Wendy Lou, author of Abolish Silicon Valley, critiques the industry's shift from idealism to profit-driven isolation under a second Trump presidency, where tech giants like OpenAI operate without accountability. She contrasts her own journey with fraudulent founders like Lucy Guo and Roy Lee, exposing how systemic incentives reward hype over integrity in scams ranging from fake compliance services to AI-generated content. Ultimately, the episode argues that this hollow autonomism alienates ordinary people, suggesting that true innovation requires rejecting the soulless pursuit of wealth that currently dominates the tech landscape. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
|
Time
Text
Feeling Like A Poser00:07:21
Hello, welcome to the Truenon podcast.
My name is Brace and I am joined by.
All right, and can you say your name is Liz?
Say hi, I'm Liz.
Hi, I'm Liz.
Okay, yeah.
Say it again, like more confident.
Hi, I'm Liz.
There we go.
It sounds exactly like her.
And I'm producer Young Chomsky.
And now say welcome to Truenon.
Welcome to Truenon.
Jeffrey Ladies and gentlemen, we're back to normal.
Everything is back.
Liz is back in the building.
She is co hosting the show.
And I'm just trying out how those sentences sound for when I actually say them and to see how they'll feel and to get a taste of that feeling.
And it feels empty because we do not have Liz with us.
We have Wendy.
Wendy Lou, who's expecting some kind of introduction by the face that you're making at me.
And I'll give it to you.
Wendy Lou is the founder of Chestnuts.
A Christmas movie streaming platform she founded in 2012, acquired by Flix in 2013 for $800 million.
She went on to found Suckies, a dating app for adult baby diaper lovers in 2015, which sold to Tinder in 2016 for 10,000 euros.
Then she went on to found Quiply, a Quip based mass emailing platform sold to MailChimp in 2018.
There's no number attached to that.
She then founded the Rough Riders in 2020, dominating the canine market on NFT sites to the tune of $8 billion.
Pivoting into telehealth with the pandemic, she founded P.ERX. Perks in 2021 before founding a blockchain based company called Gollum, before founding an AI based AI startup called AIBased, which is currently constructing the most racist AI known to man.
She is also the author of Abolish Silicon Valley and a former tech worker.
Wendy, welcome to the show.
Thank you.
Just to be clear, none of that was true except for the very last sentence.
That's NDA shit, right?
I'm still absorbing everything I learned about myself.
And now I'm wondering if I've lived my life all wrong because I. Probably could have made a lot more money if I had done what you told me just now.
What are those?
What's that?
What's that one like software that you use?
Pim Eyes.
Pim Eyes.
The one that like you can put someone's picture in and then like see all pictures of them throughout their life.
Yeah.
I just got hit with an alternative vision of what my life could have been.
And I think I could have been a lot richer.
Yeah.
And maybe not happier actually, but I probably would have been on the Forbes 30 under 30.
Well, you would be in prison.
I might be in prison.
Yeah.
So you know what?
Maybe I actually picked the right path.
We, you are really our first, I think.
Besides him, our first tech worker on the show.
But I feel like you were a poser tech worker.
That's not true.
I feel like you were a poser tech worker.
I was really good at posing.
Yeah, that's fine.
But you are our first real tech worker on the show.
I want to tell you before we start talking our shit today, Wendy, you're now an ex tech worker.
But what brought you to that point?
What brought you to this point?
Yeah, so I wasn't a poser, unfortunately.
I was a true believer.
And it is really embarrassing, which is why I had to write a whole book to go through the journey of how I stopped. being a believer.
But my background is I was just someone who started coding at a really young age.
I was really uncool.
I had no friends.
I was on the computer a lot and I learned how to write code.
I made websites.
I was in all these open source communities.
And I was starting to believe in this idea of the Silicon Valley dream, this sort of startup mythology.
I was reading all these venture capitalists and I just had this idea that if I kept doing what I was doing, eventually I could be one of them, which didn't really make sense, you know, because it's not demographically, I'm not really the right fit.
But I really believed what all these successful, wealthy white men were saying about meritocracy.
So you were reading VCs?
Yeah, Paul Graham.
I mean, Paul Graham and all these people in that kind of world.
At what age was this?
Probably like 12.
Dude, this is why I'm calling.
I'm not insulting you when I call you a poser, but your ass was not reading Paul Graham at 12.
Not Paul Graham, but I was coding stuff.
Paul Graham at 12 years old, Wendy?
And, you know, Ayn Rand.
I mean, just all these things sort of form this kind of miasma that my brain was absorbing.
And I told myself all these stories about how I was better than everyone else and that somehow learning to code would be a way to show my superiority.
It was really weird.
And unfortunately, not an uncommon story for people like me who were raised in this awful way.
I've always sort of suspected that when I met people that they thought they were better than me because they knew how to do way more things than me.
And now you're saying that that's maybe true for some people?
I think the unfortunate thing is we do live in a world where people like me and people even worse than me are kind of getting more than they deserve.
You know, they are receiving millions of dollars and Forbes 30 under 30 mentions and they're getting magazine covers and they're being feted as the people who are saving the world.
Yeah.
And I think that is a problem because I think maybe what I needed is I needed someone to sort of punch me in the face.
Well, so what?
So you.
This is crazy to me.
You read 12?
You were reading Paul Graham?
You know, everyone was kind of doing it.
It's just you're on XKCD, you're on Hacker News.
No, I wasn't.
XKCD.
I don't even know what that one is.
Hacker News, I know because that one's still around.
XKCD is a webcomic.
Okay, that's kind of what I suspected because that spells out kind of a.
Am I thinking of like an emoji that people used to use?
Am I thinking of, maybe that's just, I don't know.
Just little stick figures and they say smart stuff.
Okay, that is, I have seen that then.
So, where are you from?
I'm Canadian.
I was living, I've lived all over the world, sort of.
But I, so just picture me in Montreal, really far from anything in California, but just reading all of this sort of programmer superiority blog post stuff, right?
It's all kind of this just corpus of stuff on the internet written by.
Men who think that being a programmer makes them smarter than everyone else.
And this is at a time when the tech industry is just starting to become more of a big deal and it's filtering into the popular imagination.
And Google is named as the best place to work.
And there's this kind of cult of mystique around people like Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs.
And so for me, as a young, naive, and unbalanced person, I really absorbed this idea that that would be my highest calling.
And so I went to school for computer science, I graduated.
Immediately after graduating, I mean, I think before I even graduated, I think I finished my last exam and then did an interview with Y Combinator, which is the accelerator that Paul Graham was running back in the day.
And that Sam Meltman was part of for a while.
And that was sort of Sam Meltman's rise to power.
We're forgetting somebody pretty amazing in those lists of names.
And his name is Gary Tane.
Well, he came along later.
The Startup Agency Problem00:14:59
I know, I know, I know.
But I'm just saying, like, we can't really talk about Y Combinator without.
We're not talking about the cliff without talking about the goat who lives on it now, right?
That's true.
And he's also Canadian.
Yeah.
And very.
Diminutive in his height.
But this is, I'm sorry, I've known you for a while.
You, what, we should have shown you a movie or something back there?
I mean, was there like, was there, there was, this was, you were like, I cannot wait to get to San Francisco.
That was like, did you think it was San Francisco?
Because how, I don't know, I'm not going to ask you how old you are.
I'm going to ask you what time period was this?
Yeah.
So I, well, I graduated in the mid 2010s.
And I was working on a startup around that time.
And we kept, you know, we thought, Thought that eventually we'd make it to San Francisco.
It was a little hard because most of us were not American.
But we just, you know, there's this kind of dream that eventually you raise enough money and then everything else will be solved.
All the visa problems will be solved.
Didn't quite work out that way.
The startup failed, which is probably why I ended up where I am now because if my startup had succeeded, I think I would just be riding that wave, you know, because once you succeed, it's really easy to just have other things come really easily to you.
But my startup, it was very unfortunate.
It got caught up in the the wave after Cambridge Analytica, after that scandal, there was a wave of companies looking at the way they were using data and being really wary of companies like mine that came along and promised to make magical insights out of their data.
And so we were unfortunately the victim of this broader trend in the industry.
But I mean, we thought we could do anything else.
We thought, well, that's okay.
We're highly, I mean, we didn't use the word agentic back then, but that's what we thought we were.
We're smart.
We're young.
We're hardworking.
We can do anything.
And so we spent I remember we spent a whole summer thinking, well, we can't do the startup we were doing before.
We can't really use people's private data to do sketchy things.
But we can apply our knowledge of machine learning, our knowledge of software APIs, enterprise software.
We can build anything.
We can build a billion dollar company and we can dominate some space and then make everyone around us our bitches.
That was just the reasoning.
Wait, so your idea after you were like, oh, it turns out the whole world is mad at people who do exactly what I do.
Your idea was not like, I'm going to start this other company that does this specific thing.
Your other idea was just our company's gonna stay our company, but we're gonna pivot to just another idea that will make us a billion dollars.
Yes, yes, exactly.
And that was so normal.
There were so many companies that pivoted successfully.
I know the pivoting thing is crazy.
If I may put a pin in that real quick, is there like another?
I guess maybe bands do this, but like sometimes startups will like get like so far with an idea and then like OpenAI releases the new whatever iteration of the ChatGPT and then their rapper is kind of defunct.
And they'll be like, all right, well, we're still.
This company, but now we just do a completely different thing that we came up with at like the last second.
And but we do this now.
It's like I don't, I'm trying to think of like any other.
You think if you started a podcast about politics and then that stuff went bad and you're like, let's just do movie reviews.
Yeah, Well, I mean, I think I think we'll probably talk about this later when we talk about the concept of agency, but I do think that what you're pointing out, Brace, about pivoting and how strange it seems, I think that is core to the problem of the way startups are.
produced these days and were produced in my time where it wasn't like we thought we had a specific problem that we cared about.
There wasn't a sense of this is something we want to fight for.
This is something we believe the world needs and we want to fight for.
It was more just this kind of empty, you know, these lost young people being like, how do we do something that puts us on the map?
And using whatever it is we're working on as just a means to an end.
We didn't care what we were doing.
We just wanted to be big.
And there's something really soulless and horrifying about that.
Imagine a writer who decided, I don't really care what I'm writing.
I just want to produce something big and just writing schlock over and over.
That's a very different kind of writing from the kind of writing that I think, hopefully, writers want to do.
But that is a certain approach.
And it's a very successful one if you're in a world that likes the slob that's being produced.
And I think with startups where We have an ecosystem that encourages people to be these empty vessels to just produce whatever the market wants, whatever is going to get funded.
They should just devote their whole lives to making this thing big, even if they don't care about it, even if they don't think it's good for the world.
As long as they're able to commit themselves to it, that is what the market rewards.
And that's how they end up becoming millionaires, billionaires.
That's how they end up in the Forbes 30 under 30, right?
It's just this sense of the entrepreneur as an empty vessel, devoid of any kind of values or a purpose in life other than to just grow their pointless startup.
As much as they can.
You know, now that you mentioned podcasts, this does remind me of Adam Friedman.
But, so you, because I met you in the Bay Area.
So, you did get out there eventually.
The company, okay, you're like, we're gonna pivot, we're gonna make a billion dollars.
Does that happen?
It didn't happen to me, unfortunately.
Fortunately or unfortunately, it didn't happen to me.
It does happen to some people, right?
But for me, what happened was 2016, Trump got elected, Brexit was happening.
There are all these things happening in the world that made me realize that I was kind of missing something.
And it was very strange.
And at the same time, I mean, the startup wasn't going well, the pivots weren't going well.
None of us, we couldn't agree on something we wanted to do.
You know, and if you're going to do a startup with several people, you all kind of need to agree on the billion dollar thing you're working on because you're committing the next few years of your life to it.
We couldn't agree, and all these things were happening in the outside world that made me feel like I was maybe missing something by just staring at my computer screen and only thinking about my stupid startup.
So from there, I ended up just spending a lot of time in the library, reading a lot of books, kind of aimless, following the news more.
And that was how I discovered tech criticism and specifically left-wing tech criticism.
And that was a place that Finally, it made sense to me.
And I felt like all the dissatisfaction that I was starting to have about the tech industry just from reading the news and hearing about what was going on, I didn't have a place for that to go.
But with all this new stuff that I was reading that I was learning about, it was finally like I found a worldview that encapsulated everything and it made sense of it.
And so then I thought, well, this is, I thought I needed to do a personal pivot, right?
And to put it in these horrible startup terms.
But I thought, okay, well, maybe I don't have to just be a person who tries to be a startup founder and a programmer forever.
Maybe there's something else for me in this world and there's something else.
Worth devoting my life to.
So I ended up moving to London, doing a master's degree in inequality.
And while I was there, I got swept up in the Corbyn campaign and got involved with a lot of other political projects around workers who were trying to organize the gig economy and just all these other things that were so new to me, I'd never considered them interesting before.
I thought, I'm a software engineer.
I have a perfect analytical, technical brain and I can solve anything from first principles.
What's the point of all these people fighting for it?
Why don't they just learn to code?
That really was my problem.
Although, you know, now there's no point because AI can just code for you.
Yeah, that's awesome.
Well, they're saying that, but there's no way because I'm almost done with this boot camp I've been doing.
I'm pretty sure I'm going to be able to get a job after this.
But so then that just opened up a whole new world for me.
And then it really made me see what I'd been missing with this very shallow and narrow view of life that I'd had before when I thought that all that mattered was having a successful startup.
So from there, I started writing.
I started to try to make sense of everything that I was starting to understand about the world and about myself and writing these short essays.
Which eventually got turned into a book that got published in April of 2020, which is a horrible time for a book to come out because it was the beginning of the pandemic.
Because you can't do the book tour?
No book tour.
Yeah, it was all Zoom podcasts.
Yeah.
Oh, and you know that everybody is just, they're in there being like, did you guys read the book?
Like in the little chat to each other.
Probably.
But I mean, ever since then, it felt like things sort of made sense.
And I've been writing, I've been writing about the tech industry.
And I don't feel, I don't want to be a tech worker.
I worked at a nonprofit as a software developer, which was better than working at a startup, but still, I think it's ultimately not for me.
I think I realized I want to figure out how to be more of a full human being than the person I thought I could be.
I want to feel connected to other things in the world.
I want to feel connected to culture, to philosophy, to society as a whole.
It seems silly to say it, it feels like such a basic thing, but these were things that I felt like I had to close myself off from since I was very young.
And now it's like, okay, I want to be a writer.
I want to write about the world in a way that makes sense to me, and I want to fight for something in the writing I do.
I don't want to just churn out slop.
I want to write in a way that makes sense.
And it's been interesting to see this wave of.
AI based, you know, writing scandals coming out or just writers using AI to write.
And I'm like, guys, why, like, do you not care about writing?
Do you not, doesn't writing exist?
I don't know.
I think that people do it, not to get us too off track here, but I think a lot of people do it for different reasons.
I think some people are lazy and they're like, fuck it.
I'll just like ask the AI to come up with maybe like a few ideas, like feed my writing into it and ask for a few ideas that I missed.
I think some people are just using like literally generating what they're writing through AI and then like tweaking it.
I don't know.
I don't know because no one's ever admitted to me that they do it.
Um, and I'm too afraid to use AI in any real sense.
I mean, I use it, I use Chat GPT to Google stuff, but I don't do it in any kind of like give me an idea or anything like that.
It's always just like give me a list of articles between this year and this year about this.
But even then, it's not very good, but it's better than Google, I guess.
I don't know.
I think that people just like think that no one will notice.
I think it's funny because it really feels to me like you're trading a little bit of your soul, right?
It's like you're trading something really internal and important to you for these external rewards, yeah.
That is such a scary thing to me because I think that's something I saw.
That's part of why I felt like the startup world was spiritually hollow and morally bankrupt because that is what that is.
And seeing that thread line, I feel like I really avoid any kind of generative AI as much as I can.
And I think for me, I mean, it is very frustrating to look at an empty page and not know what to write, but also that work of trying to figure out what you want to say.
It's core to not just writing, but core to being a human being and thinking.
Yeah, it's core to using your brain.
I mean, I think one of the main things that I worry about with AI, besides all the other shit.
Science fiction shit that everyone knows about is just like on a very basic level.
I think that people kind of give up the responsibility of thinking and, like, even Google does this to us.
So I don't want to blame it all on AI.
I think really just having the ability to look things up at any moment rather than just think about it and get it wrong or think about it and maybe get it right or just think about it.
You know, I find myself, if I don't know something, wanting to just look it up immediately instead of like what it actually is nice to do is sometimes you just think about something you don't know it.
And then you kind of, your thoughts branch off, and you might, you know, I don't know, you just have more thoughts.
And that's, that's at its core, I think that's like my big critique of a lot of technology.
And I say this as somebody who experiences this is that it's thought deadening.
And like it really, you know, I think every, I don't think it's anybody is really immune to it if they use devices in even an average or even probably below average way, because it's just, it's part and parcel of what happens.
And so I didn't know, for some reason, I didn't know you got so red pilled.
On this, I didn't know that you were.
Well, I guess not red pilled, but just well, whatever.
It's in the matrixian sense that like you were so in the matrix and then you got out of the matrix.
Because I'll tell you this from my perspective, I mean, no disrespect to the two former tech workers in this room.
I, you know, my view of tech workers has always been the enemy that came into where I was from and then made that place worse and then got mad at you for being mad at them.
And I'm not saying that every tech worker is like this, but my view, writ large, I think it's a fairly accurate assessment.
A lot of people like that.
There's a lot of people like that.
But who also don't like the things that, like, I was always confused why tech made its home in San Francisco instead of staying more in Silicon Valley because San Francisco, famously home to a lot of culture, a lot of different people.
But then, like, there was, and this is very prevalent now.
You know, people move there and then just not partake in any of it or get mad at it or try to create their own version of it from first principles.
And which I still don't really know what first principles are.
What are first principles?
It's like mathematical logic.
You know, you just start from a blank slate and then you come up with axioms.
It's just a way tech people like to talk.
Yeah.
It's like abstract.
Like, instead of looking at, What people have actually done in the world or studying history.
How has this happened before?
It's just like, well, let me just do a thought experiment and just reason through it, like in this Cartesian way.
Interesting.
Which is valid sometimes, but I mean, I think, Brace, what you're saying, and you know, of course, you're valid for not liking tech workers.
We don't do that thing here.
Pretty much everybody that I talk to is invalid in one way or another in basically all their beliefs, but we're all just human beings here.
I wanted to validate you here.
Thank you.
Thank you.
But because I have a but.
I mean, I think.
The reason tech workers are drawn to San Francisco is because they know there is culture and there is something lively and human about the place.
And even, I think, the most brain deadened, annoying tech workers still have some humanity, you know?
And I think this is part of what I was trying to do with my book because I was telling the story of my own very rapid, total transformation from someone who is, you know, just this worst kind of Ayn Rand worshiping, you know, startup founder, right?
Yeah, yeah.
I wanted to say, look, it's possible.
And I wanted to look at the structural factors that produce people like me and point out the kind of moral hollowness at the bottom of that project because I think it makes sense given the way the tech industry works that a lot of young people are going to be indoctrinated into believing that the best thing they can do with their lives is to try to build a billion dollar company.
I think that's actually what the industry needs.
It needs a whole group of young people who just have nothing other than this drive to become wealthy through building whatever bullshit software that their investors want them to build.
Disconnecting From Normal People00:12:14
But also, I think every person contains within them the capacity to be better than that, the capacity to look at their surroundings and decide that they don't want to just live their lives in the service of capital, that they want to be connected to humanity, that they want something more.
And I think this is the ever-present tension in the tech industry, where on the one hand, you have this very deadening labor regime, whether it's for the tech workers who work at places like Google or the startup founders or people who work at all these other different kinds of companies, because there are tech workers everywhere, right?
There's, on the one hand, this tension, this drive where they kind of need to become the person who can function in that environment.
They need to be kind of mindless, right?
Their boss wants them to be kind of mindless.
The VCs want them to be kind of mindless and just to follow the money, churn out these products, even if they're bad for humanity.
But then, of course, they are still humans at the end of the day.
They relate to other humans.
They live in communities.
And they read books, they listen to music, they watch movies, you know?
And there are these factors that are reminding them look, there are other things in life and there are things you should fight for.
Very interested in what drives a person to step on either side.
I mean, there's some, of course, there are people like Gary Tan, right?
Who take it to one extreme, who decide to advocate for capital and everything that capital needs.
And then there are people who, like me and a lot of other people who've been on similar journeys, who decide, actually, you know what?
There's more to life than being a vessel for capital.
I don't want to spend my short time on this planet making value for shareholders, right?
It's such a basic concept.
And people discover this.
In all sorts of industries.
But I think in the tech industry, especially, it takes a special, it takes a very particular kind of almost reverse brainwashing because there is such a sense of tech being the savior of society.
You know, like AI is going to save us, tech's going to save us, whatever.
And so then you have to not only challenge the idea that you're better than everyone else because you understand these principles, but also you have to recognize that whatever technology you're going to build in this capitalist environment is not actually going to be good for the world.
That is the thing that is really hard to get tech people to understand because they want to feel like the thing they've spent their whole lives getting good at is going to be useful.
They don't want to think that their work will be used to drop bombs on civilians halfway across the world.
They don't want to think that it's just going to cause all the rainforests to be destroyed, right?
They don't want to think those things, but those things are kind of true.
And so I think the challenge is breaking through this sort of cognitive dissonance and getting people who are in the tech industry to connect to the parts of their humanity that are grounded in The values that, you know, I think all of us in this room share, and not to.
Just cut themselves off from those things and make themselves these perfect atomized entrepreneurial vessels for capital.
Well, one thing that I've noticed is that when I was younger, I remember a lot of tech companies sort of positioning themselves as these, I don't know what, places of connection, right?
I mean, especially when social media was kind of coming up.
We've all heard ad nauseum about how amazing Twitter was for people overthrowing these governments in the Middle East and forming democratic whatever, whatever, whatever, or like Facebook is.
You know, they're connecting you to your cousins, and you can see all the awesome stuff that they're posting.
And wait until Donald Trump is president.
You're really going to like a lot of the stuff they're posting then.
But there was this thing that was like, we're actually adding this tech stuff on top of this amazing, interconnected, globalized world that we have.
And it's just making that better.
And then there was a sort of backlash against tech, which some call the tech lash.
But I think we can just call it the backlash because it is a backlash.
Because tech lash sounds like it's some sort of cyber whip that's hitting you full of a cat of nine tails made out of microchips.
But, and then I feel like a lot of tech people got wounded.
They're like, listen, they called Mark Zuckerberg, who was fucking neurodivergent, and they made him go in front of Congress and were like, look at me when I'm speaking.
And they were rude to him.
And I think a lot of tech people became more insular, especially people at the top, and became like more, they felt as if they were not respected.
And you saw this kind of balloon up during the Biden presidency, but also during COVID when a lot more, there was a sort of mass onboarding to more tech.
I guess I don't know how else to describe it, but like people started using their phones and computers more and using different apps in more crazy ways.
Um, and now I feel like there's this general sense of it's tech versus the world.
And there was this very triumphal sense from certain sectors in Silicon Valley when Trump won the second time, when it was like all of us are like, we have a seat at the table now.
We've got David Sachs, he's the crypto czar.
President Trump went on the all in podcast.
We, you know, we got Chamoth up in there.
We got Gary Tan, I believe, relocated to DC for a little while.
And then I'm sure he was like, oh my God, look at all the black people here.
I got to get back to San Francisco.
And then it's just like now, and now we're in this weird area where AI has become kind of like the big thing, I guess.
Everyone pivoted to AI or the AI companies are sort of ascendant.
We've got this sort of weird, Government AI thing that looks like it's kind of maybe not working out so well.
This huge billions and billions or trillion dollar plan to build data centers.
I don't know how much ground has actually been struck on those.
And we have this tragedy that occurred a pair of tragedies that occurred in San Francisco last weekend, which is that somebody tried to throw a Molotov cocktail at Sam Altman's Russian Hill house, which apparently I was informed he lives on Lombard Street.
And I was just thinking, what if he lives on the twisty part of Lombard?
Which I love, of course.
We all love Lombard Street, but could you imagine the second attack that occurred?
Somebody driving by his house and shooting a gun out their window, but doing that on the windy road.
It's on hard mode.
Yeah.
Crazy taxi, which did take place in San Francisco.
And it was funny because I saw, of course, the reaction of people on the internet and people on Twitter, which was like all of these sort of SF tech people shocked at how this could occur.
And then.
There was blame and recrimination over, oh, well, it's our fault because we haven't explained the benefits of how awesome AI is going to make people's lives.
Oh, it's your fault because you said that you better learn AI, you're going to be part of the permanent underclass.
Or it's your fault, or it's the Chinese fault because I saw this from a lot of people that they're on TikTok.
All these people on TikTok say that the AI centers are draining the water from everywhere.
And this is a lie that they're saying on TikTok.
And so people are going crazy over that.
It turns out now that I think the first guy maybe had a manifesto and it's apparently a list of AI CEOs, which I'm like, really, the only famous one.
Oh, good.
What's the other guy?
His name is like Derrida or whatever.
Dario.
Dario.
Dario?
It's kind of a cool name.
Argento.
I think he's like Eastern European or something.
Eastern European?
Dario.
But like maybe Dario was second, but who the fuck knows the other ones?
And it was funny because all these people were like, but I don't understand why anyone would hate us.
And it's, I do have to say, as somebody who does pay probably a lot closer attention to the stuff coming out of the AI world, you know, Sam Altman. Is, I think, more adept than people give him credit for, for like trying to massage the effects or like rhetorically massage his statements about the effects that AI will have on the environment.
But kind of none of these guys can get away with hyping their products as the thing that's going to destroy the labor market as we know it.
And the reality is, I don't know if that's why any of these people did this stuff, but that's why a lot of people don't like this stuff because you're essentially, you're some guy in San Francisco who's like, hey, I'm going to put you out of a job and I'm really working hard every day to do exactly that.
And it's funny because there's been this like backlash against the normie from tech people.
And now there's this sort of backlash to that backlash from the normie.
And which isn't to say that normal people don't use AI all the time.
I think people are using it in ways that you and I could, all three of us could never even dream of on a day to day basis.
But it's interesting because there does seem to be this stuff has, is taking up a lot of room in a lot of people's brains, including my own, in a way that it hasn't before.
Yeah, I think it's very polarizing because there are.
People who are using AI to talk to their AI girlfriends all the time.
And then there are people who are like, I don't want to touch it.
I really don't like AI art.
I think it's tacky.
I think it is becoming this very polarizing, divisive technology.
But I mean, to your point about the way there's been kind of this vibe shift in tech, right?
This is something I've been thinking about.
And I wrote a piece about it using the Palantir billboard at SFO as a framing device because there was a really horrible billboard at SFO last summer that said, Software that dominates.
That was it, Palantir.
And that's a billboard that would have seemed really odd maybe 10 years ago, but in the 2020s, with Trump president, it feels very normal.
And I do think future historians will look back on this period of time in the tech industry and they will talk about Trump being elected the second time and also Elon Musk taking over Twitter and cutting it.
I think those will be two very pivotal moments the way Reagan firing the air traffic controllers was a pivotal moment in the birth of neoliberalism, or Thatcher firing the miners.
And I think.
If you look at these two moments, I think what they represent is the sense of it's no longer necessary for tech companies to act like they're making the world a better place.
They're not even really trying.
They're able to be more brazen and more open about what they're really doing.
And so, right now, we have so many companies, tech companies, that are clamoring to get some money from the Trump administration through contracts with ICE, through contracts with the military, right?
There isn't even a sense of trying to pretend that we're making the world more global and connected and spreading democracy.
No.
It's all about, well, you know, we want to.
We want to make money.
We want to return value for shareholders.
We want our technology to be part of this value chain, whatever.
And I think that is maybe relevant to the fact that people are really angry because no one's even trying to convince them anymore.
And back then, it's like a lot of people weren't convinced by the promises of the tech companies.
But now it does feel like there's a market shift.
And I mean, living in San Francisco, I see all these horrible billboards all the time, right?
And the billboards are so naked in their disdain for the average consumer.
And I think they're really representative of a tech industry that isn't even trying to justify itself or legitimate itself to normal people anymore because it's so far up, so disconnected from the average person.
And I think this is what we're seeing with these tech CEOs and whatever who are like, how could people be upset?
Why don't they like us?
Because they are disconnected.
They don't know what it's like to be a normal person, right?
They're so, with all their billions, they're so far removed from what it's like to just be a normal person on this planet.
And they don't.
They don't know how to connect with them, and they're not even trying to justify themselves to these people.
And I think that disconnection sort of breeds contempt because you'll often see them become defensive and say, oh, people just don't get it.
Well, it's like, okay, well, maybe I don't get some technical aspects of what you're working on, but certainly I get what you're saying when you give interviews or you put out press releases.
And it seems like you want to put a lot of people out of work and you have contempt for those who might try to find a solution to that problem in terms of like welfare state or anything.
Billionaires And Cursed Tech00:03:32
You're also a libertarian.
And so it does trouble a person like me.
And I'm not going to say I'm the average person.
But although I am curiously somebody that technically AI could put out a fork because that is, they really are pushing these AI podcasts.
But I'm like, I think that is, I think that's a symptom of all big tech companies thinking that they need to have in house podcasts and like selling that as a B2B sort of thing.
So that, oh, look, your stupid fucking whatever AI rapper company can put out like an in house podcast at the touch of a button.
It's like, no one's listening to this shit.
But it does, you know, obviously I have some emotional.
Dislikes of these people that maybe doesn't necessarily stem from the political or economic situation, just from being from the Bay Area.
But it does seem like there is a growing contempt that they have.
And this, like, you know, this, it is San Francisco is a fucking peninsula.
You know what I mean?
It is a city surrounded on three sides by water and the other side by Daly City, which is shout out to the most Filipino town outside of Manila.
But it is a pretty walled off city.
And even within San Francisco, you have these sort of strange outposts of tech.
You have, what are they calling it?
Cerebral Valley.
Cerebral Valley, which we're loving Cerebral Valley.
Yeah.
Which was previously called Hayes Valley after the famous Hayes Street.
And let's be honest, we weren't hanging out in Hayes Valley before it became Cerebral Valley.
That neighborhood, I worked at a rehab there for a little bit, but that neighborhood, it's like, come on.
It used to be shitty and then it got really nice and now it's, It feels kind of cursed.
It's a little scary.
It's quite cursed.
Yeah.
It used to have that freeway and now there's a weird park.
But I don't know.
It just, you'd think that at some point there will be this moment where they're like, oh, fuck, like everybody is really going to hate us.
And they started, I think they did start getting that.
And then they kind of took that to be like, okay, well, we hate them too now.
And that's difficult for somebody like me to take in because these people are making technology that really is being deployed at massive scale.
and having huge effects on wide swaths of the Earth's population.
I think it's really hard for people who are already kind of in a bubble and who are being validated by money and success and power to ever understand the validity of the critiques leveled against them.
And I think this is a case, this is what we're seeing, right?
And there is just such an incredible eye popping amount of money that's flowing into tech right now, especially into anything related to AI.
And I think that kind of money sort of makes you crazy.
It makes you unable to see what's actually going on.
All you can just see is the stacks of bills, you know, going higher and higher, and you can't see what it's.
You don't understand the people around you.
You don't understand why they could be upset at you.
And I think that what we're talking about, it's partly tech.
It's partly the fact that, you know, a lot of people in tech do have this sort of thing that they think that because they can think from first principles that they're better, they're smarter than the people around them.
That's part of it, sure.
It's not all of it.
A lot of it is just the money.
And I think that amount of money would blind people in any industry, no matter what it is.
And what is dangerous about the tech industry is how powerful it is, right?
Is how, like you're saying, this technology is being deployed all over the world and it can scale so fast.
Blinded By Massive Money00:06:51
Unfortunately, the technology that has this power to disrupt the world is in the hands of a small number of people, most of whom exhibit fairly sociopathic traits and who are rewarded for what they're doing by being showered with more and more money every day.
So that's a really great place for us to be as a society.
Well, you mentioned the billboards, and I gotta tell you, the last time I was in San Francisco, this is the longest I've ever been away from San Francisco in my life, by the way.
It's been like a year and a half.
The last time I was there, I remember coming in from SFO and being like, dude, what the fuck are any of these billboards talking about?
And it seemed like some of them, in fact, most of them were being essentially purposefully jargony and in plain technical language.
And it was hostile to me.
And it was like, this is crazy.
It feels like I landed on a damn other planet and they're trying to fucking advertise to me Gorbulon blocks or something because I don't know what the fuck these things are saying.
And there's these stupid in jokes and this.
Childish toilets humor, but about things that I don't understand.
It's like, do you want to, you know, I can't even think of the technical term.
Do you want to fuck my chat hole or whatever?
It's not that, but it's like shit like that.
There was some fucking company called like Boner or some shit like that, but it's also like a technical term.
It's not Boner, but it's some shit like that.
And I saw like a wrapped muni bus with an add on.
Post hog, maybe?
Post hog.
And I'm just like, okay, cool.
This is just fucking stupid.
And, and, but I'm like, who are the, it's, it's, it's.
I don't know, man.
I just, it made me feel like I was going, having a psychotic break because I'm in this damn, I'm not in the damn Waymo, but I'm in the damn shared Uber, which I, because I have COVID often.
And so I try, I still get access to the shared Ubers and I take that shit to try to just spread it to get people's immunity up.
But I'm in there and I'm like, look at this billboard.
I'm like, where the fuck am I and where am I going?
And everywhere is like that.
Every bus stop, every fucking billboard in San Francisco is exactly like that.
Yeah, it feels like you're in a trade show, like you wandered into a city and it somehow just got turned into a trade show, right?
Like these billboards, they're not for you.
They're for enterprise software that you can't even conceive of because it's several layers up in this very complex stack of software products that maybe you interact with as a consumer.
Like maybe you buy something and then the retailer who sells you that thing uses some software that uses some other software that uses Post Hog.
It's possible, right?
There's this very complicated Obfuscated stack of software products that are being used.
And so it's not like these are things that don't exist and aren't making a lot of money.
They are, but they're integrated in a very strange and confusing way.
And it is weird to be in a city that happens to be the headquarters for a lot of these companies.
And so I started writing about these billboards, right?
Because I mean, I think everyone who goes into San Francisco has the same experience of feeling like, what the fuck are these billboards?
Who are they for?
Because they're not for me.
And I wanted to talk about the billboards from a cultural critic point of view.
Critical perspective.
I didn't want to just say, here's what this company does, here's where it makes its money, here's why this joke makes sense, right?
Because I think people are doing that, you know, the mainstream media outlets are doing that.
I wanted to have more of a perspective of, like, why is this here?
Why are these companies allowed to colonize their space?
Why do they have so much money?
And I think it's important to remember that it's not some law of nature that a company like OpenAI is worth almost a trillion dollars, right?
It's not like, well, it's just the way it has to be.
These are political decisions.
Right?
They don't feel political, but they are.
Decisions about where money is allocated, these are always ultimately political decisions, and they're just made on some complicated abstract level, and they're made by people who wear suits in rooms that we don't have access to.
But they are political decisions, and these are decisions about where money is allocated on a global scale that should be more democratic than they are, I think, but definitely are not, and probably won't be for a very long time because power remains so concentrated.
And so I wanted to connect.
The experience that ordinary people have of looking at billboards and feeling perplexed with the distribution of wealth, with the way corporations are financed, and the way that technology is being developed in the modern world.
Because these things are all related, right?
It's not like the billboards just happen to be taken over by tech companies for some funny reason.
It's like, no, the companies that can afford to pay for billboards are these multi billion dollar tech companies that aren't accountable to any of us.
And we are building products that are maybe not good for us, but we don't even know because we can't see what they actually do.
We can't look at the source code.
Nobody actually knows how OpenAI works internally.
It's like that's not public and it won't be.
So I think there's something potentially really radicalizing in looking at the billboards and feeling like the world is being controlled by people who don't care about you.
And I think once you see that in the billboards, it's easier to understand that.
This is just how the tech industry has always worked and how it's going to continue to work if people like Sam Ullman get their way.
Yeah, you know, it's funny.
I would even take it a step further.
It's not even that they don't care about me, because, listen, nobody cares about me and they shouldn't.
But I feel like they hate me.
And I feel like everything that they make just makes that clearer.
All the B2B SaaS, which is like, is that different than enterprise software?
B2B SaaS, it's essentially the same.
Software is a service.
And that's enterprise?
I mean, it can be.
So B2B SaaS, I guess it's essentially the same.
Enterprise software is just software sold to companies.
B2B SaaS.
Well, B2B.
That's business to business.
Yeah, that's business to business.
And that honestly is the type of economic.
That's this type of business that I like because that's like we cut out the fucking plebeian ass consumer, we just talk businessman to businessman and let's make a deal, and that's awesome.
So, I'm not hating on B2B, SAS.
I don't know if I love that so much, but it is, it is like you get the feeling that, especially now with the AI stuff, and there's this interesting sort of like push pull with the millenarianism, millenarianism.
You guys, I'm saying there with that apocalyptic sort of mindset with that stuff.
That, like, first of all, these companies kind of have to sell it as if it's going to change every single facet of our society at every level.
Elon really pushes this.
Selling Apocalyptic Hype00:15:18
Altman's a little more like cautious, I think.
Um, but there's a wide range of, of, uh, I don't know what, of rhetorical techniques deployed to basically get the same message across, which is that society is going to change on a fundamental level, like beyond the industrial revolution, beyond you know, the printing press, it's going to be, it's going to change everything.
Um, And it's funny because they kind of have to say that stuff because that's like a way to sell your product.
Although I don't know if they believe it.
I think that they do.
I mean, their critics also say that stuff.
They're just like, oh, but it's bad, but it's also not that bad because we just have to make the AI good.
I don't know.
It's like there's so much bullshit, is basically what I'm saying.
But like, I guess, I guess like, you know, I'm obviously against violence, any kind of violence, even to defend yourself, even.
To kill a bug.
This is the kind of violence I'm against.
Do I think that you should still do it sometimes?
Yes, but I'm against it.
Of course, I'm against someone throwing a Molotov cocktail at Sam Alma's home.
Um, I guess.
But, but, but, but, well, why not just say that on the podcast?
Obviously, I'm against that.
I'm against that.
And I'm against someone popping up a shot, you know, up in the air.
And we don't even know.
Did they shoot at his house or did they shoot near his house?
Because San Francisco is seven miles by seven miles.
It's easy to shoot near Sam Altman's house.
And if you're on the twisty part of the road, he could have been shooting at anything.
Well, because of all the hills and the winds and things like this, that shot could have been done.
Anywhere that could have been on Telegraph Hill and the bullet fell on Russian Hill.
They were shooting at a bug, which is also bad.
Exactly.
They could have been shooting, they could have seen a scary fucking bug.
But if you do that to protect a freaked out female, boom, boom.
That's like where people love squashing bugs.
Exactly.
Well, and here they try to get you to squash it, but I don't fuck with that.
That was anti human bullshit that New York or anti bug bullshit that New York City was doing.
I brought a lot of those little beautiful lantern flyers into the city to make up for the genocide that you people did against them.
But.
I kind of get why people do this stuff because it's like, dude, if I'm these guys like hate you and they lord over you, someone's going to try to take a shot at you.
And you can't be like shocked and surprised.
And Sam Altman put out this blog post, which he loves to do this.
He loves to be like, listen, I'm just a little nerd that, you know, I'm just here tinkering with my tools.
And, you know, I guess that some people have a problem with it.
It's like, yeah, they have a problem with it because you somehow, unelected, are supposed to change the world.
And change every facet of our society.
And people don't like that.
And people probably don't like it for stupid reasons.
And people probably don't like it for good reasons.
But they don't like it.
And these people can't accept that.
I understand as a podcaster, a lot of people hate me.
And I get it.
Okay.
I understand it.
People take shots at me all the time.
You don't see me complaining about it.
I fucking shoot back.
And then I say, sorry, I don't mean this.
But like, you know, it's, I feel like that's what pisses me off.
I literally, I'm not even joking.
I do understand people don't like me because guess what?
I'm a guy in his mid 30s with brown hair and glasses who lives in Brooklyn and do a podcast for work.
And I don't understand why Sam Ullman can't understand the same thing with the guy who lives on Russian Hill and does open AI for work.
I think it goes back to he just has so much money.
And it really does prevent you from understanding anything about the world.
I mean, what he said is his version of saying, I'm just a girl.
How could anyone?
I'm a small bean.
I'm a small bean.
But the kind of annoying thing is that a lot of the anti AI activism happening in the Bay Area is a little bit these kind of like people who are really afraid of.
They kind of believe everything OpenAI and all these other companies say.
And that's a little annoying because I think they misunderstand the actual threat and they're confusing the hype for the reality.
But I mean, I guess it's good that there's a broader critique of AI going on.
But there is this sort of strange undercurrent of doomerism where people are just like, I think, a little too obsessed with AI and the risks, the existential risks it poses, which I personally think is mostly just hype.
Yeah, I mean, I think that stuff's like possible, but like, yeah, I'm not.
And listen, there have been multiple attempts to get Eliza Yudkowski on the show over the past four years.
All of them have been denied.
The last one in writing, not happening, which is too bad, Eliza, because I could teach you a thing or two about changing your OKCupid profile, which I reread again yesterday.
But I did.
I'm sorry.
It's an interesting profile.
I don't know.
What is it like?
Because you don't work in the tech industry now.
What's it like just being there?
Because again, I haven't lived, I thought genuinely, I was like, I am never leaving San Francisco.
I am going to be here.
It's the best city in America.
It looks beautiful.
Everybody I know is here, and then they weren't.
But it was, I loved it.
And then suddenly I was like, I got to get the fuck out of here.
Because I couldn't, it's just so different now.
And then it's just such a pat thing to say.
But like, the culture has really changed on a real level in the city.
And, you know, I, I, So much stuff now.
Now it's even crazier, especially with the influx of all of these really small startups coming there.
And I know obviously you did return to the tech industry to briefly work at Cluely before being fired.
Just playing.
But what is it like there?
Is it like, I don't know, do you think about it all the time?
Do you encounter things that piss you off constantly?
Definitely.
But I mean, I'm kind of insane, right?
I want to stay there because it feeds me, it fuels my hatred.
Because I'm writing about the tech industry, and I think it's important for me to be there and to see it.
Turn that, these observations, the rage that I feel sometimes, and turn it into something to make, distill it and make sense of it, and then find some broader political project to tie it to, right?
Because, yeah, it is weird.
I mean, it's really sad to see what is happening to the city, but at the same time, I think it's, for me, it's like I want to be there to see it, to document it, and to come up with some sort of worldview that incorporates everything new that's happening, but is still tied to.
These older ways of understanding the world.
I think the thing that I'm afraid of sometimes living in San Francisco is that I get too caught up in the internal machinations of the tech industry, just like all the stupid shit happening.
Which startup raised, like, whatever, Cluely just did whatever.
And it's like, who actually cares?
And even the day, these startups come and go.
The world hopefully will remain.
And I want to figure out how to, on the one hand, have this critique of the tech industry and have some sense of understanding of what's going on, but also feeling like, okay, there's.
There's something else in the world out there.
We don't all have to be thinking about Cluely all the time.
There's history and there's art and there are social movements and there are things to fight for and there are things to fight against.
This is something that I feel the doomer people, like the existential risk people, kind of miss and that they think AI is just the only thing.
It's like a sun, right?
It's the only source of light and it's the most important thing.
I think there are other things to fight for too.
There are other things to be afraid of too.
We should be looking at the consolidation of corporate power.
We should be looking at What corporations are doing to the environment.
We should be looking at what's political.
We should be looking at the material reality of how things are on this planet that we live on.
And there's so much more at stake than just AI.
But I think it's important to understand, and this is kind of why I feel it's important for me to be in San Francisco to see all this.
AI is unfortunately the thing that everyone sunk their hopes into.
In terms of, you know, how are we going to get growth happening?
How are we going to modernize?
How are we going to beat China or whatever, right?
It's just become this thing that everyone's fixated on.
So that is where all the money is going into.
And I think that is.
I don't know.
It's very strange.
I mean, it feels for me personally, living in the city and not working in tech and not having any tech money, you know, not having access to all this AI money.
I do often ask myself, like, am I stupid?
You know, like I see people I know from high school or college and they're raising money, they're working at these big tech companies, you know, they're climbing the career ladder.
And I look at that and I'm like, is this what I should be doing?
Like, have I failed?
Am I just telling myself this is what I want to do as a form of cope?
I think about this every day, multiple times a day, right?
I see LinkedIn messages.
I have a nemesis who maybe we'll talk about later.
I was just about to bring that up.
Right.
Who's a billionaire because she made a lot of money in this horrible AI company.
And I think, you know, it's like that's like a path that I could have taken if I had maybe tried a little harder, been a little bit more, I don't know, a little more of a girl boss, right?
Maybe I could have done really well for myself.
And every day I have to fight the desire to try to do that because I always could.
I could always just pivot and say, fuck you at all of you, right?
And be like, yeah, I don't want to do this politics thing anymore.
I'm just going to.
Do like a Cluely 2.0, like a female Cluely, a feminist.
Female Cluely would be great.
That's a great idea.
That's good, dude.
What to say to females when they're talking to you on your fucking Meta Ray Bans?
Is that just regular Cluely?
You smell amazing.
I guess that was the regular Cluely ad, wasn't it?
Yeah.
I mean, I feel like I could come up with something.
You know, I've seen possibilities.
You just ask fucking Groff.
There you go.
And you're like, what ideas could make a million dollars?
Billion dollars, excuse me.
But yes, I mean, there's so many things that I could do if I just wanted to follow the money, if I wanted to be a smart, rational person and see.
What's getting rewarded, what's getting validated in today's world?
I could just follow the money.
And I choose not to because I'm insane, because I want to fight for something really hopeless and I'm like a dinosaur in this world.
And I want to fight for something more meaningful.
So it's very strange, is my answer to your question to live in San Francisco.
Yeah, it's.
God.
Sometimes I think about that too, man, because I had some great ideas for apps back in the day when I found out what they were.
I was like, there's all sorts of shit I should be able to do on my phone.
I probably thought of Wikipedia before they even did, but I don't remember thinking of that.
But that's the kind of stuff that I was thinking about.
I was like, what if they had the dictionary on this bitch?
You know what I'm saying?
But people could add to it.
Talk about your nemesis, but I want to sort of talk about what your nemesis what she emblematizes for me.
Don't say sure to that, say yes.
Yes, sure sounds like I was like, I'm saying maybe not right, but yes is like, I'm right.
I think you're right.
This is why I rely on AI because listen, humans will let you down.
Oh, but then AI people complain is too psychophantic, and then when you get somebody, it's not psychophantic, it's sycophantic, and you want the AI.
An average day for Guo.
Includes waking up at 5 30 a.m. and going to Barry's boot camp for two workout sessions back to back.
Double berries.
Double berries.
Lunches are a luxury for the startup founder, and she often eats during meetings since her schedule doesn't always allow for a break, she said.
This, by the way, you don't have to comment on this because it may be rude for a woman to not.
This is eating disorder territory, right?
Or just lying.
Or lying.
Oh, that's a, yeah, ooh.
Because, yeah, I do berries back to back, but I'm not like this.
She says, I think most people could have work life balance if they cut out what most people waste their time on when they get home, which is a lot of people doom scroll on TikTok.
A lot of people just sit and watch TV mindlessly, she said.
That's facts.
That is facts.
In the interest of work life balance, Woe gives herself one day off on the weekends where from noon to 6 p.m., she's totally focused on spending time with her friends and then is back to work straight after.
I think I have more time in hours in a day because I'm going to be honest, I'm totally blessed.
I don't need that much sleep, even though I'm working these long hours.
I feel like I have work life balance.
I could theoretically work until midnight, and then I could go out to the club until 2 a.m., and then I could go to sleep and wake up at like 6 p.m. and do berries.
And so this woman, Lucy Guo, is your nemesis.
Yes, she's been my nemesis for about 10 years.
Oh, this is old nemesis.
Yeah, she doesn't know who I am.
So I'm just.
Out here hating on her.
She might.
I don't think so.
So, I mean, yeah, I can tell the story.
I mean, it's strange because I, she'd been my nemesis in this very vague, stupid sense because 10 years ago, she had this startup that went through Y Combinator.
And I remember at the time, I had a startup that was a little bit similar.
And so we kept tabs on them.
You know, we were like, oh, what are they up to?
Are they doing well?
Are they raising money?
And I had this personal vendetta against her for very dumb, sort of jealousy reasons because I thought this is another Asian woman.
You know, she, she, There's only room for one of us.
And I'm sorry, I think there's maybe room for more than one Asian woman in the tech industry.
But yes, I know what you mean.
It's very competitive.
So I just sort of kept an eye on her.
I wanted to see what she was up to.
And I remember looking at her product and thinking, oh, okay, this is kind of good, but also kind of bad.
It seems a little sketchy.
And it looked like they were sort of using people in the Philippines and paying them very little to manually label their data.
And so I remember thinking, it seems kind of sketch.
They seemed to be doing well.
And it was this weird feeling of jealousy, but also distaste for what they were doing.
And then I kind of forgot about her.
And then, you know, I had my whole weird life journey that brought me halfway around the world.
And then.
Recently, like maybe a year ago or a couple years ago, she started showing up all over social media, all over the news because she became a billionaire.
And at one point, she was the world's youngest self made female billionaire, beating out Taylor Swift.
I know, I was about to say, she beat out the real youngest self made woman, female billionaire.
And the way she became a billionaire is actually kind of amazing because the company that she had founded that went through Biocombinator, she actually stopped being involved in it.
Pretty early on, but she kept her stake.
It's not really clear what happened some sort of creative disagreements, whatever.
But she kept her stake in it.
And that company recently made a lot of money through this kind of complicated, almost aqua hire situation with Meta, where they were Meta invested a bunch of money.
And then so her stake was worth a lot.
And in the meantime, what has this woman been doing other than going to Berry's and going to the club?
She started a company called Passes, which billed itself as kind of like a softer competitor to OnlyFans for creators to monetize.
And when they started, they allowed miners with the You know, parent signature.
So 15 years.
I like what I'm hearing.
This is great.
The Capitalist Girl Boss00:09:05
Minors can.
Because I've always been like, I love it when I encounter teenagers on the internet, but I wish there was somewhere I could send them a little bit of money once in a while.
And so this was her sort of thing, she did like OnlyFans, but with children.
Yeah, I know.
Well, OnlyFans started out as a way to connect to creators you're fans of, not necessarily to pornography.
Right.
Well, so, and this is why I think this is a perfect topic for this podcast, because her startup was sued for child pornography.
And it's still kind of pending right now.
I think the judge dismissed hurt.
She tried to get a dismiss and it didn't work out.
But there was a claim from a 17 year old girl that someone working on behalf of Passes had gotten this girl to join the site and to upload photos, sexually suggestive photos, and monetize them.
There's one person who was reported to have paid $47,000 to this 17 year old in exchange for access to some of her photos.
So, I mean, it looked bad.
I think now they don't allow minors anymore after this lawsuit.
So they're fine now, they're great.
Cool.
But so this is a woman, to be clear, she is incredibly wealthy.
Wealthier than almost any other woman on the planet.
And she decides to make a startup called Passes that is about empowering young women, is how she says it.
And they're sued for child pornography.
And she is my nemesis.
And I think she's a good nemesis for me because I have moments where I think maybe I need to, maybe I'm, maybe I'm, you know, doing the wrong thing.
Maybe I need to just give all this up and just try to be successful, right?
This is what the world is telling me I should be.
And maybe I should be more like her.
And then I remember the child pornography lawsuit.
Well, you know, all the bad things that can be said about me.
I've never been sued for child pornography.
It's never been sued yet for child pornography.
You know, when you said passes, though, I had a different idea that maybe you want to run with, which is that you upload pictures of yourself and then you give a race and then people vote on whether you pass for that race.
Oh, well, that's what I think.
I mean, obviously.
So, like, my main idea with apps, which is now AI has kind of like destroyed my startup, but was to make a race changer app because I was inspired.
A long time ago, I employed a face app, if you recall, allowed for a brief moment of time you could change people's races on there.
And I thought, in the interest of making everybody understand everybody else in the world, see, we're all one race, the human race.
I did this many times and then they took it away.
But now I can do it.
It's so easy that it just doesn't feel the same.
There's not like the same, I don't know, the same spark.
But I want to say, like, reading her lifestyle here.
I want to say this really kindly.
What's the point of being alive, I guess?
But even like, and I don't, you know, we didn't go into it too in depth, but like when you were mentioning earlier, like how you were young, you're like, I really just want to make a billion dollar company.
Like, why?
You know what I mean?
Like, it's just like you didn't even say that you wanted to make a billion dollars.
You wanted to make a billion dollar company.
Because I'm like, if I was going to make a billion dollars, we have Bugatti, dude.
We're at 11.
We're hanging out with fucking Steinie.
Where, like, I'm like, I can finally, you know, I can buy a fucking island and then, like, obviously, the little plane, stuff like that, make friends with the president, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
But, like, it seems like a lot of people, and this is what I never understood about tech wealth as well.
Some people do this, but a lot of people will make a bunch of money in Silicon Valley, but then, like, not really, they're like, it's not even they have a desire for, like, certain things or, like, a lifestyle.
It's almost like making money is good because it's, like, a sign of me doing, Something good.
I don't know.
I'm explaining that poorly.
You know what I mean?
No, I think that isn't.
I think, I mean, everyone has a different matrix of desires, right?
And I think, in the case of my nemesis, I mean, she talks about driving a Honda Civic and wearing Shein, which I don't think is entirely true.
I think she probably spends a lot of money on other things too.
But I mean, people like to, I think a lot of people in the tech industry do like the sense of validation that they get from the money.
You know, money as a means to an end of.
Being successful, right?
Just everyone can look at them and know, oh, this person's made it.
This person who was maybe bullied in school or maybe was a bit of a nerd suddenly has made it and is able to prove to everyone that they did well.
And that was a not insignificant part of it for me, which is this idea that, okay, this might have been a weird moment in my life, but I'll come out the other end.
It's this whole revenge of the nerd situation.
But I do think that even people who think that they're motivated by validation or who even just think they're motivated by the technology and they want to start.
They want to start this company.
They want to make it successful.
I think also, you know, consumerism gets everyone, right?
We all see these ads.
We all are tempted to buy nice things and we want nice lives.
And I think in the case of Lucy, what's so interesting about her is that she does have, she does try to sell this vision of herself as very spendthrift, as someone who's just so focused on working and working and working.
And then if you look at, of course, if you look at what she's actually building, you're like, why is this something the world needs?
And she's found a way to spin it as empowering young women.
And I really doubt that's what she tells herself.
And I wonder for a lot of these people, what is actually at the core of why they get up in the morning and do these things?
I think there's something kind of terrifyingly hollow there.
I think there's just this kind of empty autonomism, this sort of zombie like drive to just keep hustling, keep rising and grinding, keep going to Berry's, do all these meetings with investors.
And there's this hedonic treadmill where they keep.
Making themselves do these things that are supposed to make them happy, and it's not making them happy.
And they're because they've never really allowed themselves to ask what they want, they've just turned themselves into these vessels for these perfect entrepreneurial vessels for capital.
I think that really robs you of your humanity, and it really robs you of your ability to enjoy things and to have anything worth fighting for, anything worth caring about.
And what's interesting about her, though, is she, to me, is kind of like the she's my evil doppelganger.
And just the way that she writes about, the way she talks about as a child, the things that she would do, because she played the same video games I played, you know, and this is what's going on.
What were you gaming on?
I was playing, like, RuneScape.
It's horrible.
Yeah.
I will admit I've had moments recently, not recently, but, you know, pandemic, early pandemic, when I was just.
You went back on the rune?
Back on the rune.
But, you know, for her, she talks about how she would play RuneScape and then try to make money.
Through botting.
And you know what?
I will admit I got banned for botting on RuneScape a few years ago.
Really embarrassing.
A few years ago?
Yeah, it was really bad.
I mean, I probably should have done a better job of disguising what I was doing.
But.
How much money can you make doing this?
Well, I wasn't making any money.
I was doing it for fun.
I was doing it because I like the game because it's kind of, you know, it's just fun.
What do you do in RuneScape?
I'm sorry, I'm totally derailing.
It's a stupid game.
You just click and you.
No, I know, but it's like World of Warcraft, but like girls tend to like it more because I've only known women who played RuneScape.
I was like building a house.
I was farming.
You know, I was.
But how do you make money?
Well, it's not really a money centric game.
I mean, you can kind of make money to buy things, but to translate money into real world money, you have to trade with other people.
That's what I'm saying.
Okay, so that's kind of what she was doing.
Yeah, and I mean, who knows if that's really what she was doing, but the origin story she's selling is that she was very young and making money on RuneScape and other games.
And I was thinking, it's interesting because a person with that kind of brain, this sort of capitalist girl boss mentality, can look at something as simple as a game that people play.
You know, sure, losers like me play for fun.
And she can think, how do I make money off of this?
And this is something that I think runs in a lot of startup founders where they'll talk about the day that, you know, they were young and they decided to drop out of school and make money out of something that other people around them didn't think of making money from because they had this drive, not just a drive in general, but this drive to make money specifically.
And I think that is what defines people like my nemesis and a lot of startup founders.
And I never really had that drive.
And I think that is what makes me a bad.
Girl boss, because I played a game like Rinscape and I was like, oh, this is fun.
I'm going to make a spreadsheet.
I'm going to be really efficient.
I'm going to have fun.
And even when I was younger and getting involved in programming for the first time, I mostly was doing open source and I would release code for free.
I would work on things for free.
I felt bad charging people because it was just, it felt like this sort of commons that I could contribute to.
And I liked the idea of doing something just for the sake of creating something and not making money out of it.
And I think that's, yeah, maybe why I will actually never be a billionaire because I don't actually have.
This drive to want to make a lot of money.
When Compliance Goes Wrong00:15:18
I think the people who do have it, in some ways, it's really good for them because it allows them to achieve a certain level of success.
But in another sense, it's really bad for society if we let people like that run amok and just do whatever they want because they're kind of unstoppable.
In a society that encourages them to keep making money through whatever means necessary, then they will end up doing kind of fucked up things like profiting from alleged child pornography.
Sort of transition to a final topic, which I think is related to that, which is listen, like obviously, our company is in full compliance with every kind of regulatory body over podcasting FCC, FTCC, FEC, all the F's, all the C's, everybody in Washington.
We do HIPAA, obviously, because there is a lot of privileged medical information we get, which we distribute, you know, open source, obviously, that's fine to do.
And I was devastated to learn about the story of Delve.
And this is a company that is an.
AI assisted compliance company where you sign up for them and they do their AI magic and then they work with a compliance partner and then get you into like probably HIPAA or whatever compliance.
And it turns out there was an anonymous substack that came out that detailed that it was just all basically AI generated.
The entire company is fake.
And this is a company that had gone through Y Combinator that I had watched a lot of TikToks with the founders saying that they had dropped out of MIT, that in fact, Even after they got busted and into trouble, the COO, Selin Kokalar, tweeted, YC and Delve, Y Combinator and Delve, have parted ways.
I still remember the day we took our YC interview at MIT.
We're so grateful to the community and every founder friend we've made.
And it's like, they can't even help but mention that they were at MIT, even in their, like, we've been busted for being frauds thing.
I was a huge fan of this company, and now they're going under, which just sucks because it's so much.
I love B2B, I love SaaS, I love compliance, and it's just.
To find out that one of the biggest companies was frauds.
And it's just what I don't understand is like these guys are 21 years old, 20 years old, 22 years old.
Why are they doing a compliance company in the first place?
So, that is a great question.
And I think the investors have a lot to answer for because, I mean, like you said, they're very young, right?
And it wasn't entirely, I mean, people who are older and more established and had more money gave them a lot of money to do what they were doing.
That it wasn't like they just decided to do this on their own and they had no one encouraging them.
And I think that is something we should remember when we think about who's held accountable for this.
But the way the founders talk about why they did this company is that they were building something else, which is a little bit more of a sort of consumer-based medical startup idea.
I don't remember exactly, but it was some kind of medical startup idea.
And that they were trying to figure out HIPAA compliance for that startup.
And then in the process, they ran into this broader general-purpose startup idea for compliance in general.
And I think that's a very common story.
You hear this in a lot of founding stories where the founders will say, We were trying to do this thing, and in the process, we ran into this other problem, which is a bigger problem.
Problem, and there's a bigger TAM.
And so we're doing a startup based on this thing, and we didn't have any expertise before, but now we do because we countered this organically ourselves.
So that's the story.
And it's not a bad story if you forget about the fact that what they're talking about is compliance.
And these are people who dropped out of MIT and never had real adult jobs.
And what do they know about compliance?
What do they care about compliance?
Right.
And I think to a lot of people in the startup world, compliance doesn't feel Like, I mean, it's not a sexy thing.
It's not interesting.
It's not fun.
It's not something where you're like, we got to do this right, guys.
It's like, okay, we have to check this stupid box.
We have to say we have HIPAA compliance.
We have to say we have SOC 2 compliance so that we can do the real thing that we want to do and make money.
And I think having an attitude of we're going to disrupt compliance comes from these.
MIT dropouts who've never actually had to deal with compliance and don't really see the value of compliance, that itself is already a red flag.
And if you look at the clients that they have, most of the clients are themselves, you know, YC companies, AI native companies that are founded in the last few years, right?
They all have the same kind of attitude we're disrupting the old world.
The old world is stupid.
We have AI that's going to make everything else obsolete.
And that's a really dangerous combination because compliance is supposed to be, I mean, you can argue that it's inefficient, you could argue there are problems.
Sure, but it's supposed to be about making sure things are done well.
And the Delve approach is kind of like it undermines everything that compliance is supposed to be.
It takes away all the good things about compliance because the Delve project is to basically check some boxes and say, well, you've done compliance.
And, you know, of course, they'll position it as we're helping people do compliance.
We're helping them navigate it.
But their incentives are not, the incentives are not right for them to actually help people navigate it, navigate compliance and do it well.
The incentives are there for Delve to give people the sort of bare minimum.
Surface level compliance, something that looks like compliance, the way LLMs produce something that looks like an essay or something that looks like a book, right?
It's just, it's this very superficial understanding of compliance.
And it fell apart, right, at the first investigation.
I think what's really astonishing about Delve is how little effort they put into making things look proper.
I mean, I don't know if you looked at some of the shell companies.
I did, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Right.
And so the shell companies, oh my God, someone looked up the addresses and the addresses were just, one of them was like a, A place in Wyoming that was used as the registered address for a lot of scammers, another was a vape store.
You know, it's just they, it was such a Potemkin village that they'd constructed.
They raised all this money and they just thought they could get away with doing a really shoddy job, which I'm not surprised because if you look at the history of a lot of other YC companies, right, it's just, it's normal.
You fake it till you make it.
But this company faked it a little too hard and probably will not make it, it looks like.
Yeah, it's so funny because they came out around a similar time that that MedV company got that glowing.
Profile of the New York Times.
It's one of those telehealth companies that.
I think that they sell like Ozempic or whatever.
But like, you know, they were, they, those, I feel like first all started for Adderall.
And then like some of them did like vaccine shit during the pandemic.
They were like, they had those like pop up places.
And now they all sell like Ozempic GLP medication.
And there was this sort of glowing profile in the New York Times.
And then immediately people sort of looked into like, you know, it was supposed to be the first billion dollar company that was built by one guy with AI.
Of course, obviously they have not made a billion dollars.
And the company is, Is essentially also fake.
Like, it's all they use this affiliate marketing stuff with fake doctors.
They use real doctors' names.
They advertise in all these sketchy ways.
They're under investigation by, like, whatever, the FDA.
It's completely fake.
And I think there is this real desire that a lot of people have.
And it's interesting that, like, because it kind of mirrors some of the early techno optimism stuff that, like, hey, Luxon, it's possible to be able to build now with you can vibe code your billion dollar company.
But the reality is, if you're doing that, your company is almost certainly going to be fucking fake, scam, lies, all this shit.
And that kind of stuff is really, I mean, it's encouraged.
I don't want to single out even tech here because, like, a lot of companies, since companies became a concept, were built on exactly this.
And so it's not too, but it's really prevalent in tech because a lot of times you don't actually have to have like a physical product.
And so if something shoddily built, well, if you have like a nice UX or UI, I don't know the difference, what is the difference there?
Don't worry about it.
Okay, I am really not.
But now I am.
But if you have one of, which one should I use in that situation?
I would say UX.
If you have a nice UX, you can kind of fool people because you'll be like, look at Dell.
They've got this beautiful UX.
And it can just be completely fake and shoddy behind that.
Yeah, I think what's really unfortunate about the vast amount of money pouring into tech right now, and even in the past, I mean, I think this has been true in the past as well, is that it distorts the incentives and it means that.
It's so easy to get funding for something that's kind of fake and scammy where you're cutting corners, but that looks nice.
And so people who want to take shortcuts, who don't have integrity, are just like, well, let's just have a demo that looks kind of good and then raise money and then make all these promises that aren't really, we can't really deliver on, but who cares?
You know, and so I think the ecosystem, the culture of the ecosystem selects for people who are trying to scam a little bit because they think that's normal.
I mean, this was true when I was doing my startup, right?
And we would, I, part of what made me disillusioned with the tech industry was seeing the story of Theranos.
Because when she first made the news, you know, my startup was just starting.
I remember thinking, wow, she dropped out of Stanford.
That's kind of like, you know, my co founder dropped out of school to do this.
And that's so cool.
We could just be like her one day.
And then, of course, everything fell apart.
And I thought, that's kind of embarrassing that I hero worshiped this woman who didn't really know what she was doing, was just really good at selling.
But I mean, I think back to that summer that I spent with my co founders trying to.
Pivot into a billion dollar company.
We were just kids.
We didn't know what we were doing.
It would have been horrifying if someone had given us money to build a billion dollar company.
What sort of integrity did we have?
What sort of aptitude or domain knowledge do we have?
Nothing really.
But we were part of this ecosystem where it seemed normal that some young people who just had a desire to work really hard could build companies that become integral to the global financial ecosystem.
And I don't think that's good.
I really don't think that's good.
And I think that's.
But it's just getting worse and worse.
And the kids are getting younger and younger, right?
They're dropping out at like they're dropping out of high school now to do it.
And the investors who are the adults in the room who are supposed to be doing due diligence, they're supposed to be vetting these companies and vetting these founders and giving them guidance.
They're just being so irresponsible.
They're throwing their money at companies like Cluely.
They're throwing money at anyone who has half a brain and says that they want to do some sort of AI to disrupt whatever.
And I think that's kind of where the wheels are sort of coming off the vehicle or whatever the metaphor is, it just everything's kind of going awry because we have a world that we have a tech ecosystem that in which everything, like you're saying, is so complex and so obfuscated and so easy to hide what you're actually doing.
You can just put on a really nice show.
You can pretend that you're doing something really fancy and that you're disrupting whatever with AI when you're actually not.
And investors who are supposed to be doing due diligence and being responsible with investors, with their investors' money, with their limited partners' money, they're just like, sure, AI.
They're so credulous, right?
They will believe anything if they think they're going to make money.
And so they're throwing all this money at these young people who don't know what they're doing.
And there's this horrible feedback cycle where it's very hard for someone to come out and say, Well, I want to build something that's good and maybe won't make a billion dollars, but it'll take a lot of time, but it's like a normal good product for people.
That's just so unsexy.
What's the point?
You might as well be making sandwiches.
And this is an attitude that my co founders and I had.
We would sometimes throw out ideas, and someone else would be like, That's just like making sandwiches.
Why would you bother?
you know why aim for something small when you can aim for a billion dollar company and now it's like that is that's the moment we're in but it's much worse because there's so much money there's ai is so hyped up and there's so much mystery and confusion about it And why even bother trying to raise a small amount of money to do something useful when you could raise a ton of money and do something insane?
Yeah.
And to your point earlier, Wendy, about Theranos, I remember I think one of the things that Elizabeth Holmes said kind of in her defense was just that, like, everybody else is doing this.
This is normal.
This is standard, actually.
I'm not, you know, a lot of these people who become examples and they kind of get caught for being con artists, that's their reaction.
And it kind of makes sense, you know, if you put yourself in their shoes, it's like, well, if I don't do this, somebody else is going to.
Kind of like a prisoner's dilemma, sort of thing, right?
And I encountered that a lot in tech.
If, yeah, sure, this might be, you know, bad in quotes, or, but if we don't do it, my competitor's going to do it.
And like, this is just normal.
And like, you're just making an example of me, like Martin Shkreli.
That was kind of his thing, too.
He's like, everybody's doing this.
I'm the fall guy.
But yeah, I mean, not to take responsibility off of the bad actor, but it is, there is this systemic incentive to do these things.
And people do believe that, that like, everybody's selling a bunch of hype.
So, the only way for me to succeed is to do the same thing, and you guys are just mad at me because you're trying to make me a scapegoat.
Definitely.
And it's such a structural problem, and it's so hard to change on the individual level.
But at the same time, I mean, I think individuals do, they always have the option to listen to their own integrity, you know, and figure out what they're willing to stand for.
And people aren't really doing that.
I mean, some people are, sure.
But it's like there are so many stories of people who had an opportunity to do the right thing, and they don't.
I think that's why we're seeing all these stories of the Forbes under 30.
30 under 30.
It's almost like a meme now that if you're on 30 under 30, you are going to prison for fraud.
Because there was like a lady who was doing the student loan company, even.
I'm like, what?
You just had to really work to come up with like a scam like that.
You know what I mean?
Just get a job.
But, you know, someone I know, I know a few people who've spent some time with Roy Lee from Clue Lee.
And I love Roy Lee because I actually do.
I do find Roy Lee, he's so obviously like playing up this kind of villain persona.
But this is a child we're talking about, you know?
And if I was a zoomer, I'd be like, he is, his frontal cortex is not developed yet.
He's a minor.
But onto my head, no, he's just a young man.
And they were like, yeah, he's just kind of like.
You know, they try to like explain things to him and they try to be like, hey, like maybe read a book or do something like this.
And he was just like, hell no, like I'm doing Cluely.
And then Cluely was fake.
Like Cluely's whole thing was just like some nice ads.
And this became like a kind of micro trend in AI rapper companies where they were like, we're going to do these crazy fucking ads.
It's going to be cinematic.
Cinematic ads.
They did it for like three months and all these companies did it.
And then like they kind of pivoted away from that.
Whenever one of those would come out, all like there'd be all these comments, but they were all people from like other AI companies.
Yo, this is.
Making Bank On Fake Games00:05:34
Fire dude.
This is a hype.
Distribution on this is amazing.
This is crazy.
What you guys are doing uh, but then clearly obviously was just like a chat Gpt rapper, like it wasn't the whole.
You can't take clearly on date.
Clearly is not telling you to talk about the different kinds of citrus fruits with women on date because fellas, if you're listening to this, women love that kind of learn about tangelos and like that Wendy's, you're nodding your head.
That would work.
Be like, oh oh, I heard about these crazy straw.
That's not citrus, obviously.
But they heard about these crazy strawberries, that the guy in other in Asia and things like that, But it's all.
These things are just fucking fake.
And what I liked about Clue Lee is like, listen, everything's fake, but we're doing it even faker.
But then they couldn't even fake that.
Even their fake product could not be real.
And now nobody cares about Clue Lee anymore.
Well, I'm sure he'll go on to do something really great for his next startup.
We're going to hire him.
Eddie, listen, open call for a startup, guys.
If your YC doesn't work out, if you move a hand off of your knee that probably should have stayed there while you're in Gary Tan's home sauna, I'm telling you, you can always mop floors at the Truon headquarters.
Sub minimum wage.
No, we'll pay you in Dogecoin, my brother.
It'll go up someday.
I will say that article about the gay tech mafia or whatever, they could have done a lot better on that motherfucker.
They could have done a lot better because there's a lot of shit that did not get into that article.
But great.
Wasn't that the headline image of the hands coming out of the flash shake?
I thought the image was awesome.
But then I was like, this is so.
And people were like, this article's like.
Fucked up and homophobic.
I'm like, the article is saying that this doesn't exist, basically.
And so I'm like, this is, but it does, it does exist.
And, but I'm not saying that's a bad thing.
We love gay people.
We love the mafia.
Why don't we combine?
And we love technology, obviously, featuring.com.
Why don't we fucking, dude, they better.
Now that's, now that's, there's one amazing deck company.
Wendy, thank you so much for joining us.
I hope this wasn't too, too, too.
I haven't talked to a woman in two and a half months.
This is my first time.
And it's just, I'm sorry if I've become, I don't know, a shell of my former self.
No, it was great.
I learned a lot about different types of citrus.
Oh, and you can see right now, I'm turning this polar bottle, this polar seltzer around.
Lemon.
Also, he's wearing the Meta Ray bands that have been telling him the whole time what to say.
Talk to, do they have.
Interfaces on the inside of those on the meta Ray Bands.
How do you control them?
I don't know, but a lot of people in the photography content community have adopted those because it's like, here's me taking pictures and you're seeing my point of view.
Yeah, I know.
I follow this guy named Dumper who just basically wears them when he takes his dumps.
I'm just kidding.
That guy doesn't exist, but I'm telling you right now, if you are, there's actually so much.
There is a right now, there's an open market for people wearing meta Ray Bands to be doing stuff like that.
I saw a great Twitter account that's sort of like an old school version of that.
I think the handle is just I'm peeing.
And every time he pees, he just tweets, I'm peeing.
And he's like, I might miss some, but this is every time I pee.
I will say, ratemypoo.com.
While you were on RuneScape and learning how to code, literally in computer class, I was looking at ratemypoo.com, which is genuinely probably the only website that I used from like, I don't know, probably until like seventh or eighth grade.
I mean, that's a very wholesome time for the internet, you know?
And I think we should just bring that back.
ratemypoo.com.
MySpace, EverQuest.
Fuck it.
Yeah.
EverQuest was all.
I never made it out of that first city though.
Because I only could play 30 minutes a day.
Something that our audience is, I'm sure, sick of hearing about.
But I had a real, I could have been, dude, I could have been at the ground floor of Facebook if my parents had let me play EverQuest for 45 minutes a day.
You know what I'm saying?
Hour a day?
Yeah.
I'm COO.
I've talked about this.
I think I've mentioned this before.
But before EverQuest, I played text based MUDs, multi user dungeons, fucking Gemstone 3, where you'd have to be like, go north, and then you'd say, look, and it would like tell you that.
That shit was good because you had to use your brain.
You know, Steve Bannon made a bunch of money on RMT, real money trading, off of World of Warcraft, and as did Brock Pierce.
Yeah.
But I'm like, where's the money at now?
Because I know that Elon was paying guys to play Diablo for him or whatever.
Was it Diablo or another game?
It was something else.
It was like another game that was like Diablo.
Yeah, that kind of thing.
But I'm like, damn, dude, there's probably got guys out there making fucking bank playing a computer game right now.
But what computer game are they playing?
I don't know.
Competitive.
Any game that games have in game economies, that's like been a thing that's like, I never.
Like in Counter Strike, you can like buy and sell.
They just change that shit, right?
People were mad.
I don't understand because it's like, do you know about this?
So Counter Strike has this shit.
They're like loot boxes.
I've never played Counter Strike, so I don't exactly know how it works, but it's like a skin.
Like your gun can have like a crazy anime girl on it or whatever, but you get them by randomly buying a.
Like it's basically, it's like gambling.
You buy something, then it like comes.
It's like a, I don't know.
It's like a pack of.
Trading cards, but people sell them for like huge amounts of money on secondary markets, and then they, I guess, they just change the way it works.
You should make a Truanon CCG.
What's that customizable card game?
Yeah, it's a really good idea.
And then you get the rare ones, Pokemon cards.
Gambling With Gun Skins00:00:36
We're gonna do a rare thing, we're not gonna end the interview and then say goodbye separately.