This Week in Startups - How JOKR lost $159 per order, rising startup valuations, OpenSea freezes stolen NFTs, Web 2 CEOs troll Web 3 | E1351

Episode Date: January 4, 2022

Jason and Molly cover how QuickCommerce startup JOKR lost $159 per order in the US in August (1:54), the state of startup valuations (25:57), Jason's case of COVID & the state of testing (32:00), OpenSea freezing over $2M worth of stolen NFTs (52:28) and they wrap with quick recap of the latest chapter of Web 3 Twitter beef featuring AirBnB CEO Brian Chesky and Box Founder Aaron Levie (58:24).

All right, everybody, welcome to the first episode of this week in startups for 2022. It is Molly Wood's first official episode, and she's a managing director here at launch, the investment firm that I started. So we're going to do a full news show today. Molly, tell the audience where we're going to be talking about. So much, tech news is off to a hot start in 2022. Quick Commerce startup Joker lost $159 per order in the U.S. in August. We're going to talk about whether that is or is not a large number.

It is. Startup valuations also large numbers. We've got charts from Pitchbook and the Wall Street Journal. COVID policy and testing failures, which is tech adjacent. Don't worry. OpenC. Freezing over $2 million of NFTs going against decentralization, according to some. And a dramatic reading.

I think this is going to be our new thing of an anti-Web3 Twitter exchange between Aaron Levy, box CEO, and Brian Chesky, Airbnb CEO, who gets a little bit of the Beavis and Butthead treatment for me, if I'm being 100% honest. Stay tuned. This week in startups is brought to you by Marketer Hire. Need expert marketing help fast? Hire vetted marketing specialists this week from the company already used by Netflix or birds and more. Get $500 off your first hire at marketerhire.com slash twist and news code twist.

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So we got to, you want to read the first story? You want me to read it? Yeah, tell me about this story. So this is absolutely amazing. And also I confess I'd never heard of this company. So Joker, is that we're calling it? Yeah, it's Joker. Wow.

That's an unfortunate convergence of occurrences because Joker, and this is not a joke, ha-ha, quick commerce startup Joker, apparently lost $159 per order in the United States in August. This is according to the information, which obtained some. internal documents. That is not per customer. It's per order. They basically pulled a brandless. Remember when brandless sort of had to admit that they were actually, you know, using 60 times more per order than they thought. This was sort of like that. It is an astonishing amount of money to be losing even for one of these quick commerce companies that is trying to sort of do deliveries, what, within 15 minutes, like super fast, 30 minutes or less, sometimes as fast as 10 to 15 minutes.

They are different business models. There's also one called GoPuff. Different from Uber Eats or DoorDash, they don't hire part-time contractors and buy third-party goods. They actually have their own inventory, which they store in leased warehouses, called Dark Stores. It's kind of the ghost kitchen model of super speedy delivery. The drivers don't use their own vehicles. Joker gives them e-bikes. And in 2021, they launched in 10 cities across the U.S. and Latin America, New York City, Mexico City, Lima,

capital crew, which sound to me to not be very easy cities to do super fast delivery in, let alone all of the other concerns that they have here. But yeah, it's, it's a, they're, they're losing massive amounts of money, I think. Yeah. $74 million just in the United States and $84 million in South America. All right. So there's a lot to unpack here. Um, there are two major concepts in startup land. And now that you're going to be an investor, you're going to hear these terms come up over and over again, Molly. One is unit economics, which I'm sure you've heard of before, which is on a transactional basis, like what happens?

Okay, you made a pie and you eight slices and each slice cost you, you know, 75 cents, what is it, or 50 cents to make, what is the person on the counter cost, etc. And you break down in each unit, what's your profitability? And so it's very important for a company that's going to do a lot of transactions to have the unit economics really dialed in. and you can really refine those union economics over time. So in this case, if they are buying the bicycle, how long does the bicycle last?

How many rides does it last? What's the maintenance of it? Okay, it lasts for a thousand rides, and then we have to replace it, and it costs $100, so it's 10 cents a ride. And you start figuring out your unit economics. That's one. And then there is asset light versus asset heavy marketplaces.

So a marketplace where you used to work is who you have, not that kind, but you have, you know, two different sides of the transaction, a store which has a bunch of items in it, and you have a customer who's buying stuff from that item. So Airbnb is an example, eBay of a marketplace. Asset heavy means you own the assets. So asset heavy would be, well, there's a factory where Amazon, not a factory, there's a warehouse where Amazon actually stores stuff. Uber eats or DoorDash as examples are asset light. They don't have to inventory the food, The food is made by a restaurant or 7-Eleven at Walgreens and it's delivered.

So this is an example of somebody saying, I'm going to make an asset-heavy marketplace and I don't know my unit economics yet. And so this is pretty brutal. Like, how could it possibly cost that much money? Well, they may be inventorying a lot of this inventory to go faster and make it more predictable, which is how an entrepreneur thinks. They get really addicted to like, well, it's just easier if I make this full. stack, everything from top to bond. I own the bicycles. They're full-time employees. They get benefits.

They get vacation. Once you do that, you've added 30% to the cost structure. People are out for four weeks of vacation and days off. You have to really start accounting for all that stuff. But now the converse of it is, if that, that might be month one, or that might be quarter one of them deploying in one city, which means they had to pay a lease. They had to fill the inventory. it might drop down by 90% in month in quarter two, and then it might drop another 90% in quarter three. As they put all those fixed costs in, they filled the inventory up.

So I would take the number right now as probably indicative of an early stage startup, maybe give them a little bit of a break, and they'll easily get that down. But the thing that I would be very concerned about is, can this be done asset heavy? I'm not certain it can be done asset heavy, which is why DoorDash and other folks are not in the,

inventory game. The inventory game, right? And also there's Cloud Kitchens, which Travis started. And I won't talk too much about that, but obviously Travis is a close friend. And they're not doing the delivery. They just rent to entrepreneurs,

culinary entrepreneurs, space. So if you're a culinary entrepreneur and you want to start a burger business and you want to start Molly's burgers and you want to put it in 100 cities, you can go to Cloud Kitchens and have a hundred, you know, little workstations in a cloud kitchen, one brand, and they will support you in your journey, but they're not going to make the burgers themselves.

I think that's kind of... And they're not going to deliver them. It seems like a company like Joker. And we'll sort of, I'm very curious to see whether those economics can... I mean, it's like there's two questions. One is, how do you manage your inventory if you have to get everything to someone within 30 minutes? Like, that seems to me that you have to stock a lot of stuff, maybe more stuff. maybe more stuff than is actually efficient.

On top of that, delivery has always been a bit of a loser as a business, historically, way back in the early dot-com days, right? It was like, if you want to lose a crap ton of money, try to deliver stuff fast. Yep. So this has the hallmarks of both of those things. E-bikes are kind of a new wrinkle that could be a little bit better in a time when most companies have tried to solve the delivery thing by being a marketplace. Yes.

And you have to, I mean, people are just not paying. attention to what happened in the past. If you're going to inventory of this stuff in a city, that is the only way to do a 15-minute delivery. So that means you need to have Manhattan real estate. So they're trying to find Manhattan real estate that's really cheap. So when Cosmo did this in New York, they had warehouses or like, you know, kind of spaces, really janky spaces on like 10th Avenue 34th Street when that was not a cool area when it was not developed. And you had those kind of areas. Now what they're doing is my understanding is they're finding bodegas and corner shops, Korean groceries, all these kind of like niche things that exist in New York City. And they're kind of taking them over and saying, hey, can we buy your bodega from you?

And then we're going to just shut the front doors. And then we're going to make that our delivery place. So there's a little controversy about that I've heard of like kind of gentrification or taking over like these local businesses that have a certain ethnic flavor. But that's another wrinkle in this is. Right. Do you want to get ahead of your Q1 marketing goals? I bet you do. Wouldn't it be nice to hire a wringer to help you out and to crush all of your goals,

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team, but I think the reason Uber's model works better is because Walgreens already exists. So they did a deal with Walgreens. And I ordered from Walgreens the other day, we had an ant infestation because it was that raining thing in the peninsula. And when it rains, the ants are like, where can we go? Anywhere in this person's house. So all of a sudden, you have ants everywhere. and then we also ran out of laundry detergent and I was like, ah, I can't get this laundry done now.

I had these answer out of here now. I did the Uber Eats thing and I joined Uber Eats Prime, and I was just emailing with DK, TK, DK, over at Uber, name drop about some ideas I had for their Uber Prime because they basically have this Uber for $100 where you don't have to pay a lot of fees. I think that that's going to be like, it's going to make Uber go crazy because they have this asset light. They have everything at Walgreens.

The only problem was that as I was checking out, they're like, hey, would you like candy and ice cream? And I was like, yes. So I was like, I really, Tramoth was eating at the poker game the other night, like those Hagenas bars. And I was like, I really want those Hagenas bars. So I tried to order the Hagenas bars. And they sent me the wrong thing. They gave me like chocolate ice cream and a thing and not the Hageness bars. Like, how do you get that wrong?

So you still have that chopper issue. Like, I don't know if you'd use Instacart out in the East Bay. Oh, yeah. Like, yeah, so that Instacart where they in real time will tell you, like, hey, do you want to switch this? I didn't set this and do you want that? And it's drive. It's really driver by drive. I mean, it's, it is not a, it's not a perfect system, I think, from anybody. But if, but as a consumer, certainly and somebody who's interested in the economics of this, it feels to me like leveraging the existence of lots of inventory and bringing it to people who want it is a much simpler and then taking a cut in between is a much simpler. then we're going to stock our own stuff. We're going to have a time promise, which God help you, depending on what's happening in your city. We're going to pay for hardware and we're going to pay for drivers. That said, and it's a fair note, even in our document, I would be curious to know how much

Uber Eats was losing in the early days. How much DoorDash was losing per order. I find it hard to believe it was $150, no way. This is like one of those weird numbers. But you have to, we were both, you were a journalist. I was a journalist for a long time. time, we get crumbs of internal information. And we try to build a story from what we see in the real world, what executives tell us, what customers tell us. And then once in a while, you get this leak. And it's important to know that when you get a leaked email, sometimes there's an agenda.

So this could be a disgruntled investor who has some beef and maybe they sent the worst possible spin of this. It could be an employee who got fired, who leaked this. So you got to keep that in mind. When a piece of leaked information happens and it's in a very negative light, you got to think there are qualified investors at this company who are aware of this problem. And if they're sharing it, it might have been, it might have been in the context of we started at, we were losing 159 per order. Now we were down to 15 in the second quarter and now we're

down to $3. But the journalists only got the first part of that. Right. So, you know, I take it. Like, we don't know the context. However, we don't know that objectively, that's a big number. It's a big number. And also the way they're running the business is asset heavy. And so we do know that. So when you triangulate and try to figure out this puzzle of the business, which you're going to be doing as an investor now working with me on investing in companies, that's what you're trying to do is actually triangulate and find the truth. Can this be a business that's profitable? You can't make this business work with full-time employees. I'm certain of it. If you did have full-time employees, I think the delivery fee would have to be 30 bucks. And so then it would only be

rich people who don't care about if they're ordering $100 in groceries, a 30% tax on top of it, which listen, there are probably 10% of people or 10% of deliveries are that. You really need to get to... Can you make a sustaining business on 10% of deliveries? Like that's... No. You're counting on a lot of rich people.

Well, and then if you think about the brilliance of the Uber model, they already have the drivers out there. So now when you log into your app, my understanding is, it's like, if you want to, you know, they gamify the Uber app for drivers. I think it's like, you turn it on and it's like, oh, here's an Uber eats ride. Here's an Uber grocery ride and here's an Uber X ride.

So now you think about the number of calls you can get. The number of calls goes up. And speaking of which, I think we have a segue here. We do. A good segue is always great. So, well, the segue is this idea of gamification and incentives because a thing that is still happening somewhat astonishingly is this ongoing bad behavior about tip baiting, which is something I think I covered in like 2020, which is, well, we'll let a drive.

driver for one of these services. Explain it a 39 second clip. We're right back. One of the worst things that you can encounter as a delivery driver is tip baiting. In these food delivery apps, the customer has the opportunity to reduce or increase the tips after drop off. Tip baiting is when a customer offers a large tip to get their food faster and then take away the tip at the end. While it's good to protect the customer from having bad service by holding the tip over your head, it leaves a big opportunity to screw over the driver with tip baiting. Unfortunately, there's not really anything you can do to fight it because the customer holds all the power. My best advice would be to find an area that doesn't tip bait and stick around

there. Today, I made 19 deliveries in 11 hours and 5 minutes making $225.58, putting our 84-day running total up to $17,230.63 cents. I think what's interesting about this is he's making $25 an hour delivering, working whenever he wants. So this whole idea that like the gig economy is like oppressive and killing people and unfair. He said he made 200 something in 11 hours. So he's I just divided by 10. It's over 20 bucks. Yeah, it's over 10. It's over 20 bucks an hour.

That's pretty amazing when you think about it as an on-demand being able to work anytime we want. But this is such an easy solution for this tip-baiting. Get rid of tipping. It's the worst thing in society. I mean, yeah. Like, the fact that this person is able to make this good living now is great,

but that should not be tip-dependent. Because that tells me that he could have a great day. And I know some people who drove for postmates during the pandemic when stuff was really rough, right? one got laid off. They were just like, we have to drive for postmates. And it was very clear to them immediately that the whole game is the tips. Really? And then you live and die by the tip because the tip can change after the fact or the tip can

just not get processed. Because, you know, it sends you that thing that's like, great and tip. And if you don't, then the driver doesn't find out. They either get nothing or they, or like 10 hours later or 10 days later, they might all of a sudden have a tip pop up. And so it's a, it's an inconsistent. consistent revenue stream. I don't know if it's economically possible to just pay people a flat rate.

Maybe it's not, which is a thing that people have been arguing about and why California is trying to pass all these gig worker laws. And I think it's because of that insecurity of income. And I don't know how you get rid of tip baiting. Like, we should, everybody should get a chance to tip according to the service if you're going to have tipping. This was a big debate I had with Travis in the early days of Uber that I lost because I'm from Brooklyn where everybody gets tipped and my dad would tip everybody.

Yeah. It was like, you know, being in like a Goodfellas movie. So the first time I took a flight, the flight attendant brought me a Diet Coke. And I'm, kid you not, I'm 14 or 15 years old. And it's 1985. I'm flying to Florida. It's my first flight. And I took $2 out of my pocket.

I folded in half and I put her in hand. I said, that's for you, sweetheart. Like my dad would say. And she took the $2. And she held it over me and she dropped it on my left. she's, we don't take tips. And I was like, you don't take tips? Every time I ever, and she was super nice to me after that.

She's like, it's really nice, sweetheart. This is back when people called each other sweetheart in the, you know, in the 80s. And it was a different time, okay? Don't mention me. But everybody got tipped. So my whole life, my dad made me tip people. So when I would go to a restaurant, he would give each of my brothers $2. Every time they changed the bread, he would make us walk up to the bus boy and give them $2.

Wow. And he'd say, you know, they work really hard. They're only making like whatever, $20 a ship, give them the two bucks. And we were just trained to tip, tip, tip, tip, tip. And so anyway, I just love tipping, but I would have these debates with Travis. And I was like, I want to give a tip. And he's like, it's going to create too much cognitive dissonance. You're leaving the whole idea is to take out friction.

That's one more step. And we have to remind people to tip, yada, yada. Eventually, he lost that battle. But he was in your camp, which is just included in the price of the thing, which is what they do in Europe, what Danny Meyer tried to do in New York. I think both models work. When I go to Europe and I don't have to tip, I'm always giving like a little extra

and people think I'm ridiculous. Yeah. People should be given a living wage. I like tipping, but this tip-baiting thing is an easy solution. If somebody pulls this more than once, if you change your tip down, the second time you do it,

you should just say to give the person a warning. People consider it tip-baiting if you do this and explain to them the term and say, you know, it could decrease your ranking in the service if you do this. And just like you have a ranking as a passenger, they should have a delivery ranking.

And if you tip under whatever the normal amount is, you should just have a lower ranking so that people can pass on delivering your food. I would actually argue that you can even go a little further back in the transaction to solve this problem, which is don't specify your tip in advance. If it's a tip and not the amount that the driver should be actually getting paid,

like the fact that the tip is already assumed up front. Yeah, that's weird too. Right? Why did they do that? But why did they do that? Because it used to be like when you take an Uber. Because they don't want to pay them. Well, no, no.

But why did they put it? Yeah, but I mean, why did they put it in the front? Why did they front load it? Right. I don't know. It's the question because they don't front load it on cars. I think they front loaded it because people forgot to do it at the end. Probably.

And then the payment was even more insecure because if you forget to add the tip later. But so then the problem is if you can use a tip to bait a driver, you've already got a problem. you've already created a perverse incentive with tipping, which is, oh, I will deliver this sooner and take more care with it because I'm getting a better tip as opposed to, because I'm getting paid enough to do this right. That's not how a tip should work.

That's not how a tip should work. A tip should work. It's a little extra on top for great service. Exactly. But I like tipping on the way in. I'm a big tipper on the way in. I'll just tell you. I'm a big tipper.

Like, I want to be clear. I don't even change my tip when it's bad service because I feel too guilty because I didn't go get my own groceries. Like, I'm exactly the sucker that they're talking to with the tips up front. I'm like, we'll give 15%. I'll make it 18.

Like, yeah, I'm a dumb dumb, but it's because I think these people should be getting paid more. Yeah. And they're actually doing fine. You know,

that's like one of the great things about capitalism is like, because of the competition now, they can't get drivers. And so the rates just keep going up. I mean, the Amazon workers, factory workers,

Starbucks, nobody can find people. So they just keep raising the rates. And now, like, really the minimum wage in cities is really, over 20 bucks now. It's not even the $15 that San Francisco and Seattle and a couple of other

people places have put it. So pretty amazing to see that. I think that's like one of the great things that happened in society. It's also because we don't have immigrants coming into the country anymore, I think. That we have to pay more? Interesting. It's a balance, right? Like if we have 11 million job openings and Americans don't want to take menial jobs anymore, which they don't seem to want to do. Right. That's true. Yeah. Are we going to, there seems to be some balance here. I think we have to look at, I think it should be dynamic immigration. I don't know why this is so difficult for people to understand, but if we have too many job openings, if we let more people in, and then if we don't have job openings, then we close to speak it a little bit. Like it should be in proportion to the number of open jobs we have trailing last three years. So if you average the last three years, the number of job openings, then we could actually have a point-based system like Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and let people in based on what we need. But anyway, I think we have some of that. I know I listened to, I had a lot of,

I had a lot of conversation back to you at your end of the year show about that. I was like, well, yes, but you still need a system for asylum and refugees. Like, you still need need need need need need need... No, no, you should totally carve out 20% for people who are going to get tortured if they go back to their country.

And then we do have some point, you know, we have the H-1B visa and then that's totally gamified and they use a lottery. Yeah, whatever there's an incentive, people will twist the game. Here's what you'll learn as an investor. You'll be on the board of a company at some point

and somebody will bring up H-1B visas and they'll be like, How little can we pay them? How much are we saving? Exactly. And you're like, that's not what this is for. But that's what it's about. It's about indentured servitude for elite workers.

And it's like, these poor people from India who are the main victims of this, they had to leave the country within 30 days if they lost their jobs. And these, I remember when I was in IT, the IT people were like, those guys are taking the weekend shifts. They're coming in on Sunday to put the stuff together. because we'll fire them if they don't. Like I was in the room when these conversations happened with managers when I started my career in my 20s

fix and laser printers. And it was like, what? They're like, yeah, these guys can't say no. These Indian guys we have. If they say no, we kick them out of the country. I'm like, what? You know, like, yeah, and they get paid less than you do. And I was like, but they do the same work and they work the weekends.

And we don't. Like, yeah, they're lucky to be here. Like, it was a really, I mean, that was like one of the, when Trump said they were abused, I was like, I went on CNBC and I said, it's kind of right. You know, they are. pretty much abused. Hey, everybody, I want to tell you about an amazing new app.

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Get $1,000 off. Give it a shot. Fellow. dot app slash twist. I guess we should talk about these valuations. Medium valuations of USC and early stage startups have gone bonkers. And Pitchbook provides some data. Wall Street Journal did a good story on it.

But a couple of charts will show you. This is the median valuation of USCD and early stage startups. And you can see something crazy happened in 2020 into 2020. into 2021, where we had this $12 to $15 million valuation for early stage companies. That means the total enterprise value, the value from the company is, let's say, $15 million. So if you put it $1.5 million as an investor, you own 10%. Now it's over $25 million. This is for the same companies, or in some cases, companies with less performance.

So why did that happen? We can talk about that in a minute. There's more money chasing these startups because they've done so well. And this is what happens in a bubble. More people want to invest. And really, it's about the output. So if you look at the price to sales ratio, price to sales ratio is the value of the company to its sales, how much revenue it has.

And if you look at the public markets, it's grown to over 15x from just a couple of years ago being 5x. And so the outcomes are three times bigger and the early stage valuations are basically almost double. So that's what you're seeing. and a record amount of money is being invested. It was $92 billion, I think, was invested. And so it's doubled year over year for a couple years.

And just five or six years ago, we were putting $30 billion. So I don't know if you have any questions about that, Bolly. You know, the main reason I was interested in this. I mean, I'm just interested in this generally because there's so much money sloshing around. And it does seem like there's some people are like, I don't even know where to put my money at this point. So sure, startup sounds great. NFTs, why not? But it raises for me a question that perhaps we can explore.

I'm going to drop it here, but we don't have to spend too much time on it. But a question to explore in the Sunday show, possibly, is this kind of fundamental question of how is valuation determined? Like, I think when you ask about when you try to figure out how VC works, that is probably one of the more interesting and mysterious and contentious and controversial and fundamental questions. It's super simple. At the earliest stages, valuation is a function of the market, the demand for that startup and that founder. And that's very hard for people to admit because they would like it to be more of a formula like we see in public markets. So in public markets, you're like, okay, how many peloton's were sold, how many Teslas were sold, how many people subscribe to Netflix, and let's do some back of the envelope math. It's a lot of fun, right?

You can be like, hey, we did a thing where each Peloton subscriber was worth $35,000, then the stock crash, and now they're worth like $5,000 for $10,000. It's like, okay, that makes more sense to me, right? At these early stages, you can just take them all the different metrics and then just start dividing or multiplying and come up with some, and then you can compare. So how does a Netflix subscriber to a Disney plus subscriber compare? Okay, why does Netflix get such a huge premium for their subscribers versus the Disney ones? well, maybe that won't last.

And maybe that's an opportunity to invest in one public company versus another. In a private company, you don't have a lot of metrics. You have a founder or a couple of founders. You have a market. You have a product. You may not even have a product. You may have a mock-up. So then it becomes, what is the demand for the shares in that company for the potential?

So what I always tell people is you're either selling your potential or your performance. Once you are this company, Joker, that we talked about earlier, Joker has a certain number of deliveries now at a certain point. It's not about the potential anymore. It's about what's your unit economics. And we have some numbers there so we can start doing math. Once there's profits and you're charging for the product, you can start to do that math. Before that, you're selling the potential.

And the potential can be determined by the team, the founder themselves, their track record, and then how many other people want to buy the shares? And then the people who want to buy the shares, like Clubhouse was a dogfight between Bill Gurley and Mark and Drison and I think they got a hundred million dollar valuation when they had like a thousand VCs and, you know, early adopters on it. And you're like, how is that worth a hundred million? You're valuing to a thousand people on the service. Are you valuing each person as $100,000?

Doesn't make any sense. Yeah. But it was that team had done other great products and there were multiple people willing to bid on it. So I got bid up just like any other auction. So when I work with founders and they're like, why can't I get this valuation? I'm like, well, you can look in the mirror. you're a first-time founder.

So sorry to break it to you. I'm the only guy on the phone. And you don't have three term sheets. So if you want to really get something going here, you need to have three different people give you a term sheet. And coordinating that is so hard, Molly. Like you get one term sheet and they're like, you have 48 hours to sign this.

So you really have to have, you have to know people in the venture market, which these serial entrepreneurs at Clubhouse did, then you really got the marketplace. It's like, yeah, we're not sure if we're raising. We have our seed funding. we're funding it ourselves, but we may raise and they're playing it coy. And then people start giving them term sheets.

I'm like, yeah, we'll consider that. But they're not up against it like a first time founder who's like, oh, my God, if I don't take this term sheet of a million dollars for 10%, or a million and a half for 10%, I'm going to have a problem. And so what you learn as an investor is, don't sweat the valuation too much if it's a great company with a great team. If you paid, I invested in Uber at under $5 million, $4.5 million. If it had been $10 million, I would have made half as much money,

but so would have been a big number. Right. So you don't sweat it if it's a great company. If you can get in, you get in and you just enjoy the ride. I love it. Okay. More to come. More to come on this.

I have, just so you all know, I have a list of like 75 specific questions that we're thinking of making into their own segment, which is just like, please explain. I mean, I have a lot of follow-ups on valuation too, but we should keep going with the news.

Keep going through the news here. Oh, rapid test. Go ahead. You take this one. Because you had COVID. Okay. So as a person who just, who just took, it sounds like, 10 days at least worth of rapid tests,

you apparently were either stockpiled them or were one of the lucky ones. Because as Omicron is spreading, I just had a fit about this on Twitter yesterday because a friend of mine texted me and was like, okay, we just did the holidays thing. And then now there have been like three positives in the extended family. And we're trying to figure out if we have it. No rapid tests available anywhere. No PCR tests available anywhere through doctors or one medical. or anything. Finally, they found a place where they could do local rapid PCR tests for $300 per person.

And then the follow-up to that per person. She's like $1,000 later. I guess we're going to try to go get these rapid PCR tests so we can find out if my kid can go to school on Monday. Then the follow-up that I didn't even tweet is that they got there and there was a four-and-a-half-hour long line made up of people who had pre-paid for appointments, who were. were stuck in this car. Yeah. So she, like, got on the phone. They requested a refund and left. And what is astonishing about, I mean, this is just astonishing. So, and I tweeted that this was a big part of why my mom who had, who almost died from COVID in October. Oh my God. I was just sorry. I didn't know that. It was terrible. She, so she had Delta. She had Delta. Yeah. Which is brutal. Totally, you know, I mean, she and her husband both double-vaxed, but very immunocompromised. She has type 1 diabetes, which is a huge.

indicator for, you know, bad side effects. She's exactly the person that, like, high vaccination rates are supposed to protect because somebody can still get very sick. So she did. She called me on a Thursday. She's like, you know, my husband and I both have folds. I'm like, you know, I'm colds. You have COVID.

Like, you're in North Dakota. The vaccination rate is like two. So go get a test. She's like, well, we drove around to a bunch of stores. We couldn't find a test. And the doctor told us that we couldn't come in because we have symptoms. So they didn't get tests. did. I mean, could she have tried harder?

Probably, but at some point, they're sick. So then by Monday, she's in the ER with a blood oxygen level below 90. Oh, my God. Almost dead. Wow. Almost a ventilator. Oh, my God. It took them 15 hours to find a bed because the ICU's were so full.

I mean, it just was like the whole thing. Was this in California? No, North Dakota. In North Dakota. Okay. Yeah. So hospitals were full, low vaccination rates, you know, the whole thing. But a huge part of the, like,

had she been able to get a test on a Thursday, knowing that they were both high risk, particularly her, they could have gone and gotten monoclonal antibodies then. Instead of almost dying, having two courses of monotuses. She got a full presidential package, Remdesivir, the steroids,

two treatments of monoclonal antibodies. But that actually could have been mitigated. By three days if she had tests. By three days, if she had had tests. Instead of a 10-day hospital stay and really like, I mean, I got very lucky because, sorry,

she went through all that. It's crazy. I'm thank God she's okay. What I had done was because I was regularly testing at the house when people came by, I was just ordering the buy next. I was just buying those, you know,

a dozen at a time and just putting them on a shelf. Just so we had them. And during early in the pandemic, I had a hookup from Finland and Korea who was sending me the early kits for $25 each and half of them would, get caught by the FDA or whoever in customs, but I guess technically they were coming in, uh, in an experimental kind of way or whatever. Uh, that was like in the first couple of months,

somebody's like, hey, Jake Al, you want tests? I was like, yeah, sure. Um, and I was testing pretty regularly. But I was taking these every day to try to figure out when I could see my family again. And I felt, I just felt a little guilty of it was one day I did it twice because I was really desperate to hang out with my girls. So I took it in the morning and I took one at night. Anyway, um, but the craziness of this is, We have like only three or four vendors, at last I remember that I've been actually okayed for this. We could be making these for two or three dollars each. The FDAA, both administration screwed this up.

They're both incompetent. It just shows you what controls big health has over our government. And we can't even, where's the executive order? Why didn't Trump do an executive order, wartimes act, and why didn't bind it, Biden? Because you know what? They're both in the pocket of big health. I'm an independent in my thinking. I think both political parties are grifters,

and I think they both wanted to see their big health contacts make bank, and they wanted them to have these really profitable tests, as opposed to just what's the point of this wartime act? Right? Like they said, oh, we have this wartime. I'm going to have the wartime act. That's the perfect case. Okay, yeah, take your factory,

stop making whatever other tests you're making, and make a billion of these, and we're going to buy them for you for $5 each, and we're going to send them to everybody's. And we were saying this on the All In Podcasts during the thing. Like, we should just have Amazon or the U.S. Postal Office. The U.S. Postal Service. Yeah, put 20 of these in everybody's.

Yep. And then, you know, we would know when outbreaks were going to happen. I mean, talk about a colossal failure for a country with as much money as we have. The billion dollars we would have spent on that could have saved a trillion dollars in stimulus later or a hundred billion. It would have been the greatest investment ever. But this is the corruption we have in our own government. referring a friend on Fandu's sportsbook could be your ticket to Super Bowl 56. Yes, that's right.

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And Germany has 80, And the German government was giving them away for free. Like there are so many parts of this. Like, yeah, there was the mentality of the magic bullet and we just got to prioritize vaccines and everybody will get that. And apparently nobody in the Biden administration read the internet and understood that the anti-vax movement has been building online for like over a decade and was going to be kind of a big deal. And then there was the failure to nationalize testing. I mean, Abbott, which makes tests, rapid antigen tests. less than a year ago was laid off the majority of its staff and was destroying testing.

What? Supplies. Yeah. Destroyed them because they were like, oh, we don't need testing now because we have vaccines and nobody sees Delta coming, even though every epidemiologist that I follow on Twitter has been saying for a year and a half, wait for it. Wait for it. The virus is going to mutate because we don't have global vaccination rates.

Like the idea that anybody is saying we didn't see these highly transmissible variants, coming is like, I'm sorry, do you guys not have any doctors at the office? Because like, I have these moments where I'm like, I don't want to get all my information on Twitter. And yet, I feel like I live in the future. Yeah. Because what did you think was going to happen? So we had this phenomenal moment in the United States where, because I've been obsessed with testing since the start of this, because you cannot manage what you do not measure, where on December 6th, someone in a White House press briefing asked, press secretary, Jen Saki, shouldn't we just be sending tests to every American? And here's 49 seconds of her astonishing response.

I see. Look at what we've done over the course of time. We've quadrupled the size of our testing plan. We've cut the cost significantly over the past few months. And this effort to push to insurers are you're able to get your tests refunded means 150 million Americans will be able to to get free tests. It's kind of complicated, though. Why not just make them free and give them out and have them available everywhere? Should we just send one to every American?

Maybe. Then what happens if every American has one test? How much does that cost? And then what happens after that? All I know is that other countries seem to be making them available in greater quantities for less money. Well, I think we share the same objective, which is to make them less expensive and more accessible, right?

Every country is going to do that differently. And I was just noting that, again, our tests go through the FDA approval process. Crazy. I mean, so it's, yeah. And she's so like. Dismissive. Dismissive. Yeah, it's so snotty.

It's like such a bad look. And then, by the way, two weeks later. Only two weeks later. Only two weeks later when they were like, oh, we've approved two new at-home tests. And so we're going to expand production and make at-home tests available for, you know, like a billion more a year. And I think even some comment, like, we're going to. send some to people, which will, by the way, all of this will happen after Omicron has peaked, after the National Guard has to be sent in to staff hospitals.

L.A. County is already at more than 90% of capacity in their ICUs are almost full. All of this testing capability, which could have, for example, kept my mother out of the ER is going to come too late. Yeah. Because we just apparently were like, vaccines are plenty. That'll, I'm sure that that's, like, it's just. When you're fighting a war, ranging.

Why would you not have every weapon available? Every weapon. Just go for everything. Like, testings one. You know, you have the vaccine. You have the new pill that Pfizer has.

You got the monocode. Just try everything. Throw everything at it. And let's get everybody back to life. The good news is how Amicron is a big nothing burger. Like the people who are getting it. No, if you're vaccinated.

If you're vaccinated. Because the people who are in that hospital, I think 94% of them are the undefined. vaccinated, right? 94% of the deaths are the unvaccinated, but 6% are my mom. Okay. Well, okay, so if you're immunocompromise. Those hospitals are full.

So if I break my leg and I am trying to get into a stress system, right? It's not, it is, thank God it does appear to be a mild illness in the vast, vast, vast, vast majority of vaccinated people who get it. And that's great. But just by sheer numbers, it's sort of like how we know that aliens exist because there's just so many, like mathematically speaking, they're out there. And mathematically speaking, you know, hundreds of thousands of infections every day are going to mean hospitals fill up. Yeah. The good news is this Omicron, if you are not immune corporized and your Vax or triple Vax, what they found is it's upper respiratory. So I was watching, I love this guy, Scott Gottlieb, who's on the board of Pfizer. It seems super credible to me because he's always been like very like down the middle.

Because this is upper respiratory, it doesn't go into your lungs, which is exactly the experience I had and the other people who got it at Saks. a spectacular Christmas super spreader, TM. That's his big Christmas super spreader. I listened to that show. I was like, I'm not talking about that one. Zach is like, I don't care. You would have gotten it. Anybody would have gotten it.

He's really taking the, you know, the Republicans are just, they're hardcore about it. They're like, let it. It's like a brush fire for them. They're just like, let the fire burn. We lose a couple people. You're a mom. My dad's got diabetes.

Like, ah, whatever. They're just, you know, collateral damage. But the fact is, because it's a respiratory, you never, you have this, like, incredibly like symptoms, but infants don't do well with upper respiratory. And if you ever had a kid when they had any kind of like a flu, upper respiratory, you know, like you may go to the emergency room. So now we're seeing, you know, hundreds of kids have gone to the emergency room now because of this. So I'm also like, I'm not really ready to write off 1,400 Americans dying every day,

even if they're not vaccinated, right? Like, they don't deserve that. Um, you know, my feeling on it is, I might take the other side of it, which is, like, what more. do you need to see to get vaccinated? Like, if you are going to hold the line that you refuse to get vaccinated in the face of 1,400 people dying a day, you're like somebody who doesn't wear a seatbelt in my mind or smoke cigarettes. Like, are we going to stop society for you? I like 100%.

Here's our first disagreement. Oh, no, no. I don't. I 100% agree with you about this choice idea, right? You don't get to choose to make yourself like a living weapon. Not with my mom in your line of fire. Yeah. That's crappy.

Are you for mandatory? I am for making things a lot harder. I think that I think I like the fact that we've made it socially more difficult and I think we could do even more than that. I think if we're going to have like if we're going to say businesses have to mandate vaccines, then they have to mandate them and it can't be the like or also test. Right. We're saying we're still giving people this option of like you have to get vaccinated or you have to, you can test every week.

Like no. If you're doing it, then do it. And if you're going to issue an executive order that says business is over a certain size, which I think the federal government is 100% able to do, then don't give them all these outs. We'll see. I mean, it's going to go to the Supreme Court. It's going to be interesting to see if they can actually force companies to do this. Yeah.

I mean, it's an interesting producer. We've mandated seatbelts. Yeah. So like, maybe you do it the same way and you're just like, there's a fine. That's not a, yeah. I have a hard time with the concept of like holding something. down and forcing him to get a shot. Even though I believe in vaccines 100%.

Like, and I'm triple vax and everybody I know. And if I had a friend who wasn't faxed, and I did have a friend who wasn't faxed, and I sat him down and I was like, listen. I agree with you. 1,400 people dying a day and a billion people have had these vaccines, like which group do you want to be part of? Like, shmong.

I agree with you. And I don't think that we can force people and hold them down. And I don't think we should do that. And also, we need to throw everything at this problem. Right. Like the easiest way to not get polarized by the vaccine. Because every time we do that, we just fall into the same trap, which is that vaccines are the only solution. Which is not true.

Testing is a massive part of the solution, right? Like, therapeutics are a massive part of the solution that came way too late. Like, the fact that we now, only now are getting pills is way too late. So, like, we actually need to, and frankly, I think this will help with the vaccine debate. Deemphasize. How do you feel about going back to school? Because that's been the big controversy now. And my kids are going back on Monday.

They were supposed to go back this week, but I'm taking them skiing for an extra week. Because you're trapped up there. Because I'm trapped up here, basically. It makes it sound like a treat for the kids. He's like, yeah, we can't leave, actually. Can't leave. He's too much snow. No, they cleared the roads.

It's fine now. There were three days. We're talking about Tahoe, had a blizzard. And there was like seven or eight feet of snow in three or four days. We were literally trapped in our house. And then a couple of friends of mine had lost the power. And where I am, I guess we have our own power grid or whatever. power backup. And so we were fine. So I was like literally going to be hosting another family.

And I was like, I have COVID, but I'm staying downstairs. But if you want to stay upstairs, it was like a kind of crazy situation. But I saw Eric Adams, the new mayor of New York, was just basically took the position of, listen, there's more harm being done to kids. And they're going to get COVID. This is what I thought was. So there's definitely more harm happening. Like this losing of IQ points is crazy. And obviously it skews towards kids who can't afford tutors or supplemental help. which now we're really doing a disservice because those schools were not good for underprivileged kids already.

But the thing I thought was a pretty interesting take, which was Eric Adams said, the first time I'd actually heard it was kids who stay home from school wind up getting COVID just as much because they're hanging out with their kids, you know, and going to the movies and doing other things or seeing kids otherwise or getting it from their parents.

So it's not like it's any different going to school than being at home. And I was like, it kind of makes sense to me. I don't know if that's true or not. I mean, that is highly dependent on the behavior of the families in question. That's a, that's a subject. What I think, though, is that, look, Omicron, in the early days of the pandemic, I was sort of like, oh, my God, you guys, that it is not a magical beastie that's going to leap on you in the grocery store and, like, get you, right? It doesn't work that way.

Like, it's not a lot of phomaic. No, no, no. Omicron is a magical beastie that's going to jump on you in the grocery store. And you're going to, like, I don't, there is not a scenario in which kids are going to be able to stay. home and not get it. And so they should be in school as long as they can. But that said, we're deluding ourselves if we think that's going to last because they're going to be, because people will get sick and or have to isolate, there aren't going to be enough bus drivers. There isn't going to be enough teaching staff. Like, we should prepare for some

disruption. Yeah. It's totally going to be disrupted. And the teachers unions are just not going to show up. I think this is why I'm so, yeah, I mean, this is why I'm so irritated that we did that we did hybrid work as a society, but like an all or nothing response to return to school. Like you need to be able to give kids the option. I understand that this is difficult and it's tricky and it takes some work and you need more technology and we need more money for schools. All of that is true.

And we are going to have to figure out as an adaptation to what is about to be. I mean, it's just like climate. You need every solution and you need to adapt your lives to it. December is going to be hard for like a long time. This is the year, by the way. Remember last year? were like, oh, we're going to have like the COVID plus the flu. Yep.

And it's going to be a disaster and nobody got the flu because they were at home. Yep. This year is the year. I know of a household where they have one side has COVID and the other side has the flu. Right. This is the year where this is going to happen. Double down and then the emergency rooms getting filled up or whatever. Yeah.

It's also, who in the? Okay, nothing. I'm sorry. I looked at the comments like a fool. Oh, well, be careful. There could be some anti-vaxxers in the comments. It's not even that. People have strong feelings about, yeah.

Apparently, whether we need more funding for schools, which... Yeah, that's a no-brainer. As a woman who ran her school's auction for three years. Yeah, they need more. Is it a public school or charter or... Public. Yeah, they definitely need more money. 100%.

I can't even. Anyway, yes, fair enough, tech show. We're a tech show, yeah. But, I mean, testing... The testing thing, though, is... thing is unquestionably, like, it is one of those where the technology met the bureaucracy and came to a dead fucking stop. I'm sorry.

You don't. You can. You're not on public radio anymore. You can say whatever you want here. We will be beat. Yeah. You can drop F-bombs. Don't tell me that because, yeah.

This is the great thing about being an independent podcaster now. I'm so happy right now. It's fucking great. Well, you know, and it's also the grift and the corruption. You know, like if you ever want to see grift and corruption, like, when something is a really easy problem to solve and you have unlimited resources like we have here in the United States

or seemingly unlimited resources to solve some of these problems and it doesn't get solved like it's kind of an Occam's razor here like why didn't this get solved? Follow the money, right? Speaking of following the money, open C froze $2.2 million

worth of stolen board ape NFTs art gallery owner Todd Kramer had his NFT collection stolen from his hot wallet after falling for a fishing scam according to Yahoo on December 30th. Hot wallets are connected to the internet, but a little bit less secure. Metamask is a hot wallet.

Cold wallet is not connected to the internet, so ice cold, disconnected, until it is manually plugged into a computer, so the less convenient, but of course, more secure. And this could have been obviously avoided if Kramer was using a cold wallet. Kramer tweeted two OpenC employees in the company that he was hacked along with the numbers of the apes and mutants that were stolen because they're all numbered and, you know, like any other serialized collectible. The tweet has since been deleted for some reason. Yao reported that OpenCee responded to this by freezing 16 board apes and mutineate NFTs,

which are no longer able to be traded. OpenC's intervention wasn't well received because users saw it as going against decentralization, a core tenant of Web 3.0. Software engineer Grady Booch commented on Todd Kramer's tweet about the stolen NFT quote, Silly me. And here I thought the code is the law. and that one of the very ideas of cryptocurrency was the elimination of any possibility

of centralized intervention. Hypocrats, every one of you. NFT collector, KW.Soul, also commented, quote, who was able to freeze the NFTs? Feels pretty anti-crypto to be asking third parties to do this, and ideally they shouldn't be able to. This was just extremely poor

OPSEC on your part. True decentralized ownership, no one should be able to step in. Good luck. So, I don't know what you think about NFTs and decentralization. but yeah, code is a law except when it's not.

Right. Well, the code is a law until you have created products and you're selling them, like is, if OpenC is a marketplace,

aren't they at some point, I mean, this is the, I don't want to derail our conversation, but everything is moderation at some point. If OpenC wants to exist as a for-profit platform, it wants people to feel safe

on its platform, and it wants to be able to, or it feels at, the people who run this company, that they need to step in when theft or fraud occurs and make the marketplace safer and more appealing

so that people will continue to spend money there and so that they will make money. Is that, you know, the antithesis of Web3, does it matter? When you build a business, your incentives change.

Absolutely. And I think this is like a religious thing for certain people in the crypto community, which is we want to eliminate centralized control. It's been a big debate. And when you eliminate centralized control,

a lot of bad stuff can happen. There are some good things that can happen, but if you look at whether it's selling of NFTs or content, like there's a reason to have a database that can change, as opposed to an immutable one. Like, what if somebody slanders somebody? What if somebody dockses somebody? This idea that you could have a Twitter that's, you know,

not censorable, it's like, well, what if somebody gets doused? and I don't know, what if somebody's... Well, and even if we take it out of Twitter and the idea of what you say, I mean, Airbnb, look at Airbnb as an example, right? All of a sudden, they had people on their platform who were trashing houses

or people on their platform who were not representing the houses like they were supposed to be. So Airbnb, the platform, there is no, they can't be hands off. They can't be like a completely neutral deliverer of services for both sides without stepping in and moderating on some level,

whether it's like, oh, we have to have ratings or we have to have a punishment system or we have to let you, you know, give a insurance or insurance, exactly. Like, if you're going to be a marketplace, I mean, I have this sort of theory that like everything is, everything is content moderation. Because if you're going to sit between two entities and try to make money off of them, you need to exert control on the entities on either side. Reasonable control, yes. Reasonable control. The question is how much and what are both, what are both sides? want. I don't know that anybody wants to live in a world where somebody who hacks your bank account can't have that transaction reverse. And I think this is where Web 3.0 hits a little bit of a wall,

which is, you know, these non-centralized systems have a lot of risk involved in them. And they have a lot of anonymity or pseudo-animity. Yes, every transaction is on a blockchain, but you can create unlimited wallets and you can, you know, be anywhere in the world and you can be beyond. jurisdiction. So there's going to be a lot of pain and suffering because there's no insurance, because there's nobody checking the transactions, because money laundering, you know, dark money, terrorism can all flow through this stuff. And that's the naivete of a lot of people who are in the space. They just haven't lived long enough to see the ramifications of, you know, an unregulated system. Regulations exist in a lot of cases because people have been hurt

and they want, they want some level of regulation. People want a rating system on Airbnb. They want insurance. I had one of my places used for, we had a place we were using as an Airbnb, our old house. And somebody threw a party and did like $6,000 worth of damage and it was covered, portioned by the person who threw the party illegally or against the terms of service.

And then also because there were some insurance from Airbnb. It was great. I was like, okay, well, we just, the two carpets that were ruined. We just got brand new carpets. It was actually kind of great. And it's listen, like, it's okay to want a totally decentralized. Like, it's okay to want that and it's okay to go off and do it. But as soon as there's money to be made, the incentives are going to change.

That's all I'm saying. As soon as you want to be the platform that sits in the middle and makes the money, you're going to have to make hard call. Speaking of Airbnb, we got really good on the segue. 2022, you're of the segue. Last night there was a funny anti-Web 3.0 exchange. I don't know if you've been following the. Oh, we did.

because we talked about it when you did your pre-episode. We did, yeah. So this Web 3, you know, banter keeps going between like the Web 2.0 Gen Xers and the, you know, anarchist Web 3.0, true believers. Box CEO Aaron Levy, who is hilarious. An Airbnb CEO, Brian Chesky, who is brilliant, had a back and forth where they literally trolled the shit out of Web 3.0 people. And I guess we're supposed to do a dramatic reading here. so I'm going to be Levy and you're going to be Chesky.

You got a, you got time to think about how you're going to interpret this. Here's my best Aaron Levy. The web is amazing. You can build something of value for billions of people. I picture him with a lot of energy. I know Aaron. He's got a lot of better.

He's fired up. He's fired up. So I'm going to do my best Aaron Levy and fired up. The web is amazing. You can build something of value for billions of people leveraging endless distribution channels, architecture, open source and protocols,

indefinitely scalable infrastructure. Everything gets cheaper and faster every day. In that case, let's build the entire thing all over again. Oh, we're just starting to feel like things were getting too useful for consumers, enterprise, and developers. Good time to pivot. Everyone should vote on every single decision.

That won't take too long to rebuild. Too simple. We need some opaque financial incentives in the mix to spice things up. That's a great idea. Let's financially incentivize early adopters so we never know when we get to product market fit. The current ways is too easy. Love getting confusing early product signal as a founder that can't control for wildly independent variables. This conversation is in public right. We're using DMs.

I mean, it's so great. I mean, what I love about this is, you know, anybody who's built a startup and hit scale like these two gentlemen have, it is amazing what we've accomplished since 1992-93, when the web first, you know, started to take over from AOL, you know, Delphi and other dial-up services. And we were like, well, if we could get, we could, I remember the moment when databases got hooked up to the web browsers or when images or video were supported. And I was like, oh, man, if only you could store videos. Oh, if only the bandwidth was cheaper. And all of that has occurred in 25 years. To the point at which now, you could build a service that a billion people use with 10 people.

And people have done that. Instagram hit 100 million people famously with, I think, 15 employees. And the idea that you would then rip it apart and then put an opaque financial incentive in the middle of it. What these individuals have learned over time is, like, you do not want to confuse the incentives and everything's working wonderfully. So why, what is the actual value we're creating here? Decentralization. Okay. We've already talked about like, is that actually valuable?

Okay. Yeah. And maybe for some systems it does, yeah. And this immutable database, like, we spent all the decades trying to make databases reversible. I know. I mean, the problem is like, faster. The problem is like everything.

Why did it become a religion? Why did it become partisan? Like, why are we? Because of the money, the financial. Because of the money. Exactly. So like take it out of that and ask yourself, does decentralization help? In some cases, yes.

Does it help to take the middleman out of sending money between countries? Absolutely. Does it help, you know, to create a system by which a transfer can occur without a bank taking a cut in the middle? In fact, if that cut ends up being as much as the money you're trying to send, sure. There is value in that tweak. Is there value in an immutable database? Sure. If you're trying to figure out, like, where does your food come from?

to make sure I don't get equal I from it. Right? That's like a really valuable use for an immutable database. Providence, yeah. There is no reason whatsoever that we can't tweak the system that we have. But the very idea that Web 3 has to be, well, first of all, maybe we should just not let anybody start calling it Web 3 because that all by itself means it's like a revolution. Yeah, something's wrong with the existing thing.

Can it just be an evolution that's kind of a big deal and helps some things and isn't great for others and we're just like working our way through it? Yeah. I think it's because of the amount of money and the multi-level marketing nature of this. When you buy this NFT, because it's anonymous, this is what people really don't want to talk about. I would say 90, 95% of the projects we've seen. ICOs, 95% were scams or unqualified people, people lost their money. NFTs, I predict 95%.

Same thing. And then Bitcoin, Ethereum and the other coins that have reached some stability, maybe it'll be 50% will lose their money or 80% Who knows? And when you look at that amount of grift and that amount of motivation, well, what behavior comes out? Well, this toxicity comes out because if you're saying, well, these NFTs or these ICOs are bullshit, you're screwing with my paper. You're screwing with my bank account.

And that's where people get really upset. And then they create thousands of anonymous accounts. And this is what the toxic Bitcoin people do. They believe in Bitcoin toxicity, which is anybody who doesn't believe in Bitcoin, do sciops on them. You reply to them and say, have fun being four. You reply to them and say, you don't get it. Okay, boomer.

And you try to make the attacks more personal. And then what they do is they run these attacks, because I know I've been on the other side of it, every time I would say, hey, listen, if you want to put 1% of your wealth into Bitcoin or 2% or 3%, you can afford to lose it, sure, have fun. But, you know, I wouldn't be 90% Bitcoin because this thing could go to zero. It could be replaced by a better technology. And they would do coordinated attacks against me, you know, make memes or whatever. because they know I have some influence

and now maybe I'm tampering down or maybe it could create a contagion of people saying, yeah, you know, it does. Jason's making sense. Like, why every other technology is replaced. AOL got replaced, Yahoo got replaced. Someday Google and Facebook, Facebook's being replaced now, you know, by Instagram and TikTok.

Why wouldn't Bitcoin get replaced? It would seem logical that Bitcoin would be replaced after 10 or 20 years like any other technology. Or why wouldn't Bitcoin turn out to be unbelievably valuable if it can figure out how to transition from an asset class to a currency, which is going to be like a hard jump to make that hasn't ever occurred before, but it doesn't mean it's impossible. Sure, that could happen too.

But the modern iteration of Fanboy is so loaded with technology weapons. Like I remember years ago writing some review of like a Nokia phone that people are still mad about on the internet. It was like, we're gating in the comments. I mean, listen, I have written articles comparing Xbox to PlayStation. Like I'm aware of what the fan boy can do. The fanboy has a lot of bot tools now that the fanboy did not previously have. And it is really a shame because what it means is we can't have like an honest exploration of the benefits and drawbacks of these technologies, both of which exist in probably equal amounts without just getting like shouted out of the room.

All right. And then just to put a button on this, Chris Dixon, who has been the target of a lot of the attacks by Jack. He is at A16Z. Tramoff made a funny joke at all in, not knowing who he was. Chris Dixon is like super, I mean, he's not toxic, but he's super pro. Crypto obviously he's made that his chosen career and invested, I think, hundreds of millions of dollars in this crypto project. He decided he would attempt to dunk and say, who owns Web 2.0, enlisted the institutional shareholders for Square, now Block, and Aaron Levy's Box.com,

to which he got massively dunked on by everybody. I mean, who owns anything, man? A small number of extremely wealthy people in institutions. That is the case with cryptocurrency right now, too. Like, come on. Yeah. I mean, A16 owns, well, that was really Jack's point. It's like, A16Z is buying all of these tokens early,

and it's just, you know, hey, meet the new boss, same as the old boss type situation. All right. Thanks for tuning in, everybody. I think we did about an hour. I think that's enough show for one day. More than enough show. But it moved quickly.

It did. It was just a very quick conversation. I had a blast. I think we have poked everybody in the eye in every audience. Nobody. Every audience segment was addressed today. Yeah, I'm not, I'm not sure who we left out of here. Oh, you know what?

We could do a bonus segment about the insurrection. No, we'll leave that for another day. Not our show. You're easy on China today. We're easy on China today. China will be on the docket. China will be on the docket, for sure. Lots of China news.

All right. We'll see everybody. soon email producers at this week in startups.com. If you have ideas for guests or whatever, if you're a PR firm, please don't ever email us. We do not take requests for guests to be on the show to sell their e-books.

Thank you. Thanks for our producers, and it's going to be a great 22. Thanks, Molly. Thanks, happy new year.