This Week in Startups - Solving our biggest problems, Cerebral’s fast & loose telehealth prescriptions, Jack leaves Twitter Board | E1469

Episode Date: May 26, 2022

We discuss the tragedy at a Texas elementary school and gun violence in America (2:25). Can tech play a role in decreasing child deaths? (21:14) Then we cover mental health startup Cerebral getting probed by the DOJ (52:55). Finally, we touch on a breaking story: Jack Dorsey steps down from Twitter’s board (1:13:25). (00:00) Jason and Molly introduce today’s show (2:25) Talking about the school shooting yesterday in Texas (10:49) Coda - The All-in-one doc for teams, get a $1,000 credit at https://coda.io/twist (12:06) What is HB8? (15:45) A school safety drone company? (20:01) Odoo - Get your first app free and a $1000 credit at https://odoo.com/twist (21:14) Discussing potential technology to save children’s lives, top causes of death for children (30:05) Swag.com - Visit https://swag.com/twist and use code TWIST for 10% off your order! (31:22) Discussing potential solutions to prevent gun deaths in children (52:55) Cerebral, startup that provides telehealth subscriptions to Adderall & other stimulants, probed by DOJ overprescription methods (1:13:25) Breaking News: Jack Dorsey leaves Twitter’s board of directors (1:15:45) Discussing the proper way to release the Palmer Luckey All-In talk FOLLOW Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis FOLLOW Molly: https://twitter.com/mollywood

Okay, everybody, there has been a tragedy in the world. Sadly, another school shooting. And we're going to talk about that and some of the misperceptions about what technology can solve, what it can't solve. And then also how our kids are dying because there's some misinformation out there, Molly, about what's actually killing our kids. And it has a lot to do with the last couple of years we've been through. So I think it's an important discussion.

It's a hard discussion, but I'm glad we had it. It is. And stay with us. We're going to cover a lot of ground here. going to do a lot of processing in real time and we're going to pull ourselves back from the brink occasionally. And I really encourage you. Everybody is just trying to understand ourselves included. So we're all with us through it. It's a, it is a tough conversation. It's not easy. And we are trying to counter the hopelessness by talking about whatever solutions we can come up

with at this point, you know? Yeah. And then we'll move on to some startup news, mental health startup cerebral is getting pro by the DOJ because apparently it's very easy to get Xanax Adderall through a telemedicine option that they have been providing. Yeah, an overcorrection to one of the many crises in this country. And then finally, just briefly, a breaking story, Jack Dorsey, stepping down from Twitter's board, it's going to be a hell of a show. Let me put it that way. Yeah, it's a heck of a show.

Stick with us. Stick with us. Important show. This Weekend Startups is brought to you by Coda. Cota is the all-on-one doc for teams. If you've got a stack of niche workflow tools or if you're buried in docs and spreadsheets, Cota is the dock that brings it all together. Startups can get a $1,000 credit at coda.io slash twist.

Odo. Odo is a fully customizable and fully integrated suite of business apps that lets you build and scale your stack as you build and scale your business. your first app is free forever and right now oto is offering one thousand dollars off your first implementation pack at odu.com slash twist that's odo odo dot com slash twist and swag.com swag.com is the best place to buy customize and distribute custom gifts and promotional products they work with some of the best brands like yetti north face ember mugs and more visit swag.com slash twist and use code twist for 10% off your order. Hey, everybody, it's Wednesday, but it's a sad Wednesday.

We had a school shooting again yesterday, 19 elementary school kids, murdered, two adults, murdered through third and fourth graders, by an 18 year old with an AR-15. Couldn't I guess that, I guess. I don't even have to read the sentence to know it's going to be an AR-15 style weapon. Yeah. with literal killing machines, which seemed to be so freely available, that one combined with,

one can only assume mental health issues. We get this incredibly toxic tragedy that keeps reoccurring here in the United States. This all happened in a small city in Texas. Uvalde, Uvalde, I believe, is how it's about? Ovalde, yeah. Ovalde. Yeah.

And this is unbelievably frustrating. I thought Steve Kerr, did you see Steve Kerr's statement on Twitter yesterday? Instead of talking about the Warriors versus Dallas game, he said, I'm not going to talk about the game. I'm just going to talk about how frustrating it is that 90% of the country wants reasonable background checks for guns. Not talking about banning guns, just reasonable background checks. 90%. 90%.

90 and then we have, I guess, a 50-50 split in the Senate and 50 people on one side refuse to approve what I believe is called HB8, which is supposed to be a bar, it's named a bipartisan bill. So here we are. Why are we talking about this here? Well, because it's important to us as parents, it's important to all of you. And there's some technology here that people are talking about. Technology is not going to solve this kind of problem.

It can reduce the number of deaths in children. There's been a lot of great work on all the different categories of ways kids die, but I bring it up, Molly, because I know you and I care deeply about this because we have kids in schools. And, you know, every couple of years we go through this. And I think it's important for us to have a discussion about it here. There is no technology that's going to stop this from happening. These weapons are so powerful that even if you had armed guards at the front of schools, you know, you would basically be involved in a shootout.

And best case, you know, 50% of the time we might be able to stop people if, you know, if it was a, it was an even fight 50-50. A lot of times, candidly, the police themselves are outgunned. They don't carry this level of armaments on their hip. You know, they tend to have them in trunks of every other car or something. But this is just absolutely mind-bogglingly frustrating. And I think a dialogue needs to occur. It's important for all of us to have this dialogue.

It affects every American. We need to have this dialogue about not banning guns because we know that's not going to happen in this country, given Second Amendment and how slowly the Constitution works. But like cannabis, like gay marriage, we should be able to have some correlation, reasonable correlation between what the majority of what the country wants. and what our representatives do. And so I've been on the back channel talking with affluent people, you know, people with power and money and status, about some fundraising around just helping maybe get the Republican Party off of the NRA because it really is a money issue, the NRA, which is kind of waning now.

I had just had a ton of money previously to buy off these representatives. They're kind of waning now. They've got their own problems, but we do need to have a path forward here. Oh, yeah. We definitely do. I would, this is going to feel like a little bit of a side note, but I would encourage everybody to read this Adam Gentleson book called Kill Switch. It's about the filibuster. And it's about the history of the filibuster and how it has been used and how it was created.

And it is incredibly enlightening. and the book opens with a gentleston himself was the chief of staff maybe for not Harry Reid the guy who was the maybe it was Harry Reid any the the book opens in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook shooting and at a time and and these poll numbers remain the same when 70 or 80 percent of Americans end up approved you know universal background checks and common sense restrictions on the availability of weapons like the AR-15. And the, I mean, the Republican Party has been a wholly owned entity of the NRA for decades. That's just the simple fact.

And the filibuster works such that. Nobody even has to stand up in filibuster, right? They just sort of like signal, nobody has to put their name on it. They just signal silently, we're going to filibuster this, and then the bill dies. and so it opens with him in the office with Sandy Hook parents and Harry Reid, I think, I may have the name wrong, as this bill dies and there's not a thing that they can do about it, not a thing. So there's like, there are like we're literally turning to private fundraising and technology

to solve a problem that really is like about the fact that we don't have a functioning government. There is some dysfunction in the government in very strong. specific issues. It feels like some issues we do okay with, but my lord, this polarization, you know, whether it's Trump or social media or some combination of it or,

but we do need to figure out a way to solve for, I don't know, pandemics, guns, immigration, yeah, uh, women's health,

abortion. Right, like maternal mortality, like education. Yeah. Just a small cohort of things seem to really be. Yeah. Yeah, clogging up the system.

The HB.B.8 summary, none of this seems to me, and I am a gun owner, so I'll just put that out there, and I believe that people should have the right to own a gun. I don't know if they should have the right to own certain types of guns or unlimited guns or magazines, but I have personal safety issues, obviously. I'm a high profile person, and I am a trained, like, trained by the, like literally a CIA person. I'm not anti-gun. I was trained. I'm from Montana. Like, I am from Montana. I do not want to, I was raised to believe that we shouldn't live in a country where only the cops have guns.

Like, fundamental. Right. Perfect. And so you're, I'm assuming you're not for an all out ban on guns, but gun control. Some restrictions. Yep. If I, if I, for to summarize. So there you are.

You know, we're both, I guess, most people would say we're left leaning. Maybe you further to left. me, I might be considered more of a moderate. I don't know where you put yourself on the spectrum today. It's kind of hard to do now. I feel like it literally depends on the day. And also, yeah, like, we're politically homeless. Because, like, honestly, I look at, you know, where we are today. I look at all the failures to pass gun control legislation. And I'm like, oh, yeah, that was Democrats, right? Remember the Clinton years? Remember the, like, and it was Democrats killing, not being willing to kill a filibuster, to be clear, right? There's like this one specific thing that they've

allowed to break the Senate for 100 years. But yeah, like, I am at the point. I am at the point. now where I'm just like, am I just an anarchist? Like, yeah, it's hard to put yourself on a spectrum when they keep taking issues that we thought were on one side and throwing them to the other and abandoning certain things and, you know, used to be, I mean, Republicans didn't believe about, they believed like religion shouldn't have anything to do with politics. And then they embraced the- It was like hands off of everything.

And then they went fully adventure. Well, they were, they were not into big spending. And then all of a sudden Trump spent more than anybody. So I believe unquestionably, I will say this and I will not back down that in my lifetime, the GOP has become a death cult. They do have some really extreme views. So let me just be clear, not that one. I'm not that one.

Yeah. So you're definitely not in that one. Death cult. Yeah. If you're a startup, you know you have to save where you can. I'm talking time, money, bandwidth, and that's why we love Coda. Cota is the one document to rule them all.

In Cota, your text and your tables, they can live together in the same document, which means all your valuable data. objectives and strategies are all in one place. Nothing's going to get lost. And your team is literally on the same page. Coda works right out of the box and it's fully customizable. You can create a wiki for your team.

You can onboard your new hires from anywhere. And you can react quickly to any changes in your business. And there are templates for basically anything. OKRs, reports, 360s, anything you need to do. In fact, check this out. We made a template for all of our founders because sometimes they don't know how to send an investor update. But if we give them a template, you know what?

It becomes easy, peasy, lemon squeezy. So if you go right now to this week in startups.com slash investor updates, you can get a copy of this beautiful investor template that you can use to update your investors on how things are going. So it's a very simple call to action. I want you to join the productivity revolution.

Head to coda.io slash twist to sign up and get a thousand dollar credit. Yeah. And, you know, But there's like so much failure here. There's so much failure. Maybe we can, you know, like so much failure. How do we like?

And just to look at HB.A. Yeah. As a quick summary. Establishes new background check requirements for firearm transfers between private parties. These are unlicensed individuals. There are some places where you can just, people can sell guns to each other. It does not seem like a great idea. And neither do these gun shows.

And neither does. They're not being a background check in certain places. So specifically, it's, it's prohibiting. the firearm transfer between private parties unless a licensed gun dealer, i.e. somebody who would take ownership of this transaction, manufacturer or importer, first take possession of the firearm

to conduct a background check. This seems like a really good idea. Who's against this? I don't know. It seems like maybe 10% of the sort of extremists on the gun control issue are against this concept. I don't think any of us want

somebody selling out of the back of their car or at a gun show a firearm to an 18 year old with mental illness without just checking, is this person have mental illness? Does this person pass a background check? This is a very simple concept. We have mental illness on the rise to a level that maybe the people who wrote the constitution and created this great country of ours,

maybe they didn't anticipate this level of mental illness and this level of firearm efficacy, like these things. We're going to come to the point where I push back on the mental illness thing, but keep going. Okay, that's fine. Yeah. I mean, I know that some of these people are, you know, racist. Some of them are evil people. And then it does seem like this is a cohort of young, typically white, video game,

you know, introverted, like kids who. And so like, I mean, there's like a lot of things. I just, I like, I think that's an easy. That's an easy out, right? Like, because we are not an outlier. And somebody actually, I've been using these exact words and somebody responded to you on Twitter. We are not an outlier in America when it comes to mental health.

We don't have more mental health issues here than any. other country. Right, of course. But we do have this. We do have more guns. Yeah. But we're not going to, so in the chess board, the way I look at it is there's no way to ban the guns.

If we can't even get gun control, reasonable background checks in place, I think getting to banning guns is just never going to happen. So I'm kind of looking in a pragmatic way of like if we can't ban them. Something. Like, what can we do? Right. Just with this ultimate frustration, it does feel like mental health in almost all of these mass shooting cases is.

a piece of it. So, and what's the downside of having more mental health services? Or background checking people when they buy something like this for mental health. I mean, we do check people when they buy fertilizer because we know we can build fertilizer bombs. Like there's some period of time, I guess, after 9-11 and Oklahoma City bombing that we thought about these things. Like maybe people buying large amounts of fertilizer, we should record that or report it in some way or track it, trace it. We had an assault weapons ban in the United States. for like a decade for 10 years. So we have like data.

It reduced gun deaths. Yeah. The prohibition does not apply to transfers or exchanges or gifts between spouses in good faith. So that I guess makes sense. And it passed the House March 11th, 2021, but it's not been voted on by the Senate. Anyway, this sparked a discussion for me about just how many, how are our kids dying? So, you know, sometimes I like to just open up the aperture, because if we are going to put resources towards something, we should put it towards things that we get the most bang for the buck, that we get the most efficacy out of. Yeah.

So a person named Colin Schlivert tweeted at me, Palmer Lucky, and the Chimovreeberg Sachs and another VC saying, School Safety Drone Company, one to two drones, patrol camp. is 24-7. Trained to identify in flag, suspicious behavior, and weapons, using some kind of AI. Upon the flag,

they swarm of drones released to harass suspect and to police arrive, who's in. Again, I applaud all ideas, no bad ideas. And maybe someday this could possibly work.

It's obviously not going to work now. Palmer Lucky responded very quickly. Schools are statistically safe. This would provide very low benefit to cost, even if it worked

perfectly. He would know he's building these kind of drones. It takes a lot more than one or two drones to surveil a school. So technically not possible right now. I'd have to agree with that. I don't know if a swarm of drones are going to stop a mentally ill slash evil,

deranged school shooter. With an AR-15. With an AR-15. Yeah. And with, you know, who knows how many clips and the capacity of the clips, that seems to also be an issue. Yeah, I mean, it takes like seconds. It takes seconds to slaughter a classroom with this guy. Yeah. Yeah, it's a very, very powerful, fast gun. It's,

it's meant to kill people. Like, let's be honest. It's not a hunting rifle. No, absolutely no. Yeah. And what? The reloading is a key issue in all of this. Like, hey, and you can get these 30, 40, 50, 50, 60 clips for these different guns. Different states have different rules about it. Like, the magazine size actually does matter. And I don't know any reasonable argument for needing to have more than whatever a standard clip is, six to ten bullets in a gun for protection or safety, self-defense,

hunting, sport. Like, you don't need 20, 30, 40 bullets in here. If you do, it's because you're in a wartime situation or you're going to murder a bunch of people in a mass shooting. There is a, there are many startups that have, actually, that are doing some good work in this area. One of them, is a

I believe it's called Shot Spotter. I had looked at it as an investment. My producers will tell me if I'm correcting this name in the chat. But it triangulates Molly. They have it actually in Oakland and some other areas.

It will triangulate through sound, microphones, where the gun was fired from and then police get an alert. Not that a gun was fired in Oakland or San Mateo or San Francisco's neighborhood.

It'll tell you the street. Does Citizen use that? The Citizen app? I think Citizen uses something similar to that. Because sometimes you'll get an alert in Oakland. That's like, you know, gunfire detected over here or whatever. I think that's when somebody calls to police and say I heard a gunshot or a car, you know, but this AI and triangulation service is able to tell like it happened on this city block.

And the other one that's really, I think, going to make a big difference. is having IDs on guns, where each gun is ID in some way. Now, this is super polarizing, but it would help you track guns. Another, and then the other one is obviously like fingerprint technology, or somehow having the gun aligned with the person who owns it, i.e. the police officer. So if you were to wrestle a cop and take the gun out, it wouldn't do, you wouldn't be able to actually use that gun.

So there are some technologies here. drones are not going to do it. I mean, even before a drone, we have open schools. Putting a fence around schools, like in New York City, we have very large fences, but that's because people wander into them and they're on the street. I'm not sure you're stopping somebody even with a 10-foot fence. If a person wants to shoot up a school, they just put a ladder up against the fence, climb the fence, and they're in the school.

Or when you let kids in the school, they just follow them in or they shoot them when they're going into school. So, you know, I think that's not going to be a solution. Listen, right now, capital efficiency and extending your run way is more important than ever. So how are you going to do that? Well, one easy way is to cut cost and run all of your SaaS apps on one platform. And for that, you need to check out Odoo's amazing suite of business apps. It's going to save you so much time and so much money. Using Odu means you won't have a bunch of different SaaS subscriptions to manage and all that money.

Your credit card bill comes every month. You're in shock. Everything you need is already on Odu. And all you have to do is turn it on when you're ready. And Odu will only charge you for the apps that you actually use. Odo has over 40 main apps and over 16,000 in their open source community. I'm talking sales, accounting, marketing automation, HR, website builders, and so much more. And this will streamline your business perfectly, aka no more transferring data back and forth from all these disparate products and services that you use. And you'll have one customer support contact across all of your apps, not 20.

And the best part, well, first app is free forever. They're going to give you $1,000 right now off your first implementation, pack. That's right. You're going to go to Odo.com slash twist and get a thousand dollars off. What a generous offer. That's ODOO.com slash twist. But this led to a discussion,

I think, where Palmer Lucky responded. Companies have built products that do things like video and stuff like that, but the timelines don't work. So he knows what he's talking about when it comes to countermeasures. You know, these school shootings take place in under 10

minutes, I think, typically. It would be interesting to see the statistics on that. And, you know, most of the deaths are going to occur, sadly, in that period of time. So it's very, I think, even getting a video early, you know, maybe it makes a difference in a city. I'm not sure in a rural area if the police are 20 minutes away if it makes a difference. You know, yeah. As Palmer Lucky says here, the issue isn't finding active shooters. It's delivering death to them in time to matter, which is everybody's got a phone on them.

They can dial 911. You've got to kill the person in order to stop the shooting where they have to run out of bullets or kill themselves. If saving, this is where I jumped down the rabbit hole. If saving children is the actual goal, there are better areas to tackle. Far more children die pools, for example. And I had heard that statistic too, and I believe that to be true until I did a little research. It turns out things have changed over time. And then I saw this New England Journal of Medicine study, which will just pull up this one.

chart. And I think this is important, too, to look at, maybe you can break it down for the audience that's listening, Molly. I mean, every other form of death in America for children has gone down except for firearm related injuries and motor vehicle crashes. Motor vehicle has gone down. It's gone down, but look at, sorry, but it's creeping up, right? If you look at this line, you can see that it is declined.

I want TikTok, yeah. Sorry, I'm sorry. I was just looking at the like sort of 2018 to 2020. This short goes from 20. This is the last 20 years. Over 20 years. Over 20 year period, most forms of death have stayed roughly the same. And firearm injury related injuries.

And it is notable by the way that went up massively. Drug overdoses and poisoning. But look at the time frame in which that happened, by the way, 2019 and up. Yeah. Like there's like a huge spike in both. of those in the last three years. So COVID combined with fentanyl, I would say, is probably the trend of those two things popping way up.

And that probably means that people, there might be some mental health issues here. So some number of the firearm injuries are self-inflicted, tragically, and the overdoses are, I think, probably largely. Like we should say, suicides are a big number. Suicides are a big part of that firearm-related injury number. So, and then if you look at heart disease, drowning, drowning's actually been slowly trending down. I think this is because people have gotten rid of high dives. And I know it sounds silly, but like those kind of high dives and slides and stuff like that that were removed from pools were removed from a reason.

Insurance and insurance had done the tables and said, this is how people die in pools. And slowly over time, people don't put them in pools and slowly over time, people remove high dives and diving boards from pools and stop people from diving in pools. And I bet you cameras also help this, but I did look at a series of startups, interestingly, Molly, in drowning space. There were two specific ones. My producers will grab the names of them and put them in the chat. One of them was in Sweden, I believe. They were putting cameras in public pools under the water.

And then the lifeguard would have an iPad, and it would show the number of seconds somebody was in the underwater for using computer vision technology. and then make them turn, you know, from green to blue to red or whatever, and then flash and then an alarm. So if somebody's underwater and they can hold their breath for more than a minute, you would get this. And it's called Angel Eye. And we'll just pull that up there as a project.

And I think that this is a great place to look for startup ideas. I'm going to make the transition from gun shootings and like our legal system, which is the cause of this problem here in the United States. There's no doubt about that. But this is this week in startups. And I think there are noble pursuits here. And I think these drowning systems could reduce drowning to almost zero. Because if every camera, if cameras become that cheap, computer vision becomes that cheap,

to throw a camera in a pool, even a home pool to alert you when somebody's underwater for too long and set an alarm off, then when you have your kids in the pool and you happen to look down at your phone or the doorbell rings and you answer the door, you know, I have abject moments of panic when this happens. I make the kids get out of the pool or I make them hold hands and I do a buddy system. But like even the 30 seconds I run to open the door to get the pizza and then run back. I'm in an abject state of fear because I know about drowning being such a fast occurrence having been worked on an ambulance. And, you know, the other one was very interesting. It was a Bluetooth headset that you wear like a tiara almost, almost like Wonder Woman's.

You know how she has that. Like you're the parent or the kid? The kid wears like a little crown. And it goes across your forehead to your temples and then it has a little thing. It's like a headband is the way to say it. Wonder Woman has not like a crown that sticks up. She's got that like band. Yeah, it's like a head.

Like a forehead. It looks pretty cool. We'll call it a headband. So I Swem Band is a Bluetooth enabled sensor. And I said, oh, what does it do it? The Bluetooth band and we'll show a picture of it here. Very interesting. I almost invested in this company.

They were just a little too early for me. But, and I might actually re-look at it because now I'm remembering it. But it was a little bit big in the first versions, but kids in a public pool would take them, put them on, and go in. Now, the Bluetooth doesn't signal you, Molly, interestingly. I was like, oh, so it signals you when they've been underwater? It says no. What it does is Bluetooth doesn't work underwater. So when the Bluetooth connection dies, it's one of two situations.

Oh. It's been underwater for a certain number of seconds. Or the batteries died or Bluetooth has failed. The Bluetooth connection. So with Apple, this thing would be going off all the time. Hopefully it has an Android receiver. Unfortunately, producer Justin points out it looks like that startup maybe didn't make it. Hardware is hard and getting kids to wear this would be hard.

It looks a little dorky. But I think like this in the startup graveyard might be one to look at again. I thought the computer vision underwater would be a similar more elegant solution. Yeah, I really like the cameras. And I think the cameras could work above ground, too, by the way. So I think somebody could just take a standard Ness drop cam and build software that when it sees somebody go underwater, it knows their underwater, it knows their last location, and it waits for them to pop back up, and it knows the number of people in the pool.

So even if it just told you there's six people in the pool, now there's five, or there's six people in the pool, three are underwater, three or above water. Just think what that does for a lifeguard in terms of just giving them a little more insight into what's happening in the pool. And then just my idea was to include a spotlight with it. So you have like a mechanical spotlight. If somebody is in the pool, it could, or you could do this with AR as well. Imagine AR glasses that showed the lifeguard or the parent who was in the pool in how many seconds they were underwater or just count it.

But anyway, here's a, let's, I mean, we can play the video maybe without sound. But as you can see here, this system looks incredibly sophisticated. I am, I mean, I have to say, I know, do you mention this and I sort of agree, like, maybe we should move on to other. I'm having a hard time with the cognitive dissonance right now of like all of the ways that we keep kids safe in this country, except the one. Right. Like, it's a hard, this is a hard turn. And I'm struggling with it. Like, I have to be honest. Because it's sort of like, that's great. We should definitely keep kids from dying in Pulse. Yeah. But like, it's a, I think, think this might not be the right tone for today.

Okay. If that makes sense. Does that make sense? Yeah. I'm not trying to be critical. It's just sort of like if that's an incremental improvement and it is. And I would be curious to know, producers, what do you think? Well, what I was thinking was, I think we need to have a frank discussion of all the ways kids die and then rank them and then systematically go after them.

And firearms is number one right now. Right. So firearms is number one. Cars are number two. Right. I think self-driving's got that covered. If we get self-driving cars, it's very hard for. them to crash into each other.

And then fentanyl needs to be addressed. Yeah. And I was just making the point that like swimming is something people are actually working on. And I, you know, if you like delighting customers and your employees with amazing swag, well then swag.com is the place for you. It's the best place to buy, customize, and distribute custom gifts as well as promotional products. Because swag only carries items that people actually want to keep.

They've curated an amazing collection of the best products across categories like, tech, apparel, drinkware, office supplies, and more. And they offer some of the best brands in the game, like Yeti and Teigo, my favorite. Moleskin, another one of my favorites, ember mugs, I love those, and so much more. Remember, during the last read where I told you we were building out our twist swag bag, well, I asked our fans of the pod to come up with some ideas. Tracy Milligan came up with a JBL speaker. It promotes group listening of the podcast. What a great idea.

So we decided to mock it up, and here it is, the JBL. Go3 Speaker with the twist of branding on it. How cool is that? So if you have any swag bag submissions, go to swag.com and find your favorite item. And then tweet it to TWA Startups or email producers at this week in startups.com. You might just win that piece of swag. I want to give you 10% off your first order. I'm not joking.

10% off. It's going to be big money for you. Swag.com slash twist and use the promo code twist for 10% off. Yeah. I get it. But I mean, my intent is for people to actually be educated that despite the fact that people are perceived drowning to be more than guns, guns is actually just passed. And, you know, who knows it will stay that way, cars, but cars are going to continue to get safer is my gut. And so it will be far by far in a way, guns will be the number one killer of kids, but probably.

Which honestly is almost the only time, right? Like, and it's so far away. I just. It's pretty far up there in terms of. And I don't mean to suggest. it's something that we can solve on this show or that the tech industry can solve.

Like, but I just sort of... Oh, no, yeah. That's definitely a disclaimer that we're not going to solve it. Yeah. The solution is going to be some sort of reasonable legislation and the tracking of these guns. I do think the technology to track the guns

is a big piece of this. Because if we knew where all the guns were, that would be a pretty good start. And an assault weapon ban. Let's be honest. Yeah, I don't know why people need to have that level of assault weapons. Yeah, it doesn't make any sense. No.

It's, they're way too powerful. So anyway, uh, I wanted to talk about this. I don't know. Maybe other people don't. Um, or maybe you don't. I don't, I don't know. I know. I think, I think we can talk about it. I just think like spending a whole bunch of time on solving drowning when we know when you look at this chart and the difference between those two. It's just, it's like, it doesn't feel relevant and a bunch of kids just got slaughtered. And so like, if we can focus our energy and God help us if the, if somehow startups could help, then let's focus them on, let's only talk about guns. Like, because it is crazy.

Well, and the reason I bring this up is I think there's a misperception. So the reason I brought up drowning and that drowning could go to zero is that technology can solve that problem. So I think actually as we as we wrap this segment, I'm thinking through this from like first principles and looking at. And in real time, I'm not trying to call you out. In real time. Right.

Like you're processing this in the moment. moment we like we all are like and and here's my thinking there is a misconception in the world that like drowning occurs more than the firearms it do you think that's a real misconception because it is the guy who has like a weapons country company well no like 10 years ago i i i've heard people say that i you know i and i had never seen the statistics and i am a very well-read person and i had and i had studied this space and you know if you look at firearms they've always been, you know, three or four times, three or four X, the instances of drowning. And I think this is doing it on per hundred thousand or something. Sorry, my eyesight. I can't see the left

hand or axis, but I think it's debts per 100,000. For 100,000. Yeah. So you're talking about, is that say one death per 100,000 or approximately for drowning? And then for firearms, it's been around four and then spiked up to six or something. Now, of course, these statistics are going, when there's a mass shooting, that's going to affect this, but it's still 4x, 5x, 6x, it's now 6x. Yeah.

And so I think where I've come to in having this discussion, I think it's a productive discussion, and I'm sorry that somebody in the chat room felt it was disrespectful. But I think that's actually very productive. I think there's a lot of misconceptions in the market right now that the problem, that problems can't be solved, and that some problems are bigger than others. Less than one,

this is the number one killer of kids now, guns. Some from suicides, some from shootings, some from shootings and crimes, right? This is all shootings put together, so we obviously could break them down. And then there might be different approaches to each one. There is no technological solution is the other factor here.

There's no technological solution to solving mass shootings of kids. There's not a technological solution. There is a solution to getting people to where the firearm was and tracking firearms and making it so police firearms, you know, are triggered. So that was the other thing I wanted to sort of unpack here is that there's this belief amongst people. So false belief, number one, drowning is more and guns are not a major issue.

Guns are the number one issue now. They've exceeded cars. Issue number two, technology won't solve it, right? We've gotten to that point. You got to it faster than I did. Number three, the other things on this list are in fact being solved and will be solved by technology. So that's another revelation I just had in this very moment. We could see drowning go to zero and we could see Card debts go to zero or relatively close to zero with technology. It's not going to happen with guns. Yeah. It's just not going to happen.

And it's not going to happen either with fentanyl, actually, now that I think about it, if people are, I don't know, there's a technological solution to fentanyl overdoses. There is narca. What does that stuff called? There are some really interesting drug-based solutions. Like there's ketamine and then there's one that starts with an end. but they're not necessarily technology specifically. Yeah. There's Narcan, which actually is saving 75.

So that is, I guess, a technological solution. So that reverses 75% of overdoses in San Francisco. I think it's the latest number. So we have like nine a day and two our fatalities and seven recover. So it's about 75% right there. Yeah. And there are testing trips. So for people who are taking pills and thinking they're taking Xanax or whatever,

you can actually test. So that is another technological solution. But it seems like there are two. issues here that are spiking. Both of them have to do at mental health. Both of them have to cannot be solved with technology. Both of them need to be solved with our government. Yeah. That's the bottom line. Fentanyl, mental health, and gun control. These things, there are, there are no technological solutions. And if you have one, please speak up, but I can't think of one. So I think that wraps this up nicely. I'm sorry if people felt it's too soon.

but this is the way my mind works. Yeah. I immediately go to solutions. You're a really analytical person and you're like, what can I solve and what can't I solve? Right. And I respect that. I think there's a lot of value in going down that road. And I'm, again, I am not trying to call you out.

I think we just, I was feeling like we were spending a little much time on the pool. And it was starting to be like, we may have strayed kind of far from the issue. I respect that too, Molly. A truly terrible issue. It's a terrible issue. I think you wrap up, like, it makes perfect sense. There is we can solve and there's there's there's that we need help solve. And the government has to do it.

And the government has to do it. We need to get some number of these 50 senators to just listen to their spouses, their family members, their constituents, their children, and just take a long, deep look in the mirror. Is the NRA money worth it? And does reasonable gun control if 90% of the country want it? Why wouldn't you just take the win? We have to give them a path to winning in this reasonable gun control, not banning. Once you say banning, this becomes a. unreasonable and becomes a binary switch.

I want to ask you actually. Can we make it a real stat? Can we just make it a slider? Like let's just add something that maybe reduces it. Can we try? Can we experiment? Just try with the gun ban and just try. I mean, please. And gun buybacks. Some, there was just a really successful program actually where they literally offered people gas money to turn their guns in. Great idea. And got a ton of guns. Right. So like we could raise a ton of money for buybacks maybe, right? Like let's get the, let's get your rich friends raising. money for buybacks. I want to ask you a question as a master negotiator because I did see someone, a political commentator say, you know, for decades, literally for decades, Democrats have been saying,

we're not trying to take your guns. We're just talking about reasonable regulation. Yes. That has not worked at all. So like, what if we said, we're going to take your guns because that's it, right? Like, we've tried reasoning with you and there is no conversation that you ever have with your spouse or your friend or your pastor or whatever that gets you there. So now we're taking all your guns. And that's the proposal. And then do you end up backing out in an assault weapons ban? Like, I'm just like, is the message, like the messaging has not worked.

So do you take the messaging up and not or not? I would not escalate it that way. I would try to build consensus around the mental health issue because I think we can all agree on that because we all have kids. We've also seen what's happened during COVID. we all have seen people we know or even experienced ourselves mental health. So it's kind of like... COVID has made it worse.

Like we do need a martial plan for mental health. I think those two spikes are mental health. Like a martial plan for mental health. However, when you take a martial... When you take a mental health spike and add in more guns than there are Americans. Yeah. So what's happening now, this is the perverse thing with the dialogue. The people who are gun enthusiasts, not reasonable,

gun control folks, but the enthusiasts, they believe that, let's say, let's say I'm making up a number, 10% on each side. 10% of people want to ban the guns permanently. We come to your house, we take your guns. You have no more guns. Not allowed. We change the constitution. Then there's 10% on the other side who are like, I can buy whatever I want as much as I want. I'm not an evil person. I'm a responsible person. And it's in the document. I get to have them. If those two groups of people are the ones controlling the dialogue. And the dialogue they're controlling is actually exacerbating the problem. The people who are like, we're going to get your guns eventually, and they're vocal about it.

We want a ban on all guns. Why do you need a gun? And those are driving the sales because people are anticipating that the AR-15 will be banned. So every time a shooting happens, the next day, this will happen. We'll see it in the next two weeks. You'll see a bunch of stories. This happens every time that AR-15s are sold at. People go buy these guns after these instances because they know there's a chance that that instance, remember the Vegas shooting? How many people died in that? 40 or something? 50. 50? 50? It was 50? Ay, y'all. Like, they, after that,

gun sales went through the roof because they know that the dialogue will be re-engaged. So as a negotiator, I think we have to say, we want to stop. people who have mental illness from acquiring guns. We just want this standard federal waiting period and every gun to go through, every person to go through a background check, full stop period, that's it. And I would be insurance. And I saw weapons ban. Like, come on.

Come on. Yeah. That would be the next piece. And, you know, if we could get there, I don't know that we can get there. I think the other possibility is we create an organization that is not called the NRA. it's called responsible gun ownership. And we create an organization called Responsible Gun Owners or Responsible Gun Owners. RGO.

Yep. RGO. We start RGO, Responsible Gun Owners. This is how I would do it. We fund it with $250 million. And then we go to the 50 people who are on the right and then some of the people on the left and say, would you like to rejoin Responsible Gun Ownership? Here's the manifesto.

One, two, three, four. nobody needs 30 clips if you want an AR-15 you have to insure it and you have to insure it based on the number of debts out of a card from this gun right that might be reasonable

or something that could happen and then we start giving money to people and you just out-donate the NRA and then a Republican has to say am I taking 250K from the NRA or 500K from

responsible gun owners National Rifle Association sounds like a bunch of maniacs. Responsible gun owner sounds like the one you want. And then when you go... Totally. Now we're talking. And then RGO sets up a fund for buybacks.

Absolutely. Because some of what's going to happen is even if you have background checks and even if you have there are so many guns now, you know, that it's like it's hard to stop the back of the truck sales. So you start a huge fund. And you take donations. Yeah.

Because, you know, I always think about there's like mothers against drunk driving it's considered one of the most effective political campaigns in American history and it was literally think about the framing on that one because they were like we are our kids are dying

and we are not happening anymore I mean drunk driving was like not illegal and mothers against drunk driving came in and they were just like nope yeah moms I mean you're gonna argue with your mom right like I'm not arguing with my mom

she's here she's in the other room she came to town I'm gonna hate you with my slipper And you better. She's like, somebody said you dropped an F bomb on your podcast. Oh, here we go. So here, here, you want to punch it up? We somehow incorporate in the RGO the word parents. So, yes, responsible gun-owning parents.

You got GOP, though, unfortunately. I just kind of a good troll. It kind of is. R-G-O-P. Somebody help me. Somebody in the, mothers, mothers for responsible gun ownership, something. Parents, for responsible gun ownership. parents for responsible gun ownership, something like that.

That would do it. If we did parents. Yeah. And you have to, it has to be a lobbying organization. I mean, I think that's the mistake, right? Because public pressure does nothing in this country anymore. Like post citizens United, it's the money. In fact, somebody in the chat even said, like, figure out a way to turn gun control into a money-making opportunity and boom, we're there.

I have another solution here. A friend of mine, he liked to see. certain asset and he decided maybe he'd buy it. He liked it. I mean, Colt is a company, right? They make the AR-15. Am I correct?

I think AR-15 is the brand name of cult. Now, Colt is a company, right? Colt is a company in the world. Yeah. Cult. Company. So probably a traded company? Maybe your friend wants to buy that and said, well, divest, one.

Start there. So who owns a cult company? Like, is it owned by, it's 167-year-old? a company. It's not public. Dennis Velukes is the CEO. It's in Hartford, Connecticut. It's a subsidiary of a Czech holding company,

Colt CZ Group. So it's not even a U.S. company. Czech CZ Group has revenue of $6 billion. And it's got a bunch of subsidiaries. On February 11th, the company announced it would... $220 million? Sorry. $220 million.

Why don't we just buy cult? Let's buy that. Why don't we offer them $300 million for cult? Great. And then we just go to the cold product line, and we take the AR-15 out, and we leave the other guns. Yeah. And then we have Colt.

If you want to buy a Colt gun, you have to buy a lock. You have to go through training. No, I mean, like we make a fingerprint locked, right? Like we high-tech the shit out of that thing. It's fingerprint locked. You have to go through training. It has to be insured. That's just buy cult.

And then you just keep buying these things and taking them off the market. Love this. Love it. I think that would be an easier solution. I mean, I would just talk about putting $500 million. Like, if we would just buy a piece of cult, by a controlling interest. Or if this company owns it,

if this Colt CZ Group is publicly traded, which I can't tell if it's publicly traded, let me just type in the word stock at the end of there. Cult CZ Group stock price. And then you'll find out if it's public trade. Okay, it is a publicly traded company. The ticker symbol is FRA 6QS, whatever that means. and it doesn't even have a market cap here.

So anyway, I found it. I mean, there are probably other companies. It's got to be trading on far exchanges. But, you know, it's always the problem with these farage exchanges that you can't calculate because they're, the floats are different. The amount of shares available to the public can be different. So AR-15s, it looks like a lot of people make AR-15.

So there's that. The question is, how do we buy Colt and make an AR-15 that's better? that's like, you know, fingerprint I'd, fingerprint's secure. Anyway, I mean, I love, or just keep buying the companies. Just keep buying them. This is how, like,

I really want to validate the idea of at least trying to find some solutions because honestly, it's so hopeless feeling right now. Like, it feels so hopeless that this is a problem that's been happening for five decades. Like, my entire life. Adult life in America. My entire adult life in America. This has been happening. We didn't happen.

We didn't happen. We didn't happen. No, it really didn't. happening like, when did Columbine happen? That was the late 90s? The assault weapon ban, yeah. And then the assault weapon ban expired in 2004. And pretty much every major mass shooting since then has involved an AR-15. Yeah. Or at least since like Tree of Life synagogue. Like, so anyway, I think we're just like, we're trying not to feel hopeless. That's what we're trying. Yeah. I don't feel the need to explain my position on wanting to talk about

it. I'm absolutely think all discussions about this issue are great. Anybody with great ideas, bring them to the table. Let's go. I understand it's maybe the timing is a little bit off for me to immediately go to solutions. I want to go to those solutions. I just

have a partner in life and sometimes I don't know if you've ever had this dynamic, Molly. Where a partner you have there's a problem and you come in and you have solutions and they're like, I'm not looking for a solution. I'm looking for a hug or something.

This is such like a constant relationship conversation. Like literally, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, like, it's a refrain in my relationship. It's like, do you want me to listen or solve? Yes. Like, and we'll ask each other specifically because otherwise, like immediately, it's like solve, self, self, self, stop. And listen, I want to, I would spend. Wait, which one are you?

Are you default listen or default solver? Uh, I can be, I know it doesn't seem like it, but I can annoyingly be default solver. I think you're definitely. For sure. I'm default solver for sure. I mean, journalist slash turned investor slash broadcaster, you're a default solver. Yeah. I am the ultimate default solver.

You need to do this. You need this. Yeah. I mean, I'm the ultimate default solver. And like, I've had to retrain myself that not everybody goes to solution. Like, yeah. And it was just my training. Like as a working on an ambulance, being a black belt and karate, you know, having this

experience that I grew up with was something tragic happens, take action. Yes. And so when you're running to a car accident or somebody's on the ground, like the first call I ever went on the ambulance was somebody had been stabbed right above their heart. That set my brain up for when there's a tragedy, take action. And we had to go in and put the mask pants on that person and, you know, cut their members only jacket, which I remember it like it was yesterday. My God. This Italian guy had been stabbed in a fight over a girl outside of T.J. Bentley is in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, 3rd Avenue and 71st Street, I believe. And he's wearing a member's only jacket.

And his whole chest is like his whole, this is blood everywhere. And a guy on the end says, cut the jacket. I, you have shears. They're incredibly sharp, but they have a little round circle at the tip of them. So that you can take your shears, you know, and not stab somebody with them. Right. But you can just zip right up their jacket or zip right up a pair of jeans.

They cut like that. Wow. So I shear his jacket. And I cut the arm of his jacket because we can't get, we can't get it off of him. so I'm just shearing it off. We just open up and I shear his shirt. He goes, oh, my member's only jacket. I remember like it was yesterday.

Oh my God. The EMT in charge turns around, puts his hands on the guy's shoulders, looks him dead in the eyes and says, guy, you've got a lot more problems than this jacket. And like my heart just sunk. And then when I got the shirt off, I kid you not, like a public school water fountain that, you know, just dribbles water out. Oh, Jesus. Just like every heartbeat, just a little bit of blood droop, and they were like, this guy's not making it.

And we had to put the mask pants on him, which is a blood pressure cuff that was created in, I don't know if it's World War II. But when you have lost so much blood, they put these blood pressure cuffs, mask pants, on your legs, and we blow them up like a blood pressure cuff. In order to take the blood in your legs and send it to your organs so we get another three or four minutes to get you to the hospital. He was saved. we saved him. It was the first call I ever went on. My brother Josh's first, second call as a firefighter.

His second call. You want to take a guess of what that was? I mean, I know this story, and you should... 9-11. So a family of service. Yeah. And it's the way I'm wired, so for folks who are still grieving. I want to be clear.

I would spend three hours talking about solutions to get in control. I just wanted to get us off the swimming pools. Like, I'm like about... Sorry, I went down the swimming pool around. Like my version of action oriented is like only the big thing. Like every other noise goes away. And I like laser in on the one thing. And then when I, you know, anyway, yes.

Anyway, I think this is what's making our pod work is that you and I are slightly different. And we have these like very engaging discussions. I think this is a very engaging discussion. And everybody gets to listen into it. Yeah. What do we pivot to now? because this is going to be an even harder pivot.

So no matter what it's going to be an awkward. Cerebral? Pivot. Maybe cerebral is a way to go now actually. Because it's mental health. Cerebral is perfect because we have a massive mental health crisis. And companies that are just trying to go ahead and come in and vulture right off it. Okay.

So I want to preface this by saying our producers have been up on this story for a month or long. longer, particularly producer Rachel, over a month. Cerebral is a mental health startup that provides telehealth subscriptions to Adderall and other stimulants. It has recently been probed by the DOJ over its prescription methods. Now, if you're like under 30, you have most likely gotten an ad, evidently, like on TikTok or Instagram or anywhere for a telehealth prescription in the last year, because all these regulations were loosened during COVID.

And actually, both anecdotally and I think scientifically, there were a lot of, there were a lot more diagnoses of ADHD in kids because once kids went home to remote learning, whatever ADHD they had had, all of a sudden was like rendering them nonfunctional. Right. Because you can't, because if like, if you have an attention problem and then you're trying to learn on a screen and school is suddenly the world's shittiest TV show, like, forget it. Brutal, yeah. I mean, also being in a room with other people who are paying attention will make you pay attention more. Yes. So there's like a pure effect, just like going to the movie theater and not taking your phone out and not talking might be slightly different when you're in a movie theater with 100 people than when you're home watching a movie, you might very much talk to your partner or whoever else is in the room. And you might very much take out your phone, right?

So there is some pure impact there as well. Yeah. And so these diagnoses were going way up. The telehealth regulations were loosened. and companies came into, let's say, generously, fill the void, including this mental health startup cerebral, which was prescribing Adderall, Xanax,

other controlled substances. Yeah, Xanax is a highly addictive, deadly product. Like, I know somebody who overdosed on Xanax. Oh, God, really? Yeah, like when I was a kid. Somebody who had depression, and they had a Xanax prescription, but from what I understand, I'm no doctor,

but in that instance, I was educated that it's highly addictive and it, you know, it could basically kill you if you take too many Xanax. And it's recreationally a very popular drug. I mean,

I've been out and seen people offer each other a Xanax and have a cocktail, which seems like a really dangerous idea, because it calms people down and it makes them, yeah. And in moderation, I can help people.

and the same with Adderall. It's highly abused. It's a Schedule 2 drug, but it can, you know, really help people with ADHD. But basically, I think what happened is that cerebral and, you know,

we have some experience with this, made it just absurdly easy to get these prescriptions. Like, it was like the ADHD pre-screening behavioral questionnaire takes two minutes to go through. And the questions are like, how often are you distracted by activity or noise around you? Always.

How do you get that one? That reminded you of me when I took my gun test in California. The questions were so obvious that I didn't read the book. The guy's like, you'll pass it. You don't need to read the book. Just go over there and do it. And I looked at the book. Somebody had put a little dot next to the right answers.

I don't know if it's the owner of the place or whatever. But anyway, there was one question that was like, what's the proper way to store a handgun? And it was like in a locked box with the gun in one lockbox and the bullets in another lockbox, another one was holding it in the air holding it towards the ground in a holster and I was like well gee process of elimination

I'm guessing waving a gun in the air or the ground is not a great idea a holster seems pretty reasonable but my gosh a lockbox seems the most reasonable I'm gonna go ahead and go with A I'm gonna go with A literally those were all the questions I got like two questions wrong and the questions I got wrong were about

the caliber of guns And like they had, you know, some questions about what were the caliber of different types of guns. And I was like, I have no idea, like, what the caliber of rifles are versus whatever. I mean, I did subsequently. So these questions, I saw a chat log of these questions and answer from somebody who knew somebody who did it. It was a joke. It's a joke. Like an absolute joke.

Yeah. Do you ever lose your keys at home? Oh, Adderall for you. Like, what? Okay. Oh, okay. Do you feel anxiety is, yeah, keeping you from focusing at work? Yeah, I do.

It's like, well, let me think here. Adderall, Zadax, Adderall. Is it Tuesday? Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, I need some. Tuesday, yeah. Wednesday, Friday, no problem. It's where we're sliding into the weekend, everybody. Okay.

So it's so easy. So the DOJ announced. this investigation. And at that point, then, cerebral board members replaced the CEO, Kyle Robertson, who was also a co-founder. He controls three of the seven board seats. I mean, this is a majority, but close. Did not attend the meeting where this was decided. So they like, snakeed him. As producer Justin says, one point for governance. They cut his access to slack without advance notice. He had not agreed to depart his role as of Tuesday of last week. contesting the outcome of the election, if you will.

And he has claimed that it was like illegal and he said he's being made a scapegoat for the company's issues. So it's turned into this like huge drama with this guy, Kyle sort of refusing to leave. Dr. David Mao, the president and chief medical officer and a board certified psychiatrist, which Kyle Robertson is not, will now take over the CEO position. And they're sort of just trying to like do whatever they can to move past this. but it's a mess. It's a mess. There are probably a class of drugs that are not abused

or don't have as much abuse potential that people can responsibly do telemedicine for and in a pandemic, sure, it's responsible. You probably want as a psychiatrist before giving psychiatric drugs to be doing at the minimum of video consultation, but my understanding is these were just chat. They were not video. So I think one of the producers knows somebody who knew somebody.

You do call. You do call. Mm-hmm. So, I mean, if one of the producers wants to explain what their friend told them, I'm okay with that. If they don't, that's okay too. But I know one of our producers had a friend who had a friend who did it and had a good experience or had a seamless experience, but a way too good experience. It's a chat log and then a phone call occurs. Is that right? Yep. A friend of yours has had an experience with this and, and related to you. It's a chat that's very easy to answer the questions, followed by a brief phone call.

Basically, like a type form survey and then followed up by schedule an appointment, like a calendar link, basically like that. And then you go through some verification as to who you are with just like license uploading. Yeah. Yeah.

Then a phone call. I think sometimes it is a, call. I'm not sure what it is. I wonder how long the phone call is, like a five, 10 minute phone call or something? The phone call usually less than 30 minutes. Yeah. A few people I would say if this is not video and doesn't have one in person, probably unless it was like in a very rural area where it was super inconvenient to get there, this, these kind of schedule drugs, maybe a little friction would be better. Yeah. It's, You know, it's really interesting because it arcs right back to the top of the show, which is like, what problems can tech solve?

Like, it seems really, you know, we tend to sort of want to be like, well, we're in this pandemic. There are growing mental health issues. They are real. Like, kids are being diagnosed with ADHD because they're failing at school and with remote learning and people have anxiety for very real reasons. We'll come in with telehealth and like make this easier. And then in some ways, that's great. And in other ways, maybe there should, in fact, be more friction. Like producer Rachel points out her sister is 17 and could totally steal her ID and fake this.

Like, if we had electronic medical records that this could connect to, like there are services now that are doing, you know, prescribing ketamine for treatment resistant depression. I know somebody who's doing this company. It's like, I think there's one mind bloom. I do too. Mind bloom. Yeah. Yeah. Mind blooms where there's another one.

And they're doing ketamine lozenges. Right. which I guess help with depression or something and anxiety, but I don't think it's without cost. Right. It's expensive. First of all, which I think it's valuable that it's expensive,

but also like I sort of feel like in that case, if it's treatment-resistant depression, they should be able to access. I mean, I know we have like the electronic health records in this country on top of everything else. But imagine if you could sort of interface with those health records and say there is a verifiable history of, this and if there's not, then you need to see a doctor in person.

Yeah, I think a counselor in a lot of these situations is critically important and a counselor that is specific to you so they can get a read on if this is an abuse type situation or it's a legitimate use of the drugs. If there is like some super downside to it, I don't know how Mind Bloom works if that requires an in-person consultation or if it's all virtual. But I did hear from somebody who's working on that Maps organization, which is a like the pro-psychidalic MDMA that I think it's Portland, well, I'm sorry, Oregon is going to approve psilocybin, the active ingredient in mushrooms for PTSD therapy and stuff. And that MDMA is going to become next year federally, possibly, prescribable for therapists

and couples therapists and PTSD and all that stuff, which is actually where it originated. So if you don't know maps, that's the mostly disciplinary association for psychedelic studies. And I met the person who started at some point. And then my friend Tim Ferriss, there's her name drop, has been donating a bunch of his Uber windfall to different organizations. I think John Hopkins is doing a study for him. I don't know. I think it's MDMA. So I think those two, MDMA, aka Molly.

And we'll be the first two to. be at therapists and I think they're going to specifically work with an interesting beachhead market. The VA. Yeah, great. Because we have all these PTSD soldiers who saw horrible things

in war and it turns out some of these psychedelics and MDMA can help them in therapy resolve issues. I was talking to a friend who's working on these studies. They said it can be 10 times faster to resolve these issues because people

can access their emotions, and if you're suffering from PTSD and you're a tough soldier, you know, it might be a hard nut to crack. It might take 10 years of therapy. And they said, like, it's unbelievable, Jason. Like, you might have somebody in three sessions process the death of a friend or, you know, a horrible instance. So I like to keep an open mind towards this stuff, but this one seems a little bit maybe taking too much friction out. And if it was for, you know, we had a company that was doing people's hepatitis C and you know

UTI medications and so if that's embarrassing and it's a pain in the neck for a woman to go to the doctor or a male to go to the doctor for ED medicine like those kind of things like yeah sure you know like that doesn't seem like Xanax where you could die from it there's a valid use of Xanax

there's abuse of Xanax I mean it's pretty obvious here folks there's a drug called I was looking this up because I talked to a startup that is trying to that is using there's a drug called ibegain, which is a member of that psychedelic family. The igraine is like another plant medicine. Yeah. And what it's show. Not ayahuasca.

No. Not psilocybin, but it's another one. Much like mushrooms, right? It's in that family of psychedelics, but they say that it, but it can interrupt the brain loop of opiate addiction. Yes, I did hear about that. What I think is so fascinating about all this is I'm obsessed with the sort of like the physical part of neuropsychology, like talk therapy, you know,

there really are literally the grooves that get carved in your brain. And so no matter how much you taught, like the idea about talking about it is that you can re-grew re-grove, but some of these medications that enable neuroplasticity smooth out the grooves. Like it's literally physical. You know, we think of the brain, like it's not a physical thing. It's part of our body. It's literally physical. And I'm like obsessed with this as a topic.

I just think it's so interesting and makes perfect sense as an area of study that you don't necessarily need to get through an app. And a ton of, well, and startups have a role to play here because a lot of these drugs are going to need to have some delivery mechanism around them. So there are therapists who need to be trained in this. And there are settings. So if you've read Michael Pollan's great book, A Whole New Mind, I'll highly recommend it. He talks about set and setting.

So the setting and the context of the, this and your intentionality are absolutely critical. That's why like just doing massively psychoactive drugs and going to a rave is like one experience. Like, oh, look at the pretty lights. But that's not going to be the experience of being in with a therapist saying, hey, this traumatic thing happened to me. It makes me sad. My friend died. You know, my mom and dad didn't love me enough. Whatever your trauma is or whatever issue you're going through, you know, he's very clear that, you know, having some intentionality and the setting and the context and the process that you go through. Also, the dose is super important. That's the reason this is actually so

important that we come up with back to having a functional government and a legal structure here. Yeah. You know, if you take too much or too little, these things don't work or they have unintended consequences. So, you know, somebody taking this Ibigain, is it called? They're pregnant. I mean, who knows? Like, you know, one unit of ibogaine, you know, might do nothing. Five might be absolutely perfect for dealing with your opioid addiction. And 10 might make you more addicted.

Who knows? Like, these are very powerful, you know, drugs that need to be studied. And that's where legalization comes in. I really think, like, there's, like, this fentanyl thing is a super drug that kills people. But then the other things would give people a path who want to. to use or are in the loop, it would give them a path to get the experience of getting high

and forgetting about their problems, but maybe incrementally work towards resolving their problems. And if they only have one option, which is a $5 or $10 hit a fentanyl on Turk Street, you know, here in San Francisco, like, what have we done? We've just routed people to the darkest outcome. Yeah.

And that's, I think, you know, the problem with San Francisco is they've really incented everybody in the country who is addicted to this to come to one location for the least policing and the lowest price. And it's a really hard thing. That took a turn. Well, everybody in the country?

It turns out the, I think it's something like 80 or 90% of the people who are addicted to fentanyl in San Francisco and those shelters and anything are not from San Francisco. Wow. We are importing them because anybody who is addicted knows there are certain places in the country that are permissive

And certain places, if you go score fentanyl, you're going to be in jail. You don't want to be in the South and, like, be smoking fentanyl on the street in Alabama. I think the cops are going to tackle you and put you in jail for six months. Whereas, like, where can you do it out in the open and where can you steal out in the open from Walgreens and get a bed and get services? So if you pay for something, you might get more of it. And it turns out the price of drugs is directly correlated with policing. So higher policing means your drug dealers, and listen, and some of them are victims too, I get it. Because the drug dealers are off the street for three weeks, you have to hire another drug dealer.

So now you're paying for two drug dealers, your cost goes up. So the reason when you have no policing, the drugs become a hundred times cheaper, 10 times cheaper than they do in places with serious policing. Like to deal drugs in Japan, like you're going to jail in a Japanese prison, which is not pleasant for 10, 20 years. You know, if you're doing Singapore, you're going to jail for life. So the cost is so high that the drugs are extremely expensive because to be a drug dealer means you're going to jail for a life. Right. You're literally going to get put to death in some countries.

And so I'm not advocating for that. But having no cost means costs become extremely attractive to an ad who only cares about the next hit. That's just how pernicious the drug is. Yeah. So, you know, with startups doing this stuff, I think, having some the one thing I like about this story if I'm being honest

is that the president is a board certified psychiatrist now the new guy yeah the new guy well was he with the company before yeah yeah yeah the new CEO so they did have somebody so they did have them yeah I mean

there there were there were probably always benefits to this it's just like it was too easy it was too easy because you're incentivized to then get an $80 a month subscription right it's like a private health care issue

I bet you the other I bet you're paying the doctors on consultation. And that could also be a problem here. Because if you're a doctor, the quicker you get off the phone and do another prescription, you get more payment. So the incentive could be problematic here. Maybe a solution is the doctors have to be full-time staff, getting a full-time

salary, and not be paid based upon per, like, it's gig work. I have a feeling this is gig work. So it's like an Uber driver is going to drive, sadly, you know, Uber drivers, lift drivers, door-dash drivers. sometimes they're unsafe drivers because the time is money, the faster they drive, the more drives they can do, the more money they make. And so there needs to be some guardrails on that, which is why they are checking people's speeds. Right.

You know, like, and it's sort of like, I feel like that's phase two of, because we, the, the pandemic, they loosened restrictions on telehealth, which was really important and saved a lot of lives, and you had to get people access to health. And then phase two needs to be, if you're operating in telehealth company, what are the rules? And maybe some of those are the rules. Like you can't have gig work or you can't have commission. Right. Like you shouldn't have, there shouldn't probably be commission. And I'm not saying that they have this. But if they did, there probably should not be commissioned, say on how many people you sign up for your Adderall subscription. That's obviously going to be a distorting mechanism that you don't want.

So I sort of feel like phase two, if we had a functioning government, would be to, come up with some rules on how these things should operate. I mean, one of the nice things, like, when you go to France is they've really thought this through. Like, if you want to get a Z-pack, you know, like the, you know, if you get the flu, whatever, they're like, you can buy that over the counter. The pharmacist can just consult with you. Right. And so when I was there, I had a cold.

I was like, you know, I got this kind of like symptoms that I want to get graphic. And he's like, well, what colors are flam? And it's like, oh, gosh, yeah, this is really graphic. But anyway, he's like, yeah, Z-pack is for you. it's viral or it's not viral or whatever I guess I can tell from some of these things breaking news as we wrap the show Jack Gorsi has stepped down from Twitter's board

today the board was meeting today that a shareholder meeting I don't know if that means they're releasing their results because I thought during this transaction they weren't going to release results they said they would stop releasing results but it seems like does it seem like it got

kind of ugly though this meeting like evidently was accused of backstabbing his Twitter board, his own Twitter board by helping Elon Musk get shareholders met. Like, I can't tell if this was like a rage quit or if he was always intending to quit. But it sounds like it was not, it sounds like it may have been a slightly pointed. He was going to quit when he, he was going to resign because he was, when he came down as CEO, I think there was some natural tension happening between Squares product roadmap.

Yeah. And, or I'm sorry, blocks roadmap and Twitters, i.e. payments. And in the Elon Musk plan that people have covered in the press, there was talk of payments being a significant portion of that. If Jack is doing cash app and Twitter has their own cash app, he's CEO or on the board of two companies with the same thing. This similar thing happened with Eric Schmidt, who was on the board famously of Apple, and then launched and bought Android and launched a competing product. And it was still on the board for a minute, but yeah. Steve Jobs was not pleased about it. All right.

So there's your show for Wednesday. We got through it. You know, it's not easy to talk about these topics, but I want to be able to talk about the hardest topics possible. Thank you, Molly, for participating. Yeah. It's not easy sometimes. Thank you, audience, for rolling with us. I mean, it is, look, we're all real-time processing together, and hopefully we can extend each other that grace because we need to.

We need to do it. Let's have the hard conversations. And I will, I didn't get to the, uh, Palmer Lucky video. But this is not like Jimmy Kimmel with Matt Damon saying we couldn't get to Matt Damon, but we'll get to him next show. You know that bit he did forever. I know, totally.

So it's definitely not that. But tomorrow, I promise you at the end of the show, I will go over. Absolutely, the Palmer Lucky saga. And that episode will be released on All In and I will release the This Week in Startups tape here and get Molly's reaction to it. But are you up on it? Did you read the, they made a little synapsis for us. If you haven't read it, they'll give you the synapsis, which has like the timelines.

I'm on it. Oh, no, I'll be up to date. Oh, yes. I want to make sure you're up to date while we. Don't you worry. Don't you worry. The context of what happened. I'm all about the prep.

Yeah, it's going to be a, it's going to be a dishy, dischy week to come. Well, that's the big debate right now. Should all in release the, should all in release this with me having a comment at the end of it? Or should we release it here? I don't feel comfortable release it. it without me giving some context because I don't think people understand what actually happened. Nick, do you want to chime in on this, what you think is the best solution? Should a third party give the context?

I don't know. Producer Nick, what are your thoughts on? What do you think? The right way to do this is because I think it's a very exciting moment. I don't have a problem releasing the Palmer Lucky All in Talk. Yeah, you got to do that. I think it's kind of like a really exciting moment. And I thought it was a really exciting resolution.

and I kind of feel like maybe now Palmer and I, we're not besties, but I feel like maybe we could talk to each other and that's a good thing. He's doing important work in the world. But what do you think, Nick, is the proper way for me to put context around this because there needs to be some context because I don't know that people understand why I said the things I said and we certainly didn't get there without spoiling the episode in our discussions. Yeah, I shared my thoughts yesterday with you guys with the besties, obviously. So when this was happening, I was up in the control room and I was like, my immediate thought was like, why would Jason say that? What that was such a terrible thing to say about someone? What was happening at the time?

Why would he say something like that? Right. And he, Palmer doesn't really explain the, scenario of what was going on. He says, you know, I donated to this Hillary thing. But in my head, I'm like, you know, as I know you, the one thing that's constant about you is supporting founders relentlessly. So I had this crazy cognitive dissonance like, what? Like, was he just like a crazy person? Because that was obviously before I got to launch. I'm like, that sounds insane. Yeah. And then, you know, after doing all the digging and the research and hearing the context of what you said, it was, I used the word satisfying, not satisfying that, you know, obviously people could decide who's right and wrong in the situation, but satisfying in a sense that you're like,

oh, okay, this makes a lot more sense now. What I will say is there's some, makes sense. It helps it so much. And I actually think it makes it an even better episode because it's almost like a Tarantino movie. Like you get to the end and you're like, oh, here's actually how this all started. And it's a good kind of tie up for the whole thing. So let what happened at Allens Summit play out. And then I come on and say, here's the context. Here's the clip where I said what he quoted.

You can decide for yourself if he represented that properly. And here's what I was referring to. Bullet point, bullet point, bullet point, bullet point, objective bullet points from third party sources. Yep. Not in my opinion. So here is what third party sources said about the instance. And here is my words. Yeah.

Unedited. Specifically, I mean, you'll see this in the clip. I don't think I'm really spoiling anything. But Palmer says in the thing, something about you. He's like, you said I don't care about my family or you attack my family. So that's a little bit of a mischaracterization of what you said. And I mentioned in all in yesterday. I'm like, I don't, he could have just, that could have been an honest mistake out of rage or he could have been doing it on a purpose.

I don't know. But essentially, so Ian Thompson. Invoking somebody's family is an intense thing to do. Right. But he was like, you like told, you said, I don't care about my family, right? Right. I believe that's what he said. I have to double check.

But I did not say that. I said something completely different. The intent was different. And you not only said something different. You actually weren't, you were responsible. So Ian Thompson was on the show from the register. journalist, great. Awesome. He's a new drama table, I guess, a bunch of times. Yeah, we should have him back

on. He's amazing. And he was saying, you know, he makes a point right before you say that. He says, Oculus just lost a ton of customers after the bot, it came out that he was like funding this this thing posting farm, right, or whatever it was.

And you then say, like this guy, like if you're in this position at this company, you need to you clearly don't care about your co-workers, you don't care about their families, you don't care. But you were responding to him saying that they lost these customers,

right? Meaning like, okay, they lose the customers and then maybe they get less funding, maybe someone get fired, get laid off. You got to think about the ramifications of your behavior because it doesn't affect just you. It affects also people's families. I wonder in a like producer brain, is it better

to set that all up before you play the Palmer Lucky thing? Because I worry that if you come out of it and it's you, that it might sound like a little bit of a rebuttal. especially like a defensive. I mean, I think it'll be on you to make sure

it doesn't sound defensive because you had such a nice moment on stage. Yeah. So I'm almost wondering just as an exercise if that context is better set up at the beginning. Like, hey, you're going to hear a lot in this interview.

Before you go in, or if that then predispose people to be biased against what he says. It kind of ruins the surprise of what happens. And I think it's almost like, I think you have to do it after, but you got to like, I almost wonder if someone else

should set up the clips than you. Possible. Yeah. Or just be aware, right? Be aware that you don't want to make it sound like, now you're coming on and contradicting everything he said after you had that nice moment on stage. Here was my plan.

Yeah. I obviously was taken back by what Palmer did and said. And I didn't remember exactly what I said, but I do remember some of it. So I went back and I thought it would be helpful for all of us as we resolve this issue and put it to bed to just hear exactly what I said. And the context of it, just so you know, and I know that this could come across as defensive.

But there is context that's important here because people listening to this episode might not understand what he was talking about. Right. Totally. And so since people might not understand it, here's just four basic facts of what I was responding to. And here's the unedited tape. You can decide for yourself. I know this might come across as defensive. But I would like actually to put this to bed for both of us and we can both move forward. And here's just the extra context in case this was confusing.

And again, I know this might come across as defensive, but I really am just presenting this in the spirit of. of putting a bow on this and giving everybody a tight resolution to what occurred. And I wish Palmer lucky all the success in the world. And to be fair, you were somewhat mischaracterized, which is also fine. But if I say that, it looks like, I'm like, I was mischaracterized. They will hear the transcript. You can say you were mischaracterized. They can go ahead and, you know, Chimoth can be like, so you're totally mischaracterized.

They don't want to be on it. They don't want to come on with me for the rebuttal or the, I wouldn't even call it a rebuttal. I would say the explainer. It's context. Yeah. It's just context. It's just context, but I don't think it's just context.

I just said it is perfect. And by the way, Jason, I trust you to do this by yourself and make it unbiased because I've seen you do this before. You're good at that. You are.

So I don't think it's a problem. I never put out there that like in 1,400 episodes, this is going to be like a perfect, you know, tight, like, you know, review things. A live show. Yep.

I give my initial reaction. It's subject to change. And obviously, I'm not right. I'm exploring topics. Like we did today. Today show's a perfect example. We're exploring topics. So some people, it was too soon.

For some people, it's just right. And we can disagree about that. And listen, if somebody pulls the tape from 20 years or 200 years, if some things might seem peculiar or people's opinions might change over time. We have all. We, any one of us who has been broadcasting for the better part of our adult lives has pissed someone off. Uh, you think? Yeah.

You know? Like, yeah, I mean, you got a list. You got a list. I mean, I trust, I also trust you to make it as the way you just said it is perfect. I totally agree. And I can't believe those weenies aren't going to come on with you. Well, I think for them, like, they don't want to. I'm like, team Jason.

Well, no, they were team Jason, you know, in fairness. No, they were great. You'll hear that. They were really much, very much came to my defense, which was great. Unnecessary, but delightful. Yeah. And fair, I think. They were fair about it.

especially Freiburg, which I think people were kind of taken back that he had that like really high level of emotional intelligence. But, you know, Freeberg also is his point of doing the podcast. He said this many times on the air is he wants people to be able to have hard discussions and think from first principles and move forward as a society. So he felt like that was the ultimate example of that, of people with differences, you know, agreeing on something that's more important than their differences. Like, our differences over Hillary S. Posting and Trump are not as important

as protecting Taiwan or Ukraine or the country from all kinds of terrorists and other attacks. Or children. Yeah. Or children, right? Like, so the person has, you know, I believe this,

Bomber Lucky is obviously absurdly talented. Perhaps he's a savant, genius level talent. I don't know. As an entrepreneur, I mean, Oculus and Dan Andrel, I mean, this is not a coincidence

that he's able to do what he does. he's obviously super talented so in a way it's more important for society for the two of us to kind of be able to look at all the good things he's doing and yeah if there's things we disagree about we can disagree about them but hey man we need to move on and solve real problems in the world and so that was always my intent anyway great show everybody wait before you go I have one short thing to say that I thought was the most amazing thing from it so obviously Palmer going up there as you said before it took some months to do that at your house.

Totally. Some stones from that guy. And then it was funny. There was a lot of murmuring going on while everyone was like, oh my God, is Jason going to come out? Is Jason, is he okay? Do we need to get this guy up the stage? All this nonsense, right?

Are his brother going to kill Palmer Lucky right now? Yeah. I'm like, is my dad going to get a murder charge? I'm like, can we call the mayor? Make sure the mayor's on speed by it case anyone gets arrested? No, but I'm like, yeah, I was like, I think I told my dad, like, take it easy, cowboy. Like, he doesn't need to go off.

He's fine. And there was someone next to me and they were like, oh my God, what's going on? And I'm like, I guarantee you. I would bet my life, Jason is going to be the first person out the door on that stage. Because they're like, I don't know if he's going to come out. What's going to happen? I'm like, I guarantee you he's the first one out on the stage. Oh, I couldn't wait to get out there.

You go right next to me. I was like Mike Tyson getting in the ring. I was like, let's go. But not, you weren't looking to fight. You were like, okay, let's talk about this. Like, I clearly said some things and you felt this way about it. And let's have a discussion. And it was amazing.

That is my, for me, when I say like Mike Tyson or Connor McGregor, like being in that debate is something I would absolutely cherish and look forward to. I mean, I wish that I had a moment like that every year where somebody disagree with me and we could just, you know, really go at it and debate it. You know, like I invited the people from XRP on the pod, you know, Brad. And I have known him and I see him socially sometimes, but he doesn't want to come on the podcast. I want to have that debate is XRPS security or not. Some people just don't want to come on and have a debate about stuff. And I kind of feel like it's, you know, it's a missed opportunity. You know, it's a missed opportunity.

I like that we had a little debate today. And, you know, a deep, important discussion. To me, the rest of my day is I'm going to have more energy. Yeah. I'm going to be more intellectually stimulated, you know, like this. Good because you've got a couple of entries to do. Oh, no. Go with the ad reads.

Oh, God, this show is so successful. kind of raise the prices of the ads. The ads are too cheap. They just keep selling out. Keep adding days of the week. We're blessed. We're blessed.

We're blessed. You know what? And the partners, they're just, they're great partners. I enjoy reading the ads.