This Week in Startups - All-In’s hijacked feed, Google’s earnings breakdown, Jason’s legendary iPad troll | E1376

Episode Date: February 3, 2022

First, Jason explains how someone copied the All-In podcast, put in ads, and then redirected Google’s podcast player to display it as the real All-In feed (1:44). Then, we break down Google's Q4 and full year earnings for 2021 (18:25). Is Google the best business ever? Then, Jason tells the story of “The Great iPad Troll of 2010” (45:10). 00:00 Jason & Molly intro the show 01:44 How someone hijacked the All-In podcast feed and started serving ads on it 02:18 Funny story about Jason wanting to monetize All-In, and why it's not 03:07 We get sidetracked talking about private jets 07:31 What actually happened with the All-In feed 11:12 Vanta - Get get $1,000 off automating your SOC 2 at https://vanta.com/twist 12:31 Fair use and the growing culture of limited credit on the internet 16:28 Jason gets sidetracked talking about Book of Boba Fett 18:07 Thank you to the fans and Google who sorted it all out 18:25 Google's "Bonkers" earnings 20:18 Eight Sleep - Go to https://eightsleep.com/twist to check out the Pod Pro Cover and get $150 off at checkout! 21:35 Google's net income was up 90% year over year 29:46 Gun.io - Get $250 off your first developer hire at https://Gun.io/twist! 31:04 Google's big problem, more money than they know what to do with 45:10 Jason's crazy iPad story from 2010 54:24 A note from the show FOLLOW Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis FOLLOW Molly: https://twitter.com/mollywood

Hey, everyone. Big news show again today. All our interviews just getting pushed to the end of the week because the news just keeps on coming. First, Jason chimes in with a little update on what happened with the All In podcast and why it appeared that there were ads on top of that bead. It is apparently a little bit of a hijacking situation. So we'll explain all the mechanics of that. He thanks the community for helping to solve the issue. And Google release their Q4, our results. and the full earnings for 2021. It's absolutely bonkers. It's absolutely nuts. And Molly and I debate, is this actually the best business ever? And we deep dive and double-click on the search revenue, the YouTube revenue. And of course, we're going to talk about what we teased yesterday, which is I'm going to tell the story of the great iPad troll of 2010.

Molly remembers it for when she was covering gadgets as well. It's going to be a great show. Stick with us. This weekend startups is brought to you by Vanta. Clients and security shouldn't be a deal-breaker for startups to win new business. Vanta makes it easy for companies to get a SOC2 report fast. Twist listeners can get $1,000 off for a limited time at vanta.com slash twist. 8Sleep.

Good sleep is the ultimate game changer. Now you can add the PodPro cover to any mattress. Go to 8Sleep.com slash Twist to check out the PodPro cover and get $150 off at checkout. and gun.io, the simplest way for anyone to hire world-class developers, expertly vetted for you by senior engineers. Get $250 off your first hire at gun.io slash twist. All right, everybody, in our first story today, just a little internal housekeeping,

a bunch of you started DMing me that, hey, what's the story with All-in having ads? As some of you know, all-in famously, because Chumath Bandit has no ads. And the reason you're hearing me flustered right now is that that would have been $8 million in ads a year for that show, maybe $5, 6, 7, 8, of which I would have gotten 25%. And now I'm not saying I need a million dollars a year, but I'm not saying I would have turned it down either.

And inside baseball, Molly, I said to the team, hey, let me sell three ads. I'll read them. No work for you. And you know what the dictator said to me? Still no. He said, we don't need the money. You know, if he ever bows out and you need someone to come in

and take that million dollars a year, I just want to know, I care for you. Yes. And I'm here for you. I care about you too, Molly. And I care about a million dollars. I was like, he's like, and Chmott's like, we need the money. And it's actually like, we don't need the money. And then me and Freiburg were like,

and you're like, uh, so like the two guys with Jats were like, we don't need the money. And then the two guys who were flying commercial, we're like, ah. And, you know, look, we all know need is relative, but still. I was like,

$1,000, $6,000 an hour for a private jet, sweetheart, taxes, 100 hours. I know I'm your mom, but it's so dangerous. But that's why it was such a shock to get these tweets that were like, hey, you guys take ads now, and Jason's like, blah, blah, blah. What? I'm not closer to my private jet, so no.

Exactly. I'm literally like booking my jet blue mint. Although I have to say mint is, I don't know if you've taken JetBlue Mint. Don't do private jets. So dangerous. So dangerous. I was just reading about a...

Please keep the moneymaker going. Do not die, J. Cal. No skiing over 40 miles an hour. No private jets. I literally am such a mom. I don't know when I turned into my actual grandma Pat right now, but I'm like, I hope you're being safe out there. Private jads are super dangerous.

I just read about Payne Stewart and that horrible plane crash in 1999. Anyway, I'm sorry, please continue. Well, Payne Stewart, they all fell asleep on the plan, right? They lost oxygen and it just flew for three hours. They all, like, turned into popsicles, and then the... Yeah. Because they lost oxygen. Then the plane just flew around until it crashed in South Dakota.

Yeah. So anyway. That does not happen. Private jets are actually safer than if they're like the certain class I'm talking about. Helicopters are the ones I will not get on. I took two helicopter flights in my life. Once I was on the Sony private one when I was in IT, I flew on the Sony private helicopter. And then another time when I was in Kauai on my honeymoon, we did like a no-door, you know, crazy see the Napoli.

Is it Nepali Coast? Napoli, yeah. Napoli coast with no doors. And the guy is literally, I kid you not. I'm not saying he looked like a Vietnam vet. He was a Vietnam vet because he told me. And he was wearing just a leather vest, Molly. Nothing underneath it.

And the side of his helicopter, this is when I knew I had made a mistake. I feel like I'm going to die. The side of his helicopter has like an insignia that is also the same as on his vest, which has multiple insignias. And it has a skull with a sort of. through it and a snake coming out of the eye. I know this because I was kind of like, what's that? Why is there a sword going through the skull's brain

and the snake coming out of its eyes? Oh, yeah, you know, when we were non, we all had these things, we would draw them. There are no doors. And we put the seatbelts on, and it's freight. The seatbelts are kind of frayed. And we get up there with the only two people in the thing. And he's like showing my wife in a polycos.

He's like, oh, Jake Hal, let me show you. And he then, you know, tilts the helicopter like this. and then just spins it around. He's like, oh, Jay, you can take a look now too. And he's going back and we're, I feel myself, my wife, you know, his weight is on me. She didn't weigh that much. And I'm hanging out, looking at the pressure on the seatbelt and the 3,000 feet below me. I get back.

Somebody's like, Jake out, by the way, huge mistake. This is the most dangerous thing you ever do. You know about all the crashes. I'm like, no, I looked at the safety record. This perfect safety record. I should look it up. He goes, oh, in Hawaii, these things crash so often. they just shut the company down.

They start a new company and they have zero crashes. Oh my God. And all the pilots and planes that are left over, helicopters are left over, move over to the next thing. So if you look up, helicopter crashes in Kauai, it is bonkers,

the number of people who have crashed. Two of them crashed into each other one time, because if you've ever been to like Connolly Bay or these places, you can see the helicopters going by every half hour, you know, of people going up to take these tours.

Anyway, don't do it. Too dangerous. I've only been in a helicopter once, but I jumped out of it. Really? Yeah. Was that on assignment or? Yeah, it was for work. It was for an episode of always on the showy students unit where we were testing. Because you know, remember that when the HTC1 came out, there was that commercial where they were like doing a photo shoot in midair.

It was like skydiving. And my crazy friend Sarah was like, hey, I know some guys from GoPro who are on their stunt team. No, Sarah Harbin. Oh, okay. Um, legendary producer Sarah Harman. Yeah. She was like, I know, I'm friends with the guys who are on the GoPro stunt team. And I think it would be awesome if we just tried to recreate this. And so then we were like, let's recreate it where we compare the inner performance of the HDC1 and the iPhone. So we did this like freaking bonkers skydiving trip. But then the GoPro. Well, that was the GoPro influence is that those guys are so insane.

They're like, yeah, we'll organize it all. Like, we prefer to jump out of a helicopter because like the sensation of free fall is so intense. which basically means like because you just had a standstill and you leap into the air and then I almost threw up. But it was a cool video. I'll find it on YouTube and send it to you guys.

So here's what happened with the all-in feed back to the night. Right. Right. It turns out that people will take your feed and resubmit it. And I guess this was done with a company called Spreeker. And this guy explains it here if we blow it up. And I guess some clever person, republished our feed to something called Spreaker.

I've never heard of it before, but I guess they're like an anchor competitor. I guess they don't have safeguards in place at Spreaker. No criticism, but how dare you? And this guy explains it technically, but basically they resubmitted the feed and then inserted Eds into it, and then I guess Google fell for it. that's what's so amazing although evident well we'll get to that in a second and this guy explains the whole thing

and there's something happening with podcasting standards which all these companies seem to want to break but there is a standard for locking these that's the one yeah so Libson which is like one of the OGs in the space I guess has enabled locking recently so we have to

set our pods to lock them so that other people can't then after we put them out do that so anyway it was like a pretty clever thing. And I thank you to the audience who points these things out. But this is one of the problems that people, you know, take other people's content and then put ads around it. So I hate this kind of like hijacking of stuff. There were some other pod clips kind of company that I had to cease and desist to. These people were like, hey, we're promoting your show. And I was like, no,

you're taking every episode of This Week in Startups, Tim Ferriss's podcast and mine. you're programmatically, or automating actually, clipping it into 25 clips of four minutes each or whatever, three minutes each, putting a title on each one with some people in Manila who are like, obviously, because you can tell,

this is not English as a first language, like, just bastardizing the whole thing. And then SEOing them and beating us at SEO. And I contact him, like, why are you bullying a startup? And I'm like,

um, that's what they say, why are you bullying a startup? I said, okay, I get it. Like, good, not well played, but did you ask our permission before taking everything? He's like, we're promoting to you. And I'm like, are you because there's no links back to us?

Right. And you did the whole show. I was like, how about you can do one clip per episode and you put with permission and you link back? And like, we don't have the screen real estate to do that. And I was like, okay, now I know that you can. Okay, well, then cease and also desist. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. So literally they wouldn't take it down. I was talking and I was talking to other high profile book us and I was like, wait a second, isn't there something you can do? And it was like, oh yeah, there's something called like a DMCA. And I was like, wait a second. So I just like, could somebody send a DMCA to who's their provider? And then somebody on my table was like, oh, the provider is this person.

I was like, so just send a DMCA. We send a DMCA, oh, suddenly all the clips get taken down. Yeah. Like it didn't have to be that way, man. Be fair. Fair use is being fair. So anyway. Yeah, totally.

I don't mind people taking, I mean, I don't know how you feel about this, but I'm always flattered if somebody takes one of our clips and edits it as long as they do it in good faith. Like if they try to misconstrue something like they did with Chimov and they're like, okay, let's take 20 seconds of a 40-minute discussion with no context. Maybe I'm not as cool with it. But people do some very creative stuff with our clips on TikTok and other places. Oh, for sure.

I mean, I think our biggest presence on TikTok right now is a fan account, basically. Bad accounts doing better than we're doing. All right. Listen, when you're a founder, it's, Totally fun to trade war stories with other founders. And recently Balloon CEO, Amanda Greenberg, one of my awesome portfolio companies, told me how Vanta's SOC2 solution helped her save

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So if you don't have your sock two, tight, you know you're not going to be able to close those major customers. That's why Vantas compliant software makes it so easy to get and renew your SOC2. They continually test against technical and non-technical SOC2 requirements and they partner with over two dozen audit firms who have been trained to file SOC2 reports directly within VANTTA. On average, Vanta customers are SOC2 compliant in just two to four weeks. Compare that to three to five months without Vanta.

And guess what? Vanta is going to give you $1,000 off your sock, too, just because you're listed to this week in startup. So here's how you get the $1,000 off. You go to vanta.com slash twist, v-a-t-a-com slash T-W-I-S-T. That's vanta.com slash twist for $1,000 off. Thanks, Fanta. What I was going to say is I just think there's become this very interesting lack of,

there's like a culture of no credit now on the internet. When you look at, like, you know, there are these incredibly, like, and I mean this with love. My son and I are obsessed with daily dose of internet on YouTube, which is really just a guy who takes. clips from other people, puts them in order, creates a very, you know, clever editing, creates a nice montage,

but none of it is original content. I mean, he's literally like, here's a cat that likes to get its fat belly scratch, and then you watch it and then you laugh. Okay, I'm looking at it now. It's delightful, and none of it is his own content. Daily dose of internet, 13 million subscribers. I mean, this kid's like making bank.

And he's great. I am not trying to call down, call in an airstrike on this kid. Like, he is fantastic, and he's probably making a ton of money. But just the idea of like, well, here's what I'll say. aggregating and memes are fundamentally like lacking in IP.

Like the whole conversation about IP and who owns what is really shifting. Memes to me seem like no big deal because memes are, uh, but you're not a professional photographer either who makes money off of a photo that gets recreated 10,000 times. Yeah. If it was a meme, you took somebody's photo and then did a derivative work on it and you were not trying to commercialize it and you weren't confused.

using the users, that would be fair use, right? And so the fair use test is kind of like four parts, and it's made so you have to interpret it. So are the users confused? Are you impinging on the person's ability to do commerce in the world? Are you creating a derivative work or doing some sort of commentary? And so in the case of this daily dose, I'm looking at it, he links to all the sources in the description. Oh, totally. Yeah. That's a good sign because he probably sends him traffic. Literally all I'm trying to say is I think that the Overton window for taking content has shifted enough that I think there probably is a sense from the people who are like taking those clips and monetizing them. They're just like, what? This is what you do now. Yeah. And then here's

the thing. The frequency at which daily dose of internet is doing it, if they're doing it every day and it's becoming a business and they're putting ads on it, that changes things. So if there were no ads on this and he was linking to them, it would feel kind of fair, but he would still be impeding on ability to do commerce because if you saw that viral clip there, that person's ability to sell it through Storyful, which is a company, I think, that sells viral clips would go down. So if only 10,000 people saw his show every day or their show every day, I think you said it's a hey, if only 10,000 people saw it, would you be like, okay, well, there's not that much damage, whatever. But if you're going to get 10 million people to see it and you're doing it every day and it's monetized, he should be getting permission

in advance. Yeah. And I mean, I mean, But nobody on the internet, nobody on the internet is doing that. Now that's what I'm saying. It's all the news channels do because they get sued. Derivative works. Yeah. But if you were to, if you were seen that to do it, or you were ABC, you would get permission. Yeah.

So everybody, you see this. I don't know if you've ever seen this, but somebody like is like, oh my God, my plane crash landed. And then you look at their replies and it's like, hi, I'm from CBS, you know, Arizona. Can we use this clip? DM me. Hey, I'm from this. And then there's one, hi, I'm from Storyful. Would you like to monetize this clip, please DM me?

And so now there is like a little bit of a standard. If you have the viral clip, there's like a company that will get you $100 every time somebody uses it. Yeah. But long story short, be fair. I guess it's like the concept of fair use that I go by. Yeah. And we use people's clips here, but if you're doing commentary, you're protected.

And it's the, oh, and also the percentage of the original work is another issue. Give credit. Give credit. Be fair and give credit. Right. When we did Kara Swisher interviewing Lena Con, we're like, oh, here's Kara Swisher and Andrew Rossorkin, great get. on CNBC, here's 60 seconds, we'll see you on the other side.

That is actually the definition of fair use. The audience isn't confused of where I came from. And it's commentary. Commentary is protected. You don't need permission if you're doing commentary. So you could take the book of Bobafet last night, which was absolutely amazing. I haven't watched it yet.

Don't tell me. There's only seven spoilers. It's literally the most spoiler-filled episode ever. The number of- People were losing it on the internet last night. I was like, close. Camios in last night's episode is greater than all cameos in Mandalorian and Book of Boba Fett

to date in three seasons or 2.7 seasons. My God. If you're a Clone Wars fan, did you watch Clone Wars by chance? Some of it. Yeah. Some of it. So I watched that with my daughters because they got into Star Wars. They love Ashoka.

She's like the great female Jedi now. She's like such an amazing character. It's like literally top three Jedi for me. So spoiler. So she's back. Well, anyway, she's been in the other, she's been in the Mandalorian. She's in the Mandalorian. And she may or may not make a cameo.

But anyway, there's so many of these Clone Wars cameos in last night's episode that I literally was on Twitter trending topics at 105 after I watched it, clicking on every one of the cameras. This guy, Dave Filoni. I don't know how you do it, man. I was literally in bed at 902. Yeah, I sleep six hours a night. It's like, when I get to seven, I'm just like waking up looking at the ceiling.

So I get to bed at 1 a.m. usually get up at 8. 6.30 to 8 window. Usually listen to a podcast or something in bed. Try to like rest my body. But when I'm skiing now, I actually do get an extra hour of sleep. Oh, yeah. Super poopered, yeah. Yeah, no, I'm like a, I'm a sleep achiever. Okay, let's talk about Google.

Let's go to our first story. We are just all over the place today. You can leave all that in, by the way. We're so excited to hang out is the thing. It's just excited to hang out. With all of you, too. Oh, and by the way, Danny, Sullivan is now working at Google. He came to my rescue and he immediately explained what happened.

And so did those people at Speaker or Spreaker or whatever the heck it's called. And everybody was like very nice about it. And so thank you to everybody for helping figure out the mystery. Excellent. So yes, Google, as you can see, is so valuable to companies that it is worth stealing a little bit of content and sneaking some ads in because they're killing it. Google reported earnings yesterday, the results were banana pants, like just utterly bonkers. We will get into those utterly bonkers

results in a minute. But the other news about Google is that they also announced a 20 to one stock split, causing their stock to shoot up around 8% by midnight Wednesday. All right, do we want some bullets here before we dig into analysis? I think we need to know the numbers. And then we can

start doing that. Yeah. All right. Google grew revenue 41% year over year from 2020 to 2021 to 2507. 41%. 41% This is not a hypergrowth startup.

This is Google that a lot of people were saying, oh, Google, their business is going to slow down. There's too much ad competition from Facebook. Like,

I remember a year or a year and a half ago, people saying that Google might be on more of a, you know, I don't know, growth stock trajectory, not a like 41% year over year. Growth stock is like over 20, 30%,

like a value stock meeting. I'm sorry, value stock trajectory. Like maybe going under 20%, or under 10% like Walmart or something. I don't know. Sorry, yes. They would be like in blue chip territory, not in hyperbill territory.

Yes. So when you think about this, like we'll be meeting with startups and you're like, hey, how much did you grow year over year? And they're like, oh, we grew 50%. It's like, oh, you were 500K last year and now you're $750,000, like $1,000. This is 41%.

41%. And the dollars, by the way, a quarter of a trillion dollars in revenue in 2021. $257 billion. Now, if they make a dollar a click, there's a lot of clicks. It's 257 billion clicks. I think they make less than a dollar a click overall.

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Let's go right there. That's a good at a trouble. Yeah. And then we can come back to the back of the envelope math. But yeah. So crazy. We'll boat it later. By comparison, Walmart's last 12 months of revenue was $570 billion or 4% of growth.

All right. Let's dig into where is our specific result? YouTube had another blowout quarter. So net income, Google was $76 billion. dollars up 2020 in 2020 up 90% year over year standouts. Wait, what was up 90%?

Net income. Net income, okay, got it, okay. Cash in the back. Blowout quarter. Profits. Profits up 90%. Profits up 90%. Who can say that? YouTube, $8.6 billion of ad revenue in Q4.

That is a cool $900 million more than what Netflix did. And that is not even counting YouTube Red or YouTube Premium Subscriptions. That's just plain old revenue growth. I would love to know that number. What is YouTube Bread's, you know, YouTube premiums? Yeah.

You know, do they have a million? Do they have $5 million? Do they have $5 million? I pay for it. Do you pay for it? No. We've been game changing. Debating in our household whether we need to,

because I'm like, I think we should pay for this. And my son, who sometimes is a 40-year-old man, is like, I don't know if we watch it that much. They have a family plan. And, like, okay. I'm paying for two different accounts, and I'm going to move to the family plan, I think, and try to get that set up.

Oh, there it's, uh, when you take the ads out, it changes the YouTube experience. Like, I have YouTube up all day because it does seem like a lot of the mainstream media people who said, we're not going to put our content on there and build YouTube, have now acquiesced. So, you know, SNL.

Yep. You can basically watch the entire episode on YouTube. And they were the ones who sued for, remember, Lazy Sunday. whatever and I think they sued. There's somebody fact, if I'm wrong. Or DMCA'd it at minimum. Digital Millennium Copy right now.

Like every ESPN clip, like I never watch ESPN, except for the five times a day they talk about the Knicks. And I watch those five clips. Yeah. And they clip them now. And then Bill Simmons I saw, you know, I listened to his podcast, but now when he talks about a specific team and I DM'd him about it, I was like, this is really great. He's clipping.

So Spotify's content is clipping their best. moments and putting them onto YouTube to SEO them. So I think something has changed where people are just throwing up the white flag and saying, we have to be on YouTube where we're not culturally relevant. YouTube must have also figured out a rev share here. I mean, I think that, you know, because it sort of stopped being a copyright conversation, thank God, and became a conversation about how does everybody make money? And I don't know if YouTube.

Right. So if they're giving them 55%, they decided like, you know what, that's a nice little revenue stream turns out. If there's enough traffic, we'll do it. I think what these, like ESPNs of the worlds or even new content, like, you know, the ringer, I think what they realized was we're not going to be culturally relevant. The 55% is a nice, you know, little piece of change. So we're going to have to be there.

And, you know, maybe not all of our content, but we have to be there. And I think, like, this is the thing with Joe Rogan, back to Joe Rogan or Rosalie to Joe Rogan. Like, he owned YouTube. And now I never see Joe Rogan. So I don't understand what's going on there. It's the Spotify deal is exclusive. Yeah, but Spotify is letting the ringer do stuff. So I don't know if Spotify has a philosophy.

Nick, in real time is literally correcting us in the, this is amazing. He puts some content on there. Not all of it still puts content on YouTube, but maybe not all. Maybe it's like his Instagram. Is episodes do? The, really? Oh, I thought it was a J.R.E clips. was exclusive.

I don't think he puts the whole show up, Nick. That that was like their whole deal. Somebody fact checked us, but I'm looking at the, also the J.R.E. Clips. If you go,

there was this, this is the official Joe Rogan experience clips channel, which is YouTube.com slash J.R.E. Clips. We started doing one of these. And I'm looking at the videos,

and by uploads, he has not done one in a year. Yeah. So he's no, he's no longer doing J.R.E. Clips. That's the whole deal with the Spotify deals, which not to reopen that conversation,

makes it so different from any other platform conversation is that it's exclusive, but also that like in a lot of ways, it's reducing, there was that big story about Gimlet and how what they were finding is that their traffic was just like, subscriptions are way down, traffic overall is down because exclusives,

I mean, this really relates to this YouTube conversation at all, overall, right? Exclusivity reduces audience. And so ESPN and Saturday Live was like, all of these smarter media companies who were like, oh crap, literally everyone is on YouTube, realized that trying to keep it

this like weird little closed garden was just gonna mean fewer eyeballs and you could argue that in today's economy I've figured out Joe Rogan's. Here's what Joe Rogan's doing. Yeah. He's no longer doing the J.R.E. Clips channel.

What he did is he moved clips from J.R.E. Clips, new clips, to powerful J.R.E. That's his other channel. He's very powerful. If you didn't know. I'm changing my Twitter handle I am biting my tongue I am changing my I think it's actually an affirmation

for him and I think it's cool like I'm changing mine to I'm changing my Twitter handle today to billionaire Jacob just so we can get there you don't need to do that you want to know one of the worst parts of my life is people dunking on me constantly saying billionaire Jason Calacanis says that

And then I open up my like accounts and I'm like, nope, not yet. So I'm hated like a billionaire without even the zero. Without even being there, without even the zeros. Just wrong. That's just wrong, my friend. All right, let's keep going through the numbers. Let's keep going. So anyway, if you look at his- So there's YouTube, obviously,

Joe, not. Can I just make one note? Oh, of course, yeah. He's doing three clips per episode. So for example, he just had Jordan Peterson on. And he was talking about men and boys being, you know, If you're a boy and a man, you know, you got the short end of the stick today. Anyway, that's my Jordan Peterson.

I'm more sharping my Jordan Peterson. Oh my God. You're not just it, Joe. I mean, women don't do hard labor, Molly. It's just an intellectual exploration of everyone else's inferiority. That's all it is. We're just asking questions about why everybody else is so inferior. Women watching Joe Rogan is just like super iral territory, isn't it?

like, you're just like Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan. Why do you need such a big truck? Anyway, as we, let's, let's continue with our, uh, our deep dive into all the places that Google is making all the money. So that sounded very impressive, right, that Google, that YouTube, $8.6 billion of ad revenue in Q4. It's $35 billion a year. Yeah.

So, it's a lot of money. How much they give to, creators. So do they give 55% of all that or maybe less? I don't know. Yeah. I think it's, I don't know. We should, let's do that breakdown. But so for those who have had questions about the search business, you could probably put those away also. Search the core business, $43 billion in revenue in Q4, 35% year over year growth. So as a hyper growth, you know, situation maybe not quite as impressive and still growth that anybody would die for. And then that cloud business keeps growing, $5.5 billion in revenue in Q4, 44.

percent year over year growth, which gets us to this question in our notes. Is Google the greatest business ever? That is what, Freedberg, science guy Freedberg, who I think is your favorite bestie. I'm not sure of, you know, taking me out of it. I think he's your favorite. I can't pick a favorite child.

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Anyway, he says that all the time. It's best business because here, let's look at this. $250 billion is a lot of money. And at this growth rate, which is 40% year every year, in five years, or no, in 2026, they're going to basically be a trillion dollar revenue company. I don't know many businesses that are anywhere near a trillion dollars. Like Walmart does $570 billion, but remember, they're selling goods and services. It's not software or a marketplace, you know.

What is their margin? Like, their margin is like, I'm thinking single digits, whereas Google's is, you know, incredible. Right. So, you know, you're going to, for somebody like Walmart, or even Apple, which is tremendous. Like, they have great margins, obviously, for a hardware company. That's what I was trying to sell.

They're still a hard cost to get, make that in China and ship it here. Totally. Like, that's the only comp I can even think of in terms of margins. And that's just because they charge so freaking much. Like, I can't even, maybe Salesforce is comparable in terms of margin, but not. Well, margin, sure. But, you know, then you're just, what does Google do with all this money?

It's like Google is going to have so much money. Yeah. You know, they doubled their profits. So if you're, if you're going to be throwing off that much cash flow and you're not allowed to buy things, are they going to start doing a dividend? Because you can't hire more people. You can't possibly pay people more money than they get paid at Google.

Right. So that's my question is, if we're not going to let them buy stuff, like what could, what would they, if you were there, right? and you were on the board, Molly, and we're having a discussion, and they said, listen, we need to spend $10 billion on something, not buying it,

we have to actually spend it. It's kind of like Brewster's millions, if you remember that, like how do you spend $10 billion on something? Like life extension is one of the other bets? I have an idea. It's kind of a passion project of mine. Oh, what's that?

Climate. Climate? You know, we could use $10 billion? I mean, they have at. Right? They have the other bets category. And this is so interesting because one, I talked to X, I guess like almost three years ago now, maybe four when I did this series on like, what is Silicon Valley doing to save the planet? Yeah. And what was so interesting about X is that it had started as the Moonshot factory, but in recent years has gotten super focused on returns and

being profitable. And so they've killed a lot of cool businesses. And I can't even remember what I'm allowed to talk about, but there was one that was like, oh my God. Right, which was like the blimps that were going to give a balloon were like permanent blimps or airplanes that were going to give internet access. I think low Earth orbit stuff. There was a lot of things they were playing with over there. There were way cooler projects that were like, oh, this will save the world, right? This would revolutionize transportation.

This would get rid of, I don't know, gasoline. And they killed them because they couldn't figure out a business model. So great, fine. If you need to make money, that's the right call. But if you are now, if you're Google now and all of these industries, right, if somebody needs to figure out direct carbon capture and storage, X now. Like, take, if I could sit on the board, I would say, you know what, take the reins off X. Don't ask those businesses to make money.

Just go ahead and change the world. I mean, there, I always thought fiber was a really good one and I had actually talked to, I actually talked to Larry Page about it. ago. And I was like, I think that this is like, even if you lost money on this, like the way you could change the world would be to just take some percentage of your profits, 1%, 2%, and just lose money on fiber forever because he was really jazzed up about Google fiber. And then they deprecated that. So I think they were under pressure because of their stock to deprecate all those projects. I think you're right. They now need to go back and say, you know what,

let's do these crazy moonshots again and not look at profitability. Let's look at Impact. As an example, Google's Nevada Data Center is going to be powered by, I'm reading a headline from 2020, a billion-dollar solar farm. And I think that they are building now the largest solar farms in the world. Google might be the largest funder of solar in the world now. They are just going for it. Yeah, they're legitimately net zero, not net zero with offsets. It's like they actually do fund so much solar that they, I mean, estimates say it would take to answer

some of the skeptical notice who don't think that the climate crisis needs more money. I mean, first of all, somebody did a study about nuclear fusion 10 years ago or so and determined that it would, you know, they were like, okay, if we put $9 billion a year toward fusion, we would have fusion in 10 years and then backed it out to as we reduce that investment, how long will it take? And they were like, oh, the world currently invests about a billion dollars a year in fusion, which is a fusion never plant. It means we'll always goof around. They're getting there on fusion, though.

It seems like they've made, I'm seeing more investment in fusion and a little more progress. Absolutely. You know why? Because of that first part, we're seeing more investment. So there was one estimate that said it'll take $4.5 trillion dollars of investment to decarbonize the energy supply in the United States. What if Google said to X, figure out microgrids? Like, figure out power decentralization.

full stop. Clean energy infrastructure. You've got $3 billion go. You will definitely make money, but you reduce the current much more ruthless approach that X has taken over the last few years. Like, I'm just saying they have the money. So, like, do it. Yeah. And, you know, like, finding places to put these solar farms now is becoming part of the issue, right? So, like, you know, by airports, by nuclear power plants in the desert, around data centers that are in the desert. Like, I think. I think we're starting to figure out with the solar stuff. The panels are so cheap.

There's nuclear power plants around. There's nuclear power plant sites that have been kind of like semi-approved, even though they're not building on them. Just build around them. This is, I think, Elon's idea. He tweeted it at some point, like, well, if nobody wants to live near a nuclear power plant, put the solar there because you already got the grid going there. Right.

Like all the grid cables are going there. So I think Google should, if they want to really be less hated, because they have all this heat coming from regulators, just solve climate change. This is my message to, our message to Google. Sol climate change. Dear Google, you're printing money. So soft climate change.

What a legacy for Google to literally just start building solar farms. What if Google said people, we'll put, what if Google did what Solar City was doing originally? And they said, hey, we'll put fiber to your house and we'll put the solar on it. And we'll partner with, you know, Tesla to put power walls and Tesla solar on there. and like, we'll fund it. We'll do the, the bonds, right?

That could be actually something really cool. If they just took all this cash and said all of our cash is going to go towards solar bonds, you know, we'll put the money up to buy the solar panels. Yeah. Just go for it, Google. And if anybody, like,

solar is in so many ways, the one of the magical bullets for the energy transition, but we need more efficient panels, right? Or Google, go crazy on battery tech. Get us the better battery. Like, it, it can be solved. It really, like in so many ways.

A lot of its will. And then will is related to capital. So the people with the capital have to have the will. Yeah. Well, here's the thing. If you have a money printing machine like Apple and Google and Amazon now is starting to have a money printing machine and you're hated, I look at this as like the ultimate PR hack.

Like, if all these young people realize you're doing more to save the planet than the government, and the government is moving slow and fighting with each other and yada, yada and, you know, toxic. But capitalists are actually just doing it. That to me is when capitalism becomes beautiful, right? And I'm obviously a capitalist. I'm pro-capitalism, a chosen career, capital allocator. This is where I think capitalists can reflect deeply about wealth disparity and say, okay, we won.

Google won. We level that's, okay, you could either say obscene or you could say unprecedented, however you want to frame it. But the reframing could be, you know what? We realize this is an insane amount of wealth. And with that great wealth comes great responsibility.

And that responsibility we have chosen is to go build solar farms and invest in solar panels and the grid, etc. on top of that, to be honest. It doesn't even have to be a do-good or move, right? Like the total addressable market for climate solutions is the whole freaking planet, for one thing. But also the risk, like the only existential risk these companies probably face at this point.

And literally, Facebook is seeing it, the water come closer to the door every day, is climate change. Emily Kirsch told us on the episode on Sunday that, like, there are predictions that we will lose 15% of global GDP by 2050. That's not grandparent territory. And what if there's less people? You know?

Right. Like, what if people decide to have less kids? And, you know, that would be a shame. And, you know, like, we have, then you have less customers. This idea that, like, rich people want to see populations decline is, like, that's not in a company's best interest. Like, growth comes from more consumers.

So, yeah. And they did the 20 to one stock split. Like, I never understood why stock splits make the stocks go up. because nothing has changed except the psychology. It's like a broker people can buy more, though. Yeah, but you can buy fractional shares now. So yeah, that's true. So if I gave, if you had a $20 bill in your hand.

Only on Robin Hood. Can't buy fractional shares everywhere. Okay. You can buy fractional shares in Robin Hood, and I think some of the other services do it. But if I gave you, but yeah. Is it not that common? I don't think so. Although my kid has a little accountant.

He buys fractional shares. He's very proud of his portfolio. The next generation can do it. I know. But I mean, if you had a $20 bill, in your hand, and I replace it with 20 singles, and you're like, wow, it weighs more, and there's more of them, and I can fan them out. It's still the same amount. I don't get it. I think affordability, I mean, just as a matter of psychology, affordability matters.

Like, oh, if this is cheaper now, I'm going to snap up some more of it. Yeah. Okay, sure. But it became 10% more expensive on that news. But I guess there's, CNBC was speculating that Google Stock split might be them angling to get added to the Dow Jones Industrial Index. Wow. I don't even know what the qualification is to be on the Dow Jones. but okay. And why would, I wonder why they would want to be in the Dow versus the NASDAQ.

They just don't want to be considered a tech company anymore because reputation, I don't really know. I think it's a status thing, or maybe it means you're more blue chip so people could feel more comfortable holding you. Maybe.

You know, holding the shares if you were like some big endowment or something, but IBM is, I guess, a candidate to be removed from the Dow in favor of Google Alphabet. I mean,

I mean, Ouch, but kind of though, yeah. So if Google were to be added and IBM removed according to our notes here, that would technically shift the sector weightings of the Dow. That could mean a longer evaluation process for the Dow committee,

partly because the big obstacle for Google is that the Dow considers it a communications services company. What does that even mean? I mean, they're not making cell phones or they're not Verizon. I mean, is it that like, I just picture like the people who are on this board or like, you know, the people in Brewster's millions who are. It reminds you of the Oscars Committee. It is like the Oscars Committee or like the, no, The Golden Globes. What is that? The Foreign Press.

Yeah, the Hollywood Foreign Press. The Hollywood Foreign Press is just extraordinary. They're like, we have no diversity. And they're like, okay, well, we're not going to air the Golden Gloves unless you change this in the next year or two. And then like, they're like, yeah, we still don't have any black people in the Hollywood foreign press. And you're like, what? How is that possible? Is that true? I saw that headline. You got to be trying. Because you're trying. It's like you're either trying to not do it or you're not trying at all. It doesn't make any sense to me.

Anyway. If we keep on this route, I'm going to talk about the NFL. I do think it's interesting that tech only makes up 22.2% of the Dow right now, whereas communications services makes up only 3.7% of the Dow, which is the third smallest. The last tech company to join the Dow Index was Apple back in 2015. All right. Who cares?

I mean, this whole like designation means nothing. The fact is like I just look at IBM growing 4% and, Google growing 41% and $57 billion versus $257 billion. It's like, okay. I suppose it matters to investors who buy indexes. So if you buy the Dow Jones Industrial Average, then presumably you would want a company like Google in there. Yeah.

I mean, Google is five times IBM's revenue. Yeah. With 10 X its growth rate. I was about to say that. I was going to let Molly say that. I'm in the same line of the document. as you know. I just, you really, you guys are, you have a mind meld and I was thinking about poor IBM. Yeah, I mean, the fact that IBM is still around and doing 57 billion is extraordinary. I mean,

when was IBM founded in the 50s? I don't, I shouldn't know that off the top of my head. Oh, yeah, before that, right? Because IBM was pretty instrumental in, I think, some wartime tech, if I am remembering. 1911. Yeah. It really is that old? IBM, I think, is betting the farm right now on quantum and they're just hoping that they get there soon enough to stay alive. Yeah, wow, 1911. Yeah. Who knew? What do we think?

Do we have time for a story time with Jason? I mean, we did tease this yesterday. Yeah, we got to do it real quick. We got to do it. All right, so if you missed yesterday's show, here's the quick setup, which was that way back, it was the night before iPad announcement, January 26th, 2010, which it was, God help me, 12 years ago now. and Jason trolled everyone on Twitter by tweeting out fake specs about the iPad and it resurfaced yesterday after two days ago after Octane AI CEO Matt Schlett or Schlicht tweeted about his involvement in the troll.

JCal remind us, first of all, remind us like for those who were not there. Because now, sure, Apple announcements are a big deal and everybody tweets about him for one day. but they're you know it's sort of like a little groundhogs day oh no pun intended because i think today's groundhogs day but it's like it's the same thing over and over but back then an apple announcement was like it was a big deal well this was Steve jobs and you gotta remember there was Steve jobs previous announcement was here's the iPhone so the amount of energy the world was watching this this was a big deal this is when tech in 2010 had kind of crossed over into pop culture.

And iPad did not exist. iPad did not exist. And there was massive speculation. And developers were developing for it. So it was like the worst kept secret in Silicon Valley. And some people had been playing with it for, I think Walt Mossberg had said he had had it for a month or something. Yeah.

And then developers had been able to go to Apple, from my understanding, go to a room and put their software onto an iPad, test it, and then leave the room. but they had to write their software on their Macs, and then, you know, look at it on their desktop, and then they wanted to actually test it on the hardware they had to go there and have somebody over their shoulder, et cetera. So, and the Steve Jobs was, you know, quite the showman. So I was in bed and Twitter wasn't that old.

This podcast, I think, was a year old because we had started in May of 2009. Yeah. And so I was kind of unknown, although I think I did have 90,000 followers or 100,000 followers on Twitter. I mean, I feel like another important piece of, context here is the way that, like, you just described, Apple did play favorites. And that did start to irk a little bit.

So I could imagine 2010 J-Cal being in bed like, oh, I didn't get to go to the secret room, play with this for a month. So how about this? There was a little bit about that because obviously I co-founded a gadget with Brian Alvey and Peter Rojas and Ryan Block, yada, yada. And, you know, during that time period, uh, we were, yeah, we weren't insiders, but Steve Jobs was aware of us and, you know, we were in the room for these kind of keynotes. But I had sold it at that point. And so I was sitting in bed.

I was using Twitter. I had my daughter was probably two or three months old at the time. Yeah. And two months all the time. And I just decided like to pretend I had one. And I thought it would be funny. Now you got to remember, Twitter was a chat room back then. It wasn't Twitter today.

There were no blue check marks. It was just a bunch of people goofing off. And at one point I was the number three user on Twitter. It was Scobel, the Senator Obama. Was he a senator? before he became president. When he was in the, he was like Senator Obama than me,

like literally 30,000, 20,000, 15,000 followers kind of situation. Very nascent. And so I started describing the tablet. And I'm like, oh, it's got a built-in HD tuner and a DVR. And it's amazing for newspapers and video conferencing is super stable, but nothing new. And it's got two cameras, one on the front and the back. The idea that it would have two cameras was crazy.

It didn't get launched with cameras. And I was like, oh, it's got thumbpads on each side for mouse gestures. and fingerprint security. This is long before they had touch ID. But I had heard about a company in Israel that was doing it. So I just sort of added that. And I was like, yeah, it's basically like a Nintendo Wii level innovation and FarmVille's insane. Because my friend was doing Farmville at the time, Mark Pinkus.

And I was like, you know, you can connect the tablets and it makes like a Wi-Fi network for gaming. And, you know, I just was just crazy. But then I was like, oh, yeah. You were designing a perfect product, really. And I was like, oh, yeah, by the way, the back is a solar panel. And recharging. but it doesn't really work that quickly. And I just literally describe something

that was absolutely physically not possible. And then I decided I'm going to go to bed and people are telling me like, you're full of it, no way. And of course, you know, some people are like, maybe, but overwhelmingly the people on Twitter were like, this is not true. And I say, before I go to bed,

this is my favorite part is that that's all happening and Jake was like. So I said to my wife like, yeah, go to bed. She's like, I don't think it's a good idea. Like, Mark is going to be upset. Like, you probably shouldn't do that to Mark because we're, you know, we're friends. And I said, I'm not joking. And the specs are real.

We'll find out in a few hours. Because everybody was up late. I speculate. So I sleep in. I get up the next morning. My phone is melting with text messages and phone. I mean, I'm talking 100 phone. I was high.

It's CNN. Hi, it's Wall Street Journal. Hi. It's the New York Times. Hey, J. Cal, it's this person. And while I'm looking at my phone, it rings. It's Pinkist and it's like, he's called me 10 times. And Wall Street, everybody, what had happened was everybody.

Picked it up, of course. All the journalists picked it up. And then they all took their stories down because they felt so stupid. And then I got lauded for like showing how little ethics the tech press had that they just ran with the story. And to be totally honest, people needed a story and they wanted the page use at that time. People were page you crazy. So they were like, I think a lot of people in TAC wrote the story because they wanted the page views. And it was a click-a-duty story, even though they knew I didn't have it.

Maybe. I mean, you did run a site that was the number one gadget site. Was the number one gadget site and got a lot of early scoops and, you know, was known to run with those scoops and sort of fix it later. Like you did really sort of pioneer that model. And so I'm sure that at least, I'm sure those people publish thinking there's a 50% chance that this is true. If it's true, we can't miss it. And also, yes. I mean, I think this is around the time somebody asked me once, like, what my ideal CNET headline would be, because for a very brief time, I was like the front door programmer. And I was like, oh, yeah, free naked iPod. Yeah. Like,

free, anything Apple, like, anything Apple. Anyway, so yes, obviously everybody went a doodle over this. And Tuesdays goes to bed And then the best part is this update that's still up on the Wall Street Journal. Yeah. There it is. Social Games publisher Zinga tells Silicon Alley Insider that contrary to Mr. Calicanus's tweet,

Zingka CEO Mark Pinkus won't be appearing at the Apple Lodge. Now think about whether the iPad that he has invented. Because I had said, Pinkis is going to kick off the Ving with jobs and do this. And Piggis is like, dude, I'm trying to negotiate that exact thing. So then I was like, all right, well, I got to get some, you know, I got to get some more out of this. So I basically then gave away like 10 iPads for free. And I actually did, we did give those iPads away for free. We did a contest because I happened to own the Twitter handle contests.

And I was trying to get followers for it. Yeah, it was pretty good. I, you know, I had taken down my entire Twitter archive at one point because it was just so crazy. And like, I was just archive this thing so I don't get canceled because I don't know what debates I've had on here. So my tweets aren't up there anymore, but I do have the archive so I could pull them up. But there was no retweet function. back then.

Some of the tweets still exist because people have RT and then what I had. Oh man. Remember when we used to type RT? Aw. Yeah. Cut and paste it.

Yeah. My favorite part though is just like the time machine of of outrage. Looking at this last tweet from Jared Earl saying, I have a different read on Jason. Jason may be laughing,

but he's spent what little credibility he had. Fair. It's so sad that that ended your entire career and influence, Jason. I don't, I say to Jared Fair. That one little stuff. But I mean, Jemima Kiss, who I've known for a long time,

I got to have breakfast or one time when I was, or maybe she interviewed me or something when I was in the UK. She's just a great journalist. She got it. And she was like, you forgot the snack dispenser and the teleporter. Like, she got it immediately. She understood the assignment. She understood the assignment.

Because really, it also was easily read and still is as a send-up of the absolutely absurd speculation and hype around every single adult announcement. I mean, you cannot believe how many. That was what I was doing. How much ink was spilled over like, what is it going to be? What is it going to have? And oh, my God, we got to like, we got to get all the clicks from talking about what that. I mean, it was beautiful satire.

Yes. It was all satire for me. It was, for me, all satire. And this has been Storytime with Jason. There it is. We can go into other crazy moments in my career. But that was a, because there are people literally who now have venture capital funds who were in seventh grade when that happened.

And they now have venture capital funds and co-investing alongside them. Amazing. Amazing. Hey guys, Rachel reporting here. On February 14th and 15th, we'll be hosting Founder University intensive. This is a two-day program for founders.

Now, this course is only open to women founders. We'll be hosting a course open to everyone on May 9th and 10th. You can apply for both at Founder.com. And applications for the longer 12-week Founder University program are due on February 14th, and you can also apply for those at Founder.University. Follow Jason and Molly on Twitter at Jason and at Molly Wood. If you're not a boomer and prefer TikTok, search for this week in startups to find a fan account at this underscore week underscore in underscore startups. And our official account at TWA startups, but honestly the fan account is way better than ours.

And if you're still not tired of hearing from Jason six days a week, you can hear and read his book, Angel at angelthebook.com slash audible.