E33: Apple’s hypocrisy, America’s math failure, crypto’s regulatory correction, Clubhouse’s future, UFOs & more

It seems like you have a piece of shit on the side of your mouth. Or is that a birthmark? Oh, no, that's a birthday.

Gotcha.

Did you record that?

Yeah, absolutely.

Jesus, look at this guy.

He takes his shirt off for one fucking selfie. And now everybody who's fat and pal on the show, the other three of us is gonna be ridiculed.

I'm having steak tonight. S-T-E-A-K tonight.

I am lifting twice a week now. Come on, Sachs, come get some. Let's fucking go. Three, two.

Let your winners ride.

Rain man David sack.

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

Love you, wet ice queen of Kinwa. Hey, everyone. Everybody. Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the all in podcast with me again, the dictator himself, chamath Pauly Hapatia. Rain man David Sachs. Definitely with us. Definitely a great driver. His dad lets him drive in the driveway. And of course, everybody's favorite, the queen of Quinoa, the science conductor himself, David Friedberg. Queen. The queen. A lot of activity online. It's been a little bit of chaos since we all got together here. I guess we should talk about this apple story with Antonio Garcia Martinez. You may have heard that he was hired by Apple to, I guess, run their ad efforts. And I have a little bit of information on kind of what he was going to do there in terms of ads, which is really.

Us. Tell us. Tell us.

Okay, well, anyway, you know how we're.

Basically start at the beginning and assume people don't know who. Antonio Garcia Martinez.

So, Antonio Garcia Martinez was a Facebook developer. He is some really smart guy who uses a lot of big words and wrote a book called Chaos Monkeys, which is a great book where he takes a very Jack Carawack kind know a lot of prose. And he wrote this book about his time at Facebook. The problem is he said some things in the book that would be, five years later, problematic. At the time, they were actually considered problematic by some folks, and in the full quote, maybe less problematic, but he was essentially ousted because of the following problematic quote. The quote is, most women in the Bay area are soft and weak, cossetted and naive, despite their claims of worldliness and generally full of shit. They have their self regarding entitlement, feminism, and ceaselessly vaunt their independence. But the reality is, come the epidemic, plague, or foreign invasion, they'd become precisely the sort of useless baggage you trade for a box of shotgun shells or a jerry can of diesel. And they shortened that quote to be that most women are soft and weak and full of shit. So, in context, in this book, he was contrasting the Bay area women he had dated with the mother of his kids, who he describes as strong and tall and tough and amazing. But still, the quote's a little gnarly. And the quote, when it's out of context, becomes particularly gnarly. And, of course, this led to a petition at Apple, which then led to him being fired, which now is going to lead to him probably getting a $10 million settlement. Of course, there's a lot of hypocrisy being brought up here because Apple has allegedly been using, or Apple's supply chain has slave labor in it from the Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities. And obviously, Apple gave Dr. Dre billions of dollars for beats by Dre. And he has an even more misogynistic series of lyrics and was also accused of physically assaulting, I believe, his wife and other people he dated. Who?

Dr. Dre.

Dr. Dre. Yeah. So anyway, what do you think? Okay, there you go. Next story.

No, I'm happy to jump into think, Jason. I think you focus a little bit too much. And I saw your pod with Zach Coleus on this. A lot of good takes. But I think you're a little too focused on what AGM, as I think it's easier just to call him by his initials, what he did, as opposed to what the employees at Apple did. And there's at least four things that Apple did or five things that Apple did wrong. I mean, number one, I think there was a very good reason not to hire this guy, which is that he wrote a bestselling tell all book about the last big tech company he worked at. So if you're a big tech company, why in the world would you hire him? So that was stupid decision number one. But they did decide to hire him. And once they hire him, they got to treat him like any other employee and give him a chance to show what he can do. And so that leads to mistake number two, which is these 2000 employees who signed this petition really distorted and took out of context that passage. And I know the passage is cringe, okay. And gnarly, and. And it could, you know, certainly appear sexist, but you have to put it in its context. And the. The larger cont. This is a work of literature. This is a best selling book. It's, what, 150,000 words? They're taking 150 words out of context. And the context was, like you said, he's describing the mother of his children, the love of his life, as this sort of Linda Hamilton esque in Terminator type figure, or Charlize theron in Mad Max. And this passage is not in there to describe all women. It's just basically a literary flourish to contrast the woman that he loves being such a badass compared to every other. Know, when kara swisher interviewed AGM five years ago, she brought up this passage. He explained it, and she said, yeah, okay, I get, you know, it's certainly the case that people can understand the context if they choose to, and they simply are not choosing to understand the context. Which brings me to mistake number three, which is these 2000 employees lied in their petition by claiming that their safety is threatened by apple hiring AGM. That is simply untrue. It's physically impossible in the era of zoom when everyone's working from home, but this guy is not a threat to anyone's safety. But they use that claim. They make that claim because they know that if you accuse someone of threatening your safety, it will trigger the machinery of HR to remove that person from the workplace. This is the language of safetyism, and it's a specific tactic to basically get somebody canceled and removed from the workplace. Okay? And then that leads to the next mistake. I think mistake number four, which is the bosses at Apple, caved into this pressure. They were total cowards. They never even gave AGM the chance to explain himself. They never asked him, what did you intend by this passage? What were you trying to do? And by the way, they knew about this book.

When they say it's even worse. They knew about the book they had vetted. And they talked to many people, as when a big tech company hires somebody for a major position like this, they call all the references. All of this is uncovered and dealt with.

Of course they knew about it. And then when the mob complains, they fire him summarily without subjecting the decision to proper HR processes. This is HR by mob rule. It's totally unacceptable. No company should be run this way. And then finally, that brings us number five. Is that in explaining their decision and trying to justify their cowardice and giving it to the mob, they said that they fired him because of his behavior. AGM never had a chance to engage in any behavior. He had barely started at the job. This wasn't because of his behavior. This is because of the book that he wrote five years ago. So what they're saying is that if you ever publish a written work at any time in your life, years and years ago, that that can somehow constitute present day behavior and that other people in the workplace can have a problem with that. This is not behavior. And this is why he's going to have a giant defamation suit and settlement because they are making him unemployable in the tech industry by claiming that he was fired for some sexist behavior. He was not.

What do you think he'll get paid in a settlement?

I put it at 1010 million. Well, I was just thinking he's a half million dollar a year employee to a million with his rsus. So let's just put it at a million unemployed for ten to 20 years because of this. Or the damages to his reputation and.

Present value that back.

Yeah, so I think 10 million is the number.

My curiosity in this was just did those 2000 employees feel the same way about Dr. Dre?

Of course not.

Or do they feel the same way about some of the movies that they sell in the itunes store? Or do they feel the same way about some of the games that they enable in the App Store or some of the subscriptions that are sold?

Right.

Do they care that much about what's happening in their chinese supply chain? I think it seems, at least on the outside, the answer is no. But it would be interesting to get an explanation of that from the same HR people. I don't know whether the guy should have been fired or not, but I do think that you should have a predictable standard, and every company is allowed to do what they want. If the standard at Apple is that we are going to hold you accountable for everything you've done in the past, irrespective of whether you've disavowed it or not, so be it. That's their right. And I think that the employees of that