This Week in Startups - E1013: Decade Wrap-Up Roundtable! Garry Tan, Initialized Capital & Zach Coelius, Coelius Capital on the biggest hits & misses of the past decade: Trump, Theranos, Streaming, Mindfulness, Crypto, Tesla, WeWork, Amazon Prime, Vaping & more!

Episode Date: December 27, 2019

LINKS to brackets: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1zqc-2vDRl7e86USf4okiX8DRcXPzX1HW || https://www.canva.com/design/DADuVKZjuc4/9Qt3B4m4DU-Z_HxbuDTb6w/view?utm_content=DADuVKZjuc4&utm_campaign=designshare&utm_medium=link&utm_source=sharebutton 0:29 Jason intros Garry & Zach 3:02 Jason goes over the bracket-style breakdown 3:15 Best of the decade: Ride-Sharing vs. AI/ML 8:32 Best: Amazon Prime vs. 4G LTE 10:07 Best: Tesla M3 vs. Disney buying Marvel + Star Wars IP 14:15 Best: Streaming vs. Mindfulness 17:01 Garry's Best: AI/ML vs. 4G LTE 20:20 Jason's Best: Model 3 vs. Mindfulness 24:05 Zach's Best: Ride-Sharing vs. Streaming 25:12 Jason & Guests pick their biggest win from the last decade 29:20 Jason tees up worst of the decade bracket 29:45 Worst of the decade: 2016 Election Fiasco vs. City San Francisco/Amazon Eating the World/Snowflake Culture 38:01 Worst: ICO Madness vs. Zuckerberg 40:34 Worst: WeWork vs. Vaping 44:13 Worst: Juicero vs. Theranos 44:48 Zach's Worst: 2016 Election vs. ICO Madness 45:09 Garry's Worst: Amazon Eating the World vs. ICO Madness 45:56 Jason's Worst: 2016 Election vs. Zuckerberg 49:52 Jason's Worst: WeWork vs. Theranos 51:56 Garry's Worst: Amazon Eating the World vs. Theranos 53:47 At what stage does Garry & Zach like to invest in companies? 55:52 Championship round Jason: Mindfulness vs. Zuckerberg Garry: Mindfulness vs. Theranos Zach: Streaming vs. 2016 Election Fiasco 59:52 What topics will define the 2020's?

This Week in Startups is brought to you by Zendesk. The best customer experiences are built with Zendesk. Qualifying startups can join their startup program and get Zendesk products free for a full year. Visit Zendesk.com slash twist today to get started. And LinkedIn. To redeem a free $100 LinkedIn ad credit and launch your first campaign, go to LinkedIn.com slash this week in startups. Hey, everybody.

Welcome to This Week in Startus. your host, Jason Calacanis, and we got an amazing episode for the first time. We're going to do brackets. What are we going to do brackets for? The 2010 through 2020 period. We are here in 2019, about to go into 2020, the third decade of the new century and the new millennium. It's crazy. With me to fill out our brackets of what were the most important trends and stories of the teens, not the aughts, right? That was 2000 to 2010. This is the teens, 2010 to 2020. Gary Tan is back on the program. You are on episode eight. It's been a while. It's been a while. About a thousand episodes. We had you back. Yeah. Which is typically what we do. We wait a thousand episodes, so you'll be back on in

2029. Hopefully sooner, but. But a lot of change for you. When I met you, you're doing posterists, which was my favorite social media service of the time. Thanks for using it. It was amazing. You would email the secret email address. And I would take your photo off of your Blackberry and post it to Friendster, MySpace, whatever. Yeah. All the proto-social networks and Facebook only had, I don't know, a million, two million users, something like that. You were way too early. Yeah. Would you wind up selling it or shutting it down?

Twitter bought it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And now you're a venture capitalist. That's right. Along with Alexis. Yes, created Reddit. Had initialized. Yeah.

You guys are on your second or third fund? Fourth fund officially. Fourth fund? Yeah, yeah, 225. But we started with $7 million in 2012. Wow. So you guys have been... We've grown up.

You're all growns up. Yeah. Coinbase is your big win. Yep. Coinbase, Instacart, Cruise with this guy. Yeah, very well done. Awesome. And Zach Collius is back on the program.

Of course, he is started as a, well, you were an entrepreneur as well. And then you were one of the first syndicates on Angelist and then decided, screw it. I'll just create a $50 million fund. Both now, syndicate and fund. I'm a unique beast there. Yeah, we have the same structure. The whole fund is designed to facilitate.

the syndicate structure alongside it. Because it's a superpower having those, you know, I have 1,800 people who help me on deals now. Like, they do diligence for me. They send me stuff. Like, they tell me when I'm being stupid. It's like, how can you beat that? Like, it makes this fun look tiny.

I got 1,800 partners. He's got, what, five? Nothing. Yeah, you probably have under 99 LPs, I would assume. Yes. We have 3,300 members of our syndicate, and it's a similar phenomenon where we use them for referrals. It's like having this incredibly large scout program.

Yeah, it's amazing. And so here's how it works. Pretty straightforward. We're going to do our big wins for the decade and our disasters. We have on each side eight choices. You get to put in one wild card. And first up, on wins is ride sharing, which of course, I think, was the biggest in terms of market cap of companies in the last 10 years versus wearables, the story format.

that Snapchat pioneered or your own fill-in. Where did you wind up, Gary? Did you go with wearable, story sharing, ride-sharing, or putting your own? Well, as a VC, I feel like this is a little bit cheating, but everyone says AI and ML. Yeah. But, yeah, I wrote an AI and ML. All right. I think that we're still at the early days of what's actually happening there.

Right. It seems to me that the next decade will really be the MLAI, but it did start this decade. So I think that's a strong first pick. Yeah. I mean, deep learning, all that stuff. Only in the past five or six years, computer vision, man, it's actually happening. It's happening in a major way. You have an investment in one of those spaces in the supermarket space.

Yeah, standard cognition. Cameras only. So Amazon Go comes in. Amazon Go works great, but it's really expensive to build all of those shelf sensors. Retailers can't actually afford any of that stuff. But they can't afford a bunch of cameras and a server in a closet. So thank you, NVIDIA, for those voltages. The GPUs are really nice, and it means that computer vision can actually work.

Yeah, and we had the founder on the podcast. Basically, you could just take a bodega or a 7-Eleven, slap these cameras up, and people walk up, grab shampoo, grab a coffee, and it just automatically charges them. Absolutely. And it works. Yeah. But it's not out there yet. Just Amazon Go.

This is the year. This is the year. They have some big things brewing. There's a store in San Francisco you can go to. A market. Yeah, a market. You can actually do it. That's right.

But they have some partnerships. So they're the weapons dealer, stand-in-car ignition. That's right. They're going to be arming everybody versus Amazon. Yeah, and that's the big trend that you see overall. Yeah, that was episode 977, for those of you, Jordan Fisher. Yeah, one of the best computer vision engineers we've ever met. Zach, ride sharing, wearable, story sharing, or did you fill in?

I'm going with Gary's call on AI. I didn't think about that. That was a smart call. I think he's right there. AI is like, if you think on a broad basis across all the startups, like in my portfolio, AI is, truly moving the needle forward for probably half the portfolio. We just sold a company called a Prente to McDonald's for a very large exit, and they're just like literally a small team that basically built AI for drive-thrus.

So now you no longer need somebody to take the order. You just go to the drive-thru, you talk to the mic, and it basically makes a perfect order for you. So there's just, it's such a broad-based phenomenon that like, I think it's just a drive-thru is going to get your order right. Oh, it's right. It's perfect. It's better than the human. I always felt like it was like,

this is the concept of yelling out of your window into a broken microphone on the side of a freeway was just never going to work. Man, vote Andrew Yang. When I hear that kind of stuff, it's like Andrew Yang. Oh, you're talking about UBI. Oh, I mean, it means the jobs are going away. The idea that somebody is forced to sit at a cash register and take your order and put it incorrectly 14% of the time into a register makes no sense when we have a supercomputer in our pockets. And when we have voice recognition being so close to perfect. I don't know if you guys have a pixel four, but pixel four voice recorder, if I would

put it out on the table right now and just record this, it would be 90 plus percent accurate. It is scary. And that's all AI. It's just understanding the context of what we're saying because in the case of your company, when you're ordering the McDonald's and French fries, it knows the McDonald's menu. So it's using AI and machine learning and the noise of it. that particular drive-through.

It's going to figure everything. And the accents and the vernacular of people who live in that, like if you live in New Jersey, you talk different than if you live in California. Oh, let me get a frying over here. Exactly. You know over here. Yeah. I think, like, to go back to the inner yang question, I think, I think, like, the most

scary thing is, is you look how broad-based this is going to be and how quick it's going to be. And so traditionally economists are like, oh, yeah, we lose jobs here. We'll praise them someplace else. But we've never seen the speed that this is going to happen at. Like in the next five years, trucking, longest since trucking, will no longer really be, like, it'll be obvious that job is dead. Like, and I mean, that's like one of the biggest jobs in America. And so when this happens across the board, across every industry, like the destruction that we're going to go through as a sort of a society is pretty scary.

All right. I went with ride sharing. Yep, of course. I'm personally biased. A little bit. Being the third investor in Uber and making a career out of it. But I will say, I think actually these two things are not disparate. If you look, I think part of the reason we have low unemployment in this country is because of the gig economy.

And I think the reason we have rising wages is because the gig economy gives entry-level workers the ability and even, you know, maybe the next step up, the ability to say, you know what, I don't want to work for you. I'm just going to pick my hours. I don't want to drag my ass into the Apple store or to target and do some morning raw, raw meeting and work the hours you want. I'll just do postmates or Instacart or whatever on the hours I choose. And in a way, it's almost like a year. UBI. It is a universal basic income. It is like a gig economy because you can pick how many hours you want to work if you live in any of the major cities. All right. Next up, Amazon Prime, which became a juggernaut, we're all members of Amazon Prime's cult. We don't even know what we pay. It's

150 bucks, by the way. Nobody even knows what they pay. And nobody cares. If it was 250, nobody would cancel it because it's such a life changer versus 4GLTE. I went with Prime. I thought that was an easy one. Bamworth, of course, is going to go up. I don't think that was any big shocker for people. But Prime, boy, has that been an amazing determiner of behavior? People will pay more on Amazon for the same product they could buy direct from the company that makes it. Just because it's so much easier and trustworthy to click it on your Prime account, what did you guys pick in the four or five? I actually chose connectivity.

You picked LT, okay. I did. I went with Prime just because it's really, I think, like it's a representation of what's coming. Like, there's just so much power in underneath that. I think we're going to see you like a doubling on a doubling on a doubling. So like, I'm an engineer, so I love tech. And I don't like, I think business model innovation is amazing, but, you know, the tech is always more breathtaking to me.

Because if you combine that with AIML, what you have is, I mean, you have autonomous cars. Like these things do actually run on these networks. And so, you know, Jetson's future look like, it's not here yet. but this combined with the other, it's going to come. You seem to be leaning towards things that are emerging will have an impact in the next. Oh, yeah. I'm going with what had an impact in the 2010 to 20. Okay, that's a good reframe.

Yeah. So I went with Prime. Now, here's one, Model 3 in our 3-6 bracket, Tesla's Model 3, which I drove here today, the bus car on the road, or Disney buying Marvel, Star Wars, and Pixar. And they picked up a couple of smaller things there as well. Which one of those was the bigger win of the, for you guys? Tesla for sure. I mean, it's breathtaking amount of tech.

They've built world-class engineering teams. They've done a lot of the things that they said they were going to do. A little late, but that's okay. It takes time. They were on Elon time. Yeah. What about you? What did you pick?

Yeah, I pick Disney. I think the first step in the chess game for the, you know, the trillion-dollar entertainment market was Disney making those moves that then lead up to the next one we're going to pick. Like, I think that's, I mean, that's literally changing the entire entertainment world. And, I mean, if you think about it, all those jobs that we are about to destroy are going to be replaced by VR and entertainment. So, we're all going to be plugging ourselves into the Matrix in the next few years. Yeah. So, Disney's just getting ready for that.

And that's. So we get a little bit of UBI drip drip. We get the IV drip of the UBI, a couple of dollars a day dripping into our podcast. You're in VR. And then we drip, drip, drip that to Disney. Well, when you have ML plus VR plus a neural implant, you're a lot of money. you're done, right? You are essentially setting up the Matrix.

Oh, you like that? I'll give you some more. And then it's just like... Absolutely. You want Boba Fett. Here's the Mendelorian. Oh, you prefer Han Solo. We'll go with that route.

Here we are in the Matrix. It literally is the beginning of the Matrix. How we get that. I went with the Model 3 because... You're a little biased. A little biased, but I thought the self-driving features have gotten so robust. And I think he's further along than people think he is. I don't have any inside information,

but I do think he's a little bit further along than people anticipate, and it turns out LIDAR, which everybody thought was going to be required, maybe not required. What do you think? I think the LIDAR is required or not? Because he made the bet that it can do with camera vision, right, and other sensors. I think they'll get there, honestly. I think they'll be able to figure it out.

Can we talk about Tesla haters for a second? Yeah, those people are bizarre. Oh, man, it's really intense. I think it's actually, I think a lot of those people don't think that there's not, they sort of reject the fact that there's so much capital seeking yield. And that's why Tesla to me is this paragon of finding great engineers, throwing them in a particular direction. And then the Tesla haters hate that they're able to turn that capital into real technology that then gets shipped. Right. And it doesn't seem like it should exist.

That's part of it. and also the audacity to just put a date and a time frame on, you know, this innovation is something that before this people weren't willing to do. You know, Steve Jobs would kind of take it out of his pocket and say, here it is. You can buy it next week. You can order it today. And Elon's saying, like, here's a cyber truck coming in 30 months or 24 months or whenever it's going to arrive.

This was a little bit of a different approach in terms of showmanship and of sort of setting the future. and then having the money come from customers, almost like a Kickstarter. People forget that. People, the first 100 roadster buyers put down full deposits. It's kind of too bad that Apple doesn't spend more of that hoard on exactly what Tesla is doing. Yeah, they have taken the opposite approach. They actually have the cash.

They have the cash, yet they don't deploy it. Right. Their biggest purchase of the last, like, 10 years was beats for $2 billion. I think they probably spent as much on that. Brandon marketing. That's not technology. Yeah. Like, it's probably about the same amount of money. They were spending like hundreds of millions on bad TV shows. It makes me sad that they're out of ideas then. It is weird. Like, people are actually love the stock, but it feels like they're out of ideas.

Unless they maybe, do you think they have the AR glasses and they're just like, you know what, we're going to drop these. It's going to be so mind-blowing that we'll just put everything behind that. I hope so. I'll find out. Yeah, we're going to find out very quick. Okay. And then very quickly, two versus seven, streaming versus mindfulness. Streaming. You went streaming? I'm kind of a hippie, so mindfulness for sure.

I went mindfulness as well. I thought streaming was, you know, we had it, but mindfulness seems like a more acute issue. When we get back, we're going to take, then we're going to go from, we just went from eight to four. We're going to go from four to two when we get back on this weekend startups. You already know Zendesk because it's the world's best customer support system. We all use it.

We all love it. But what you may not know is that they have an entire range of products now. and they call them the Zen Desk Suite. And that includes integrated customer support that lets you track and prioritize and solve customer tickets across all channels in just one simple-to-use dashboard. And of course, the Zendesk guide. It's a knowledge base for your customers so they can solve their own problems quickly and easily.

Plus you get live chat. Yes, you don't need a separate company to get live chat. And you can engage with customers in real time. And of course, there's a call center if you're one of the few people left who likes to pick up the phone. With all these customer support channels connected, it's going to be super easy for your agents to be hyperproductive. And information is going to get shared across your company. So all those tickets could result in product getting better. All of this comes in a startup-friendly pricing package with a flat pricing structure.

You get that flat rate, which is what you're looking for. Qualified startups defined as series B or below. Under 100 employees, which is probably most of you listening, can join the startup program and get Zendesk products for free for a full year. How's that for commitment? Zendesk loves the startup community. They came from the startup community and now they want to help you. If your series being below, you're going to get it for a year for free. You've got nothing to lose and you get to use the industry standard.

Go to Zendesk.com slash twist to get that free first year. That's right. A year free. Can't do better than that at Zendesst.com slash. Twist. All right, it's our 2010 to 2020 bracketology. We've got Gary Tan with us. We've got Zach Collius. Great investors. We're now going into our second round. We went from eight down to four. I had in my top bracket, ride sharing versus Amazon Prime. No shocker there. I'm going with ride sharing. I think that in the gig economy and everything that came with it, the on-demand economy.

And these two things are related prime and ride sharing, but I think ride sharing has had a much bigger impact. And it definitely defines the decade in terms of startups being that Uber Lyft, Postmates, Instacart, Airbnb, and all the gig economy are kind of part of the biggest IPOs of the decade. Who did you pick in your top brackets, Gary? I want AIML over 4G just because, man, this really did happen in the past 10 years. There was this competition for identifying dogs versus cat photos. Yeah. In 2012, I think the error rate was something like 30. percent still. 2017 it got down to two, three percent, something like that.

They stopped, they stopped counting it. They stopped doing the competition because it's better than humans. Absolutely better than humans. It makes no sense that a human would do as good a job as a computer I, between that process. But a few years ago, that would have been the total opposite. A few years ago, and you would have asked any computer scientists that question, they would have been like, oh, human, crush it. Just a few years ago.

I mean, the rate of change. I think it's just a, I want to make my number one just. just the rate of technology change. Like the speed of technology change happening in the last 10 years. It's just unbelievable. And there is a perception out there that things are not changing. And I think because the startups that people see, the ones that are most apparent to them are Airbnb and Uber and Lyft

and things that seem, I don't know, kind of simplistic. They're not actually watching the deep tech going on here in the valley. And those products haven't hit yet, maybe. In a lot of ways. I think most people struggle at the bottom end of the graph when growth is happening, but it hasn't yet hit, you know, the hockey stick, they really just, they look at it. And because it's not continuous, it's very discontinuous and it's very bumpy in both directions, people really struggle to conceptualize growth.

But it's, but if you look at it like on the ground here and how broad-based it is, it's like, it's so obvious. Like 20 years from now, we are going to live in a world that just doesn't even resemble what we live in today, whereas the world today does sort of resemble what was here 20 years ago. Like, it's not that different. It is not that different. The only exception would be the smartphone in your pocket. It's a big move.

Which was a big one. But in the next 10 years, I like where you go with that, Zach, because if you think about something like vetoes, vertical takeoff and landing vehicles, people think that that's ridiculous. And meanwhile, millions, tens of millions of people own quadcopters and are making HD videos of their vacation. and at the same time saying it's impossible that these things will carry humans and it's like you're flying one around your house

at Thanksgiving and making HD videos. It's really not that different to put a human in that thing. It's just bigger batteries, bigger rotors, and those are coming. When do you think those hit? 2024, 2025, 2026. When will we see those going to Oakland?

That's got to be all actual safety regulation at the end of the day. Yeah, you also have some issues. with the quadcopters because you can't have a single rotor fail. And like if a single rotor fails, the whole thing goes down. So it's like it's a non-trivial problem. It's a non-trivial problem.

But they're going to get there. And then you can have them fail. They will, when they're at eight or 16, my understanding is so they're putting double ones. But they've already got people flying these over lakes. Yeah, but that's, you know, a little quadcopter falls. I'm probably just going to give you a headache. What's funny is you'll see it in China before you see it here.

Probably, yeah. Oh, yeah, for sure. They're just like, a human died? Okay. What's your point? like we're making progress here like they're going to have them going everywhere all right

I had my model three versus mindfulness this was a tough one for me but I went with mindfulness because I think the decade has been defined by people losing their goddamn minds people are the number of people who are suffering from anxiety depression and who are acting out

on social media and losing their mind That will be that when people define the decade, they're going to be like people losing their minds, Trump derangement syndrome, anxiety, whatever. So I went mindfulness. What did you go with Gary? Yeah, mindfulness to. I mean, look, all of humanity is reforming into a global brain, right? This is what's happening through our phones. It's just obviously happening. Right. And we kind of don't know what is actually going to happen. Right. The loss of truth, the loss of the ability to discern reality is part of this craziness. People can't even figure. out what is a fact anymore in a large part because of social media tribalism and the insanity on social media. I'm not sure if that's actually true. I think that's just sort of a leftover from the stupidity of television. Like I think television created a dynamic where people were so brainwashed. They believed that what they saw was the truth. And boomers and old people who grew up in that world, they've carried that over into a world where anyone can put up anything on the internet. I mean, if you look at old people and the way to interact,

with the internet and Facebook, they're just so stupid and gullible that, like, I think if you go to the millennial generation, I think they're pretty good at, like, understanding that it might, what you're reading might be a lie and then, oh, maybe I should do a little Googling and figure out the truth here. Like, I think young people, I think, are really going to take us to another place and understanding real truth as opposed to just sort of gullible stupidity like we have these old people right now. You're right, but that's going to be the kids of privilege, and there are lots of kids who are not privileged. Why is that?

Why? Why? Everyone has the same phone. Why are the kids who are not privileged? They're just as smart. My brother works with youth, sort of underprivileged youth, actually out in the East Bay. And that's one of the more remarkable things.

Like they will watch a YouTube video and they can't tell. Is this real or not, right? And their parents aren't there maybe to assist them. That's why it's privileged. Because if your parents are there, your parents will say, hey, There's something wrong. Here's how to look it up. Like here's Snopes.com or whatever it is, right?

Well, they say this about schools, too, that the real corollary between performance and school is parents' involvement in the schools. And if you have two working parents or one working parent, maybe there's just not enough time in the day for them to be involved in going to the school every day. Whereas in a traditional family with, or what was the traditional American family, one person, working one person, not maybe more time was spent at school or flexible schedules. So, I mean, parents should be, you know, we're, you were pro as parent both of us are parents as parents were supposed to be programming our human

intelligences and a lot of people don't and if you don't what that means as corporations and the media will program your children for you the algorithm probably yeah exactly that's why i got rid of youtube at the house i was like this thing is sending you know my my 10 year old down a rabbit hole that i do not want her going down and just i deleted youtube off of the ipads and everything and i said listen, well, let's pick really great movies or TV shows that will watch together. We'll curate them a bit. And so I had her watch Blade Runner, Bicentennial Man, AI, like the whole series of replicants and artificial intelligence. And we watched them.

Some of the movies were boring to her, but at least we got to talk about those like bigger themes, as opposed to a media diet built up of whatever the YouTube algorithm is sending people towards, which is really scary. It gets dark fast. Yeah. So what did you pick in your bracket, Zach? I'm going streaming. I believe basically streaming is the first step to basically the matrix,

and that's just we're all over it. So I'm going to run streaming all the way to the victory. All right. So then you had Prime versus streaming or what'd you have, AI versus streaming? In your final bracket? In the final bracket, basically, yeah, I picked ride sharing because I think you're right. I think the gig economy as a representation of ride sharing is truly amazing. I mean, like moving away from this sort of binary, you're employed or unemployed,

it's just such a movement away from stupidity. Like, I mean, like, this whole, like, what employment means is, like, oh, you have to have a full-time job and you have to go to office at a certain point in time. It's just, it's such an anachronism. And, like, we need to break down all of the sort of structures that had been built around that. And, you know, Travis and Uber and everyone else who basically moved the ball forward with, like, saying, like, let's take all these stupid laws and just ignore them and, like, let's go, like, let's do cool stuff. Like, that's God's work. Like, I'm very proud, like, to basically, like, have been. part of that generation to help break that down.

It makes me angry. So your final is ride sharing. But my final winner was streaming because it's the future of the matrix. So your win, streaming is the big win for you? AI ML versus mindfulness. And hey, man, I'm an optimist. I think that, you know, we're going to beat this thing. It's, you know, human over machine.

I think that people are actually going to find their better natures. Wow. You know, we're going to find some way to make social media good. You know, parents are going to take care of their kids. Hopefully, honestly, the people who create the social networks, we're going to find a way to make a better global brain. Wow. So you went mindfulness. Oh, yeah, all the way.

I also went mindfulness. It's so weird that thinking that humans can become aware of their own psychology and become self-possessed will actually be the big win in a world in which people lost control of their own emotional state because of their devices. That's what my YouTube channel is about. It's about mindfulness and how founders need to actually take care of that. It's almost like we're diametrically opposed. I believe people will be the opium of the masses of entertainment. Well, basically, it's all right. And you actually believe people will suddenly become aware and cognizant and, like, actually care.

Well, I want to fund those things. I want to fund the things that will move humanity to the vision that is not black mirror. All right. When we get back from this quick break, we're going to talk about the disasters and then see which disasters wound up winning the day. And then if darkness, or the light prevail when we get back on this week's startups. All right, you guys know LinkedIn. You're on LinkedIn all day.

Me too. We love it. There's over 600 million members. What you might not know is that 62 million business decision makers visit there. That's right. And 71% of people use information from LinkedIn to make informed business decisions. All of your future customers are hanging out on LinkedIn right now. When you advertise on LinkedIn, you find both these customers,

and you build long-term relationships with them. Well, LinkedIn ads drive the results you care about most. And LinkedIn's powerful targeting helps you reach the right audience, right down to their job title, right down to the company name and the industry and more. Here is my marketing manager, Maureen, creating an open office hours lead gen campaign. Open office hours is how I meet the next generations of companies that I want to invest in. And here she is. She's looking for founders, co-founders. She sets a budget, 25 bucks a day.

She puts the ad up. She uploads the text. And boom, she says, apply now. Here's the form. And look at that in minutes. We have a campaign up and running and we get founders to apply to come ask me questions at open office hours, which become episodes of this very podcast. And that's how we get our funnel going. We use LinkedIn to find great founders that we can invest in. I want to give you $100. What? Yep, that's right. I'm going to give you $100 right now in LinkedIn ad credits. And I'm going to like, you launch your first campaign by going directly to LinkedIn.com slash this week in startups. No spaces, no dashes. LinkedIn.com, you know that, slash this week in startups. If you type out this week in startups, you get $100. It's that simple. Terms and conditions, of course, apply because we're giving you a hundy, but you're going to love it. LinkedIn marketing works.

Go get the hundy. Let's get back to this amazing episode. All right. Gary and I picked mindfulness as our champion for the last decade. Oh, and Zach picked streaming, the opiate of the masses. And I will say, being able to get four or five superhero movies a year and Star Wars movies a year is literally like for an 80s kid. It's everything you could have hoped for. Because we used to get what?

Like one Star Wars film every three or four years, one Indiana Jones every three or four years. And we got Superman and that was it. Oh, Superman and Batman. That was the extent of it every couple years. Now? Oh, my God. I can't keep up with it. And this Mandalorian's amazing.

Watchman, the new series, amazing. It's too much good stuff. I may change my vote back to streaming. But I'm going to hopefully go. Don't do it. Don't do it. I'm going to stick with the lightside. Bread and circuses. Bread and circuses.

Bread and circuses. Exactly. All right. So for our disasters, the election fiasco, interpret that as you will. Russian interference, Cambridge, Analytica, versus snowflake culture. That's really interesting. ICO Madness versus Zuckerberg, both equally loathsome in my mind. WeWork versus vaping, both unmitigated disasters, and Theranos versus Jusero.

I think I know where I'm going on that one. So let's start with the election fiasco, Trump being elected, et cetera, versus the snowflake culture. What did you go with Zach? So my wild card was not the snowflake culture. It was the city of San Francisco, which is an unmitigated disaster. Oh, mitigated disaster. Oh, mitigated disaster In the last 10 years.

We have And I have a theory on this And my theory is that like We have been part of really one of the most Amazing periods of time, truly a renaissance of opportunity For smart young people to come out here and build world changing companies, world changing ideas And just to really To do.

Absolutely. We all are right. Yeah. And I think the unfortunately talent is a zero-sum game. And so the city of San Francisco, unfortunately, has been the loser in that balance where people here are making billions of dollars and changing the world, but are not busy working on the problems that really need to be solved in the city. So instead, we have basically the ideologues, which is really one of the biggest problems for the city, is just ideology,

like just trumps rationality, and it drives me crazy. And we have basically people who are lazy and incompetent and can't do anything. So it's terrible. We literally have the most competent people in the world building the largest products, projects, companies, whatever, however you want to frame it, that are impacting the globe. Yet we have the most incompetent people where we're not capable of running a city with a very small amount of people. It's seven miles by seven miles. All of tech, all of tech taken together, only 10% or less of the voting populace. So we are literally a minority that is being discriminated against. Right.

We're hated. Deeply hated. And I can understand resentment. I mean, I'm a townie. I grew up in the Bay Area. Yeah, you're local. Yeah. And tech actually changed my life.

Fundamentally, I mean, I grew up relatively poor, actually. And I got my first job flipping to the Internet section when I was 14. I helped my parents buy their first house because I got that job making webpages. And so tech put me in this place. right now. Right. And people in the Bay Area, they just don't even think that that's what happens. It's very weird the ideology of the summer of love and permissiveness and openness,

which was the beautiful part of the history of San Francisco, which is why so many different type of people were able to call this place home without fear of being murdered or shot or beaten in the streets. that same permissiveness seems to have been applied to methamphetamine, opioids, dealing drugs in the streets, and having a no prosecution. No crime. You're like, you know, it's no longer a crime to break into someone's car or, like, as long as you don't hurt somebody, it's not considered a crime anymore. Like, you're...

And where does that lead eventually? It leads to crime gangs and people who are addicted to drugs, seeing this as the best city to move to. So the city has become the best place for two types of people. Best place to build an at-scale technology company and the best place to get drugs and not be arrested. It's a very weird combination to be known for. It's a disaster. Unmitigated disaster. This changes everything for me.

If I had known this. Yes. I think that wins the bracket. I think I'd have to move this to the two seed or the one seed. I think for me, the election fiasco, I'm trying to figure. figure out if that beats San Francisco. I'm going to give it some thought here. I mean, so I personally really struggled with the election Fiat Yasko. I think the institutions of America have done a pretty good job keeping Trump from doing as much damage as we all thought he would do.

I mean, he's done a lot. But I mean, like, what he did is the Kurds. I mean, God, he should go to jail just for that alone. Like, I mean, he's so bad. But like, I think our institutions have been pretty strong. But what scares me is that, like, the reason. why he was elected, the movement away from truth, the movement, like, the gullibility of the stupid old people, like, is, is, that's a long-term problem that's not going to go away. And that's terrifying to me what's going to happen over the next decade as a result of that. So I'm, I'm, I'm really scared by that, too. I went with the election.

Yeah. I think that it's unclear if Trump successfully won because of interference. It seems, it's obvious there was interference. I believe that if it did tip in his favor and was the reason he won, that would have been leaked by now. There's a non-zero chance the election was actually hacked. So I started a company back in 2002 that did one of the first online voter registration absentee ballot systems. So we were like really early with the internet and voting. And we basically got put on the committee.

They basically chose the voting machines for the city or for the state of Minnesota where I was from. And so I actually got a deep dive into the way that the voting technology works. A lot of my friends are still there. And one, the level of just raw incompetence, the technology is really 20 years old right now and has not been updated in 20 years. The biggest voting machine manufacturer in America is owned by a Russian oligarch. I mean, like, there's a long list of vectors into actually hacking the election. And so, like, the actual votes, the voting machines, you don't have to move that many votes in Ohio, Florida, and a few other states to change an election. Like everyone argues that...

Don't you think that would come out, though, after this level of investigation and the motivation of people on the left to actually release it since we've had everything else leaked? So my friends who are deep in this basically say that there are a lot of red flags, but everyone who's in power is so terrified by delegitimizing the election itself that if they started talking about the red flags that were in there, people would no longer believe that elections were valid anymore. And they feel that the delegitimization of the election itself is more damage. than basically sharing the fact that like there's a good chance the election was actually hacked like hacking the voting machines. Gary, what did you pick and you want an eight? Now that we know that nothing is real. Honestly, I need to switch my vote to San Francisco. It's ridiculous.

I mean, both of these things. I mean, I put Amazon on the disaster side because it's probably the only tech company. I mean, this is also a new thing. If you look at the S&P 500, I think it's 40% of the market value. And that wasn't true at the start of this decade. And so, you know, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, all of these guys, they are great companies that are only doing software, right? Amazon is the one that the Fortune 500 really should be worried about because they don't care. They'll touch Adams.

They'll open warehouses. They'll bring the margins all the way down to zero. There might not be another company other than the other four big tech companies that do software and Amazon. I mean, that's, I think, could happen. So the consolidation of power at Amazon and their raw ambition to you is a disastrous for society. In fact, it's just incredible amounts of power in the hands of one corporation. Are you pro some sort of limitation of the size of these companies now? There's been talk of just picking an arbitrary number, trillion dollars or whatever or some percentage of market share and just saying that's enough, which is what Korea does as well.

I think you can have 70% of the market if you're like the tell. Com company, and then you have to divest after that. Right. I think it gets dangerous because government obviously has, there are a lot of unintended consequences when people start messing around there. So I don't really know what the right thing to do there is. Yeah. I mean, and that is, we are in uncharted territory.

If we were to limit the growth of the major companies, does that mean we give the doorway and an open lane to Chinese companies, which are essentially. I mean, Peter Thiel talks about AI. as it's fascist. Right. AI is fascist because it consolidates power and data and decision making in the hands of the few. It does not seem wrong in this case. He's wrong about a lot of things, but in this case, he might be right.

Okay, next up, ICO Madness versus Zuckerberg. Who did you pick as being more disastrous for society in the industry? Which is a bigger disaster? I'm still a Zuckerberg fan. What? Yeah. I look at the scale of what he's done, and I look at any of my companies, and I say, when they start to scale, things start to break, and all sorts of bad things happen, that's just the nature of startups. And I look at the scale of what he's done, and, yeah, there's going to be a lot of stuff that's going to break, and a lot of bad things are going to happen.

But I still do believe that the original thesis of connecting the world should lead to a better world. and I believe that he's doing the best you can to operate at the scale that they're operating at, which is super hard. And there's a whole bunch of disasters in there. But I think he's done pretty good job relative to like how hard that must be. Counterpoint, Gary? You know what? I actually kind of agree.

Oh! It's actually hard. You know, Zuck has done a lot of stuff that probably, again, was unintended consequence. And, you know, I think this is a testament to these big tech companies are so powerful that they're starting to resemble government. And so my worry for, you know, government power is sort of the same worry that I have for really huge tech companies, you know, Zuckerberg and Facebook included. Deciding what is permissible speech as an example. But I think Zach is doing, I do think he's doing his best. Yeah.

But the problem is his best might not be good enough. Yeah, I think he's very unsophisticated. I think he doesn't understand human nature very well. I think he is a machine when it comes to stealing other people's ideas. And the thing I find most offensive about him is his ability to just steal from other entrepreneurs, copy what they do, and just basically annihilate them with his Borg-like tendencies. As bad as the ICOs were, it was a small crater. I chose ICO simply because there were so many Charlton's. There are so many people who literally just stole money from actually the Uber drivers we were talking about earlier.

And they cashed out. Like they, you know, so many normal people, average Americans, average people in Korea all over the world. Bought into their life savings. Put their life savings in this stuff. And all the while someone else on the other end was selling. And, you know, they've got their lambos. And, you know, I'm curious if you go to Ibiza right now, how many of those people are just, you know, crypto people who are just on the beach. Oh, it's so loathsome.

But I think Zuckerberg had a more negative impact. We work or vaping? Hmm. We work or vaping, which one was a bigger disaster? I actually am not sure that vaping is as horrible as everyone thinks it is. Like I think if we moved everyone off of cigarettes onto vaping, the net gain in terms of life is so gargantuan that I think the cost is very real, right? Like, addicting kids to this, you know, high nicotine fruit flavors is just glows some horrible evil shit. Yeah.

But compared to like the number of people who die from pain. lung cancer every year because of cigarettes, I'd like to see that gone. And I think it's, I think it's a trade I'd be willing to make. So let's serve two evils then. Yeah, it's a lesser of two evils. They're both evil, but I want to get rid of cigarettes so bad. So plus, I mean, I chose vaping simply because it seems like wolf in sheep's, you know, in sheep's clothing, right? I mean, they willfully went out and tried to get people addicted who wouldn't have, maybe wouldn't have tried cigarettes. And so that's net worse. We work. We work. Mispriced asset, you know.

It's interesting. I think the vaping, if you, I agree, if it was a bridge to get off cigarettes, it's noble. Because you're not burning chemicals and ingesting them in the way that you do with cigarettes. However, when you make peanut colada flavor and you put a bunch of, and it looks like a Benetton ad, I think we know who you're targeting. You're targeting teenagers. And that is as loathsome as it gets. That's evil.

It's pure evil. They since they got called out on and have reversed their position, and they're trying to sort of reframe it. So good. Maybe society works. We have a little back and forth debate about it. Ultimately, I think the vaping will be regulated. And even the amount of nicotine in it, they could regulate the amount of nicotine that you're able to draw on these. And if they did that, if the cartridges could only have a certain amount of nicotine in it, it would feel.

like a bridge. And I've actually heard pitches from founders who want to create vape pens that have a percentage of nicotine that would be slowly declining to sort of get you off that as well. Which is really interesting. It sounds like a terrible business. Well, it would be

if you succeed. You lose your customer. Unless you get them to come off the nicotine but you still have the behavioral habit of smoking gum maybe. I don't know. Or just you use the vape pen for the flavor and it's just a fun social thing to do to vape for the oral fixation of it all. But I think WeWork represents a fundamentally okay business, but horrible governance. And the horrible governance to me is unforgivable. And you went to Y Combinator during the era of, I think you would admit, Paul Graham was skeptical of, and wanted to

protect the founders from investors. Right. And that has maybe tipped over into, investors having no say, now you're an investor. When you try to bring up governance with companies, people expect no governance. Do they not? Yes. Well, we take board seats now. So it's a different thing. But when you were in YC, it was like no board seats, no governance. Just convertible notes, saves, don't have any governance. I mean, honestly, now I go on board seats to try to be the right referee in between the worst impulses of founders and the worst impulses of the rest of the board. And we need governance. And for me, we work then wins versus vaping.

Two versus seven is kind of fun. Jucero, which everybody remembers as a instant juicing company that was basically a bag of chopped up vegetables you could squeeze and have the juice come out. Or you could buy an $800 machine to do the squeezing for you. It was kind of an embarrassment. That's the excess of ego of various venture capitalists. Yeah. It was very ego driven. but Theranos was an outright fraud of epic proportions.

Yeah. Pretty easy. I think we're all going to pick Therese. Pretty clearly. Yeah, yeah. All right. So up top, what do you have in your second round here? I've got elections.

I mean, I chose the Trump thing. And then the ICO fraud. And which one makes it to your disaster. You know, I'm going to carry the election. I mean, it's so terrifying for me what will happen in the next. decade as a result of consequences here. Okay, and what did you pick? I had, what, Amazon

versus ICOs, and honestly, I think Amazon is touching every, you know, it's more corporate power through tech is just, it's risen this decade, it's just getting started, and so that's far scary to me. The ICA

madness is over, Amazon is not. Yeah, it seems like the SEC, though slow, made it pretty clear you guys need to stop the shenanigans. If you're going to do a securities offering, it's a security's offering. Unless you really prove to us that this is a utility token, we're going to assume it's not. And this idea of selling future tokens that might or may not be utility, that seemed to break the back of the SEC. And then they just went ham on made examples. But I went with Zach. I think he represents everything

that went wrong in the last decade, governance and too much power and too much breaking things without thinking of the impact on society. I think it was the end of a certain hacker aesthetic, which was move fast, break things. You can't move fast and break things when the democracy that enabled you to build those things and the freedom that you had to build them gets broken because of the scale of your company. I did hear a crazy thing about Clinton versus Trump in terms of the cost per ad. And this is a natural part of how ad networks actually work. Trump actually paid, I think, about a dollar, Clinton paid $10 just because of the click-through rate. Because you had click-through rate, Trump could pay 10 times less.

And that would be illegal if you were a radio ad, a newspaper, any other. I mean, so I'm an ad tech guy. And like, this all comes down to Clinton was incompetent. Like, she hired incompetent people who didn't understand how to run those programs. And if she'd hired competent people or even just let Facebook send their people over to show her people how to do it, she would have gotten the same price that he got. So I think the rules, as long as the rules are fairly applied to both candidates, like, yeah, that's their fault.

What about Twitter just saying, you know what, we're going to take this election off? This seemed to be a very mature idea. Why didn't Zuck do that? It's really problematic because if you think about, so think about Michael Bloomberg, right? Like we, I would love Michael Bloomberg to be a real viable candidate here. Michael Bloomberg does not have the followers on Twitter. He does not have the presence that a lot of these people who do nothing, but scream into the ether all they do.

And so his ability to get his message out there is dependent on his, either his ability to personally fund it or our ability to help him fund it to get that message out there. And so paid political speech is a very important thing for democracy because you want to have the ability for voices that are not just populist voices to spread their message. And by preventing him from doing that, I think we're, I think they're doing a disservice. So they pulled up the ladder. They pulled up the ladder and they're preventing basically.

New entrants from getting scale. What do you think, Gary? Should Zuck do what Jack did and turn off political ads for one election? Just sit it out? Was that a good move or a bad move? Do you think history will look at it? I think it's sort of inevitable that, you know, the same sort of media standards that are applied to traditional media probably should apply to social media.

Yeah, it would have been good if they just said you can use the ads, but you can't target them at this level of granularity. So you can do it by state maybe. but you can't do it down to the individual. No retargeting. None of this like sophisticated stuff. You can just buy ads generally by state and come up with a less micro-targeting,

which feels like you can abuse it much more with stolen data. Yeah. I mean, media is so fundamental to society that you could kind of argue that World War sort of broke out, at least partially because of mass literacy in newspapers, right? And so this is not a little bit important. This is a lot important. This is really important.

Yeah, I mean, if you look at the history of the printing press, I mean, more people died as a result of what the printing press being invented than really many other periods in all of history. Like, because it created this concept of nationalism, which created this concept of my nation versus your nation, which then led to all these big armies, which led to all this death. And so, like, there's good reasons to believe that, like, we're in a similar period in history where, like, a lot of people are going to die because of this. Well, it feels like Hong Kong is the most underreported story of the last year. I mean, a million plus citizens going out and taking on the Chinese government, which is not as the, doesn't have the greatest history of, you know, tolerating dissent. If you just think about Tiananmen Square, I mean, they literally roll tanks over young protesters. It feels like Hong Kong is about to boil over. Could be dangerous.

Scary times. We work for, I had WeWork versus Theranos. To me, I think Theranos is the most deranged insane story. ever to like literally fake blood tests is a level of insanity that you would have a hard time as a fiction writer Michael Crichton would have a hard time making it believable in one of his novels. So I just went all thereinos. You know what's funny and shocking to me was how long it took for it to come out. I remember my old partner, Harge Tagger, who hired me at Wycombinator. he was starting a startup in the health space.

He heard about thermos. He went to Walgreens and Palo Alto after the announced saying, hey, you can do a one drop of blood, blood test now. And he could not get them to do a single one. Huh. And that was probably a year, at least a year, maybe a year and a half before the Wall Street Journal article. It was buzzing.

And you also had the former, what was the French guy who was worked at Apple, did the same thing. He had his blood test done. they didn't do the microvial at Walgreens. And then he also had Jean-Luigue Garcia. He had, who worked at Apple for jobs in France, he also then had Stanford Blood do it, and then wrote multiple letters on his blog and was emailing Elizabeth saying, look. Here's the data.

It doesn't work. It doesn't match. Stanford says something different. Then they restated his blood test, and you're like, wait a second, who restates a blood test? That doesn't seem like something that gets re-reacted. stated. I had a personal experience with like a, almost like a cold poker read where I was at a

like sort of a celebratory banquet and they were honoring Elizabeth Holmes and she got up to talk and I remember like it like hit me like a bolt of lightning. I don't even know what she said, but I turned to my now ex and I was like that woman's a fraud and she was like, oh no no, no, she's real. I was like, I have

no idea how I know this, but she's a fraud. It was like a poker read where you're like, that guy's bluffing. I was like, I don't know what it is, but I can tell. And yeah, it's I mean, I think, you know, I had therenos go all the way simply because it's the worst thing that's happening in the valley. It's been happening for the longest time. It's probably not even a valley thing. It's probably just a pure business thing.

People just are sociopaths. And we run across them every single day. They run around. They keep doing business. And, you know, only when they're very, very bad at what they do, do they get caught in this way. You can keep the fraud up for a surprisingly long period of time. Bernie Madoff comes to mind. You know, and in a way, it's interesting how they, the journalist put Elizabeth on the cover

of every magazine as often as possible. And you have to think the fact that she was photogenic and a female founder that they wanted to have their, you know, Steve Jobs. And she wanted to be that, which is so deranged that she was imitating jobs down to the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the. Yeah. I mean, he was like... Black Turtle Neck. She literally was trying to imitate Steve Jobs.

Well, the trial is going to be down the street, I think, early next year. And I hear that those seats are starting to sell. They're selling out. I'm just kidding. I don't know how to get the tickets. I don't know how you get the tickets. I think there'll be hot tickets. Yeah, it's going to be amazing when the movie comes out as well with, I guess, Jennifer

Lawrence is playing her, which seems like the perfect casting to me. Okay. So that put me in our championship round. I have mindfulness versus Zuck. What do you have? Mindfulness versus Theranos. Okay. Insanity versus equanimity.

What do you have, Zach? Streaming in the opiate of the masses versus the election and the poisoned chalice of the lies that have permeated our political discourse. All right. It's been a lot of fun. Gary Tan, thanks for doing it. Zach Koleas, thanks for doing it. If you need to get your company funded, email us. One lucky listener will get their company funded today.

What stage do you guys like to meet companies? What's the ideal Goldilocks zone for initialized? When do you most love to meet a company? I mean, seed checks of a million to five million, but it's hard to believe that five million is maybe a seed still. So weird, when we came up, that would be a big A. Yeah, that's an A. Yeah, five million for a third of your company or a quarter of your company would be like a strong A back in the day.

Zach, when do you like to engage? Seed early, some checks are 200 up to a couple million. So this means generally having the product in market and a couple of customers, feels good? The first hint of product market fit is what I look for. That sense, that little bit of smoke that comes when you have a tiny bit of traction and you can enunciate it. Before the graphs, sort of like a month-over-month growth where any VC can extend the line, like I like to get, I like to front run the VCs and grab it right before that. So there's like a little smoldering in the kindling of the fire, but we don't have a

I can't fire yet. Usually they can enunciate it in like, usually like, so you talked, when I talk to founders when they're still at the idea stage, they'll be like, oh, what do you do? And they'll be like, I can do this and this. And there's all these and, and, and then when they find it, it just dramatically simplifies. It crystallizes. It becomes this like, oh, we do this. And I'm like, oh, that's a good idea.

Because then I can call their customers and be like, what do you think about that? And they're like, oh, I want that. So it's just to be able to, there's a tell where it's a crisp ability to define why you exist in the world and customers. who will repeat that and reflect it back to you. You just find it. And when you find it, it's obvious to everyone. So I try to be right there when that happens.

Yeah. What's funny is I don't actually care about customers yet. I'd rather have a complete team and then a direction that basically society needs. If I believe that there could be product market fit. Carey's much smarter than I am. He can see that line and actually extend it. I'm too dumb to do that. I wait until they've found it.

And then I like to get involved. Yeah. Okay. here we go. We're going to go to our final picks. Gary, you had mindfulness versus thereinos. You had pure madness versus equanimity. Who won out for you? Oh, man. I mean, I'm an optimist. You know, I wouldn't be doing this if I didn't believe that, you know, technology is going to remake society, hopefully in a better way. I love it. So mindfulness wins for you. I think so. This is particularly particularly joyful for me considering I own 5% ofcom.com.

Yes. Which is literally the first syndicate I ever did. That's amazing. And they got Alex and Michael from Calm who had LeBron James as their spokesperson announced yesterday, which is mind-blowing to me, told me last year we were going to shut the company down if we didn't get that $378,000 from you. When you talk about the meaningfulness of being an investor and an early supporter, To me, that one is probably the most meaningful bet of my career.

I mean, even beyond Uber, which would have succeeded with or without me. It feels like maybe Com wouldn't have made it, or at least they told me it wouldn't have made it. Made the world a better place. You truly are an angel. I felt like it's a really significant. You know, I was talking to my wife last night about this, and I was like, it actually makes me feel really good. She's like, how come you're so optimistic about it? I was like, you know, kind of like when you have a win like Calm or a win like Uber, it just makes you feel like,

like all the losses were worth it. All the pain and suffering was worth it because those things became so humanity positive. What did you have? You had ride sharing? So, no, my final was streaming. The opiate of the masses versus basically the destruction of truth and Donald Trump. And, you know, I'm not an optimist. I'm a cynic when it comes to a lot of these things.

And I'm terrified about the destruction of truth. And that wanted for you. That to me is the most terrifying. Because, I mean, the consequences are, we are truly, I mean, they, we could no longer be in a democracy in our lifetimes. And that, that's fucking scares the shit out of me. Like, truly scares me. So that defines the decade for you, the dark side one. The dark side one.

Gary, for you, the light side one. Yeah. And I'm sitting here with mindfulness as well, the light side. and looking at the dark Sith Lord Zuckerberg. Oh, yes. Which one had a more profound impact? And I am the tie-breaking vote at this point in time. Wasn't the dark or the light that wins ultimately?

And you're the host. So matter what you say is really the winner. It doesn't matter. No. I mean, each of our votes counts and we'll look back on this. It would be very interesting for people 20 years to look back at this moment where we're trying to make sense of it in the moment. In the moment, what will ultimately prevail?

Zuckerberg creating a platform that allowed the amplification and the interference by a foreign despot, Putin, to get an insane person elected who has caused immeasurable damage to our democracy or namaste, people realizing that they need to take control of their own mental health. I'm on pins and needles waiting. Yeah. It's very difficult for me to make a decision here. But like you, Gary, I go with the light. All right.

I believe that mindfulness will conquer all people will become more aware because of this disaster. And they will take ownership of their own mental health and turn off the Facebook and turn off the Twitter and say, I expect more from the world. And there's a generation that gives me hope, these Gen Z, they're looking at this saying, we are not opting into it. We will not opt into this madness. We're going to make our own world. And that makes me positive. I might be wrong. I'll bet the under.

You're going to bet the under. All right. This has been amazing. Thank you, everybody, for getting involved. And as we wrap up here, what do you think we'll be talking about in 10 years? What do you think the 20s will be defined as? What do you think? Because we have all these overhangs. We have AI is going to be making. Maybe we get to general AI, self-driving, VTALs, transportation changes. So I just committed to write a check into a company that's building technology for, tracking carbon. And so in the process, I sort of did a little back of the envelope sort of math on carbon. And so right now we're releasing carbon into the atmosphere. It's free, right? We're not,

it's free, right? We're not charging for it. But, you know, it really should be about $40 a ton, give or take, if we were going to start charging for it to save the environment. And if we don't start charging for it, we're screwed. There must be a carbon tax or something equivalent or we are truly all going to die horrible deaths in the next 10 years. So we have to start pricing. You believe that's a 10-year window. Okay. Yeah, yeah. Well, because we already have the feedback loop where because the permafrost is thawing, it's releasing large amounts of carbon into the atmosphere that was previously locked up in ice. And so it's causing the feedback loop. We might already be screwed.

So, like, I truly believe that we don't start charging for carbon correctly, which is $40 a ton, we are going to die. That's $40 trillion a year of GDP that currently is not being priced or measured. It's just being released in the atmosphere that must be priced. if we are going to live. So $40 trillion a year, the biggest market of all time. So, yeah, I think the next 10 years we will be talking about that. What do you think, Gary? On the disaster side, you know, we have Theranos, which is, I mean, certainly not a failure

of imagination. She was pointed at a direction that if it was real, could have really pushed forward society. And then on the flip side, you have Zuckerberg, who is an amazing engineer, product person, built great team. who is really real, but could be more mindful, right? And I think that the next, honestly, the next 10 years is my, it's my hope that, and I hope that we get to fund them.

I hope that we fund people who are incredibly great engineers pointed to the right direction, who are real. And then that, you know, that's what my YouTube channel is about. So find me on YouTube. It's a genius. He just tied it together so smoothly. I love it. I love it.

Truly genius. I think there's going to be four things that are going to just be, you know, huge factors over the next 10, perhaps 20, but I'm going to put it at 10. I think in the next decade we're going to cure cancer. And it's going to change how we look at lifespan. And that is going to just be a colossal win for society. People will get older and wiser and participate in society. And maybe average life expectancy will go up 20 years. We really think old people are that wise? I think it's going to create a multi-generational discourse that does not exist today where, you know, we have maybe three generations kind of

thinking things through. You're going to have, start to have five or six generations. And hopefully our generation, Gen X, will be the first to experience the end of cancer. So the idea of our friends dying of cancer, we don't, we haven't experienced this in large part. We don't have a bunch of friends with cancer, correct? Our parents or other people of Jerry. One of my closest friends just got cancer, which is. One of your closest friends, right? And I'm sorry for that. And my parents are both cancer survivors. So this idea that surviving cancer is the likely scenario will be eliminating cancer. You wouldn't have to survive it because you won't get it. This could have big ramifications. But I think we're going to have a revolution in China. And I think that it's a non-zero chance.

Back to that. Now, it's not the majority chance. But a revolution in China, there is no way for us to factor in the impact of a literal revolution. People fighting each other. and the government, hundreds of millions of people potentially having their lives at risk in an all-out war in a place that has been the same for hundreds to thousands of years. I also think nuclear is going to save the day. Nuclear energy, small nukes, which people like Gates and Y Combinator and a number of people. I don't know if you have an investment in the space. You do? Sorry.

You have an investment in the nuclear space? I don't. I think new nuclear is going to solve for energy. And I think the realization is going to happen in a very profound way that we are past the tipping point for global warming. And that creating hundreds of small nuclear reactors in the world is a lower price to pay dealing with that than dealing with the storms, the fires, the floods, and just watching the oceans boil and having the Great Barrier Reef to do. disappear and all other beautiful things in the world. And then finally, and this one might be more 20-30, but I think this eugenics, this ability to flip genes and create a superior race is something that China is already dabbling in.

If you remember the Li Li Li and the twins who had their HIV genes, resistance to HIV flipped, who knows if it worked or not? The Chinese are clearly working on this. and this could be quite mind-blowing in and of itself. Imagine if a country decides, we're going to give everybody an extra 10 or 20 IQ points on average by flipping these genes or give them 20% more physical strength or give them the ability to sleep less and focus more.

We could be up against a communist country like China deciding to follow some master plan in the way the Nazis did and create a superior race. And that might even dovetail. with the revolution in that country could be driven by this. This sounds like science fiction. But this is the reality of CRISPR that is actually being tinkered with today with some dramatic results.

All of these things are related. So if we make it to 2029, I'd like to invite you to both come back and then we'll do this again. You guys locked in? All right, send the G-Cal event. If Google is still around, we'll send the G-Cal under it right now. And we'll see you all next time on this week's start us. Bye-bye.