E103: Tech layoffs surge, big tech freezes hiring, optimizing for profits, election preview & more

What the f- What are you wearing, Jason?

What? Oh, Uber had a big week, so this is the Uber/Moncler crossover hat.

Oh, look at that.

And I also bought a Moncler shirt.

You bought that? Or I sent it to you? Oh, what?

Are you-

You got the watch and the mug?

Oh, you don't know about-

(laughs)

(laughs)

... the Apple Moncler watch?

(laughing)

Or the commemorative mug?

(laughing)

(laughs)

Or the new tat? You don't know about the new neck tats that are coming from Moncler? It's actually a neck tat.

(laughing)

Oh my god. (laughs) Oh, it's so good.

Let's just say somebody got their beak wet.

(laughing)

I'm not saying that I got $100,000 sponsorship-

(laughing)

... but (laughs) we don't have a rule in the agreement about logo placement, do we?

Listen, J-Cal, if anyone was willing to sponsor you, every square inch of your clothing would be covered in ads like a racecar driver.

It is, look.

It'd be like wearing a jumpsuit every day.

These, these, you know, Moncler sponsorships are great. This is five, $5 plus $17 of shipping from France on its Etsy.

(laughs)

What's going on here? I'm going all in. Let your winners ride. Rain man, David Satterfield. What's going on here? And I said we open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it. Love you Betsy. Queen of Kinwah. Going all in.

How was everyone's week? What'd you guys do this week?

Uh, just busy working, um, trying to be helpful where I can. Uh, and that'll be the extent (laughs) of my comments today.

How is Market Street this time of year?

Look, there's all sorts of wild report- I've gotten all sorts of inbound from people asking me if I'm, like, leaving Craft Ventures to do something at Twitter. No, it's not true. We're just, Jason and I are just pitching in and helping out while Elon establishes his permanent team at that company. Elon's the CEO, he's running it, he's the decider, he's making the decisions, and there, some of us are just kinda helping out in any way we can, and that's really the extent of it. It's a, you know, very much part-time thing where we're just helping a friend. Uh-

Yeah.

... but it's been, like, blown up in, by the media into something much more than it actually is.

It is 100% accurate. I am still doing my day job, podcasting, investing in 100 companies a year, just helping out on the margins. Uh, that's it. The end.

I do wanna try talking about one issue that's already public, because it's already been tweeted. So Elon had a tweet this morning about how there's now, like, an advertiser boycott going on. And this falls on the heels of a bunch of reports that came out over the last couple of days that supposedly there's been a big influx of, like, racist tweets. And Jason and I actually saw what was really going on, which was, it- it's all not true. I mean, what happened is that within hours of Elon taking over the company on Friday, there was a 4chan attack, where basically people from this message board created bots to post hundreds of thousands of spam messages that contained racist words and epithets. And within hours, this had been detected and Yoel, who runs the, the trust and safety implementation, he met with me and Jason, and Elon directed him to shut it down. And he, Yoel actually posted a tweetstorm about it. That's the only reason I feel comfortable talking about it, is 'cause Yoel already posted the tweetstorm, but maybe people don't, haven't seen it or they haven't connected all the dots here. But what's really, I think, unfair about this is that as you've, as you've seen, it's not like your feed was all of a sudden filled with racist things. These were spam accounts or bot accounts that were posting to zero followers. They generally have zero followers, or if they do have followers, it's other bot accounts, right? So they're posting racist tweets into the ether, so to speak. It's not degrading anyone's experience. It was shut down promptly. But then what happens is these activist groups, they're monitoring the fire hose, right? And so they publish a report saying that racist tweets have gone up 500% since Elon took over Twitter. The truth is, Elon hasn't even had a chance to change anything about the content moderation policies. He's posted that, like, "Guys, I haven't even, I haven't changed anything about content moderation." Whatever the rules are, they're the same rules that existed prior to he, to him taking over. And this is just an organized operation by people who want to create that report. So then these activist groups basically publish this report, they feed it to news outlets, and then somebody then takes those reports and then feeds 'em to advertisers, and you get a boycott. But I think the, the point here is that Elon didn't do this. This is being manufactured by people who are not operating in good faith. They are trying to manufacture an incident that they can u- then use to hurt the company.