This Week in Startups - Immigration, The Trump Interview, Air Taxis in the Bay Area and the Future of Remote Work | E1971

Episode Date: June 25, 2024

This Week in Startups is brought to you by… LinkedIn Ads. To redeem a $100 LinkedIn ad credit and launch your first campaign, go to http://www.linkedin.com/thisweekinstartups Vanta. Compliance and security shouldn't be a deal-breaker for startups to win new business. Vanta makes it easy for companies to get a SOC 2 report fast. TWiST listeners can get $1,000 off for a limited time at http://www.vanta.com/twist Lemon.io. Hire pre-vetted remote developers, get 15% off your first 4 weeks of developer time at https://Lemon.io/twist * Todays show: Alex Wilhelm joins Jason to discuss the most incredible new ride Jason has ever seen (9:02), Jason’s recent Donald Trump interview (14:49), JCal becoming a meme (36:34), and more! * Timestamps: (0:00) Jason and Alex kick off the show (2:38) Club 33 at Disney. (9:02) The most incredible new ride Jason has ever seen. (10:43) LinkedIn Ads - Get a $100 LinkedIn ad credit at http://www.linkedin.com/thisweekinstartups (14:49) A look at the Donald Trump interview on All In. (19:54) Vanta - Get $1000 off your SOC 2 at http://www.vanta.com/twist (30:45) Lemon.io - Get 15% off your first 4 weeks of developer time at https://Lemon.io/twist (36:34) JCal became a meme! (37:15) The gentleman’s RIF and the status of remote workers. (48:26) New air taxi plan from Archer. * Subscribe to the TWiST newsletter: https://www.ticker.thisweekinstartups.com * Subscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp * Mentioned on the show: Check out the Donald Trump interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blqIZGXWUpU Check out Disney’s Club 33: http://www.disneylandclub33.com/#google_vignette Check out Archer: https://news.archer.com/archer-san-francisco-air-mobility-network-connecting-five-locations-across-bay-area-kilroy-oyster-point Check out Joby Aviation: https://www.jobyaviation.com/ Check out Dell article: https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1dl16s2/nearly_half_of_dell_workers_opt_for_fulltime/ Check out Athena: https://www.athenago.com/ * Follow Alex: X: https://x.com/alex LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelm/ * Follow Jason: X: https://twitter.com/Jason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis * Thank you to our partners: (10:43) LinkedIn Ads - Get a $100 LinkedIn ad credit at http://www.linkedin.com/thisweekinstartups (19:54) Vanta - Get $1000 off your SOC 2 at http://www.vanta.com/twist (30:45) Lemon.io - Get 15% off your first 4 weeks of developer time at https://Lemon.io/twist * Great 2023 interviews: Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland * Check out Jason’s suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis * Follow TWiST: Substack: https://twistartups.substack.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartups YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartups TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartups * Subscribe to the Founder University Podcast: https://www.founder.university/podcast

I wanted to see this air taxi thing, maybe. Yes. All right, ladies and gentlemen, if you've never been to a big city, you may not know this, but traffic is bad. The world around, especially to and from the local airport, but there is a new plan from Archer. They're putting together a San Francisco air mobility network, and we have an image of the map they have planned here.

Jason, talk us through these locations and why they matter. Well, I've always felt like having a Bay Area impography would be perfect for VTOLs, a much better way to communicate. across water is at 150 miles per hour. Can you imagine going from Napa to Palo Alto in 15 minutes? This is extraordinary. This Week in Startups is brought to you by LinkedIn Ads.

To redeem a $100 LinkedIn ad credit and launch your first campaign, go to LinkedIn.com slash this week in startups. Vanta. Compliance and security shouldn't be a deal breaker for startups to win new business. business. Vanta makes it easy for companies to get a sock to report fast. Twist listeners can get $1,000 off for a limited time at vanta.com slash twist. And lemon.io. Hire pre-vetted remote developers.

Get 15% off your first four weeks of developer time at lemon.com slash twist. All right, everybody, welcome back to this week in startups. I am your co-host, Jason Kalakanis. I'm an angel investor, early stage investor here. in the Silicon Valley with my partner in crime, Alex Wilhelm. You probably know him from Crunch Base and a Crunch and his new newsletter, cautiously optimistic.new.comstomptomist optimism.com. We'll get it.

I actually own both. But I've been reading it. It's really good. Thanks. I own both those domains and I literally sat there like staring at them and I wasn't sure what to do. Actually, now I want to go make sure I bought both of them now that I've said that. But I was really torn between the two.

Yeah. And I got a little mention there. So big weekend. I was away for the weekend. How was your weekend? Yeah, it's fantastic. I mean, now that my kid can like run around and do stuff, she's just so much more fun to take everywhere.

So, you know, swim classes, trips to the park, out to see the in-laws, got out of the city for a little bit. I love a weekend, but I'm not going to lie, given this weekend's new cycle, I was very excited to get back to the show and to give everyone a little taste. We are going to talk about tech leaders and the immigration debate, air taxis, and are they really about to become a reality in the Bay Area? and then the relatively bleak picture for Chinese venture capital today and how the bay is thriving. But first, we're going to talk about a couple of short fun things just because why not?

It's Monday. Jason, I had not hurt of this Club 33. And it turns out this is not a new club in New York City. This is a more family-friendly setup. Yeah, Club 33, I went to for the first time. This is a private club inside of Disney. And so I tweeted about it. You're allowed to tweet about it.

You just can't take video from it. So it's not like this is super cloak and dagger or something like. like that. It's not skull and bones or anything. It's just a fun place to go when you're in Disneyland. If you're by that Blue Bayou and Pirates of the Caribbean area, there's like a little door and it says Club 33, you press a button. They reach you. It's quite charming. And you get a four-course lunch. So I took the kids and a friend of mine's a member. And we had a nice four-course lunch in a very civilized way, if I may say, to start the chaos that can occur when you go to. an amusement park. Your oldest is how old?

18 months. So you're not quite... You're three years away from this, yeah. She has never seen a Disney movie, but I take it from this entire setup that you are part of a Disney family. We're not part of the Princess Industrial Complex, as much as we are part of the Star Wars Marvel industrial complex. Like my daughters are crazy about X-Men. They love the new animated series, and 97, really fun. They love the Star Wars and, yeah, Pixar and Disney as well. But I think They're kind of on the superhero characters and Star Wars most. On the Club 33 point, I understand that if you go to Disneyland as a regular, as a normal, as I would do if I went for the weekend, I'm getting an experience.

Then you can pay a little bit more to like skip lines and so forth. Club 33, is that like the apex of insider status? I think Club 33 is, in fact, the apex. I had a lot of people who DeAnne and was like, how did you get in? How did you get in? It takes five to ten years to get a membership for this thing. A friend of mine's a member. they saw I was going to Disney.

They were like, hey, let's spend the day at Disney. I'll take you to lunch. So we went to lunch. It was beautiful lunch. It would say it's not like it's a Michelin Star fine dining experience, but it's quite, quite good. And we had a wonderful meal. It was a four course, like two-hour meal.

And it's a beautiful room. The really interesting story is that Walt Disney kind of created this because he had a lot of people coming to Disneyland to become investors. He was trying to raise money. So he needed a way to impress them. So he made a little club there near this like Main Street area. We would have these like French shops. It's kind of like the French quarter kind of situation.

You know, then they decided to make this a premium experience. I think for celebrities, studio. It's kind of like celebrities and studio heads kind of situation, I would say. And when they started it, interestingly enough, they did sponsorship. So Disney needed money, I guess, to get the park going. And so Coca-Cola, Kodak, Monsanto, General Electric, a bunch of people, SunKist were, I guess, sponsors of this. And SunKist was Orange Grove.

So Disney land in California was all surrounded by Orange Groves originally. Walt Disney also has an apartment inside there. That's not part of Club 33. So it was a way to kind of get business partners to have an elite experience. It's kind of like Soho House, you know, or the battery or whatever private club you might experience. But this is the first time I've ever done this kind of stuff. I've done like a fast pass ticket before. That's kind of the middle ground, which I think it's like an extra.

Hyundai for tickets. Instead of paying $100 to take, you pay $200. I'm not sure exactly the price. Yeah, because it's been a while since I've been there. But I did do,

a little embarrassed to say the... Oh, come on. Just out with it. Out with it. Well, the VIP tour. And so what the V... You basically, I did it at,

I went on Thursday to Universal and did the VIP tour there. It's about $500 a ticket. So it's not crazy compared to the $125 ticket. But you get to go on the tour behind the scenes of Universal. So,

to do Universal first. Sure. You do a little buffet lunch, which is more civilized. They charge your phones, all that kind of stuff. But then you go on a tour, and the Universal tour through, like, the back lot is slightly different than the normal one. You get off of the trolley and you get to walk into the sound stages and see, like, the George Lopez show with a small group of maybe a dozen people.

You get to go into the prop house and actually see the props and where they rent them to anybody. Anybody can rent props from Universal, apparently. And you get to walk on the streets. Whereas with the other trolley, you know, Gen Pop, you can't get off and do stuff. So I think it's worth it. And then you get unlimited fast pass type things.

So the kids didn't have to wait online all that much. And it was the first time I've ever done that. But, you know, I get like big speaking gigs now. So I can in my mind justify it. Hey, if I save time here instead of having to go two days, I can do the same number of rides. You can probably do the same number of rides in one day that you would do in three. Because it's basically when you go to these things in the summer, 45 minutes wait, maybe even an hour for a ride. when you have this VIP experience, it's no weight per ride.

The longest we waited, I think it was seven minutes. And that was this, so going back to Disney for $500 an hour. There we go. I was waiting to get back to the hour. That's the big one. So that's like $4,000 for the day or something. Plus, you still have to buy your ticket. So maybe it rounds up to five.

We had a group of eight people. So I've been divided by eight people, I guess. It's not that much, but it's not, it's expensive. Let's put it that way. It's just not that expensive. That number does not blow my mind. Because Americans spend more on vacations than I expected, like, in terms of people like going into debt to go on vacation. And if you were going to send me to Disney and you could say, Alex, there's two ways to go about this.

One, you spend $1,000, you get sunburned, you see nothing, you wait in lines. You can be a pee the whole time. Or for 5K, you can go and actually have fun. I wouldn't go without paying the 5K. Like, I mean, that's just, if it was 20, I would just not go at all and I would avoid. But like to me. 20 makes no sense. Five, maybe it makes sense.

I can totally see that. I did not feel guilty about it at this point of my life because I'm, I'm 53. I already made my money. I'm kind of like, this is an easy use of proceeds to spend it. But like 10 years ago, I probably would have been like, no, I would be too scared to spend that kind of money on it. So I enjoyed it. And one of the nice things about it was there was like, they do fireworks. It's really like a, I mean, I remember this from, you know, the past. We would kind of try to get a good spot to watch the fireworks. It meant, you know, about 8 o'clock you got to line up for the 930 fireworks. You're basically sitting there for 90 minutes trying to secure a spot. So you waste 90 minutes on top of the hour.

So you can usually do like four or five rides a day. My kids did a dozen rides. They did each of them two times. I want to point out, rise of the resistance at Disney is this incredible new ride. Now, I'm not into the sequels as much as I am, the prequels and the regular series. But this rise of thing is what they call trackless, where, you know, the car is not on railroad tracks. There's something on the floor that moves around. So you actually don't know which direction it's going.

And the scale of rise of the resistance is unbelievable. You go into a room with 40-foot, at-at, you know, attack things, you know, those elephant-looking things from the Empire Strikes back. And they have a large number of characters dressed as the First Order, tons of stormtroopers, and you really get immersed in this experience. I was blown away. I think Rise of the Rest in Since thence is the best ride I've ever, best amusement park ride ever, hands down by double.

It's incredible. It is an wild experience. And like you walk into, as you're seeing here on the screen, that deck where there are 50 stormtroopers, another animal. But the first order officers in front of them are real people. They kind of give you a hard time. So it's kind of like going to a haunted house, you know, kind of thing where they interact with you. So the girls loved it.

Then they have a Millennium Falcon, a full Millennium Falcon in this Disney Star Wars area that's new. And you get to ride the Millennium Falcon. That's a different ride. And in that one, the two people in the front of the cockpit control left, right, up and down. The two people in the middle control firing the left and right laser. cannons. And in the right, you use like, you're the navigators who put a tug thing on and you try to steal that coaxil or whatever, the coaxium stuff that they had in the Hant Solo movie. So, everybody's interactive and you get a score. My kids loved it. It was great. And they have

Star Wars characters walking around. You know, we saw Ray. We saw Chewbacca. So I have to just give it A++. Navigating the B to B maze can feel really tough, huh? You're trying to hit the mark with all those top-tier executives. You want them to pay attention to your enterprise product. But where can you find all those big fish, the whales? The ones who call the shots and make the buying decisions for corporations, for startups, and everybody in between. Well, here's where LinkedIn ads is going to solve that problem for you. And I've used this.

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Super easy, call to action. Make your B2B marketing, everything it can be, and get $100 credit on your next campaign. Go to LinkedIn.com slash this week in startups to claim your credit. That's LinkedIn.com slash this week in startups, no spaces, no dashes. Terms and conditions apply because they're giving you a hundee. And then to go sit about the fireworks, they have like a VIP area. So I walk in there. And I saw Tyler Winkleweye was there, one of the Winklevye twins randomly, said I'm not to him.

So, sort of another Silicon Valley person. So I guess that's kind of one of the great things about it is you get to sit in the center thing. And they do the fireworks on that castle. Oh, my Lord, Alex, fireworks above it. And then they project onto the building every IP they have. Hickstar, Toy Story, Star, everything on that castle. And, yeah, just A++. Emily was our guide.

We had a great VIP guide. And they'll do like little things for you where, hey, you're on the ride. can we get you like some pizza and some soda pop or, you know, pot candy while you're on the ride, I'll go get it. I'll take your kids on the ride. Well, if you don't want to be on this ride, because I get motion sickness. So some of the more intense ones,

I can only do one or two of them a day. They took my, my daughters on, like this great Emily, um, when my kids fell in love. She did it like two or three times with them because they wanted to go on the same ride twice. Three times. So anyway,

long story short, great experience. You save up for it. For sure, it's special. But you're right. Like Americans going to, if you're going to Europe, I mean, even a coach ticket to Europe.

I was looking at the business class tickets. I was like, I don't know. This seems pretty expensive. $8,000 round trip to Europe. And then I look at the coach, it was two or $3,000 to go to Europe in the summer. I'm like, $2,000 or $3,000 for a coach ticket? You got a family of five, your 15 grand to sit and coach? It's, this is why my children will have to go to French American school versus going to France.

But I will just say that this underlines to me a couple of things. One, having money is great. Two, doing the normal experience is a sucker's bet in a big country with a lot of demand for certain assets. Like, room at an amusement park. It's just so tough to be the bog standard person because it's not really aimed at you. And the fact that you just actually made Disney sound cool to me with the Star Wars. And I think it's so cool that your daughters are into it because, you know, when I was growing up, Star Wars was much more of a boy-coded thing.

And it's really fun to see things that I love growing up now reach a larger audience because, well, one, it means we'll see more Star Wars stuff. And also there's a lot of joy there. So I'm glad your kids were building it. Yeah, it was a wonderful experience. And it was great. It was a little uncomfortable. Like, I think I got, I got, I got noticed twice while I was cutting the line with the Thor guide. So that was a little uncomfortable to me. There he goes. No, like twice. People were like, hey, take out, a big fan of the pods. I'm like, ooh, that was like getting on the VIP.

cutting the line. Thanks for watching. Thanks for the ad dollars I spent them here. Uncomfortable. Yeah. All right. Speaking of things that make you very, very uncomfortable, Jason Calcanus,

you put on what I consider to be the trader's garment, the full suit. The suit with a tie. You dressed up and you interviewed the president. That dropped over the weekend. Thank you so much, by the way, for the heads up that that was coming.

I love being in the know before you do things that I have to then discuss. You didn't know. I did not know. Oh, that was all sarcasm. Like, I had no idea until it makes the morning when people started texting me. Anyways, here we have Jason on the left. This is the Jason you get over a bottle of some fancy wine and a Napa wine cape.

And then on the right, this is what you get if you are Potus over on the all-in show. Now, for folks who don't know, Jason has several podcasts, one of which is this weekend startups, which I think is my favorite. He's also on another one called The All In Show with a couple of his buddies, David Sachs, Chimonf. Oh, Chmoth, don't yell at me. Paul-Pat-Tia. Polly-Hapat-A. Polly-Hap-A-Tia. Polly-Hap-Tia.

I actually practiced that once for a different show, so I wouldn't screw it up, and then I forgot. My bad, Chmoth. And then David Friedberg, they occasionally have guests on. They had a number of the GOP candidates throughout the earlier part of the campaign,

and now they had Trump on. This, of course, came in the wake of Saks and Chamath, hosting a eight-figure fundraiser for Trump in San Francisco. Yeah. And got them on the pod. So lots to talk about here. I want to focus on immigration, but first, take us behind the scenes.

How did this come together because I think probably folks out there like myself were surprised that this happened? Sure. I mean, to have a former president on the pod and let's be candid, looking like the next president as well, trigger warning for those people who aren't fans of Trump. So we've had, I think, five presidential candidates on. We had Dean Preston on. And I did like this 15 minutes with Dean Dang trying to support an alternative Democrat who

wasn't 81 years old and possibly in cognitive decline. We had Chris Christie on. He was great. He's a moderate Republican. We had RFK on who's an independent left-leaning, I guess, yeah. You kind of one of those, something for everybody. Yeah, exactly. That's why maybe moderate independent. We didn't have Nikki Halley on. She declined the invite. She declined the invite. And we had Vivek on. We were the first people to have Vivek on. So we kind of have had everybody except Biden and Trump and Nikki Hill. And so my guys are really into politics. I am not, as everybody knows, into politics all that much.

I'm more of a tech and entrepreneurship guy, innovation guy. Anyway, long story short, two of my co-hosts are really, really, really into politics. They have hosted multiple fundraisers. I think Sachs did fundraisers for RFK and Chumath participated in that. They did Dean Preston. They did a fundraiser for him. They did Trump and they did DeSantis. So they've been, you know, like many business people, placing multiple bets and building relationships with people.

It's kind of how our system works. So they told me, hey, Trump wants to be on the pod. They'd ask them, come on the pod. Now, important for people to know, as a former journalist, I know how to ask questions. And I know how to interview people after 2,000 of these interviews here and been on air for a while. It's not my show. It's our show, right? It's four participants.

So I get, you know, roughly 25% of the time on the show, just mathematically. And so I had the opportunity to participate in this. And I was like, you know, he's not my preferred candidate, but I think I can ask a couple of meaningful questions here. So I made a list of like maybe six questions I wanted to ask him. I wanted to keep it civil just as an interview technique. If you come hard at him, he just insults you, gets into a name calling thing, tells you know what you're doing.

And then the interview shuts down, right? We've seen a, we've seen countless interviews like this where an adversarial person just starts hitting him really hard, meet the press style interview. I saw one recently as I was preparing for this interview. and you don't get anything out of them. So my technique is always get the person in conversation, get them warmed up, and then maybe follow-up questions, try to get them to give something up. So I went for abortion.

My shortlist was abortion January 6th, deficit spending, immigration, and I didn't want to talk about COVID-19 and, you know, his role in that. And then Fauci and the gain of function stuff that's been coming out since in these congressional hearings. So anyway, I had those like five or six things I wanted to get to. I was able to get to maybe three. I think I got to four out of my six. And I started with the easier ones first, although people were like, oh my God, you derailed the conversation, went right to abortion. And I'm like, I think that's going to be the deciding issue. Putting aside abortion, which I went into, I did want to get him

to talk about closing the border. Now, an immigration versus recruitment. As a tech person, as a capitalist, I'm with the 70 or 80 percent of people that think the border, I think it's 80 percent of Americans think the border should be orderly, shut down, whatever, and that people should come into the country in an orderly fashion, and it should be fair, and, you know, it shouldn't just be random who gets to run across the border. But more important to me is H-1B visas and recruiting the best and brightest to come to America. Listen, a strong sales team can make all the difference for a B2 startup, but if you're going to hire sharks, you need to let them hunt, and you can't slow them down with compliance hurdles like SOC2. What is SOC2? Well, any

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That's vanta.com slash twist for $1,000 off your sock, too. And so I pushed them on that. I think we might have a clip of it here. We do have a clip. And we're going to play the Trump response, but I'm going to go ahead and just paraphrase the Jason question because I think this actually does lean into what you said about asking questions in a more conversational format versus being adversarial.

Both interview styles work out well. In this case, Jason did get something very interesting. They got a lot of coverage. So here's the question. Mr. President, we need high-skilled workers in this country. We need to recruit the best and brightest. Every time we get someone that's a loss for our adversaries and our competitors, it's a gain for us, but I've never heard you talk about this. Can you please promise us you will give us more ability to import the best and brightest around the world to America? And then here is Trump. I do promise, but I happen to agree. That's why I promise. Otherwise, I wouldn't promise.

Let me just tell you that it's so said when we lose people from Harvard, MIT, from, the greatest schools and lesser schools that are phenomenal schools also. And what I wanted to do, and I would have done this, but then we had to solve the COVID problem because that came in and, you know, sort of dominated for a little while, as you perhaps know. But what I want to do and what I will do is you graduate from a college. I think you should get automatically, as part of your diploma, a green card, to be able to stay in this country.

And that includes junior colleges, too. Anybody graduates from a college? You go in there for two years or four years. if you graduate or you get a doctorate degree from a college, you should be able to stay in this country. And you know. All right. So now, very exciting bit of commentary there from President Trump.

I do promise. I happen to agree. That's why I promise. I think you should automatically as part of your diploma get a green card, includes junior colleges, anybody graduates from a college. You go in there for two or four years. You should be able to stay in this country. Then, this is why getting people to talk matters, his campaign, Jason,

had a bit of a follow up to this. Oh, yes. They did. You like the question and how I did it? Well, the question that you did was a way to get him, I'm going to be impolite. I think you can lead Trump where you want him to go. I think you can offer him a bit of a leash and he'll kind of follow him because he's a very effective talker.

I mean. And politician. Sure. Yeah, to a lot of people. So clearly you guys were, we want more high school immigration. Trump grabbed that. He said, hell yeah, here's what you want to hear. Made headlines around the world from India to Politico and so forth.

Then his campaign came back and said, President Trump has outlined the most aggressive vetting process in U.S. history to exclude all communists, radical Islamists, Hamas supporters, America haters, and public charges. He believes, only after such vetting has taken place, we ought to keep the most skilled graduates who can make significant contributions to America. This would only apply to the most thoroughly vetted college graduates who would never undercut American wages or workers. There it is. In my read, Jason, obviates his entire comment that he made to the show. And I'm very curious if you think that's an unfair interpretation of that rockback as they say in politics. I give this like a medium walkback, like a 20% walkback, not a full walkback.

I think he is committed to high-skill workers and wants job creation and wants those entrepreneurs. I think his base, or let's say the most extreme portion of his base, believes that any job given to a foreigner is a job taken away from an American. Which is silly. Of course it is. But, you know, it's kind of like that South Park. It took our jobs kind of thing. If Americans feel that way, because of what happened during Reagan, through Clinton and the bushes in between, where we gutted, gutted manufacturing the United States and sent it to China. That was both parties, by the way.

They just went full free trade globalization. So I understand why some Americans are like, I know what you're going to do. You're shipping my job somewhere where you pay people $3. hour, not $35 an hour. Right. And so they really mistrust immigration. That's why I've been trying for years to reframe immigration or to reframe a portion of immigration as recruitment.

This is the NBA. We're trying to recruit people who, when they come here, will create a certain number of jobs and will create a certain amount of economic activity or at the very least pay a massive amount of tax because they make six figures a year, five, you know, seven figures a year. In other words, like some HBS graduate from India who we send back or an MIT graduate from the Philippines or Africa or the Middle East and we send them back. And they could have stayed here and made $500,000 a year working at Goldman Sachs or Google and we don't get that tax base. That's a mistake. And then we're also sending best and brightest back to their countries as opposed to having them here and being productive after we educated them.

It makes no sense. So I do think it's a mini walkback to try to appease a group of people. But I do feel like that will, his commitment there, I think will last the test of time. I do think he's going to make progress on H1B visas. The last time we had COVID when he was in office and then he shut everything down, right? He shut down all immigration. And so this negotiation that's going back and forth where I think radical, I wouldn't say radical. Let's just say the polar opposites.

People all the way on the left want a free border like let's go, let anybody in. and then, or very permissive, let's say, and then on the right, they want the least permissive possible. The majority of the country, going to say 80%, not the 10% is right? They want reasonable immigration. So they're going to agree with what I proposed and what Trump promised. So I do think eventually in this crazy political game, the will of the people eventually wins. They call this getting to Denmark in political circles, which is the representatives of the government start to match what the populace wants. So when it comes to abortion, basically 80% of the country wants reproductive rights and probably

half of that 80% wants some limit. And the limit seems to be 12 or 16 weeks. I know it's difficult for people to discuss these things, but that's basically what the majority of people want according to few surveys that have been done for many years. Cannabis regulation. Again, 78% of people want, you know, cannabis legal. And here we are, it's almost legal. Gambling.

Same thing, right? Draft Kings, everything. Maybe we have 35 out of 50 states now, allow some kind of wagering on. So we're kind of getting to Denmark on these things. And I think we'll get to Denmark on immigration. And, you know, I like the ability to ask him a question. I would have liked to got into January 6th. But literally, if you saw the end, I was volleying questions at him. Yeah. Like rapid fire. Because they were basically giving us the wraps on, right? We have 50 minutes with him. We got to 50 minutes. I'm one, 25 percent of it, but I'm very proud of the interview.

Now, other people are going to look at it and go, oh, Sachs and Chamath didn't ask him any hard. questions. Well, Sacks obviously is team Trump now, right? He's hosted the big fundraiser for him. Shammat's obviously on his side as well. They're just going to have a conversation with him and they're rooting for him. Oh yeah. And they're allowed to. I thought the Ukraine section was miserable. But I want to go back to the Trump thing because you said 20% walk back. And to me, he was very clear. He said, I promise, but I happen to agree. That's why I promise. Otherwise, I wouldn't promise. And then his campaign set up not only a. series of restrictions, they also said, quote, America haters, which I take to mean as anyone

who's not in the tang for the current administration. And so to me, this sets up an ideological test versus a quality test. And also only applied to the most thoroughly vetted graduates and also the most skilled graduates. Trump said two-year universities, any four-year university. So to me, this is a saying everyone gets a green card to 10 people, which to me is more than a 20% walkback. And I think this matters because Trump during his administration. If you go back to October of 2020, the Department of Homeland Security put an interim final rule that made it harder to hire foreign workers in the U.S. And his administration made changes to green cards to make it harder to unite families. And is generally historically puts people who are extremely nativist into high parts of government.

So to me, I agree with you on H1B visas. I actually very much like what Trump said there. I agree with green cards for every two and four year school. hell yes. You know how big this country is? Do you know how easy it is? You know what room we have for awesome billion people to come here? Two billion people here.

No problem. Democracy and capitalism together. Rock on. Yeah. I think Trump is selling your friends. Yeah. Trying to be very nice here. Well,

we'll talk about, I'm trying to deliberately to not, to not get into a table with you. Yeah. Because you and I have a lot of shows to you together. I like to get along. But I mean, to me,

they're getting, they're getting grin-fucked. And I don't know how to say that in a family-friendly way. They're getting snowed. Yeah, thank you. Snowed. I think they're going to snow. Listen, do politicians tell their constituents what they want to hear?

I think that's shodily enough, yes. Shockingly enough, yes. So what's great about having these discussions on the record in a forum like this is now we can go back to it and say, hey, here's what happened in the first Trump term. If there is another one, it's looking like that's a 60, 70% likely case. We'll see. Here's what he does in the second one. At least we'll have this moment in time where he says he's committed to it.

And we move the discussion forward. In terms of the vetting, everybody's 100% of people are for vetting. Like, we know that there are ISIS, Hamas, terrorists from around the world, bad actors, criminals who want to get into the United States or any other great country. Of course, we want to vet them. And then they're always spicy, I think, on the Trump side with what was the language he used, bad actors or America haters. Like, they throw stuff like that in there to just rile up the base and to tweak the libs. That's just their like standard trolling in my mind. When they say those kind of things, and it's just like the left, you know, when they include woke politics and stuff and insert it, they're just trying to stir up the pot with their base to get them out to vote.

I hate to be cynical about this. But every time you see the left or the right pander on these issues, I think they're just trying to get people out to vote. Like, oh, my God, it's existential. And I don't think actually those issues are the existential ones. I think the budget's the existential one. Right now, startups have to do more with less. We all know that. and founders have to be smart with how they deploy capital.

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Higher developer smarter. Visit lemon. com slash twist. Well, neither candidate for the American office of president has anything like approaching a plan to reduce deficit spending or cut the deficit. So if you care about that, you're better luck voting for the local squirrels. Another question I asked him, right. yeah, and tried to get somewhere with him.

I didn't get a great response there. I'll be honest. I did get a good response, I think on the Fauci thing, move the ball forward there. I just, I feel like there is a view amongst the technology people, of which I'm counting myself this time, that we need more high school immigration

and that the H-1B visa system, as it currently exists, is too small, too constrained and so forth. Yes. The Biden administration has done some good work to expand the list of degrees that fit under the F-1 visa program and what's called OST,

but that's kind of a new, wants to this conversation. I'll just say that if Trump can bin back his campaign and actually do what he said he would do, it would be good for this nation. And that's, I think, what we should say about that. Let me ask you candidly, should I have done the interview or should I have sat it out in your mind? As somebody who's not going to vote for Trump? Oh, if, if you, I mean, so the way that I would answer to that is a lot of my people were like, how dare you give a platform to a fascist, how I'm never going to speak to you again, Jake. I thought about that. Because I had to go to my spouse and I think it was like Saturdays anymore and like by the way um you know my co-host she's like

yes I'm like well I interviewed Trump and she just looked at me like how'd that happen I'm like it's a long story it's a long story I would have done it I think yeah of course you do it because the chance to okay here here's my thought if you go pluck a random and I'm going to pick a category of person here a random anti-Semite from the pool of that is it's online and platformed them a nobody I think that's pretty much a mistake. You're not going to learn anything, and all you're doing is giving them a place to espouse their terrible views. A major candidate for president,

pretty different. And so that's my distinction here. And I think you took it seriously and tried to ask questions that were not designed to just bluff his ego. So I'm fine with it. And I do think we got an interesting news cycle out of it. And I think it goes to show that Trump, while he wears the skin of a nativist Christian theocrat,

is actually just an old business guy from the 90s who doesn't really care and likes people to like him. And he wants to stay in power. That, I mean, if you, you have come to the same conclusion I have. He's a pragmatist. He's a liberal New York Democrat who, and I think it's a pragmatist. He, and I think, you know, he really needs to win. He needs to win.

Because if he doesn't win, then the next three cases, which, you know, you can pick, you know, on the law fair law spectrum where you think each one of those cases is. And there's a valid debate among. people on the left about, you know, on CNN, I watched them debating, is his law fair or is this fair law? And you can go through all four cases. He has to win. If he doesn't win, I think he's going to lose one or two of those other three cases that remain. And those are the more serious ones where I think there are less speeding tickets and tiki tax. So now that he's in a position where he has to win to stay out of jail, I believe, or to, you know, I guess exist in the

world without all these felonies and everything. So politics is dark. I just wanted to get in there and get a couple questions in. And, you know, if you go watch the Jared Kushner interview, I wasn't on that one. I wasn't available, that one. But, you know, that one, he didn't get asked any hard question, right? It was like, that was just four guys talking. And, you know, that's how most podcasts are.

They're not journalist heavy hitting. But I told my guys, I'll be respectful. I'm going to wear a suit and a tie just because of the office of the president. I would feel uncomfortable meeting with a president without a tie on. That seems to me to be crazy. And I was just put in a tie. But I just, that my personal. respect for the office of presidency is you wear a tie. I would wear a tie for Reagan, Bush,

any of them. And I just thought, I'm going to ask a couple of hard questions, but I'll keep it respectful. I'm going to try to prioritize what I think the important issues are for America. For Americans and also for your audience. That's why I liked the H-1B in particular point, because it's something that a lot of us care about. And my awesome folks, I care a lot about because my grandmother on my mom's side was a Danish immigrant. Going to Denmark, my family did it in reverse. And my mom's grandma, my mom's dad was actually from Mexico. So I have a family with a history of immigration and entrepreneurship,

because my grandmother founded many businesses that mostly failed, but hey, she tried. And so this matters a lot to me. I just, I could do it without the pandering from the campaign and I could do it without a lot of other things. But I do think that it was a useful moment for the conversation. So thank you for that. and you became a meme, which apparently has been a goal of you for a long time. I'm here for this.

It wasn't a goal to be a meme, but here we go. I saw a tweet saying that. Yeah, my serial killer glasses and everything and my tie. I guess people think I look like I'm a CIA agent or an accountant or like a cutthroat CEO who's about to do a riff. People are having fun with it, so have fun with it, folks. I just want to say the pink tie selection was excellent because I'm a big fan of the color pink. There you can see it again if you haven't seen it before.

This was used around the web. It's very funny to see someone that you know become a meme because you're like, that's just, that's just Jason. I just talk to them a lot. And then everyone else is like using it as a thing. All right. Let's move on, talk about the gentleman's riff. So this is something that you've been talking about,

essentially predicated on Jay Penske's media company, which owns Rolling Stone, the Hollywood Reporter of Variety. They're going back to being in the office four days a week. And you discussed this as quote, the gentleman's riff. So, first of all, what's a riff? And why is this the gentlemanly variety? Well, a reduction in workforce is what RIF stands for. And so when you saw Elon cut 80% of Twitter, then Zuckerberg cut 20,000 people, Microsoft cut 20,000 people, Google cut 10,000,000 people. Everybody has looked at, you know, the overspending in tech and said, you know what, we probably,

there's a layer of management in these companies. In some places, it's product managers, There's other places. It's mid-management. We don't need this many people, do we? And when you cut 10%, almost universally, things get more efficient because there's just less people making decisions, less people mucking things up. You know, if you had a Navy SEALs team and it was like 50 people, it'd be unruly, right? Then you get it to two, you know, Blackhawks and you got, you know, 16. It's a little more elite, right? And there's always the elite players in a company and you stack rank them, the bottom five or 10%. When you get really, to the bottom five or 10% in any organization. Doesn't matter if it's a basketball team or

corporate or a math Olympics, whatever it is, then the rest of the team can focus and they don't have the weakest members of the pack. Right. So whoever's running the slowest, they're cut. Whoever's running the fastest. Now the average goes up, right? So this has become a trend. And then at the same time, you have the trend of COVID ending and people want to go back to offices and then overworking. And management doesn't know how to, I'll be candid. Management, in most cases, one, doesn't know how to manage remote workers. Two, most people are not mature and driven enough to be remote workers. The top third, I believe, are awesome at it. I think people like me and you and the team we have here, if you have the right people who are self-motivated,

who can get up in the morning and crank it out and don't need somebody over their shoulder, I think that's, I would say, the top 20% are more productive at home. There's another wide, big fat middle, maybe it's 30% that are as productive plus or minus, and then the bottom 50% are clearly need mentorship, need to be in an office. What we're seeing now is the gentleman's riff. So instead of riffing and having to pay you a ton of severance, we just say, hey, we're going back to the office. Now, if you look at the other image I put there, it was Dell saying, hey, we're going back to office. And, you know, there's reasons to have an office, culture, mentorship. Those are good virtuous reasons to have offices.

Socialization, make humans more happy. Some people are introverts. Doesn't make them more happy to be in an office. It makes them actually it's arduous. Commutes are arduous. We all get that. But between these two leaders who have a lot of respect for, Penske is very good at what he does.

Michael Della is obviously extremely good at what these are elite practitioners. Yes. They've decided, hey, come back to the office or resignation accepted. And if you look at that second Dell story, I think they said something like 50% of people were like, okay, I'll resign. The adult story is actually a slight, slight difference. It was, you can't get promoted if you stay, work from home. So half of people said we'd rather stay in our current job role than get promoted.

I want to interrogate this from a slightly different perspective. Yeah, interrogate me. I totally agree that this is the polite way of producing your staff. We've seen companies like Google do this, et cetera. Essentially, it's a clean way to break a lot of hearts. I have a unique experience-ish. So in my time of crunch, I was 50-50. I was half the time in San Francisco, half the time in profit.

So quite literally, two weeks on, two weeks off, sometimes it was three and one. But it was back and forth constantly. I lived in two places. I would go to the office for two weeks and I would get distracted. I would sit there. People would come talk to me. People would want to catch up. It was a never-ending stream of people trying to get my attention, resolve small problems

that didn't be fixed, et cetera. And we had a reasonably good corporate culture. It was lovely. I liked a lot of people at Crunch Space. I'm still friends with some of them. Some of them are not building cool companies. It's great. Then I would go away for two weeks in my home office in Providence, and I would get all the work done because there weren't people around.

So here's the thing. If you said there's an office you can go to, you have your own office in the office, you have a door and you can close it and you can have some time to yourself to focus. I think I would take you up on that. But what every company wants is, welcome back to the large open floor plan office. Here's your 16 inches of desk space where you're crammed in with a bunch of other people who are going to type, talk loudly, sneeze and be gross around you. I would rather die because I also have to commute to get less done. So to me, employers are not fulfilling their half of the bargain, which is creating a place for people to do their best work in an office.

They're just using this as the gentleman's riff, which to me is like, okay, you're making it hard for me to work from home, but you're not supporting the things that I need to be functional in an office. I think this applies to young people. I don't really count myself as one of them anymore. And because of that, I get to say things like this. I'm never going back to an office. So you are an elite practitioner.

I know because I've tried to get you to join me here for no less than four years. And you have a competition for your services. Congratulations. I would put you in the literal 1% of journalists and performers in podcasts like myself. If you're in that, you define, right? So if you're LeBron James, if you're Kevin Durant, if you're on the all-star team, which you are, of tech journalists, you get to pick. I'm going to sit up a little straighter.

But I mean, Casey, Harris-Wisher, you know, pick the person who, who's iconic, who can bring audience, you get to choose. Now, if you look at that bottom dirt, I do have a concern for young people and the lack of mentorship. Yes. And I feel like, I think a reasonable thing to do, I like this trust but verify and earning trust over time, right? Yes. And freedom plus responsibility. So here's how I think this all hashes out eventually. The delving to say, hey, you're not going to get promoted. You can be a, you can be a contributor. but you're kind of a widget now. You're a contributor, but you're cap.

I think that's kind of a way to reset the pay scales and say the people who are more dedicated who take the time to come to the office, take the time to mentor to people. We're going to just focus on them career rise. And then y'all at home, you're kind of like AWS. You're part of the stack. We need you for certain things. We're going to deploy work to you. You do your work.

And it's a, dare I say, very transactional relationship, which was how I presented it to you. Hey, pal, I need you for three shows, a couple hours of production, an hour or two on the show, a couple hours post-production. How does that work for you? And listen, it's a transaction, like anything else. Goods for services, compensation for services, keep it fair. And I think actually that's where this is going. So when you look at Athena, go to Athenawound.com if you want to get a discount, you know, that's like $36,000 a year to have an assistant. If you don't like the assistant, they swap them out. It's kind of like AWS. It's a stack of incredibly smart. 0.1% of executive assistant. to do operational work for you, and it's extracted away. I think that this is kind of the grand negotiation that's happening right now. If you're a young person, if you're not yet elite, you've got to come to the office if you want to invest in your career. If you don't want to invest in your career, you can work from home, but you're not going to get career advancement. You're not going to be a priority for us. And if we find a cheaper solution to shift work to,

i.e. AI or Manila or South America, we're going to do it. So now you get to pick your bucket. Do I want to be all in and run into the senior managers at the office in Austin for Dell? Or do I want to be a widget at home and I could be swapped out unless I'm in leave? That's where we're getting. I think that would be a very reasonable setup. I wonder if we could get corporations to hold up their end of the bargain and not non-gentleman's riff in office workers who are making that sacrifice. Because what you're saying here is we are offering two relationships, the remote setup and the in-office setup.

And the in-office setup is for the fast burners who want to move up this organization's chart, et cetera. To me, that implies a greater social compact. And I wonder if companies are going to be willing to hold that up. Because if I do all the work to go into Dell to show up, because I want that promotion, I stay there. And then I get laid off with a bunch of other people to have my job shipped by overseas. I'm going to feel a little bit burned by capitalism, which I don't think it's healthy for the country. So if you, companies just have to, we expect a lot of workers.

And I think we should expect a little bit more of employers when it comes to, how they deal with the labor relationship. And I don't think that the rolling layoffs is going to be the best thing for morale. I'll tell you what you get. You get what you give in life. You get what you give. Corporate America is now cutthroat, not loyal to employees. Let's just keep it up.

Let's keep it a buck. Let's keep it a buck. When you say keep it a buck, there's a hundred pennies in a buck. When I say keep it a buck, I mean I keep it 100 percent, which means keep it 100 percent on us. We're going to keep it a buck here. Corporate America does not care. They will replace you with AI the second they get a chance. They will replace you with an offshore worker the second they get a chance unless you're

part of the one to 10% elite in any pursuit. Therefore, become elite is all you need to know. If you're not elite, you will be replaced with AI. You will be replaced with the lowest cost solution, as it should be rapid capitalism. If you don't like rapid capitalism, you can live in Europe. In Europe, you cannot fire somebody without going to the courts in France. which is why they can't hire a team of 10 to do an experimental project. When I talk to like European startups, they're like, yeah, we don't want to do that

startup thing. We're going to do an LLC in America or offshore. We're not going to hire people in France to do that because it's an experiment. And we told the people we're hiring an experiment. Maybe it works. Maybe it doesn't. And so, but we don't want to have to fire you. So you just, when you put those constraints in, then you don't get the risk taking.

And that's why this is the most risk-taking market, America. you can fire somebody for any reason or no reason at all. You can leave a company with no notice. You can literally walk out the door in the next minute and they have to pay you and give you your comp and everything, you know, too sweet in America. And you will get your money if they don't pay you

or they do something like in California, they just default to the employee. It is what it is. And I think Penske with the writers is the one that's going to, I'm watching. You know riders. They're introverted. Famously easy to manage.

Yeah. Can you imagine what's going to happen? Well, there's the old joke that grouping atheists is like hurting cats because they don't go in the same. Writers are like cats on pure catnip just running around doing their own insane stuff. It's going to be a mess. I just don't think that we're giving enough credit to what is possible remote. And we're talking always about the potential pitfalls thereof versus the cool things that it unlocks. For example, right now, here.

are you and I again doing another show and you and I both didn't have to commute. We didn't have to commute. We saved all that time. The one hour commute is one hour less on the docket. All right, let's do another story. I wanted to see this air taxi thing maybe. Yes.

All right, ladies and gentlemen, if you've never been to a big city, you may not know this, but traffic is bad. The world around, especially to and from the local airport, but there is a new plan from Archer. They're putting together a San Francisco Air Mobility Network,

and we have an image of the map. They have planned here. Jason, talk us through these locations. and why they matter? Well, I've always felt like having a Bay Area impography would be perfect for vetoes. Why? What's the number one fear of vetoes, Alex? My guess is that the people are worried about them falling out of the sky and dying.

Bingo. Okay. And when something falls out of the sky, there's two sets of people who can die. People in it. People below it. Now, if they're flying over water, nobody dies on the ground. So, Sydney, San Francisco, Manhattan and the boroughs, anywhere that has good weather, like not wind, not rain and snow and sleet and ice. So you take the northeast out, even though northeast is perfect.

And what are you left with? I think you're left with the Middle East, UAE, Saudi, Oman, all those incredible places are on water. They have large swaths of desert. Does not matter if one of these things falls out of sky. By the way, they're not going to fall out of the sky. These things are much more bulletproof than people flying around in Sirius and, you know, other prop planes and regular aviation. Yeah. You put all that aside.

The fact that this might come to the Bay Area is extraordinary. I don't buy for a minute this is going to happen in the Bay Area first. You know, you start looking at Japan, China, Middle East, Sydney, Australia, I think has, you know, because it's a, it's a Bay City. Anywhere there's ferries, right? So follow the ferries. If you have ferries, that means you have people commuting across water. A much better way to commute across water is at 150 miles per hour. You are watching from Napa to Palo Alto in 15 minutes.

Yeah. You go for dinner and come back. Yeah. French laundry from, I mean, you go from Monterey, you live in Monterey to landing at Facebook's headquarters on the bay, right? In East Palo Alto. This is extraordinary. What are your thoughts? All right.

So the company in question is called Archer. If you're not familiar with them, they went public VAS back in 2021. Hold the numbers earlier today. They were worth about four bucks a share, about a $1.3 billion market cap. This is the company that you may have heard that is working with the UAE to bring its EVTOL or EVTOL system, electric vertical takeoff and landing system to the UAE. And their plan in the Bay Area is to have a port at South San Francisco, which is very much near the SFO airport, Napa, where there's.

a small airport, Oakland, where there's a big airport, and then Livermore, which is out in Alameda County, and I have to admit, even though I used to live in California, I've never been to Livermore. I haven't been to Livermore, but Alameda is, you know, like on the port there by Oakland. And these things are going to be incredible of getting people in and out of airports. We had Sky Dayton, a friend of mine who was one of the original funders. Joby. Joby's the other competitor here, and Archer and Joby both have functional veto.

So as crazy as a sound, I think that's the, the one you're seeing on the screen right now is the Jobie. Yes. And what it does is those propellers, and there it is landing in New York City, the propellers let it vertical take off and land, VTOL, vertical take off and landing. But when it gets in the air, they tilt forward and it has a wing, so then it uses less energy and flies more like a prop plane, right, with wings. So this is an extraordinary, extraordinary turn of events. They promise us flying cars. We're going to get flying cars. Hopefully these things don't fall out of the sky.

They are designed to be absurdly redundant. You typically have eight rotors on them. And I think each rotor, depending on the design, they're kind of stacked. So you get two rotors, two engines per. So if you have eight, I think you have like 16. So, you know, the top one can go off the bottom one still functions. But what these all have from the. commercial drones that you might have from DGI, which I heard is getting banned in America,

because it's Chinese. These things can, if two or three of them go down, they just automatically compensate. Like the AI or machine learning, it's just like, oh, we're 10% off on engine 2A, or 4% off on engine B. Just figure it out. So maybe you'll see sometimes those drones flying and like somebody hits them with a broomstick and they just automatically redo it. I think these are phenomenally, ultimately will be phenomenally more safe than your average regional jet.

So, super exciting. One of the unwritten points that people don't talk about enough with private jet travel is how less reliable or dangerous it is. And I learned how to fly on a Sessna 152, which is an airplane the size of a shoebox that you can literally grab the wing and shake the whole plane. And it has one engine and there was no water around. So I survived that. But the point is these are going to be safe. so much so, Jason, that the amount of money floating here is a lot. So Archer, Public, raise money when Public V.S.

FAC raised a lot more money. Joby, of course, is also in the mix. And then there's WISC, which is EVTAL's Air Taxi, but self-flying, vertical aerospace, which is just EV2Ls that are air taxis. And then finally, Lillium, I think from Germany, that is building an EVTal jet. So more of a regional hopper than a city hopper. But a lot of companies are working on this. And I think it's a lot like the humanoid robots.

There's enough money, enough smart people, enough product momentum that something is, one of these companies is going to win. And I'm very excited about that because I don't care which one. I just want them all to bring something to market that I can use because I will be a day one user of this. If you look at the Jobi stock, it's at $3.6 billion right now market cap. And you look at Archer, it's at a $1.2 billion market cap. These things have absolutely gotten crushed. This is exactly the type of private company that the public markets don't have patience for. This is the most deep tech venture type long term two-decade investment you can make.

And so this is a really interesting, I think, opportunity or moment in time. I haven't put a J-trade on yet. But I do think that people are so down on these companies that we need to do a fundamental analysis, you and I to look at these and think about how much cash they have left. And how much cash is left? How much are they burning? And when do they project they'll be in market? And then we have to do a calculation that we believe they will be six months,

12 months, 18 months late. And we believe they spend 25% more money. And does that give them the runway? Whatever they say they're going to spend plus 25%, however long it's going to take, plus 12 months? And could they possibly come in for a soft landing and make this work? No. That is a brilliant selection of points.

And I almost made us go through that, but our docket was getting kind of long. But I do have some of the data where everyone out there is very curious. So in the case of Archer, who wants to build the Bay Area Network, if you will, their current EVTal, by the way, it's called Midnight. It's now doing 100 plus flights a quarter, so at least one per day. I love that momentum. In the first quarter, it had operating cash flow of negative 86.5 million, up about 20 million a year ago result.

But that only matters compared to its cash balance, which at the end of the first quarter was $523 million of liquidity, which is $406 million in cash in crash epivalence, and then another $117 million that they can tap. So the company burned net, about $60 million in cash, has about $520, which means, Jason, you know, call it eight quarters in its current burn rate. That's two years. Cash burn might go down. Revenue might come in.

It looks a little tight, is my thought looking at this company. But not impossible. It's not Nicola. It's not discur. They're not going to crap. so to speak in the next three, four, or five quarters. But that's a little tight. I'll be honest, a little tight.

So you got to be, this is where public market investors, you've got to be really thoughtful. And then people who bought these SPACs at the standard $10 spec price, you've got to understand when you're buying a no revenue company doing something incredibly futuristic, you know, Virgin Galactic, right, doing space travel, VToles, desktop metal, one of ours, doing 3D printing. Are these products in market yet or not? Are customers putting deposits down, a partner's putting deposits down? Are they letters of intent? Or is it actually predictable real revenue?

You know, something like desktop metal? They do have predictable revenue. They do have actual customers, but it's nascent and it's early. But they're real customers, obviously. Then you go to Virgin Galactic. They had deposits and maybe they're starting to put people in space. These two cases, Archer and Joby, they're not, you know, you can't go buy it yet. So if you are in, you can't go buy it.

ticket. So just first principles thinking here, these are consumer products, these two. They're going to be expensive consumer products aimed at the top 10% of society. Who will, like we talked about in our Disney VIP tickets, eat this up. If you can arbitrage money and time, that is big business. Yeah. I would add one more thing to that. If you can arbitrage money and frustration, which is the same thing, but slightly different, because I travel just enough to hate it, because I'm cheap. So I always have an economy class ticket and I was sitting there eating my stale muffin. And I'm like, I'm going to cry.

But if there's a way that I could avoid some of that, like just getting from SFO to Napa, like for our last trip, would have been. Yes, wonderful. I would have saved an hour and a half, two hours in a car. I did get to hang out with our team, which is nice, but like, it's just a lot of time. For everyone who is curious about what's coming up next on the next new show, we have so much to talk about, including digital twins, the impact of Bay Area domicile status as for startups.

And we have AI music and legislation and lawsuits. There's so much coming up. We couldn't fit it all in. So stick close to this weekend startups. We have so much more coming. Jason, as always, a treat. All right, everybody. And make sure you write a review on your favorite podcast player,

subscribe to the YouTube channel. He's X.com slash Alex. I'mX.com slash Jason. And you will get in the live show about 15 to 30 minutes of the live show. Does it make it to the other show? So there's a reason to tune in live. You get a little extra, a little extra content. Yes.

See you next. time on the swing star. Bye-bye. Bye, everybody.