This Week in Startups - Apple’s new releases, Twitter bots, Didi returns, Bad actors on Binance + Michael Shellenberger’s vision for California | E1477

Episode Date: June 7, 2022

Jason talks with independent candidate for California Governor Michael Shellenberger on what he wants to improve in California (2:57). Then, we cover Apple's 2022 WWDC (48:40). We cover the $2.35B of illicit funds laundered through Binance from hacks, investment frauds, and drug deals (1:27:25), and we touch on Elon Musk accusing Twitter of withholding bot information (1:37:24). Finally, we cover Beijing wrapping up the Didi investigation (1:41:11). (00:00) Jason and Molly introduce today's show! (2:57) Michael Shellenberger, 2022 California gubernatorial candidate, sits down with Jason (10:46) Notion - Get started for free at https://notion.com/thisweekinstartups (12:03) Michael Shellenberger on capital allocators being loyal to CA (22:35) Ourcrowd - Check out the deal of the week at https://ourcrowd.com/twist (23:45) Michael Shellenberger on handling drug addiction and rehabilitation (39:10) First Republic Bank - Discover what a long-term financial relationship can do for you. Visit https://firstrepublic.com/startup today to learn more. (40:00) Molly’s skunk situation (41:51) Recapping the Warriors’ finals game 2 victory (48:40) Apple’s new features from the 2022 WWDC (1:27:25) At least $2.35B of illicit funds laundered through Binance from 2017-2021 (according to Reuters) (1:37:24) Elon Musk believes Twitter of withholding info about # of bots, threatening to walk away from $44B bid (1:41:11) Beijing to wrap up Didi investigation (according to WSJ ) (1:48:42) If you are a founder pre-series A, you are invited to our Founder University Two-Day intensive on June 13-14!

Hey, everybody. Welcome to the show. It's Monday. Congratulations to the Warriors on their big win. To start the show, I talk with independent candidate for California's new governor, Michael Schellenberger, on what he wants to improve in California, Molly. It's a really fascinating interview. He's kind of like a moderate and he's running as an independent. I am voting for him in the primaries because I would like to see somebody who's a moderate, at least debate. Even if they have a small chance of winning, I'd like to see him debate. And primaries are tomorrow, by the way, if you are in California. And as we've discussed, if you're going to vote, I mean, please vote and also vote in primaries,

turns out. Yeah, very important. Speaking of which, I got to fill up my ballot. So that's going to be super interesting. Then we cover Apple's 22 WWDC announcements and array of updates, including some dishy new I-Message features, a new chip for the Apple Silicon family, and then possibly the absolute like a bomb of the announcement, pay later. Buy now pay later.

Yeah, coming to Apple. Really, really interesting stuff. And after that, we cover a report from Reuters that finance has had $2.35 billion where the illicit funds laundered through their system, you know, talking drugs, investment frauds, hacked, and everything in between. Pretty gnarly stuff. But it looks like the chickens are coming home to roost in the crypto space. It's fascinating.

And since we know you missed us over the weekend, we just keep on going. We've also got Elon Musk accusing Twitter of withholding material bot information. Big news there. And finally, Beijing is wrapping up its DD investigation. The stock's gone up a bit. But they're moving from the West and listing their stock publicly here to now the decoupling of China and America. They're going to be listed, D.D. on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. So it's going to be a great episode.

Stick with us. This week in startups is brought to you by Notion. Notion is one place for notes, stocks, projects, and everyday work that goes way beyond a wiki. Go to Notion.s0.S.O. And use promo code twist to get $250 off an annual team plan. Our Crowd. Our Crowd helps you invest early in pre-IPO companies, alongside professional VCs. If you're interested in investing, you can join our crowd for free at OUR-C-R-C-O-D.com slash twist.

And First Republic Bank, where everybody gets a personal banker who's reachable by phone, email, or text, and through First Republic's banking app. Learn more at FirstRepublic.com slash startup. Member FDIC Equal Housing Lender. Hey, everybody next up on the show, Michael Schellenberger, who is an independent candidate for California governor. Now, we don't often talk about tech here on This Week in startups because it's this week in startups. We're here to talk about startups, capital allocating into them, and technology, innovation, and entrepreneurship. It's kind of our wheelhouse here. But one of the things facing the tech industry is the absolute mismanagement of not only,

California, but more specifically the Bay Area and then drilling down into their San Francisco. And I've watched this first hand having moved to California in my early 30s, almost 20, yeah, 20 years ago, exactly, and then moving up to the Bay Area, almost 10 years exactly. So I did 10 years in L.A., 10 years in San Francisco, and also the Water Bay Area in the peninsula, in the suburbs, basically. So I've gotten a really firsthand look at this and watched as Los Angeles, um, devolved and also as California surged in some ways. And then the utter collapse that occurred right as my 10 years here, I watched San Francisco, boom, and all the tech companies suddenly want to

base themselves in San Francisco. And now getting a startup to come to a meeting in San Francisco is essentially an impossibility. So we're going to unpack that with Michael Schellenberg. Welcome to the program, Michael. Great to be with you. Good to see you, Jason. Good to see you. You and I met socially recently, and we had a nice talk. And you are a resident of the Bay Area. I don't know if you say the specific town you're from or not. I don't want to micro-thority. Yeah, totally. So I don't micro-target myself. I just, you know, generally say I live in the wider Bay Area. But you're in Berkeley, which is a really avant-garde liberal area. And you're running for guys. governor, why are you running? Because you could be doing other things with your time. And it does seem like California and the Bay Area and Los Angeles are absolutely collapsing and losing, you know, from end to end here, losing companies, losing great entrepreneurs, losing capital

allocators, quality of life has plummeted, housing prices has soared, the education system is totally in disarray, homelessness slash addiction, and we'll get into that and double-click on how we frame that issue. It's a disaster, and you want to go in here and try to be in charge. Why would you want to take on what to most of us would seem an insurmountable challenge? Sure. Well, the main reason is I'm completely heartbroken by the destruction of our state and by the humanitarian disaster that we call homelessness. We're dealing with open-air drug markets, open air drug scenes that are killing people. I just wrote a piece about how there's three times more homeless deaths in Los Angeles between

2020 and 2021 than in New York. The reason is that in New York, they have sufficient homeless shelters and they make people sleep in them rather than sleep outside. So we're completely mismanaging this. The school's student performance has gotten worse. We're in the fourth season of blackouts and water shortages. and we pay the highest taxes, the highest gasoline prices, and the highest and the most for electricity of anybody in the continental United States.

So we have the highest cost of living and the worst public services. It's a leadership problem. You know, it's we just don't have the leader, the political leadership to make the, the, I guess I would say tough decisions. I don't think that they're super complicated, actually. It's simple things like raising educational standards, requiring, you know, shutting down the open-air drug scenes, having sufficient shelter. and psychiatric hospitals and group homes for the sick,

raising educational standards rather than lowering them, building power plants, water storage facilities, desalination plants. It's basically a pro-civilization agenda. This is just the basics of civilization. So it's in that spirit that Mark Andreessen wrote about during the beginning of the pandemic of build. We need abundant housing, water, energy. We need functioning schools.

There's not a lot of magic here or shortcuts. It's just really buckling down and doing the common sense things we need to do. And I guess that's the frustrating part for those of us who love the state of California and then the cities within it. It is such an amazing place to live in so many different dynamics. I mean, you can go skiing in Tahoe and surf in Malibu. You can do everything in between. We have the wine country and everything from San Diego to Los Angeles to the Central Valley. It's just a wonderful place.

And I've been totally captivated and fallen in love with it as well. in my 30s and 40s, and now I'm considering leaving. And the thing that I wonder is, if it's all so obvious, we need to build more housing. We need to get out of the way when somebody like Elon wants to build a factory. And he said at the All In Summit, you know, that he would still be papering the applications for his Texas gigafactory, which I got to tour. And he built that in under 18 months. and in 18 months in California, you would be an impossibility.

And so we have a hundred billion dollar surplus. We don't want for money, but we yet have, and people want to be here. So with all of this obvious solutions, I guess the question, and I think it's important to understand in each of these vectors, and we have a limited amount of time, obviously, but in each of these vectors, how did we become so ineffective? Let's start with housing. what is the dynamic that has made it impossible? We hear about NIMBY, we hear about YIMB of, you know, as concisely as possible.

Why is this so screwed up? And then how do you fix it? Sure. I mean, I think on housing, this is arguably the toughest issue, so it's great to dive in. I mean, we don't have, we have abundant land, but we don't have abundant housing. And there's just basically, it's an overregulated sector. We waive the main Environmental Quality Act, California Environmental Quality Act for building a stadium, but we won't waive it for building apartment units for our workers. We've allowed hyper-local control to

prevent that housing. Also, the law is abused by a small group of labor unions. I do believe a majority of Californians would like to see more housing. There needs to be sort of a consensus built. There's a need to kind of have a broader consensus in the society that we don't have. I will say too, I think that the people that have the strongest interest in adding housing is the tech community. The problem is that there's just very little loyalty to California from the new capitalist entrepreneurial class. So you have effectively an aristocracy, a kind of landed feudal aristocracy holding on to older form of development, not wanting the new development. And then you've got an entrepreneurial class that's just not loyal to this place. will move to Miami, they'll move to Austin, they'll move to other parts of the country.

So, you know, usually when you had like the Rockefellers, Carnegie's and Melons, they would make their fortunes and they'd be rooted in a place. And then they would fund the politicians and the others to, uh, usher in a kind of new form of development, including, you know, upgrading the housing and the cities. That's partly happened with me. I've been supported. It's now public. Um, I've been supported by David Sachs and other, uh, people.

that are successful high-tech people in California. But, you know, honestly, there hasn't been, there's not a machine in place. I mean, we're creating the political machine for a pro-abundance agenda. And that hasn't existed until I ran. Startups need a central hub to store information and collaborate on work more than ever, especially when you have remote teams. That's why you need to move to a right first culture. Any best practice, any project should be written down,

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You're going to get $250 off their annual plan. Notion.S.O. And use the promo code twister and checkout for $250 off. Thanks to the Notion team for making a great product that we love and enjoy. Yeah, I mean, it seems like this is kind of from out of left field that you're, you even exist as this kind of unicorn candidate who is socially liberal and maybe just wants to get stuff done.

It isn't, you know, part of the far left agenda or the Trump far right agenda. You're the moderate. I think a lot of folks have been looking for it. Why should the technical class, the capital allocators, be loyal to the state when you have somebody like Gonzalez telling Elon or saying, FU, Elon, and you're raising our taxes, and the regulations are absurd, and the politicians are blaming the billionaires and blaming the companies for causing all these problems. Why should we be loyal when Mayor Suarez is saying, hey, come here, we'll get everything

out of the way. We want you here. When Abbott and other folks in Texas and Austin are saying, hey, we want you here. If you want to build a factory, we're going to make it happen and get everything out of the way. hey, you need housing, we're going to get housing built, and we're going to do it fast. Why should the people who are builders in the world be loyal to California if if California politicians are outrightly hostile to our very existence?

Yeah, well, that's a good reason not to be. And I think that's why technical, you know, tech entrepreneurs have been fleeing the state quite understandably. I don't blame them for it. The governor, you know, we basically, you have the governor news some, but the others in the political elite, take us for granted. I mean, they, they, they, and they take you for granted. They make us pay the highest taxes, highest cost of living and they don't deliver on basic public services. I mean, the disrespect, particularly shunned to Elon Musk by, I guess one of the, I don't know if

she was the president of the Senate, but Lorena Gonzalez, of course, famously said FU to him on on Twitter. Yeah. He said message received. Obviously, I would be, I would, I would, I would be calling up entrepreneurs trying to get them to come back. You know, look, I think the main reason that anybody is loyal to California is that we just think it's a spectacular state for all the reasons that you just gave. I mean, there's just no other state like it. I mean, I fell in love with California when I first visited as a boy. When I travel around the state now, I'm still blown. I was just in Santa Monica, which is, you know, I certainly been to Santa Monica, but I start to go into the neighborhoods and you're just like, oh my gosh, it's like the most amazing place in the world.

Yeah, I got to live there. So I think the reason to fight for California is because we love it. Yeah. There's no reason it can't be a great state. I don't think we'll ever be like Texas. in allowing the kind of unregulated development that they have in Texas. But I don't think we have to be like Hawaii either. You know, I think there's, I think we want to be the Goldilocks principle here between Hawaii and Texas. There is a lot of land. I mean, anybody that flies over California, you see there's plenty of land.

Yeah, there's, there's much more room for density in cities. What I'm proposing is a really simple idea called a citizen's jury where you impanel several hundred, a randomly selected representative sample of the electorate to deliberate in 12 town hall meetings across the state, 12 cities, 12 months, to deliberate and build consensus so that you can go back to the legislature

with a pro-housing abundance agenda. If the legislature rejects it, let's say January, 24, you then have time to put it on the ballot and put it up to voters. We end up passing a lot of things on ballot initiatives in California. And I would do that with housing, education, and then energy slash water since the two things are so related.

Because ultimately, I think there is an ideological obstacle. I think there's sort of a public consensus obstacle. But as the governor of the state, you'd have a lot of power to bring people together. And then decide if everybody just wants to be like Hawaii and not build any more houses, then the public decides that that may be what it is. And then entrepreneurs can decide whether there's really worth staying in San Francisco and L.A. But that's clearly not the case here. I mean, the people in this state overwhelmingly want to lower taxes,

They overwhelmingly want to build more housing. They overwhelmingly want to address the fentanyl crises and the drug addiction crises, which has been framed as homelessness. So let's talk about that. In San Francisco, we've watched, and my office used to be in the tenderloin, and I had to move it because people were being stabbed outside of our office. And we watched over, you know, five, six year. period that we went from two or three thousand homeless people to what felt like 10,000 or so.

I think the numbers show that. And it was distinctly different than, you know, what I experienced in New York City in the 80s and 90s of homelessness and the modest homelessness in Santa Monica I witnessed in Venice, you know, in the 2010-2005 era. It all of a sudden got very different. It seems to have correlated with the super drug fentanyl. And it does seem to correlate as well with the non-ability to prosecute the dealers and maybe hold people to a specific standard. You wrote an entire book on this, but looking at it from the outside and my basic research, it seems like people who are horribly addicted to opioids and fentanyl have a very low chance of recovery, maybe 5%.

So this is basically a problem of addiction that is not going to be solved in the overwhelming majority of cases. So what is a society to do? Well, I think we know what we can't do, which is make it actually profitable for dealers to be here and make it profitable in some way for people around the country who are addicted to say the number one destination if you're addicted to these things is California. Because if you're living in one of these other states, I mean, if you're a lot of these other states, I mean, if you're in the South, if you're in Texas and you're addicted to this,

you're going to be arrested and you're going to eventually wind up in jail for stealing or whatever it is, tragically. But the cost of being a dealer or addiction is high in some other states and it's zero here. Is that basically the core of the problem? Because I've read some of your tweets on the problem here. How do you, and you wrote a whole book on it, but how do you frame it as a problem and the reality of it? And then what is the specific tactics that need to occur? Yeah.

Yeah, you basically have it right. I mean, the data is not great, but we know that the number of homeless people in California increased 31%, even as the number declined, 18% in the rest of the United States over the last 10 years. San Francisco saw a significant increase. Again, the counts aren't great, but somewhere between 9 and 10,000 total homeless in San Francisco probably 5 to 7,000 on the streets. At any given time, we know 20,000 homeless people will come through San Francisco.

every year for the open drug scene, which is allowed. It did get worse after 2014, which is when we decriminalized up to three grams of hard drugs and also decriminalized shoplifting, $950 worth of goods. And you saw that arrests for shoplifting declined from around, arrests per reports declined from 60% in around 2014 to just 17% today. So there's people's experience as reality. Of course, you also have two overlapping drug epidemics. One is the opioids, which is most people are most famous for of the 105,000 drug deaths last

year, 71,000 were from fentanyl alone. But methamphetamine is also a big problem. So we find people smoking methamphetamine and fentanyl. A lot of the psychosis you see, people taking off their clothes, people screaming. Some of that may be from underlying mental illness. but often it's just paranoid psychosis induced by long-term, unerrupted methamphetamine use. People used to be arrested and have to spend some time in jail where they would get off drugs for a period of time. You know, it's not rocket science.

I mean, you have to shut down the open drug scene. You can't let people sleep outside. You don't have to go to shelter, but you can't sleep outside. You can go somewhere else. We need to detox the people as an alternative to jail and prison. Americans were very libertarian, so we're uncomfortable diagnosing people and being like, you need to go get treatment just because you're an addict or you need to go to psychiatric hospital just because you're mentally ill. So breaking the law tends to be the thing that gets people into the help they need, which is why you need. It's the backstop.

You know, what's that? It's the backstop, you know, because we believe in America, and it's one of the beautiful things about America is personal freedom, you have a choice. a person who is addicted to these super drugs, and let's face it, these are unlike, you know, a lot of the drugs we're considering decriminalizing or legalizing. I mean, some in fact, may have properties that they're studying at Stanford and John Hopkins, MDMA, psilocybin, LSD, you know, ketamine. I mean, the science behind these things actually helping people in a proper context with therapists is extraordinary. So we are specifically talking about two super drugs here, 71% of the deaths are coming from fentanyl and then some amount from methamphetamine.

Right. But every addict you'll speak to, and this is where the data is irrefutable, the addicts who do recover, say that consequences of their behavior became the impetus for them to then change their life. And this is where, you know, bringing up tough love, making a decision for somebody who's incapable of making the decision for themselves, it's very hard for Americans. And in a way, it's a beautiful intent that we want to help people and we want them to make their own decision, but it might also be unrealistic in the super drug category. And any family who's dealt with addiction, you know, the richest families in the world with kids on Oxy or, you know, brothers and sisters,

it's incredibly tragic. They could be on high price drugs, low price drugs, they could be functional or they could be on the street. But the fact is, the consequences eventually are the backstop in America and we have removed the backstop by saying, hey, if you steal, if you're break into somebody's home, if you break into their car, if you're on the street, if you're naked running down the middle of street, endangering yourself, or you're selling these super drugs, we basically took out the backstop. And now we're getting a surge in the amount of people who are suffering. All around the world, tech companies are innovating and driving returns for investors, and our Crowd is an investment platform that analyzes many of these companies across the global

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It's hard to say that, you know, good intent, but we do have that phrase like the road to hell is, you know, paved in good intent, right? Like, is that what's actually happened here? Yeah, definitely. I mean, it's the removal of all consequences. from people who break the law if we designate them as victims and everybody that's an addict or mentally ill is designated as a victim. And you're absolutely right. I mean, it's very hard to quit drugs in general, but you almost can't quit them if you're just being constantly enabled to use the drugs.

I do meet people that recover and, yeah, they almost all have to go to jail or prison or have some threat of jail and prison hung over them. You know, it helps to shut down the open drug scenes because then it's harder to get the drugs. people have to spend more time finding them. You also can make detox and rehab available. But with the basic ingredients of dopamine dysregulation, so we know how to regulate that for folks. I mean, everybody needs any exercise, they need jobs, they need meaning, they need purpose.

I'm fine with the opioid replacement therapies. As you mentioned, there may be other psychedelic trials that we could do. One of the big ideas that I'm promoting is that we need a statewide psychiatric and addiction care system. Right now we have a countywide psychiatric addiction care system. Right now we have a count. based system. So you have 58 counties offering duplicative services, but then basically L.A. and San

Francisco, because they're so liberal and they have the open drug scenes are overwhelmed. The public health departments are overwhelmed. Plus, if you want to get somebody rehab, you don't want them to be near the open drug scene. You want them to be in the Central Valley or in the mountains. So California, you know, we do, we are a wealthy state. We do have the potential to create a much more European style rehab program where you have like, you know, job creation, you have job training. People can go work for Cal Fire. They could go work for Cal Psych after they achieve recovery. That would also be a place to be to do some of the more experimental treatments. You know, there's there's psychedelics where there's also, you know, cold baths.

There's heavy exercise. There's all sorts of things that are being experimented. There's medical treatments. So there's no reason we can't solve this. Definitely there's some people that are never going to recover. But I think that what we've done in what we've basically, what we're doing is we're just giving up on people. And so there's a lot of pessimism, addiction pessimism, basically consigning people that are in their 20s who have lost control because of addiction, but we're basically consigning them to palliative care, a life of chronic drug use and probably in early death. Yeah. I think it's inhumane. I think it's inconsistent with California's commitment to human potential, the positive cycle.

psychology movement. So much of what we love about California is that this was a place where people, we moved away from all that kind of really negative Freudian, backward-looking psychology to a positive future, you know, human potential psychology, optimistic psychology. Yeah. So that's, I think, what the potential is here. That's why I think that's part of the inspiration for me was we can take this situation of chaos and you find an alliance between people who, whose families are directly impacted by addiction and mental illness with people who's, you know, the business leaders, the tech workers, the people who are directly impacted by the homeless crisis to come up with a better plan. The families themselves, I know you spoke to families of addicts and people

suffering in the tenderloin specifically here in San Francisco. They overwhelmingly would like to see their own family members arrested and the consequence. Of course. And so when we look at this, You know, and it's a very hard discussion for people to have. But imagine you're at the family of the son or the daughter who's in the tenderloin. And you have been so broken and crushed that you literally want your own brother, sister, son, daughter, mother, father, cousin, uncle brother, whatever, to be arrested because not being arrest, being in a jail, as horrible as that is, the family members would literally rather see their family member put in jail for some number of months or a year in order to sober up

and in order to possibly get on the recovery path, then remain on the street. Yet we have a group of individuals, I guess some cynical people believe are profiting from this. We talk about the industrial homeless complex here in San Francisco. There are hundreds of millions of dollars. I've heard people say a billion dollars, where people are, let's face it, profiting in some way. Now, their intent could be good. They could believe they're doing the right thing. They could be, you know, in the short term, removing suffering.

And all that can still be true. But the fact is, I think the families and what they would like to see happen with their family member trumps what, you know, what people would frame as the bleeding heart, you know, or very far left, very, very, permissive group of people running these, in many cases, for a profit or very profitable homeless organizations are getting. Am I too cynical? Am I framing there? Or am I dead on? Totally. I mean, of course. I mean, if your child or your brother or your parent were on the street, if I were on the street out of control because of addiction or mental illness, I would want to be arrested and mandated treatment. Of course you would. Because otherwise you could die.

you know, close to 100% of the women are being sexually assaulted. It's really people prey on each other on the streets. This is not a safe environment. So we have this, the issue has been, I mean, the manipulation of people's minds has been around one flew over the cuckoo's nest. People don't want to be involuntarily hospitalized. But like I said, the easy way to solve that is that we're not going to be involuntarily hospitalizing people who aren't breaking laws.

You can still have a choice. So if you'd rather, if you break the law and you'd rather go to jail, that's fine. But if you'd rather accept mandatory psychiatric or addiction care, that should be the option. Well, we remove that option. This is, you know, it's interesting. When you interview people in Europe, they often say, you know, we don't criminalize addiction. If you want to be a drug addict in the privacy of your own home, not breaking any of the laws, I think most of us are fine with that.

I think it's terrible. But I think we should stigmatize it socially. But I don't think it should be a priority for law enforcement. So I think that's the new, that's the new. the social contract, so to speak, is that you know, you can, there's a lot of, we give a lot of freedom for people to use drugs in California, but

you can't be breaking the law. If the drug use has gotten out of control that you're breaking laws, then you should be given the option of jail or some mandatory treatment. Yeah. It's, I think we've run an experiment that has run its course. And if you were to look at that experiment,

the result is life on the street and this open-air drug market leads to super drugs, which are distinctly different than the drugs that people may have recreationally used at Berkeley themselves or any number of places. And it's a different class of drug. And until you can have a really adult discussion,

that fentanyl and meth is different than mushrooms and weed, you cannot paint these things with the same brush. And then the horror of living in the tenderloin is objectively worse than going to prison or going to treatment. And in fact, if you were to rank them by people who've been to all three, they would tell you, living that life on the street is horrific, going to jail is horrific,

and going to treatment is challenging and hard, but, you know, was the thing that ultimately got them productive in society. Why are you qualified for this job? What makes you qualified to execute on this plan? Which seems, by all observations, by people listening in the audience, or when we discuss this and with the group,

you seem to have picked a very pragmatic, logical platform here that is right down the middle. Okay, great, we all agree. It's a solid platform. Why can you be the person to execute on this? Why should we vote for you in the primary here? Yeah, it's a good question. It's a funny question because it feels like

when I first started thinking about the job, I remember looking at it being like, yeah, I could do that job. That either can sound, if you don't think I'm qualified, that'll sound arrogant. If I sound qualified, then maybe reassuring. Yeah. But it always felt like a job that I could do. These are issues I understand. I really care about the state.

You know, I've done a book now on the crime, drug, and homeless crisis. I've done another book on energy and the environment. I pay a lot of attention to things like health care systems, education, my whole family or policy wonks. these problems all seem manageable to me. You know, I've traveled to Europe and see how they dealt with it there. I've looked at how Florida has handled its school choice, which is a system I care. I believe in that parents should have greater choice where their kids go to school.

And, you know, I'm on the one hand, I'm a very open person. I want to build agreement among people that have differences. I'm very, I'm 50 years old. I came from the radical left and I'm just much more moderate and open-minded to different perspectives. but I'm also, I think you say I'm a disagreeable person in other ways. There's certain things where there's certain things that I'm really firm on. Like I think we need to have a statewide psychiatric addiction care system. I'm very convinced and make the argument that we can't solve this at the county level.

But on other things like how exactly would school choice work? Would it be public schools or would it also include private schools? you know, would people be allowed to be in in trials for psychedelic drug use? If they're in rehab, I'm open to that. I'm open to housing. Like, how do we get it built? Where is it built? Ultimately, that has to be a decision made by the people.

So I think I've got some of the discernment here to be like, and I think I understand California as well enough. I mean, it's just this issue we were describing. There's people that are mental health advocates and also Europeans. which they would really like to see people with serious mental illness like schizophrenia just be mandated medicine and mandated treatment. I think if all else were being equal, I agree. Like my aunt has schizophrenia.

She did well in a group home. But I also know Californians well enough, I think, that I think that there's just enough libertarianism and squeamishness around requiring psychiatric care for people that haven't broken any other laws. And so my view has been, let's start with dealing with the folks that are on the streets, suffering from mental illness and causing problems. Similarly, with drug addiction, I don't want to criminalize addiction. Nobody should have to go to jail or prison just because they're an addict.

Nobody should have to accept shelter. But you can't sleep on the streets. Yeah. So, you know, there's, you know, you can't break the law. Have to be able to hold these things that are seemingly inconsistent, but in your head at the same time because it is a complex problem. You can't stay on the street. You can be addicted, but you can't be addicted on the street. You can't commit crime.

If you do go to jail, it's going to be because you stab somebody or you rob somebody's home, not because of the addiction, but the addiction may have caused you to do that because you needed money to service the addiction. So this is a very adult, you know, you have to be able to make a couple of logic jumps here. Yes. We're criminalizing behavior, not health status. Right.

So you might be sick, but we're not going to quit. criminalize that. But if your sickness leads you to break laws, then we're going to make treatment, whether that's rehab or psychiatric care, the alternative to incarceration, because that's obviously the most humane thing to do. So my latest is that when people sort of ask me what my identity is, you know, I say I'm a liberal in my compassion for the vulnerable, I'm a libertarian in my passion for freedom, and I'm a conservative in that I believe you need civilization for both. People ask me, well, how do you balance that? Well, that's it. It just, just kind of goes, we're not going to criminalize addiction or mental illness, but we are going to,

we are going to criminalize public camping, defecating on the streets, public drug use, public drug dealing, both because you can't have a city without enforcing those laws. Right. But also enforcing those laws are what ultimately are the ways that we in America, and I think it's different in this in Europe, but that's how we in America are going to get people to help they need. Listen, I am super supportive of what you're doing. And in fact, I am voting for you. So, Thank you. People should make their own choice. But the reason I'm voting for you here in this primary is because I think Gavin Newsom has done a horrible job.

I think that his, you know, if you're proven ineffective, you had your shot, you were ineffective, things got worse under your watch, and you're not focused on the right things. Therefore, I would like to see you debate. Just that, for me, get you the vote. Now, if you do a great job debating him and you can build a, you know, this platform, all the best. and it would be great to see some change here. I've been a lifelong, I voted lifelong Democrat, but like you, I am conservative on some concept. I guess I'm conservative on some concepts like, gosh, you know, I'd like to balance the budget.

I don't know if that's conservative or liberal today since they all spend so much money, but I would like to see us be fiscally responsible. I don't know where that puts me in terms of party allegiance. I would like to see reasonable policing, but I don't want mass incarceration. Again, don't know which party I'm in. It's hard to tell, but I just love the idea of an independent candidate. And I love the idea of an independent candidate who's got, you know, who's done the research and who takes a shot and who's doing it because they're motivated to see the world get better

and because they love the city or state they're living in. So I applaud you. I don't know you that well, but I'm increasingly, you know, interested in seeing you succeed because we do need to have more people run for office and we intent matters. and I think your approach to it matters, which is, hey, let's just do the research, let's find a solution, and let's execute on it. Like you said, it's not rocket science. If we don't have enough homes, we're going to need to build more.

And if we want to have less people addicted to drugs, especially the super drugs, that's the way I look at it. If we want them not addicted to super drugs, we're going to have to say super drugs are not allowed and enforce that existing law. Again, not rocket science people. Michael Schellenberg is running for governor. you have your ballots, you can vote for him in the primary, and let's see him come in second and debate Gavin Newsom.

I love it. I want to see that debate. When you do the debate prep, I want to come. I want to come here that debate prep, and I'm good with some one-liners. It would be very cool if I could get a one-liner in there that made its way into the debate. You know, I can punch up maybe some one-liners for you. Appreciate that. Well, let's get through the primary tomorrow and hopefully that will happen.

Everybody go vote in California, please. And we'll see how you do, Michael. And best of luck to you. Thanks so much, Jason. Appreciate being here. Cheers. This week in startups is supported by First Republic Bank. A seamless banking experience is something we all want.

But what does it really mean? At First Republic, it means you have access to your own personal banker, someone who knows your name and is there for you when you need them. So whether you're browsing their full suite of services or, or you just have questions about your bank statement. You can reach out to your personal banker by phone or email and through their secure banking app. Ashley, a managing director on my team,

has worked with First Republic on one of our fund accounts for almost four years, and she loves their customer service and support. See what a difference and always-on, seamless banking experience can make for you. Visit FirstRepublic.com today to learn more. That's FirstRepublic.com, member FDIC, Equal Housing Lender. Hey Molly, welcome.

Well, hello. Hello, how are you? A little bonus BC school. Well, we were waiting for you. I know that you had a sitch. You had a sitch and you had to deal with it. People never get pets. Oh, no.

The worst nightmare for any dog owner happens this weekend? Last night. No, no, it happened last night at 10.30. Oh, great. It ended when you got to go to bed and get your- Ended around one after multiple baths and yeah, no, totally. So no, no, Cinderella sleep? No Cinderella didn't get her sleep.

No. I love the Cinderella. Just going to be. What do I need to clean up today? Just. It is. This is like the light. I was talking to some moms about life.

And it's like the life of a mom. And it's like it just never ends. A single mom even harder, right? Yes. Well, that single mom, breadwinner, homeowner. It's like all on you. I am really not smart. It's what I'm thinking.

Like, I'm realizing is like I'm not smart. Like I could have made a lot more choices to make my life easier, such as not I have two dogs or like couldn't I have bought like a nice like condo with no freaking wildlife? That would have been smart. Yeah. Here's what I'd say.

You're not smart. You're brilliant. But that's only from working with you. Oh, thanks, partner. I needed that. You know, even brilliant people can make ininvisible decisions at times. We do not always make our lives easier. Let's just put it that way.

well you know what smart people I have a theory will increasingly make their lives more complex because they're good at solving problems so it's like well two dogs what could be the worst thing that could happen and it's like I don't know for a big week a skunk attacks your dog and you've got to give them 17 baths and they still smell terrible and you're exhausted but anyway you're here that's all it matters I'm here we got a lot of news to go through so we got this we got this hey good game yesterday huh we're your spots back quite nicely right maybe I'm the curse here oh no no it was sacks. Sacks in the front row. Oh, yeah, that'll do it with that dour.

That dour energy. Well, absolutely. That Asperger's energy just kills the game. Just looking at them like... He's so sad. And then, Sacks, they removed sacks from the front row and they put J-Cal in the front row. And what happens? Boom.

Boom. We crushed them. We destroyed this. Gorgeous. Everybody showed up. Pool party. Clay was back. Draymond. Dremon. Dremon mixing it up. Yeah. include this in the show, by the way. This is a little warm up for the show.

Yeah, uncalled for tea, but it was great. I literally get into my front row seat that a friend of mine got me, which was quite nice. Thank you to my friend. I didn't ask for his permission to say on the air, so I would say. And I sit down. And whose seats am I next to? Cheryl Sambert.

I saw your picture. I was like, shut the front door with this. I think Cheryl's like, Jake out. This freaking guy. Cheryl and I are drinking We're cheering What are we working on now? Well, I was like, don't get another job

I told her, I was like, you know, you're going to get a lot of job offers take a year off because there's not that many years left and, you know, you work really hard. And I wouldn't talk about our conversation, but it's quite fun because we've got a great history together. We had a real long talk for three hours.

It was fun. That's so great. So you were like under the basket. I was, yeah. Tell me about this placement compared to bench under the baskets. The seats we were in the second row center court are better in that you can see the action on both sides of court. The seats at the baseline are better because you can see the are better than the half court.

If you for half the game because you're closer to the action, you see this action around the basket. So I mean, which is say you're like literally if I took three steps, I would be under the basket, which means like all that action under the basket is just happening. Then I was, you know, I guess they call that kitty corner to, you know, the bench. And Draymond was getting into it with Williams. And I started getting into it with Williams. And then Draymond and I were laughing at Williams. And I was telling Williams, you have no rings.

He's got all the rings. And then Draymond said to me, that guy's a fan. He's a fan. I was like, you want an autograph? I'll get you an autograph from Draymond. So Draymond and I are standing up with the only two guys standing up yelling at the Celtics. And I'm like, oh, my God, he's not going to get thrown out of the game. I'm going to get thrown out of the game.

I'm going to sit down. But the whole audience starts getting into it. And it was a whole mushug and craziness. But it was a good time. And congratulations to my paled Ramon, who just absolutely was, you know, he's just that X factor in the game. When he does that, when he just shows up just a little bit different, it's everything. It's the complete, it's a complete change and approach. And you could see the, like, fired upness of the rest of the team.

Oh, yes. Like you could really see it. I mean, just to see Jordan Poole show up like that in the third and fourth quarter was just a delight. I love those young kids. Half court shot? Yeah. It's like, it's on. I mean, the roof almost came off the building.

I bet. It was absolutely awesome. Go dubs. And I'm sticking with my Warriors and Six. I think the Celtics are an incredible team. Other people are thinking this is going to be what they call a gentleman sweep, which is you, the other team gets to win one. game and they save face a little bit. I'm still going Celtics and six.

I think this is a very serious. Warriors and Six. Warriors and Six. Celtics win two games. Celtics are no joke. And I got to hang out with Bill Simmons finally. So I was in the, you know, the VIP area. And I saw Bill Simmons and we had a nice podcasting talk.

And I saw Chad Hurley, professional shi poster on Twitter, former founder of, or still co-founder of YouTube. So we had a nice conversation. He wants to come on the pot. It's for Brian from Airbnb. So, again, a who's who of Silicon Valley and celebrities and a win, which is all that matters, really. That's all that matters.

How many of those Silicon Valley guys? Because I saw this, I saw, I think a Twitter thread to the effect that, like, you know, now going to game and chase is just so it's like a bunch of Silicon Valley guys who don't know anything about basketball. Not true. I don't know that that's entirely true. No, I think there are some people like facts who, you know, are just showing up because it's the finals. No, that's not an addictiveist act Does he not like basketball? No, he had court side seats to the Warriors for a couple seasons

But he rarely went to Oakland Because it was a challenge to get out to Oakland As you know, if you're in the city or you're in the peninsula It was like a two-hour mission Yeah, I know, he's not like the most sophisticated basketball fan But, you know, other people are there every game You know, and then they are super into it And it's a great culture, I have to say out here

Because I think a lot of the culture of the Warriors team and how well they play together, how well they're coached, how well the team is managed, and the longevity of this, you know, this trio, Clay,

Steph and Tremong. Yeah. It's something you don't see in the NBA all that much now. So that is super attractive and I think a lot of folks who are in Silicon Valley think about building teams

and to have the most well-constructed disciplined team to be our team, you know, I think it resonates with people. And so I think it's like a mutual respect. You have Bramon, Stefan Clay, who are just world class.

You have Steve Kerr, who's world class. And then this other cast of characters that have been, you know, the supporting cast from Bogot to David Lee, Andre Aguadala, Kevin Duran. I mean, to have Igradala come back, I think, is such a big, you know, like such a great vote of confidence. Yeah, love it. Yeah. It's all great.

So, but a lot of news has been happening. All right. Let's talk about time. I know. We probably should fly to Boston. Yeah. I just got to keep working. We got to keep working.

I got a lot of deal memos. I got to get out this one for the syndicate. I'm behind on my deal memos. You know where you can get a lot of work done, turns out is a cross-country flight. I'm just saying. Look at Molly. Focus time. You've got full VC now.

Somebody tweeted like. Just enabling. Oh my God. Somebody tweeted this great tweet there. It might have been VC Brags on Twitter and they were like, VCs be like cut your staff, do layoffs, belt tightening, lower valuations. And meanwhile, sitting courts up. or coming from Grand Prix Miami to Sick Court side

for the Warriors. And I just responded with Who Me? He were like, no comment. It was the Who Me? Who me? The Who Me? With From Carmel, Anthony, when they asked him if he would ever consider playing on the bench. And he was on the thing. And he said, Who me? Me? It was a classic.

But listen, let's get into the news. There's a lot of news. And it looks like some news broke. And we can do live reaction here. Apple had its is right now. As we speak as we're talking. As we're talking, the worldwide developer conference is going on. And it's just being teed up right now.

And so maybe we could, Molly, you could set us up here about what's going on over there. And then we could watch a video and live react to it because we don't know. This is notes that came in while we were on air. Surprise. So this is live reaction. Like a CNN kind of report. I've just really been waiting for there to be a big breaking news alert that's like Apple announces, it hears you about the Bluetooth thing.

fixing it. So far, I have not gotten that breaking news alert. Had it been a notification while I was in the car taking my kid to work, I wouldn't have received it because Bluetooth doesn't work in my car anymore. Bluetooth gate continues. Bluetooth gate goes on. However, Apple has announced, but enough about me, Apple has announced a bunch of new iOS 16 features. You can now customize the theme colors and layout of your lock screen. Sometimes I get to the point where I'm, describing these Apple events and I'm like, we're still doing this? We really are? Yeah. We're really talking about customized lock screen. Sure.

Widgets? Okay. Yeah. Some slightly cooler things. You can, the kids these days all use iMessage as their social network. It is the group chat of choice. And Apple seems to have realized that, which is cool. They are now bringing a SharePlay API to iMessages, which means you can actually watch

videos live together, which is cool. Oh, wow. Like a watch party. Like a watch party. And you know how? I mean, they're always sharing like a YouTube video and you got to watch it and then tell people what you thought or like, hey, play at the same time. I think that's actually like as a great feature.

Because people have been saying for years that I message could be a social network. I mean, it really could be like a privacy first, you know, non-public social network. And that's how people use it with group chat. So this is actually, I think, a super cool. You don't want to be the green. You don't want to be the, what is it? You don't want to be the green bubble in the group. Oh, man, I am really not for the green bubbles.

I told my teams no more. X-Day on the green bubbles. I am not paying for, I'm not reimbursing green bubbles. It's like if you're going to be in the VC land, you've got to have an iPhone. I mean, and I know they're never going to, but just please hurry up and, like, they need to release I message as a platform. And it's never going to happen. This is a sticky thing. Because it sells iPhones.

It sells iPhones. I tried to move to Android. And I was parallel, I was doing a parallel thing. And I was like, okay, I'm going to get off this iOS and I'm going to go full Google stack. And I tried. And I was using Chrome a whole bunch. And it was I message that kept me. So they know that's what's keeping me.

Absolutely. And I looked into all these third party tools of like how to get I message on your Windows desktop. And like, they're like, well, you can set up an IMac and then do like a remote thing and pop it up in a window. And I'm like, so I buy a second. Take an old second computer and I'm, you know, like logging into it. And use it as an I messages terminal? As a terminal that I'm opening up in a second window, like, you know, doing a remote thing. And I was like, oh, God, this is so complex.

Can Apple please just let the world use this? And they would take over. But the profits from the iPhone are worth more. So I guess they make the screen. That's the sun in their universe. Here's a 72 minute. Here's a 72 second clip. Yeah.

We'll talk to you on the other side. And now we're adding three of the most highly requested features to messages. First, have you ever sent a message only to immediately realize you didn't quite say what you intended? Well, no worries, because now you can edit any message you just sent, so embarrassing typos can be a thing of the past. Second, have you ever wished you'd never sent that message at all? Nice. Well, good news.

Now you have undue send, so you can immediately recall a recent misfire. Thank you! And finally, you can never mark any thread is unread. A perfect tool if you don't have time to respond in the moment and want to be sure to come back to a message later. Oh, wow. Unread. We just got punked by our own producers.

We just got bugged by our own producers. I was like, wait a minute. That was the actual Apple. I don't like that would be hilarious if they did that, but they did. That was us. They didn't. Holy cow. Bravo producer Nick.

Shut the front door. Accurate. it because, I mean, right? This is the kind of like... I'm so hyped right now. Usability, awesome sauce. Okay, hold on. Three things we just saw.

Number one, you can edit a message for a typo. Auton correct. You can take ducking and make it... The right word. The right word. Thank you for saving me. Number two, you could take that shit back. If you said something,

I'm not saying I've said something to a spouse or a friend that I, you Immediately after hitting the send button was like, oops. Or just wrong thread. Like wrong thread happens all the time. Like the simplest person is just wrong thread. You're like, ah, crap,

that was not for you. That was for my husband. Or, you know, I get that from like my girlfriend, Christine all the time. And it's always like, what are we having for dinner?

Dada, she's like, dang it. I'm like, because our names start with them. Right. Both of them. So now,

and then also you have, um, mark as unread. The simple email feature, which allows you, instead of saying, remind me of this, it's like,

okay, I'm going to keep it on read so I know to reply to it. Of those three, take a moment here, Molly, which one is the most awesome for you? Most awesome for you. So this has a lot to do with you, Molly, and your personality. What do you, if you could only have one, which one would you won't have? I mean, it's so terrible because I feel like you.

You already know what a like a control freak I am. Like I can't live with a typo. I can't. For me, it's the typo. It's a hundred percent of the typo. I don't send messages I want to recall very often. No. Sometimes I do forget things.

The typo is very close to the mark as unread, though, because the worst thing in the world for any interaction is when someone sees that you've read their message, but you haven't answered. Yes. So if you can mark it as unread and it doesn't show up as red to them, then they're like, oh, she hasn't seen it yet. It's okay. She's not ignoring me. As opposed to it shows up as red and she knows. And yes, by the way, chat. But yeah, of course all this stuff came from WhatsApp.

Yeah, of course. That's what everybody does now. Well, I mean, it's specifically Apple. They're like, go ahead. Specifically Apple. They're always like, make whatever features you want. Mine now. Two years later, three years later, we'll add it.

You know, when we're, yeah. Like, we dunk on Zuckerberg a lot for stealing everybody's stuff. But let's be real, Apple pioneered this model. Well, Apple does it. They bring you this thing. With a time delay. And I think their time delay is intentional, Molly. This is my theory.

Yeah. They want to let their app developers exploit all these new features, test them. That's their R&D department. And then when those, but you don't want to piss them off. So what Zuck does is, oh, you came out with spaces. Oh, you came out with stories. Oh, you came out with ephemeral messages, lenses. I am in a race to get that onto our platform in a short period of time because he doesn't

have an app store. So why does he care if he upsets Evan Spiegel, our friend from the Warriors, him. What does he care? He doesn't care. Yeah. But Apple does have an issue. So if they were to steal these features, the people in the app store would be like, that's not fair. And then you would have this vibe like Amazon started getting. Hey, you're studying our data. You know we're getting downloaded a lot. And then you made an Amazon basics. So Apple is brilliant. These features, as somebody pointed out, have been out for what, five years in different messaging platforms? Totally. So they had plenty of head start. It's literally less, this is such a good start, exploit it. We're not going anywhere.

We own the platform. So good observation that they basically are like, we'll give you this head start. We'll make sure that our own users are like clamoring for this. So that by the time they get it, they're just like, Apple is our God, line up for more. And then they could say, look, in the interest of fairness, you had five years to build an audience and you just didn't. Well, I mean, based on the Supercut are very genius producers who are being very well managed I will say by management is doing a very

good job here. I think that this is a direct result of death management by me but they have more time allocated to do creative things and that was a very creative thing to do so shout out to Nick who that was adorable. I love it. I love it. I love it's great about what Nick just did with this video is that video just perfectly encapsulates this theory I have, which is they wait three, four, or five years, and then people forget about

the feature. And then when you get it, you're like, oh, my God, it's a new feature again. It's amazing. Oh, my God, it's amazing. You can edit. It's like, but you can do that. It's like being in a cult where they come along and they're like, now you can have hamburgers.

And you're like, oh, what are you about to say? It's a cheeseburger. They're like, and now is our new innovation. It's six ounces of ground. between two pieces of bread with cheese. We think you're going to love it. The cheeseburger and be like, oh my God, a cheeseburger. In classic Apple style, they would start with a hamburger and then two years later they'd add

cheese and you'd be like, oh my God. They charged you extra for the cheese. If you want with your cheeseburger, you can pay $199 for the cheeseburger stand. Exactly. If you want to spend another $99, we'll put it in a box. You get, we get them. Okay, so what else? So that's the I messages stuff.

There's the lock screen thing, which like, yay, whatever, customize your phone. People love that stuff. Apple also announced this is big coming for the Buy Now Pay Later space, which has had some issues later. Some issues. Apple announced Apple pay later. APL? They're putting out an APL. They're putting out an APL so that you can use your, which is interesting because as we've discussed,

like that's how a lot of people are using their Apple card and by a lot of people, I mean like me. Like when I buy any Apple products, I am respectively using Apple Pay later, but now they're rolling it out for, I guess, buying other items with Apple Pay 2. You can sort of buy now pay later with it. All right. There's no video for it. It's not explained, but obviously it's very basic.

We don't know yet if we know they were doing this for Apple products, but how this integrates into other commerce experiences, I guess is an unknown. But I guess if somebody signs up for this and you use Apple Pay, and I'm increasingly using Apple Play because of its simplicity. And I'll tell you something, Apple Pay on your watch is next level. So I was using a, I had a very frustrating moment. I was indignant, in fact. I was using me, parked by the ferry building and had to use a parking meter.

And it said you could NFC this, you use your watch and it didn't work. and I was outraged. Because when I went to get my blue bottle coffee, I was able to beep, beep, ding, pay for it. And then, you know, I went to, I was doing another experience recently. I'm trying to remember what it was, but it was another food experience where I was ordering from a kiosk. It was in the airport, and I paid with my Apple Watch.

And it's so delightful to not take out your phone or your wallet and just it's pretty awesome. Watch. It's great. Now, what if I could say? I buy this blue bottle coffee. And listen, it's not cheap. Molly, this is like six bucks.

I keep paying later. It's eight now with inflation. If I could do that $6, I could pay later, I could do four easy payments of $1.50 over the next four months with no interest. No interest. Oh, my Lord. I would only be paying $1.50 for that coffee in some way. And they show the, I just dropped this in the chat.

If we can pull it up because there's a good screenshot of how it would look. So you have this option pay in full or you just do a little slider pay later. And then it's like, oh, okay, 46, 27 every two weeks, four payments. And it shows you in two weeks, in four weeks, in six weeks, how much it is, no interest, total cost. I mean, to be honest, it's like way more transparent than the buy now pay later options now. Yes. What I do think is interesting and a thing that drives me absolutely insane about Apple Pay is that it looks like, you have to use your card, your Apple card.

Huh. I don't know if that's true. I mean, it just says. I think it would do Apple Pay because I fill up like five, well, I shouldn't say this. Somebody's still my phone. But I put five grand on my Apple Pay like at the start of the year. Right.

So you could do it with whatever probably. Oh, that's smart. I want to do that. And I have the card set up to auto pay. So I will use my card from time. But I'm just always using Apple Pay for everything. And it's just so delightful. So it says Apple Pay later is available everywhere Apple Pay is accepted online or in app.

using the MasterCard network. That's from Apple. Oh, she could do it on anything. So that would mean any card that you've loaded into Apple Pay. That's great. Because if it was just tied to the card, because one thing that drives me crazy about Apple Pay is that even though I have set my Chase card as my default, because those are the best points in the business,

it always wants, it always defaults to using the Apple card to pay first. And I'm always like, no. But if you've just set up Apple Pay with either cash or any card or a debit card or whatever, it looks like you'll be able to use them all. Which is interesting. They've just, but you have to apply. Hold on a second.

I think I underestimated what's happening here. Because my first question was, I guess they're going to have to make a deal with each merchant or something. And I'm reading here from the release, Apple Pay Later is available and everywhere Apple Pay is accepted online or in app using the MasterCard network. Okay, those are the qualifiers. So if they use Apple Pay and it's MasterCard, because I guess they,

you know, the fees matter here. You can do this. which means, I mean, everybody supports Apple Pay now. It's like becoming a thing. So this means they're going to have a footprint that's much bigger than a firm or any of the other people doing this. In other words, it's being done not on a merchant by merchant basis. It's being done on like a platform basis.

This is really disruptive. I mean, what is this going to do to a firm stock? Do we have, because who are the, is there any other publicly traded? Our firm has to be getting. wall up right now. I think it already is.

Let me look. I'm going to just pull it up real quick because yeah, no, this is a, this is actually a huge

deal. Down 3% 2.87. So it's actually moderately bad. And I had heard that I actually heard that

Max Levchin was on CNBC today. So I mentioned that was a preemptive. In the past five days, they're down 20%. So it's obviously

been a rough ride for them. And I don't even know since the peak, but that's one of those stocks that got a mega wallop. They were at $168, November 4th. They're now at $24. And so they are down 85% from the peak.

Peak trow, 91%. Oh, my Lord. And now Apple just came and said, like, peace out. Now, as we recently looked up, Apple has about a 51% market share in the United States. So it's not like everybody in America is all of a sudden going to be using this. You have to have Apple pay set up and have your stuff in there. Just the most well-heeled customers. Just the people who buy the most stuff.

I know. I mean, this is like, you know, I think there's like generally, after my years as a business journalist, I have realized that there is generally an underestimation of the importance of things that are related to financial stuff. Like overall, right? I was talking about this this weekend at a conference with, in relation to climate. Like, guys, it feels like there's not a lot happening. in politics, but there's a ton happening in money and that's actually more important.

This is that. Like, that's great that you can customize your lock screen or whatever, but Apple just started dominating payments. Dominating. And here's the thing, they made it so easy. So you look at crypto and crypto's like, we're a better payment system. I don't know. I open up my phone every day and the user interface is so great on this.

And now I can spread my payments out over six weeks. Not that I need to, but why wouldn't I, to your point? There's no interest. There's no interest. And so time is money. Listen, I'm not the customer here, but I was the customer probably 15 years ago. And 15 years ago, this would have been meaningful to me when I was, well, maybe 20. When I was living more on a month-to-month quarter-to-quarter basis, this is significant.

What's really interesting about this, Molly, is if you think about Apple's competitive advantages, they have all the money. With a $200 billion-plus hedge fund, they don't need to go to anybody to secure a facility. Yep. So a firm or any other buy now pay later company, they need to set up money and pay interest on it in some way and then there's some margin here. Apple could just make this a feature.

So for them to float your money for six weeks, cost nothing. And for you to buy a phone every two years and make them $600 in profit and to use the app store and make them probably another 600 in profit with that 30%. And if you have Apple card and you end up, and also they have, and I hate to say this, right, Apple is they're big on privacy, but this also gives them a lot of insight into data, shopping data, like a lot, a lot. If you have the Apple card, they're taking a transaction fee every time that you use that Apple card to do these purchases.

I mean, this is just like, if this is actually how Apple discovers a new solar system, if you will. because this is a huge deal. But also, it still sells iPhones because you can only do this on Apple devices. It's freaking genius. It's so genius. So they also have an API, which is interesting,

for the lock screen. So what this means is anybody can build a lock screen experience. In other words, you have the app store, you make an app there, you know, the Peloton app, let's say, or Spotify.

Better example. And you got the Spotify watch app, right? It's extension of that. And then you have the Spotify widget, you know, that you could float on your, you know, desktop or your iPad desktop or your phone. Or when you swipe left, there's that little area that can, it's not the control center, but that's the other area for like notifications. What this means is there's another app extension essentially. So what could you do with the phone is locked? You pick it up and you see something.

So let's watch this 50-6-second clip where Craig from Apple Explains. Sometimes notifications can cover up your personal photo, so we've rethought how they appear. Notifications now roll in from the bottom of the lock screen as you receive them, and you can choose to hide them throughout the day. Now, sometimes you get a bunch of notifications from an app, like when you're following the score of a basketball game. Well, now there's a better way to keep tabs with something called Lod. live activities. Live activities make it easier to stay on top of things that are happening in real time, right from your lock screen. And for developers, starting in an update to Iowa 16 later this year, they can use the Live Activities API to create these compact and glancable experiences. This will

make it really easy to follow that NBA game, track the progress of an Uber ride, see how you're doing on your workout, and more. All while letting the other ELBORs, elements on the lock screen shine. All right. Another winner. Small thing that's existed on the Android for a long time. Like a long time. Like a long time.

Yeah. But what an amazing cheeseburger. I'd like to try it. I've never had a cheeseburger. I know Android users have this, but do you think if I give you like $99, I could also have ketchup? I mean, awesome. Absolutely.

Like, honestly. Slide up. This again. What color ketchup would you like? Existed before. Existed before. But that is freaking awesome to not. There's so much stuff that I do on my phone all the time that I don't want to have to unlock it to monitor like a time, like a song playing.

I mean, they have those kind of like little widgets, but they don't totally work. The Uber thing is awesome. No, it's, yeah. The Uber one is the best one. The Uber one is the best one. I mean, to just know it or DoorDash or Instacart to see them approaching or Domino's has their little status bar. You can have a little Amazon. Where's my stuff?

Except Amazon won't do it because they're an ambiguous fight or whatever. Whatever. Yeah. Whatever Amazon. This is brilliant. And you know what's really interesting. that we're starting to see here is Apple protecting our privacy.

I mean, if you want to get really cynical about this, I did a tweet about it. Oh, I do. Somebody named Seth Miller said the audacity after decimating the entire economy. Now, I don't know who Seth Mills 21 is, but let's see if I can find his title, CEO of Rapp Chat App.

Okay. So he's in the ecosystem of the many, like probably small companies that was, you know, injured by. Yeah, so here, look at this person. This change. If we can pull up the screenshot, I guess he got an upsell when he was in maybe the news product, and it says personalized ads. So if you click on his tweet and you click on the screenshot, let's zoom in on that.

And I'll just read you what it says. Personal ads and Apple apps such as the App Store and Apple News help you discover apps, products, and services that are relevant to you. We protect your privacy by using device-generated identifiers and not linking advertising information to your Apple ID. turning on personalized ads increases the relevance of ads shown. Turning on personalize increases the relevance of ads shown by letting us use data like account information, app and content purchases, and where available the types of news stories you read. Apple does not track you or share your personal information with any third party. So anyway, Apple 12 years after Facebook perfected personalized ads has launched personalized ads. but Apple can do personalized ads

because they're storing your data on your phone, I would think, and not sharing it with folks. And they're using it in their app store and news apps to help you discover apps and products and services relevant to you. So they did it differently, so it's okay. Is it, though? We do not, by the way, they do not say

that they are storing this on device. And I am certain that they're not. There's no way they could be storing some permission on device. device. Otherwise, they couldn't offer you personalized anything. Like, they need to be able to. Well, you're saying like, because of speed? No, I'm saying they need to aggregate data around you, otherwise they can't target you. Well, here's what they could. They could have a hundred psychographic categories, right? Like NBA lover, car lover, et cetera. And they get, let's say they just

had a hundred on your phone. You know, so you like cash, you play casual games or you play, you know, strategy games, whatever game category you're in, whatever. they keep that on your phone. And it's going to, you open up your news app or you open up your app store and it says, hey, listen, this phone likes casual games and strategy games, cars and the NBA. And the ads, people who are buying ads can say, can pick from those psychographic categories, but they can't target you, which, you know, unlike, say, Facebook. So I guess they could do it technically.

It wouldn't be able to do it in real time, like in a search, right? or in your feed in real time because that would take it being on the server, I think, and be faster. But who knows? We'll try to find out. Yeah. We'll try to find out. I mean, it's like crazy hypocritical.

It's dirty as hell. It's dirty as hell. And it was always coming. I mean, we've been saying this for, we've been saying, I think we've probably been saying this on some level, at least I have for half a decade or longer, which was like Apple has a ton of data around you about you. It is only a matter of time before they want to monetize that data. Full stop.

Yeah, but. And this is that. It is that. And it's saying, we're only going to do this, though, in our walled garden. It'll only be the data, which is just like, well, you know, we're not going to follow you across the web the way that Facebook did. Here's a big difference, Molly. You have to give them this. They're asking you to opt into it with a very understandable message.

Right. So what percentage of people would. Which they didn't do at first. By default, when iOS 15 came out, it was not. It was up down. Maybe they weren't doing personalize. changed it. No, no, they changed it. They specifically got in a lot of trouble and then changed it. So if Facebook did this and Facebook said, hey, we want to personalize ads to you. Is that okay?

I would feel a lot better about Facebook. I'll be honest. But, you know, burying this stuff in the interfaces. This is where I think defaults matter. So I will give, I'll give Apple like a B on this. You might give them a C or D. But I think it's like a B for me. I mean, I'll give them a B on interface. And clarity. I'm going to give them a C or D on opting into targeted ads at all. On like targeted advertising only ends badly. And it shouldn't be necessary. Like that's, I don't want that.

And I just, I'm glad I can opt out. But the fact that I can opt out, but I like know it exists now makes me suspicious in a way that I wasn't before. It was like, I think that was Apple's moat. It feels off brand. Yeah. I think that's a really good insight. The other important insight I want to share with everybody is, and there's a lot of people commenting on Domino's

and the fact that I know the Domino's interface for the personalized screen. Okay, let me defend myself. Why would you have to? Domino's is awesome. Domino's regular pizza is like a trashy delight, but it's trashy. I agree.

I would never order, like I'll go to like a really good brick oven place. I'll get rid of it. But I have to say, I know you're going with this. Then crust pepperoni. is not pizza. It's not pizza, Nick. Producer Nick is absolutely in line with me on this.

It's like having some other thing. It's like a little cracker. It's like a cracker with cheese and pepperoni. It is the perfect, most delightful thing you can order for your daughters when watching Obi-on or the Mandalorian and you've got to. I'm not saying like, you know, listen, I try to be the best dad I can. but sometimes you're caught in the crossfire. And you got kids yelling and screaming at you,

and nobody's happy, mom's not home, I'm a solo dolo, I am just like, one hand I got the Domino's app, the other hand I got Disney Plus, and I'm like, I got to get these three girls,

you know, under control. I'm like, oh look, Obiwa and Mandalorian, boom, boom, oh look, I ordered Domino's, and all of a sudden the world's right. I got the Domino's thin crust coming. They love the thin crust. I love this. They do like their chicken too now. They have little chicken nuggets there.

Also, absolute 100% shout out to Domino's for building their own delivery infrastructure. Yes. Their stock has gone 10x over the last 10 years. Listen, Domino's nice of you to make it a business story, but also it's delicious. I have been telling, I have been telling Uber publicly for a long time, buy Domino's. Yes. Buy Dominoes. Isn't Domino's?

There is, this is a real stock story. Like, I think Domino's is like, the stock that's up the most over the last decade. 10x over the last 10 years. It's unbelievable. But isn't it more than almost any other consumer stock, if not any? Like, there was something, there was some crazy stat that was like, if you look at the stock that's gained the most in the last 10 years, you'll never guess.

You know, it was like one of those. Like, you'll never guess which stock it is. And it's freaking dominoes. I mean, pull up the five-year chart for Domino's. I listen. Pretty nice. It's a complete trash. It's only 13 billion.

And Domino's is awesome. Although. I have a question about Domino's. I recently had to rank cheap pizza. with my son and I was like, you know, it's a tough one for me because dominoes is close to the bottom once you factor in like mountain mics and roundtable. And you know what is actually weirdly the best cheap pizza in the world? Chuckie cheese. Oh, chucky cheese isn't bad. Yeah. That pizza is delicious. I've, I was like, this is going to be the worst pizza I've ever had. And I was like, I could have a slice. I thought though, no, it's good. No, it's good. No, no, no, no. I thought though it's no. No, it's good. One quick dominoes. I thought there's good. I thought though. No, no, no. I thought there's no. One quick domino's there. their regular cheese pizza is repulsive, I think. That's horrible. That's accurate.

That's accurate. Thin crust is great. Thin crust is transcendent. It's a domino's cracker. It's a domino cracker. Domino Cracker pizza is great. It's a little appetizer. It's great as an appetizer.

We're having this tonight. Pallet cleanser. I'm getting this tonight. Well, here's the thing. But so very, we have two very important points here about Domino's. We do. Number one, thin crust pizza. Number two, they built their own app and their own delivery infrastructure.

It is so freaking fast. It's disturbing. Like they get there fast. Now, the app's not perfect, but it is a great user experience. And I want to know Dominoes. Are they franchises each store and independently operated? Or is it a, are you just an employee of that? Because it does feel like they have.

I think the benefit of franchising, Molly, is and Nick, producer Nick's online, is that the franchisee has a higher motivation than just a GM, like if you had a general manager of the store. So they, yeah, yeah, so Domino's prides itself in branding excellent around its team members and franchises. Much of Domit's business has come

from its franchise business model, which is an internally based franchise system. I don't know what an internally based franchise system is. But whatever it is, it works, because God bless them. Like, they care. They are racing to get you your pizza. And they do it right.

And you can't, I mean, at least the dominoes that I've driven by, I don't know, maybe like some of them in the Midwest or the south are different. But in the Northeast, like, you can't even go inside them. They're just delivering. Most are cloud kitchens. Yeah, there's kitchen. And some of them now have pickup. So if you want to save, like, they give you two bucks off if you pick up yourself.

So they do it. All right, here we go. NerdWallet, 2020. initial franchising fee. The Domino's initial franchise fee is 10,000 for building a new store of franchise or franchising a closer. What? No.

No way. I'm going to order 10 today. What are you talking about? I've spent $10,000 a year on this stuff. You're going to order a store? Well, I mean, I think if you want to open one of these. It's going to become a Domino's colonizer. I would totally colonize Domino's.

I would like to point out. It's long overdue for to have like a feta cheese pizza. The Greeks are coming. In reasons why, I love my life in Oakland. We very much are. Listen, we should have a lamb. Don't you talk about us.

Lamb lovers. Lamb lovers pizza. Let's go. Get a pizza place and a wine shop and just reclaim the brand on behalf of the Greeks. I went to the Oakland Greek festival and I always try the Greek wine and I'm always like, yeah, no, no. Okay. I can I get dominoes in my freaking house, by the way.

For the second house in a row in Oakland, get it together. Get it together, Oakland. Okay, on the low side, you can expect to invest around 145 on the high end total can climb about 500,000 initial investment. Franchising free, $10,000 for building a new store. Net worth requirement is $250,000, check. Cash liquidity requirement is $75,000 check. I'm qualified.

I could open up 10 of these tomorrow, but I think you only get a certain area. So it's probably they've all been taken. You get a corner. Well, you could open one that delivers to my. house because again I'll do it. Pardon my language. I'm on my second location in Oakland

where I cannot get Domino's. This would be a funny thing to do. This is for this weekend startups to open. Just open like a personal one. Like you know what? Open a Domino. All right. So I'm going to put poor Prash is going to be like,

you're welcome the rest of my neighborhood. You're welcome. We did this for you. We did this for you. We did this for you. We did this afternoon. You know he is. Crazy project.

I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. All right. Back to half. Is Jason's dominoes. com. Is that domain taken or not?

It is now that you mentioned a live on the air. Hurry up, hurry up. Never mentioned domains on the air. Fresh if you're watching live, hurry up. You better, you best be typing.

You better get those little fingers going. All right. Also, they're adding a new chip to a silicon family. Apple is adding, they're calling it M2. The M2. So recently, you know, recently when I said

the iPhone is the sun and the whole company revolves around it, and we were like to have and ship that many products that aren't accessories, I should acknowledge that the chips are a big deal. These are a phenomenal technological accomplishment. The vertical integration of making their own chips gives them an insane technology mode. And not to mention the machines are bananas.

I would like to edit myself and give full credit to Apple building its own chips, which I did a story about years ago being like, this is going to be kind of a big deal. And it turns out it's a huge deal. And the chips just keep getting better. I mean, you buy one of these It really does incentivize you to buy new machines It was like the old day

It reminds me of the old days of the Pentiums Remember when like a new Pentium chip would come out And you'd be like, oh my God, and the Intel inside They play the tune and you're like, whoa, this computer is a lot faster than my last computer And when your computer's a lot faster, that feels great Yeah I mean it just hasn't felt that way

In desktop computers or iPads for a long time And then you get these M1s And they hit two notes they're discernibly faster and then have absurdly more battery life so that combination is super compelling now will they keep up the battery life march I don't think so

but because it's kind of at the point of being unnecessary when you're a laptop lasts the whole day you're kind of like okay we're done here but having this incredible amount of powers they'll deprecate that battery though we all know they don't know I mean they deprecate performance because they start to remember they got sued for intentionally slowing down your iPhone to preserve battery life?

I mean, for one thing, the actual just usage of batteries will over time deprecate the battery life and they probably will make it hard and expensive to replace. They made it hard to buy a new laptop. This is where if Apple really wanted to make a ton of money, imagine the back of your iPhone could open up like the old BlackBerrys or Nokia's and you can swap your battery out again. Wait for Apple to launch that again. And they're like, and now the newest concept in smartphones, a replaceable battery. And we're all like, oh my God, go!

They'll be like, you can insert an SD card to expand your own memory. And be like, whoa, blah, blah, blah, blah. You can put an SD card at every. You can have two SIM cards. It's like, what? Do you believe in miracles? And now of coming from Apple in 2025, you've used wireless AirPods. But wouldn't you like at some point to not have to worry about battery life?

For those of you who would like a crystal clear connection, we present the 2.5 inch jacked. The headphone jack. Oh! They had the headphone jack back. The crowd goes loud. They did that. They did it with the last M1. Yeah.

They were like, and by the way, we've now added the HDMI and an SD card. And we're like, they did. And they were like, it has ports. And now our latest feature, we've removed the touchpad that nobody ever used or wanted. And like, go! Go! You literally got rid of the

touch bar that was annoying and nobody wanted. Literally no one news. And then they bragged about it. They didn't just quietly kill it. Oh no, they were just like, now. Some of our creatives have told us. You could put your fingers anywhere on the keyboard

and it won't start doing things. Yes. And now you don't have the constant distraction of a slider bar popping up that you don't know what it does. Textual keys are now back to, non-contextual. You're welcome.

You're welcome. No, they were literally like, some folks in our community have told us. They prefer the focus of, and they prefer not carrying six dongles in the bottom of their bag, forgetting them, and then wanting to kill themselves

when they get to their destination and having to Amazon FedEx overnight and anchor dongle. Some of our people have told us. Some people have told us. They're going to reintroduce Bluetooth. They're going to be like now. You can wirelessly connect your phone to your car.

What? Go! Oh, God, Apple, we love you. This has been the same temperature, by the way, for months, for four months. I'm holding up my Amber Mug, for those of you who are not watching this. Amber Mug figured out Bluetooth. Amber Mug did, but then Apple broke it, so I can't change the temperature on my ember mug. I just hope it's not going to cook the milk.

I got to say, I probably have a pretty good MPS score right now in terms of as an employer. Between the Ember Mug and the second row, Corside Seats, I think MPS score is pretty high right now. Would you recommend working with Jail to a friend? That's a 10. That's a 10. I mean, look at all these presents. I got a red flag right here.

I got two red flags. Two red flags. Yeah, those cost about $3.00. You're really easy to please. I am so easy. I was just like, oh my God, this is so fun. I got you a kitchen magnet. It's got the Golden Gate Bridge on it.

It worked. It worked. I'm in. Something that's not working or working too well, depending on which side of the equation you are on. It works. Yeah, it works. It's hackers and investment frauds and drug dealers and finance.

Turns out an investigation by Reuters has shown that at least 2.35 billion of illicit funds, again, hackers, investment frauds, drug dealers. You know, the dark economy, the black market has been laundered through finance between 2017 and 2022. Now, again, this is an investigation by Royalties. They found this. I don't know if I have to say allegedly or this is according to their reporting. Allegedly, blah, blah, blah. I mean, we're not blaming any specific person. So I think we can probably fairly say.

I mean, it's the CEO's fault ultimately, but I'm not blaming any specific person because, but you are in charge and you're all the one who's going to go to jail. I mean, you just went ahead and built Silk Road 2 thinking there's a market need here. But, you know, I'm not accusing you of anything. We're not accusing anybody of anything, but you're going to jail. You may want to be, you may want to find a friendly jurisdiction. should perhaps query the Tether guys. And we're there hanging out.

Where's the CEO of Tether? You might want to buy the house next to him. I might want to use Duck, Dock Go for that too, by the right. Set the table, Molly. Set the table here. What's going to? As only you can, Molly.

Finance, of course, is a crypto exchange that has about 120 million users globally. They process hundreds of billions of crypto transactions per month. They were actually banned in the United States in 2019. And then opened an entirely separate exchange called Binance.us that reportedly did comply with U.S. Crypto Exchange laws, because ironically,

even though it sometimes feels like we have none, we do have a few. Yeah, keep going. So between 2017 and 2021, that's when I think they started, right? And that's when the laundering started. In May of 2021, so about a year ago, the U.S. Department of Justice and the IRS launched this investigation into finance on allegations of these money laundering and tax fraud issues. Then in August 2021, Binance enacted Know Your Customer, KYC, and anti-money laundering AML requirements for all users. Prior to that, they had what Reuters referred to as, quote,

weak AML and KYC checks that made it super easy to hide transactions. Evidently, current and former finance execs had raised concerns about the lack of these protections back in January, according to Reuters, to the CEO and founder, but that person, CZ. He's the guy CZ. CZ, and that's like his only name, right? Yeah, I guess. He's like Madonna in that way.

He's like Biancy. CZ did not listen. So basically three months after the DOJ and IRS come knocking, they put in K.YC and AML. So they ran this up, they got the market share, they did it illegally,

allegedly. They get investigated, and then they tighten the things up. So this seems like a trend. I dare I say this is like a playbook now. You know, we say in Silicon Valley like move fast break things or never ask for permission, you know, never beg for forgiveness, don't ask for permission kind of thing. The problem with CZ, his nickname for Chang Peng, Zao is the problem with this process is,

as we've seen, if you're in health care or say in insurance or finance, you don't get to move fast and break things. If you're making a video game or a social network or something that doesn't impact people acutely in a highly regulated industry, you might want to pursue this, Molly. Like, sure, move, fast, and break things. But as we saw with Theranos, as we're seeing here, and as we saw with Xennafits and, you know, insurance fraud over there, where they were, I guess, faking people's insurance certifications. like there are some highly regulated places where you could, you know, if you move too fast, get in trouble. And if you do want to reinterpret the laws, which Airbnb, Lyft, Uber said, hey, we think

that these laws from our interpretation, we're okay, you will then spend a decade with each jurisdiction, you know, and you may win some, you may lose others. And in the case of ride sharing, it won in, you know, 19. 98 out of 100 jurisdictions in the case of Airbnb, they won in probably 95 out of 100 places allow Airbnb. So you just got to be careful. You know, getting somebody a cheap taxi ride or a cheap hotel, again, slightly different. You have to look at the impact each of these has on society. An Instagram, you know, app or whatever, social network or video game, very low impact.

Transportation housing, medium impact. health, finance, insurance, massive. And you will have the hammer dropped on you. This is a lesson from this week and startup for founders. The end. Clip here. Here end is the lesson. Yeah.

And also, I mean, if you build a tool that just allows for the illicit movement of money without oversight, eventually, one, people are going to find that tool and use it for that. I mean, people are trying, you know, people are out here trying to use like Zell and Venmo to just avoid paying taxes and they've had to crack down on that, like, let alone creating sort of a new Silk Road style funnel for just hiding transactions at a massive scale, $2.7 billion. Also, there's this kind of bonkers situation where Binance invested $200 million in Forbes after Forbes itself released a leaked document called the Tai Chi entity, which alleged that CZ and Binance had created a corporate structure designed to intentionally deceive

United States regulators and secretly profit from U.S. crypto traders. So Forbes reports on this leak document, explains this structure as, quote, a strategic plan to execute a bait and switch, setting up an entity in the United States effectively and sort of like pretending that it was following the rules but wasn't is probably the TLDR on that. and then two years later in 2022 Binance announces a $200 million investment in Forbes like to buy them and shut him down for leaking this thing? It must be a coincidence.

I mean, don't all crypto companies buy decrepit old media brands. Isn't that like part of the playbook? Yeah, sure. I don't know. But had time blowed the lid off of sales force is like sketchy out. Totally. The only analogy I could think of it.

Of course they didn't. I mean, I think Mark Benioff just. wanted to have the time 100 and pick the time man of the year, or I should say person of the year. It's like at this point a sports team or a jet, but you just have so much money that a sports team or a jet doesn't even thrill you anymore

so you just want to. The timing is bizarre. The timing is absolutely bizarre. But does Forbes, are they the ones who, is it Fortune or Forbes that has the contributor network where like Forbes? Is that Forbes? Oh my God, it's so gross. It's like, I get all these people asking me to do interviews

or like I get mentioned in this and I'm like, why am I being mentioned in Forbes? I didn't get called by a journalist. And it's like, oh, no, that's the contributor network. I'm like, how do I know that? They're like, oh, do you see this little icon over here? That means it's a random person who we allowed to write about insurance on the site, who's an insurance broker?

And they write about themselves. And I'm like, do you need page juice that much that you created this thing? And I guess it's a, I think it's a talk about bait and switch. I think the Forbes bait and switch is like 90% of their traffic comes from these, you know, you know, self-promotional articles. And yeah, the contributors, contributors, whatever that means, free content. But then they have this facade of like, oh, these elite journalists theoretically, not elite, but, you know, there's some real journalists somewhere in the building.

And then they sell advertising and the advertisers are getting 90% garbage and 10%, you know, theoretically elite content. Yeah, great journalism. Anyway. Interestingly, and I had forgotten this, we did report or I did see that what they were going to do with Forbes was take it public via SPAC. And that plan was called off six days ago. This story has everything.

This is like Stefan on S&L. This story has everything. The hottest club to go to. The hottest club to go to is CZ in Hong Kong. It's right below tethered. The hottest spot in the world, and money laundered drug deal and Oh, God, Stefan.

media spack. Oh my God, we get all this. We are literally, we need to shake up the age range on this show because we are literally telling all the same jokes. No, we never had a Stefan joke on either. That's my favorite character for a long time. I know I love that one so much. And that is the perfect example, the perfect analogy for what's happening here. What they said was I think John Malaney is something guys.

He made his name. They said John Malaney would write that for whatever. A hater? Bill Hater. Yeah. And he wouldn't get to see it. Well, they would write one script. And then he would change things that were so outrageous that, you know.

He was always cracking out. Yeah. And he came up with this, which he said was a combination of just trying to keep it together. And the feeling of being in a club as a club kid taking ecstasy and like rolling too hard and be like. Oh, my God. That was the, I mean, Stefan as a character was. literally the greatest. So genius. Just type of been Stefan, S&L, best up.

It's the greatest. We must have watched like 30 of those a few weeks back for that exact same reason because it's brilliant. Sure we're next level. Okay, we've got to wrap up, but we got to talk about the, what's the guy's name? Elon, Alon. Elon Musk believes Twitter.

I was, I just had a conversation with somebody who referred to him almost like Ellen. Ellen. I was like, where do you, it's kind of nice to know that the permeation is not complete. Yeah. Well, here's the thing. Something, something Twitter.

Yes. And obviously it's a bot problem. And this price is either, as he said, in the all-end interview we did, like maybe the price gets negotiated, the deal gets canceled. But headline today. Headline today. Teet up, if you will. Headline today is that according to a letter from Elon Musk's lawyers in a SEC filing,

quote, Mr. Musk believes the company is actively resisting and thwarting his information rights and the company's corresponding obligations under the merger agreement. And the letter goes on to say, and this is kind of the key legal language should, must be trying to get out of this deal. This is a clear material breach of Twitter's obligations under the merger agreement. And Mr. Musk reserves all rights resulting therefrom, including his right not to consummate the transaction and his right to terminate the merger agreement. Yeah.

Now, Matt Levine from Bloomberg has written several times that this is like, that there is no such right. And that material impact is a very, very, very high bar to prove. But he has also gone on to say, you know, effectively like Musk is going to do whatever he wants and nobody's going to enforce the rules here. So well, and if you look at it, this is something that Twitter has been opaque about, you know, the bot problem. And so if they, I don't think any of us believe it's less than 5%, right? So if it is, in fact, more, or you get a bunch of data and it looks really bad, now that puts Twitter's board in a really precarious position, I think, which is, do you want to go

into discovery and have every conversation from engineers to the CEO, from the CEO to the board, and then 50 other conversations in between where you talk about how you're going to explain the bot problem to the public shareholders? And that is chaos. And we don't, like, what Twitter has said is, you know, it's really hard to measure this. Musk does not believe that. He has made it very clear. I keep calling him Musk like I'm trying to like distance myself from this story here.

Mr. Musk. Ellen has said. Elon has said over and over he does not believe that it's that hard to measure it. Twitter keeps saying it is hard to measure it. No, it's not hard to measure. I mean, I think you're 100% right. They probably don't want to go into discovery.

Nobody wants to deal with the toxicity of a long, long lawsuit. It seems to me. It's not possible to go over. Having zero knowledge whatsoever that what's happening here is he's going to, like, it's exactly what Matt Levine says, as usual. He's no walk away from the deal. Twitter could probably sue him, but they're not going to. He does what he wants. There's no rules.

I literally have no information on this. I haven't talked to Elon about it or anybody, but my 95% chance here would be a lower price or it doesn't happen. Yeah. I mean, it's, and also the price is overpriced now. So I would just, if I was Twitter, I shouldn't buy it. How do you feel about $34 in 20 cents? Yeah. Like, and maybe at 3420, maybe it's worth.

But that's not a very fun name. So he's, or a fun number, so he's probably not going to do it. No, it's still got 420 in it. 3420, 69. Oh, 3420. 3420. 3, 420. It is what it is.

Yeah. We're 42069, round up the penny. So we'll keep watching this, but I think it's going to be a summer of debate and You know, Scatine Arps is the largest, I believe still the largest law firm in the world. Like, they know what they're doing. Finally, as we wrap, Beijing is wrapping up. It's D.D. investigation. According to the Wall Street Journal, CCP investigators will complete.

I'm sorry, their investigation of Chinese ride-sharing company, D-D. The company's app will be restored to the Chinese app store as soon as this week after being removed almost a year ago. Stock was up 30% on the news. I have a horse in this race. Theoretically, Uber still owns a large position, so full disclosure there. But you remember, this has more to do with Chinese and American relations because they went public already. And we're doing great. And then China said no more companies from China on American exchange.

Exactly. That's what it was about. It was that D.D. went public on a U.S. exchange. And I mean, you know, you can only interpret it as sort of a revenge tour and a warning to other company is not to do that. It's the protectionism campaign in full force, but it looks like D-D-D-at-le-at-least is going to recover from it. Although during that time, the time of this investigation, yeah, stock is down 84% down to a market cap of $12 billion? Is this the low right here? $2.53? Oh, no, that's right now. That's today, June 6th. Yeah, it's up a little bit.

But, I mean, you know, so basically they were worth six times more or something like that. Oh, and relatedly, there's this nice note. Relatedly, Dedi will be delisting from the New York Stock Exchange and listing in the Hong Kong stock exchange. Kel Suprize. Yeah, Kel Suprize. Yeah, I mean, it's all going to be, I mean, basically all of these companies will just trade in Hong Kong and like the decoupling. We'll see how far the decoupling goes. It seems like right now, media finance, these things will be decoupled.

And then, you know, manufacturing, probably not. So, you know, maybe it was a bridge too far having, you know, our apps in China. We never got our apps in China having their companies listed here and them having less control over those companies and those companies having more Western influence in them, i.e. the boards of the companies, et cetera. So it is what it is. And more visibility, right? I'm sure that that would lead to, I mean, investors would probably get some visibility,

but I could imagine China. I'd be curious to know what visibility U.S. investors might have into the business as a result of D-D listing on New York Stock Exchange as opposed to Hong Kong. Maybe there's no difference. Basically, no, I think you're going to have to start obeying the securities laws of the West. And so, you know, that means, you know, information rights and, you know, where do you legally reside in terms of shareholder complaints, right? And then what influence does the Chinese government has?

Can the Chinese government take a company trading in the U.S. And then tell them they have to hand over their data or not. Well, if it's in Hong Kong, problem solved. There's super clarity here. Hong Kong is China. China is Hong Kong. You know, they're in charge the end. So I guess they just wanted to have complete control as opposed to questionable

or partial control over these companies. And now they have complete control over them. They're anybody buying Chinese stocks that are listed in Hong Kong, like, Good luck to you, but I would never do it because it's a black box over there. They can do whatever they want. They do do whatever they want. They could tell kids they can play 10 hours of video games or no hours of video games a week.

They can tell you you can have an education startup or not. They can tell you shared prosperity is the goal or maximizing shareholder revenue is a goal. They told everybody shared prosperity is a goal. It's a distinctly different benchmark than the West. In the West we say, you know, shareholder value is what you're going for. on the margins, ESG, stakeholder, this and that. But still, you're responsible for your shareholders first and foremost. And in China, shared prosperity is the goal.

So if you want to live in a communist country, you can move to China and have the stock market be run on shared prosperity, whatever that means. I encourage everyone, should you want to know what that's been like lately, my former marketplace colleague, Jennifer Pack, is in Shanghai. And she's a big foodie. and her Instagram, J-PAC Radio, P-A-K-K-Radio, has been the most fascinating dystopian look inside what that lockdown has looked like for two months. And it's basically just been her journey to like try to get food. And it's all these pictures of the like the government handouts when they come and like they have rotten vegetables or they have this.

And then they're trying to do this like barter thing. And I just am finding it like just as a look behind a curtain that you don't usually get to see. Go follow Jennifer Pack. because it is, it's absolutely been mesmerizing. Like for people who complained about the effectively non-existent actual quote-unquote lockdowns in the United States, like kids, you have no idea. I mean, her feet is making me really hungry, but I'm also looking at, you know, like day 58. Day 58.

It looks pretty, pretty slim pickings and day 57, pretty rough. You know, and she's a foreign journalist, effectively. like she's Chinese, but a journalist, you know, from the United States. And like, so she's in a pretty good neighborhood. They have like pretty decent access, relatively speaking. I don't think anybody in her neighborhood had to kill their pets. But like, it's just bananas to see the, and to read her captions and see the scramble that they had to go through to get to any one of these. And like she had to make like all these spring rolls because they got pork handed out from the government that was about to go bad.

So they had to make like 150 spring rolls to just be like, I don't know, we got to use up the government pork. Yeah. Crazy times. It's just so interesting. Well, you know, it's if you want to see you, Jennifer. It's a different world. Shout out, Jennifer. And yeah, I'm glad the lockdown's over.

I saw, you know, people running into the streets, getting to go out and eat food. So, yeah. I hope they. And, you know, Sweden ended their lockdown a year early. In the United States, it's basically everybody decided we're just going to go through the storm. you know, or people will have the choice to go through the storm or stay. We have a, we have a mask mandate back in our county. I heard that, yeah, Danbury and a couple of other places out there now have a mask mandate, but people are not doing it.

It's like Alameda County, yeah. There was a really interesting, interesting David Leonard piece. Now we've got plenty of show and I should stop talking, but interesting piece in the upshot in the New York Times. Where according to the data, masks work mandates don't. Like counties that had mandates had almost the same exact rates. even though a well-fitting N-95 actually does work to prevent, right, transmitting and receiving COVID. Yeah. Mandates make no difference because people are wearing cloth masks that are shi or they have their dicks hanging out because they're below their noses or they take them off to eat or whatever.

And Alameda County, of course, two months later, two months after the surge. If you lock everybody in their home or if you were to like, say, you have to wear an N95 and you inspected it and you walked up and down the plane and you had like police officers inside. tackling people who took their masks off to take a sip of coffee. Like, yes, it could theoretically work. But in practice, people are wearing bandanas. Right. And then Omicron is so contagious that the second you pull your mask down to like eat some food on a plane, boob, you got it.

Yeah, you're done. And we're done. All right, listen, it's been a lot of show. Anyway, we got to go. And we'll see you all tomorrow. It's going to be a big week. Stick with us. If you are a founder of a pre-Series A company, you haven't raised that series A yet, which is really hard.

Well, we wanted to invite you to Founder University. This is a two-day intensive course. It takes place on June 13th and 14th. It's remote. It's free. We limit the number of people who can come. We asked you to apply. And this virtual workshop is free for founders and helps you understand how to fundraise and pitch, how to hire great people, how to build a world-class product, how to execute on your sales and marketing and some growth techniques as well.

The launch team and I have been doing this for a long time. It has been amazing for us to get to know founders. And that's why we do it. Of course, we want to help folks as many as possible. That's part of our mandate. But really our mandate at launch here at this week in startups and, you know, the syndicate, which is where we invest, you meet and invest in companies, is we want to back builders. And so we use these events as a way to get to know you. And if you're building something and we see, you're credibly building something interesting in the world, well, then we want to invest in you. So truth be told, every time we do founder university, a half dozen of those people, we wind up funding in the next year or so.

So it's a great way for us to spend time with entrepreneurs. We're going to be joined by a lot of experts. My friend Becky DeGraugh, who's my attorney from Wilson Sincini, will be speaking at the event. FitBots co-founder Jesse will be speaking. Marlowe's CEO, Mary Fox will be speaking. So we get a bunch of our portfolio companies who have been crushing it and who have learned a lot. And we've seen that they are qualified builders.

We have them come speak at the event. So you see how we do things here at this week in startups and long. launch and the syndicate. We like to create a flywheel. We invest in people who come out of a founder university. Some number of them really crush it and become world-class companies. And it's not guaranteed. You have to do the work, folks. The ones who do, then we have them speak at a later founder university. So a lot of the great companies we've met came to a founder university. They got to know us. They learned something that was worth their time. And that's really what we do with the agenda. We try to make it worth your time to take two days off work,

essentially. Now, it's remote. So you can consider it your weekend, even though it's taking place around the week. You consider it professional development. And if you learn one or two important things about running a company, fundraising, growth, hiring, well, those one or two things will pay for those two days. I am absolutely certain of it. Now, you have to apply again so you can register at founder.d.university. Yes, it's a great domain. So go to founder.comiversity and sign up. We also have a course called angel.comiversity. If you want to invest in the companies, and you think the philosophy I've explained here about how I invest in companies, I'm invested in over or 300 of them.

If you think this is an interesting way to meet startups early, help them and invest in them, well, you can read my deal memos as we invest in new companies and you can join us on that adventure. And I do this through a course called Angel University that has raised close to $200,000 for charity and you can sign up for Angel University at angel. not university. We do it four times a year. Great program.

And it's just me and my partner, Mike Savino, talking about how we pick companies, how we evaluate them, how we diligence them, how we see. source them, like Founding University is a source of investment and deal flow for us. And that three or four hour course, actually I think it's more like four or five hours is well worth your time. All the proceeds from Angel University go to charity. And again, over $175,000, I think at this point it's gone to charity. I'm very proud of that work. And Founder University is free. But you do have to apply and we do pick people who have built a little bit of something. So we're looking for you to have some skin in the game. We have a Founder University 12-week program, which you can also see at

Founder.com. We'll be starting our third cohort shortly. And you can apply for that program. If you have not started building or your very early stages haven't incorporated yet, you're nowhere near the series A. You're kind of in the solo or co-founder situation and you're just starting to build. Maybe you've incorporated, maybe you have it. And that's a 12-week course. And that's another great one that we do.

So please join us, founder. Dot University. And if you want to invest in these great companies, angel dot university.