This Week in Startups - TWiST News: AI in Gaming, Nvidia and GPU Clouds, Nuclear Energy Challenges, and Waymo Updates | E2038

Episode Date: November 5, 2024

This Week in Startups is brought to you by… Squarespace. Turn your idea into a new website! Go to https://www.Squarespace.com/twist for a free trial. When you’re ready to launch, use offer code TW...IST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. OpenPhone. Create business phone numbers for you and your team that work through an app on your smartphone or desktop. TWiST listeners can get an extra 20% off any plan for your first 6 months at https://www.openphone.com/twist Lemon.io. Hire pre-vetted remote developers, get 15% off your first 4 weeks of developer time at https://www.Lemon.io/twist * Todays show: Alex Wilhelm joins Jason to discuss AI's role in gaming with Decart’s AI-generated video game and its potential impact.(10:31) Viral growth strategies for startups and Runway AI's video creation innovations. Financial topics include NVIDIA's market value and Amazon's nuclear power ambitions.(21:39). * Timestamps: (0:00) Jason and Alex kick off the show (3:34) Election security in America and challenges of swinging state votes (8:41) AI-generated video game by Decart and its potential in gaming and entertainment (9:03) Squarespace - Use offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain at https://www.Squarespace.com/TWIST (17:07) Viral growth strategy for startups and collaboration between Decart and Etched (A20:38) OpenPhone - Get 20% off your first six months at https://www.openphone.com/twist⁠ (21:37) NVIDIA's value, financial speculation, and customer concentration (29:32) Lemon.io - Get 15% off your first 4 weeks of developer time at https://Lemon.io/twist (44:16) Amazon's nuclear power deal and regulatory challenges * Subscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.com Check out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.com Check out the Launch CloudKitchens Incubator: https://ck.launch.co * Subscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp * 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: (9:03) Squarespace - Use offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain at https://www.Squarespace.com/TWIST (20:38) OpenPhone - Get 20% off your first six months at https://www.openphone.com/twist⁠ (29:32) Lemon.io - Get 15% off your first 4 weeks of developer time at https://Lemon.io/twist * Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland * Check out Jason’s suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis * Follow TWiST: Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartups YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartups TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartups Substack: https://twistartups.substack.com * Subscribe to the Founder University Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@founderuniversity1916

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Starting point is 00:00:00 I wasn't aware of the B story, but I think we need to be thoughtful about this because this could come back and sting us if we don't stop buzzing around the issue and get to the heart of it, which is whatever happens to this specific type of B, could the B be be moved? I mean, to be or not to be, that is meta's question. But there's other. I knew if we went down the B Avenue, we'd end up here for a long time. We were stuck in honey. This week in startups is brought to you by Squarespace.
Starting point is 00:00:32 Turn your idea into a new website. Go to Squarespace.com slash Twist for a free trial. When you're ready to launch, use offer code Twist to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Open Phone Create business phone numbers for you and your team that work through an app on your smartphone or desktop. Twist listeners can get an extra 20% off any plan for your first six months at OpenFone. com slash twist. And lemon.io.
Starting point is 00:01:01 Hire pre-vetted remote developers. Get 15% off your first four weeks of developer time at lemon. com. All right, everybody, welcome back to this week in startups. With me again, Alex Wilhelm. How is your weekend, sir? You know, Jason, my weekend was actually very rough. I'm not going to lie.
Starting point is 00:01:20 Our newborn is going through a period of colic. Oh. And, uh, yeah. So going to work today has actually been lovely. It's been a respite from just... For you. Yeah, this weekend was really hard. I'm not going to lie.
Starting point is 00:01:35 Oh, man, I am so sorry. Well, you know, here's the thing. You know the since you have an older one is that it gets easier and easier. And you forgot, didn't you, how hard it is. I think you forgot between the first and the second. I think this one is... So when it started off, our new baby was easier than our first baby. And now she's definitely harder.
Starting point is 00:01:54 So it's kind of a mixed bag, but apparently colic peaks at around three months. So it'll get easier and a bit. I'm just glad to be back at work. Well, I hope mom's doing well. Good luck to the baby. It's part of growing up. You'll get through it. It is.
Starting point is 00:02:15 You'll just have a lack of sleep. But don't worry, I will carry the show today. We've got a full docket. I've been there, my man. I'm eight years removed from it. My youngest. eight-year-old twins. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:02:26 And it's so great to see all of the live viewers. For people who don't know, Alex and I decided we would do this show live. So if you go to Twitter slash X and you follow TWA startups or you go to YouTube and you follow the show on YouTube, you can watch the show live. Monday, Wednesday, and Fridays, 12 central time, which is 1 p.m. Alex time, also known as Eastern Time. Yes, sir. 10 a.m. Pacific time, known as.
Starting point is 00:02:54 Silicon Valley time. So 10, 12, 1, whatever your jam is, join us. And if you're hearing this on the podcast stream, you're going to get the same show, except we clean it up a little bit in post-production. So if you watch it live, we stumble, we try to pull things off, but it's kind of fun. It's like watching a little bit of CNBC. We're going to lock in next year to Monday, Wednesday, Friday shows. And we're getting close now, aren't we? We're getting close. We're getting very close. In fact, we're doing, I think, more shows right now than we have all, year and I got to say humming along, having a lot of fun. And I think today, Jason, we can provide people with a little bit of a respite from the other thing that's going on tomorrow.
Starting point is 00:03:34 Tomorrow is the election. Yeah, I've spent the weekend since we, for the last two weeks, I've been trying to understand. And we'll leave this on the show because I think it's important for all Americans to understand election security in America. What could be better? Sure. And what the reality is. And what you're going to see. for the next week or two, and hopefully not much longer than that. There's a bunch of people arguing, fighting, sharing media about how insecure our elections are. And I take this as a positive, Alex, because we have so much scrutiny on the 50 different disparate systems, also known as our states, it's basically resulting in the election system getting tighter and better every year.
Starting point is 00:04:19 35 out of 50 states have voter ID laws, watermarked ballots, and are essentially impossible to game at scale. And that's the important caveat here. If you are worried about the national election for your candidate, whoever you got, and it's 50-50 right now, respect to everybody for their choices, you know, even if I might disagree with one of them, that's America. But the good news, Alex is, is even in your sleep-deprived, rough weekend state, you can cognitively understand that the lowest swing state is 13,000 votes, and that is Georgia. And to swing Georgia would take 13,000 fake IDs, fake ballots, and some number of people to go execute against that plan.
Starting point is 00:05:09 Is it possible? No. Could people cheat and do 100 or 200 or maybe even 500? Sure, I guess. but it's extremely hard to do that. And so I have been fighting the good fight on mine, Alex. You may have seen me on Twitter. I actually, what's funny is Jason,
Starting point is 00:05:26 I'm now associated with you in a way that I haven't been before. And so I'm catching your Twitter strays pretty consistently. And you have picked the single most thankless political position and media job in the history of mankind. And I was going to text you this, but I'll just do it live. I want to give you like three points. for being on All In, your other show, and which I would say the majority of the hosts there have one particular view. Yeah. And you have not gone along with them because you're having your own view, which I think is very respectable.
Starting point is 00:06:05 But you're taking a lot of flack for it from, I think every single side because some people think you're a squish on the right or you're too conservative for the left. And it seems that you don't have that many friends and allies. So I'll say it. 10 points, Jason, for sticking to your guns. I literally have the left telling me that I'm a sellout for the right, and I have the right telling me that I have Trump derangements in her, which to me is the greatest compliment ever, because I believe that both parties have been hijacked by the fringes. I think that's pretty obvious.
Starting point is 00:06:34 And I don't like either candidate. I'm sorry, I'm going to just stick to my guns. I don't like either candidate. I don't like how either parties behaving. And I do think America will survive either candidate. For me, the number one issue is the spending. And I guarantee you, Alex, if you want to make a bet, let's see if you'll take this bet. Over or under.
Starting point is 00:06:55 $9 trillion more at the end of this term, the next four years, 20, 25 through 2028, at this end of this next presidential term, we will have $9 trillion added to our national debt, which is basically the average of the last two years, which we've added. about 16, 17, 18 trillion. We'll see what it winds up at. But basically 8 to 9 trillion is what each president has done in the press, too. I think we will be sitting here in four years with 9 trillion more in national debt. You take the over or the under? I think, and I don't like this answer. I'd take the over on that.
Starting point is 00:07:35 Okay. So for me, I think we're going to wind up in the same exact situation we've been in, which is we're going to just bankrupt this country if we don't change it. And I hope, I hope the one good thing for me that could come out of the Trump, a Trump win would be if Doge, the Department of Government Efficiency, actually happened. I mean, independent of how I feel about Trump, that would be an amazing thing. So I hope that happens. And, you know, I hope you all vote and I hope your vote counts. Yes. You know, that's, I think every American should want that for every other American. I hate to be Captain Nuance here. But I hope everybody's vote counts. And I hope you do vote. Yeah. If you don't vote, don't call, you know? I mean, take part. If you don't vote, you don't get to complain. Have a say and then complain, but don't not have a say and then complain. That's the only thing I can't stand. But if you're not in the U.S., you're probably saying, dear God, Jason and Alex, I know you're trying to keep it to a minimum, but move on. So I'm going to do that just for the sake of our European, African, Asian, and Latin American friends.
Starting point is 00:08:36 So, Jason, on the show today, I have a video, sorry, an AI generated video game. It's going to blow your mind. Then we're going to talk about Nvidia being once again the most popular and, sorry, most valuable company in the world and some notes on GPU clouds that are very interesting. Then what the hell is going on in nuclear power for AI? Because it is a bit of a mess. And then finally, if we have time, I have the latest numbers from California regarding Waymo's self-driving ride growth. So quite a lot to get to. Twist is brought to you by Squarespace. Squarespace is the place to build a beautiful website.
Starting point is 00:09:10 You know we're huge fans of Squarespace. Squarespace here at this week in startups because every startup means a gorgeous website. People will judge a book based on its cover, but you don't have a ton of time. You don't want to waste cycles on doing something repetitive like creating a website. Oh my lord, your team is busy building your product or service. Why not use the best and most powerful website builder ever created? And that's Squarespace. And they have a new AI powered design intelligence tool that's going to help you build something great, unique, and fast. And they've, of course, got an e-commerce engine built-in. It's so simple to use with built-in payment technology. So if you're selling something online,
Starting point is 00:09:50 you can start racking up that revenue right away. Squarespace will also give you all the tools you need, like an email campaign, donation capabilities, and of course, domains, analytics, SEO, all built in from day one. Squarespace has what your startup needs. And we can save you few bucks, squarespace.com slash twist for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, go to Squarespace.com slash twist and get 10% off your first website or domain purchase. Again, squarespace.com slash twist, an amazing product that I personally use and endorse. And the longest running supporter of this week in startups, go ahead and tell them that you found out about Squarespace from this week at startups. But first, Jason, I'm going to pull a Sunny,
Starting point is 00:10:34 and I'm going to give you an AI demo here. Love it. And I want to know, have you, heard of a company called Descartes? Descartes. I have not. Okay. So, put it in in Descartes. Put it in. It's not even spelled like Descartes, the philosopher. It's literally D-E-C-A-R-T. So there's many jokes.
Starting point is 00:10:51 Anyways, they have a new thing called Oasis. Oasis is a playable, real-time, open-world AI model. What that means is it generates a Minecraft-style game frame by frame. So this is a literally an AI model that's auto-generating a game as you interact with it, which I think is pretty cool. And we have a video that we took of Stewart from the production team playing this earlier today so we can avoid. There's a big wait list for this.
Starting point is 00:11:19 I'll tell you why in a second. But Jason, this is what it looks like. This is the current state of the art, if you will. Okay. So Stewart is going to pick Mountain Meadows and we will be transported through this wormhole type thing. And if you're on the audio, this looks like Minecraft. It looks very similar to Minecraft.
Starting point is 00:11:37 And it takes normal inputs. So Jason, first thoughts of the graphical fidelity. What do you see here? Okay. So it looks like my kids are playing Minecraft on their iPads or we're playing Doom or Quake 20 years ago, 25 years ago. And you're saying this world and the game itself was generated by AI. Yes. So the AI engine is taking the inputs from the player and the information that it has and building the game.
Starting point is 00:12:07 around you as you play. This is really cool, but it also has some drawbacks. One thing it doesn't seem to have right now is any idea of permanence. So Stewart, who played this for us, to take this dick this little video, is eventually going to turn around? And what is behind him is not at all what was behind him before. And every time he turns around, it regenerates the world. But those, see, this is, for example, brand new if we're watching the video, this wasn't
Starting point is 00:12:33 there before. That's all new. Right. But oh my gosh, Jason. We can now do this with off-the-shelf-ish technology. And I think this is going to be in two years absolutely enormous. I was blown away by it. I mean, this is, I think, what people believe using a computer will be like in the future,
Starting point is 00:12:52 which is to say, instead of downloading apps, you'll talk to an AI and it will build the app in real-time for you. So they'll say, you know, I really like age of empires. I like a real-time strategy game. But I'd like it to be based on, you know, pictures from my photo album of my extended family. And can you please invite them? And then it will just generate that for you. Just like right now, you could go in there and say, hey, I'm doing some research on voter irregularities. Can you give me a bunch of information?
Starting point is 00:13:21 And when I was actually doing my research on all the voter stuff, I was using chat GPT, Claude, Gemini, and then having a check fax. And it's pretty interesting how we're getting closer now. You know, every six months in iteration to the hallucination and the accuracy issue. I don't want to say it's resolving itself, but it's slowly getting better. And so I feel like the citations, I'm seeing them more often. And, yeah, this could be one of these moments where, you know, if you think about what we just witnessed and the fidelity of it, Imagine also describing, I really love Star Wars and these three characters are meaningful to me. Can you make me an episode of the Mandalorian that occurs between these two episodes and, you know, make it super spicy and interesting for me in these ways?
Starting point is 00:14:15 And I want Darth Mole to show up. This could be the future of Netflix and other platforms, whether it's games, music or here, you know, here are games, but it could be music and you could see this happening on Netflix or Disney's app as well. I want to show one more thing. We have a chart, Jason, showing the number of unique users who have played the game that I just showed you. And it's a chart that every VC loves to see because it just goes in one direction. So here is the cumulative unique users that have played this Oasis game from Descartes. This is very impressive. So 1 million unique users in less than four days.
Starting point is 00:14:51 Eventually, I believe, and I wrote a short story back in like the late, 90s or early 2000s when I was a journalist. I wrote a short story. I got to find it on one of my old laptops. And the story basically revolves around a kid who made a piece of software that a billion people downloaded and paid a dollar for. He made a billion dollars overnight and it was in his bank account and it was all in e-cash. And I think actually that concept is something we're going to see in our lifetime, which is somebody makes something on the internet, a billion people see it. We've seen it with songs like Baby Shark. We've seen it with viral memes like David goes to dentist and stuff like that.
Starting point is 00:15:33 But it's only a matter of time before a startup does that same thing. I think that's the great hope for venture capital today and angel investing is that what you're seeing there, and it's really great that you talk about as venture capital is going, whoa, wait a second. How did that, how many people did it hit in 79 hours? What was the number? It surpassed 1 million unique users in three. days and seven hours. Amazing. You know, and you think about what Facebook took to do that, probably a year or MySpace, probably two years. You know, it takes a while to get a million
Starting point is 00:16:06 people to do anything. But this is the world we will be living in. And a large portion of this is because of the platforms that are out there that are already at scale to share these things. So this probably went viral on some combination of Reddit, Twitter, Instagram, et cetera, TikTok. And this is our future is somebody like gosh, I don't even want to say it, but the girl who had a on the street interview and became very famous. Yes, I recall that situation. Yes. And then she has a podcast now named after her catchphrase.
Starting point is 00:16:40 Like, this is what the future is. Instant virality. And if those million people pay $10 each, imagine, like, that's kind of the next card to turn over here is a group of people releasing these things on TikTok. So as a strategy for startups, I think the takeaway here is if you make something compelling, package it over and over and over again in TikTok's tweets, you know, other viral formats and share it over and over and over again and see if you can catch fire. And if you do, you could eliminate a round of funding. You could literally get rid of your Series A and not dilute 20% and just go to Series B.
Starting point is 00:17:18 How do I know this? I had a company we invested in and I called them an alicorn, a unicorn with Peggson. Wings, and that was Com.com did a seed round. The next thing I knew, they did like a 250 million round. They never did that Series A in between. And what that did to the cat table was, instead of everybody taking 20% dilution and having to go on a fundraising tour, the app had, they had just figured out paid marketing really well. And Com just surged from, you know, a couple of hundred thousand in revenue to tens of millions without doing a dilutive financing round. One last note about this one, though, just to add to the startup story, you're telling, Jason.
Starting point is 00:17:58 So, Descartes, the company that made the OASIS model, is working with ECHD, which is a Twist 500 company that's building chips that are transformer-specific. So literally all these chips can do is do transformer stuff. Now, OASIS was not running on etched hardware yet, but the companies did say that when their transformer ASIC does come out, this will run in a 4K resolution. So we'll see it again when Edge has its hardware out, but cool to see a hardware startup and a software startup working together to make hit AI products, if you will. I think I saw Runway AI, another one of these cool AI companies, and maybe our producers will find it before the show ends.
Starting point is 00:18:37 They had, you know, in their model for doing video, the ability to change the camera angle in real time. And I don't know if you saw that go viral, but that to me was a revelation because all of these AI video creation tools, we're doing five seconds, and you couldn't really change it, right? If you got a video and then you asked it with the same prompt to make another video, it would make something completely different. There was no providence or ability to edit it and iterate on it, which makes it worthless unless it happens to hit our home run the first
Starting point is 00:19:14 time. Yeah. The ability to say, hey, change the angle on this, or let's do a pan, tilt, zoom, this direction, that actually makes it usable. So I think we're very quickly getting over the constraints that the software had and the GPU processing had and the limits of the amount of hardware that was out there from, what do they call them, Neo servers or Neo clouds? Neo clouds, aka GPU Clouds, yeah. And so here it is. This is, I think, runway gen 3 alpha and what you're seeing is it made you know these beautiful images but then um you can actually go in and change the viewing angle and that's really like a new concept here of um being able to actually take what AI is building and actually use it in Hollywood.
Starting point is 00:20:14 Yeah, because I'm not impressed with these five second clips. Everyone's like, oh my gosh, just look at this five second, you know, clip that looks like a Marvel movie. I'm like, Okay, cool, one, do it again, have some fidelity between shots and actually stitch things together. That's what I've been waiting for. So I hope this is a move into that direction because, in theory, I do want to be able to say, you know, make me a Marvel movie, but with myself as Captain America, because I'm so handsome and strong. Founders know that every missed call is a missed opportunity. Customers don't want to wait. They will call someone else if you don't pick up. But if you use open phone, you're never going to miss
Starting point is 00:20:50 another customer call. And guess what? It's super affordable and easy to use. People used to spend tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of dollars, putting in a corporate phone system. And now for just $15 a month, open phone will give you a business phone line and complete control of your destiny. Want to know who's answering customer calls and how they were handled? Open phone can do incredible things like sync with HubSpot and give you AI powered call summaries. Automated responses to ensure you don't miss a single ring, well, that's all built into open phone. And if you've got an existing phone number,
Starting point is 00:21:23 they will let you port it over at no extra charge. Get 20% off your first six months. What an amazing offer at openphone.com slash twist. That's O-P-E-H-O-N-E dot com slash twist for 20% off for six months. All right, I want to talk about Invidia. I'm a public markets nerd, Jason. You know that.
Starting point is 00:21:44 And InVidia once again took the absolute top spot and as the most valuable public market company in the world, I have a screenshot of this. They beat Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Aramco, and META, the other leaders, with a market cap of just about $3.4 trillion. Now, the context here, and the reason why I want to bring this up to our startup audience, is that there's some stuff that goes into this. One element is that Nvidia is going to replace Intel on the Dow Jones Industrial average,
Starting point is 00:22:12 which is kind of like, I don't know, a coming of age moment for a company. Like when you reach the DGIA, you've really made it. Yeah, it is an honor to be in those indexes. There are, you know, only a certain number of slots. One person comes in. Somebody has to get dropped off the list. I remember when it happened to Uber, it was a big deal. And, you know, there's some programmatic buying that occurs.
Starting point is 00:22:37 And indexes obviously, if you buy an index fund, as we've always talked about, you're a fan of of them, low fee index funds, a really great way to compound wealth. Then you have people programmatically buying your stock. It just builds the base of people. The undercurrent I'm hearing, which it was in the financial times today, and this is something we've talked about on this podcast last year, and we talked about on All In as well, is the concept of round-tripping and conflicted transactions and how NVIDIA's balance sheet is shaping up. Now, it's important to say this is all speculation, but there is a group of people
Starting point is 00:23:21 speculating that this is a house of cards and that there are accounting irregularities at NVIDIA. Yes. I'm not saying that, but this is a buzzy undertone. So how insane is this that the world's number one company, there is now this undercurrent of, is this a house of cards, and is there something funky going on here? So maybe you could understand. pack where this thread is coming from and why people are starting to, I guess, it's kind of like the Tesla movement where they added the queue. I don't think anybody's shorting Nvidia here. That would be a crazy thing to do. But there was this sort of like anti-Tesla movement that occurred for a while because the stock was pretty high. And, you know, people didn't believe they were going
Starting point is 00:24:08 to get, you know, a cheap car on the road. Of course, they have now the best selling car, I think. Is the Model Y cheaper than the Model 3? I think it's a little bit more. It's like the fattened version of it. So the Model 3 is a little bit sporty and has a trunk. The Model Y has a hatchback and is like a little bit bigger. So if you're taller and you want more room and you want more storage, you go Model Y. If you want something zippy with a trunk and not a hatchback, I think you go with the model Y.
Starting point is 00:24:36 Okay, that helps a lot because I see threes and Y's a lot. And the Y is the one that's just stretched like this, essentially. Yeah, it's a little bit chubbier. It's a beefier version. Let's go through this because I think it's important when these kind of allegations start coming up that we kind of just understand what the underpinnings here are. Okay, so there's a thread that we're talking about here. And we're going to have the thread up on the screen.
Starting point is 00:25:01 We will also link to it in the video and the show notes. So if you want to follow along, you can. This is from Amanda Cashyap Sriram. And he has three ideas about how Nvidia might be. let's just say buttering up its investors by telling them things they want to hear. So the first thing he brings up is that Nvidia might be essentially giving out sales rebates, but then booking that separately so it doesn't actually impact net revenue. And the argument here is that this would show up, quote, under the balance sheet item,
Starting point is 00:25:32 prepaid expenses and other current assets. So, Jason, I went through Nvidia's last earnings reports. I went through their earnings transcripts. and I tried to find anything interesting about prepaid expenses and other current assets. Basically nothing. Not in the CFO commentary, not in the Q&A, not much. The thing that I did notice here is that the amount of prepaid expenses and other current assets at NVIDIA is pretty small compared to its overall scale. And I think most importantly, as you see from this chart, has leveled off.
Starting point is 00:26:03 So this is not going vertical still. It's decelerated. And so to me, I don't think there's enough here to actually be smoked. hinting at fire. Got it. And so I have seen entrepreneurs do this before. They will tell us they have a certain amount of revenue and they have a certain cost of goods, cogs. And we kind of netted out. And then we find out that they're discounting their product. And that comes up on another line item where they're, you know, let's say that this product costs $10,000 a year. It's about $1,000 a month, whatever, $10,000 a year per customer. Sure. Some SaaS product, but they're actually giving the
Starting point is 00:26:46 salespeople the ability to discount it for $5,000 a year. So they say they have the million dollars in top line revenue and the revenue is growing. But what we find in the last three months is that they had to discount the product 50%, 60%, 70%, in order to hit their numbers. So it looks like the top line is still growing, but somebody's getting a 50 or 60 or 70% discount, and that's coming in a line item later in it. So there are such a thing as discounts that can occur.
Starting point is 00:27:20 You might imagine that with car sales, where you sell it for a certain amount, and then there's a discount, a spiff, all kinds of weird things. I don't recommend people do, just sell your product, whatever you sell it for, don't play games with hiding discounts in other places because it creates the appearance of impropriety.
Starting point is 00:27:38 And what I learned early in my career is, the appearance of impropriety will, like we talked about with this Minecraft game, Descartes is making, you know, the same way that can go viral, here you could have round-tripping allegations or discounting go viral, which is what's happening right now.
Starting point is 00:27:58 The next, that I think is going to come into play, because there are multiple issues here. One, you have this discounting kind of thing. The second is, what is the lifespan of an H-100? And then people are giving loans to companies like Corrieve, a NEO cloud provider. And so this FT story was talking about just billions and billions of dollars in loans being given by private equity firms two companies that are going public, and then also Nvidia is investing in those companies while those companies are buying from them.
Starting point is 00:28:37 And that is called round-tripping, and then there is this house of cards in some people's mind where maybe we're going to build too much capacity like we did in the fiber era, like I talked about previously on the show, and that the floor will come out. there'll be too many H-100s, too much supply, too many Neo clouds available. And we'll see the cost for H-100, which I think was at $8.
Starting point is 00:29:06 This F-T story said it was $8 an hour to use an H-100. Now it's down to two. So it's like 75% cheaper, which is what you would expect. Things get cheaper in technology. But, you know, all of these things coming together, I don't know if it's a house of cards, but oversupply, the appearance of round tripping. this all could add up to, you know, maybe some cataclysmic moment for Nvidia. All right, founders, are you tired of doing all your own software development?
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Starting point is 00:30:35 So many of our launch founders have worked with lemon.io and they've had great experiences. So here's your call to action. Go to lemon.com slash twist and find you're a perfect developer or the perfect tech team in 48 hours or less, that's right. And Twist listeners get 15% off. The first four weeks, stop burning money, hire developers smarter and faster at lemon.io slash twist. Okay, so round-tripping is the thing that comes up.
Starting point is 00:31:05 I mean, honestly, every couple of years in technology, and Jason, before this situation, we talked about this a lot in terms of Microsoft's investments into open AI. And the question was, are they giving them investment in the form of cloud credits? And then money goes out, money comes back in. you basically take, you know, cash flow and turn it into revenue. Kind of cool, but it also dicey.
Starting point is 00:31:27 I've never actually sorted out precisely when this becomes illegal, if that makes sense, because some round-jipping is probably accidental. If you invest in a company, they buy a computer. If Dell invests in Jason Inkin, you go buy some Dell laptops. Is that round-tripping? Probably not. But where do you draw the line on that, actually? I would say the way you would draw the line on it is the scale.
Starting point is 00:31:49 Yeah. Does the scale hit anything material? And so let's take the OpenAI example. Let's say Microsoft invest 10 billion in cash in Open AI. Okay. Okay. So now they have 10 billion sitting in their bank accounts. And then Open AI proceeds to buy $5 billion in cloud credits from Microsoft in the next year. And then another $5 billion the year after that. Okay. So now you've got billion. of dollars going back and forth between bank accounts. If this was done in a coordinated way, it would be illegal. So if I said to you, like, you have no need for this cloud, but I want you to do it anyway, that's, if it's not needed and necessary, then it definitely doesn't pass the sniff test. I know this because there was a certain accelerator, which I won't name because they constantly like to pretend they're being bullied, even though they're the number one accelerator. There was a strategy inside this accelerator where the founders would buy each other's software to ring their cohorts. So imagine you have two or three hundred companies and 20 or 30 of
Starting point is 00:33:02 them agree to buy each other's software for the year and do it in a coordinated fashion. You buy my SaaS software, I buy yours. And now do it 10 times and all of a sudden things grow. This is easily found out by investors because we always ask during our diligence, tell us your top five clients, where you source them. We'll have them literally, we'll ask a founder to put this in a Google sheet and we train our founders to do it. Hey, tell us about your five largest clients by dollar amount. Tell us by the five largest by engagement. In other words, how many people are using the software every day. And put it in a Google sheet. Tell us how you source them when they started paying and how much they've paid every month and to date. Oh, and also put the contracts.
Starting point is 00:33:47 that you have with those folks in a drive. This is called due diligence. Startups, when they become past the seed and angel stage, will be required to do this. And seed investors putting in anything, let's call it above 250 or 500, will start a diligence process. Why will they start a diligence process?
Starting point is 00:34:04 Because they are investing OPM, P, M, other people's money. When you invest other people's money, you're what's called a fiduciary, and you have to do due diligence. You have a fiduciary responsibility to do that. So don't get upset if like a VCS you for your diligence folder, they have to make sure that they're not investing
Starting point is 00:34:22 in FGX and Theranos. And if you watch those examples, people did not do diligence. They basically just said, other people did diligence, I'll skip mine. And then there are some nefarious founders who say, you don't need to do diligence,
Starting point is 00:34:37 somebody else did it. That's the major red flag. Hey, if somebody else did diligence, you don't have to. Not a good approach to life. And so if you were in the same example of OpenAI and Microsoft, Microsoft invests $10 billion, $9 billion of it goes to salaries, marketing, whatever investment, and $1 billion of it, 10% goes back to Microsoft. And Microsoft's cloud business is $50 billion. So it's but 2% of Microsoft's revenue.
Starting point is 00:35:11 Yes. It's 10% of the amount to invest. You would be like, okay, pass this is a sniff test. If it was 5% or 10% of Microsofts and they did that same technique five times, then you'd start going, huh. And I think the challenge is, Nvidia has invested in multiple companies now. And that's where I think they're going to get either investigated if they haven't been already or somebody's going to come in and do diligence.
Starting point is 00:35:38 And it's just not worth it. They should, if they really feel they should be investing, they should give money to a venture capital firm. that's dedicated to AI, take a former employee of NVIDIA, and start a venture firm that's a spin-out, where you put money in, and they make the decisions outside of people buying H-100s. That would be much better hygiene, because then you could say, well, Jensen isn't making these deals.
Starting point is 00:36:05 So it's not like the sales team is selling it. And there's a corporate development person investing, and it's the same conversation. So the proximity of these conversations, is the other piece to your question of when is it illegal. I know this because I worked at AOL and Shamath worked at AOL. We both saw this up close and personal. There were salespeople who were selling people on paying AOL $50 million to be the default music provider.
Starting point is 00:36:36 And then AOL was also giving them $50 million to invest in their company. And this round-tripping scandal, you can type in AOL round-tripping scandal. You can type in AOL round-tripping scandal and find out all about this resulted in, I believe, people going to jail and a bunch of sanctions. It didn't make its way all the way to the top. And this is where a sales team and incentives matter. If the sales team, you know, runs a muck like this and they start trying to hit sales numbers and they get commissions, they will rightfully do whatever it takes to hit that incentive. And this is where management needs to be on top of things and avoid the appearance of improvements. Right. Okay. So a couple thoughts about this in the case of an video. One, we have a chart from the same Twitter thread that we're talking about illustrating the concern here. This is round-tripping in a single image. So scale, I think, does matter. And I'm glad we got to that because I don't know if the numbers in question here really add up to the potential for impropriety. Now, I do agree that CoreWeave and Lambda and the other GPU clouds that are, you know, borrowing up to 11 billion, as the FT said, are sending material.
Starting point is 00:37:44 real money to Nvidia. But Nvidia is not underwriting the debt in question. So that's actually not a round-tripping concern. I do agree there is a hygienic point to be made about Nvidia investing in smaller companies and then having those companies purchase its hardware. But I just don't think the sums in question scale to the point of being a concern to make Nvidia a quote house of cards.
Starting point is 00:38:06 And just to make that point kind of clear, Nvidia's biggest risk right now to me isn't a lack of financial, not hygiene per se, but just like clarity, but it's the massive dependence it has on a couple of customers. So for example, customers, A, B, C, D, and E in its SEC filings, these are your alphabets, your Microsofts, your Amazon's, and so forth. Just the top four customers of the company in its last quarter were 25, 36, 46% of its total revenue. All five customers equal 46%.
Starting point is 00:38:44 Top four customers. Four customers equal. Yeah. So, yeah, you have to ask yourself, at some point, do they have enough clusters to do the work they want to do? Well, XAI put together what it said was the biggest, you know, GPU supercomputer, 100,000 H-100s. And Vidae was very proud of this.
Starting point is 00:39:07 They were like, and they're going to double it. And one more point, I'm going to say this, going back to Microsoft's earnings call, Sautinadella, a man who is putting a lot of his eggs in the AI basket, said that the good news for us is that we're not waiting for the inference, i.e. demand, to show up. If you sort of think about it, this is going to be the fastest growth to 10 billion of any business in our history, and it's all inference. So I think there's a case to be made that the demand is higher than they can supply. People are spending a lot to build at this capacity. They're made. be an overrun. I don't think we're in danger of a fiber collapse again, though. Okay. There you have it. At some point, you know, there will also be competitors and the margin will come out of these systems. Oh, yeah. I don't know if I would put my money into a GPU cloud. I just don't think there's shenanigans. I mean, here's one last thing. Just for the financial nerds out there, Jason. If I underwrote a loan to you for $5 billion, predicated on the fact that you had purchased $5 billion of
Starting point is 00:40:08 Nvidia H-100 chips. And then Blackwell comes out, their next generation. And suddenly those are worth half? Yeah. So then to me, it's a sketchy way to underwrite.
Starting point is 00:40:20 I don't know if I do that. Yeah. So what's the reasonable lifespan of these chips? You know, if you look at Google servers or Facebook servers when they built these large clusters, I don't actually know
Starting point is 00:40:31 the number of years that those computers would operate, but I would think it would be six, seven, eight, nine, ten years. I do know that when these computers and clusters would have a bad hard drive or a bad server, I was told by the people who architected them, that it wasn't worth going and finding the computer and removing it from the rack, they just remotely turned the power off on those. So because like literally sending somebody there was like, okay, it's a thousand dollar,
Starting point is 00:41:00 you know, server blade, just turn it off. We've been using it for seven years. There's just no more power to it, and we'll just turn it off. And I think that's going to be the real question is, what is the lifespan of these? Will it be six, seven, eight, nine, ten years, or will it be one, two, three, four years? And then also the software is getting more efficient. And so as software gets more efficient and you get more out of each GPU, which I think is a big focus right now, is writing software that maximizes the utilization of the, these GPUs. My understanding is, in some cases, Sunny said, you know, you're using 20, 30, 40 percent of the
Starting point is 00:41:41 capacity of a GPU when you're running certain jobs and they could be more efficient, you know, and how they move data and jobs, et cetera. So it's definitely worth keeping an eye on this. And it's definitely worth startups understanding that the impact of any financial irregularities or appearance of irregularities. And what we're probably dealing with here is this is probably an appearance issue. I don't think someone like Jensen would take this kind of risk. The company's already worth a trillion dollars. Does he need to optimize on the margin? This way, I don't think so. So why would anybody take the risk? I could see salespeople taking the risk and management turning a blind eye to it at AOL at the end of the empire. And that's where like maybe a house of
Starting point is 00:42:31 cards could exist and there around tripping issues did exist. Yeah. You know, a data point that I just thought of, Jason, about this is if you look at how Nvidia is handling shareholder return, its buyback schedule, how it's handling its cash supply, it all looks very copacetic to me. Yeah. It does. There's, when we work when public, it's S1 filing was a litany of obfuscation.
Starting point is 00:42:54 Would I read Nvidia's numbers? They're impressive, but they don't, there's no bad smell in them that I, I can tell at least. So if there's something hiding in here, bad. But, you know, everyone just look at the numbers yourself before you. And stop doing, and well, and stop doing the round-tripping. That's my number one piece of advice. Take the round-tripping out of this.
Starting point is 00:43:15 Just make a venture arm. Commit $100 million a year, a billion dollars a year, whatever tickles your fancy. And have it run separately with an independent group and let them have carry and management fees and then take the gains, but don't let the sales team or the management at NVIDIA make the decisions of who to bet on while concurrently
Starting point is 00:43:40 selling them product. That's the conflict internal right now that is going to make everybody bring this up over and over and over again. Yeah. You remember when Jensen went viral for having like 30 direct reports and how he kind of did
Starting point is 00:43:57 the founder mode argument before Airbnb did, if you will. You know, I wonder if you could get that past him. Because I think you and I share a general vibe with Jensen and how he would approach. Oh, he's hands on. Yeah. Yeah. Very high bar. And he's very hands on. That is theoretically a strong bulwark against the sales team getting into running on his territory. Yeah. All right. Let's move on. Jason, you wanted to talk about Amazon and how their big deal for nuclear power has hit a bit of a roadblock with a company called Talon. So I'm curious, why
Starting point is 00:44:28 of this cut your eye? Well, you know, we're discussing not only how many chips you need for AI to process these jobs and hit superintelligence and solve the world's problems, but energy seems to be a blocker and consistent energy that doesn't burn out the grid and doesn't burn a hole in the ozone layer and burning carbon and fossil fuels, you know, in order to make these great advances seems to be critically important. And other countries, namely China, are really big on nuclear and they're moving very quickly and they have top-down authority to just say, we're doing it. Here in the United States, you have regulatory bodies, you have citizenry, et cetera,
Starting point is 00:45:20 who can have these, you know, major debates around the refiring or reopening of defunct nuclear power plants and the building of new ones. So I think the most interesting part of the nuclear story here in America is that I don't hear people saying, I don't want nuclear anymore. I don't see mass of protests. And I'm actually seeing the opposite, which is people saying, hey, you know what would be great if we didn't have a dependency on foreign oil. and we had more consistent power. And you know what? I think we went on a complete diversion
Starting point is 00:45:58 with the No Nukes concert series and the hippies saying this is not clean power and it's unsafe because of Fukushima, Chernobyl, and Three Mile Island, which in total had under a thousand, under a hundred deaths associated directly with the meltdowns that occurred in those emergencies, however we would frame them.
Starting point is 00:46:18 That to me feels like a sea change. But now there seems to be a blocker here. And maybe you could explain the thinking behind the blocker to Microsoft buying, basically, energy from a nuclear power plant. Okay. So there's two stories that came out in the last couple days about this. The first one was that meta, they had some plans to build an AI data center that was going to run on nuclear power. And it appears to have been thwarted because there is a very rare type of bee on that land. A bee, like us in an insect.
Starting point is 00:46:50 a rare species of bee. Yes, the insect that goes and flies around and stings you. Now, I don't want to pick the endangered species fight, but I'm going to move us on to the Amazon story. So Amazon bought a... I wasn't aware of the bee story, but I think we need to be thoughtful about this because this could come back and sting us at any moment if we don't, you know, stop buzzing around the issue and get to the part of it, which is, you know, whatever happens to this specific type of bee, could the be be moved? A hundred feet, you know, 100 yards past where this is going to be. And could they build a special sanctuary for bees adjacent to it and spend a billion
Starting point is 00:47:39 dollars on saving these bees? I mean, to be or not to be, that is, that is question. But there's other, I didn't, I knew if we would have done the BF. we didn't appear for a long time. We were stuck in honey. Amazon spent $650 million to buy a data center campus that was going to be next to the Susquehanna nuclear facility in Pennsylvania. Now, that's owned by Tallin.
Starting point is 00:48:03 Talon has a interconnection agreement with PJM. And I know everybody, you don't care about this, but I'm going to explain to you anyways because I had to learn about it. And there was a proposal to increase the production at Susquehanna, nuclear plant from 300 to 480 megawatts. Now, this all came, got squarely because of an interconnection agreement with other people. So there's energy production, there is a grid, and there is interconnection, and there's agreements and rules that fall down there.
Starting point is 00:48:37 The FERC, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, just voted down a plan that would have allowed for more energy to be generated from 300 to 480 megawatts. notably Jason, and this was, to my surprise, I thought it would be Democrats being opposed to something like this. It was actually the Republicans who voted against this, and one Democrat voted in favor of more capacity. But it all seems to be a little bit hard to parse out. I'm not going to lie. I've now read for the first time these interconnection service agreements or ISAs. I'm not an expert in the law here, but it's a bad sign that this deal didn't work out the way people wanted to because other groups like Constellation with Microsoft, as you mentioned,
Starting point is 00:49:22 want to co-locate data centers by nuclear facilities, ramp up the production, and then go to work. It gets weird when you talk about baseload power, grid capacities, and then if you're before or behind the meter, but this is still an overall, I think, bad note for the nuclear will save AI moment. Yeah, we're going to need to get some leadership here to explain to the local regulatory bodies that if we don't allow this type of arrangement where nuclear and data centers come together, we're probably going to fall behind in the AI race to China and other places where they will allow this to occur. Now, I do wonder if we could accomplish what people want to accomplish with nuclear by going into the desert,
Starting point is 00:50:23 putting a lot of solar and a lot of batteries, which would be a lot, obviously, and trying to do the same thing with renewables and batteries. I don't know if it's possible, but if anybody could do it, it would be Elon and we'll see. Well, I'm very optimistic about that, but with some variations, because one, I like solar, I like power walls. Give me a big battery pack.
Starting point is 00:50:44 I'll high five you. A company that we also have in the Twist 500 is called ExoWat, and they're doing solar lenses versus solar panels, and they're doing heat-based storage instead of electricity-based storage, which apparently has a lot of industrial applications. So I'll take my solar panels along with my solar lenses and my lithium ion, next to my iron batteries, next to my heat batteries. I like all of the above, but that includes nuclear. And so I'm just disappointed that here we are seeing what seems to me to be a very technical
Starting point is 00:51:13 conversation about grid load and who pays for interconnection and just some technical things that we should be able to get past to prevent what would be a co-located data center by effectively zero carbon power source. I mean, guys, this is what we want. We should be fighting to make it happen, not pissing and moaning about interconnection. I mean, and burning, yeah, burning natural gas and coal seems like a not great solution to this problem. The good news is, you know, one of the things I've found is when in business is when there is a big prize, all of a sudden, people get very creative because there is a big prize and a lot of money at stake. And, you know, that is what I suspect will happen here is people with very big pockets like Microsoft or OpenAI or XAI or Apple,
Starting point is 00:52:05 Google, Alphabet, meta, because they have so much money, because they have lobbyists, because they have lawyers, they're going to be able to fight this fight on behalf of people like American citizens who could never mobilize to fight this. And this is one of the great things about capitalism is there's such a big prize in solving general AI that depocketed investors will, you know, race to provide this product slash service to the big iron holders. whether it's Microsoft or meta. And so I think we're going to figure this out. That's what I like that tells me.
Starting point is 00:52:46 If we don't, maybe Mexico and Canada get the business. Maybe data centers will be in Mexico and Canada and we'll literally, you know, use hydro and nuclear power plants in those locations. Like, I mean, it sounds crazy, but Mexico is right there. And maybe Mexico wants the business and we'll just put five nuclear reactors near the border. And they'll get all the data center business. and we'll be flying flights from the United States to these regions in Mexico that decide, you know what, we do want to have this business. And that's one of the great things about jurisdictions.
Starting point is 00:53:21 You know, as I get older and I've lived in three different states, I really think one of the great features of the United States, I was talking to somebody from Europe the other day, these podcasters from trigonometry. And, you know, it's a, we have this really great way that you can compete in the States. Texas, Florida, can compete with New Jersey and New York and California for the same group of people you see Seattle, Washington now, is, I think they have on their referendum to get rid of state capital gains tax again. I saw a headline and I haven't been following it,
Starting point is 00:53:57 but they were using Bezos as an example of somebody who moved from Seattle, Washington, where Amazon is headquartered to Florida. And then he magically sold a bunch of shares when he was in Lard and they're like, wait a second, we could have kept him here if we didn't charge him the capital gains tax. Maybe. He said he moved for family and for him. Do you find that slimy? Like he, the guy builds his company in Seattle. And then the moment he wants to make a lot of money, he's like, I'm going to go give, I just, it. I think it is, you know, I think he moved to Seattle and a lot of people did Microsoft as well, because they had that tax treatment originally and they changed it. So, you know, I think what's going to make people competitive in the United States is
Starting point is 00:54:41 if you, if you overcharge or you take away people's rights, you know, you have both of these things occurring concurrently in some jurisdictions, people are going to have to, people will make the bet of their attention and the greatest attention is where you domicile yourself and your businesses based upon how that jurisdiction treats you, whether it's safety and security or it's tax treatment or education systems or some combination of it or bodily autonomy, as we've seen in Iowa and Texas, right? Some people are literally, I know some technology companies that are having a hard time getting people to come to Texas because there are questions about abortion. Can you get one if you needed to get one? Well, I love the competition among states
Starting point is 00:55:35 for people's custom, you know, business or whatever. And my beef with someone leaving their state is just that it feels to me a little bit undisloyal. But then again, capitalism is competitive, so maybe I'm overthinking it. I don't want to get too caught up in the nuance of interest state tax policy. But I just want to say, you know, talking about Canada and Mexico picking up, business that we might not want in the U.S. for one reason or another, I just want a really big United States. Why can't we just like take Canada, right, and just tuck it in and get like six more states and then we'll have the 56 states out of Puerto Rico, 57, and then we'll have like big America. How cool would that be? I would love to see a president propose making
Starting point is 00:56:18 additional cities, which I've been a fan of because we have so much land here. And I think somebody got Trump to say that was a good idea as well, like make a new city. Like, That's what China does. They have just like, we need a new city. Let's pop one up. We have the resources to do that. We have the land to do it. Why not pop up a new city from scratch, from first principles?
Starting point is 00:56:38 And yeah, why not try to buy some land and create a 51st, 50 second, 55th, you know, state if people want to be part of the United States. Maybe Puerto Rico wants to be part of the United States officially and be the 51st state. I'm here for it. Oh, yeah. I'm totally in favor right. All right, guys, that's the AI power story. It's going to be a recurring event. This is why, for example, why SMRs, small modular reactors are in the news and all SMR startups are doing well because everyone's desperate for power.
Starting point is 00:57:05 But let's move on and talk about our favorite thing in the world, Jason, which is self-driving cars because I have some good news for you and me. Can we get this tweet up on the screen, guys? Nate, Matt Bullard found this data before I did. So I want to give him credit for this. Here is a chart showing the number of driverless rides that Waymo has done in California per month. And it's gone from 12,000 in August of 2003 to 312,000 in August of 2004. Yeah. And I went, Jason, I did the work, and I went through all the filings, downloaded all the documents, found the information that we needed and we prepared a chart showing you the progress the company is made in the last three months.
Starting point is 00:57:46 So can we get that up on the screen, Stuart? Here we go. And the headline stats are as follows. total miles driven by Waymo, self-driving cars in California in June was just over 1.1 million, 1.4 million in July, 1.8 million in August. Number of passengers, 800,000 to 1.1 to 1.4 million. And this is the stuff that blew my mind. The total passengers that they had in June was 291,000.
Starting point is 00:58:15 By August, it was just under 500,000. So to me, the technology is scaling. people want it. And have you heard about a lot of crashes, Jason? I haven't. I mean, it's pretty clear that at low speed, in a contained environment, Waymo can do it. Now, there will be criticisms that they're using mission specialists
Starting point is 00:58:37 and how much intervention is going on. But the rides are occurring, and this is great for humanity. Young people are not going to buy cars, is my prediction, at the same rate they did. And so, you know, everybody wants to know how I feel about Uber. Oh, my God. Well, you know, I don't own the same number of Uber shares I've always owned. That doesn't mean I don't have confidence in them.
Starting point is 00:59:02 But I do think Uber will participate in this. I do think Tesla, Waymo, obviously Waymo's got a deep partnership with Uber now. The Austin and Arizona rides are going to go through Uber. Yeah. The number of rides, and we've done this, you know, over and over again, we keep doing the back of the envelope math. this is going to take 10 years to roll out to hit 10% of rides in the U.S. is my estimate.
Starting point is 00:59:24 Maybe it takes 10 years to hit 15% of rides in the U.S., which would be an absolutely ginormous tam and growing. I wonder what the point of owning a car will be if rides are everywhere constantly and the wait times in the suburbs and the burbs goes down to under 10 minutes. If it was under 10 minutes everywhere to get a ride and it was cheaper ultimately than owning a car, I don't see people wanting to own cars or maybe a family that would own two or three would own one. Yeah. So that could be how this hash is out.
Starting point is 01:00:06 You know, I own four cars. I own two collectible cars and three cars in service. So if you take the two collectibles, which I don't ride, I have three cars for a family of five. That makes sense because I need my car and then two sets of kids going in two different directions. We need three. But do I need my car? No. I could, I don't drive it enough.
Starting point is 01:00:26 I could be in an Uber all the time. You own one car or two in your family? We're a one car family. Right. And I'm, well, we own, I keep almost buying a car. But then it's so annoying, Jason, to actually go through all the little options and the car you once in like Idaho and then you have to ship it. and then we only have two spots, and we have a nanny who drives,
Starting point is 01:00:47 and we have one car. Yes. So basically you've come to the conclusion that getting a second car, the juice ain't worth the squeeze. You could afford to do it. Oh, sure. But the, you know, the rigmarole of getting one,
Starting point is 01:01:02 ensuring it, maintaining it is greater. Again, the juice ain't worth the squeeze is what a lot of people will come to the conclusion on. And so I think this is going to be also good. people forget this, but one of the reasons we really liked, what did we call it when people shared the sharing economy? We had a buzzword for the sharing economy. Well, I thought it was the sharing economy. Yeah, there was another word for crowd, not crowdsourcing, but anyway, the sharing economy was a concept that startups went through like, oh, you know, your skis,
Starting point is 01:01:38 your, you know, basketball. Collaborative consumption? peer-to-peer economy? Pure-to-peer. Yeah. Sharing economy, I think, is probably the best term. The sharing economy was something people thought we would have for anything over $1,000.
Starting point is 01:01:57 So a lawnmower, instead of owning a lawn mower and using it once every two weeks, the idea would be, you would come to my garage, take mine, and we would rent them. We're so, we have so much about,
Starting point is 01:02:12 in the United States in the Western world writ large, you kind of don't need to do that. But if it becomes easier and the lawnmower comes to you,
Starting point is 01:02:25 and it's crazy to say this, but I was driving through one of the communities here in Austin, Texas, and I saw not one, but two robotic lawnmowers. Yeah. Two different homes
Starting point is 01:02:36 with robotic lawnmowers. And I just thought to myself, well, there's no reason that that one lawnmower, which goes out, every week and trim somebody's lawn, couldn't do the other 10 lawns. So why are 10 people buying these? It makes no sense. It's not good for the environment. And it's wasteful. Why not just have it hop the fence and go to everybody else's yard? Same thing with internet connections.
Starting point is 01:02:58 I've always wondered why people don't share them more often. I guess privacy is one of the reasons. But like if one person were to buy an internet connection for their apartment, why don't find people share it and split the bill? I don't know why. I don't know why. It's because someone's going to start torrenting half the internet and then uploading half the internet and then blowing the direction. I think the tragedy of the commons. It's another way of saying that. I am a big fan of the sharing economy in theory other than the fact that I just don't have a lot of time. And so the amount of money I could get for renting out my backyard to a dog company or renting out my child's cool car to be pusher behind because all the kids want to write on it.
Starting point is 01:03:41 I just, it's not enough money for me to care about. And that's the thing. I do know that Facebook marketplace has become absolutely hit critical mass. So the recycling economy. Yes. That has happened for clothes. I know with my 14 year old daughter, all of her friends are very cognizant of the environmental impact of clothes specifically.
Starting point is 01:04:04 And they like thrifting. It is like a pursuit. And they, they don't like it just to save money. They like the act of going to a thrifting store and creating outfits. And they like the idea of going online and getting things cheaper and being able to resell stuff they have. So Facebook Marketplace seems to have really taken Craigslist and eBay to another level of recycling of goods. I put a bunch of computers when I moved and stuff like that on the Facebook Marketplace. And then, boom, they were gone same day.
Starting point is 01:04:39 Yeah. Same day. People come and pick it right up. People tell me that the only reason they're still on Facebook is for Facebook marketplace. It is that good. And there's the buy nothing groups that are all about swapping back and forth. This is why when people are like, oh, no one's actually worried about climate change. I'm like, I don't know, man.
Starting point is 01:04:56 Some people do take it pretty freaking seriously. But what is buying nothing? There's these buy nothing groups. I think it's designed to facilitate swapping or just like literally like I have a thing. Do you want it? And it's a way to just reduce overall consumption and therefore reduce waste and so forth. Yeah. I don't take part of this because I buy so much stuff.
Starting point is 01:05:18 I have never heard of the Buy Nothing movement. And this is super cool. There is a Buy Nothing Project.org, 11 million neighborhoods, 2.6 million gifts a month, 245 communities. Wow. This is very cool. I guess people on Buy Nothing, which is an app. There was an app apparently.
Starting point is 01:05:40 Oh. Yeah, it seems like this is a thing. Not good for the economy, not good for capitalism, but maybe good for the planet and therefore good for capitalism long term. But Jason, I want to go back to something you said about not buying a car. I'm actually literally the person you're talking about because I do take Uber's in and around Providence when something's a little further away. And so I actually have transitioned entirely to feet and Uber. And it's great. I, you know, I think that there is something in this buy nothing and reusing and the sharing
Starting point is 01:06:15 economy that's going to have like a sharing economy 2.0 moment. I think we're on the cusp of a sharing economy 2.0 moment. Okay. I'm going to write that down for later so we can go back to that as a theme. Jason, we have to leave it there for today, but we are back on Wednesday. We have back on Friday. Well, Wednesday, we're going to know some things. We will partially know some things on Wednesday. I should know some things about the election. Please don't, if you're hearing my voice and you're upset by whatever happens on Tuesday,
Starting point is 01:06:46 do not burn any buildings down. Do not commit any violence. Do not beat up police officers. File a protest. Do a peaceful protest. That's what the country is all about. If you hear my voice and you're thinking about burning a building down or causing property damage, or beating up cops.
Starting point is 01:07:03 Please don't do that. No, do what I'm going to do instead, which is put your family to bed, fire up a fresh game of Factoreo, drink some tea, and then check every 35 minutes because you can't keep away from yourself. All right.
Starting point is 01:07:14 Well, I am doing a live stream on All In tomorrow night. So if you haven't gotten enough J-Cal and you want to hang out with the besties, tomorrow night, go to YouTube. You can find the feed right now. There's literally like 30 lunatics already in the chat of the live stream. You know how some people will hang out
Starting point is 01:07:32 in a live stream before. Oh, I know. There's like 30 people arguing and Chekhouse got TDS and, oh, my God, Trump's, and Hitler. So if you really want to get into it, please go to the online live stream right now. I'm going to decline that as I have declined invitations locally to participate in election watching ceremonies because I cannot imagine something worse than that. Like, can you imagine?
Starting point is 01:07:53 I love that you're doing it. It's going to be popular. Godspeed, I will be automating an incredibly large space factory and try not to spite. Awesome. All right, we'll talk to you soon.

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