This Week in Startups - Fact-Checking Mark Rober, and the Fall of TechCrunch | E2101

Episode Date: March 21, 2025

Today’s show: Jason, Alex, and Lon break down a subreddit question: A founder builds 100% of the product, is promised equity—and now he’s being pushed out. We break down exactly what he should do next. Plus, YouTuber Mark Rober’s viral Tesla test gets fact-checked by a small creator, and the results don’t look great for Mark. Finally, TechCrunch gets quietly sold to Regent in what looks like a fire sale. Is this the end of an era for tech media? Timestamps:(0:00) Episode Teaser(1:25) Jason's memories of Tony Hsieh(4:09) High stakes poker stories with Tony Hsieh(7:28) Reflecting on joy and fun in life(9:45) Atlassian - Head to ⁠https://www.⁠⁠atlassian.com/startups/twist to see if you qualify for 50 free seats for 12 months.(11:46) Founder question from Reddit(20:12) Fidelity Private Shares℠ - Visit ⁠https://fidelityprivateshares.com⁠! Mention our podcast and receive 20% off your first-year paid subscription.(21:52) Subreddit question: Stealth vs. building in public(27:33) Update: Mark Rober's Looney Tunes wall experiment(31:21) Lemon.io - Get $2000 off your first hire at http://lemon.io/hire(37:50) Lessons from the Mark Rober experiment(40:24) The future of tech journalism and subscription models(47:34) Jason’s idea for a gadget museum(50:12) Updates on CoreWeave and Klarna IPOs(51:43) Bipartisan bill to amend Section 230(56:29) Algorithms and their impact on Section 230(59:00) Global perspectives on online speech and anonymity(1:00:00) Podcast closing and call for social media engagementSubscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.comCheck out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.comSubscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcpFollow Alex:X: https://x.com/alexLinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelmFollow Jason:X: https://twitter.com/JasonLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanisThank you to our partners:(9:45) Atlassian - Head to ⁠https://www.⁠⁠atlassian.com/startups/twist to see if you qualify for 50 free seats for 12 months.(20:12) Fidelity Private Shares℠ - Visit ⁠https://fidelityprivateshares.com⁠! Mention our podcast and receive 20% off your first-year paid subscription.(31:21) Lemon.io - Get $2000 off your first hire at http://lemon.io/hireGreat TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarlandCheck out Jason’s suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanisFollow TWiST:Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartupsYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekinInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartupsTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartupsSubstack: https://twistartups.substack.comSubscribe to the Founder University Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@founderuniversity1916

Tech Wrench just got sold to a company called Regent. That dropped out of the sky. No one saw that coming. Like all these things, it's probably an SEO play. I'm guessing it's a fire sale and SEO plan. They're going to cut two thirds of the writers and game over. What do you think, Alex? It's adversarial.

You can have an opinion. No, I mean, this is one of those times that I'm so conflicted. It's hard to be clear-headed. I mean, I love so many people there. We like to. Yeah. This is like, this is where you could actually, You know, earn your bones here.

Just let it rip. Okay. I think the people complain that the media isn't sufficiently nice to tech are a bunch of whiners, and they should go sit upon their thrones of gold and stop coveting about people who make one one thousandth of their income. This weekend startups is brought to you by Atlassian. From MVP to IPO, Atlassian for startups

provides your team the right tools to plan, track, and collaborate on work. Head to atlassian.com slash software slash startups to see if you qualify for 50 free seats for 12 months. Fidelity Private Shares. If you want an all-in-one equity management platform, FidelityPrivate shares has you covered. Visit FidelityPrivate shares.com. mention this podcast for 20% off your first off your All right, everybody, welcome back to this week and startups. We go live Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, typically at noon. But I got to get out on that ski mountain with my two daughters. It's the end of the season.

It looks like we're overcast. We might get some flurries. Yesterday was my 30th day. I set a goal just when my friend Tony Shade. I met Tony, I think, maybe. I have met Tony a couple times, yeah. Yeah, yeah, it was one of my good friends. And he passed away.

He was a great guy. He was a really good human being. He created a company called Zappos and for that link exchange. It's one of the most generous people ever met in my life. You remember he had that he owned a bunch of buildings in downtown Las Vegas that he was going to make into sort of this new tech hub. And when what's trending when we would go down there to cover CES, he would let us stay there and he took really good care of us.

He was a really nice thing. Did you stay at the apartment building he had? Or did you stay at the, okay. No, he had a nicer place too. We stayed at, yeah, he had like apartment buildings and condos for people who were working on those tech companies around there. And he just let us stay there for. I think for free.

Yeah, he would do that. Again, back to this crazy generosity that Tony Shea had. And people have asked me, like, why are you so, like, obsessed with trying to hit a certain number of days? You know, he had some sadness in him. You know, he had the depression, I think, and the anxiety. And no amount of money cures that. You know, like, you can become a billionaire, and sometimes it can make a worse.

And I just wanted to start the show, just talking a little bit about him for a second with you on, as you got to meet him. I would go to Vegas. And, you know, I kind of had made my bones already. And I, you know, I knew people in Vegas. They would give me free rooms, you know, at a very nice hotel sometimes or upgrade me to suites. And I would go there and I would never stay there because he would invite me to stay in a

trailer park with him. And some of my fondest memories in life were going and staying in those trailer parks. And then I would get back from CES stuff or meetings or poker tournaments, whatever it was. And it would be 1 a.m. and he would come out of his trailer. He's a billionaire. He's staying in an airstream.

And he'd knock on my door. I heard you come in. I was waiting just in case he came back. This is a guy who's a billionaire at 1 a.m. I come out, we'd sit by a fire pit, and we'd talk for two hours. It's just incredible. And one time in a poker game,

and I'm going to tell the story in a documentary my friend is playing, is making it forever comes out. And he, we're playing. It's somewhat high stakes, but not like millions of dollars, but tens of thousands of dollars are on the table.

Wow. You know, it's, I mean, it's high stakes, you know, trust me, for a kid from Brooklyn, when I'm in a $10, 20, $30,000 pot, it does make me think for a second. I have to actually remember that, like, that number doesn't impact me now, but, you know,

that's the thing about high stakes. It's meant to make you consider your behavior because your blood will flow if there's a Tesla in the pot, or as I tell people win a Prius, lose a Prius. I said famously at Schmott's game. And that always stuck. And he didn't care about money. He wins his pot. And he had, you know, had a couple of pops. And it was late, you know, this early morning poker game. And, you know, he needed to go to bed. And so I'm trying to get him to go to bed. And we have this, like, final hand. And I had, you know, a full house and somebody else, you know, has a straight.

And then he turns over in this $30,000 pot. I kid you not. A straight flush. Wow. You know, really great hand in poker. One of the best. And he's like, and I'm like, okay, we're going to count your money. You're going to bed. We count this money. It's, you know, he's got over $30,000.

A priest. And he says to me, you take it, you know, on your daughters, whatever. He said, no, no, Tony, Tony. You can't take your money. Just you won the money. If I had won it, you would pay me. And if this person in the hands had won it, they would get paid, right? This is just how the nature of.

Poker is, right? We don't feel bad afterwards. We all sat down at the table. Scambling. And he's insistent. And he's had a couple drinks and he's not being belligerent, but he's being insistent that he will not take the money. I'm trying to get him to better. He says, I refuse to take this money. Game is stopped. There's two tables going. There's 20 people in the room. Now it's becoming a bit of a thing. And he says, you take it. And he pushes. $30,000 to the dealer. The dealer looks at me.

I do a big sigh and I think you know, these are well-paid dealers. These are my dealers. Yeah, yeah, yeah. These are my dealers. Professional Vegas dealers. They're getting nice. But these are the ones who play in home games

who can handle certain types of situations that only happen in home games. Things happen. Sometimes somebody has a little too much to drink. Somebody maybe throws cards at a dealer. Sometimes a, you know, a situation can happen. Accusation. Yeah. Well, and this is their career. They don't want to risk their whole reputation on one $30,000 pot. Like word gets out, hey, this dealer steals pots, you know.

Yeah, yeah. So this is a, yeah, but even beyond that, there, you know, anyway, I just have this moment. This will be one of the greatest stories of all time. You know how I have my moments. Like, I just, and I have one of these moments in my mind where I'm like, my timing. And I just said, this is like one of the greatest moments of all time. and I look at him. I look at the dealer. Now the other dealer for the other table is watching now too because the whole room is stumped. And they're both looking at and there's a third dealer to rotate in.

So they're three dealers. So these are going to get 10 times each. And this is 15. Yeah, they're right. They're thinking we're thinking we're splitting this three ways. No, but they're also thinking, Jake House not going to let him do this. They don't want to make their money that way.

You know, guys have too much to drink. Exactly. And I look at him and look at them. And I said, okay. And the dealers are like, no, no, we can't accept it. And I look at the dealers. I say, it's okay.

He can afford it. And he's like, that's right, I can afford it. And he goes to bed. It's a few hundred. I take the dealers. I take the dealers. I give them their 10k. Wow.

Greatest night of their lives. That's a huge night. That story was told every poker game around the world. Legendary poker story for 15 years. And it gave Tony so much joy because he didn't even remember he did it. He was barely with us. drinking, having fun. And that's the race been told

thousands of times since. He passed away. And I just told myself, it was a long story, but, you know, I told myself as we were in the audience here, you know, when he passed away, I was talking to some friends about it. You know, he said he always just wanted to have more fun.

Specifically with you, J-Cal, he wanted to hang out have more fun. You just thought to myself, you know what? That's a good operating system. I'm going to try to have a little more joy and a little more fun in my life. Yeah, that's what The one thing I do that inevitably me joy of fun is when I do a podcast, especially with you,

I love doing it. We've done together for many years. Kind thing to say. And, you know, I'm super excited. We're going to spend more time together. But at the end of your life, all these chipsacks, you know, and other victories and things,

they don't really get remembered all that much. What gets remembered is the funny times you have with your friends. Exactly. And the joy you have. And I got to tell you, on this mountain, or when I'm in a secco at my friend, laughing it up, skiing like I did this year,

all those moments, add up to like all this incredible joy my life. So I just set joy goals. And the only joy goal I set is just getting out there on the mountain with my daughters and friends. And then making a funny podcast for you all to listen to. Maybe learn something during them. I feel like at the end of your life, you're not going to look back and be like,

oh, if only it was one more deal. If only I had made one more big deal. One more Robin Hood. One more Tom. One more Uber. You do those in order to fund and allow for the fun parts, the social parts, the parts with family and friends. Yes, exactly. So anyway, lest anybody think I'm just like retired and ski all the time. I just go out for two hours, 40 days a year. It's 80 hours of my life. And I just, I'm trying to hit 41 days. This will be day 31, Saturday. Sunday will make it day 33. So I'm within seven days of time. My record, eight days of breaking it or so. We'll see if it happens. If it happens, it happens. If it doesn't, it doesn't, maybe I have to go to New Zealand at some point. It's a goal. You know, you put a goal out there. It's a per goal. You know, yeah.

All right, if you're shipping a product or rolling out an update, you're building a company, you need to be organized, right? We know that. Atlassian has exactly what you need to streamline your work and smash your goals. And the Atlassian for Startups program is packed with all the tools you need, like Jira, where you can track every task, sprint, and bug. That's the industry standard. Confluence, another industry standard for team collaboration and documentation. And of course, Lume for quick video explainer creation. Now, Loom is really brilliant. My team started using Loom on their own. They started paying for it on their own. Why? They wanted to get credit on the investment team for communicating to me, the general partner of the firm, why they wanted to invest in a company. So they would do a loom where they recorded over a recording of an interview they did with a founder or visiting their website and going through why they want to invest in a company. And this was so great for me. I would be skiing in Japan. I would be on a

flight to New York to see my parents, and all of a sudden I get a notification for one of my team members, hey, watch this loom, and I get the link for the loom, I click it, and then I can put comments at any time. So it's like doing a conference call, but on my time, asynchronously, and I can communicate right there on the video. Also included in Atlassian for startups is Compass, Jira Product Discovery, Bitbucket, so much more, all powered by Atlassian intelligence. That's their built-in AI. Atlassian software helps companies like Canva, Cloudflare, and Revitus. keep growing and keep innovating. Whether you're brainstorming on sticky notes or scaling to the big leads, Atlassian is here to accelerate your startup's growth. Check out Elassian for startups where eligible

startups get up to 50 seats for free for one full year. That is absurdly generous. Why can they be so generous at Atlassian? Because they're the standard. Atlassian is the standard. And they are generous to startups because they were once a startup. I remember meeting them 20 years ago in Australia. What a great company. Head to atlasian.com. slash startups slash twist for complete details. All right. I wanted to start the show today with you and, you know, as we get into a rhythm with you and Alex here,

we had, man, a explosive show on Wednesday, a lot of, you know, back and forth. It was a lot of emotions going on. We're going to do a follow-up on that story. But I really want to get the show really focused on founder stories. One of the great places we find founders talking is Reddit and sometimes on Hacker News. Yeah, Hacker News, good discussions. A shout out Paul Graham for creating that or whoever created it. Whoever create Hacker News, great job, by the way.

They never changed it. Reddit never changed. They just focused on the community. There's something really special about that. As we're designing the new inside app, we have to keep that in mind. Don't change things. Just make it work and then focus on the community. I find Hacker News very comforting.

It hasn't changed in so long. You can always go there. It's exactly the same as it ever was. And so little of the Internet is like that. Everything changes all the time. I find Hapaghani is very stupid. I know Paul Graham created. I know Paul Graham created.

He wasn't the one who wrote the code. I don't think. I think there was specifically a person who did it, and I think there's an open-source version of it, which is really interesting. There was a time when everybody thought there would be like a thousand hacker news. Right.

Anyway, putting it aside, we find really good stories there. Why do we find good stories there? If we ask people for stories, a lot of times when they pitch us a question here for me, those stories are not authentic. They're like packaged from backdoor promotions. It's a little annoying for me.

But I told Lon, just hang out there, see what's going on with the vibes on Reddit. We have a This Week in Startups, one where people are talking about stuff, entrepreneurs, startups. There's a bunch of different places people talking about business. So that's a lot to surprise me with conversations there. And then I want him to round-trip them. Well, let's go with our first question you found on one of these sites. And find the hard ones. Let's work backwards from hard. Yeah, I'm trying to find questions where there's like multi-stages or it's a little specific or something that you can really

speak to. There's a lot of general questions and I skip them. Question one. Let's start with question one, court. This is a technical founder. They say they're in need of a real. check, this comes from user, James Calhoun 2 in Reddit's startups community, I'll summarize. They are a technical founder. They built 100% of their company's product on their own. It was not their idea. They have a co-founder slash CEO. It was that person's idea. They then built it entirely themselves. Now, this CTO says he was promised equity by the

non-technical founders, but now that the product is built, the plans keep shifting and changing, and he finds that he's being offered a lot less equity than his other partners who did not build the project. They're also now telling him that he's, quote, not founder material, and he needs to, quote, acknowledge the CEO's leadership. Okay. One more factoid. He claims that he still owns the IP rights of the code base as leverage. So what should he do? And I think the even bigger question for you is, What could founders do to avoid ever having this problem down the road? Sure.

So before you start any project, you should document the arrangement. If you're the idea person, the business person with the idea, you're going to want to give what's called a work for hire contract to anybody who works for you. And you pay them a salary in exchange for that. So I own this week in startups. Lawn is an employee of mine, well paid, well trusted. an adored employee. He has signed an IP assignment

when he comes to workers. Same with Alex. And they sign this thing that says, hey, you don't own this week and startups JCal does. Now, they don't expect to own it, et cetera. But if the three of us got together

on a weekend and I said, hey, let's do a pod. It's going to be called three dudes talk about, you know, movies. You would probably want to say, here's the arrangement. I came up with the name of the show.

I came up with the IP and everybody works for me. I know this because this is what happened with All In. I ran All In out of my company here. Two years into it, it went from being like a J-Cal production where it was one of my employees doing it. I paid for everything. They showed up to becoming a company. We formalized it. It was a little bit of a negotiation. We had a little hand-wringing. And it's always uncomfortable. Whose value is more, et cetera? We wound up in the All-In situation just saying, hey, there's four of us. I just said to everybody, listen, if everybody shows up every week, four people, will do 25% each. If you want me to be the CEO of it, I'll take a little more equity. They didn't. They wanted to hire a CEO. I was like, that's fine. And you know what? It worked out great.

There's a CEO. The company makes a ton of money. All I have to do is show up and do that. If we had done it earlier, it would have been less negotiation and time consuming. So you always want to do that in advance. In this case, the mistake the CEO of this company made, apparently, is if he didn't pay this person, then that person does own the idea. He does own what he created and it was created on his laptop. Now, if you're creating on my laptop that launch gave you and you signed an IP assignment, then when it went to a judge or whatever, if it ever got there, which you never would, your lawyer wouldn't take the case. They'd be like, you don't have a case here, kid, you got paid a salary, signed an IP assignment, and case closed. So they did this wrong. Now, they have to

have a hard conversation. These guys are insulting him. They don't value him. He's going to have to establish his value with them. And the way he's going to have to establish his value is by having an attorney, giving the attorney a $1,000 retainer, and paying them four or $500 an hour, and it might get up to 10 hours, and this is going to be messy. And that attorney has to say, listen, my client, you know, and that's going to probably make the whole relationship toxic, right? Because now they've got to get an attorney. So if all of them watch this, and they understand that this whole situation is going to implode, because nobody wants to spend and do a legal battle over this, is probably not that much at stake. I think what the, the

folks who are running the company have to determine is, is this person, do they actually mean what they're saying when they say he's not found or material? Because apparently he is, because they picked him. That's like picking a spouse, Lon, and being like, you're not really a great husband material. It's like, but you picked me. Right. So what are we talking about here? What does it say about you? Are you also partner material? If you pick me and then you're deriding me has not found, you know, you ever meet that couple at a dinner party? Yes. Who hate each other? And you're like, why'd you pick? each other and why you're still together? Like, you're both opting into this. So I think what they have to do is sit down and he has to just say, listen, I want to be a co-founder. I have a lot. You may not think I do, but you picked me. And so I want to be an

equal co-founder. And I want to build with you for five years. And the way we do that is we put ourselves on a five-year vest. If anybody has to leave, it gets advanced one year, let's say. So, you know, if the two of them gang up on a farm day one, he gets plus a year, right? So that stings a little bit. So they have to decide, oh, my God, if we're each getting 33%, divide that by, let's say, four. And it's typically a four-year vest, but I like the five-year vest for co-founders. That's 8%. They kind of just give him 8% of the company, plus whatever he earned already. Maybe they've been doing this for a year.

He has 16% of the company. It's like, it kind of stings, right? And it's supposed to sting. It's supposed to sting because there's something at value here. And there's a long line of people who left YouTube, Snapchat early, and they got equity chunks for, you know, the other parties might say not doing anything, but in reality, they did do something. They did obviously contribute. So he's going to just have to be prepared emotionally to not continue on with them. This would be my advice to them if they were like my sibling. Tell them you want to be

equal founders or nothing. Or I need to have this percentage, whatever the percentage you think you deserve is. I want 25%. You two can split 75%. I agree. I'm not like a CEO. I'm a CTO. That's what I think is fair. If you guys want to pay me 25%. Great. I want to get paid 80%. of whatever dollars you get paid. I want to get 80% of whatever equity you have. I agree you have more experience. I think I'm 80% as good as you guys. And that's going to be my contribution over four years.

Take it or leave it. If not, you can buy this code base for me or I'm going to go do my own thing because we don't have an agreement. That's it. And he's got to be hardcore and believe what he's saying. And he's got to emotionally be ready to lead. I think that's the thing is, yeah. It's probably a little bit emotional.

Like he built this thing. He doesn't want to leave it by. But that's the only way to like. make the deal is be ready to walk away. This advertisement is paid by Fidelity Private Shares. All right, founders, we all know. Tap tables, due diligence, and of course, managing investors is a huge headache. But there's a very simple solution for you.

Today we're talking with Kristen Kraft, an old friend of mine, and she works at Fidelity Private Shares, a new group over at Fidelity. You've heard of Fidelity before. And they have a mission to help startup simplify equity management. they're going to save you money. They're going to give you better service. Welcome to the program, Kristen. Thank you so much, Jason.

It's great to see you again. Yeah, great to see you as well. Maybe just from a product perspective, what are you trying to accomplish with the product? So, Jason, we are super excited about our cap table management and data room platform. We want to make it super simple for founders and startup operators to manage all sort of ownership and equity in the company and essentially prepare to raise. We want to make sure that everybody goes into these fundraising conversations well prepared.

They're ready to share their cap table and that they're ready to go through due diligence as they're trying to close their round. So from a product perspective, that is where we're laser focused. And that product is really well built, really strong attention to detail in the way that Fidelity is known and beloved for. So if you want an all in one equity management platform Fidelity Private Shares, they've got you covered. visit FidelityPrivatechairs.com. That's one word, no spaces, no dashes. FidelityPrivatechairs.com. And hey, mention this week in startups.

They'll give you 20% off your first year subscription. Once again, FidelityPrivate shares.com and tell them that you heard about it here on this week in startups. Great, great, fine there. And if the person wants to email me any time, I'm happy to create emails with them. Yeah, I'm going to go leave this as a comment on there once the video goes up and I'll let them know. One more question. This one comes from, I found a new subreddit that I really like Founders Hub.

It's a just community of founders knocking ideas around, joining each other's companies, a really nice little Reddit community. Maybe our first caller should join that community. Maybe they should. They definitely should. So this one comes from a big brainy is the user's name on Reddit. They are building a tracker for founders who are building their startups publicly. So the idea is you can track your progress and failures.

you turn the process of building your product into early marketing for your company. Yes. And you're getting real-time feedback from potential users while you're still in building mode. The system even nudges founders to log their growth, track what they're working on, and release new updates once every 15 days. So my question is to you, are you interested in this? Do you think this is a useful tool? And what are the pluses negatives of building your product in public rather than stealth?

If you build your product in public, it's obviously giving intelligence over to potential competitors. The truth is, potential competitors are going to watch you like a hawk anyway. In this build and public movement, you will get great ideas. You will get new employees and you will get new customers. You will also educate people on what your plans are. So be thoughtful in how you do it. It's one thing to be like, hey, here's the new version coming and we have three features. What order do you want to see us release these features? or, you know, hey, here's what I built. I was vibe coding. Pull up Fresh, who used to work for me, his Twitter handle, and you will see him vibe coding this weekend. He was making some sort of like a 1990s retro, you know, health app. And he builds in public. And he's, you know, he worked for me for like seven years, great, great, great employee and team member here. But he wanted to go be an entrepreneur. So I let him go do that. And I actually backed it. So he's doing this SunCeek. It helps you improve. He's building apps to help you.

be healthier. Pull plunge app, Sunseek, getting stunned. And, you know, he's into Apple Watches and all that stuff. And if you scroll down, you'll just see in his feed, if you scroll down, him building, like, different pieces of software and showing it. So he was vibe coding this week, and he was bringing this, like, he made a Mac retro runner app, right? Yeah.

And so now what is he done with this? And I'm not sure what this app was called. Looks like retro run. Yeah. So, you know, it's like, it literally is using the original Mac OS look and feel. to make a running app like Run Keeper or Strava, I guess. Yeah, yeah.

Track your runs and your roots and whatever. I think that's what it's doing. Yeah. So now, like, let's say, like, this is actually a killer idea. People can go steal the idea. Oh, maybe people want to have that retro. I'll add it to Airbnb.

We'll have a retro thing, and you can switch your interface to retro, if you like. So, you know, but how many views and how many replies and how many followers did he get on that tweet? Let's just take a look at it here. you know, most people get like, when I see people like dunking on me and quote retweeting me,

I look at how many views they have, they have 10. And I'm like, I bet you're six of them. So now he's got 281 people who saw this and he got one reply. He got two likes. So this one didn't break out for him yet. No. But if you look at some of his other posts, like his pin tweet or whatever, he might have thousands of people doing that. And then there's like some build in public communities where they kind of help each other. So I think it's great. I wouldn't ever share things that are really great growth hacks on it. I wouldn't share like really important news on it. Some people are too filled in public. But for other people, it gets them a ton of advice. We had another company, I think it was Jenny AI. You can pull up Jenny AI. And they were literally releasing their revenue.

And now they started making millions of dollars. So people were like really tracking Jenny with a J. Yeah, I found it, Jenny AI. Yeah. And if you look at the founder, he was literally sharing, and some of these folks take it real serious, they share their revenue. They have a bad quarter, they're sharing their bad quarter. I mean,

I prefer this to not having product velocity. I think this lights a fire under people on your team, and it makes it exciting for certain people who feed off the energy of a crowd. Great. So this is like being a comedian

who writes a series at home and never talks to anybody as introverted versus somebody who goes and, you know, does stand-up. or host a live talk show or something. You know, like some people feed off the energy of the crowd. Some people like to work quietly in the laboratory.

Viva deference. All that matters is you're building a great product. You're obsessed about product, team, product, customer. Team product customer. You have to be obsessed with those three things. This helps your product get better. It helps you build a team and it finds your customers faster. So under my rubric of three things matter in startups, team, product, customer.

and if you're focusing on anything other than those three, you've got to ask yourself, like, why am I focused on this right now? You know, like accounting or legal, like, yeah, sometimes you have to do chores, but you really got to get back to the big three. And also, anybody wants to ask a question that gets on the show. You can post it on Reddit or Hack or News,

but you could also send it to me on Twitter at TWA. I'm sorry, at TWA startups. You could also send it to us posted on our Reddit. We'll find it if you send it to us. DMS are open, right, on the TWA startups. Feel free. Reach out. Ask us questions. All right. What's in the news? Let's get to some news stories here.

We got a little plug in there for founding university. Do you want to, we could bring in Alex and talk about the news? I know he was working on the docket. Let's get in the news here. And I'm sure we can tie up the first. Hey, Alex, how are we doing? There he is. Hey, I am doing fantastically. It's weird to sit backstage because I'm always like, oh, I want to jump in. And then I'm like, dude, no one can hear you. Shut up. So it doesn't matter.

Well, this is like the fun of it. Well, we, our cup runneth over now. And we keep adding resources to show to make the show better. And some of these stories are complex. We did a complex story Monday and Wednesday, which is a YouTuber who set up a series of experiments. It's quite controversial. Maybe you could catch us up on Mark Rober. Rober. Mark Rober.

NASA scientists. Former NASA scientist with an incredible YouTube channel where he runs experiments. This one, this experiment might have blown up in his lap and people are replicating. it, we'll see. Let's see where we're at. Yes, absolutely. People are replicating it and people with much smaller accounts. So today we're going to talk about a guy named Kyle Paul. He runs a YouTube channel. It has a grand total of 2009 subscribers. Shout out Kyle for having to start. He's a couple videos out, Jason. They mostly do five, six thousand views. And then most recently, he replicated part of the Mark Rober Tesla test. He didn't do the fog. He didn't do the water.

What he did was the Looney Tunes wall to see what he could get from the tests. So, This video did 145,000 views in less than 20 hours. People are definitely talking about it. And it goes through and answer some of the questions people had about the original video. So in this case, he runs a Model Y with full self-driving. And we're going to show that clip in a second. And then later on, Jason, he also breaks out a cyber truck, which has the newer self-driving hardware in it.

I believe it's version 4. And we'll take a look at that. But let's start with a video of a Model Y. And this is a 222 model Y with hardware 3. and FSD turned on going towards a Looney Tunes wall that Kyle Paul this YouTuber put together.

This is in the in the Mark video Roebler. Rober. Rober. Rober. B.E.R. Rober. Mark Rober's video, he used autopilot a different technology than FSD. That was the original sin I bank of the video. Here, we're correcting the original sin and using FSD, full self-driving, which uses, you know, different pieces of the technology. Let's see what happens.

Does he run into the Looney Tunes wall, which is a wall that perfectly replicates what's behind it to try to trick cameras? And as I said, humans would be tricked by this in some cases, too, if they're not paying attention. But let's see what happens. I'm interested to see. Here is one of the takes. Not touching the wheel. I go much faster than 30. One.

Apparently does not see the wall. Does not see the wall. Does not see the wall. And he breaks. Okay. He breaks. And people did say, why didn't you just go through it? It turns out there's, I think, a U-Haul on the other side.

So if he went through it, it would be a collision. Just to be clear, he ran this test with the model Y, Jason. I think three separate times. He had to apply the brakes manually each time. So I think that goes to show that for the 2022, using FSD and hardware three, it will not catch this particular scenario if it ever comes up in your life. But I'm curious, Jason, your take on the quality of the experimenter. It looks like a pretty good experiment because if that was a human being who was paying partial

attention, there is a chance one out of 50, one out of 100 would go through the wall if they were, you know, applying their lipstick, changing the radio station, putting in navigation, you know, advancing their podcast, whatever it is. So founders, let's be real. Let's keep it a buck. Finding great developers is hard. It's like one of the hardest things you have to do in our industry, especially when you're trying to run and scale your startup. But here's the good news. I got a tip that's going to save you time, money, and a ton of headaches. You need to check. out Lemon.io. Lemon.io has thousands of on-demand developers who can help you.

They have done all the work to find and vet great developers who are experience, who are results-oriented, and who charge competitive rate. Great developers, we know, are hard to find and integrate in your team, so Lemon. dotio will handle all of that for you. They're only going to offer you handpick developers with at least three years of experience. And if something goes wrong, lemon.io will find you a replacement developer ASAP. A bunch of launch founders have worked with lemon.io, and they have told me they've had a great experience. So here's your call to action. Go to lemon.io slash twist and find your perfect developer or an entire tech team in 48 hours or less.

And twist listeners get 15% off the first four weeks. So stop burning money, hire developer smarter. visit lemon.io slash twist. I do think that this test certain percentage of humans would fail and FSD on hardware three which is what I have is a distinctly different experience

that hardware four. Yes. So much so that I believe in the last, I know in the last Tesla call and somebody can fact check me if I'm wrong here. Elon said he was probably going to have to upgrade hardware three to hardware four

and they were going to do that for free if FSD couldn't do stuff. And they had hinted at that, the call before it. And then I can remember him sort of casually mentioning that. And I remember people at Tesla talking about there's a big jump in the hardware between three and four. I think that it's pretty clear. I'm going to go ahead and guess.

Hardware four gets it right. Hardware three doesn't. Let's take a look. All right. So next up, here we have a cyber truck, so a much more recent vehicle than 2022, running hardware four, running FSD. And two quick notes for folks. out there who want to get into the nitty gritty here.

Kyle actually did have the cameraman zoom in to show the actual version number of FSD so you can get down to the absolute release date if you want. Anyways, here is the cyber truck running the same test a little bit later in the day. And we'll go back to that in just a second. All right. We are in a cyber truck. Full self-driving computer four. Full self-driving version 13.2.8.

We have full self-driving turned on. Ready. Go. Hand off the wheel. Not touching your back. It sounds like a slowdown to me. It's making that Millennium Falcon light slowdown sound. Yep.

And that's a stop. Yep. So I think that that shows that at least a little bit later in the day, the Tesla Cybertrick did a great job, stopped early, stopped very calmly, didn't slam on the brakes to the last minute. Some people have said, and we are in the business here of kind of poking holes of things, that it was so much later in the day that the actual outline of the image on the wall might be more invisible.

that said, I would have more stock in that if it had been more of a chaotic stop. But given how confident the cyber truck was, I do think that if you are in a cyber truck, you will not go through a Looney Tunes wall while using FST. It's a meaningless test. This will never happen in the real world.

It's super entertaining for us. And the overall picture here, Alon, is that the Looney Tunes test is the stupidest test, but the most entertaining. And so, I think we're entering the phase of self-driving and autonomy,

where we're coming up with insane tests because having it stay in the lane and having it stop before a bicycle goes across it, we know it's going to do that 100% of the time. So congratulations, humanity, Tesla, Waymo, everybody in between who's making self-driving technology, people who are making breaking technology. Less people are going to die.

If you die in a car crash, it's not going to be from a Looney Tunes wall. It's going to be because you decided to drink and drive. You decided to be a distracted driver. You decided to not engage self-driving technology. Big picture here. FSD, you know, putting Tesla side, I'll just say, full self-driving. Level two, three, four driving.

It's here. It works 80, 90, 95% of miles flawlessly. we got work to do on the last 5%. And the last 5% lawn has nothing to do with the Looney Tunes test. So I want all these people to get back to work on better tests. Come up with a better test.

The better test is construction zone. So if these guys really want to go at it, I can tell you when my hardware 3 model Y fails. It fails on 290 in Austin, which is under massive construction. Literally, every time I take that goddamn highway, they have moved the cones around. It doesn't match the maps.

Waymo, Tesla, Zooks, ain't nobody going to get that right in Texas. I can tell you that, y'all. Law and your thoughts. Yeah, I mean, the one thing I was going to say is, I do think this reinforces some things we were saying about the original Mark Rober video, which is this is YouTube.

This is for entertainment purposes. I don't, I think everybody watching this who was expecting or anticipating, and I'm not blaming them. But the people are watching this who are expecting engineering and scientific scrutiny in these perfectly variable free experiments.

It's a YouTube video. The goal was something clicky that's going to be visually fun, not something that's really going to prove autopilot versus full self-driving. Like the roadrunner test is for fun. Yeah, but I do like that people can get out there and run their own experiments and publish it. Like there's something very homebrew about that that I really do appreciate. And so I want this Kyle guy to do the fog and the hose videos as a, absolutely. And I'll tell you right now, if he does that, I will donate immediately $100 to it. So crowdsource the tests, let people pay you to do the tests in aggregate. Don't take money from any specific person who has a green technology. Just so we don't have any more muddying the waters with friends, et cetera. Please. And what this is, now that we've gotten through three conversations about it, we have, you know, some of the most important things. Self-driving works. It works most of the time. We're trying to cut.

Entertainment works, people are entertainers. And then also, if you are a NASA scientist, the expectation is for you to do NASA-based experiments, and this is running into a passionate group of people who know the technology better than Mark did. So while Mark might, in a NASA experiment, do really well, what he learned here, his lesson is, okay, no appearance of impropriety,

because people will find it. All the receipts are on the Internet. Putting that aside, we'll assume good faith there. The second piece is, he has to understand. There are people every day who obsess over the version numbers of FSD, and all they do is release, specifically the Testa FSD, because it's out there being beta tested with beta testers who have to remain vigilant. They are recording and publishing, I would say, hundreds of these videos per week.

He does one experiment. Their collective knowledge is so much great. greater than his. That would be like me coming out and putting out like a chess video here explaining my chess opening. Like, have you not look at the internet and seen that people are playing live chess on Twitch on TikTok? And these people have ratings of 2000 and their grandmasters doing every move. Like I come in and I'm like, hey, check out my new chess move. It's like, dude, you're rated 900. On a good day.

He's a 900 chess player going up against the grand. masters of FSD who are going to run laps around him. He should have known this going in. Let's do more experiments. I'm actually asking the community right now, come up with the rest of the experiments. We'll donate to it. In fact, if somebody can make these experiments, I would pay them to do it for this week in startups. So if this guy wants to do a couple more, and we'll release them here on the channel. Sure. I'll come up with new ones. And I don't want to just do it for Tesla. Do it for every brand. Let's get an Audi with the self-driving in there. Run four cars against it. Why isn't car and driver doing this. Like, do you understand car and driver, like how many videos you would get? How many views

you would get? If you took all 10 of your top 10 cars from last year, from the Corvette to the Prius and everything in between, even Lons, Prius C, rated 2 of 10? Like, let's get the two. It's a great car. It's a great car to drive after a war. So anyway, let's move on to the next news story. What else you got in the news, Alex? So a couple things. One, Tech Wrench just got sold to a group company called Regent. That dropped out of the sky. No one saw that coming. Wow. This is kind of... Did they sell in gadget as well?

I do not know. We only know about Regent, but we also know that Region bought Foundry last week, which was like PCMag and so forth. So something akin to a roll up here. This happened literally right before we jumped on. I have a bunch of texts from from our colleagues that I need to go read, Jason. But I think people who listen to the show and watch it probably are TechCrunch readers as well,

so they might care that it's been sold. Details to come, but probably not a great sign, Jason. You've done more media M&A than I. I've done. It's an investment firm, regent. You know, TechCrunch probably makes 20, 30 million a year because of the events, but it's kind of, I admit, I don't want to be rude here. But without a, like, a top leader in it, it's Wayne. There's no Alex there. There's no Mike Larrington. There's no Jason Calacanus. There's no Peter Rojas. You know, in order to have these, you need to have, like, a person who actually runs it. Oh, Yahoo retained ownership to Engadget.

So that was the one I sold them. So it sounds like they were. want a tech crunch. I don't know who region is. I actually had called Jim Lanzone. If you ever wanted to sell TechCrunch to let me know or engage it, I would buy them. Jack it to my friend, Lanzone for not calling me. Thanks, Jim. Thanks, Jim. But good luck to them. It looks like region owns DC World, Macworld, and Tech Advisor. So this is going to join a suite of tech news sites that they already have. And I'm sure they're willing to invest and double down and bring the brand back to its former glory. I'm sure that's the plan. Yeah. Nope. Like all these things, it's probably an SEO play.

And I'm guessing it's a fire sale and SEO plan. They're going to cut two-thirds of the writers and game over. And actually, if they own PC World, Macworld, Info, tech advisor, all those other publications I'm reading here that they own, they're going to play straight and tech crunch become quite lefty, dare I say, I think you might agree. And it started to dip into the sort of like holding truth to power, anti-tech kind of space, Alex, I think,

which made it not popular amongst my crowd. You know, the VCs and the CEOs haven't exactly like TechCrunch's kind of woke position over the last couple years. What do you think, Alex? It's adversarial? You can have an opinion. No, I mean, this is one of those times that I'm so conflicted. It's hard to be clear-headed.

I mean, I love so many people there. We like to. Yeah. This is where you could actually, you know, earn your bones here. Just let it rip. Okay. I think the people complain that the media isn't sufficiently nice to tech or a bunch of whiners and they should go sit upon their thrones of gold and stop coveting about people who make

one one thousandth of their income. Also, like, keep in mind how the market is set up. I mean, there is more people working in PR just in San Francisco for tech companies than tech rush has ever had ever worked for a period historically added together. and I think to make tech much better, what you should do is you should quadruple the staff, not cut it by two thirds. I think if this ends up being the fire sale SEO play

that you're describing Jason, it'll be an enormous loss. And also, I feel sorry for all the LLM companies because as media continues to get gutted, there's going to be less and less stuff for them to ingest. So this is bad, personally, bad, I think, for the industry and bad I would say for the future as well.

Doesn't make me happy. Maybe I'm wrong. I would love to be wrong. All these brands now, are just like SEO, you know, click fodder. They all, like, you know, all the old Gawker brands, et cetera. They just get bought for pennies on the dollar. People just extract all the money out of them.

They don't invest in them. The people who write for them could be in a foreign country just writing like, you know, regurgitated articles. The only people really, you know, the future of the industry is subscriptions. And substacks, beehive, ghosts, all those platforms. We use Beehive, a partner of ours. Really great platform. If you don't want to have to pay the 10% Vig,

you just want to pay like a SaaS product opposed to giving all your revenue over. The information, I think, New York Times, the subscription-based model is clearly the only sustainable one now. Once you start trying to get advertising going with the exceptional podcast for written words,

you know, for written words, it doesn't work anymore. The reason it works for podcasts is because I read the ads. When I read the ads, and we have a very niche audience, You know, if you're spending $30,000 on five ads or $60,000 on 10 ads, whatever, you buy some ads on a podcast. If you're a SaaS company and you get one customer, it paid for itself. That's like a little niche thing over here.

Then the other piece of it is, you're Bill Simmons, you have a massive audience, and you talk about Mikalob or Bud Light. I don't know which one he does. But, you know, whichever beer he does, like you reach the masses. Yeah. It's a messy middle for people like Tech Ranch. I don't think this will be the last publication you see. to make a subscription and they didn't commit. Well, man, that's a long story, but they're not a single problem.

But partially, we were hamstrung by what you might call big company politics and a buyer's internal tooling that was already owned. But we, I mean, speaking very generically to protect other people's work, but like, we got it into the seven figures. I was proud of that. That's pretty good. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. And it would have gotten to eight figures if they just simply put everything behind a paywall. And it would be an independent strong brand. They should have just said, you know what? Nothing for free anymore. Anybody who's a subscriber can share three free stories a day. If you happen to get it that way, great. And you have to commit.

That's it. You know, and, well, actually, it's funny that you bring that up because when that project that I worked on Tech One Plus was ended, kind of shot out from underneath me,

that's when you called back and we're like, hey, hey, hey, and then now I'm here. So thank you, Yahoo and Region for putting me on Twist, apparently. There you go.

Yeah. Better deal. I gave you a better do. I just worry that, that we're not replacing these things nearly as quickly as we're getting rid of. Like the information is great. Bloomberg is great. There are other sources for tech business news.

Yep. Not that many. And I mean, to just lose tech crunch without something else coming in, it does make me worry that so many of these substacks, so many of these podcasts, so many of these YouTube channels, they are basing their content on original reporting from places like

tech crunch. That's fueling the entire. analysis industry. And I think that people don't necessarily make that connection. And we're getting rid of the original reporting part and counting on the commentary part to replace it. But you can't have the commentary without the original reporting. I think that's where you hear me say things on this program. Like, maybe I'll hire Alex from DeCron. Yeah. Yeah. You know, and oh, maybe I'll pay for the next FSD test. Like if it costs him $1,000 to paint the wall, if I get that exclusively on this week

and start it, maybe I'll just pay for it. Yeah, run the test here. I'll give you a thousand bucks for the rights to it. And, uh, you know,

work. Yeah. That's actually one of the things I want to do when we get to speaking of getting free products. I was on the ski lift. And I was thinking about how much I love gadgets. And I have a collection of gadgets.

And I was like, I think I'm going to start like my own little internal gadget museum. Yeah, when I have, because I'm getting a big warehouse kind of space, uh, for production in, uh,

Austin. And I was like, you know what? I'm just going to, and I talk to you about it, lab going. Because I love gadgets so much. All these things are coming out. And then I want to index them and store them. So if somebody sends me like the guy who was on from the rabbit, remember the rabbit? I told him to come on. R1. Let's have him on when he releases the next version.

Somebody reach out to them. I know that we're booking some great guests here. But I told him I'd have him on a year later. So whatever his one year anniversary, which I think would be, actually maybe that was a year ago at CES because it wasn't this CES, right? It was the breakout of last year's CES. It was actually been a little bit over a year now since Rabbit was a big deal. All right. So if he's still producing it, he's got a new version, maybe we should take a look at those, that category. But imagine he sent me two of those. One we use in the lab, one we put in the archive in the museum. Or we get one, and we just clean it up, whatever. I think it'd be really dope to have a full-time person in the lab, just indexing all the free stuff I get, putting it on shelves, organizing, and then showing it to see here so we can track the pace of technology. And then we have a party, people could see all the stuff. You know, like in a museum type, like a computer history museum type thing or gadget history museum. The museum of gadget history is fun. That's a good idea. Yeah, actually, I think I have the aesthetic picked objects.

And if you consider something kind of like this, perhaps, what is this? That's the closing shot of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Yes, yes. No, I know, not like that. Top men looking into your gadgets. I just know you guys are film guys, so I figured. No, I think it would be like that, but imagine a row of apple-like tables in the middle. So you have the warehouse, and then you have the apple-like tables in the middle with glass on them.

and you could open the glass, put on a pair of white gloves, take out the original iPod and look at and geek out and it works and it's charged and it's just sitting right there. Or, you know, here are all the original electric cars. You know, here's, you know, you start putting all that stuff there. So I kind of just have like a little weird vision of something. And the Hall of Missfires, you know, you have the Zoom, the Apple Newton, you know, like all the product. Did you just say Zoom? The Zoom. Yeah, yeah. Do you remember the Zoom? I own. No, no, Microsoft Zune. Microsoft Zim. I bought one day one. And I will go down on this shit, but the Zoon was fantastic and got a bad rap. Zun was one of the best products they made. I mean, also the surface tablets that Microsoft make are incredible. I want to get one of the new surfaces. Those products were always amazing. They're great Harvard.

What else is in the news? I want to do two quick IPO items. We are tracking a number of major debuts. We covered the WIS exit, but there are some non-M&A transactions. So, CoreWeave, just keep in mind that CoreWeave filed to go public. There's a lot of questions about its deal with Microsoft. There was reporting from the FT that Microsoft had broken off a deal with them. They said no, no, no. And then they worked with Open AI and got a good press cycle for a $12 billion deal. It turns out that Microsoft effectively had just said, we're not going to buy this option

that we had to access a lot of your compute. And then Open AI came in and swooped it. So I think that the positive Open AI story was a little bit too positive. And the Microsoft story was a little bit too negative. I think, Jason, given the stability that Open AI provides, it was. will go public. I'm just not sure exactly at what price, but that means the IPO is moving forward. So net positive there. We will see a GPU NeoCloud go public in the next couple of weeks, which is awesome. Thank God. Fantastic. And then finally, just really quick,

Klona teamed up with DoorDash and people began to make inless jokes about people needing to finance their dinner. I think everyone has seen this meme by now, but if you haven't, this is kind of what people are saying, there's a sad guy going inflation is bad. And someone asks, is inflation bad or did you just order a private taxi for your burrito? And he says, private taxi for my burrito. I think people are spending too much money on things they can't afford. Klarna responded, but I think what matters here for us is that partnerships are dropping a plenty for Klarna, good IPO momentum. So I'm really hoping to get that company out and onto the public markets, ASAP, before anything else changes. Yeah, and there's the other breaking news story is

Lindsey Graham and Dick Durbin, Senator Dick Durbin, they're going to introduce a bipartisan bill with apparently wide support that would make Section 230, which protects common carriers, people who are publishers like WordPress or Twitter or Facebook or meta, that it would expire Section 230 on January 1st, 27, basically in two years. I don't know if they have an idea of what would replace it or if this is a gun to the head move, where they're like, hey, it's going to expire so that we force a new idea. Alex, I don't know if you, I saw you tweeted it like this is not a good idea. Yeah.

Have you read anything on it or we'll just cover it Monday or just any quick thoughts on it? Yeah, just really briefly, the way this is being framed by everyone who's covered it back to launch point about original reporting is that it is the gun to the head point. No one knows exactly what should replace Section 230, but the idea is tech companies are never going to play the game while they have what is pretty robust protection. So by setting a sunset date, they have to come to the table. The reason why that's actually, I think, a terrible idea is that there's no chance of passing anything through Congress because bipartisanship is effectively over for now.

And what the GOP and the Democratic Party want to replace Section 230 is diametrically different. And so I don't think that there's a way forward here. Also, I think Section 230 is awesome because it lets companies moderate their own online platforms and we shouldn't do away with it. What the hell is wrong with everybody in D.C.? I think that they have a very, they have some scar tissue where they feel like these companies can run them up

and influence elections, you know, and they take it personal, right? So I think that's their perspective, is that why does, you know, YouTube get to trend stories about, or Twitter, trend stories about Lindsay Graham, let's say. I'm not going to say any specific types of stories, but, you know, they get to trend a story, whereas a journalist would never cover those stories, but the algorithm can trend it up, and then you get the benefit from it. The truth is,

something does need to change. So this is going to sound crazy. I don't like the gun to the head maneuver, but I understand it. So I'm just being clear here. I understand that it needs to change. There is very simple thing that needs to change. The algorithm should break your 230. Let me say it again. Ah, if you use an algorithm like TikTok does or YouTube does or your For You page, you lose 230. The algorithms are more sophisticated now than any editorial page at the New York Times ever was. And they're doing it on a one-to-one basis. If you use an algorithm to present content, you lose section 230. That includes X. My friend owns X. I'm saying he should lose 230 if you force it on people.

And then what should happen is when you turn on x.com, formerly noticed Twitter, YouTube, it should present you and say, you can follow these accounts and we'll make a feed out of it. Or you can pick one of these algorithms, or you can write your own algorithm. And if you use one of these algorithms, you can click on show and explain, and it will explain what the algorithm knows and you can tweak.

you're you're in an interesting way kind of pitching blue sky like this was the blue sky doesn't actually function this way in a day to day basis but the pitch was it's not a social media platform it's a protocol and you can customize it any way you want so yes i want to this idea is sort of out there in the world i want to i want b y o a bring your own algorithm i think there should be an app store for algorithms that works across all services i should be able to go to YouTube. And in fact, I'll talk to Lindsay Graham about this. Anyway, I'm in favor of the gun to that. I'm going to say right now, I might be, I might, it sounds crazy. I might be with Lindsay. Well, I might be with Lindsay and I think I'm going to write a blog post about this.

And I'm going to do a substack or something. I'm going to, I'm going to share this. They need to make the algorithm actually break 230. Don't get rid of 230. Leave 23. Okay. But say, amend 230 to say, if algorithms are not calming carrier, if you default to an algorithm, you lose 230. If you don't want to lose 230, users have to see once a month what the algorithm is showing them before they use your service and have the ability to change it or opt out of it or use a third party.

This would be a really great use of the legislature. Yeah. And, you know, what are we showing here? This is a bill from 2021 from Lindsay Graham, and it was to repeal Section 230. Jason, I'm just bringing this up because I don't actually think you're in favor of the full Lindsay Graham position. Nope. So I just wanted to clarify that for everybody. I'll just say that if we do end up in a world without Section 230 protections, we're going to end up with, I mean, either completely unmoderated services, Jason, which I don't think will work for advertisers because even Rumble, for example, has a pretty strict TOS or just something that is.

so lobotomized as to be completely uninteresting. I might be the last section two three defender in the world, even though Jason, I think the algorithm point has merit, but I really don't trust Durbin and Graham to land this particular plane after things have gone pretty well for the internet.

Yeah, I mean, I think Elon and Zuck and the first, you know, people who are freedom, who, you know, Zuck is now freedom of speech. I mean, the weather vane points that direction, so he's going to point that direction. But Elon and Ev Williams, Jack, the original Twitter people, they were always the free speech party of the free speech

party, like, left of left of left on that issue. I think they're going to fight this, and I think they're going to win because in Korea, when you sign up for a social media service, you have to put your social security number in. Wow. Wow. Imagine if starting a Twitter account required you to put your social security number in. You can look it up. I'm not sure what they call it, what the Korean social security numbers call, but I remember when I was there,

I was like, and they were like, yeah, it's, you don't have the right to go online and trash people anonymously in Korea. It's not fair. It's your national. Yeah. Your resident registration number is what they call it. Your RRN. So less people think like the rest of the world works like America. In Europe, if you try to, if you say something about the Nazi party in Germany, like, like you're not allowed to do that. And in France, you're not allowed to sell Nazi memorabilia. They've got some bad feelings about what happened. Like Yahoo! Auctions had to ban certain things. Things work differently in other countries. We just have this weird delusion that everybody should be able to say whatever they want in any context, anonymously, all the time, create 50 different accounts and then, you know, bombard somebody with siops. That's a uniquely American perspective.

It is not the perspective of other countries in the West who feel you have to own your words. First Amendment, baby. Yeah, I just feel like in this cultural and historical moment, it's a bigger concern than maybe it would have been five or ten or fifteen years ago, if only because we have this regime now that is so interested in controlling the message. And I feel like if we remove these protections from these tech platforms, they're going to step in and fill the vacuum. And it will be the Trump administration deciding what it's okay for you to say online. And that's the danger. That's what everybody should be scared about. When it came to executive orders, I remember them saying, like, is it a problem doing

too many executive orders? Like, wasn't he the first one who kind of was like, I can just do executive orders? And then like an ex-person was like, okay, I'll do them. And now it's like, oh, it's my first day. I'm going to do 500 executive orders on the first day. It's like, be careful, folks. You know, like, you may think like for your side, this is really cool because you get a little bit of power every four years, every eight years. All right, everybody, this week and startups.com

slash doc. We're getting active on TikTok. We're getting active on Instagram. Follow us. And just do me a favor if you're super fan of the show. You appreciate the show and 2,000 plus episodes of the year. Just one thing you can do for me. Go to Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. We're posting the shorts and just say, hey, J-Cal, love the show, what your favorite episode is. Say hi to Lawn. Say how to Alex. Just say hello in the comments because we're trying to wake up these shorts we're doing. and wake up those channels because we're not using them. Forget about following. I'm sure you do follow them,

but a comment specifically. And make it a funny comment, making a thoughtful comment that actually is worth replying to because if we get three or four comments, but three or four comments on these shorts, then YouTube assumes like or Instagram, hey, these are legit. People are watching. So please help us out

by just posting a comment. Say, hey, J-Cal. If you say, hey, J-Cal, I guarantee you I will reply to you because the team will send me the link. We'll see you all next time on this weekend service. Bye-bye.

Bye.