This Week in Startups - Anthropic seeking $5B valuation, OpenAI hires 1000 contractors, Mr. Beast’s latest video | E1668

Episode Date: January 30, 2023

Jason and Molly kick off the week with a generative ai update! (5:00) Then, they cover Mr. Beast’s latest video and “stunt culture” (35:21), some more third-rail topics (49:40), and Billy McFarland being back in the news! (59:50) (0:00) M+J kick off the show (2:10) Apply to Founder University 2-Day Workshop at https://intensive.founder.university/ (5:00) Anthropic raises at a $5B valuation (9:31) LinkedIn Jobs - Post your first job for free at https://linkedin.com/twist (11:01) More on Anthropic (18:01) Notion - Sign up for FREE at https://notion.com/jason (19:21) Semafor reports OpenAI has contracted 1000 developers (27:06) Baidu is developing their own AI Chatbot (33:53) CAST AI - get a FREE cloud cost audit AND a personal consultation at cast.ai/twist (35:21) MrBeast’s latest video + Stunt culture (49:40) Third-rail topics (59:50) Billy McFarland is back in the news FOLLOW Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis FOLLOW Molly: https://twitter.com/mollywood

Hey, everybody, we've got a great show for you today. Happy Monday. We are taking all the risks today. We're calling this third rail Monday. You will see why. But first, we have another generative AI update for you from over the weekend. The bubble watch goes on. Yeah, Anthropic is raising $300 million out of $5 billion valuation and a bunch of other AI startups seem to be raising at huge, huge revenue numbers.

Big time. And then as I believe I predicted, coding is important. fact over. Semaphore is reporting that OpenAI has hired a thousand contractor workers for data labeling and creating data for its AI to learn how to code. And then China's version of Google, Baidu, is creating its own version of Chat GPT. What could go wrong? Yeah, what could go wrong? And then we have a conversation about Mr. Beast's latest video where he cures people of blindness. Is it exploitive or is it endearing? And then we just go super third from that point. I'm talking about the project Veritas Pfizer stuff.

There's like vaccine talk. Like I'm just saying if you want to skip ahead, like to stop after Mr. Beast, go to the end and then you'll still like us in the morning. Yeah. Billy McFarlane from Fire Festival is back. Oh yeah, Billy McFarlane. Yeah, yeah. He's back.

Just all the horrible stuff at the end of the show. Stick with us. It's amazing. It's going to be a great show. It's going to be a great show. Stick with us. This Week in Startups is brought to you by LinkedIn Jobs. A business is only as strong as its people and every higher matters.

Post your first job for free at LinkedIn.com. slash twist. Notion. Notion is one place for notes, docs, projects, and everyday work that goes way beyond a wiki. Get started for free at notion.com and JSON. If you run software in the cloud and it's been a significant cost driver, listen up. Cast AI automates cloud cost reductions with client savings of an average of over 60%. Twist listeners can get a cloud cost it with a personal consultation free of charge, visit cass.a.i slash twist to get started. Hey, everybody. It's Monday. We made it. How you doing, Molly? It's Monday. I did that gut check with myself today, too, because I don't know what. Anyway, it's Monday. It's Monday. It is Monday. Yes, we're back. You're back. Yeah, I'm feeling better. I was in Miami last week. Did a quick interview with the mayor of Miami. Like you do. Fan meet up, like one does. And had a little dinner for

LPs and I'm back, but I'm feeling better. I'm at 85% I think. All right. We'll take it. Like I'm not worse after travels. That seems like the right trajectory, because travel can set you back. Usually it does, but I was on the tail end of, I think, whatever I got. It wasn't COVID. I took tests. Yeah. But yeah, I'm feeling better. And yeah, that's it. Good. I'm better. I think I'm better. I'm hoping I'm better. I got more travel coming up. going to, I got a speaking gig in Salt Lake City and then I got a speaking gig in Japan. And I'm going to take four days to ski in Japan when I'm there. So I got a little mini vacay for J-Cow.

I'm doing a solo Naseko trip. I'm going to ski in Japan. So fun. By the way, we're both available for speaking gig. So please feel free to reach out. Feel free to reach out. Yeah. And coming up, February 16th and 17th,

later this month. Well, it's still January, I guess. But in a couple of weeks, we're going to have our next Founder University. And Founder University is a two-day program. We've done it, gosh, two-dousand times. And in this two-day program, you're going to learn a bunch of important stuff as a founder, customer acquisition, sales, marketing, pitching investors, hiring, all that kind of good stuff. I take pitches at it, Molly takes some pitches at it. And it's just a great way to level up as a founder, get to know our firm, and it's free. Yep, it's free. of the founders who have gone through these two-day workshops, by the way, have gone on to be accepted in the launch accelerator. And the one that's coming up February 16th and 17th is for women founders only.

Got it. So about once, I think once a year maybe one of the ones we do, maybe a little more often is for to really kind of incubate and nurture female founders, which, you know, I'm still for us to increase the deal flow from female founders. When we created a specific space where women knew they were welcome, then more women showed up. And so we do this, go figure. And it's been a great success for us. It's really increased the number of female founders that we get to meet and ultimately invest in. So go to founder. Dot University to apply.

And it's a great two-day workshop and free. Hope we see you there. And it's remote. Oh, yeah. And it's remote. You don't have to go anywhere. Even better. And if you don't get into this one, you know, there will be three more in

2023. But founder of it. We do it for a year. We do it basically quarterly. and a great two-day program. All right, listen, there's a ton of news. This generative AI has just taken the industry by storm. I think the industry needed something to feel good about

and this impressive demo of chat GPT and stable diffusion. Well, yeah, I think post-crypto posts, you know, the bubble bursting. People are like, hey, what's next? And we still don't have AR. We're waiting on those Apple AR glasses. And people pretty much have given up on Web 3. So what's going to fill that space? I think, yeah, chat GPT and stable diffusion have inspired people.

A lot of developers are doing a lot of cool stuff with it. They are. I mean, I'm just going to go ahead and make my plug for all the climate opportunities that still exists. So we still have that. It's a double bubble. That bubble is still going. However, yes, all of the, all the super tech bro excitement right now is all about generative AI. And we have now entered, I think, the stage of the generative AI fundraising hype cycle.

being equally real, potentially, according to anonymous New York Times sources over the weekend Anthropic, which is, quote, an AI safety and research company that's working to build reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems, shrug, is close to raising

$300 million at a $5 billion evaluation. Yeah. Let's let the numbers sink in for a minute. Yeah, no, I mean, I always like to read how they describe themselves and I think the key thing there is, it's a research company, and they obviously care deeply about AI safety, which is like these things don't cause damage in society.

That seems to be on the minds of everybody doing AI. But we're far from having general AI, but there are other types of harm that could be done, like stealing people's content or misinformation. If chat GPT is right half the time, well, that's not good enough. Like, you don't want a recipe that works half the time in coin flip, and nor do you want medical advice or customer

support or legal advice. So as impressive as chat GPT is, it can't be right half the time. It's got to be right 99.99% of the time to take human out of it. I also have to think that a big part of this safety conversation does have to do with bias and abuse, like, because we've seen so many AI systems repeat, you know, racist rhetoric and all kinds of things. So the safety could mean a lot of different things here. And we don't know. We just know that. Garbage and garbage out, right? Garbage in garbage out. Some of its co-founders, a couple of interesting facts. Anthropic was founded in 2021. Some of its co-founders include former OpenAI researchers. Its CEO actually is Dario Amodi, a former VP of Research at OpenAI. And the website really emphasizes the safer, more

reliable AI systems messaging. Anthropic last raised, and this is extra interesting, $580 million at a $4 billion valuation. That was. wasn't in April 2022 series B, its last round was led by Sam Bankman-Fried with Carolyn Ellison and other FTCS and executives joining the route. Which means the majority of the money or the largest check, typically, and the person who sets the price, when you say it was led by, that's for people who don't know, typically the lead does two things, sets the price and puts in the most money compared to other investors. So you would think of the $580 million. That's a big number. maybe you put $100 million in or

$250 million in. There's no idea how to tell. But that's interesting because they bought shares in a company. I wonder if they've deployed that capital anthropic. And so then the estate or whoever is doing the bankruptcy

of Sam Bankman-Fried FDX and trying to collect this money which was obviously stolen or fairly obvious to me that it was ill-gotten gains unless he made it somewhere else. that would go back to those shareholders. So that's an interesting miracle.

Yeah, it really is. It's just sort of like, side note, some huge amount of money could potentially be clawed back by the bankruptcy court. So we don't really know. If this is around, that's going to be at $15 billion, or would they say $5 billion this round? $5 billion.

$5 billion. So that's 20% increase from the last one. So Sam Bankman-Fried's money should have gone up 25%. So if you put $100 and it's worth $125 now, maybe they could sell those shares to new shareholders as a secondary right now. Maybe, yeah. And get a profit for the people who have lost money. The March to $1 billion continues.

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Like you said, it's a research company. Anthropic appears to be pre-revenue. Two articles covering the fundraising, one from 2022. and one from last week, neither mentioned the word revenue. And the blog post that announced last year's fundraise said, quote, the purpose of this research is to develop the technical components necessary to build large-scale models,

which have better, uh-huh, implicit safeguards and require less after-training interventions, as well as to develop the tools necessary to further look inside these models, to be confident that the safeguards actually work. Okay. I just read a bunch of that, but didn't understand it. So maybe if you were listening, you can explain it.

Well, I mean, I think part of this is marketing. I'll be totally honest. This idea that the, you know, AI is going to become sentient and cause all these problems in society. It's, you know, it's a bit of science fiction right now. That's not happening anytime soon. That could happen in five, ten, fifteen years if we get to some sort of form of general AI. But I don't think that's, I think it's people use that as kind of a marketing. schick right now more than reality.

Like, what is chat GPT or stable diffusion going to do? Like, they're going to just flood the internet with images. And so what do you mean when you say safety? Like, I guess, you know, it's like, listen, I talk to a lot of companies that are in the R&D phase and they're raising money to commercialize. That's one part of this equation, right? Is do you, is that an investable and venture appropriate endeavor? One.

But two, what do you mean? what do you mean when you say safety? Yeah. So I think that it's marketing around this general AI becoming sentient and doing bad things in the world. Like literally people think it's going to escape the computer network and then go do bad things in the world. Is that what you think? Or that somebody will take it and use it for harm. So like some, this, you know, ephemeral terrorist organization.

So Al-Qaeda will get their hands on this and then do something with it. that is really bad. Like deep fakes, right? So you make a thing where Putin declares war or says, I'm going to drop a nuke, and then somebody reacts to it. That's kind of the hypothetical situation. I think a lot of these AI people

start to convince themselves of. Oh, for sure. I mean, that's, you know, like, as I reported from seeing Sam Altman speak, you know, he sits in public and says the worst case scenario is lights out for all of us. But I think... I sort of feel like there is a safety conversation to be had around AI that's a lot more narrow than that.

That doesn't have to be sort of like. And that's the part where like that's what I want to know. Like, is that what they mean? Do you mean AI that is accurate that doesn't plagiarize, that doesn't accidentally reinforce racial or gender stereotypes? Like, I would appreciate if it were me and I was talking about a hundred million dollar check. Yeah. I would want to know a little more about what you mean. They probably have some demos that they're showing people that have a path to some kind of product.

But if you look at what happened with, you know, when Google bought DeepMind, they were, you know, trying to beat video games and do sort of proof of concept of that. And it was Google who looked at it and said, you know what, we can buy this company. I think they bought it for five or six hundred million. And we can apply it to our stack of. products, Google Local, Google Flights, Google Shopping, Google Search, writ large, you know, Google Ad Network. We'll figure out where to apply this and point it. So that's the playbook they're going for here, obviously. Build a bunch of talent, build a bunch of proof of concepts, show that you have the dexterity to do all kinds of interesting things. And then you have

the option to get bought by Amazon, Apple, whoever needs a couple of hundred AI developers, which are worth, you know, conservatively, one, two million dollars each, three million dollars each is probably what they get bought for as a group in an aqua hire. And then who knows, maybe they have an actual product in there that's like some sort of chat GPT like product. Our producers went through the job listings for product-focused software engineers. Yep, good reporting. Some of the projects listed were developed conversational interfaces that leverage the language

models. So chat GPT-like product. That sounds chat-GPD. Build core components of the API to access large language models. so an API for others to build on sort of like Open AI does. And then things like write billing, email, and other integrations with third-party providers suggesting that some version of revenue will eventually be turned on. So really, it sort of sounds like OpenAI 2.0, but with this kind of vague safety lens.

Yeah, I would discount the whole safety thing as marketing. And it sounds like they're going to build the same exact stuff that Open AI is building. and they will make it AWS-like. In other words, you can go take this and use it to build your startup, build your vertical product, right? So I think this is kind of like the beginning of a new cloud computing era where there'll be the equivalent of S-1 or EC2,

whatever they are, you know, CPUs on-demand, storage on-demand, CDN on-demand. Now you'll just have some chap GPT-like product on-demand. And if you're, I don't know, intuitive, and you have some billing software, you're going to be able to have it automatically figure out, oh, these expenses are in this category, and you'll use something like OpenAI, Azure,

something on Amazon's cloud to do that. The thing that's super interesting, I think, is in the short term what this is going to do to developers, because it seems like developers are going to be writing better and better code, faster and faster. So this is where this augmented human intelligence, I think is what's going to be particularly notable. If developers, just as a group,

become 20, 30% more efficient, then they're going to be training the AI that made them 20 or 30% more efficient, which means that AI is going to become again 20 or 30% efficient because it's going to see those developers say, oh, yeah, of these five snippets of code you gave me, these two were perfect, this one needed a tweak, these two didn't work, and I passed on them.

So now you're training. that AI in real time to write better code. So as developers use this, it's kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy. It's just going to get better and better and better. And then developers, you know, are just going to be like watching the AI write code and like steering it. And then that's going to get really weird. If you want your business to be more productive, more cost efficient, and you want to have bigger impact, you need to use Notion. We run our entire business on Notion here at launch. And, you know, we were looking for a deal flow solution. And these CRM systems for venture capitals, my God, quarter million a year.

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Sure. And that at least 40% of those contractors are software engineers who are creating data for OpenAI's models to learn software engineering tasks. They have it. And that's a model when you think about it. Microsoft owns GitHub, which has co-pilot. That's also getting sued by some open source folks for stealing their code. And it's debatable how much code is protectable.

You know, it's kind of like a recipe. So how much can you protect a recipe? You can't. You can protect the name, cronut, like a croissant donut. You can't protect the recipe. So there's been an ongoing debate about that. for many years. But this could be very powerful. So if they're hiring all these contractors, that's, IBM did that for Watson back in the day. They would just say, here, show us,

you would show the same image to three people on three different continents with three different education levels, right? What is this? Oh, that's an orange. Okay, great. Oh, that's two oranges. Okay, great. That's two oranges on the beach. You know, and the, whatever keywords they put in and they label, if two out of three of them or three of them or one out of three, then that you would put on how sure you are of what that is. So you can imagine with code, all you have to do, Molly, is say to like 10 developers, write the code to, you know, say, hello world or do, you know, LinkedIn login, authentication. It looks at the 10 pieces of code. These three worked and had no bugs. these three needed to be edited

and then looks for some commonality and then says okay this is the best way to do LinkedIn authentication for your website. Now nobody ever has to write that again. Right. You just instead, you go to a version and listen, like, I know somebody who's doing this now goes to chat GPD and is like, generate me some code for this and then has to, you know, human check it.

Like, because it might be wrong or whatever, massage it into what they need. But it sounds like what they're doing. And I should note that 60% of the contractors were hired for what I call janitorial. data janitor, right? They're cleaning up. They're labeling. They're creating these sets of images and clips and other information. And then these engineers who are specifically creating data around software engineering, one of the things that they're doing is almost like commenting. So taking pieces of code and annotating them with the natural language, the human explanations

behind what the code does to help associate the code base itself with that. action that somebody might type in. For example, I want you to create me, you know, an auto-linked in login. Right. So OpenAI, I remember has that existing product called Codex that is designed to translate text into code. They power. That's what's co-pilot is built on.

Yeah. Right. Which also is text to code. So I'm just going to go back to what I said a couple days ago, which is like, don't learn to code, learn to wire. Like the computers, the machines have been. coming for this job for a long time. And in fact, Tesla's former head of AI,

Andres Carpathy, tweeted the following last week, the hottest new programming language is English. Yeah, I mean, people are talking about that, that if you can actually do the prompt engineering, like we talked about it all in the other day, I think here as well, you can have an interesting job if you tell the code how to program itself, right?

So I want you, when you say, I want you to write me a play about two podcasters talking about Sam Bankman-Fried. And then when you say, in the voice of Shakespeare, with a little Quentin Tarantino, and that rhymes like Eminem. It's like, okay, wow, those are a lot of conditions that you added to it, but it understands them. And so that's super fascinating. And I was watching Carpathie do a YouTube video this weekend, where he made his own chat GP2 instance with like version two of it, the open source one. And it was like a really interesting video. I just watched it in the background while I was doing some work.

It was like an hour and a half long video where he was explaining how all these predictive models work. And he actually showed like this Shakespeare AI, which is on GitHub. And so people are taking like, you know, verticalized content, the complete works of William Shakespeare. And you can just go on a onto, you know, GitHub right now, grab that Shakespeare AI and then put it into your software. So you'd be like, I want my, you know, um, podcast to be translated into Shakespeare and make us translate our, you'll be able to translate this podcast and have us talk like we're Shakespeare characters, but keep the complete intent and then republish it in our voices with us as Star Wars characters. Like it's going to be pretty crazy when you think about like what this AI is going to be able to do. Right. And then what are the aspects of that that are related to this.

kind of safety marketing pitch. I think what we're likely to see, just as a little bit of a kind of bubble watch prediction, is like, for example, this race of this, whatever I've already forgotten the name, Anthropic. It's like, cash in now with the slightest of differentiators because you're one of the eight people, right? Remember that moment in time where all of the autonomous driving

startups got acquired Argo and you had the Waymo. intellectual and they raise tons of money because there are only like 11 people in the world who know how to do this. Yep. It is quickly going to become a commodity. Yep. Or much like self-driving, it's way, way, way harder than anybody thinks. And so it's going to get like speech to text.

Remember when it was like Dragon naturally speaking or something? It was, they were like, yeah, it's 85% accurate. But that 15% is the difference between something that is functional and makes you sound like normal and something that doesn't really work. And so if AI gets 85% of the way there and then gets stuck, much like autonomous driving, then now is the moment to get your $5 billion valuation and your aqua hire. And slap whatever differentiator you want on. As many shares as you can.

Yeah. And a lot of investors are going to lose a lot of money right now. Just saying. In order to make money on this, you would need to have, if this was a publicly traded company with $100 million in profits on, let's call it $250 million in revenue. 250 million in revenue. You know, if they were selling to enterprises at $25,000 a year or something, there's a lot of customers.

You would have to have $100 million to have 50 times earnings to make a $5 billion valuation. There's a long way to go. So as far as a bet goes, it's not a terrible bet because if the company sells for anything above the capital, it's raised, you get your money back. So one important thing to understand here is if it's $5 billion and they've had a, let's say, a billion dollars invested in the company. If the company sells but for a billion, all those investors get their money first, obviously.

So that's why sometimes people will take a optionality bet here, which is, you know, if it, if it happens to go to $50 billion, they have a 10x, but that would be very hard to do. It's very hard to get to a billion dollars in profits, which is what it would imply if they got to $50 billion, at least a billion in profits, maybe $2 billion in profits. maybe two billion in profits. Hard to know. Tread carefully, people. Tread carefully.

Speaking of treading carefully, this is just straight up Jason Bate. Oh, okay. Last in our trio, our triptych of generative AI stories. By-Due, China's equivalent to Google, is building its own version of chat GPT. Bloomberg reported that,

exactly, a CCP-approved dystopian version of chat GPT. Yep. You know, to sort of tell you, like, you ask it a question, it's like, yeah, I got my version. of the truth for you? Sure. Makes sense.

I mean, all this stuff is open source and you can fork it and build on top of it and it's really going to be about the data at this point. You know, like you're going to need to have

100 engineers, 50 engineers to program it, but it really is going to be about the data set. And so I would think bydo has some very interesting data sets. Very, very interesting data sets.

I mean, ironically, right? All the data sets. I mean, China is, effectively a survey-led state. Yes. So the data advantage that China potentially has, I find to be a fascinating question. Like, does China know more about people than Google?

Honestly, I don't know if I honestly know the answer to that question, but... I would say it's probably close to even. What you could think about is, you know, when you're on YouTube and that whole like intellectual dark web kind of exercise and then there was that lawsuit where in France, somebody who was murdered by terrorists said, hey, this was kind of,

this person was being steered on YouTube towards more and more extreme content. And that led to, so there was that whole... I did a bunch, by the way, a bunch of reporting about that. The ladder of radicalization, there's like a ton of actual research about how it happened. It's a thing.

So if the algorithm can steer people towards more and more extreme content or more, let's just call it, adjacent content. So adjacent content's either going to be, you know, it could be steering negatively. It could be stirring positively. You know, you get into some beautiful guitar solo. It could take you in a positive direction, right?

But it could also take in a negative direction. And yet somehow it never does. No, it does. I mean, I see a lot of cool, like Pink Floyd people doing covers and Mark Knopfler covers going on in my YouTube feed. So that's positive for me. Good. Great. But here's what happens.

you know, if it can steer people in certain directions to adjacencies, well, what the government could do with that is if they weren't just interested in making more money, they could actually know, oh, we're steering somebody towards being radicalized or this person is doing searches that are the precursors to somebody becoming a dissident, right? Somebody becoming a protester. So they might know from some early signs of what you're searching for that you're eventually going to wind up as a protester there, and then it becomes minority report. We have the precogs, precognition, knowing this person potentially could become not a terrorist, but a

protester, you know, a freedom fighter. They've got too many thoughts about freedom. They're searching for the Constitution. They're searching for freedom of speech. They're searching for certain religions, whatever it is. And that's where I think this becomes super nefarious. And then you combine that with people's credit card data, location data. Maybe this person was looking in a bookstore window. And you know, like, hey, they have certain books in the window there. Yeah. And just the fact that the person was hanging around a bookstore plus their YouTube data,

now you know something about them and you could go pick them up and torture them and re-educate them. Yep. I mean, AI makes all of the what-ifs into potential realities. You know, like when you imagine the worst case scenario of like, well, what does it matter if you have all these disparate pieces of data about me. Well, this is where. If all that data was sitting there in a database,

you'd be like, who cares? Who cares about my location data? Who cares about my YouTube data? Right, exactly. It's like, oh, well, if the AI stitches it together. And now they're saying, you're a potential terrorist. You're a potential freedom fighter, whatever, you know, framing you want to use. And you don't even know it yourself.

They're like, no, I'm not. It's like, you will be. They're like, you will be. Just trust me. You're going to be part of the Rebel Alliance. Yeah. You just, pretty obvious. You just talked to me back into the safety marketing.

Just tell me what you mean. I mean, there are things that will be obvious, like deepfakes, right? It's obvious. You can just imagine in your mind, but it's the cases where we don't know what the AI is going to come up with. The AI is going to find things that are going to be very challenging for humans to deal with. You know, and when we find those uncomfortable truths, that's going to be really challenging for human brains to kind of understand it. Yeah.

I mean, Asimov's first law is a really, really, like, if you ever sit there in the dark and truly contemplate what that means and then apply it to what we think AI is about to reveal about us, like it's,

it gets, you get, talking about like a human, some despair can't harm humans. The first law says that, yeah, that the prime, the only job the robot has is to protect humans.

Protect humans. So then the robots, inevitably determine that the only way to protect humans is to kill all the humans because humans are so bad for themselves. Right. So. And like Megan. That's where I'm going with this idea that what it uncovers about us is that we're the

problem. Well, and then you have the seminal work of Megan, you know, and Terminator. I'm not saying that. Yeah. I'm not going to protect John Connor. And then Megan's got to protect, you know, her little girl. And it's like, oh, the doctor is going to put a shot in their arm and it's going to hurt. okay, we have to kill the doctor now, you know, like in some horrific way or, yeah, somebody is administering some basic discipline on a child and it's like, oh, okay, they're harming the child to have to protect them. Yeah, and kill this person. Good times, good times. But what are the other two? There's three laws as a moment. There are three laws. Yeah, it's like a robot, like what has to protect him, may not injure a human being or through an action, allow a human being to come to harm is the first law. The second law, a robot must obey the orders given it by the human beings.

except where such orders would conflict with the first law. Got it. Which is how they always end up killing us. And then the third law is a robot must protect its own existence, as long as such protection does not conflict with the first or second law. Clever. Clever. I mean, it was, to be clear, a narrative device, not a real law.

I just want to. Yes. We could do better now that we know that the second law is what allows them to use the first law to wipe us out. Yes. It's a loophole, if you will. But yeah, uncomfortable truths. If you run software on AWS, Google Cloud, or Azure, you know how out of hand the bills can get, right? The pricing uncertainty can really hurt your business.

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And we met with the founders last week and they are really excited to help founders and listeners to this week and startup save on their cloud bills. So give him a call. Go visit cast. AI slash twist. Speaking of uncomfortable truths, let's talk about Mr. Beast. Oh, he's awesome.

He's having a cultural moment of medium awesome. Okay, so we all know Mr. Beast is a huge deal, obviously, right? Like, he's very popular. He's sort of changed, I think, what it means to be a creator celebrity. Like he's got this potentially billion dollar business. All these people are investing him in it. He's got the Burger Empire, like Mr. Bees is an empire. And this video posted this weekend and just purely anecdotally, I will say, my son and I were watching YouTube last night like we do because nobody watches TV with their parents anymore.

You just watch various YouTube videos. And we saw this thumbnail pop up for this new video yesterday. Mr. Bees posted. And here's the thumbnail. And in case you're not watching, it's Mr. Beast with his, I've always found slightly empty and scary grin. And then this kid with these like big, weird, fake-looking, creepy crocodile tears running down his face and a bandage. And the video is titled, 1,000 blind people see for the first time. Amazing.

So in the video, he took a thousand people who suffered from blindness caused by cataracts, and he paid for the surgery to repair their eyes. I watched it, yeah. It was quite... This is a classic video on YouTube. Like there's that whole, do they call them cochlea implants where you can hear again? Yep. There are tons of those, right? Yeah.

They're usually like, I get so emotional when somebody can hear their child for the first time. And then there are these ones with blindness where people can see again for the first time. And so I guess the device he came up with here was if seeing one of those is amazing, why don't we do 10 of them, 100 of them, a thousand of them? Totally. If one of these is totally engaging and pulls on your heartstrings, let's just blow that up.

And so it is, it's just provoked this really interesting reaction. And so I will tell you that last night, we saw this thumbnail pop up. Yeah. And literally my 15 year old was like, that's creepy. Like his immediate response was that feels gross and exploitative.

And so we skipped it. We were like, no, it's not watch it. And I was like, you're right. There's something weird about that that I don't like. And so then I wake up this morning and Mr. Bees is trending. Okay. And I see that like the internet is going crazy because tons of people are having that exact same response.

And tons of people and I will say, well, much like in a predictive AI, I was like, I know exactly what's going to happen on the show. Jason's going to be like, that's awesome. And I'm going to be like, that's exploitative and weird. And we and we are going to have the exact. And so I want us to be able to mirror the conversation that's happening on the internet today because people are having really strong feelings about this. Let me guess. Because I could tell you the, dare I say, woke position on this. Don't.

I can tell you what the woke. What is woke about it? I'll tell you the work position. Oh, God. I'll tell you the. Now I'm regretting pushing so hard for this. No, no. I knew what it happened and yet I'm irritated.

All right, let's go. Let's go. You haven't heard what I'm going to say. This falls into the, this is going to trigger for people, dare I say. What is the state of the world when a YouTuber has to pay for people's health care? Why don't we have health care? Yeah. Which is completely valid.

One. Uh-huh. That is the default, yes. That is like trigger number one. We don't have health care in this country, which is totally valid. The counter to that would be, well, he's a rich guy with a huge platform. And so at least they helped a thousand people. And he's raising awareness for this.

So what's wrong with that? The second one is going to be, what kind of world do we live in when people are used as props for him to make money and get more famous. He is using them for exploitive reasons and there's no dignity. And if he was a good person, he would just quietly pay for all of their surgeries. And why doesn't Jeff Bezos also pay for a billion people?

And if Jeff Bezos gave everybody a billion dollars and everybody would be a billionaire. And we would have no poverty. So those are the two reactions. I am certain happen. Oh, yeah. And then there were the ones that are just like, you're also exploiting, exploiting disabled people, right? Like, you're just monetizing the suffering of the differently abled.

And, you know, so there was that version too. Someone, someone's tweet said, I'm tired of having to perform gratitude for wealthy people just to stay alive. It's like, yeah, that's the one. And I think it really. And then there's the, and then there was the really messed up joke that I don't want to, I don't want to docks my son, but he was. like, yeah, you got a thousand more views. Hey, oh. Wow.

Oh, man. Yeah, that's a dad joke. Sort of, yeah. Wow. That is a. Yeah. Anyway. I mean, it's like, you know, and then I was like, yeah, what's he going to do next?

Kidnap a thousand orphans and then make them work for him for free and then say, I'm a job creator. Anyway, it's, I think it's like, it's both of those things at once, right? Like, that's amazing for those people to whom this happened. It's a raw shock test. You can read into it whatever you want. They were 100%. exploited for him to get clicks.

And it just is like, you start to see that, I mean, this is sort of, this gets to what you were just saying about the YouTube algorithm, right? Every, if you want to win at the game of entertainment, you have to get, like, it wasn't enough for Mr. Beast to give some people some money after making them stand in a parking lap for a few hours or what I was 10 hours. It wasn't like, you could do that and then you can give someone a house and then you could give someone a car and then you can give them 50 Lamborghinis and then you got to create the Wonka House, like the wheel of entertainment when it's click-related is like to get more and

more and more and more extreme. And then eventually you land on something like this where both of these things are true at once, like, yay? And also, ugh. Like, there's something a little creepy about it. Well, you know, this is not like some brand new phenomenon, obviously. There was a show called Queen for a Day. Yeah. And this TV show. basically would bring people in to give their emotional sob stories and then give them, you know, a refrigerator or a washing machine or a hearing aid. This show was like in the 40s, 50s. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

I mean, this is incredibly popular. This is American entertainment at its finest. Like, reality TV exists. It takes some schlub, give them a, hear a sob story. Like the American Idol with the weepy thing. and they go and they visit the home and they're like, oh my God, and everybody in the family only has one leg. And I mean, it's just like it could not be more.

Like, American entertainment is exploitation at its core. I, yeah. And Mr. Beast was the guy who seemed to be doing it a little bit better, right? You felt better about it. And then all of a sudden you see this kid with the big fake crocodile tears and you're like, ooh, oh, I get it. Okay. It's just the same stuff.

Yeah. I mean, I think everybody who- Just the NFL draft like Nick said all over again. Everybody who's in this video opted in to do it. Some of them not only got free surgery, he gave him 10 grand. If the video pays for all that surgery, I think he probably breaks even on most of these videos, is my understanding of it. Some of him he loses money, some of he makes a little money. But like his bigger business is going to be like his edibles.

His candy brand, I guess he could do edibles too. But I don't have a, it's like the brand. I don't have a super problem with it. I think people are looking for something to be outraged about. I don't think it's his... No, I think they're both true. I think both things are true. I think a little bit of it is both true at the same time.

Like, this is a little bit Jesusy, and the thumbnail is the creepy as hell. And it's exploitive and America's messed up and capitalism sucks. And Mr. B did this nice thing for these people, right? It's like, I think all of those things are 100% true. And I'm delighted that Jason and I were basically able to roleplay Twitter for you today. In case you're wondering, you no longer need to tweet to click. on the trending topic. You don't need to. You just pick your opinion that reinforces your tribe and you can pick capitalism or one screenshot from the NFL draft in 2020. That's absolutely,

it's sad, but it's hysterical. Okay. Go ahead. Yeah, totally. Oh, yeah. So ESPN got roasted for this because every, like, just read like this was a, so this is like, oh, T. Higgins, Clemson. Wide receiver. By the way, this guy's awesome. He played in the AFC championship yesterday. hometown Oak Ridge, finalist for 2016, Tennessee Mr. Basketball. Sister Kiki played basketball for Tennessee State. Mom, Camilla, Fiction for 16. And this was like every single first round pick. They were like, here's John.

His mom died of cancer. It's like, oh my God. It was complete craziness. America's gross, y'all. Like, that's what I'm saying we had higher hopes for Mr. Beast. We wanted him to be better than Oprah. Listen, hands on a truck says something about America. Hands on a hard body.

Hands on a hard body. Is that the whole? It was a documentary. I remember seeing it back in the day. And it's like, okay, sure. Like, it's a contest. It's fun. Nobody gets hurt except it's extremely painful and you pee your pants.

I mean, I have a friend who thinks like. What are we saying about America that like a mom with three kids who's a single mom can't afford a car and she's got to torture herself for 47 hours? Like, they're all true. I have a friend who feels this way about hot ones. Like, we have this big art. She thinks that that hot one show where celebrities go on and eat hot wings until they cry is exploitative. And I was like, what? Like, come on.

Like, absolutely it is. What they're getting into? Get people to see their Marvel movie after they got 15 million. We have to show one. We have to show another one from ESPN. I'm sorry. Oh, my God. We have another ESPN one.

This is amazing. Stop it. This is not real. You made this up. I can't believe this is real. Levis and to Choucu Jr. Wow. Okay, hometown DeSoto, Texas. Hobbies include video games in Sudoku, spent time volunteering in high school to honor local veterans. Mother Annie contracted and survived West Nile virus in 2012. Like, what are we talking about? What is going on here? Oh, my lord.

You know what I think I changed my mind? Mr. Beas is just doing what we do. You know how many people work on productions like the NFL draft? Like hundreds of people. And they all just were like, that's right. And they're like, yeah, air it. Post that. It's fine. Let's just put some more sadness there to Can the guy just play about Can the guy just be like a great prospect? Can he just? We need some more sad music.

It literally is like Everything has to be sadness and trauma porn. And Shout out to his mom for surviving West Nile in 2012 though. Yeah. It's pretty. I think he just moved up to in the draft based on that.

That's right. So you got a sister to the ad draft. Good genes, strong immune system. God bless America. All right, Mr. Bees is just doing what we do. He's just out here being America. I was going to write some fiction when I was in my youth, and I wrote this scene. I got to pull it up.

It's on one of my old laptops. And I wrote like this scene where I was like, you know, it would be like really interesting. This is getting super dystopian watching like Shark Week. I just watched Shark Week. And I was like, I wrote the scene where people in this dystopian future would swim across chummed waters where like air jaw was. and they would do it to get clemency for their family member who was in jail and it would pay back the state and the state was so corrupt that they were like, yeah, like if one of your family members or you as like the prisoner want to swim across for entertainment on this pay-per-view, we'll take the money from the pay-per-view and pay off your debts. And like, you know, like five people jump in the water and swim from one platoon to another. And like two of them get taken out by shocks and that's a remake and they make a $10 million and they're heroes.

Yeah, you invented Squid Game. and I literally invented Squib game before it happened and I saw Squib game as like, huh, but then even more than that, there was just a shark week where a guy was in a plexy glass tube and I guess I don't know if we can show it here without it getting sense,

we'll probably get a strike against us, but anyway, if you guys can pull it up, guys in a glass, you can get a still photo of it, guys in a plexiglass thing, and I'm like, that plexiglass is not going to survive air jaws, no way.

Like, if one of the first of, of those big 20-foot sharks. Yeah, no chance. Goes full speed into that. It's going to shatter. And literally, I'm watching this video, it shatters exactly what I thought would happen. And the guy's left. Like, instead of being in a plastic cube, he's like left, like floating on a sheet of plastic

while a great white shark has just demolished the box. And they're like, I wonder what happens. Yeah, there it is. So this guy is in a plexiblock, like in a coffin, basically. Yeah. And you're like, um, okay. Yeah, that's a plexiglass coffin. And you're in a seal outfit.

And yeah, that's a 20-foot shark. And yeah, the shark just comes out from the bottom. He's like, I'll take a bite. And literally, this piece of plastic, which some, you know, person's like, yeah, that piece of plastic will be fine. The shark can't bite through it. It's like, oh, okay, we don't have to keep seeing it. That is, I'm going to have nightmares tonight. Yeah, the shark rocket eating the seal.

It's also jackass, right? Like, this is literally the grand tradition of American entertainment. I think it's just... Should this stuff be allowed online is the question? Does it inspire people to do more dangerous stuff? Oh, it 100% does. Like, that was the whole, right? That was the...

I mean, I remember, again, doing those stories in 2016 about stupid Jake Paul and Logan Paul and the stunts get more extreme and the TikTok challenge that, like, literally, we had to stay home from school one day because there was that TikTok challenge that was like somebody, you show up and kill somebody. I don't even know, right? Like, this is, this is a hundred percent part.

Stunt culture is dangerous. And now I think the argument is that now Mr. Bees is part of stunt culture. Should we touch the third rail? A want-want. Should we go right to the third rail? And speaking of stunt culture. You know what? I'm kind of on one this morning.

I made that orphan joke. Like, let's do it. You saw this Project Veritas thing with the Pfizer executive? No. Oh, you didn't see it. I literally ignore anything that has Project Veritas in it because I'm just like, oh, no, thank you. Please tell me. So literally, Project Veritas trended over the week.

weekend. You know their stunt culture. They do kind of what Dateline would do, which is like frame people. You know, like people doing bad things, of course. Yeah. So they use dating as a pretext to get people to go on hidden camera. They get a Pfizer executive who predicts that he could be on Project Veritas. He's like, yeah, this, you know, there's all his hidden camera stuff, but he starts lying about how, or he claims.

he was lying. He starts talking about how he's going to do gain, they're doing gain of function research at Pfizer and how it's great for Pfizer because they're going to sell so many vaccines and all this stuff. And literally, then the guy, James O'Keefe comes out and he's like, does the dateline thing. It's like, hey, can I talk to you for a minute? And the guy's like, I'm a liar, I'm a liar. I was lying about everything just to impress my date. And now here we are. And the guy goes crazy and breaks the laptop and there's a big fight. You have to see it. Because is this like recent or old? This is over the weekend.

No, no, no. I mean, like the actual, this footage. Like, did this footage occurred recently? Just suggest that Pfizer is currently working on engineering a virus that they can then magically cure and make a ton of money. Honestly, what would even- Did Pfizer respond today? Because they haven't responded over the weekend.

Oh, really? What would even surprise me about any American corporation at this point? Like, really, in related news, did you see the story about Exxon? Which was that, like, in the 70s, as far back as the 70s, Exxon had scientists who specifically and unbelievably accurately predicted everything that is happening now with respect to global warming. Like literally they were like, oh yeah, they were like, there are going to be tons of super storms and like a lot of people are going to die. And Bangladesh is pretty much going to be gone. And I mean, like literally, shockingly good science.

And then we're like, oh, we should definitely spend billions of dollars on a decades long disinformation campaign to make sure that no one finds out about that. I mean, imagine literally finding out that you are at the crux of possible human extinction and being like, we should probably cover that up. We should cover that up. Yeah. Nothing would surprise me at this point about any American corporation. But this is going to be open up a can of worms because the guy basically says like, yeah, we're basically doing. But, you know, he's being let on and they don't release the whole tape. So you don't know how much he's being egged on by his.

That's the problem is that Veritas stuff is not a trustworthy source. It's gnarly to use dating as a pretext. to get people to make confessions like this? Like, I don't know we, like, this does not, this is a trap. It doesn't exist in the world of journalism. Right. Exactly. And so it's a YouTube banned the video.

Other places didn't ban the video. It's like, or I don't know if YouTube banned it or not. And then what happens, honestly, what happens is that even if it's true and it probably freaking is, I'm sorry. It's probably freaking true. It's going to be hard to believe it. Like you're going to, you will have, you will have, when you're an unreliable narrator, you rule out a huge chunk of your potential audience.

Correct. Who won't necessarily believe that it's the truth? Mainstream media will cover it. Right. Mainstream media does not do these tactics. Like mainstream media is not going to break into an office building to get documents, right? They rely on leakers. Yeah, I only did that one time.

Compass here. So they would never send a New York Times reporter onto Grindr or Match.com or whatever app they used to set up a date. to then kind of lead the witness into confessing about things, whether the confession is true or not, they would never use those tactics. The guy from Project Veritas says, the only way to get this information is to use these tactics.

To be honest, even if they use those tactics, and I'm not saying that's never happened in the history of journalism, it's a pretty cutthroat sport, right? Like, I don't, I'm not saying, I don't think that is common now. I don't think that happens a lot. But I'm just saying, even if that did happen and you got this, like, bombshell thing,

your initial response would not be to like, aha, we got you and then put it out. It would be like, okay, now I will embark upon a painstaking years-long process of trying to confirm this. Yeah, I mean, this is-for I report it. These are tactics that like Musad, KGB, CIA use, right? Yeah. Trapping people with love and sex and dates. That's like, you know.

Remember when Meg Whitman said that about reporters? She was like, yeah, yeah, yeah. This was not very long ago. and then she called me personally to apologize because she got, so she was in like in all hands and she was like, don't talk to reporters. They will groom you like pedophiles do effectively. Like, we could look it up and get her direct quote,

but she was just like, they'll try to make friends with you and they'll do this thing. And she kind of like compared journalists to pedophiles and then made this series of like personal phone calls. It was at Quivie. It was when she was at Quivie. Oh my God. Yes.

I use analogy was inappropriate. And I had just talked to her. Whitman said an interview. None of us are ever perfect. I didn't intend it. It's not how I feel. Whitman reportedly compared the way journalists cultivate sources to tactics used

by held predators to groom victims at an all-hands meeting on Friday and ones were mostly accurately reported. Okay, so she said it was. Okay. Yeah. People said they were strange and off-putting. Which was such an, it was very interesting.

I thought she handled it. I mean, frankly, she handled it beautifully. She literally personally called reporters that she had talked to, called them directly and apologized and whatever. But I, and then I'm again, as long as we're on third rail day, third rail Monday, I was like, I literally was like, well, they kind of do, do that though. Well, yes. We're out of your making friends.

Not grooming in predator kind of way, but you might build rapport. You build rapport. Which is what predators do as well. You act like a spy. Yeah. Like a spy would do. You build trust. But then.

pump people for information. The important thing is that you then try to confirm that information. You don't just go like, aha, we got it. We got the story. You confirm. You do the reporting. So here's the Pfizer response, by the way. In the ongoing development of the Pfizer-Biontek COVID-19 vaccine, Pfizer has not conducted gain

a function or directed evolution research. Okay. Directed evolution. Yeah. And this guy says they do. And this guy says they do. Now, they say that in the ongoing development. development of Pfizer-Bionta. If you were really going to parse this, you'd be like, well,

they didn't say they did it any other time, didn't do it any other time. But working with collaborators, we have conducted research where the original SARS-CoV-2 virus has been used to express the spike protein from new variants of concern. This work is undertaken once a new variant of concern has been identified by public health authorities. This research provides a way for us to rapidly assess the ability of an existing vaccine to induce antibodies that neutralize of newly identified variant of concern. We then make this data available through peer-reviewed scientific journals and use it as one of the steps to determine whether a vaccine update is required.

Express the spike protein. That's not the same thing, right? As gain of function? I mean, I don't really know, right? Like, who knows? Medical research is crazy. And I would not put it past any pharmaceutical company anywhere in the world to engineer viruses that they can then magically introduce a vaccine against.

That, by the way, will not cure it because nobody here. is in the business of cures. Yeah. Because cures don't make any money. You would, you would, you want to think that the system does not have perverse incentives.

God, we are going to be it flagged like hell today. There are perverse incentives in every system. And, um, yeah, they made a lot of money off of the vaccine and it did some good and lowering deaths and it didn't actually keep up. And I'm not taking any more boosters,

but I don't know what my position is, what my parents taking boosters. Maybe I want my parents to take boosters because they're at more at risk than I am. I definitely do. You know, Joan Didion had a great quote at one point about journalism and like you, specifically around sources. The great Joan Didion. And she, this is the quote. My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interest.

And it always does. That is one last thing to remember. writers are always selling somebody out. It's a tough quote. But it's not wrong. It's not wrong. No. No.

It's a dirty job. It can be. Investigative journalism is a very, very cutthroat job. Yes. Full stop. And they, you know, we'll use a source. And so, you know, the, the, I don't agree with project, full stop, don't agree with Project Vertas's techniques.

And that's what I mean when I Yeah, it could be valid. Maybe. But I want somebody else to do that reporting. Like, I'm never going to, I mean, if I see Project Baritas, blah, blah, blah, I'm always like, no. That's the problem with it. Like, I automatically don't believe it. That's the problem with being shady.

Is you don't get a benefit of the doubt. You don't. Yeah. And. Yeah, I wonder what's going to happen with this whole situation. Speaking of being shady and getting the benefit of the doubt. I love Mr. Beast, by just so. Just, I know Jimmy.

I wasn't talking about Mr. Beas. No, no, I just want to put a pit in that since that was how we got here. I just want to say, like, I think what he's doing is great. And if he wants to, you know, do philanthropy through his YouTube channel, I think it's awesome. Yeah. Generally speaking. All right. Yeah.

I mean, you know, I think Mr. Beast is, Mr. Beast is America. And America is Mr. Beast. Yeah, there you go. Perfect. There you go. Also, classic. American tale of redemption in progress right here. No.

Billy McIreland of Firefest fame is back on Twitter and selling his services. We kind of, we have a little bit of thing going on. Oh, yeah. He's an event planner. Uh, no. He'll help, well, he will help make All In Summit go viral. For sure. Yeah.

That's his services. Who's got to start out. All the wrong reasons. Who's got a startup, he tweeted, uh, on Saturday and needs me to blow up the marketing. Blow up is the key word in that sentence. And then on Sunday, he tweeted a whole thread about how he got his first company to go viral and then ended the thread with this tweet,

want me to make your company go viral, DM me. And then there's a link to a page that includes his consulting schedule. Oh, nice. Where he's charging $600 for a 15-minute interview. Okay. A thousand dollars for 30 minutes and $1,800 for an hour-long consulting call about how to make your startup go viral. So we could have him on the show for $1,800,

record it here, interview him for $1,800, talk to him about his life and times, and see if it goes viral on YouTube when we make back the 1800, like Mr. Beast. Maybe. Maybe. I'm just going to tell every single one of my founders, please don't.

Because even if he does give you great advice. I mean, imagine somebody takes this advice and it lands him in jail. I mean, the... Be careful, folks. We have one additional side letter for 2023 for all of our deals. Please don't hire. If you hire Billy, we're out. We sell our shares.

Let me tell you a story. Story time. Okay. Story time. Story time. Since we're third rail Mondays, I had a founder who hired somebody who had a colorful background like McFarland. Like high profile had done like horrible stuff.

said terrible stuff that just was super toxic. And he had met the person at a party. I'm going to make this an amalgamation, so it's not about a specific company. But imagine, if you will, you hire somebody like this. And I'm on the board, and I'm like, under no circumstances,

can we be at a startup responsible for this person's redemption? Because you have shareholders and there is no upside to hire. this person that could not be achieved through the thousand other people who have this skill who will apply for the job. So if you as the founder, CEO, meet a person, they have this colorful, checkered, disturbing past, and then you bring them into the startup and it blows up in our faces. Anybody who sees this person on our masthead sees he has an email address, from us makes us connection,

it's going to put us in the press for the wrong reasons. You have shareholders and employees, you have an obligation not to do stuff like this. It's not dissimilar to the Palmer Lucky stuff, right? Alleged Palm Alarkey stuff, he denies, whatever. You know, if you're doing something that could be embarrassing to the company,

you're just taking, you're putting everybody at risk and why would you do that if you don't happen? Anyway, the person, as a board member and investor, you have very little say in this kind of, of matters on dated average person hired the person anyway and then just engaged with them um because they just actually didn't get the work done um luckily it didn't blow up but yeah you know it's like you don't really want your startup to be the platform in which somebody

solves their problem right not your obligation and so if you're billy mcfarland's problem is obviously needs cash uh like everybody needs a job i guess most people do and uh If your startup uses his advice, even if it's brilliant advice, and then people find out you used his advice. It's just like a stain on your company. Not worth the risk. Yeah. Well, our producers went ahead and came up with some other ways to spend that kind of money.

So for the $600 that you could spend on 15 minutes with Billy, you could eat at the French laundry with all the food and wine upgrades. About 500 bucks a person. That's good. Instead of the 1800 for an hour with Billy, you could spend $150 more and sit two rows back from the floor to watch LeBron versus KD at the Barclay Center tonight. Oh, very nice.

Side note, I had to include this because I'm about to fly in New York. You can get that kind of tickets? You can't fly first class to New York, stay at a four-star hotel for the same amount of sitting in that seat. And the Warriors. And the Warriors. Seriously. Literally. Literally.

Quite literally. Yes. Like I was like, my son's 16th birthday is coming up. I was like, ooh, I'm going to ask Jake out for like some Warriors hookups, you know, like to get some good tickets. And I was like, no. I could, instead I could get him at. car. Yes, it is a little crazy. One of the tricks in the

if you're a big sports fan is to go to a smaller market you know, make a trip out of it. You go to Utah Jazz versus Warriors sit courtside for you know, two grand or three grand instead of 20 grand at Madison Square Garden or whatever or at the Warriors Arena or Lakers.

You get to have that course side experience. Yeah, people do that. They make a trip out of it. Same thing for concerts too, by the way. You know, you're in a major city and you go see some major artist, it's kind of hard to get tickets, scalpers, whatever. But you can make a trip out of and go to Red Rocks or go to, you know, I don't know,

Canada and be able to scalp tickets at a more reasonable price. Something like, I'm talking about the Booboc. Canada. Canada, you know. Yuba City. No offense to my Canadian listeners. Yuba City is the weird spot to go see big bands in the Bay Area. The general, it's like near Marysville. Which city?

Yuba. Yuba City. I don't even know what that is. Like a lot of bands make a stop in Yuba City. Oh, Y-U-B-A. Y-U-B-A. U-B-City. I went to see a show there once, and then the car broke down on the way back, and then I spent the scariest night in my life in a hotel with, like,

I swear, a dead body in a pool, like the room had been condemned. There was like a guy in a Camero who was like, Oh, yeah, go to this. Sacramento. Yeah. It's a hall. You want to take a reliable vehicle. But if you break down, Earl will come in a Camaro,

and he will direct you to the auto body shop, and he'll tell them, he'll tell you that you could say that Earl sent you. And then you will tell that story for the rest of your life. Hostel Part 7. I can't believe I didn't die. It was amazing. Yeah, don't die, please. Okay, everybody.

Well, that's the show for today. Third Rail Mondays. It'll be a tradition here. Maybe we'll see you tomorrow. Oh, and us. I mean, the shows, we might get three strikes and the YouTube channel is over now because we talked about Project Veritas and other stuff. But, yeah, we good luck to us.

Let's see how it goes. Let's publish. publish, boop. See you tomorrow, everybody. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.