This Week in Startups - TWiST News: Bitcoin’s Future, Reddit Answers, SEC Shifts, and more! | E2057

Starting point is 00:00:00 come January 20th, it's going to be game on Reddit, most likely to be acquired. I think Reddit, DoorDash, Uber, and Lyft are my four most likely to be acquired in the next four years. Those four will be on the acquire slash merger, because some of them might merge or whatever. I don't have inside information, obviously. I don't need some public companies. This is purely speculation. I wouldn't be surprised if Reddit, Lyft, DoorDash, and Uber were part of something bigger, either acquirers, acquires, a quarry, conglomerate, put together Amazon plus Uber, Waymo plus Uber,

Starting point is 00:00:35 Lyft and DoorDash. This weekend startups is brought to you by Ramp, the corporate card and spend management software designed to help you save time and money. Get $250 when you join Ramp today at Ramp.com slash twist. Zendesk. The best customer experiences are built with Zendesk. Qualifying startups can join their startup program and get Zendesk. Zendesk products free for six months.

Starting point is 00:01:01 Visit Zendesk.com slash twist today to get started. And DigitalOcean, whether you're just getting started with AI or seeing your project take off, DigitalOcean is the cloud platform that lets you focus on what matters, building killer apps. Right now, get up to $100,000 in free credits at DO.co slash twist. Terms and conditions apply. All right, everybody, welcome back to this week in startups. It's Monday, December night. My God, we've got plenty of shows for you this month, but we're in that trow between

Starting point is 00:01:35 Thanksgiving and Christmas New Year's when everybody simply bides their time to go F off and go skiing and do whatever. No, we're all working really hard to try to get a bunch done. If you're trying to raise money between Thanksgiving and January 15, it is a terrible idea. That is the dead zone for founders. And I literally have founders who are pinging me like, hey, I think I'm going to raise around before the end of the year. I'm like, really? It's November 20th. Like, come on. You know VCs

Starting point is 00:02:06 have families in most cases and they have unlimited time off. They're going to take breaks during this time. And then to get three or four VCs and a fund to get consensus on a deal, unless it's a world-class deal that is competitive, it's not happening, folks. So just be wary of that. So basically, if you have tons of inbound and your company starts with the words open AI, you can probably raise before the end of the year if you want to, but if you're not that company, probably not. The VCs would have to feel FOMO. They would have to feel like they're going to miss out and the window is closed.

Starting point is 00:02:37 The train's leaving the station, the next time you can get it is at 34th Herald Square or, you know, Columbus Circle. Like, you're on an express train. You know, if it's an express train startup, yes. If you're a local startup, which is 95% of startups are not on the express route, because they're figuring out product market fit. But, you know, I just always want to start the show and remind people, The greatest thing you can do in your life is start a company.

Starting point is 00:02:59 That's it. I'm talking about professionally. Start a company. Next best thing you can do is join a startup. Third best thing you can do is invest in a startup. Fourth best thing you can do is try a startup's product and give the founder feedback directly. That's constructive. Tell them what you love.

Starting point is 00:03:13 Tell them what you hope they add. Tell them what's broken. These are the four things you can do. Everything else you do in your life does not echo in eternity. Well, speaking of testing products, Jason. Actually, the intro banter that I wanted to get to today was simply that as we were going to live to record the show, SORA from OpenAI is trickling its way out.

Starting point is 00:03:34 And sadly, I could not log in before we hit record to play with it. I'm hoping that I have access today because you and I both pay for Chad GPD. So come Wednesday, I'm hoping to have a couple of cool clips to show off. Yeah. But in terms of shipping velocity, talk about that a lot, building new things and testing things out in the market, I think this is going to be the biggest product release, apart from the Reddit news later in the show that we're going to see between now and 2025.

Starting point is 00:03:59 So I'm pretty excited. For people who don't know, SORA is the video creation tool from Open AI. So they give them names. I think eventually this idea that there's different names and different products, maybe it will be like a Microsoft Office Suite where you have Excel and Word and PowerPoint

Starting point is 00:04:15 and a database of some kind. Or maybe it's all just going to be one. Because I notice when I use GROC, I tell it to create an image in the same place I ask it, question. And I know with chat GPT, it's like that too. I think they may have even removed from the interface whatever their image creation tool was called. It's Dolly. So I don't know that there's like Dolly exists anymore. So I wonder if SORA needs more of an interface. But, you know,

Starting point is 00:04:40 we had a great all-in holiday spectacular on Saturday, thanks to everybody who came. It was chaotic and fun and awesome. And I gave my big surprise of the year to Google. I just thought, man, remember we were sitting here a year ago? Every was saying, oh, my God, 10 blue links, Google's toast, nobody's going to use it anymore. I've been using Gemini. Uh-huh. That product is as good or better than chat GPT.

Starting point is 00:05:07 I cannot believe the parity level. And you can just download Gemini right now. You know, like it's a dedicated app. It's not like hidden in your Google interface or it's like a section of Google search. Right. They've actually committed to making it a dedicated iOS app. And when you talk,

Starting point is 00:05:23 to it, it's really good. This voice interface. And when we did our best technology of the year, two people said voice interface and two of us said self-driving cars and Waymo's. And I took a Waymo when I was in San Francisco. It's great. It's great. But it's going to take time, clearly. And one of the things with the Waymo, and I don't know if this is going to get changed over time, Waymo and self-driving cars they take 10 more minutes to get you where you're going. A great human driver, they know the routes, they zip, zip, zip.

Starting point is 00:05:57 It turns out like Waymo takes peculiar routes around the city. So even though it's great, it adds like 10 minutes to a 20-minute journey because it doesn't take the streets in San Francisco that are maybe a little more challenging. Isn't that interesting? Oh, so it's making easier to drive streets

Starting point is 00:06:17 versus quick streets for transit. Correct. And it's a bit of a square when it comes to driving, you know, like you get a good Uber driver. You know, you're going to roll through some stops in Pack Heights, you know, come to a full rolling stop kind of situation. Uh-huh. And this thing is like, stop, crawl ahead, go, stay within the lines. It doesn't break any of the rules because for obvious reasons, you're working with the transportation departments. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:06:46 If you break the rules knowingly and you train your AI to break the rules, it's like, did you train your AI to enroll through stop science? It's one person you can go to and give the ticket to, Waymo. Yeah. Yeah. Cruise. You know, you can just go give them the ticket for 100% of the time they do that. Whereas with a human, you got to catch him doing it. And then they give you a sob story.

Starting point is 00:07:06 You get a little interface back and forth. Maybe, you know, if you got a brother who's on the job, maybe you get a pass. I don't know. I'm just saying sometimes that happens. You get a little beige in your wallet. So anyway, he. It's definitely in the future, but there are going to be some interesting issues. It is nice to not have a driver sometimes, like you're making a private phone call or, you know, you want to talk about something that you don't want somebody here.

Starting point is 00:07:30 You know, that happens to be sometimes. And there are some nice aspects to it. So I give them an A plus as well. Yeah, no, I'm really excited about that. I have lots of thoughts about that. But we do have a guest, isn't that I do want to get up and on. Friend of the pod. Yeah, friend of the pod.

Starting point is 00:07:44 Anthony Palmviano is here. Everyone knows him from his high-powered and very caffeinated Twitter account, which is one of my favorite things. Also, he's an investor at Palm Capital, which is a single-family office, and then also a founder and CEO over at Professional Capital Management, which I had Pump explained to me before the show, and I'm going to take a shot at it. It is an investment company that does incubation and uses cash flows from primarily founded businesses to invest in both private and public equities. Anthony, how is that? That was great. There we go. How are you guys?

Starting point is 00:08:15 I'm good. How are you doing, brother? Look at that. I know. This is a very good setup. It's like somewhere between two ferns and your money manager's office. I don't know what you're, what's the aesthetic? We're going for here, POM. The one that would make you laugh, Jason. You did it. You did it. You have good depth. You got a great suit on for those people listening. But Pomp's been coming on the pod for years. He's got a great podcast. But, you know, he's been in crypto. He's one of the OGs, like my friend Vinnie Lingham or Sandeep.

Starting point is 00:08:41 He's been there forever. And so whenever Bitcoin does one of its back flips or there's a lot of crypto news, he's just one of the best guys to have on the program. Top three or four I can have on the program. So I wanted to just start with, you know, hey, listen, Bitcoin came back. We got Trump in office. My friend David Sacks, I don't know if you met him before, but somebody was actually showing a clip of him talking with you like five or six years ago. It's pretty good. He's now the Crypto czar and AI czar for Trump. So people are pretty bullish Gensler's out. Let me just ask right off the bat. What are the vibes in the crypto space after what I'll call nuclear winter for the last four years under Gensler? Or maybe it's more, actually. Yeah, I don't think that regulation really stopped anything in the sense of obviously asset prices are at all time high. you saw Coinbase go public, you saw the Bitcoin ETF get approved, you saw the ETF get approved.

Starting point is 00:09:31 And so there was kind of progress, even though people felt like there was abrasiveness or friction from the regulators. I think the question is how much more progress could be made if you take that abrasiveness away? And so the best description I heard

Starting point is 00:09:44 is somebody said it's like holding a beach ball underneath the water in a pool. If you take your hands off, like do all of a sudden, does the beach ball kind of come up? I thought that was like a pretty good visual for it. As a business operator, wouldn't you love to save 5% on all your expenses? Well, with Ramp, you can. Ramp is the corporate card and spend management software designed to help you save time and put money back in your pocket.

Starting point is 00:10:08 And you don't have to wait to see benefits. The average Ramp customer hits 5% savings in their first year. Here at launch, we love Ramp. Our operations team, including Heidi, uses it all day long. Why? Well, Ramp automatically captures all the receipts. seats right from our emails, and it learns our spending patterns and shows us where we can save money. The reporting features, while they're game-changing for managing things like subscriptions, which, gosh, nobody likes to waste money on subscriptions that nobody's using. Ramp Elijah to issue cards to every single employee with built-in limits and restrictions, so no one gets too busy with the plastic, if you know what I'm saying.

Starting point is 00:10:48 And Ramp will even play bad cop for your company chasing down, missing documentation, and requesting payments. Ramp is so easy to use and you can start making payments in less than 15 minutes. Here's your offer. I mean, wow, super generous. Now you get $250 when you join Ramp. Just go to ramp.com slash twist. That's rAMP.com slash twist. Disclaimer, cards issued by Sutton Bank, members, FDIC, terms and conditions apply. And so Paul Atkins, the new SEC kind of nominee, very pro-Bitcoin in crypto. Scott Bassent seemed to be pro-Bitcoin as well. And so I think that the question before was like, hey, how much damage could be done by certain positions, certain organizations? Now, even with Trump being the first kind of Bitcoin president, I think the question

Starting point is 00:11:37 is like, hey, what if everything goes right? What if there is this big tail win behind the asset? And, you know, frankly, I don't know anything more than you guys know. So we're going to find out together over the next four years. Yes, I wanted to start actually there. Ironically, Anthony, He started to push you on, but you just said you don't know. But I'm curious how quickly things can change with the new administration. Because it feels like right now, everyone's kind of pre-buying the good vibes that, you know, the good times are back and we'll have the first Bitcoin president, as you said. But does there need to be like things that pass through Congress to have the impact in the market that people are expecting us to have? No, I think the vibe shift is all you needed.

Starting point is 00:12:17 I mean, you know, Bitcoin's up 50% or so since Trump was elected. And so when you think of like market impact, there's nothing that is a clearer signal than like people are buying the assets. It's a finite asset. So the price goes up. And so if you go and you say like, hey, why are they buying the asset? You know, there's a couple of different things. It's not just Trump. But I do think that Trump being that Trump being that is a big part of it. But I think that people really are seeing the Federal Reserve cut interest rates. They see M2 money supply expanding. I think they see the regulatory changes that are being made. They see companies like micro strategy buying billions of dollars. There's many copycats now that are popping up. There's rumors that sovereign wealth funds now are starting to buy. I explicitly know that there are, you know, very well-known, sophisticated kind of Wall Street legends that are actively trying to solicit these sovereign wealth funds in countries to buy Bitcoin. And so it's just like, you add all this up and you're like, it's pretty hard to make a bearish argument for Bitcoin over the next, you know, five or 10 years. And so it's fun to talk about like how high could it go, but I actually just think of like, what's the best, you know, kind of counter argument?

Starting point is 00:13:20 it's just really hard to kind of identify one right now. So that to me is a great set of arguments for potential increased appreciation of the price of Bitcoin, which is great for people who hold it, huzzaw. I'm curious, like, how much do crypto startups benefit from the same tailwinds? Is it one to one or is it a fraction of the benefits that we've seen in terms of the price of Bitcoin from this change in sentiment and tailwinds? Yeah, it's a great question. So there's a couple ways that people benefit. one of the things that is like least discussed is most of the companies that we have invested in in kind of Bitcoin or crypto, you know, world that are private companies, some portion of their

Starting point is 00:13:58 balance sheet, they're holding, whether it's Bitcoin, Eath, you know, some asset that is not a stable coin. And some of them did it at a necessity that are in the business. They're, you know, constantly moving assets back and forth or whatever. Some of them did it for the same reason that micro strategy did it. They said, hey, look, we don't believe in the dollar, you know, as a store of value, we think Bitcoin's better. And so let's put it, you know, 20% or something like that. Those companies obviously have a lot more assets on their balance sheet than they did three years ago. And so I think that's kind of like one very clear, simple reason. Another thing is, take a company like Coinbase, as the price goes up, people come into these assets because they want to get rich.

Starting point is 00:14:32 And I think one of the like maybe lies of Bitcoin and crypto is everyone starts with this like moral argument. I don't know a single person that came into Bitcoin is like I'm buying it for humanity at first. I think everyone shows up and like, I want to make money. Like my friend told me to buy this thing. is going to go up in price. Now, over time, do I agree that, yes, there's a bunch of people who kind of go from speculator and they get converted to like hardcore Bitcoiner and they hold it, not just for speculation purposes, but they kind of buy into the bigger story and ethos and all that. Absolutely.

Starting point is 00:15:00 But when people first come in, they're coming in from a capitalistic, you know, kind of self-interest standpoint. And so that's great for a business like Coinbase. Like they want trading volume. They want to see a lot of turnover in the market. And so I think that there's, you know, money being made there. And then maybe the third bucket is these. assets and Bitcoin maybe in particular, the higher the price goes, the less risky it becomes

Starting point is 00:15:21 because it started out so small. And so, you know, we managed to fund a couple years ago that had the very first two public pension funds in the United States who gave us money and part of the fund's mandate was we were going to go buy Bitcoin on their behalf. Now, one of the things after they gave us the money is we went to talk to a bunch of other pension funds and they said, this is too small. Like, it's still risky because it's only, you know, a couple hundred billion dollars. Now it's two trillion dollars. And they're like, oh, okay, like, cool, I can put like real money into this thing. It's actually de-risk, which is very different than like a stock, you know, invidia. Is it risky? Is it not? Because the price keeps going up.

Starting point is 00:15:56 And so I just think that, you know, a number of these different things have kind of lined up where it's like, we're kind of in the golden years right now of Bitcoin, where the return is still pretty attractive compared to stocks, etc. That probably goes away at some point. You know, 15, 20 years from now, maybe Bitcoin's going up 10% a year instead of 50% and people are like, it's, you know, just like stocks. But also those large pools of capital were able to come in. because they can come in, they obviously are going to drive the price higher when you've got a finite asset. You know, I think the, there's two different markets here. There's Bitcoin and then there's crypto, right?

Starting point is 00:16:26 It's like, and you've said this from the beginning. Like, this is Bitcoin is one thing. Everything in crypto, we'll talk about in a minute. But just as we wrap up here on Bitcoin before we get to Haktua and Rip, Ripple and everything else going on there, which I'm really interested to get your take on, the Bitcoin, you have seller who has been like, you know, a convert for the last four or five years. and just really, really is going all in. I'm hearing different things from OGs in Bitcoin

Starting point is 00:16:54 who are saying, like, a lot of them are saying they have concerns with this level of promotion, this level of aggressive promotion. Some might call it pumping. Other people might call it a Ponzi. So there's that sort of like optics of what he does. Every day, just telling other people, like, you've got to mortgage your home

Starting point is 00:17:16 put it all in Bitcoin. Then there's the other piece, which is the leverage he's using. Okay? And so I want you to address each of those in whichever order you want. Do you have concerns about either of these, which I've always considered red flags, independent of crypto, Bitcoin, or Michael Saylor? When I hear somebody pumping something too much, I get concerned, I get interested, too. And then on the other side, you know, using leverage, I'm always super concerned about leverage

Starting point is 00:17:44 because I've seen friends and companies get wiped out using leverage and loans. Take it either way you want, Paul. Maybe let's just start with like kind of caveat the whole conversation. Nobody that I know in Bitcoin says 100% of things that every other Bitcoin is like, you're right. It's an industry where everyone is constantly critiquing each other, which is somewhat of a meritocratic free market of ideas. And that's what makes Bitcoin so great.

Starting point is 00:18:10 It's like people show up and, you know, there's two types of people. there's the like, hey, I've been in Bitcoin for five minutes. Let me teach you guys how to fix this thing. Those people tend to kind of get washed out. But then there's people who show up and they're like, hey, by the way, I'm trying to learn about this. I have this, like, unique idea. Can someone help me?

Starting point is 00:18:27 Can you help me like think through this? And, you know, I can point to a number of different people have shown up over the years. And that unique idea, actually, people are like, you know what? We hadn't thought about that before. But like, that's a great idea. What if you did this?

Starting point is 00:18:37 What if you did that? And like, they kind of extended it. The body of understanding grows with these new entrants, because they bring fresh perspectives, experiences, etc. That's actually a really interesting point, yeah. So, you know, it's open source, right? It's like you can have an open source developer join an open source project and contribute, and you're like, why didn't we think of that before?

Starting point is 00:18:56 Well, it's like because you didn't have the experiences. And nobody can stop them. It is permissionless, in fact. If I want to get into Bitcoin and I say, listen, I think what sailor is doing is crazy, here's what I'm going to do. Then I get to test it two ways. In the battlefield of ideas debating it with a gazillion trolls, and spam and 4chan and Reddit and true believers and optimistic people, pessimistic people.

Starting point is 00:19:19 You get the whole range, full-on combat. But you also get to place a bet and then own or not own your bet. And in the case of Michael Saylor, the bet's paying off right now. So he's Bitcoin Jesus. Whereas when his nav, I believe there was a moment in time where the value of micro strategies was less than the bitcoins he owned. Is that correct? Do you remember that moment?

Starting point is 00:19:41 I don't remember exactly, but definitely the market cap drew down significantly after having gone up a lot. But here's what I would say about sellers. You know, I've gotten to know him over time. Well, specifically the strategy. Yeah, the strategy. Yeah. But here, I think to understand the strategy, you've got to understand the person, right? So I've gotten to know him probably, you know, more than some folks.

Starting point is 00:20:02 I think just like anyone, people will agree with some things he says, will disagree with other things that he says. I think that the concern from some of the OG Bitcoiners is some of the things that have to occur for mainstream adoption or antithetical to the Bitcoin ethos. So Wall Street pulling Bitcoin into the financial products doesn't sound like peer-to-peer electronic cash, right? And so you get these kind of paradoxes of if you want it to be super successful, you are going to have to understand that it's available to anyone. And so countries are going to buy it.

Starting point is 00:20:35 The system is going to buy it. Hey, startups. When you're a business, you got to treat your customers right. Unreasonable hospitality is the standard today. But you're going to need tools. You're going to need a platform to help you do this. And that platform is the Zendesk suite. The Zendes suite is going to give your startup all the tools you need to deliver exceptional customer experiences so you can build stronger relationships without growing your headcount. That's key, right? Every dollar matters. You got to control headcount. You got to control. spend. So use the tool that Shopify, Squarespace, Uber, and Instacart all rely on. It's called Zendesk. Let's take a look at another customer, Unity. Very famous company, they saved $1.3 million with Zendesk automations and self-service, and they saw an 83% increase in their first response time. These companies love Zendesk because it's so easy to set up, and it scales with you as you grow. They'll also give you all the metrics to make your reporting easy, keeping you and your business agile, and investor-ready.

Starting point is 00:21:40 And that's because you're there, esteemed customer. And they've created the Zendes for startups program just for you, where you get unlimited access to all the Zendesk products, expert insights, all the best practices, and entry into their amazing community of founders, all at no cost

Starting point is 00:21:55 for the first six months. That's right. They want to support you. Zendesd.com slash twist. Get ready to scale with the best in customer support with six months free, nothing to lose. The second thing is when people, you know, kind of loudly talk about this, it is probably a net positive. I would argue that, you know, Bitcoin is a decentralized organization. There's no executive team.

Starting point is 00:22:19 There's no board of directors. There's no marketing team, et cetera. And so I always say that Bitcoin's price is the marketing campaign. When the price goes up, everyone talks about it. When everyone talks about it, people are like, oh, I don't know any. Maybe I should learn about this thing. Maybe I should buy some word of mouth spreads. And it becomes this, like, reflexive cycle.

Starting point is 00:22:34 So the price going up is actually really important. because price goes up, people speculate by coming in. When the price crashes in the future, some portion of those people stick around. I always say that it's kind of like a mobile app that goes out and they have zero users. They run a marketing campaign. A hundred people come in. Then 25 churned, but they're left with 75 people. So what do they go run another marketing campaign, right? And some of those churned and like over time they kind of build up. You build the floor in a way, right? You build this like foundation of people who will never sell. And I think you made a really astute point earlier, which is as the price goes up,

Starting point is 00:23:07 the distance between your entry price and the price of Bitcoin goes up, then your concern about a drawdown becomes, I don't know, less because you've been through it. It's like, I've been on this roller coaster. You know, we got in at, you know, under 100, right around 100 and right above 100. You get in at that price. If it's 10,000 or 100,000, I really don't care because I believe in the story in that you should have some percentage of your net worth in it. So who cares? We all know it goes up and down 80%. But if you bought it at 100, obviously, and then you got scared when it went to 50, yeah, it's kind of a bummer to lose half your money. So here's where I think it becomes pretty interesting is if you look at, you know, again,

Starting point is 00:23:45 let's take the critics of micro strategy and sailor. On one hand, he said a couple of things that I think make some bitcoins kind of say, eh, I don't know about that. And so, which would be what? What does he say that in the back channels in the group chats that people are like, come on, dude. I think the one that people are probably like, hey, this is the kind of craziest one is if the United States buys, you know, 20% of the supplier, whatever, like, they'll control Bitcoin. And I actually want to give him kind of the benefit of the doubt. He understands how Bitcoin works in the sense of just because you own a lot of coins, doesn't mean you control the network. But I think that it is the kind of thought process

Starting point is 00:24:23 behind that of like decentralization is really important. Now, what is interesting to me about micro strategy is it's kind of like, hey, don't hate the player, hate the game. Right? And it's like anyone could have gone and done this. He's just the guy who won, figured it out. And then, you know, what he probably doesn't get enough credit for yet is like, you kind of have to have the balls to be able to go and execute on it. And so there's a lot of people who, you know, if you go and you talk to like a Stanley Drucker Miller,

Starting point is 00:24:49 he would tell you the thing that he learned from George Soros and became the best investor, blah, blah, whatever, is it's not how often you're right. It's how much money you make when you're right. Right. And so as a big pots will define your night as a poker player. You could win 20 hands, and I win the right too. And those two were all in hands, et cetera.

Starting point is 00:25:10 And you won these 20 stealing the blinds hands. That's not what matters. It matters when there's a big pot and how much money you got into the pot and you built a pot and you executed. If you take this kind of further out, if you think of the greatest trades that people talk about today, there's Soros and Druck breaking the pound. There's the, you know, maybe you've got the guys who did the housing short and they made, you know, I think John Paulson made like $10 billion. or something for his investors. Got Michael Burry. Maybe we can come up with like 15 or 20 great trades.

Starting point is 00:25:40 Sure. $10 billion is like probably the biggest number I've heard someone made on one of these big trades. If Saylor is right, he's going to make hundreds of billions, which would make this the single greatest trade in corporate history. Now again, caveat or assumption of like he's got to be right. So far he is. But I think that that is the part to make.

Starting point is 00:26:03 that everyone wants to focus on like the activity, but it is the like, I'm not going to take my foot off the gas and I'm fully convicted. I'm going like all in. That is really, I mean, we're all investors.

Starting point is 00:26:15 Like it's very, very hard to say, I have an idea and I'm going to go big. The criticism is he's using other people's money to do this. He's raising, you know, three, four billion dollars. And if he,

Starting point is 00:26:28 if he loses, he wins, and if he wins, you know, it's kind of like. Because I think he's the, largest shareholder of microchrist. And largest individual shareholder of micro

Starting point is 00:26:37 strategy. So like again, you know, it's his company, he's got control, he's got a big percentage. Now, he did also publicly come out when he bought Bitcoin with the company and say he personally bought $250 million at the time of Bitcoin. So again, that doesn't mean he's running like a

Starting point is 00:26:53 leverage strategy personally, but he at least put his own cash into the same asset that the company did, you know, blah, whatever. So could blow up here, I guess is what everybody wants to know, because when I hear everybody say, this is like, I figured out the money machine, I unlocked the safest bet, it can only go up, there's no losing here. And he's kind of tipping into that level of there's no downside here. I like, I'd completely disagree with the whole,

Starting point is 00:27:19 like, there's no risk. And I've publicly said, you know, in different conversations, when I hear people saying there's no risk, which I don't think he said, I think there's a lot of people who hold micro strategy stock that are saying it. Yes, we've seen them on all over X in every single video we've done. When I hear that, I immediately say to myself, red flag. Like, you know, you don't got to be around that long to know what somebody says there's zero risk that. Yes.

Starting point is 00:27:45 All that. Now, let me walk through maybe to kind of use an extreme to prove the point to start. If Bitcoin gets hacked and becomes worthless, is there a risk to microchredd, obviously? So I use an extreme, very low probability thing to just show that there's obvious, you can't say there's zero risk because I just gave you a scenario where we all agree like there's some risk. Again, it might be 0.001%, but there's some risk. Now let's go back to something that maybe is more realistic. There's key man risk.

Starting point is 00:28:15 If Michael Saylor, something happens to him, if he says, hey, I'm done, I want to retire, whatever, like that introduces risk. It's no different than name a company that had a really well-known founder. Steve Jobs. I mean, we just go through the list, right? And so it's like, okay, like that becomes a risk. The second thing is there's two ways to look at the quote-unquote premium. One is that the Bitcoin is trading, or I'm sorry, the market cap is trading at a premium

Starting point is 00:28:42 to the Bitcoin, which is some of the premium. But I also think what people are doing is they're looking at it and they're saying, hey, if he keeps getting convertible debt that converts out of 50% plus premium and he's able to buy Bitcoin, he's essentially creating like a credible. value to the balance sheet, which would look very similar to quote unquote revenue, but because of gap accounting, we can't call it revenue. It doesn't count his revenue. But in that, we are going to give him a multiple so that if he continues to do this,

Starting point is 00:29:11 he'll, like, grow into the valuation. So there's two things that are leading to that, you know, kind of market cap above the NAF. One is a premium of NAV. And then there's like a, yeah, I don't know, like new revenue, multiple, whatever. So immediately, what's the risk? Well, like the premium to nav closes, and maybe that's only like a one X, even though it's trading out like three or four X, you know, multiple.

Starting point is 00:29:33 And then something happens in the market where he can't go buy more Bitcoin. People won't lend them money or the stock price crashes or, you know, like there's all these different scenarios. And so now all of a sudden that multiple collapses. And so I just think that, you know, there's a lot of good. But to your point, if I hear no risk, I mean like there's risk. You didn't go over the most important risk, though, which is that. the price of Bitcoin declines sharply.

Starting point is 00:29:58 All the convertible notes have the option for the lenders to request their money paid back a year before they mature in cash. So if he, I mean, he could end up short on money and have to sell lots of Bitcoin if the price declines. All right, founders, if you're running an AI startup, you already know it's all about compute power. AI models need data. They need training and GPUs. Lots and lots of GPUs. But here's a thing. All these traditional cloud platforms can be a nightmare to manage and to scale. And that's where DigitalOcean comes in. DigitalOcean is the cloud platform that helps you scale

Starting point is 00:30:36 faster without headaches. And with DigitalOcean, you can quickly spin up GPU powered virtual machines and start training models, even building AI agents and obviously crunching all these massive data sets in just seconds. And when you're done, you can turn those virtual machines off as quickly as you spun them up. And they're going to let you scale compute power based on your precise needs without making, man, a massive, massive hardware investment, including offerings from single GPU configurations to setups with eight GPUs. DigitalOcean keeps infrastructure so simple, with an intuitive UI, robust documentation, and on-demand support, you could spend your time building the next big thing, not managing infrastructure. DigitalOcean is your best choice because

Starting point is 00:31:19 at simple, scalable, and cost-effective. Right now, approved listeners can get up to $100,000 in free credits and GPUs at special discounted rates of $1.90 per hour. That's a 20% discount in addition to the free credits. Visit d.0.co slash twist to get started and view terms and conditions. That's d.0.c.com slash twist. So I don't think that that's a risk yet. it could become a risk to the scenario you proved.

Starting point is 00:31:52 Sure. But if I understand correctly, and I'm not in, I don't spend a ton of time looking at, you know, kind of the up-to-date numbers because I know they just bought another like $2 billion of Bitcoin. But I believe that Bitcoin would have to crash, like more than 80 percent to be at a level that is equivalent to the debt they'd have to pay back. So Bitcoin has done that before. Close.

Starting point is 00:32:11 Yeah. It's done it four times. Yeah. Right. So maybe it's 75 percent. Yeah. Four major drawdowns. He's got 400,000 Bitcoin, $400,000.

Starting point is 00:32:19 last number I have at 100,000 of Bitcoin, that's $40 billion. Companies worth 80, 90 billion. He's, I think it's about 90 billion right now. And then the debt load right now is $7 billion, I think, is the last number. They keep adding. So just just use $40.7, right? Like, basically, he'd have to go through a 75 plus percent drawdown for the Bitcoin to be worth the debt.

Starting point is 00:32:44 And they're like, he'd have to liquidate it all to pay back the debt. But even if Bitcoin drew down 75%, he still would have to go. the cash to pay back the debt. Now, he would have no other assets, right? I think to your point, Alex, but there's like, well, there's enough of a gap between the money owed and what the Bitcoin is worth today where he could weather a 50% drawdown and still be, 50% drawdown from, yeah, so if the asset, the company, if you take the debt out of the 90 billion, let's say it's worth 87 billion right now. He's got an $80 billion company, $40 billion in Bitcoin. Yeah, if it goes down 50%, so Bitcoin's trading at 45, $50,000.

Starting point is 00:33:19 dollars. I think that's probable. I don't know if it's the, you know, the majority case, but it's a probable case. Then he would have a stock price would decline to probably $20 billion, because he's, getting two for one right now, double than a half. He would have to start selling some Bitcoin, I think, to pay off that $7 billion. And then the amount he would have to sell if he had $20 billion in Bitcoin would be 35% of his Bitcoin to pay them back. So he'd still own two out of three bitcoins, but you'd have to sell $1,000 in that scenario. It went down to $25 billion. You'd have to sell even more. You'd have to sell maybe two-thirds of his Bitcoin. And then you'd still own, and then you'd you really start to get what I think would be a spiraling confidence.

Starting point is 00:33:53 Now, uneducated people are saying on Reddit and social, it'll just raise more money. And I'm like, do you not know how debt works? Like, people will give you money if it's going up. But if it's going down, they're not going to want that debt. You can't just refinance. Like, yeah, that's like refinancing a home that you overpaid for and the market crashed 30% for homes.

Starting point is 00:34:11 And you go to a lender and you're like, can I get a loan at that price? And it's like, yeah, no, no, you can get it at this price if you pay down that debt. There is a risk of ruin here. don't know if it's 10 or 20%. But it's not zero. I think my point is that we would have to see a crash in Bitcoin's price that we have not seen in 10 plus years for the current. Yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 00:34:34 Because here's the thing. 50% right? No, no, no, no, no. Because forget the market cap of the company, because that's basically just a made-up number, right? He's got $40 to $45 billion of Bitcoin, whatever that number is. Let's say $40. and he's got $7 billion of debt.

Starting point is 00:34:50 So right now, if he just said, hey, I'm going to pay off the debt, he'd end up with $33 billion of Bitcoin. Right. But if Bitcoin's price draws down 75%, so he's got $10 billion of Bitcoin, and he's got $7 billion of debt, he could still pay it off

Starting point is 00:35:02 and end up with $3 billion of Bitcoin. So what I'm saying is like, the price of Bitcoin has to draw down so significantly. Could it happen 100%? We saw Bitcoin drop from $69,000 to 16, right? So like these drawdowns happen. But I think that the bigger risk

Starting point is 00:35:17 is not that as much as it is. Because even in that scenario, like he just pays back to debt, he ends up with no Bitcoin, but like he's no kind of no worse off than he was before. Well, that was my point of like,

Starting point is 00:35:27 if we win, I win and if we lose, I'm winning anyway because I own my own personal Bitcoin and I'm getting paid every year to do this. I do think the thing that gets like that of this is. That's like most public companies though,

Starting point is 00:35:38 right? Well, to a certain extent, yeah, you just gave up your time as a human being on planet Earth and you could have been doing something else. But here's the thing.

Starting point is 00:35:45 He's asking people to buy his stock. and the people buying his stock, the public, I am, like, you and I are looking at it from the Michael Sala perspective, which I think is great that you're pointing that out. Like, how does he lose? But how does the stock, how does the shareholder in micro strategies lose?

Starting point is 00:36:01 I think that they're on a path to lose in the midterm, short to midterm, because people are starting to realize, I can buy two Bitcoin, two and a half Bitcoin, three Bitcoin, depending on the moment in time, for every share of micro strategies I buy. With no risk.

Starting point is 00:36:15 Yes. Yes, true. And I think that most people should just go by Bitcoin and not worry about kind of all the high finance and multiples and all that kind of stuff. And it's like just that we've been saying. Whatever. Yeah. Now with that said, this idea of like Bitcoin yield, the ability to generate more Bitcoin per share. Again, this is new. If it ends up being what they're saying, I think there's a lot of people who will start to say like, oh, wow, we should figure out how to also tap into this. The question, though, is that's all predicated on the ability to raise more capital in the future to buy. Bitcoin. Right. And that is Alex, this is the problem, Alex, I think, is I believe what

Starting point is 00:36:51 Saylor is doing with this Bitcoin he owns, the Bitcoin yield, I believe that this is a metric. Whenever I see new metrics, adjusted EBTA, community-based EBTA from Wewer, that has been indicative of fraud

Starting point is 00:37:04 or Ponzi schemes in the past. When I see a new metric come, that is like 10 red flags for me. Because why do you need a new metric to understand and what the value of a company is. And I feel like that's the one that he's using to manipulate people.

Starting point is 00:37:21 And, you know, I don't know if he's doing it intentionally or whatever, but trying to get people to think about, like, how many shares you own of micro strategies, and that's better than owning your own Bitcoin, if you had a million dollars right now, and I said, Pomp, you have to buy Bitcoin or micro strategies, what would you do with the million dollars? If you, on a dollar basis,

Starting point is 00:37:41 how much would you buy directly own your keys? how much would you buy in micro strategies? And if a friend of yours, a family member, said the same thing, I got a million dollars, it represents whatever, 5% of my net worth, you know, and I just want to put, it's worth 10% of my net worth. I'm worth 10 million. I'm worth $10 million. I'll dollar cost average it.

Starting point is 00:38:00 How would you tell your brother, sister, cousin to allocate it to micro strategies or buying Bitcoin directly? Bitcoin in particular is fascinating to me because if I go talk to people on Wall Street, they will say it's the riskiest asset they own. If I go talk to people in the crypto world, they'll tell me that it's boomer coin and it's like the least risky asset that they own. So it sits in the middle. Yes, it's boomer coin for the crypto people, right? Now, here's why that's interesting to me.

Starting point is 00:38:25 If you look at what can go up more on a percentage basis, then you're going to end up in meme coin land. Like these things can go up thousands of percent and like it's amazing. But if you look at it as a risk reward, what is the risk I'm taking? What is the confidence level I have that it's going to work? And what is the amount of size that I can put into it? then Bitcoin is like very attractive. And so what I normally tell people is if you don't own Bitcoin, you should probably, in Satoshi's words, like get some in case it catches on.

Starting point is 00:38:52 And then from there, if you want to go and say, hey, I'm going to take 5% of my portfolio and go speculate on your favorite stock, micro strategy, mean coins, but knock yourself out. But like, okay, so you would tell a family member 950 into Bitcoin, 50K into micro strategies, or Hawk to a coin or whatever else you want to. Or go play the lottery, go to Los Angeles, like do whatever you want, right? Yeah, exactly. And again, like that isn't a knock against a certain stock or a coin or whatever. It's just like...

Starting point is 00:39:16 No, I think it's such an important point, though. Every single person I know who has been in the Bitcoin game for any period of time says they would tell their family member, do not buy micro strategies, buy Bitcoin, own it, your keys, your coins, that basic philosophy. I think it's very important for people to know. Anybody who's listening to this, if you own micro strategies two to one for a Bitcoin, sell your micro strategies immediately and buy two Bitcoin. That's my best advice. Jason said that. I'm not saying that. I'm saying it. And I think if we're sitting here in five or 10 years, I will say right now, I believe there's an 80, 90% chance plus that two bitcoins outperforms the one Bitcoin and micro strategies. If you put a million dollars into micro strategies right now and a million dollars in Bitcoin, if you know and you get two bit in the nav is two to one, man, I think it's like so obvious right now that this.

Starting point is 00:40:11 thing is overheated. I think he should get maybe 10%, 5, 10, 15% above the value of the Bitcoin. That, you know, minus the debt. That I think is reasonable, you know, like, listen, VCs get paid 20% carry. Like whatever, or, you know, if you're a money manager, you get like 1% of like the, you know, which winds up being 20% of the gain, right? You get one point of the five. So it's 20% actually. So it feels like 10, 20%, 30% is the amount money managers should get on a device or a capital. allocator should get on a device. Not 2x. It's a bit crazy.

Starting point is 00:40:44 Anyway, Pomp, you're awesome. Everybody go into your podcast players since you're there right now and subscribe to Pomp's podcast. It's amazing. He's honest. He's always been candid. He's always kept it a buck. He keeps it 100.

Starting point is 00:40:54 And just a great follow on Twitter. Your Twitter handle is again. A. Pompeyano. There it is. Thank you guys. Thank you so much for coming on. Appreciate you.

Starting point is 00:41:02 And we'll continue the discussion. All right. Bye. I want to make a point about Bitcoin yield because you said it's been very interesting there, Jason. You said that when people in. Ventimetric, it's a red flag, hard degree. So I want to put a hypothetical to you because I think this was solved the problem for me. So instead of calling it Bitcoin yield, if Sailor had said,

Starting point is 00:41:21 hey, we're going to start tracking the Bitcoin to float ratio to see how good of a job we're doing to make your shares worth more Bitcoin. Would that bother you? I mean, it would be like a price to earnings ratio or a price to sales ratio. And sure, that would totally be, in intellectually honest. I believe that sailor is not being intellectually honest. And when you combine that with his relentless promotion, I believe that's the recipe for disaster here. Now, that doesn't mean disaster is going to come. That doesn't mean, I think he's running a Ponzi. It doesn't mean I think he's a fraud. None of that. I believe he's such a believer in this that he and he has like a mania about him, right? So people who are manic like that, sometimes they change the world, sometimes they're Elizabeth Holmes, right?

Starting point is 00:42:15 Sometimes they're FTX, sometimes they're Steve Jobs. Yes. And so what you have to do when you look at a situation like this, when somebody is that manic, when they're that enthusiastic, when they start making up their own metrics and they're living in their own world, which I believe Michael Saylor is living, you can kind of see it in how he speaks. He is like living in an alternate timeline where he has seen the future. He's like a guy. who's come back from the future. And you know what? He's been in the business for a long time. I understand that.

Starting point is 00:42:46 Sometimes when you've been in the business a long time, you think you can see clearly, like, yep, this is a straight shot. He believes it's a straight shot to, you know, a hundred X from here. Therefore, if you do believe it's a straight shot to 100 X, and I sent you back in time and I said, yeah, coin's going to trade at 10 million each,

Starting point is 00:43:03 and it's 100,000 now, what would you do? I'd sell the house, sell the cars, sell, you know, the boats. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which he literally said in a video, There's a famous viral video where he says, and they've clipped it to kind of manipulate it a little bit. Okay. I think in fairness to him, that viral video was like, if you believe in Bitcoin, the right thing to do is to mortgage everything, sell every asset you have and just put it into Bitcoin, if you believe in it.

Starting point is 00:43:23 And it does give that caveat. But there is a much better path here if you do believe in what he's doing, which I believe is to own the Bitcoin directly. If it was 10% more or 20% more, I'd say fine. put 20% 1 in 5 Bitcoins into Michael Saylor's hands. Maybe he's got some magic leverage machine and he's going to have some tremendous advantage over you just holding it. But at 2 or 3x, I think it would be the height of foolishness to buy a micro strategy share over buying directly.

Starting point is 00:43:57 That's what I think. I think he's got so far to go in closing this gap of yield and, you know, his leverage. I think he, do you want to be the person closing the gap for him? or do you want to be the person who takes advantage of the gap? So if you bought him when the nav was under, you were smart. If you buy it when it's two or three X, I think you're the sucker at the table. At the same time, yeah. Would I short it?

Starting point is 00:44:18 Hell no. No. Never bet against people being irrational because you'll get your face ripped off and thrown in the dumpster. I'm just going to watch. Yeah. One last, anything on this. I thought it was very... By the way, let me just ask you a question.

Starting point is 00:44:32 Just check my logic here. Because people are saying like I'm a hater or whatever. is there anything I'm saying here that you can find any breaks in my argument or any bias in it? I mean, listen, I know you work for me, so you're biased. But you are an independent person who could be employed by anybody. You're not going to like just yes me to death here, as we've seen in previous episodes. You've got your own opinions. Is there anything in my argument, any chink in the armor, any Achilles healing when I'm saying,

Starting point is 00:45:01 please tell me if there is audience and Alex and chat room. No, actually, if this was, you know, the Alex has opinions hour show, and, you know, it was by myself, I think I'd be ruder about this. So I think you're probably being a little bit measured because I think what we want to do is leave space that there's something we're missing. Now, I don't see what that could be in this particular case, but I don't think that I'm omniscient and I don't think that you're omnipotent. So I think between the two of us, we're going, hey, why not buy your own Bitcoin? But maybe the leverage machines a great way to make money in the near term. Great chance for us to check the chat room. Anybody in the chat room if you're on YouTube, if you're on X, if you're on LinkedIn, please go ahead and let's discuss if we got something wrong here. Let's discuss if I got something wrong here. Please let us know. I'm reading through the chat right now for a phone. We'll take a second here. It's okay. And we are coming to you every Monday, Wednesday, Friday in 2025, 12 p.m. Texas time, 1 p.m. Alex East Coast and 10 a.m. left coast, a.k.a. the

Starting point is 00:46:04 specific here in the United States. You can find us at TWA startups on all the major platforms and our YouTube channel. Go subscribe. Hit the bell. If you hit the bell, you get a notification and you become part of the Nodie Gang. And if we scroll up, we can read some members of the Notie Gang as well. Who got in here first? I always like to know who got in here first, Alex. And then if they have any great questions, yeah. Well, I know. I'm just kind of, I'm laughing, that people are saying that we've beat this horse to death. Sailor's a smart guy who, Granted is definitely taking a big risk, but we want good vibes J-Cal back. Apparently, we're being too much of a pessimistic.

Starting point is 00:46:41 I don't see anything in here that actually underpoints our theory. I will say, yes, if you are a capital pool that does not have access to Bitcoin through one of the 8 trillion ways you can now get access to it directly. Maybe micro strategy does a super premium. That's why Jason says maybe 10% to nav. Sure. Last thing on this, Jason, for me, is very simple. he said that there's some people in crypto who are a little bit annoyed

Starting point is 00:47:05 that Bitcoin is becoming so institutionalized and brought it into Wall Street and so forth. I think that's a really good point. I find it very funny that I now buy the future of money, the revolution against the system in my fidelity account. That just strikes me as ironic.

Starting point is 00:47:19 Like, ha-ha, Wall Street One. But we should move on, Jason. Yeah, a lot of topics to cover. Yeah. You know, one thing I wanted to... Oh, please. Yeah, one thing I just wanted to bring up. I found this when I was researching Paul Atkins.

Starting point is 00:47:32 And we didn't get a chance to talk about this, I think. But here is Commissioner Paul Atkins from the SEC in April 20th, 2007, conference co-sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute and the Brookings Institute, right? These are famous places that, you know, people go to give talks. And, you know, my pet peeve with the SEC is accreditation. Ah, okay. So here we go. Can you see in my screen?

Starting point is 00:48:02 I'm going to make it a little. I can't. Okay. Let me see if I can make it one size bigger. Maybe that's too big. Something that's good to read here, right? I'm at a good size. So in this speech, he talks about accreditation.

Starting point is 00:48:13 It turns out in 2007, this was a major topic. And he says here, let me highlight it with my mouse, the concepts of economic risk and return also affect a different proposal of the commission relating to private investment funds. Specifically, part of the commission's proposal would add an additional requirement for any natural accredited person to have at least 2.5 million in investments before he or she could invest in a private investment fund like a hedge fund or a private equity fund other than a venture capital fund. So a venture capital firm can be accredited. But here they were saying, hey, getting people into hedge funds in private equity in 2007. Can you imagine there was such an

Starting point is 00:48:51 incredible run-up since then that people could, you know, participate in? He says here, the underlying premise for the commission's proposal is that these types of investments are too risky for individuals other than the very rich. And remember, $2.5 million back then would be like saying maybe $5 or $10 million. Now, you know, money's doubled since then at least. Therefore, we have to presume that the non-rich are either unsophisticated or lack access to sophistication and is simply not tolerable to have these types of people at risk of losing their money on a hedge fund. Assuming that these premises are true, however, what evidence does the commission have to support the conclusion that private investment funds are the most risky? On a logical basis, you'd have to say, well, this is more risky than buying an index

Starting point is 00:49:43 fund or a venture fund or gambling in Vegas, which people were allowed to do. And how does the risk profile of a pooled investment compared to the risk of investing in securities of a single issuer? Right. And just to be clear, this means you can take your money right now with no accreditation and put all of your capital into um the jason's flyby night court on the jets publicly traded oh you can bet on the jets yes i was thinking more like you could buy one single stock but you could you could buy less whiskey yeah you could you could buy you know uh a spack that went to zero sure and then i'll just end many public comment letters express i would get letters back then express indignation at the commission's proposal.

Starting point is 00:50:29 One commenter wrote, stay out of my wallet, stop trying to protect me for myself. Stop pursuing to know more than I do about my own life, risk tolerance and financial sophistication. End quote. The commission's proposal may very well prevent the non-rich from losing their money in private investment funds.

Starting point is 00:50:48 But it also certainly will prevent the non-rich from participating in any upside profits and gains of these funds, does this mean the rich get richer, while the non-rich should be content to just hold their place in the economic ladder? This is not a mere rhetorical question, because the so-called smart money investors are allocating increasing amounts of their portfolios to private investment funds as alternative investments, although this is still a minor part of their allocation, this change in allocation is clearly a market reaction to developments in capital markets. I'll end there. Yes. But it's a long way of saying, this is my God.

Starting point is 00:51:24 Yeah. I'm psyched about this. Gary Gensler out for this guy. You know, they've been slow rolling and dragging the accreditation laws. This person clearly gets it. If you're an American, and he uses the word sophistication, which is what I've been using instead of accreditation, which I like. If there's a path to sophistication, which the SEC has been charged with doing, but they will not do, because I think they're slow rolling it, maybe this guy, maybe my guy. we'll go, Paul, maybe Big Paulie will go in there and say, let's make this fair. I believe that this is the way for people to move from one bracket to another.

Starting point is 00:52:04 Why? Why do I believe this? Because I did. My family did. The Calacanis family did. Your family could do this too. I'm not saying bet all your money into it. I mean,

Starting point is 00:52:15 if you had a $100,000 net worth and you told me you wanted to put $5,000 in a private equity fund and $5,000 in a hedge fund, I'd be like, you know what? Great, you're going to learn something. Great idea. Especially compared to what people tend to spend their money on anyways. I mean, people often think about what are the risks here for someone who might, you know, put their money into the wrong private investment pool or whatever.

Starting point is 00:52:36 But that person might have put it on to, you know, fan duel. Or Hawk do. Hock to a coin. It's dollar sign Hock, I believe, if you want to look up that blue chip asset and put all your money onto it. I mean, is you going to jail? Have these people learned nothing? Did they not see every single celebrity get.

Starting point is 00:52:54 ding the last time around. Remember they all got dinged? It was like a parade of everybody who promoted an, in isch coin last time. What else we got on the talking? I'm sorry. I just feel bad for her on a Monday.

Starting point is 00:53:06 Okay, so you wanted to talk a little bit more about the Brian Thompson murder case. You had a fresh take. I just want to say that there was some breaking news this morning. According to news reports, there was a 26-year-old picked up at McDonald's in Pennsylvania, had fake ideas, including one that the NYPD believes was used by the suspect.

Starting point is 00:53:24 And he had a gun in a similar suspension. So I don't want to say that, but it certainly looks like they got it. They got them. 99% they found him. Where are we are? So, you know, now we will go into the, you know, the eventual end game here to find out, you know, if he was hired by a state-sponsored actor or he's deranged or his parent died of cancer because they were denied coverage or anything in between these possibilities.

Starting point is 00:53:53 Everything is possible here. You know, I was just thinking about how divisive this issue is. And I said on the All-in pod last week, I realize as an individual, you know, as the time goes on, you get older, maybe you get a little bit of resources, your perspective is very different. My perspective on health care has changed greatly in 20 years. I used to be scared about my health care like many Americans are today. cover something, it's like a low underlying anxiety. You know what I'm saying? Like a pervasive fear that my God forbid somebody in my family, I'm not going to be able to get them chemotherapy, whatever it is, you know, some drug they need because they have got some rare disease. And so

Starting point is 00:54:44 when you become more affluent, what happens is your experience with health care becomes a different frustration, which is my employees keep complaining about the healthcare, and I'm spending 10% more a year. This is infuriating. It's like you have the perspective of the person who's been caught in the middle. That's been my perspective for 20 years, which is, cannot believe how much this costs. I can't believe when people on my team tell me what their deductibles are, etc. It's nuts. Crazy to be an employer and have to deal with this stuff. You're just flabbergasted. But you can always afford to pick the golden plan, right? Yes.

Starting point is 00:55:22 Whereas somebody who is coming up, you know, 25-year-old J-Cal 30 years ago in 1994, you know, I didn't have health care for 10 years. Did you put that out there right now? I didn't have health care for 10 years. When I was running my companies as an entrepreneur, I did not have health care. Think about how crazy that is. I was flying without a net for a decade maybe, you know, on and off. Sometimes I had it.

Starting point is 00:55:44 Sometimes I didn't. Eventually, we wound up having it. We had a PEO at Silicon Allie Reporter. for many years between Sony and that, you know, when I was, you know, entrepreneur and then getting out of it, I had like maybe a year I paid Cobra. If you remember that, you would have, you have a Cobra payment. I covered myself for a year or two on that. So I, I had, I don't say, I'm memory hold that. I just forgotten it because you're young. You don't need healthcare for, you know, if you're lucky, knock on wood, you don't need it. So I would be like, this is such a

Starting point is 00:56:11 waste of money. I'm healthy. I never go to the doctor. Now I'm older. I got sick parents, I got sick grandparents, aunts and uncles. I see it all around me. And I really think, as I've been saying for many years here, the employer being wedged into this is a major part of the problem. And consumers not being consumers of this product, they have no agency. When you have no agency,

Starting point is 00:56:35 there's a famous line, um, uh, which is a man without hope is a man without fear. So it's a daredevil. And so, It does not justify anything. Murder is murder.

Starting point is 00:56:50 Like, go to jail forever. We get it. But I do understand that the reaction from people is dark. Yes. And it's disgusting. But I understand it comes from somewhere. You know, grand frustration here. And I think this, I don't want to say this is like some rallying cry, whatever.

Starting point is 00:57:08 I don't want to inspire people to do this stuff. But do be self-aware, you know, as an individual of privilege, where you are in that journey from, you know, having this issue abstracted from you, right? Yeah. And I have been super aware of it, but I haven't had to deal with it, right? Again, these dark memes, don't do them, man. I just find it so disturbing to watch people making light of this person being murdered. Whatever it turns out to be for him being murdered is just really dark.

Starting point is 00:57:40 I really don't think people should be joking about it, but it is what it is. Yeah, I have a lot of thoughts about this. I mean, one, right now, I'm much in your position, Jason. I have incredible health coverage, and no matter what happens to me, my family is going to be just fine. Like, literally anything that comes up, we're good. And that does remove that layer of stress. And to put it into my personal context, because you did too, I recall growing up, we basically never had, we never had vision and dental insurance because my dad had his own company. And so we had basically just high deductible emergency insurance at best.

Starting point is 00:58:14 And I remember my mom, Brian, in the car after I would get a cavity or something because she didn't have the money to pay for it. In fact, the first money I made in journalism, Jason, do you know what I did? I went home and I got my forefront teeth fixed because I never had the ability to have proper dental care that was corrective at that point. So, trust me, I've had the crying parents, I've had the fear. I get it. And I think that this moment, if we can use it at all for good, if there's anything we can get out of this that's positive, it's a recognition. amongst the more well-to-do that the people who are less well-to-do

Starting point is 00:58:50 are struggling, they're in pain here and the American healthcare system, while we like to beat our chest and say, we're the best in the world. It's not working for a lot of people. Not in healthcare, we're not. I mean, we spend the most get the least. I mean, Congress is very, we're not a frontier market.

Starting point is 00:59:08 We're not an emerging market. But we, if you spend the most, you should get the most. Now, listen, the solutions and the innovations, here. People come from all around the world. So again, once again, back to like capitalism. Capitalism is a rabid competition. And what it has resulted in is we have Renovo and we have these incredible companies and we have cancer blood tests. We have incredible stuff in this country. But it's capitalism. So you kind of pay to play in a lot of cases. I think what has to happen is it just has to be a floor. And almost all Republicans and Democrats and everybody in between

Starting point is 00:59:43 and I speak to who are in power and who have affluence, all feel the same way. Just build a floor of like a basic amount of healthcare that everybody gets all the time because we kind of have that already with Medicaid, Medicare and emergency rooms. It's like there needs to be some really great leadership here and some really great competition. And I think maybe the states having something to do with this might also be helpful in creating competition. I'm just spitballing here. But, you know, we have states in competition with each other to land companies, etc. Maybe we need to have the states have their own versions of universal health care by a state, by state, instead of having this be a federal mandate. And then there could be efficiencies

Starting point is 01:00:27 in each local place and they could run tests and see who does it better. And if you did it better, then you might draw people to your state because they go, this place has the best health care. I want to move to Texas or I want to move to California, New York, or Vermont, because they do the best job. Just like some people might move to a place because you have the best safety or the best education system or the best tax treatment. The struggle there that I have is if some states opted out of the strategy that we're describing here, they would have a much lower tax basis. So all the corporations are going to move to Oklahoma, which has no health care, and all the people want to move to California, which does, and you're going to end up the pretty

Starting point is 01:01:03 uneven market. So that's kind of why I think if we're going to do what you say, I hate to say probably a federal solution versus one that's done by the states. Otherwise, it's going to be super uneven. But the federal is just so inefficient and doing everything. I just, it's the only thing we have as a nation that allows for like a full collection of action. And I think that the annoyance you just expressed there super valid,

Starting point is 01:01:28 but I think it's the cost of being a big nation. We could be more efficient if we were just Georgia because we'd be much smaller. We'd have six roads. point about like the competitive nature of states and like they iterate and you get in a little competition. If the floor is set by the federal government and each state gets to fulfill it in their own way, oh, hell yes. I love that.

Starting point is 01:01:51 Okay, great. Awesome. Maybe that's the compromise there. Yeah. All right. What else we got on the docket? Let's rip through a couple more items. You threw this in and I had seen the headline about Reddit answers and I thought to myself,

Starting point is 01:02:00 I don't care. I was so wrong. This is like the coolest thing I've ever seen. So pull it up. Show it. Yeah. All right. So I'll go ahead and queue it up. This is how Reddit describe its own new feature. So Reddit, everyone knows, has a deal with Google to essentially allow them to ingest Reddit's materials. Now, what Reddit is doing here, Jason, is putting together a Q&A service that curates summaries of relevant conversations and details across Reddit. Essentially, it'll pull in what Reddit knows about the query you put in. It's a Q&A service. We all know what that means. What's really interesting to be. me here is that this is not just Reddit building a new feature. This is a Pontra-Google strategy.

Starting point is 01:02:43 Why should Reddit sell off its unique secret sauce to other people for a pittance when it could build its own service that gives people on platform, properly leverages its own brand, and I think can make tons of money. So forget all the- Okay, please. I'll give you the answer. They have to be careful. because a large percentage of Google of their traffic comes from Google. If Google perceives them as a competitor, they'll do what they did to me at Mahalo

Starting point is 01:03:15 and EHOW and other people, which is de-endex us and move us down. Google has a rule. No indexing of other search-like indexes. Okay. So if they perceive Reddit as a direct competitor, then they really put Reddit, move Reddit up in the result.

Starting point is 01:03:34 and send them a lot of traffic, I think they would be downgraded. And so that is a challenge that they're going to have. I do think Reddit would make a kick-ass search engine because a lot of people go to Reddit, like they go to Amazon and do some number of searches there, but the majority of people wind up at Reddit through Google. But Reddit has, I think,

Starting point is 01:03:54 Reddit and X have the two best data sets in the world for information. I cannot find this, but I should have pulled it up beforehand. But I think that Reddit was a top five search query on Google in the last couple of years. People append Reddit. They append Quora. They append Amazon. They append Twitter. But they mostly append Reddit.

Starting point is 01:04:14 And I think that shows how the center of gravity in finding information online has shifted. You need Reddit's information in Google's search box. Or do you just need a search box on Reddit? So I agree Google could go nuclear and try to downrank Reddit. One, anti-dust concerns, but also two, I think that would so dramatically harm Google's search quality that it would be a net positive for Reddit over a four to eight-quarter time frame. I swear to you, Jason, Reddit's too addictive, too popular to be slowed down by Google Search alone. And I think this is absolutely brilliant. I don't think that they could stop them.

Starting point is 01:04:52 I just think they could give them a headwin. Market cap for Reddit now $29 billion. I'm an idiot because I kept talking about how much I loved Red and how undervalued I think it is. when it was hit like a third of that price. So once again, I'm a dumb dumb because I didn't make the trade. I got to just start making trades. Whenever I'm passionate about something, just tell me, did you make a trade? Jake Al.

Starting point is 01:05:15 So I keep making trades when you hear me be passionate about some. After the show today, don't forget to go buy about 10 million worth of micro strategy. That's the opposite. Oh, I'm sorry. I mean. Yeah, please. Okay. So on the subject of being a dumb, dumb, when I saw this news dug into it, my alarm bells went off in my head because I recalled reading through Reddit's Q3 earnings call previously to learn more about its data licensing business.

Starting point is 01:05:42 Because I was thinking, here's an enormous revenue stream for Reddit. It's going to be amazing. And you know what? On the earnings call, the CFO, Jennifer Wong and the CEO, Steve Hoffman, were incredibly relaxed about data deals. Jen Wong said, we have, quote, limited visibility into the timing of additional partnerships. Steve said, I'd say for us, it's a nice to have business. And then he said this. But if we're thinking about the future of Reddit, it's really our ads business.

Starting point is 01:06:11 It's search. It's more of our kind of on platform initiatives. So I really think that during this earnings call, they were trying to be like, just wait like two months for us to drop this new thing. But this explains me why they haven't landed another seven deals for 60 or 100 million apiece. Why not? Because they're doing it themselves. I love this.

Starting point is 01:06:30 One of the coolest things I've seen in the last couple of months. I'm just stoked for a ex. I'm a long-time Reddit fan, you know? Yeah, I mean, it's the little website that could. They just never stop doing what they do. And it really is the lesson founders is, because there were two companies, Digg and Reddit launched at the same time. Dig kept trying to be something it wasn't.

Starting point is 01:06:48 They started competing with like Facebook and they kept changing their interface. Same interface. Same focus. Don't change the interface. evolve the interface on the margins, polish it, but don't go too crazy. This latest update of, you know, the iOS software is showing how much frustration people have when you change the interface too much. And you've got hundreds of millions of people, billions of people, or even just millions of people who know your product. You don't want to make them relearn it, etc. Reddit has been

Starting point is 01:07:17 one thing, a community to discuss stuff. And through pseudonyms. The pseudonyms mean you have the same handle forever, theoretically you can, but you don't have to reveal your identity. And so, you know, your reputation is formed over time from your contributions. There are 350 million in revenue-ish every quarter. They're at 1.4 billion. You know, the sky's the limit for Reddit, I believe. I think that the company becomes more and more valuable. And I think they're an easy takeout candidate for 100 billion. Yeah, you know, I think somebody's going to come along at some point and just say, you know, too valuable of an asset in the AI space, Microsoft, Google, Google, Google, X-A-I, you know, pick any of the major players.

Starting point is 01:07:59 I think meta is the obvious one since they understand community. There's somebody's going to come in here and start buying, you know, and Reddit is a real, real gem. Yeah. No, I wouldn't say meta, because I feel like this is too competing with other meta products, but it's in Microsoft, they have a history of tuck-in communities. Yeah, why not? GitHub? Yeah, yeah. If they, Microsoft is the perfect candidate, because Satia, Nadella, B,

Starting point is 01:08:24 has just great vision in terms of acquisitions. And come January 20th, it's going to be game on Reddit, most likely to be acquired. I think Reddit, DoorDash, Uber, and Lyft are my four most likely to be acquired in the next four years. Those four will be on the acquire slash merger, because some of them might merge or whatever. I don't have inside information, obviously.

Starting point is 01:08:50 I don't need some public companies. This is purely speculation. I wouldn't be surprised if Reddit, Lyft, DoorDash, and Uber were part of something bigger. Either acquires, acquires, a quarry, conglomerate, put together Amazon plus Uber, Waymo plus Uber, Lyft and DoorDash. Although I think Lyft is kind of like an anchor because it's so small. It would slow people down, to be honest. It would be better to build from scratch than buy a broken asset. I mean, I don't say that to be cruel at all.

Starting point is 01:09:20 Sometimes if the asset doesn't have scale and it's up against like giants and it's proven itself to not be able to compete over time, there's a reason why Lyft didn't get bought during all of this. And I've talked to people, you know, who are kind of, I don't want to say insiders, but who are analysts of the space. They're like, it doesn't do anything

Starting point is 01:09:41 for another company to buy Lyft. They could recreate the asset because it's not, doesn't have scale. Whereas DoorDash and, Airbnb and Uber have a scale. And when you have a scale and a network effect and 100 million customers, whatever it is, 50 million customers, 150,

Starting point is 01:09:58 that scale is worth a lot. Oh, absolutely. So I do think Uber and DoorDash and Airbnb will be bought in the next four years. They'll be part of something bigger. I could see Amazon specifically or Google jumping the fence and buying those companies

Starting point is 01:10:15 and then spinning them out into other kind of entities. Waymo plus Uber plus DoorDash. would be an amazing Amazon competitor. Conversely, Amazon buying DoorDash and Uber would then be a massive competitor to Waymo because Amazon has a lot of bets in self-driving. I think they own Zooks, or a big portion of Zooks or some of these other companies.

Starting point is 01:10:34 Expand the aperture a little bit here. Let's say you're Shopify and you want to build out your last mile delivery business. You're of lots of money. Why not tap on Lyft? I think because you, like I said, you'd be better up just building it from scratch. But if you said Shopify and Uber or Shopify DoorDash Uber, yeah, now you got something.

Starting point is 01:10:54 Hold on. Now you've got an Amazon competitor. You put those three together. Wow. Alex, I never really thought about putting, you put DoorDash Shopify and Uber together. Uh-huh. That's like $80 billion, $150 billion. What Shopify's market cap?

Starting point is 01:11:08 So I just pulled them all up. So Shopify's $150 flat. Uber's $1.39 flat and DoorDash is $73 and change. So $3.75. Call 400. Call 400. You put those three together for 400. You've got a trillion-dollar company by putting them together.

Starting point is 01:11:24 It's a trillion-dollar company. I would not mind consolidation there, frankly. Just because it would do is foment a stronger and better Amazon competitor to the degree I think it would help us. Which proves my point at the end of the wrath upon, I've been saying, don't allow the trillion-dollar companies to acquire anything. Or maybe, you know, whatever it is, the top 10, just pick. Let them, you know, be able to maybe do tuck-ins, but not like the big, big, or put them under more scrutiny. Let's say that. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:11:56 But then everybody under $500 billion, let it rip and take the mag-7 to the mag-17. That's my best advice. What else do we got on the docket? We got a last docket or we're good. Yeah, I want to do one more tiny thing, which is a bill that's going through Congress slowly called the Kids Online Safety Act or COSA. You may have heard about this, Jason. It's been bouncing around for some time, past the Senate back in July. There's been concerns in the House.

Starting point is 01:12:22 There's been work to be done on the bill. And then this weekend, everyone's favorite social media CEO, namely Linda Yaccarino, came out in favor of this. And I was a little bit surprised to see a social media company come out in favor of this bill. she says essentially that Attacks protecting children is her top priority. Makes a lot of sense. And then she talks about balancing

Starting point is 01:12:50 free speech and children's privacy. Kind of the standard debate there. So Jason, I went ahead and I went through the bill some this morning trying to sort out what are the complaints, what are the positives here? And my gist,

Starting point is 01:13:05 the thing that I kind of walked away with is that this bill is pretty big in terms of what it wants to do in terms of algorithmic transparency, letting people opt out of algorithms, age verification. And so I'm kind of curious if it's indicative of an extra support

Starting point is 01:13:23 is indicative of a new trend amongst social media companies that maybe some regulation about things that deal with children to find us 13th and under in this bill is the way forward? Listen, I can tell you, Yon cares deeply about kids.

Starting point is 01:13:40 He believes this is like one of his big issues. Like the population growth. He's a family man. He believes in kids. We're friends, obviously. I don't speak for him. I'm not back channeling anything here, but it's pretty obvious. He does.

Starting point is 01:13:51 And he believes in protecting kids and who doesn't? I think, you know, X is also in a very unique position. It's kind of like an adult social network, isn't it? Like, I think their position is like, this is for world leaders, et cetera. Whereas I think like Instagram and TikTok are for kids. Instagram and TikTok are for kids. When I look at young people, people going into their teens, they all want to be in Instagram and TikTok. X is not like on

Starting point is 01:14:17 their mind. They don't want to have like a textual, you know, debate about Ukraine or the stock market or Bitcoin. Like, it's, that's, it's kind of more like it's college, right? I feel like you're in college, you're on X, maybe. I think TikTok and Instagram, watching teen girls, watching preteens, you know, even I know some people let their eight, nine, 10 year olds have And I think 100% we should go do what Australia has done and we'll see how they actually make it work. I don't think anybody should be on social media until they're 60. 100%. It's been proven already.

Starting point is 01:14:54 It's damaging. I don't care about the freedom of speech and the, you know, debates around that. I just know what I see with my own eyes is that you're robbing kids of their childhood if they're on social media and phones. And parents cannot fight this war individually. we have to do it collectively. My hope is that parents realize it's not that these things in and of themselves are damaging. I believe they are. I believe it's like a kid with developing and social dynamics.

Starting point is 01:15:21 It's just a little too intense and addictive and they've designed it to be addictive because I know the people who work there. I know Dave Morin. He's told me the stories. I know everybody, Sam Less and everybody who worked their Facebook, whatever, these guys were obsessed with making it addicting. And it obviously is and TikTok is taking it to the level. The net, net, net of all this, and if you read, what is Jonathan Hates book?

Starting point is 01:15:45 Gosh, sorry, my short-term memory. Anxious Generation. And I had him on the All-In. Interview series, you'll see it over there, Jonathan Hate, All-In, you'll find it. It's not just that it's damaging. It's that it takes away time with friends. It takes away time in nature. It takes away time in sports, time from reading books, time from being creative.

Starting point is 01:16:07 That's what these phones and devices do to kids. limit your time for your kids, encourage your school to let kids grow. There's let grow is like this organization that he mentions over and over again in the book. Kids should have phone lockers at school. They bring their, I just got my 15 year old.

Starting point is 01:16:23 Her birthday was yesterday. Happy birthday, Lotus. I love you. She got her phone. You know, it's 15. I got her to the phone.

Starting point is 01:16:30 And she loves it. But, you know, I think they should have phone lockers at schools. Oh, absolutely. And the schools that get phone lockers, the kids,

Starting point is 01:16:37 you know, there's a little bit of like hand-wringing complaining in the first week, and then by the second week, it's universal. The kids are free from their devices, and they look each other in the eyes again, and they blossom. That's what it should be. Just like when you go to dinner, we now have a thing at poker games or dinner. We stack the phones, whoever touches their phone first. Believe that out, has to pay dinner. Next time you go to dinner, I want you to try this. This is the J-Cal test. You want to have a great dinner party? Stack the phones in the table. Whoever touches their phone

Starting point is 01:17:08 first has to buy dinner. Just a fun thing to do. And you could also do a thing where you have like a buy, like, you know, before the entrees, after the appetizers, everybody can check their phone for two minutes to make sure, you know, there's nothing going on with the nanny. So you have a two-minute phone break between advertisers' dinner. Watch how great that dinner party is. When you go to dinner, stack the phones.

Starting point is 01:17:28 Whoever does it has to pay for dinner. And you know what happened out of dinner? Somebody's like, what? This. I'm paying for dinner and took their phone back. That's amazing. Free dinner. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:17:37 Free dinner. And you know what? If somebody else wants to do it, now the two of you are paying for dinner and the other three couples are not. Oh. Try it. It's fun. It's a fun thing to do. The third person only pays a third.

Starting point is 01:17:48 The fourth person only pays a quarter. At some point. No, but I hear you. Yeah. The difference between our dinner parties, Jason, is how offline my group here is. For example, I had to explain to my spouse what Blue Sky was this week because she'd never heard of it. I hope. Yeah, I'm on Blue Sky.

Starting point is 01:18:04 Yeah. But I mean, but why would she be? Right. No. Right. So anyways, I was going to make a very different point about this. I was going to talk about the duty of care roster and the algorithm transparency. And I was going to say, Jason, this really does feel like a very heavy-handed regulatory bill. And I thought you were going to take the government out of tech angle, but you went, what? The other way. I just think kids are different. You know, I don't, I think you have to treat kids differently when you have a mind that's developing. Do we want kids, you know, experimenting with cigarettes, vapes, cannabis. you know, having gender affirming care and stuff like that, before their brains are fully developed, all these very considerate things, tattoos.

Starting point is 01:18:46 You know, when you're a parent and your kids start to get to a certain age, you realize, oh, my Lord, you got to protect the kids. They don't have the ability to make great decisions until they're 25, really. And we kind of let them lose at 18 and 21. And, man, I think another thing, kids should not be on the hook for these student loans and they shouldn't be irreversible because they're making that decision at that 18 to 20 year old window

Starting point is 01:19:10 your brains are not developed. You should be able to get rid of them in bankruptcy. And then we would have some worth of offfulness about this. You know, you can't get rid of your student loans in bankruptcy? Which is the biggest giveaway possible to the lenders thereof.

Starting point is 01:19:23 No, there should be some risk there so that way they won't lend as much. And then the cost of college would come down. This is about as lefties I think we get on this show. I'm sympathetic to everything that you said about children, and as a father, I absolutely agree. I struggle to reconcile my general vibes that parents should be allowed to make these decisions

Starting point is 01:19:46 versus the federal government. And there is something to be said about if this bill passes, because it does not ban social media. It merely requires modifications to social media platforms with more than 10 million monthly actives, to be clear. And there's concerns from the EFF and others about the, quote, duty of care standard. and how that could lead to content moderation. That's very aggressive.

Starting point is 01:20:08 Van Paul's against this, a lot of other people. But we'll leave it here. Where do you stand? Which part of it? Where do you stand? Because I don't want to seek content moderation. I just want to figure out a way to keep kids off of this stuff.

Starting point is 01:20:19 Well, so that's why I said you short-circuited my entire complaint because I thought this was going to be way too technical, way too difficult, and leave too much open area for companies to get in trouble, different ways and different administrations. And so I was going to argue that the way this is set up kind of a mess, your endorsement of the Australian approach just precludes all that.

Starting point is 01:20:39 It just does away with it because then it's not a question. Yeah. I mean, I also think, by the way, there's like a whole thing about pornography on the internet. This idea that porn should be available 24 hours a day to everybody and, you know, you would never allow a kid to go by pornography in a store, but they're, this whole generation, and it's really messed with their brains, having free access to porn. And I know, like, when I was a kid, you know,

Starting point is 01:21:08 like there was like a Playboy magazine, you know, there's a stack of them hidden on a rooftop in Brooklyn. We would go and we were 12 or 13 years old and see these pictures. We're like, whoa, holy cow. What these kids are exposed to and their version of that, which is they take out their phones and they show people stuff. It's like, oh my God, it's just dark and not what life is about,

Starting point is 01:21:29 not what sexuality is about. It's a little beyond our mandate here. But I think we do need to think about that. And, you know, here in Texas, there's a big controversy because all the major pornography adult sites do not allow you to load from IP addresses this stuff because there is a bill. And we'll look into it a further issue episode, but there's some bill here where you're going to have to verify your age and order to look at a pornography site in Texas or get a VPN, which everybody's a VPN.

Starting point is 01:22:00 It's really good for VPN. It's a screen door you can walk around. Well, it's another level that would, I think, protect kids, et cetera. And you know what? I'm open actually to having that discussion. I don't know. Like, I'm a freedom of speech guy, but I'm not like unlimited access to porn for kids guy. Maybe I'm becoming like a dad.

Starting point is 01:22:18 You're starting to sound very much like a California Democrat. Now, I've got a solution for that problem. That's the joke there. No, no, no. My point is that you sound like someone who's like, we can do something about this versus we should not do anything about them. which is the more libertarian perspective. Yes.

Starting point is 01:22:33 I'm libertarian, except when it comes to kids. I don't think that that's a bad perspective to take. The only thing that I think technologists would raise is, how do you want to age-verifying? And then how do you want to let people maintain that verification across devices? Because it's a non-frivial point. And I don't think that there's a good answer for it.

Starting point is 01:22:53 Here's a breaking news. People are making progress with these robots, by the way. These 30-40K robots, check on Optimus now. walking up and down hills. Remember they were making fun of Tesla for the optimist, you know, like being tethered at the first time you showed it and the next year having people standing next to it

Starting point is 01:23:11 at the all-in summit we had, or all-in holiday party we had a robot there. But look at this. It like just re-got its footing there. It's better than me when I used to drink. I'm not going to lie. Look at there's Alex leaving the bar. No, he didn't fall down in the middle of Highway 101 in San Francisco,

Starting point is 01:23:28 so it doesn't count. This is the optimist, you know, And so for people who like mock technology, like, just understand the exponential technology. And if you're seeing other robotics companies figure out walking up and downhills, like AI is going to make these things learn faster and faster and faster and faster and faster and faster. And the hardware is already there. Figure, it was from our company that we've talked about on the show a lot, had to tweet out today by how they're like, come work for us.

Starting point is 01:23:54 We're going to make millions of these things. That's the temperature amongst people who are currently working on them. And, you know, Elon tweets a lot, but he also tweets things that he thinks are the most impactful to his businesses, unsurprisingly. Starship launches. And if he's showing off this much optimist, it's probably indicative of, I know, I'm talking to Jason, but like, indicative of where his mind's at is my read of it. And that means it's probably doing well. So, yeah. Okay.

Starting point is 01:24:20 Awesome. We're back on Wednesday. We're back Wednesday. Wait, are we taping episode Tuesday, though, with Sundeeb to do an AI show tomorrow? Oh, I'm pretty sure. I'm going to bephrase that. Live news will return. on Wednesday, there should be a Sunny AI special tomorrow.

Starting point is 01:24:34 Awesome. And I hope we go live with that. So for my great producers, let's do that. Thank you to researcher Maddie. Thanks to producer, court, John and Chris. And thank you, for Alex Wilhelm. You can follow him, X.com slash Alex. And we're just trying to get 5% better a day here. Tell us what we can do better. I'm Jason at calicanus.com for live. DM's open at Jason on all platforms, pretty much. I'm on blue sky as Jason M. Calicast, but I don't have any followers. I can't find anybody over there. Discovery is terrible. I'll follow you so you have at least one.

Starting point is 01:25:01 It's kind of like a clunky version of like Twitter from 10 years ago, right? Is it what? Is it just like a vote against X and against threads to go there? Is there some feature that's great that you like? Just so far it's only the people. I'm not a big block guy. So I don't block a lot of people. But if you do, apparently it's great for that.

Starting point is 01:25:20 Not my jam. I just like to go there because it's like all my friends moved one city over and I have to drive to go see them. it's so weird. Yeah, that's exactly what it's like. It's like, oh, you move to the, I got it. Yeah, you move to Brooklyn. In Manhattan, if you moved to Brooklyn, it was like, you're excommunicated. I'm never going to see you again. You're dead. I do think, yeah, I, uh, I like the way the new block system works on X, and I'll just announce here how blocking works for me. Okay. If you are obnoxious and funny or insightful, you're going to get a like and I'm going to engage you. If you're obnoxious and insulting, but not funny and clever, I'm just going to snap block you, and then we'll still see each other's stuff. You just can't participate in a discussion with me.

Starting point is 01:26:03 So if you say like, TDS, you know, whatever, whatever. If you say, like, listen, I don't think you have TDS, but I do think you should recognize and this is your blind spots. Yeah, I'm all in, right? Or make a funny joke about my glasses.

Starting point is 01:26:16 Maybe I'll think it's funny, but that's a high bar for funny for me. So just be in, I want to have intelligent discussions online or funny. Clever, intelligent, funny, that's my zone of excellence and that's where I like to be.

Starting point is 01:26:31 I don't want to be with like stupid drive-by tweets. And by the way, if it's an insightful compliment, like if you give me, I'm a sucker for the sandwich, hey, this is, I love this,

Starting point is 01:26:43 I've been listening to Twist for 10 years. I think you're wrong, da-da, here's your shit sandwich, and then you say something nice about it all in or my investments at the end or my weight loss, that's the way to do it,

Starting point is 01:26:53 folks, if you want to get a follow. That's like the really gold standard. Also, a great way to deal with feedback for employees if you're a manager. I've learned that one the hard way. Can't go all one way? I have gotten a little better at that myself. I was today, it was a little live about Twist 500. I said, we got to do better.

Starting point is 01:27:09 But I think we've done a great job. But I think we need to do better. So more Twist 500 coming on Wednesday. After we take into account Jason's latest changes. But they will make it better. So everyone get excited. We have a list of companies we are preparing to share with you. Exactly.

Starting point is 01:27:23 I mean, the goal is I want people to understand that we. suffer over every selection and we really understand their business. So maybe it requires like an act of journalism. Maybe we have to put a researcher on maybe contacting the founder and asking a couple questions over email and maybe getting some insights or something about it. Or maybe actually calling the venture capital asking the question. We'd actually do a random act of journalism. I would love, I would love to do that.

Starting point is 01:27:48 We have resources. Yeah. Well, we'll talk about that offline. Anyways, everybody, we adore you. We'll be back on Tuesday and Wednesday and Friday. Goodbye. Bye. Thank you.

This Week in Startups - TWiST News: Bitcoin’s Future, Reddit Answers, SEC Shifts, and more! | E2057

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.