Mark Pincus: Red-pilled Billionaires, LA Fire Update, Newsom's Price Caps, TikTok Ban, Jobless MBAs

The episode opens with the hosts' usual teasing. They introduce the show as "the number one finance technology, business, and MAGA podcast in the world," joke about one participant's 1950s "house of tomorrow" backdrop, NASA hat and haircut, and announce a first-time guest introduced as Mark Pincus. They also argue about which host can claim the guest as an old friend. One participant says the friendship goes back to the 1990s, when the other was a reporter covering Silicon Alley.

The banter turns into a small preview of the episode's later economics argument. One participant says they have been collecting rent from the guest for the past year, and another jokes that the tenant should report the landlord to "Gavin's gouging police." The tenant pushes back: in their view the real gouging comes from the Presidio Trust, which charges "over a $100 a foot," while the sublease was "a pretty good deal." The landlord puts the all-in cost at roughly $120 to $130 a foot for space they were not using, and calls Presidio real estate "the most expensive real estate."

One speaker says the Presidio Trust manages federal land and keeps and reinvests its revenue, and calls it "probably the only profitable operation in the federal government." Another participant says they used to sit on its board and lists where the money went: restoring natural habitats, removing eucalyptus trees and archaeological digs. A third remembers looking at a former general's house to rent, with three to five bedrooms but one bathroom. Historic-landmark rules meant a second bathroom could not be added.

The guest is introduced through their companies: Tribe, an early social network, support.com, and Zynga, maker of Farmville and Zynga Poker. One host tells a story against themselves. When asked to invest in Zynga Poker, they objected that playing for virtual coins took the money out of the game and called it "the stupidest thing I've ever heard." The company became a multibillion-dollar business, and the host calls it "another $25,000,000 angel investment miss on my part."

Asked about early social-networking investments, the speaker answers in the first person. They say their first social media investment was Napster, where they wrote the first $100,000 check. They also say that they and Reid put up the first money for Friendster, and that they invested alongside Peter in the first rounds of Facebook and Twitter. The speaker sums up the approach this way:

Like, pick the right body of water even if your boat doesn't. Tribe didn't work.

Someone asks whether the guest bought the patents of Six Degrees, the 1990s Web 1.0 social network, and sold them to Facebook. The answer corrects that. The speaker says they and Reid bought the patents for $750,000, "which was a lot then," because they worried that Yahoo or Friendster could use them to block the whole industry. The speaker says they were accused of being patent trolls but "just sat on them," and that they now own half while Microsoft owns the other half.

Asked how the friendship with Reid survived opposing positions in the election, the speaker gives a detailed account of their own political shift. They say that they and Reid started their involvement in national politics together: they had lunch with Biden and wrote large checks in December 2023. The speaker then had what they call a "red pill moment," which began with questioning the Democrats. They describe the change as gradual and then sudden: "the wall starts crumbling, and then it comes down all at once."

The speaker gives two examples. The first comes from early 2023, when they began reading Pirate Wires and Mike Solana. They recall a Solana report that Ukrainian soldiers had swastikas on their helmets and that New York Times photographers asked them to remove the symbols for photos. The speaker says they doubted it at first, then saw it in the New York Times four months later, "buried in the middle of the paper." Similar stories, where they say Solana was early, left them "uncomfortable and queasy" about mainstream media. These are the speaker's recollections. The episode offers no further evidence for them.

The speaker calls the second example the decisive one. In May 2024 they read an article arguing that the common account of Trump's "good people on both sides" remark after Charlottesville misrepresented the speech, because he denounced the Nazis several times in it. The speaker then watched the video. They argue that the speech was "one of the pillars of why you were supposed to hate Trump." Biden had cited it as his reason for running and raised it again at the start of the DNC, and the speaker believes "they clearly know that they're misrepresenting things." They describe their reaction as returning to first principles: listen only to original speeches and primary data, and stop trusting mainstream media.

The speaker links the shift to a change in staff. They say their chief of staff of nine years left in April of the previous year, and that this person had been "the main person protecting me from myself on Twitter" with advice to "stay in your lane." After that, the speaker began tweeting whatever they thought. They admit they sometimes "got it wrong or it was a little too emotional," but say they enjoyed it and found a new audience of "techno optimists." They endorsed Trump publicly two days before the election. They say this was when they "completely got there," and that their daughters pushed them to say so on Twitter. They add that the New York Post put the endorsement on its front page on election day.

The speaker contrasts two reactions to the endorsement. Their pro-Kamala New York friends found it "kinda funny" and "didn't care." Meanwhile, the speaker says, Reid was getting messages from people saying the speaker was "going off the rails" and asking whether they should "bring him back into the fold." The speaker admits being anxious before talking to Reid. When the two spoke on FaceTime, Reid said "I'm team Mark," and the speaker answered "I'm team Reid." A four-hour dinner followed. The speaker reports Reid saying "I never questioned your principles" while still wanting to change the speaker's mind. A host draws the lesson that "Americans can get along even if they disagree politically about a candidate."

Another participant picks up the remark about the chief of staff and broadens it. They argue that Silicon Valley errs by not embracing its own social awkwardness, and they criticize a "virulent form of blockers" who act as a "filter between your true self and everybody else" and play at being gatekeepers. They separate this from administrative support, which they call valuable. They describe their current setup: an assistant in the Philippines, hired through a service called Athena, at about 3,000 a month. They call this assistant "the single most effective administrative support I've ever had," because the assistant offers no opinions about what they can say or do. They point to big companies, including Zuckerberg's current transformation, as examples of intermediaries shaping public perception.

The response agrees and puts it in the context of the culture. The speaker says people around prominent executives tend to take "the edges off," and that "authenticity is having a moment now." They say a lot of negative coverage has been written about them, and they cite their high school quote:

some people have tact and others tell the truth.