This Week in Startups - All-In Summit recap, Argo debuts AV test cars in Miami/ATX, $AMZN to sublease 10M+ square feet | E1467

Episode Date: May 23, 2022

Molly and Jason are BACK from Miami to break down all the most interesting stories and content from the All-In Summit! (2:13) Then, they cover Argo AI, an AV company that just launched autonomous test cars in Miami and Austin (36:50). Finally, they close by discussing a recent Bloomberg report on how Amazon is looking to sublease 10M+ square feet of warehouse space... negative signal, or no big deal? (45:23) (0:00) Molly and Jason intro the show! (2:13) Recapping the All-In Summit! (14:05) LinkedIn Marketing -  Get a $100 LinkedIn ad credit at https://linkedin.com/thisweekinstartups (15:31) Reflecting on the most interesting debates and conversations at AIS (26:12) Intercom - Get advanced Intercom features and Early Stage Academy at a 95% discount https://www.intercom.com/early-stage (27:15) All-In Summit party recap + TWiST Live preview (35:35) OpenPhone - Get an extra 20% off any plan for your first 6 months at https://openphone.com/twist (36:50) Argo AI launches autonomous test cars in Miami and Austin! (45:23) Amazon is reportedly looking to sublease 10M+ square feet of warehouse space, is this a negative signal or just overblown? FOLLOW Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis FOLLOW Molly: https://twitter.com/mollywood Thanks to our partners: LinkedIn Marketing -  Get a $100 LinkedIn ad credit at https://linkedin.com/thisweekinstartups Intercom - Get advanced Intercom features and Early Stage Academy at a 95% discount https://www.intercom.com/early-stage OpenPhone - Get an extra 20% off any plan for your first 6 months at https://openphone.com/twist

Hey, everybody. We are back. We missed you. We're back from Miami. We've been saving up news all week to talk to you. We're going to start out with the topic. Everybody wants to talk about what the hell happened at the All-In Summit? It was nuts. People want to know about Palmer Lucky. They want to know about the parties. So we're going to just recap all that. Molly, going to go back and forth. And it was quite amazing. And we'll tease the this weekend startup's live tour as well. Exactly. Coming to a town near you. Then we're going to talk about another we live in the future startup called Argo AI. Autonomous Driving is not so far in the future anymore. It's coming and it's going to be awesome. We're also going to dig into a report and see if this is accurate, fake news, real news. What actually is going on here? Because there's a headline that Amazon is looking to sublet 10 million square feet of warehouse space. So is this indicative of some major problem in the economy? or for Amazon itself. Well, let's do the math as we're prone to do here. Molly, we'll do a little math and figure out what's going on.

I'm learning to love the math and things I never saw coming. It is going to be a great show. So stick with us. Stick with us. This Week in Startups is brought to you by LinkedIn Marketing. To redeem a free $100 LinkedIn ad credit and launch your first campaign, go to LinkedIn.com slash this week in startups. Intercom. If you're an early stage high-growth startup, you can get access to Intercom's Early Stage Academy today at a 95% discount.

Join the program today at intercom slash early dash stage or email them at startups at intercom.i.o and open phone. As a startup founder, a lot of mistakes are easy to roll back, but using your personal cell phone number as your company number. isn't one of them. Open phone makes it easy to get business phone numbers for you and your team right on top of your existing devices. Visit openphone.com slash twist to get 20% off your first six months. Hey everybody, it's Monday. We're back from the All In Summit. Molly, first impressions of the summit, any general feedback for me about or for the audience about what that was like? The All In Summit, for those of you twist listeners who may not be familiar, Jason does another show. On Fridays with three maniacs with three maniacs.

And all those maniacs got together and had a conference in Miami. And it may or may not have been a super spreader event, as I'm seeing from at least one other notie. No, it was actually a remarkable event. It was tremendous. Like, first of all, our team is incredible and put on a phenomenal, phenomenal event. phenomenal, yeah. The, let's be specific. The besties, yes.

Go down the list. Just take a moment to catalog in your mind, because there were obviously parties. There were lunches. Yep. There was the networking. And then there was content on stage. There was swag. Maybe we could just go back and forth of the highlights of those things.

Yeah. And just take people through what the experience was like. Because we started on Sunday night with the part. party that was called Good Besties, like a Good Fellows kind of send up. And you were there for that. Yeah. No, I flew in too late for that one. You flew too late for that? Okay. Yeah. A couple of people got in too late. That was, to me, like, it was overwhelming.

Like, walking in there, it was... That was like when you guys realized that you were freaking rock stars. It was like a rock star kind of moment. Yeah. was bizarre in that the people who are coming to this, there was no promotion for this except at the end of episodes, you know, I tweeted a couple times, but at the end of each podcast, I said, hey, we're doing this All in Summit. Google All in Summit if you want to come. And my lord, people got dressed up and 700 people showed up. And we spent a million dollars on three parties, is my understanding. It showed. It really showed. They were nuts. So that party, people dressed up

as gangsters. There was a Frank Sinatra, like, three-piece band singing, you know, classics. Hoboken's 11. That's the band? Oh, yeah, that's amazing. They were great. And, you know, there was like a groppa and biscotti tasting area. There was a gelato area. There was a pasta station. There was steak Florentine. I mean, everything was just blown out to epic portions. You're getting like more good fellows the more you describe it, too. Like, like, and then we had a poker tournament. And then there was the guys. And there was this guy. There was a poker tournament. Everybody got to play in the poker tournament. The top three winners got 15,000, 5,000, 5,000, and 5,000 to donate to charity. So I think that's 15 plus 15. So 30,000 went to charity of their choices. And it was just crazy because, you know, when Chabatha walked in and I walked in, everybody started taking pictures with us. I swear to God, Molly, I took, I would just say, give me your phone. Boom, I take it from the same amount. Boom. Hundreds of them.

And then the content was amazing. Content was fantastic. It really was. I mean, I got to say, like my big, I think that the conference 100% accomplished the goal of the show, which was we have to be able to hear. We have to be able to have conversations on a wide variety of topics on which we may not agree and then still get along. And there were, of course, multiple instances, including one big one. of people not getting along very well. People not getting along very well.

And working through differences, right? Rupure and repair was occurring in some cases in real time on stage. And so I think that goal... I guess we should just go right to that moment. That goal was really... Yeah, I mean, come on. Like, there were like a lot of headlines, but the big one I think that ended up being in exactly the spirit of the show

was Palmer Lucky. So what I had said was All right, I guess describing, Molly, can you describe what he did? So, Palmer Lucky, who of course was the, no, I remember. You remember. I got it. You remember. I got it.

Okay. Palmer Lucky, of course, inventor of Oculus, was fired from, very, very smart person, was fired from Facebook after it was revealed. I'm just giving all of this background very quickly as a setup. It was revealed that he had been, it seems like, bankrolling some anonymous accounts on Reddit that were like spreading conspiracy theories about Hillary Clinton. It was like it was back in, you know, during the election.

Allegedly. We'll put the allegedly. Yes. We'll put the allegedly in there. He has since gone on to found a very successful company called Anderil, which does national defense drones. And he gave an impassioned speech at All In about the importance of the tech industry working with our military, right?

That we got to have the best technology in the world. I agree with. Something you agree with. you've invited him on the show a long time. And then he's like, on another note. Uh-oh. Uh-oh. I always backstage.

I was like, uh-oh. Here it freaking comes. Here it comes. Begins to come for Jason very personally for getting him fired, trashing him, calling him an idiot. He was reading tweets. It sort of started out like it for a minute or so. It felt like maybe like a roast.

Mm-hmm. And then it just kept going. going and it was very personal, right? Like, he was emotional. He was talking about how he has all of this rage because Jason and his co-hosts would, by the way, Chamath asked me like, did he mean you about the co-host thing? I was like, I wasn't even there then, man. Yeah.

But maybe I was on that. I have no idea. We can't seem to find it. But it just, it went on for a long time. He talked about how he has a lot of personal rage about how Jason and people like Jason tore him down and do that to founders and that it's this really negative atmosphere. and at which point, by the way, all of the security in the building,

including Jason's brother, are like, do we need to pick this guy out? Like, it's like, there's a lot of houses going to end. Yes, yes. And then this is the part where it becomes in the spirit of the show. Jason comes up on stage. It is like, importantly, I think, hey, man, I'm sorry. Well, I said, the first thing I said was a little joke. I was like, hey, great to meet you in person.

That got a little laugh. But I mean, here's the background on what I said about him. And we're going to publish us as an all-in episode. Yeah. So, I mean, I basically said, if it's true, and I remember saying this because I always, I mean, people who listen to the show know this, you know, Smiley. I say, if this is true, you know, allegedly. Like, I always put the caveats in there because I know a lot of news that breaks. We don't know if it's true or not, you know, the three different versions of the truth.

Palmer's, Facebooks, and the actual truth, whatever. So I'm always pretty clear about that. To my memory, and I'm trying to find the video that he quoted, because I would like it to be super accurate, I said something like, if you're going to post like these kind of memes and stuff like that, if it's true, like, you should post it under your real name. And if under your real name, people find it offensive, like your family, your wife, I don't know, your spouse, the people, you know, your spouse, the people, you know, you work with, it should be an indication that maybe you shouldn't be posting it. And so to pay a bunch of shit posters or whatever, $9,000, if that's what happened, we don't know what happened because Facebook, when they fired him, didn't give any details or obviously, you know, not going to put the details out there. I said it's gross, right? And so he took it very personally,

but then he made this kind of weird, his, he made a weird, um, uh, theory. that I ruined his career. Right. That Zuckerberg fired him because of me and that I destroyed his career and he had to claw it back, which, I mean, let's be honest, I'm not that powerful.

I'm just a podcast host. I'm not making decisions for Zuckerberg. All right. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Let's just, you're not just a podcast host. Okay. But there's some power. But are you getting people fired from Facebook

on by dint of your news roundtable? Probably not. No. Definitely not. I mean, and I am but one. of a thousand members of the press. But the point is, I think it was framed in that moment as, you know, pro-Trump versus anti-Trump. And that's why I want to pull the tape so I can play it for people and just, you know, get a refresher on my memory, if I'm being totally honest,

because this was years ago. Yeah. You know, that I just thought it was gross. So, and, you know, he did say Jason and people like Jason, but it was kind of personal. But people in the audience were kind of taken back because you've got to remember, these were the people who really are my super fans. So he came into the lions then of my super fans. You know, people I had given discount tickets to who have been watching the pod for many years. And so they were in shock. And so I just had, you know, somebody's crisis PR person happened to be backstage, like the PR person, they started giving me advice. And I was like, I don't really don't need any advice about this. I'll take all-comers head on. No problem for me. So I get out there and we have a discussion.

I said, listen, if I hurt your feelings or I said something that was rude or, you know, hurt your family or something like that. I apologize, straight up. I think the work you're doing is important. But I took the approach of, I'm going to ask him three times why he was fired from Facebook. Yeah. And I said, hey, why were you fired from Facebook? And then he went on his, you know, tirade about me. I said, hey, but why were you fired from Facebook? And then finally, a third time, I said, I'll ask you for a third and final time. Why were you? And he said, I can't say, whatever. So that was it. You know, I basically, um, uh, meet it. super honest and clear to him, you know, why I said those things. And I also told him, listen,

I think the work you're doing is very important. So while we disagree about Trump or we disagree about Hillary and how to handle those things, and in Silicon Valley, this is my observation in Silicon Valley, it's probably 80% or 90% of people really were offended by Trump and maybe 10 or 20% were like Republicans or on the right. And then if you look at military and support of the military, it might be 80% or 70 or 80% in Silicon Valley don't want to support the military and make weapons and maybe 20% or 30% do. I'm taking a guess here. You tell me if I'm directionally correct. So on one thing, we're in the 80 and I'm in the 80, he's in the 20, but in the other we're both in that 20% where I support the work he does. So I said, listen, whatever our political

differences are. I think the more important thing here is, I want to talk to you about the weapon systems you're making to protect Taiwan, Ukraine, the United States from, you know, an increasingly dangerous world with dictators. And I tried to just make it part of that, you know, and steer the conversation towards that. So, yeah, on all in, we are going to play it. And I'm going to play the actual tape of what I said after him. And I'm going to break down my thoughts on it with either myself or maybe with the besties themselves. Because I do think it was, to your point, Molly, a representative of what we're trying to do there is have hard conversations.

Yeah, because you owned it and you guys hugged it out. And who knows if that was real. The hug was a lot. Hey, everybody. I'm here with my pal, Tom Eschbacher. He is the senior sales manager at LinkedIn Marketing Solutions. And today we're going to talk about marketing for startups. And LinkedIn did a great new internal report called Today in Startup Marketing.

Welcome to the program. Tom. Thanks, Jason. We all know organic reach super important. You make great content. You get your likes. You get your shares. You get your comments. But what people don't know is that you can boost organic and it creates a bit of momentum on your site.

Can you unpack that for people? Definitely. So organic is just going to go to the audience who's already following you and then a smaller group of members. who are connected to any of those audiences. So what we often encourage is keep an eye on your organic engagement metrics and who are the people and companies and segments that are engaging most frequently with your content and then amplify that reach via our best-in-class paid advertising targeting.

So what that means and what we've seen, especially for Seed and Series A companies, is by boosting successful organic posts with paid, it results in a 13X lift in unique, reach. And that's really meaningful insights that can help inform your product and go to marketing strategies and open up new audiences for you. You can go to LinkedIn.com slash this week in startups and get the report for free as well as a hundy, $100 from Tom. I will say, not to reopen the wound that I do.

Please don't do it. Okay, do it. Okay, do it. That, like, I think it's fair to be like, hey man you control a lot of weapons now are you okay you good you good bro sorry you can me laugh molly like listen i don't think he's going to fly drones over my house it was i don't it's not even about your house or you i just am like do you that you did wonder one did wonder if he's okay because he was very emotional during this

But I was okay with it. I love conflict. I just mean, you really do, by the way. You really do. I embrace conflict. You know why? Number one, I grew up a fighter. And so when a fight starts,

kind of doesn't change my blood pressure in a bad way. I kind of get into it. It's a very, I mean, maybe it's dark, but I kind of like a good fight. Hopefully not physical, but I like a good debate. And I like a little conflict because, you know what? It means there's something important. Yeah, it means there's something at stake. And by the way, I don't mean he's coming for you. I just sort of mean like much in the way that like if you're Peter Thiel, whose motives I have a lot of questions about and then you control a company that does a really, really, really, really powerful thing and you sell that to that thing to the government. Like it's sort of in the same vein as me. Like, are there larger motivations about what you are trying to accomplish that I should have questions about. So anyway, I'm not going to like, I don't need to. I don't need to.

started all over again. It was, it would be the co-host after all that he does mean. It was just an incredible moment. And then there was a debate at the event between Antonio Martinez and Antonio Garcia and Antonio Garcia. And also Glenn Greenwald. And they've debated Ukraine.

What did you think of that, Molly? I that was definitely a little bit of a two-on-one situation. It was a good conversation, but it was a lot of filibustering by Glenn Greenwald. Sacks was involved in that. Sax was involved in that. I mean, they also thought a great debate. They were good conversations. I actually thought the conversation with Glenn Greenwald.

Like I thought Antonio Garcia Martinez was so, he did a great job. Eloquent. He was very eloquent as always. He was very funny as always. It's good to hear these like really very profoundly different perspectives. He won. I mean, basically he won, right? I kind of felt like.

Like if you pass the audience to vote, it would have been 70%. He won. Yeah, 100%. He's quick-witted. He's quick-witted. He's very quick-witted. And he's funny. You know, I kind of, I feel like.

And also, yeah, not to give too much away. Because, again, you're going to hear these. Like, you're going to hear these on the- And I do want to explain to the audience who, like, the NOTES are like, why can't you put them out sooner? It's because we got these files. Huge files. These were recorded in like 4K, right?

So the processing of all these files literally takes time. But yes, among things that were said during that debate were Antonio Garcia-Martinez responding to Glenn Greenwald with, wow, I think your argument sounded better in the original Russian. Oh, it was a sick dunk, sick dunk. It was amazing. And, yeah, so it was, content was great. And then you made it to the two parties.

You went big on the Miami Vice Party, I have to say. I bought a crimper just for it. You bought a crimper, man, when people see these pictures, it's going to be great. You really went bit. We had a Miami Vice 80s party. That great DJ, shout out to my guy, Mick, if you ever need a great DJ and you got some cash laying around, he's not cheap, but my God, he got the party started. So I look out of the corner of my eye and I see DJ Spielberg, who wrote the theme song for All In, the famous theme song

I'm going All In, is on the desk floor. And because we had a great ratio, I mean, this is another thing to bring up, Molly. Was that not the best ratio for tech conference ever, just in terms of the diversity there? I mean, honestly, yes. And kudos to you for working really, really hard on that specific thing. Like, there were a lot of women. There were people of color. Exactly. I was afraid all in some, it would be a boys club. Instead, I found women who are as brilliant as they are kind and men who are as inclusive as they are accomplished. There really was also, I mean, all of the women speakers that you had were so prepared. Somebody tweeted, you know, I thought a fair.

Maybe not as fair to Nate Silver, but, you know, was like, the women who spoke at all in Summit were like prepared. They had all this data. They had slides. They were like, mic drop, mic drop, mic drop. You know, and a number of the men got to just, like, show up and shoot the shit, which was fun. I think, you know, I liked that that was the perception because the women really crushed

it. I here's here's the challenge uh and i'm always you know i keep it 100 molly you know that you know the the all in pod uh as you and i have discussed you know sometimes people might perceive it as a boys club because it's four boys uh talking it happens to be four guys who became friends and not no different than the view right the view is all women so there is this you know thing in media where you might have a collection of women or a collection of men as a show format. So there is inherently that problem with both shows, right? I'm sure people have made this criticism of the view where there's a couple of view copycats, right? I don't know the names

of them. And so people just assumed it's going to be all boys club. And obviously it's tech and finance, which are also, you know, still a majority male dominated, especially in higher position. So what I did was I looked at the first 200 people who bought the full flight tickets, which were not cheap, $7,500. And my jaw dropped. I mean, I was like 90, maybe it was the first 50 came in. It was 91% now. And I just said, for F's sake, I don't want to go to this conference.

I don't want to be a bunch of dudes. It was like just not fun, right? And so I just, with the scholarships, we said, we're going to do a scholarship program. Or I should say merit-based pricing. A scholarship, I'm concerned about using that because it's kind of like, oh, women and people of college can only come if they're on scholarship. And that's not the vibe. It was more like there are people who are up and coming in their careers

who maybe can't afford $7,500. I know I couldn't in the early parts of my career. And in fact, they used to sneak into these conferences when there were $4,000 or $5,000. And there were lots of those attempts as well. And we did have that too. I'm like, please don't do what I did for my whole career. Yeah.

But, you know, so it was hard to get speakers who were women and female. And so I made a strategic decision. I was like, okay, I'm going to find some people who are founders of companies. And so Tandis and Edina are founders of companies who are doing extraordinary work in the world. And if I can't get, you know, there's like maybe four women who have billion dollar venture funds. We talked about this, I think, just two weeks ago. We had that real talk. Actually, it was for Sunday's edition, I think, of Easy Sunday School. I think it was actually, yeah. Or the last Sunday, a week ago Sunday. in the changing face of VC.

And, you know, all four of those women couldn't make it. Two of the four said they would love to come. Two of them, maybe not so much. And it just was a timing thing, right? And so I was like, okay, I'm not going to not have women on stage. That would be horrific. So I'm going to have to, you know, call an audible here. And I found women who are building amazing businesses.

But, you know, I invited Mary Ameker. I invited Katie Hahn. I invited Kathy Wood. And, you know, some of those folks couldn't make it. And they would have been perfect fireside chats like Brad Gerson or Bill Gurley are, right? So I wanted to have people with billion dollar funds come. The women with the billion dollar funds couldn't make it this time where some of them ghosted me, if I'm being honest, and didn't respond.

And so, you know, didn't Tandis and Edina and Claire do an amazing job? I mean, they were incredible. They were incredible. And I will say, I think, in terms of. typical Gemini fashion. I was telling our new president Savino, I'm like, yeah, there's like two fully formed people in here. One is a glass ball of emotion. And the other one is Spock. And they are constantly, you know, so it's useful in terms of balance. But I understand both of those perspectives. The Spock perspective is like what is ultimately the all in goal. Right.

Like you should, we should just have these conversations and we can disagree. And that will, that will maybe mean being on stage with someone who you profoundly disagree with, but we should all be, like, we should all be, you know, brave enough and intellectually honest enough to have these conversations. That is 100% a valid viewpoint, unless you're the person who experiences real harm. Right. As a result of some of these conversations. And so I think, like, both of those perspectives, I would say, and I don't think the entire

all in audience would say this, are equally valid. Like if you're the person who's like, look, at the end of the day, nobody on the All In podcast is going to experience one of these harms. They're just not. Chimov. Maybe. He gets pulled over, you know? Like, he could experience stuff.

Right. But the other three now. So Chimoth is the closest, but he's probably not getting pulled over in his Maybach. Not when he's being taken. Or whatever that person is, right? Like, he's still a, I mean, Chimoth, we kept talking about this. Like, his whole demeanor. I mean, he's a prince.

Right. He is like royalty. Right. And he's rolling like royalties, right? So he is going to be insulated from some of those, if not all, of those real harm impacts. Yeah. And so it's not as easy as just being like, I'm intellectually dishonest, so I don't want to be on this stage. It's like, look, you're having an intellectual conversation about something that can cause people real harm.

And so I don't have to be on that stage if I don't want to. And I sort of feel like I, like, struggled throughout with both of those things being equally strong, but me personally, I was like, these conversations are really interesting. They're compelling. You besties, by the way, are charming as shit. Like, the interaction is so delightful. You all, it takes so much trust to do what you do and to have the conversations that you have that I really enjoyed it.

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How easy is that? When you do an event, the content on stage is one piece of the puzzle. The audience is the other piece, right? And then there's the setting, right? So you look at those three pieces. The setting was epic. Setting equals party and the venue, et cetera. The content, what's on stage?

And then the audience, because they are an equal participant in this three-legged stool. And we wound up, I think, being 36% female by the end of the day. And it was amazing. I went to the women who were coming had their own brunch. And they invited me to it. So Sunday morning, I went to brunch with them and had some waffles. Which was awesome. And was fantastic.

And all of them were like incredible women doing incredible business in the world. So with 36% women, all of a sudden, I look over at the dance floor, there's DJ Spielberg. He's dancing with 20 women on the dance floor. You go to a tech conference, there's no dancing, there's no fun,

there's no joy, people don't get dressed up. And so you had, like, it was actually like a real party like going to a, like the best wedding you ever went to. It was like three nights of the best wedding you ever went to or the best birthday party where couples came and like it was like a normal thing, not just a dude fest. And so then I get on the dance floor. I go to go to the dance floor.

Who's on the dance floor with Spielberg? Friedberg. The hugest nerd in the world is cutting a rug. That guy lived it up. Oh my God. He lived it up. Living his best life. Just having a blast.

Like he, I saw no sign of nerd with Friedberg. No sign of nerd. No, he was living his best life. intelligent in the Palmer Lucky conversation. And he had an absolute life. He came out of his shell a bit. He pressed the flesh. He went out there and took selfies with people.

He met people. I gave everybody a little bit of coaching. I said, listen, I know this is going to be intense for you. Let me give you a tip. You can only talk to one person at a time. So look one person in the eye and just tilt your head and say, hey, what do you do? Where are you from? And yeah, you'll have literally 24.

people surround you. I mean, you probably saw these pods of like Chimov, Friedberg, and sacks, walking around the party. It was intense. It was intense. And, you know, we then would look up and you just talk to one person at time and then the next person you talk to. And you talk to as many people as you can. If you get overwhelmed, you can just go backstage or to the VIP room and just take a break for 10 minutes. And so the second party was the white part, Havana White Party, which we did in a beautiful space, beautiful Havana band, DJ Spielberg, tore it up. amazing food, beautiful setting. Amazing food.

And you and I were at that party and we got mob because there was a lot of Mollywood fans at that party. And we started taking a lot. You took dozens of selfies. It was so nice. It was so cute. Sacred space was the name of that place. Rachel pointed out, God, it's so cool.

Like, go there if you're there. Yeah. Yeah. Sacred space is beautiful open space with just gorgeous setting. I guess they use it for weddings and whatnot. It's like a movie. And it was pretty great. This one woman came up.

to Molly and I, and she said before, you know, she was a fan of Molly's, I guess, at Marketplace and before it, other stuff. And she said, you know, Molly, I, I didn't think finance and business was something as a woman I would, you know, she was a very young person. Maybe she's in her 20. She said, 20. Oh, yeah. And she said that you inspired me to be involved in venture capital, to be involved in tech and to be involved in finance. It was a very, like, touching moment. And I think, you know, it's kind of the work we do here is, you know, we talk about this stuff. and Molly's like a bit of an inspiration for for women getting in the industry. So I thought that was really cool.

It was just a really great. It was a great time. Also the cars. Bravo on the cars. I'm just going to say the Miami Vice car. The Miami Vice Party had my actual lottery car. The Mercedes 280. What car was that?

It's the Mercedes 280s. Now it is from the 60s. So a minor continuity error, but I'm going to give it to you because that car is like, legitimately I'm like lottery car, 280SL. That's the one. I was like, stop everything. Picture time. Put a car in front of each party so people can take pictures in front of a car, but have the car match the party.

So they had, like, you know, in Havana, I guess there was because of the boycotts, they couldn't have like a really nice car there. But for the, we put this Mercedes in front of the Miami Vice Party. It should have been more like a Testarosa or a Lamborghini Kuntock or something like that. But anyway, there it is. But there it is, gorgeous. And then we had. a, did they have a car, like a gangster car outside the...

The Miami, yeah. It had a, like a... No, the Miami one, yes. Oh, the Good Pelas one, I don't know. But I don't know if they had a car from Goodfellas one. I was sad, too. I was really sad that flight was so late because I had some great Palazzo Pants and Pearls for that party. What a disappointment.

Stupid airlines. By the way, no one could get out of Miami. Like, in case you're wondering what flying is like right now. It was not easy. Disaster. It's, and listen, some people got COVID. It happens. Everybody got COVID?

There's like three notice. There's just a ton of people who haven't had COVID yet. And, you know, I think. No, because it's surging nationwide right now. Like, unfortunately, we may have had a summit in the middle of a massive surge. That might have happened. Here's the thing. I think what the government has decided at this point, if you look at the, I unpacked everything,

if you look at what the government is saying, because I got a bunch of those alerts on my phone, hey, you've been exposed to COVID. And I was like, I know I'm in Miami. Like it went off three times while I was in Miami. I was like, if in Miami you've been exposed. Because in Miami, I didn't see one mask the whole time I was there. I think the way they've designed the rules, it's like, if you don't have symptoms, go on with your life.

And it's like, really? Okay. They have designed this now, I think, with the intention of everybody's going to get exposed. do not try to stop people from getting exposed, just try to keep the health system up and running and not overwhelmed. I think that's my best estimate of what the CDC and the governments have chosen to do at this point.

Because look, this version, Omicron is weaker and more, you can catch it. And Sweden decided like, what, a year earlier than us that they would go through the eye of the storm and just reopen and they're still around. So I think... I mean, the 1918 pandemic was literally it lasted for years.

Like we forget that. We think there was like a wave or two. It lasted for years. And this will too. It is a new virus in the world. It exists. And at the end of it, and like,

I don't, I don't know what else we can do. All I know is that everybody needed to be together. Because then we followed it up with, you know, a team and all staff, like team days of team meetings that were magical.

It was a magical. Yeah, that was pretty great. Yeah. I really felt, Like we made some good progress there and how we operate what we do as a business as investors. So shout out to Mike Savino and Charlie. Shout out to Amber did a great job. Rachel did a great job.

Content team did a great job. Just everybody across the board's registration. It was good. And I want to do more events. So we're going to do a this week in Startups Live tour. We're trying to figure out what that will be. But you'll hear more about that. Molly and I basically interviewing somebody famous maybe in five different cities.

And then doing something that startups really need, which is they need funding. They need employees and team members, and they need customers. So I'm thinking about those three things, the most acute needs for a startup. And so if we can have, I don't know, 500 founders startups show up for a live event, how can we help them with those three needs? Getting funding, getting team members, getting customers. And so we'll figure out some way to feature the startups at the startups event and do something

for the community and then also to just kind of meet each other and have a slice of pizza or whatever. Can't wait. I thought that was pretty great too when they, At the end of the Miami Vice Party, they just started walking around with like the best pizza in Miami and just giving people a slice of pizza. Because when you were three hours into a party, if a slice of pizza shows up, that's pretty great, huh? You're eating it. You're stoked. You're like, that's what I need. I need a slice of pizza. Yeah.

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that's even ridiculously generous. I mean, that puts it down to $8 a month. You're kidding me. You need to do it for yourself as an executive or a salesperson. Openphone.com slash twist, and if you have an existing phone number with another service that's overcharging you or that doesn't have this incredible feature set,

they'll put it over for you. If you're thinking about phone numbers, I just want you to think openphone.com slash twist. That easy, folks. All right. So there's other news happening. That's the little recap here. But let's tee up what we, you know, my favorite part of the show, which is the WLITF,

which we might make into an actual show in the real world. Now that I've produced two of the top seven tech podcasts, I'm going to go for a third at some point. So this is going to be a show that Molly and I are going to do on Netflix or HBO at some point, I think. Yes. And the show is going to be called We Live in the Future. I have all of the IP for this locked up. W-L-I-T-F. Don't even try. This is so exciting.

I have the domain name too. W-L-I-T-F.com. We live in the future. I used to do a segment called Future Tech on, always on way back in the day, and it's the best. When you get to go and be the person who tries out the mind-controlled skateboard, that's what we're talking about. You want to watch this. We're talking about the really far, far-out-the-stuff. So there's a startup in today's segment, Argo AI, and it's launched a drive-related.

AV testing in Miami and Austin. Argo AI is a Pittsburgh-based autonomous vehicle company. It's backed by Ford and Volkswagen. Yep. And this move to Miami and Austin differentiates it from the competitors who are operating mainly in San Francisco,

which I found fascinating that San Francisco, which is kind of opposed to everything. And we kind of put the collage. Except this one thing? Yeah, they kind of put the kibosh on everything here, except fentanyl. Big fans of that in terms of living in the future. And getting pedestrians killed.

Sorry. I'm getting pretty sorry. Oh, sorry. It got dark. It's a really, it got really weird in San Francisco. This is Molly after dark. I'm sorry.

I got a little cold slash COVID. Like I'm like, I don't know, whatever. It's Monday. It's so. Cruise, obviously, Waymo and Zooks are all operating here.

But Argo AI was acquired by Ford for a billion dollars. And Volkswagen invested a couple billion dollars in it. It was last valued at 7.25. But, here's a demo video. Yeah. They released for the announcement, and we'll just play the video and talk over it here for a moment. Just your standard car driving itself.

Yep. I mean, this is a big deal. They have gone fully driverless in these cities. No, like, person sitting behind the wheel to take over just in case. No safety driver. No safety driver. You see people sit in the back like, we're going to die. Ha, ha, ha.

Nope, they're going great. A lot of Ford branding there. They're happy to come on. anytime. Yeah. One of my old buddies from Ford now does their, does all their comms. Yeah, I mean, it's a, it's a big deal. And apparently, and this is kind of what is fascinating,

is that they are trying to, instead of focusing on high speed, on highways and sort of like big commuter corridors, which is more actually the Tesla approach, they're like, we're going for high density. We're going for cities. We want to be able to be a robo taxi fleet in town. Yeah. You know, the number of miles driven. is what will determine, you know, this working. And so we seem to be moving into a new phase.

We had these like proof of concepts and, you know, really good on the highway moments. And now they seem to be creating small corridors. They're saying, hey, let's just perfect, you know, this, you know, three by three mile area. So maybe we'll avoid certain high, super high density areas, but we're just going to perfect a small area. So, my instinct is telling me that what these companies are now doing is they're saying, okay, if we can perfect this area and do a lot of manual intervention. So they're literally writing code like this particular block is troublesome because it's a narrow block. And if somebody double parks, there's just not enough room to go around it. Like they're doing that

level of manual intervention to make sure this stuff is safe. And I think that's pretty wise. because once you get the most difficult places dialed in, then what do you do? You just, you open up to another three by, now instead of being three by three miles, now it's five by five, now it's 10 by 10. So that's what I think,

that's what I suspect is happening here. The regulator said, can you not kill anybody? Can you not run into a baby, a stroller, you know, a car, a dog in a three by three area will keep you contained and then go a little wider, a little wider. And I think this is going to be, I think this is the tipping point that we're actually experiencing

and that things are going to start cascading faster and faster. Because it's not one person. Now it's four people getting this done simultaneously, at least. And my position, Molly, was always, I think there's going to be five, six people who get there at the same time and it becomes a commodity and it's in every car. And sure, there'll be different winners. but, you know, I think Uber, Lyft are going to have access because Ford doesn't want to run a ride sharing.

I think Tesla does want to run their own ride sharing. I think a lot of these companies want to just sell it to consumers and other folks. So you're just, I think these things will be in the Uber and Lyft fleets and the DoorDish fleets imminently, imminently, like as in the next two or three years. Yeah, Argo is going to be operating cars and Lyfts fleet. And the other thing, I think, the other one thing to note about Argo and these companies all starting to get here at the same time is that they're also going to operate in Detroit, Pittsburgh, Hamburg. I bring those up specifically because those are cities in which it snows.

Like so far we've seen a lot of these companies operate in cities where it's increasing levels of difficulty in terms of the, right? Like boss level is in a city or in San Francisco or in Austin, but these cars have been fooled by, right? There's so much development was in California that then they got them into the snow and they were like, oh, crap, they can't see. So they're like really pushing forward into harder and harder and harder driving modes. And that's what legitimately gets us closer after all these years of being like, it's five years away. It's, you know, I think the snow areas having used autopilot in snow or like very gently attempted it,

I think this is going to be the really hard weather is going to be the super hard. That's like the super boss. What do they call the end boss? Like there's like a mega boss. Some, the final boss is going to be really hard. Mega boss. I think it's the final boss. Like that's the final boss level is like you're in Boston and there's black ice.

Because you know what? Totally. Humans can't defeat that. So if these cars have snow tires on it and they're like, you know what, we shouldn't be driving. I think that's when you're going to kind of figure out the end of this is when these cars just pull over to the side of the road and they're like, nobody should. should be driving in these conditions. That's that that's the, um, the final boss. And, you know, that feels like five years from now, six, seven years from now. I feel like going and delivering, you know, uh, some groceries, that's going to be sick. Like, you're going to be like,

your groceries are at outside and you go outside and like, you have your phone with you. And it's like, yeah, just open the back, open, the trunk just opens. You know, you, you, you press open trunk, and you see five bags with your name on it. And five bags with Molly's name on. I say, here's five bags for Jason. It's five bags for Molly. Don't take the molly bags, take the Jason bags. Take your bags out. Your bags are there. It goes to the next thing.

So imagine food delivery, grocery delivery with half the cost. I think this brings it down to about half the cost without the driver. And yeah. And over time, this is like a huge climate story. Like we don't, you know, we've almost forgotten what a big deal it is to be able to optimize traffic with autonomous driving. That's farther out. The idea that there would be every, every car on the road is autonomous.

But I could imagine a time when it's like, you have zones, right? The Bay Bridge, I'm sorry, humans, you're too stupid for this. Like, it has to, you have to be in autonomous mode or in an autonomous pod or vehicle to go over the Bay Bridge. Because that traffic is just like a huge emissions bomb. Yeah. And traffic, gigatons, gigatone level, saving. Yeah. Well, because you're not sitting there idling.

And idling is, you know, just horrific. If people can, if your trip is, takes half as long, it's half as long. have as much emissions, I guess, right? Or even to slowing and then accelerating. It's slowing and then accelerating. It's just like, yeah. Anyway, it's super cool. Yeah, congratulations.

And the future's coming. Yeah. Okay, now this is interesting, this next story. I saw this and this didn't make sense to me. But this is, yeah, tee this one up because this one's confounding. We've got to unpack this one. I know. We're going to need a lot more details.

But here's what we know so far. according to anonymous sources who spoke to Bloomberg, Amazon is looking to sublet at least 10 million square feet of warehouse space and could vacate even more by ending leases as shopping volume cools. Now, we know, of course, that Amazon has sucked up tons. Like, they've, like, taken over malls and built all these warehouses or taken over all these empty warehouses. And now they're like, I guess there's going to be less retail.

and so they want to dump 10 million square feet of space and potentially employees? Like, there are a lot of questions. Hold on a second. One thing at a time. What I'm trying to figure out is Amazon is so good at predicting things. How did they get this wrong? Because I don't think that commerce has collapsed. I'm ordering more than ever.

I get that the pandemic's over and there might have been a spike there. But somebody at Amazon, I guess based on this, if this is true, because again, this is anonymous sources, I believe, that they have 10 million square feet of excess that they want to sublet. That's a lot of extra space. So did they, who made that mistake that they did that much extra space? Did they miscalculate that? Or are they getting more efficient with their space? In other words, they're just like, you know what? we can go higher in a space,

we can use more robots in a space. Something went wrong here that they overestimated this amount of space. Or did it go wrong? Is it just like the natural expansion and contraction? So we'd had the pandemic. There was extra money. People were at home and they couldn't go on trips. So they spent a lot of money on stuff.

And so Amazon might have been like, yeah, we expanded to meet that demand. And now we're contracting because there's a recession coming and people are going to be traveling more and they're going to be doing different things. I mean, if it's true, it's an indicator of, I think, like, it's like, oh, okay, the recession is happening. But it's hard to, it's hard to know if it was really a miss. I mean, they couldn't not expand to meet all that customer demand. So, yeah, the question here is, you know, it's interesting is I know people who are looking for,

I have a couple of companies we invested in that were looking for warehouse space. And they said, like, a lot of the spaces they were looking at, that Amazon very quickly, over the last couple years would just take them. So they were just taking everything on the market. Now, they have so much money. They're such a powerful business that maybe they kind of took it just in case knowing they could sublet it. So think about this next level. There has been a real shortage of these spaces. So in July 2021, supply chain drive, which is somebody who covers a space apparently, reported Los Angeles and Central New Jersey had industrial vacancy rates of 1.7 and 1.8% in Q2, and that's way below the national rate for this industrial-type space,

not place. This can't be used as office space. When it's industrial space, it's not designed, for offices, it's just designed to store stuff, right? Yeah. And the national vacancy rate was 4.5. Both of all those numbers are very low. So I think they didn't want to get cut out, maybe. So they were like, you know what, let's just take it, since we have the money, we'll take the leases. And if we wind up with a little extra, we can always sublet it to the people who have the demand anyway, and maybe they make a profit on it. So this may not be as bad as it seems. And, you know, the overall percentage of what this is. So according to this article, Amazon leased 370 million square feet of industrial space in the U.S. at the end of 2021. I mean, this is a large amount of space.

But if they're getting ridding 10 million, is that like 2 or 3 percent? So 2.5, 3 percent. It's actually a very small percentage of theirs. It's a large number, 10 million, as a literal number, but as a percentage of their space, it's a rounding error for them. Well, but here's what I want to know as a result of that, right? So let's say they close 3% of their warehouse space. If you, like, go to duck, dot go and type in Amazon warehouse jobs and then go to news, right? Yeah.

It's like Amazon to deliver jobs, tax revenue, traffic to Route 9A corridor in Hawthorne, New Jersey. Tri-Cities Warehouse will employ this many people. Like, are they also getting, are they also laying people off? Because when those warehouses came in, and I just, I thought it was a little weird that the Bloomberg story didn't mention that at all. Like, if they're not going to be using these warehouses for Amazon warehouses, are they then presumably, and this was a big argument, right?

Amazon would come in and they're like, we're going to take over this space. It's going to be a warehouse. It's going to be a lot of jobs. I'm just, I'm like, wait, are there jobs associated with this space? And it's totally unclear. I can't. I have no answer to this right now. but I would assume so.

Yeah, I think they're going to constantly be in this back and forth between automation and their growth. So my guess would be they go steady state, which is to say, you know, whatever number of employees they have now, if they keep growing the amount being delivered, I bet you they're going to offset it with the gains in robotics, right? So they kind of have this thing where if you ever watch people packing stuff, the robots have picked it off a shelf, put it onto into a bucket, and then the person kind of just inspects it and puts it in the box, tapes it up. And they make sure that the right things are in the box. But I actually know the space because it's typically been a dollar per month for this kind of space.

I know because I wanted to buy one of these buildings recently. Per square foot? Per square put per month. So I just asked our producers to pull. that number, and I said it's a dollar a month for this stuff. And so $9.50 per year is what it costs. So you divide that by $12. It's less than 75 cents per month. So in fact, if it was a dollar and they had $10 million, it's $10 million. It's $100 million a year. So this is basically not going to cost Amazon all that much to have this extra space and to sublet it. So this might be like the variable that

might have been left out of this story is what this actually costs them. They have 36 billion in cash, an extra $100 million a year in extra space, probably worth it to have it. So this might be a big nothing. It's just they like to have a little extra capacity and they're sub-letting it right now. I guess so. Yeah. So maybe it's a nothing burger.

It definitely suggests at a minimum that they don't need the extra capacity anymore because e-commerce consumption is going down, which is not actually that surprising given every single other trend happening in the economy right now. The number we really would need to look at is, you know, the COVID bump. What was it in 2019? Right, COVID was 2020, 2020, 2021. So if you get 2019's number and 2022, the second half of 2022's number, and we just compare

second half of 2019 to second half, Q3 and Q4, 2019 to Q4, 23 and 24, that's going to be the real interesting comparison for e-commerce companies because it's right before COVID started. and it's like, you know, give it a six months mulligan with COVID. I don't want to say ending because I know people get upset. People are so emotional about COVID. I think it feels like the emotion is coming out of COVID now as it's an endemic. So I won't say COVID ended, but COVID moved to the endemic version of COVID,

which is, hey, we're going to deal with it. And then I think a lot of people are going to have, I think we're going to move into a space of resentment. That's my prediction, like later this year, of people are going to say, okay, it was clear we should have shut down for that first year, but did we need to shut down for the second year or the second half a year and my kids lost some education moments, whatever? And what I think about all this is, hey, once in a hundred year pandemic, you're not going to get it perfect. You know, like, you can't possibly perfectly know when to reopen. You're not going to get

perfect, although we are now like just tearing ourselves up for something even worse by like not even funding vaccine distribution, even in the U.S., let alone the rest of the world. Like, we're still screwing some stuff up. Because I saw somebody the other day post about having their insurance tonight over their long COVID. My mom has long COVID. Like, yeah, it's people are going to remain. I'm only going to caution you that people are going to remain emotional because for the people it's hit really hard, whether it was a death or long COVID, which is existing as I'm going. You have a different feeling about this. Yes. My mom lost her best friend to COVID. And, you know, she feels differently about it, right? If you have an immunocompromise, it's a really good point. If you have an immunocompromise person

in your life, you still feel like, why is everybody taking this risk? Because it's your mom or your dad. You know, I feel that way too. My dad is a cancer survivor. My mom's a cancer survivor. They're older. I do think about it. And you know, you can, it's hard to hold both of these things. If you lost a parent to it, if you're, you know, if you have long COVID, you're going to still have this very strong emotion about COVID. And then for everybody else who maybe didn't have that, you're like, why did I give up my vacation? Why did I give up? Why did my kids suffer?

And back to having tough conversations. Like, it's a shit situation. It's a shit situation. It's a situation we all had to go through. And let's not attack each other about it. Let's not attack each other. Let's just keep moving forward. Like, wouldn't it be nice if we could have like a government?

That was just like, here's the thing. This is now a virus that lives with us. It's endemic for most. It's not for others. We, the government, because it's our job to do this. are doing our very best to make sure that the people who could be the worst affected by this are taken care of. Because that's the only way to move. We got to move forward. We can't keep society close forever. And it's like when, you know, I find it analogous to like how we treated the first

responders after 9-11 or how we treated people coming back from Iraq war, Afghanistan war. Like, if we can't just treat those folks excellent, like, to the best of our ability, like, what's wrong with our society. You know, when John Stewart had to like use his celebrity to go to Washington to be like to shame these, you know, absolute horrific people who were, you know, just, oh my God, God, the first responders, they're, you know, out on the West Side Highway, standing ovation for risking your life, of which my brother is one. Yes. Who, you know, has lung issues after being on that f***ing pit trying to look for bodies and put that. fire out at 9-11. And, you know, like, the committee doesn't even show up. Yeah. You know,

and they could give two sh-s, like, and it's like, we're talking about thousands of people. And we can't just give them all the resources possible. Like, we're talking about asthma. We're talking about what, just give them every resource we can. If somebody comes back from the Iraq war or Afghanistan with PTSD, because they saw their, their brothers and sisters in arms blown up by an improvised explosive device, like, just give them everything. We have the resources. Give them everything they need. Stop with them.

It's the same thing with long COVID. Just we have enough resources. They're real people that didn't do anything to end up like this. We have the money. Just do it. Spend the money. You can leap out the ass, please. But no cursing on this.

We can start us. We just leap it out, please. Because we want to keep our rating top beans. But it is really annoying. Just to put one more f*** in it. Like, it's so annoying that, you know, we couldn't do this. Agreed.