
00:56:29.000They start making these distinctions that are based on this rigid ideology rather than based on facts and reality.
00:56:37.000But they'll say it, and they'll say it from a position where, you know, hey, I'm an atheist, I'm fact-based, I believe in trusting the science.
00:56:52.000I've been in Silicon Valley for over a decade now.
00:56:55.000It's saturated with religion, actually.
00:56:57.000And, you know, they'll laugh at you trying to keep kosher or whatever, and then they'll go on for six fucking hours about their weird little keto diet or whatever that they're following religiously.
00:57:06.000I interviewed a Berkeley professor, sociologist named Carolyn Chen, who wrote a book called Work, Pray, Code that's kind of a sociological take on this.
00:57:12.000And she mentions how so many people...
00:57:15.000Come to startup life and are formerly religious but then adopt this new religion.
00:57:19.000And it's very much one of self-actualization.
00:57:21.000A lot of sort of, you know, white person Buddhism layered on top of it.
00:57:26.000You know, a lot of LinkedIn posting about hustle porn, about you getting more productive.
00:57:55.000I guess sometimes I talk about motivation and what's necessary to achieve success.
00:58:02.000But I think I do it based on my personal experiences and what I've learned that I think that you could tell people.
00:58:07.000I 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.
00:58:16.000And it's going to, you know, like they haven't really done anything.
00:58:18.000There's a lot of, I haven't done anything, but I'm going to show you how to do things, people.
00:58:48.000Because you have like over 10 million downloads, which, and I'd love to address this if you want to talk about your show and stuff too, but that's greater viewership than all the big network shows put together, right?
00:59:00.000You have an enormous audience, but you never thought that would happen when you started this.
00:59:05.000I've done nothing to try to promote this show.
00:59:17.000We've existed like Jamie and I have existed in this strange vacuum while this show has sort of propagated and it's spread its way through the world and We haven't done anything different and I haven't done anything different in terms of the way I do it other than Get better at it get better at communicating get better at listening get better at you know researching topics and asking questions and You know,
01:02:41.000And in a sense, I've sort of applied a lot of that that I've done to other aspects of my life, whether it's martial arts or comedy, and I've sort of applied that to this thing.
01:02:52.000So it naturally fits within my personality because I've always been curious as to why I think the way I think, why I behave the way I behave, and what I can optimize, what I can make better about who I am and how I make my way through life.
01:03:06.000And then when that gets applied to this, I sort of just sort of took the same pattern of thinking about the way I think about all kinds of things and applied it to conversations.
01:03:20.000And applied it to like, why do people think the way they think?
01:03:22.000Like you, what's it like for you in Ukraine?
01:03:27.000So 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 you this question because it's my job.
01:06:01.000So there's a lot of that in my past that sort of helped me think about things as someone really not willing to subscribe to these patterns of behavior and thinking and just activities that everybody else thought were either Significant or mandatory.
01:06:21.000I was just not interested in that for whatever reason.
01:06:28.000I remember thinking that when I was a kid, 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.
01:06:45.000You read a biography of someone who sort of navigated their way through the river of life and avoided the rocks and made their way to the waterfall.
01:07:05.000You know, and the 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.
01:07:16.000Like, okay, there are folks out there that are doing something that they really enjoy.
01:07:21.000And the difference between that And I think there's a lot of value in doing something you don't like doing.
01:07:27.000Because I had a lot of jobs that I fucking hated when I was a kid.
01:07:30.000And I think those were really important to me.
01:08:53.000You're literally attached to a wheel, right?
01:08:56.000So it's not like you can be creative in how you optimize the wheel or use your body in some sort of expressive way that's unique to your personality.
01:10:07.000Well, first of all, 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.
01:10:21.000Like, if you took away all of his accomplishments, and you 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?
01:10:34.000So 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.
01:10:45.000But 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.
01:11:17.000I mean, maybe there's some freak of nature that's like 32nd Place or something like that who just eats oats and fucking does squats, but most likely not.
01:11:26.000If you want to be like that giant butterball turkey-looking ultra-vein muscle dude, you have to take steroids.
01:14:40.000If 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.
01:14:52.000It's a hard company in terms of what I've heard about.
01:14:56.000If you're one of those people working on the floor and someone orders a French press and you have 35 seconds to get that into a box or you have a strike.
01:15:06.000And you're peeing in a little bottle because you don't want to take a pee break.
01:15:10.000But, you know, I mean, if you're paid well and you understand that that's the job when you go into it and it's a really competitive environment, it's a good job in terms of, like, health care and how much compensation you get, I don't know.
01:19:58.000Three months ago, we were worried about vaccines and whether or not you'd have to wear a mask on an airplane.
01:20:04.000And now we're literally on the verge of a nuclear war.
01:20:08.000And 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.
01:20:16.000It's not something like, oh, you see the missile being launched.
01:20:25.000Now they're moving fast in the speed of sound, and they can take hard angles in the middle of the sky, and you can't predict where they're going.
01:20:33.000And the Russians used one in Ukraine recently, a couple days ago.
01:20:47.000And then you apply a nuclear warhead to something like that, and it's really terrifying.
01:20:51.000And the thing that he was saying is that we used to have this concept of mutually assured destruction, that we would know that the Russians are launching at us and we would have a certain amount of time to decide to counterattack and then the world would be fucked.
01:21:03.000He's like, that's not the case anymore.
01:21:04.000A missile would launch so quickly and would hit us before we had any option to retaliate.
01:21:10.000And that's something that needs to be understood.
01:21:14.000Russia launched hypersonic missiles due to a low stockpile, sources say.
01:21:19.000The leading theory in Western assessments of the hypersonic missile attack is that Russia's number of precision guided munitions are dwindling fast.
01:21:29.000Well, the theory is that their actual internal production of it is very poor.
01:21:34.000I mean, just recently, just today, the only tank manufacturer in Russia announced that it's stopping production because it can't source components.
01:22:34.000But 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.
01:22:43.000My fear is that they launch one nuclear warhead and say, go, okay, now what?
01:23:10.000You know, if you're in a gang war and one person gets shot, you might be able to have a ceasefire.
01:23:14.000Like, this was the discussion that Malcolm Gladwell was having in Outliers about these Appalachian cultures where they were just constantly, you know, the Hatfields and the McCoys, these people that were constantly feuding and killing each other.
01:23:26.000Like, there were certain times where they had tried to come to the negotiating table, and at a certain point, too much blood had been spilled.
01:24:58.000Well, I mean, look at what's going on in America between the left and the right.
01:25:02.000I 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.
01:25:20.000And it was weird that a lot of people on the Red State side would almost be looking forward to it because, oh, we've got all the guns and we're the tough guys.
01:25:27.000I'm like, societies that have actually gone through real civil wars, like Spain or Yugoslavia, nobody comes out.
01:25:40.000When 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.
01:25:54.000I don't know if we can, not just the U.S., but just broadly, the notion of a nation state.
01:25:57.000I think the Internet demolishes a lot of consensus.
01:26:00.000And the amount of consensus necessary to keep, you know, a nation state in a country of 330 million spanning four time zones is very, very difficult.
01:26:07.000The problem with the alternative is that people are terrified of this concept of a one world government.
01:26:17.000I 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.
01:26:33.000It seems like it could be, especially if you have digital currency that is centralized.
01:26:38.000It's like if the government has the ability to veto purchases or decide that your social credit doesn't allow you to do certain things because you've done the wrong thing or you said the wrong thing.
01:26:50.000Yeah, I mean, those are some of the objections to the sanctions being levied on Russia, right?
01:26:53.000The West can just, like, turn you off.
01:27:17.000I mean, looking at it from the Ukrainian perspective, though, they didn't have a choice.
01:27:21.000I mean, they provoked – there's an unprovoked total war that they've declared, like a real total war that they've declared on the Ukraine.
01:27:26.000And so, in some sense, why shouldn't the sanctions be totalizing?
01:27:31.000Well, it's interesting, too, the attack on the oligarchs or the sanctioning the oligarchs.
01:27:36.000That'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.
01:28:12.000And what investments are safe when you're an oligarch fleeing for Turkey or somewhere, wherever you're going, to UAE, wherever you're going?
01:31:45.000I mean, I think that's a legit criticism.
01:31:46.000Again, I don't think it invalidates the Ukrainian cause, but it's true that there's a certain type of person who, like, just switches their little thing that they're obsessed about.
01:32:33.000The most stressful shit, right when I'm going to bed, it's like, why the fuck am I thinking about this now?
01:32:38.000It'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.
01:32:50.000You know, that's when you check the locks on the door.
01:32:52.000You always think that someone's gonna come into the house while you're asleep.
01:32:55.000You don't think someone's gonna come in the house while you're awake.
01:34:18.000Oh, in the summer, it's paradise on earth.
01:34:20.000So one of the islands, Orcas Island, like I bought a few acres of land, not that many, just random land, nothing beautiful or gorgeous or anything, and like started homesteading it, like chopping down trees, laying it out, putting up a teepee, a yurt, solar system, all that fucking MacGyver shit.
01:34:34.000And I did that for off and on a couple years after...
01:34:37.000I remember when I first got there, the book thing came out, it was a bestseller for a month.
01:34:41.000It was a big deal, a lot of media for a month or two.
01:34:43.000I'm disgusted by it after a month or two.
01:34:45.000And so I literally showed up at this place.
01:34:47.000The first advance check, I bought this land.
01:34:49.000So I show up with a backpack and I'm like, I guess this is me now.
01:34:52.000I just showed up with a tent and I'm in the fucking woods and this is it now.
01:34:56.000And I remember those first couple nights, like, you start a fire and the whole thing, and, like, the fringes of, like, what you can see on the fire and the light, it's like, I don't know.
01:35:59.000I'd never worked in tech, but I'd gone to school in Berkeley and I'd seen kind of the first tech bubble, so I was kind of vaguely aware of it.
01:36:11.000I end up at Facebook a year before the IPO as one of the early members of the ads team.
01:36:15.000So 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.
01:36:26.000I was the first like product manager for ads targeting.
01:36:28.000So 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.
01:37:06.000In the sense of like, oh, this is like totally irrelevant to like, oh, I was literally just searching for this thing and here's an ad for it.
01:37:12.000Let me ask you about this because we've talked about this multiple times on the podcast.
01:37:16.000Sometimes you're having a conversation about something.
01:38:42.000There was a Planet Money show about this in which they talked to various people who had this experience to try to figure out how it actually happened.
01:38:47.000I was a guest on it, but let me address the problem.
01:38:52.000Let's say Marcus Zuckerberg is listening to your conversations and gets a live stream of your phone all the time.
01:39:00.000What fraction of the time do you think you're actually mentioning something commercially interesting that would be worth, like, targeting against?
01:39:05.000Like, how often do you say, hey, I'm flying to Boston next week, and I need a flight and a hotel on a taxi?
01:39:10.000And you say it in some structured way.
01:39:36.000One of the chapters in my book, I understand you're listening to have a chapter called The Narcissism of Privacy, which comes off maybe more snarky than I mean.
01:39:43.000Privacy is a right, and people have a right to it, obviously.
01:39:46.000But I think one of the sort of misleading things when you think about companies like Facebook is that Facebook wants to know the thing that you least want them to know, which is your personal conversation with your loved one or whatever.
01:39:56.000When it comes to commercial data that actually helps target ads, there's very little of what you do.
01:40:00.000Or things that you wouldn't think of are what they want, not necessarily what you would not want Facebook to know.
01:40:07.000Right, but what concerns people is the idea that your microphone is picking up keywords that they have accounts with.
01:40:16.000So whether it's cell phones, tires, whatever it is, then you see an ad for it.
01:40:22.000It would be more possible in like the smart speaker systems you have at home, for example.
01:40:46.000So, like, a lot of what happens that's actual targeting is, like, data joining.
01:40:50.000So, like, getting back to the Cabela's example, like, I understand you're into hunting, so maybe you shop at the local Cabela's or Bass Pro Shop.
01:40:56.000They'll have your phone number and email for all the shit you buy online.
01:40:59.000And what they want to do is find you online and sell you because it's the fucking deer hunting season sale or whatever.
01:41:05.000And so what they'll do is they'll upload that list of emails to Facebook and say, oh, this is the deer hunting group.
01:41:10.000And then they'll show you ads based on your actual buying history.
01:41:13.000So that sort of thing absolutely does happen.
01:41:24.000If there's any saving grace to this, it pays for the services that most people wouldn't be willing to pay for otherwise or wouldn't exist otherwise, for better or worse.
01:41:31.000Interesting 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.
01:41:39.000When it first started being implemented, when people 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...
01:41:52.000Not 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.
01:42:00.000There's never been a company that has the kind of input on social policies or on the way the world functions like Facebook.
01:42:10.000Has 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 Walter Cronkite and like three TV networks and creating consensus around things like Vietnam or other events, I think there's precedence.
01:42:24.000It may not have been within one software company in the sort of way that you were talking about, but was there a media establishment that manufactured consent around certain social issues?
01:44:02.000How you do it, you try scaling it with software.
01:44:04.000So one of the things I did at Facebook, and I get into it in the book a little bit, I was briefly the product manager for the team that policed ads.
01:44:10.000So it's a smaller problem than the big problem you're talking about.
01:44:12.000But, you know, people who run ads, there's also like an ads creative policy.
01:44:15.000Like you can't run ads with like naked women and stuff in it, right?
01:44:24.000To do the things that only humans can do well, and then you scale their efforts with software.
01:44:28.000So 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 literally the same file, you have smart software that actually picks it out and prevents them from doing it.
01:44:40.000Even Facebook and Google can't afford to hire millions of people to review these ads or the videos.
01:44:45.000But the problem is when you do have humans that do it and then it's subjective.
01:44:52.000My friend Kyle Kalinske got banned from Twitter today.
01:44:56.000I don't know if you know who he is, but he has a great progressive political talk show, The Kyle Kalinske Show, and he also has another podcast he does with Crystal Ball.
01:45:08.000Really bright guy, very well-read, open-minded, the whole deal.
01:45:53.000That fucking standard head exploding gif that everybody's been using from the beginning of time, that's enough to get you blocked from fucking Twitter now?
01:46:04.000My view has always been that Facebook and all these companies should not be in the business of actually judging truth for people and that, in my opinion, they're over-policing.
01:46:11.000And I've written a lot about this after the election in 2016. It eventually burned me out so much I went back to tech because it just drove me crazy.
01:46:41.000But 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.
01:46:50.000And they say, well, you know, you are allowing these extremist groups to thrive, and they're recruiting people, and this or that.
01:46:59.000And so they use it as a justification.
01:47:00.000But the problem is, once you do justify banning people because of an ideology that you don't agree with, it's going to move further and further down the line to the point where things that you do agree with and you think should be fine are now worthy of getting banned for.
01:47:26.000That was when the, what was it, NDAA, National Defense Authorization Act, came into play and Obama said it was indefinite detention of people without trials.
01:47:37.000And Obama was like, well, I'll never use that.
01:47:39.000Okay, then don't fucking make it a law.
01:48:04.000The bridge between that kind of thing and the NDAA is not that far.
01:48:10.000This ability to criticize someone is very important.
01:48:14.000And as soon as you restrict that ability or restrict people's ability to communicate or say controversial things or say things that you don't agree with, you're getting close.
01:48:23.000You're bringing those things together and it's fucking dangerous.
01:48:26.000It's really dangerous when you start doing that because it keeps moving.
01:48:30.000It doesn't stop If you don't have an absolute line of free speech, then you decide what should and shouldn't be censored.
01:48:37.000And as soon as you do that, then it becomes subjective.
01:48:40.000You can apply all sorts of logic and reasons why someone who you don't agree with should be removed from the conversation.
01:48:50.000You could do so because it's going to cost you financially or it's politically uncomfortable, whatever it is.
01:48:58.000Dude, I think this has made people lose their minds, right?
01:49:00.000Like, network computers have made people lose their minds.
01:49:02.000The reality is that, like, freedom of speech, people don't actually want freedom.
01:49:06.000They say they do, but they don't, right?
01:49:07.000Like, once their enemy, like, gets a platform, it, like, goes out the window.
01:49:12.000And 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.
01:49:23.000And all our political struggles end up being religious struggles almost because we do have this sort of credo-religious belief in our country.
01:49:31.000And I think you really have to maintain that civic religion alive to have things like the level of freedom of speech that the Constitution implies.
01:49:38.000I think we've lost that civic religion.
01:49:40.000We've lost that faith in the United States.
01:49:42.000Yeah, it needs to be something that both sides espouse.
01:49:49.000That's something that both sides talk about openly and agree to because we are a community.
01:49:57.000Whether we disagree about certain aspects of our laws and the way we communicate or whatever.
01:50:29.000And as soon as you start fucking with that and limiting freedom, you see knuckleheads on television say that they think that maybe the First Amendment and the Second Amendment need revision.
01:51:30.000It's like, yeah, I think I'm going on because of this thing with Apple, and then he had his deal with Spotify, and he's like, oh wait, you're the Apple guy?
01:52:30.000It's not retirement exactly, but you're working for a big company.
01:52:34.000I changed my LinkedIn to reflect the fact that I worked at Apple, which I did.
01:52:39.000Then what happened, which we've now seen in many companies, and I was the first of this at Apple, there was 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.
01:52:52.000That at the time, again, to be clear, it was hardly a secret.
01:52:55.000Bestseller list, NPR book of the year, Wired book of the year.
01:52:57.000Not to, like, toot my own horn, but, like, it's about a secret as Christmas fucking day at this point.
01:53:42.000Which, you know, as I've described, what pisses me off most about it is that in some sense, they, among all the rest of it, they mischaracterize the book.
01:53:50.000Because, you know, there's a couple passages in there that are a little salty, right?
01:53:53.000It's like, it's a work of literary nonfiction told in the voice of like a Michael Lewis or a Hunter S. Thompson or a Tom Wolfe.
01:54:17.000But to be clear, 99.9% of the book is about entrepreneurship, how Silicon Valley works, the internal culture at these companies, how the ad world works, like we talked about targeting.
01:54:30.000One of the salty jokes is about dating in San Francisco and what's that like.
01:54:33.000Literally, it's like a one-paragraph comment on it that's quoted out of context.
01:54:37.000I was actually praising the mother of my first kid saying, oh, this woman's amazing, unlike these other women that I went dating with, which is a conversation we've all had.
01:54:45.000It's like, oh, dating in this city is so hard, whatever.
01:54:48.000But, of course, it misses the context that I'm pro this woman that I'm in love with, and it's so great that I'm not dating these other women or whatever.
01:55:15.000We can talk about this cancellation thing if you want to, but one of the key aspects of these cancellation mobs, or these cancellation coups as I call them, is that the politics are often deeply unpopular.
01:55:24.000I think something like 1% or less of Apple employees signed whatever petition it was to fire me.
01:55:30.000This mob was a very vocal but small minority inside the company.
01:55:34.000And yeah, Apple just freaked out and, you know, this is publicly known, freaked out and fired me within a day.
01:55:40.000I wonder what would happen if Apple said fuck off to those people.
01:59:45.000You found this loophole where someone's robbing old ladies out of their retirement fund.
01:59:50.000But 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 that book.
02:00:13.000What is it like being in those companies, whether it's Facebook or any sort of tech company?
02:00:22.000For someone on the outside, we look at it and we say, how are those fucking places run?
02:00:28.000I've had a good friend who was a big executive at Google, and now she works at another large tech company.
02:00:36.000And the way she described it to me, she's like, it is utter madness.
02:00:40.000It'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, there's 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 work done and when confronted they talk about their activism and she's like,
02:01:08.000listen, You are here for, you know, X amount of hours a day.
02:01:14.000And 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.
02:01:23.000Yeah, I mean, I think the companies are somewhat to blame, because they've done the whole, like, bring the real self to work thing, right?
02:01:31.000There's this philosophy among, like, the HR there that, like...
02:01:35.000And if you're being cynical about it, it's engineered to get the most productivity out of you.
02:01:38.000If you work at some of these companies, particularly, again, to answer your question, I think it depends what stage of the company you join.
02:01:44.000But if you're talking about big companies like Apple, Google, Facebook Now, it's a campus.
02:02:39.000Because, again, it's a formative experience.
02:02:41.000Some of the most impactful professional work I did was there, like it or not.
02:02:47.000Taking Facebook ads from the shitty, stupid little iPad offer ads on the right to literally the thing you just looked at or bought, which I know sounds cringy, whatever.
02:03:10.000You were talking about ATT, which is like the ads transparency thing.
02:03:13.000For those who don't know, if you've got an iPhone, you download an app and suddenly there's this opt-in that Apple is showing you saying, hey, do you want to share your data with these people?
02:05:02.000But it also doesn't give up the access to your data that's this very valuable commodity for Facebook, right?
02:05:13.000So here's the tricky thing about data, right?
02:05:15.000One 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.
02:05:22.000Because 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.
02:05:32.000Facebook doesn't know about that, strictly speaking.
02:05:34.000So 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 like?
02:05:41.000So part of this is what I described in the book and what I helped build in the early stages.
02:05:45.000There's a way of joining you, Joe Rogan, Facebook you to Cabela's you in some relatively data-safe way that lets Cabela show you an ad for those shoes.
02:05:54.000Facebook 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.
02:06:00.000And so a lot of the stuff that's going on isn't like, oh, Facebook knows everything about you.
02:06:04.000It's like, no, Facebook knows who you are on every device because you tend to use Facebook everywhere.
02:06:50.000Well, if you're a person who's, you know, you have full control over your urges.
02:06:56.000You'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.
02:07:03.000Because we know that there are people like that out there, right?
02:07:05.000So in the best case scenario, is it better?
02:08:55.000If you want to geek out, One direction Apple's going that's kind of interesting is that a lot of the data for your iPhone's going to live on device.
02:09:01.000Like, 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.
02:09:51.000One of the things Apple did recently, I don't know if you followed the story, they launched a system to catch what's called CSAM, which is a child sexually exploitive material, which you can kiddie porn, basically.
02:10:01.000And they launched a system that would, it's complicated, but would scan photos on your phone, basically.
02:10:07.000Yeah, I heard about that, which is weird.
02:10:10.000Right, and it's funny, because it is that on-device paradigm.
02:10:13.000It's like, okay, if you've got the photos...
02:10:16.000From what I recall, they would only scan photos that were going to get synced to iCloud anyhow, but they were doing what's called looking at the hash of the image on your phone.
02:11:09.000If you've got an image that happens to map to that, then you could have a collision in that space, and it's like, oh, it's kiddie porn, but it's not.
02:13:04.000I 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.
02:13:11.000And so they describe the images, which are disgusting, obviously.
02:13:27.000Yeah, and there's a very bizarre argument that somehow or another seeing those images keeps people from actually performing acts of violence on children.
02:13:37.000But that is a fucking shifty argument.
02:13:40.000And there's another even shifty argument that CGI versions of child pornography should be acceptable because it's like a way that they can get it out of their system or whatever.
02:15:08.000And that there's still, with our moral foundation, our ethics...
02:15:15.00021st century, like, as advanced as we can in terms of the way we feel about people's rights, and that still, still, there's people out there that want to do that to children.
02:16:28.000I mean, I think the free speech standard in the U.S. 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's where the state should step in.
02:16:38.000There's actual physical harm or crime.
02:16:41.000And doxing and things along those lines.
02:16:46.000How significant is the difference to the end user if you have, say, an Android phone versus an Apple phone in terms of privacy?
02:16:54.000There is the issue of encryption, like iMessages are encrypted, but someone could hack into your iCloud and gain access to your iMessages, right?
02:18:54.000Think about how the Apple employees targeted you for things taken out of context in your book.
02:18:59.000What if someone takes things out of context in your emails and uses that as evidence that you're a piece of shit in a trial where they're trying to convict you and they're trying to sway the jury?
02:19:13.000Yeah, but, you know, there's this, like, truism in startup life that, like, for most companies, it's not a technical problem that's a problem, it's a human problem.
02:19:20.000And those problems are actually harder to solve.
02:19:22.000Technical problems have some solutions, right?
02:19:24.000So, do you think that, like, the technical solutions to human problems are just, like, prophylactic?
02:19:38.000I think one thing you can criticize, I think, tech for is that it's a solutionist mentality that thinks that there's literally a technical solution to everything.
02:19:53.000I 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.
02:21:53.000Do you think that privacy and 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,
02:22:09.000in many ways, the future of how cell phones integrate into networks and systems?
02:22:35.000And yeah, I think part of the reason why I joined, like why would you join a big slow company when you're like this tech entrepreneur guy or whatever?
02:22:44.000Google and Apple are going to define that future in mobile, right?
02:22:47.000And I think people like – or players like Facebook are going to be second fiddle.
02:22:50.000They're just going to be apps in their ecosystems.
02:22:52.000And so, yeah, I think it's going to change the way the – and this business, if this on-device thing takes off, that's going to change the way a lot of things work.
02:23:01.000It'll just be – it'll be slowly and, like – Well, this child filter thing, right?
02:23:07.000They all just deploy code that lives on your phone, and that the data lives on your phone.
02:23:12.000And the ad system eventually will probably move in this direction as well, if I'm reading the tea leaves correctly.
02:23:17.000And so what that means is when you browse, again, you're shopping for Cabela's shit or whatever on your fucking phone, that data just doesn't leave the phone, and Cabela's targets you on the phone with an ad experience on Apple, and your data never left the phone.
02:23:30.000So how would they know that you're browsing for Cabela's?
02:23:35.000Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of complicated tricks about it, like what's called differential privacy, federated learning.
02:23:44.000Because you might ask, like, well, but then how do you train models?
02:23:46.000Like, how do you know, like, how do you train from, like, a million phones to know that, like, a guy who does this should see that ad?
02:23:52.000Like, how do you collectively learn it?
02:23:54.000Because an individual is not going to generate enough data on one phone.
02:23:57.000There's clever hacks around that that try to collect that information in relatively privacy-safe ways.
02:24:02.000Come up with a model that says, oh, if he's looking for X, show them Y. But then have your data never really leave the phone and do it that way.
02:24:09.000It's a very different way of engineering things.
02:24:10.000Yeah, because I was talking to a friend and we were discussing privacy and GPS. And they were saying you should never use Waze and never use Google Maps.
02:24:24.000You should use Apple because Apple destroys all the data.
02:24:27.000And I'm like, yeah, but you also don't get as good of an experience.
02:24:41.000Waze was acquired by Google, but Waze is far superior.
02:24:45.000And 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.
02:24:53.000Because so many people were routing traffic through there via Waze that it was causing these traffic jams in these, like, sleepy communities.
02:25:00.000Because people figured out you could fucking speed right through this neighborhood.
02:25:03.000And some people were violating speed limits, and so then they just started implementing cops, you know, and putting these stops where they're like, you can't drive here unless you live here, which is kind of...
02:25:14.000Because you're supposed to be able to just drive wherever the fuck you want if it's an open neighborhood.
02:26:42.000And I think one of the interesting things about the whole anti-Facebook media cycle from 2016 is that if you were to look at the usage data for Facebook, you wouldn't be able to see where that backlash happened.
02:26:52.000People didn't actually stop using Facebook.
02:26:54.000Or they might have stopped using it for other reasons because they got bored of it and they moved to Instagram or whatever.
02:26:57.000But was there an actual, for all this tech backlash, did people actually use Amazon less or Facebook less?
02:27:02.000Particularly after COVID with, you know, people being locked in and all the rest of it.
02:27:05.000Did people actually revolt against tech?
02:27:07.000Or is that just an impression in some journalist and some commenter's mind?
02:27:10.000I think it's mostly the latter, actually.
02:27:12.000But that impression does have an influence on the stock price.
02:28:42.000I don't know him personally well, to be clear.
02:28:44.000But 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.
02:28:53.000You know, he seemed to me somewhat cold and aloof, but definitely in charge.
02:28:58.000Like, the wimpy, dweeby character in, like, The Social Network or that movie or whatever, that wasn't the vibe I got from him in the meetings I was in.
02:29:05.000Maybe you decided to toughen up after that movie.
02:30:55.000He quoted, I think it's Cato the Elder, a famous Roman senator.
02:30:58.000And he would end all his speeches with, Carthage must be destroyed.
02:31:03.000It was in the context of the Punic Wars.
02:31:04.000And so he just randomly cited that and the implication was clear.
02:31:08.000And 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.
02:31:15.000They literally printed that phrase with like a Roman helmet and it appeared all over Facebook.
02:31:19.000And then everyone stole the fucking posters.
02:31:22.000I had to struggle to find a photo because Vanity Fair wanted a photo of it and I couldn't find it because I didn't manage to steal one of the posters.
02:31:27.000A friend sent me a photo before it got stolen or the fucking thing.
02:33:32.000They'd have these things called hackathons where you spend like an all-nighter hacking on shit and you would get a t-shirt for that and it was like a badge of honor and you'd collect them because there'd be one like every month or two.
02:33:52.000There's a phrase from Paul Graham who writes all these blog posts about tech and he runs this thing called Y Combinator.
02:33:58.000And he said, if you brought back Lennon from the grave and brought him onto the campus of a large tech company, And he saw the posters on the wall, the great leaders, the uniforms.
02:34:06.000He would think that communism had won.
02:34:48.000Like, how early you are in the company defines your wealth and what fraction of the equity you get.
02:34:52.000Because the real money is in the equity.
02:34:53.000The salaries actually aren't that high.
02:34:54.000I mean, they're healthy, but they're not crazy.
02:34:56.000It's the equity where you really make the real money, right?
02:34:58.000And 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.
02:35:07.000So if I had joined Facebook, like, two or three years before, it would have changed the entire picture.
02:36:01.000But they kind of know that it's a different world.
02:36:04.000I mean, there's websites you can go at, like, see what the comp levels are so you can sort of get an idea.
02:36:09.000But if you're talking about the early stage of a company, and it's so variable, right?
02:36:13.000Like, I came in what's called an acquihire.
02:36:15.000What that means is, like, they acquire a company, but really they're just buying you.
02:36:19.000So it's just, like, a nice hiring offer.
02:36:22.000And the numbers there can vary by a lot.
02:36:23.000And if you just get hired via a college fucking recruitment fair, it's totally different.
02:36:27.000And then again, as time goes on and Facebook shares go from $5 to $50, suddenly a 2x difference in stock has a major, or even more, has a major difference.
02:36:52.000There's no way to actually know the pay delta.
02:36:55.000So I don't think there's a lot of resentment there.
02:36:58.000I mean, in theory, the rewards should vary with the risk, but I'm not sure it's true.
02:37:02.000To be honest, if I were giving startup advice, joining as an early employee at a startup, I mean, now startup wages are pretty good, so you're not taking such a big financial risk.
02:37:10.000But to be honest, the fall-off and the upside between a founder and an early employee is massive.
02:37:16.000It's by orders of magnitude, potentially.
02:37:18.000And it's like, you're taking the same fucking risk?
02:37:20.000It's like day one of the fucking company, right?
02:37:22.000And like, are you actually going to get filthy rich?
02:37:25.000If it becomes Google, of course, everybody gets rich in a Google-Facebook scenario.
02:37:28.000The reality is most companies don't, right?
02:37:30.000They either fail, most fail, or they have like a middling outcome, like the company sells for a certain amount.
02:37:34.000It's like, okay, it's a healthy outcome, but it's not like everyone, including the fucking dog walker, is a million.
02:41:00.000How come no one has figured out an alternative to Twitter?
02:41:03.000I mean, I know Getter existed, but then when I got on Getter, one of the first things that I noticed is that Getter imported all of my Twitter followers and tried to pretend I had 9 million followers on Getter.
02:42:03.000And they won't even take it down, which I salute them.
02:42:06.000I mean, that's a fucking ballsy move because they're going to lose their Twitter account because they're saying, you know, like, it's true.
02:42:13.000But it's not true that she's the man of the year.
02:42:16.000I mean, it's true that it's a biological male, but...
02:42:18.000The fact that they have the balls to say, we're not deleting this.
02:43:34.000In many ways, what the Web3 people want to recreate is Web1, which we're both old enough, and some of your listeners, I'm sure, old enough to remember, like, email, FTP, Telnet, like, core protocol, HTTP, like the web, right?
02:43:47.000These are core protocols that aren't defined by, like...
02:43:49.000Facebook or Twitter saying, this is the way the world works.
02:43:51.000No, we agree that 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.
02:44:01.000Gmail might say, we don't want to give you a Gmail account anymore, but email as such is not shut down for you.
02:44:08.000And so Web3, in a trustless environment, with not people necessarily agreeing in direct ways, coming up with a way to recreate a way to say, Hey, I own this thing, like an NFT, like a picture of an ape, say.
02:44:21.000I own this thing, and the world thinks I own this thing, and it's not a function of Sotheby's or an auction house or whatever saying that I own this thing.
02:44:34.000It exists in this thing called a blockchain, which is basically a public database that we all agree on that everyone maintains via various mechanisms we have to get into.
02:44:42.000And then I can have, in the same way that email just works, I have an app that sits on top of it that reads that and renders it to me in some Twitter-like way, but there's no Twitter that can just say, Babylon Bee, you don't exist anymore, or Donald Trump, get off of Twitter.
02:45:05.000Do you think it would take some sort of egregious censorship thing?
02:45:08.000Like, I think Donald Trump being kicked off Twitter was a step in that direction, where so many people were so furious at 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?
02:45:26.000Like you said about privacy, I think those aspects to your average person who isn't living on the edge and posting weird, crazy shit, isn't that convincing?
02:45:34.000I think for Web3 to take off, and to be clear, my career has not been in consumer internet.
02:45:38.000It's been on the back end, monetizing the usage.
02:45:43.000There has to be something new and cool that Web3 enables that just doesn't exist that's going to drive that adoption.
02:45:49.000You're not going to convince people to leave Twitter for the new Web3 version of Twitter just because, oh, there's less censorship going on, right?
02:45:55.000I don't think that it's really a top-of-mind issue for most users.
02:45:58.000What's interesting is Twitter still allows pornography, right?
02:46:02.000Dude, when I search for random names that collide with a porn star's name, I see porn.
02:46:42.000Although I think most people probably don't want porn in their Twitter experience, but yeah.
02:46:44.000Well, some people obviously do, and they must have drawn some line.
02:46:49.000I 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 was advocating for the option of a Wild West version of Twitter.
02:47:17.000A lot of what motivates Web3 is that crypto-libertarian aspect of tech that just wants to total freedom, the most minimalist thing, which I think it's powerful, and I think we should have it.
02:47:28.000I think as time goes on, that's going to be more attractive to people, I believe.
02:47:36.000I don't give a fuck about Gen Z, but the people who are alive are not just Gen Z. There's a lot of people that aren't Gen Z that are, you know, millennials and even Gen X that are aware of the problems and the pitfalls of allowing social media companies to dictate discourse,
02:47:52.000to decide what's acceptable and not acceptable to say.