This Week in Startups - Twist News: Fusion, Rural Investment, and Applied AI | E2068

Episode Date: January 6, 2025

This Week in Startups is brought to you by… PrizePicks. TWiST listeners, download the app today and use code TWIST to get $50 instantly after you play your first $5 lineup! Go to: https://prizepicks.onelink.me/LME0/TWIST PrizePicks - Run your game. Lemon.io. TWiST listeners get 15% off your first 4 weeks of developer time at https://Lemon.io/twist Vanta. TWiST listeners automate your SOC2 and get $1,000 off at http://www.vanta.com/twist Today’s show: Jason and Alex cover Sam Altman’s fusion proclamation and the age of abundance we’re approaching, rural investment and subsidies with austerity on the horizon, and applied AI. * Timestamps: (0:00) Jason and Alex kick off the show. (1:33) The new interactive live show docket (4:34) The Vail Resorts Epic Pass controversy (10:16) PrizePicks. TWiST listeners, download the app today and use code TWIST to get $50 instantly after you play your first $5 lineup! Go to: https://prizepicks.onelink.me/LME0/TWIST PrizePicks - Run your game. (12:10) Critique of Vail Resorts' management and stock performance (14:39) Sam Altman's interview on fusion energy (18:03) US oil production, energy innovation, and the importance of risk-taking (20:54) Lemon.io. TWiST listeners get 15% off your first 4 weeks of developer time at https://Lemon.io/twist (23:07) Ro Khanna on rural business subsidies (29:59) Vanta. TWiST listeners automate your SOC2 and get $1,000 off at http://www.vanta.com/twist (31:29) Debating government subsidies and the impact on rural living (35:10) Government debt and austerity measures (39:47) Chinese hacking into US infrastructure and cybersecurity concerns (47:10) China's economic challenges and the importance of domestic production (55:10) SF Smashburger spot review and handling online criticism (1:02:21) Security precautions for public figures and the decline of empathy online * Subscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.com Check out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.com Subscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp * Follow Alex: X: https://x.com/alex LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelm * Follow Jason: X: https://twitter.com/Jason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis * Check out the following articles and companies mentioned in the episode: U.S. State-by-State AI Regulation UPS Service Centers Close in Rural America Salt Typhoon Hack (via Washington Post) Density.io Deep Sentinel * Thank you to our partners: (10:16) PrizePicks. TWiST listeners, download the app today and use code TWIST to get $50 instantly after you play your first $5 lineup! Go to: https://prizepicks.onelink.me/LME0/TWIST PrizePicks - Run your game. (20:54) Lemon.io. TWiST listeners get 15% off your first 4 weeks of developer time at https://Lemon.io/twist (29:59) Vanta. TWiST listeners automate your SOC2 and get $1,000 off at http://www.vanta.com/twist * Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland * Check out Jason’s suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis * Follow TWiST: Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartups YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartups TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartups Substack: https://twistartups.substack.com * Subscribe to the Founder University Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@founderuniversity1916

But most people don't have your skin. And that's the thing. That's why I'm glad you're being empathetic because we, yeah, the last show we were talking about how you won't close your DMs. And I'm like, close your DMs. And you're like, no, I want to know. I want to know who the anonymous accounts are who are saying this stuff. You know, I have security protocols like anybody in my profile here.

I'll just tell a little story here. I had somebody docks me. Person is upset because of something I said on the show. They decide to docks me. They decide to put my primary residence is worth $10 million dollars. What do I know? Blah, blah, blah. You know how they got my phone?

they went back two years, but when I took a picture of the tree line in my backyard, they reversed him and searched it and they tweeted it. This is on July 4th weekend. I looked the guy up. I Google search him

because I have security protocols. So now I've got to get the security company involved to find out if this person's going to jump my fence. Right. Right? Okay.

I finally got on LinkedIn. I look at the company. Hey, that company looks very familiar to me. I clicked the company. I know the CEO. Who we worked for it. This week in startups is brought to you by prize picks. Run your game. The best place to get real money action while watching your favorite sports. Download the app today and use code Twist to get $50 instantly after you play your first $5 lineup. Limon.io. Hire pre-vetted remote developers, get 15% off your first four weeks of developer time at lemon.io slash twist. And Vanta. Compliance and security shouldn't be a deal breaker for startups to win new business. Vanta makes it easy for companies to get a sock to report fast. Twist listeners can get a thousand.

off for limited time at Vanta.com slash twist. Hey, everybody, welcome back to this week in startups. We taped on Sunday because I'm going to be traveling. I'm going to be in Japan doing a little skiing last minute trip for a couple days. But I will be recording the show. We might have to change the times a little bit because I'm, I don't know, 10, 12, 14 hours ahead of when we normally do it. But fear not, we will keep you updated. And with me again, my amazing co-host partner in crime, Alex Wilhelm.

How are you doing, sir? Happy Sunday. I'm doing fantastically. I love working on us. Sunday because I feel ahead for the week. And the good news for you and I is there's actually lots to talk about. I was a little worried. Start of the year, Sunday show. Is it going to be a lot of us telling jokes? But no, lots of news. I just want to say buckle up because it's going to be nuts this year. I'm just letting everybody know right now. The inside track is it's going to be

chaotic in 2025, which means we've got a lot to talk about. A lot of change is going to happen. And one of the changes I asked Alex to do somewhat last minute was to start sharing our docket publicly with you, our amazing audience, and then to just really show you behind the curtains what we're going to talk about about six or 12 hours in front of the show, which is when Alex gets working on this. This week in startups.com slash docket. This week in startups.com slash docket will redirect you to a Notion page. Shout out to our sponsor and partner Notion, which is where we keep the show notes. And you'll see him building the docket in real time. And what that'll do is you'll get to follow along as we talk about these topics. If you're an insider,

you'll get smarter. And what my big hope, Alex, is that you all will be engaged as producers. We did a really interesting thing in the first couple of years of the show. I was figuring out what the business model would be to pay for the team. Yeah. And we had this concept of anybody could be a producer of this week in startups. And I had crib that from Adam Curry, who was doing that on his No Agenda podcast at the time. And I want to panning that because we had so much advertising, I didn't need the money. And I thought, I'll just go with ads. But the one thing that I think Adam Curry and John C. DeVorek, ah, John DeVorek, nah,

what they got right was they have such an engaged audience. I forgot about No Agenda for a couple of years. And then I started listening to it again. And it's actually quite good. And what I love about what John DeVorek, who I grew up on, he used to write for PC magazine, which was a print magazine about PC. And I always idolized John Devorick, Jim Seymour, all the guys who wrote these columns because I was obsessed with PCs in the 80s. And my dream was to someday be a columnist in PC magazine. And of course, Adam Curry was, hey, it's Adam Curry.

You watched the V. It was a VJ. And I was like, well, that's a pretty cool gig, too. So I love both of those guys. You know, they're like probably a decade or two ahead of me in careers. And I just thought they were great broadcasters and writers. Putting all that aside, it's such an activated audience. And they do something called Value for Values. So you can provide value to them by writing show notes or suggesting stories or making album art and then, or you can make a donation and then they shout you out on the air. I'm not planning on doing that. But what I think is really interesting is that they just take the top hundred people who love the show, like the 0.01% or the 0.1% or the 0.1% whatever it is and they've really engaged them. So that's what I'm hoping to do is take the notie gang, we have notifications turned on and just activate you in helping us build the docket because, hey, you you might see us make a mistake or you might, you know, in the notes, or you might ask chat GPT something and have a great question for us. So instead of waiting for on air to do that or your letters to the editor after the show is published, well, why not show you the docket ahead of time? And so anyway, that's the goal. And we'll see how this experiment goes.

I think it's really fun. And what it's going to make me do, Jason, is use less shorthand. Because sometimes I might write something in an abbreviated form for you and I. Like, I might say trad infra and mean server tech from the 90s in context, but I'm going to have to be a little bit more explicit. And I just want to share with everybody, we went through the permissions that are available for non-staff members on the page. And we're currently set to comments. So you should be able to drop a comment. If you're listening to this, please send me an email, Alexwlaunch.com. If you can or can't leave a comment, I do want to see how it says it's a little hard for me to test with my own account. But would love your feedback there. And I will see

those live as we're going through work. But Jason, there is a story that is bubbling up on rich person Twitter, and I need you to explain to me what's going on with Vail and why does everyone hate the CMO? I've pulled their earnings. I have looked into this, but it seems very strange. So give people a taste of ski Twitter. Sure. There was this very innovative thing that happened a couple of decades ago, which was the season pass for skiing. Now, if you were skiing in Wyndham, like Scott Adams, he lived in Wyndham, New York. And I used to ski there, you could get a season pass. But then Epic and Vell resorts put together a consortium of mountains and they bought a bunch of mountains. And you could buy the Epic Pass and there's a

competing one, the Icon Pass, and then there's another one called like the Indy Pass, I think. These all costs $300 to $1,000 and it means unlimited skiing. Okay. But what it meant for the mountains were they got to take the money in advance. This is a very important note that anybody who's an entrepreneur understands why this is important. Cash flow. And secondly, subscriptions. So at the beginning of the season now, Vail resorts or any of these ski seasons,

ski companies get all the money in advance. I have to buy my ticket, my season pass, I think by November or else they stopped selling them. So you can't go skiing in January. It's not going to go for a week. I'll buy the $600 pass. No. If you snooze, you lose.

If you wait to the mountains open, you then have to pay per day. Lift tickets today in America are $150 to $300 per day. You're only on the mountain from 9 to 4. You might get like four hours of skiing in, you know, based on parking and everything. So you're talking about it's costing $50 to $100 an hour. You have a family go out. It's $100 a day to rent skis.

It's absurdly expensive. This is a elite, rich person sport. But you buy the season pass, a local one for $300 and you own your skis. you buy a season rental. Season rental for my kids, $150. There's lift tickets for $400. So I'm in for $4.50. Yeah. Yeah. They've ski, I don't know, eight days so far. I'm going to do a spring season for another five days. They do 12. They do 15 days. Hey, for $500. Pretty good deal, right? Such a good deal that now too many people buy these passes. And there's no incentive for Vail Resorts, which owns the Epic Pass to sell less of them. Because they get all this money in advance. It's all guaranteed. So if it's a bad season, let's say it's warm and they don't get as many ski days, it doesn't matter.

All the money comes in advance. They get to sit on your money, make interest on it, and they don't have to take loans out to run it. Anyway, cash flows the business brilliantly. But there's two problems. Number one, Vail is a cheap-ass organization in my estimation. They made a couple hundred million dollars,

and they're fighting in Park City, which is their premier location, really, or one of their premier locations, with the ski patrol. When I found out what ski patrol gets paid, it's less than a nanny gets paid. It's less than a housekeeper gets paid. It's not that there's any, I'm not saying anything derogatory about that, but these are, you know, serious professionals who go ski and rescue you if you get hurt. 23 bucks an hour they get paid.

They're asking for 25. This cheap Vail resort, which has hired, according to what I've read online, the chief marketing officer from Comcast, which is one of the most hated organizations for trying to unsubscribe, you know, and just known for terrible customer support. So Vail has the worst. Vail Resorts, which run Epic Pass, has the worst customer support, and then they're at war with the people who run the mountain. The lines were extremely long to get up the lift. The lines should move bristling, and why were the lines long? They oversold Epic Passes like they always do. It's a holiday.

And they had to shut down multiple lifts because they didn't have their ski patrol. Not having ski patrols like, I don't know, like not having your ambulance corp. So look at this chaos. People are furious. I think there's going to be many lawsuits. Anyway, none of this matters. It's all the 1% or problem, but there's a lot of startup lessons in this insanity.

Good ones and bad. The Epic Pass was like unlimited skiing. So I've skied 17 days. Now I go out for an hour and a half, but I couldn't do what I do, which is skiing for an hour and a half a day if I had to pay two or $300 a day because it just wouldn't make economic sense

to do six runs for $300. But if I can buy a pass, and if I go out for an hour or two when it starts raining or it's too windy, I can just come home. Yeah. Let's talk about prize picks. It's the best way to get real money action while watching your favorite game, which for me is the Knickerbockers. Yes, my New York Knicks. It's simple, it's fun, and it keeps you locked into the action. Here's how it works. You register, you make a deposit. I did that through PayPal, easy, peasy, lemon, suezee, and then you pick more or less on two to six players and their stats. So, for me, it's basketball, but you could do football, baseball, you name it.

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twist to get $50 instantly after you play your first $5 lineup. That's right. 50 bucks guaranteed. You don't even have to win. Price picks. Run your game. Anyway, long story short, incredibly innovative to do the Epic Pass. Incredibly cheap. This is a terrible organization that has run horribly. Yeah. They are cheap skates. They have horrible food on the mountains, horrible parking. They treat their staff terrible. And it's kind of like Comcast was for cable modems for some period of time where everybody hated them. Or Verizon or the Wall Street Journal trying to cancel your subscription. just a very non-customer-centric organization, but that has an incredible value prop.

So I'll leave it at that. I'll throw this thing because I saw this before I saw your tweet about it. And I was like, okay, this is funny to me. I grew up snowboarding. I grew up in Oregon near my bachelor. I've been to Beaver Creek. I love the mountains. Hell yeah.

And then I looked up their earnings. And I was kind of curious. I'm like, are these companies struggling financially? Is this actually a burden on them? And the answer was no. They paid a $2.22 per share cash dividend, bought 20 million of their shares back last quarter, and they're expecting to have total reported EBITA in the current fiscal year

Jason of about $900 million. So I think they can afford $2 per hour to their ski staff to avoid a PR catastrophe. That's the thing. They didn't just shoot themselves in the foot. They shot their brand in the foot. What a mess. Well, now people are saying we should boycott epic next year and go ICON and use the icon mountains and teach a lesson.

I don't think that'll work because they made these passes so cheap and then people might live near, you know, one of the other mountains. So they kind of have in some ways a lock on these things. But I do think if there are ambulance chasing, clas of action lawyers out there, may I point you to an incredibly juicy target, which is Vail Resorts, the company, the stock ticker is M-T-A. Oh, M-T-A. I looked at that up before.

M-T-N. And let's see, five years. I'm looking at the five-year stock. It's down. Yeah, you bought the stock in 2020. for $272, you've lost half your money. You've lost half your money. So this organization, their stock price tells you that they're mismanaged and not run well, I think.

Yes. And they probably should, there should be some stock shareholder lawsuits here just based on the just utter incompetence of this. There should be a no vote. And listen, I have an epic pass for, I don't know, six, seven years and I love it. But this is a terrible organization. It's a disgrace. Discratsiod, as we say.

in Brooklyn, disgratziad.com. I own the domain discraziad, and I am going to redirect it. I don't even know how to spell

that word, but you should redirect it to Vail's IR page. Well, it used to be that Discratia D-I-Z-I-A-D-com

I redirected it to Jake Paul after the Jake Paul Tyson match, which I thought was a fraud. A literal fraud. I don't know if I'm correct or not,

but I'm going to take Discratsia dot com. Disgrace. And I am Jake Paul. You're off the hook. VAL Resorts, you're on the clock. All right. So I want to start with something very optimistic. We have a lot of actual hard news to get to, but just before we jumped on air today, a really interesting interview with Sam Altman dropped business week. Jason got him for a very deep on the record interview. We're going to talk more about it later on in the week. A.I. But I want to drop some sunshine in your lap by pulling out this quote about fusion.

So Bloomberg is talking to Sam Malman, hey, you know, what are we going to do about chips? What are we going to do about energy? And Sam just shoots back and if you're watching the video, there's the text, but I'm going to read it for everybody. So energy, Sam says, fusion's going to work. And then Businessweek says, on what time frame? And here's Sam Malman.

Soon. Well, soon there will be a demonstration of net gain fusion. You then have to build the system that doesn't break. You have to scale it up. You have to figure out how to build a factory build. A lot of them, you know, regulatory approval. And that will take, you know, years altogether. But I expect Healian and other companies will show you that fusion works soon. That, Jason, would change the world as much as Chad GPT, if not more.

Yeah. And Sam Altman made a bet on a fusion company, a very large one on helium energy. Yeah. And it was disclosed. It was a personal one. So I don't know. But my understanding is he went all in on this. He might have made like a nine-figure bet, like a hundred million dollar bet.

Yeah. So, you know, you can talk. to a bunch of folks. Some people think the fusion timeline is a decade. Some people think it's five decades. The truth is, China is approving a massive number of not only nuclear power plants, but coal power plants and solar, and they're forcing EVs. So you got to go after everything. Yeah. Hopefully the United States can get past the grifting, the virtue signaling, and just all energy matters. All energy sources matter. Just go after everything. Because what's happening is, even if you don't like fossil fuels, the United States is leading along with some European countries

in terms of the reduction of them, clean air, et cetera, we're going to solve all these problems. So a little bit of fracking, a little bit of oil offshore drilling, I'm not worried about because you have the natural counterbalance of technological innovation. So I do think we want clean air and clean water and we don't want to pollute, but you don't have to sweat some amount of fossil fuels because solar is so cheap. Yeah. And nuclear is getting approved, maybe not by our country as fast as we like it, by emerging markets.

And there's a belt and road concept that China is doing. And what it basically means is spreading influence by giving people resources. And that belt and road goes through Asia to Africa and back. Yep. And I think they have 150 nuclear power plants outside of China they're building. Oh, wow. That's a lot. This is where you could really spread influence.

If you want to spread influence, the United States should be the leader in nuclear and then obviously fusion like we are for EVs and batteries along with China. And we should be trying to sell these things and get unlimited energy for everybody. I'll get off of my stump speech here. And thank you for coming to my tip. I just want to throw in that people often underestimate how much oil the U.S. produces when we discuss this topic. So I just pull up some data from the government in 2023.

This is about a year old. We produced 22% of the world's oil, which is double the number two country, which was Saudi Arabia and then Russia's number three also tied 11%. How is that possible? Because we were sitting here 20 years ago in the early 2000s, everybody's talking about peak oil. We're going to run out of oil. And there is going to, remember the peak oil discussions? Oh, yeah. Documentaries.

It's going to throw society into this cataclysmic thing. Then what happens? You find more oil. You figure out ways to clean oil. You get solar going. You get batteries going and everything works out eventually. So here's the chart. Look at that.

So this is a chart showing U.S. oil production from 2011 through 2022 when it doubled. Going back to the 1900s, we produced very little oil. It peaked originally in the early 70s and then declined through 2010 roughly and then shot up to all-time record highs in the last couple years. Shale oil, fracking, offshore drilling, better technologies, deeper wells, pick your poison. but the point is the U.S. is on top of a thing that we didn't really want to be on top of, but lights need to turn on as Jason's Christmas tree once again points out to us today. We are going to move into a golden era of abundance.

We're kind of soaking in it right now. It's just very hard to appreciate it. The human mind is designed to look for bad news. We have a bias towards negativity. Why do we have that? I've said it a million times on this program. the people who were conservative and scared and anxious didn't cross the river and get eaten by the crocodile. So in our DNAs to be conservative, to be scared.

But you know, one of the things that Elon said to me 20 years ago, we were on a flight together, we were going to do something. And he said, you know, it's really interesting to me how much people overestimate the downside risk. And he was about to go bankrupt with Tesla. And he said, you know, like the downside is I go bankrupt, but I can only start another company. And so it's not life or death. I mean, he was worth a couple hundred million, maybe 100 or 200 million at that time, you know, from PayPal and whatever. But he had poured it all into these companies and that always stuck with me. Take more risk. Take more risk. Now, you look at his personality. He takes out a lot of risk, right?

As a society, we are programmed in our DNA to not take risk. We should be taking more risk. So to Sam Walton's credit, putting $100 million of his own money, if he's worth a couple of billion, and now he's worth maybe $10, $20 billion, depending on what you think, Chatschipitos, I mean, it's a worthy bet. If it's a 1% chance it works out and we have unlimited power, well, that was like, if it's a 1 in 1,000 chance, you make that bet. Yes. So people's minds are not designed to do this. We are in the age of abundance right now as we speak. the fact that we as a society can complain and handring about the topics that we are obsessed about in this country is part of our privilege and the abundance we are living in.

That doesn't mean they're not real problems. That doesn't mean people aren't suffering. It doesn't mean horrible things don't happen in the world. But let me tell you, there's a reason why everybody in the world wants to come here. Still to this day with as problematic as things can be. All right, founders, let's be real. finding great developers is tough, especially when you're trying to run and scale your startup and raise money. All of this leads to you having slow product velocity, but here's the good news.

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What's fact, to explain what factorialio is? Factorio is a factory building game. It is essentially the OG factory building game. Yeah, I'm still obsessed. I'm playing a 25x science game if you know what I'm talking about. But the thing is, whenever I run into a problem, I try to finangle with what I've built. And every time I do that, it's wrong. No, abundance mindset.

If you're short on something, go build 10 times as much as you need. And I keep having to teach myself this lesson. And in fact, it was oddly abundance pilling me. So shout out to the team over at Wube. All right, Jason. So lots to talk about today. We have AI taking on the healthcare task world. We have startup shutdowns.

UPS and how to handle rural deliveries, the ups and downs of online engagement via a chef in San Francisco. Where do you want to start? She, you know what? I think the Rokana one dovetails with what we were just talking about. So maybe this lady will make you picnic. All right. So Jason got into a conversation with one of California's congressional group,

The well-known Roe Kana, he is the representative of California's 17th district. Sunnyvale, Cupertino, Santa Clara, parts of San Jose. If you don't know why that matters, well, Sunnyvale is where Yahoo was based. Cupertino, of course, is where Apple is. Santa Clara is another big tech city. So Ro, Jason, is probably the most visible congressperson from Silicon Valley. Is that fair? I would say so.

And he is a friend of the All In Pod, where we talk about politics a whole lot. And he spoke at one of our events. I think it was two years ago. did the All In Summit, and I think incredibly highly of him. He's on the left, but he's kind of a centrist and he's very common sense and he's focused on what matters. And so he started talking about UPS closing facilities. And this caught my attention because we're $36 trillion in debt as a country. And he says in this tweet, UPS plans to close around 200 U.S. facilities, including in places like somewhere in Ohio, Iowa, this will hurt rural businesses. We need federal incentives and regulations to keep shipping centers open in rural America. We need a rural new deal. And I just thought to myself, do we? And I wrote a little bit of a response to it, which is, you know, I'll just summarize it in my own words.

Yeah, please. I chose to live in a rural area for the first time in my life. I've always been a city dweller or, you know, infill areas, you know, San Mateo outside of San Francisco, which is still a city, really. but it's kind of like a Bukala kind of city, Brooklyn, New York, city, Manhattan, etc., Los Angeles, Brentwood. But now I live on a ranch in Austin, which is about 30 minutes outside of the city center. And the tradeoff you make when you move outside the city center is you get less services, but you get more land. You lower your cost of living massively, but you give up the fact, and the thing I miss most is San Mateo has 200 Asian food restaurants, my favorite cuisine. and I can't order

ramen, Korean, sushi rolls, sushi, you know, Korean barbecue, soba from restaurants that are dedicated to those specific dishes. Yes. And I can't get them to my house in 20 to 40 minutes. In fact, all I can get on Uber-Aids to my house right now is, I kid you not, Carl's Jr., McDonald's, and Starbucks.

All right, well, that's the American trifecta right there. You can clog your orderies and get the jitters at the same time. What more do you want? know, I have to come up with a solution for this. I might get like a chef to come twice a week and prepare some meals. I don't know what I'm going to do. It's a little bit of, it's the only downside, but I have a couple of dozen acres all to myself that I can hike on. Right. And so I think this idea that all taxpayers should subsidize me out in the hill country, uh, you know, in the, in the, in the ranch land of Texas by putting up a couple of ramen and sushi places that I love would be ridiculous. And so he sent me to a substack. I looked at it. I was like, you know,

honestly, this poor, you know, entrepreneur living on the sticks who has to pay very little money to live out there. Cost of living is dirt cheap, land, etc. I feel bad for her that she's got to ship her items and she's got to drive one hour to go to a depot center that doesn't take the exact size box as she wants and doesn't have the, it's an inconvenience for her. And I just thought to myself, you know what? Raise your prices. If your product's good enough, it takes an extra day to get there. But we can't have every person whose business takes a hit or has to drive an hour. I'm sorry, we don't have the ability as a country anymore to subsidize everybody. The federal government should not be solving these kind of problems. So I just respectfully, and I used

the word respectful of government, I was disagree with bro. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or your thoughts on all this. All right. So I did, I had to do some research because I had not looked into UPS's business in a long time. It turns out, and this was, to my surprise, Roe's actual post was about an article from March of last year. So, first of all, we're going back in time nine months to when UPS announced this. UPS as a company is doing quite well. It is changing up its business, Jason. It's selling off parts of itself.

It sold off coyote logistics to a company called RXO. So it's currently in a mode of curtailing unnecessary activities, working on profitability and trying to invest in automation. We've talked about it's on the show before back when there at the port strike or they're threatened port strike. So this is something that we are familiar with. Now, when it comes to subsidizing companies so they keep open facilities in rural areas, I think we can't afford.

So I tried to figure out where rural money comes from in the U.S. And it turns out that the USDA, the Department of Agriculture, has a rural development group that does a whole bunch of different things. And the USDA, the last time I checked, the federal spending data, spent about 4% of our money. So it's a fraction of a fraction of a fraction. So I would say directionally, I agree. We spend too much money. We need to spend less.

But I think that when it comes to rail and delivery infra, we probably unlock more inside of the heartland than we lose by subsidizing them. Now, of course, it could be a boondoggle. UPS is a private company. I don't want to just give them tons of money for no reason. Jason and I are both capitalists. But in this case, I was sympathetic. The problem is, and I know this is the flaw in my argument,

everything probably has a reasonable argument for it. And so it's hard to cut money without stubbing some toes. If this was a profitable endeavor for UPS, they would not be retreating to a smaller number of centers. So if they thought there was a business opportunity, they would do that. And this area is serviced by USPS, the United States Postal Service, which is already subsidized. I mean, I think we lose a lot of money on that already. But that's not as good for, you know, maybe they don't, they don't.

They don't do fast enough shipping. The free market will sort all this out. It is not the government's role to be in there picking winners and losers and subsidizing. It's the free markets. And Amazon is doing drone delivery, which means they can eventually do drone pickup. True. There are self-driving cars coming. And there are self-driving trucks coming.

So Amazon and Zooks will be picking up all this rural stuff in a truck that has no humans in it. And they'll be doing it for half the cost of UPS is right now. And UPS is not the leading shipping company, is it? I think FedEx is larger. Yeah. And then I think Amazon has their own delivery now. They don't just rely on UPS. They have their own drivers.

So we have the most amazing, vibrant, competitive logistics industry, I think, in the world in the United States. Nailing product market fit is every founder's top priority. But once you've got your product dialed in, you need to focus on selling it, especially to big customers. You know, we call them lighthouse customers. Some people call them whales.

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You will get slower service, but you will have acreage that costs, I don't know, $1,000 to $50,000 an acre. Yeah. And you get to live in the most beautiful, unbelievably vast landscapes of America. You make that choice. You have to give up something. And what you're giving up is convenience and speed, but fear not, technology is going to save the day eventually for this. I just think we got to make hard choices in this country.

Stop trying to subsidize it. I say cancel the entire broadband subsidy thing and let people buy Starlink or the other five competitors to Starlink if they want broadband. Enough of this. Okay. And I don't think we should be subsidizing people in the cities either. Okay. No subsidies. Let's slow down on the subsidy.

Everybody's got to tighten the belt. All right. So I will trade you. What's this woman's name? Meredith Nunak Hovins, Barnswallow Flowers, if you want to look it up, in Oscaloosa, that's a town I've never been to. I'll trade you or her business and let it die off

by not subsidizing UPS and cheating that's going to be the end. She just said it would be one day extra, but okay, go ahead. Let's just take the worst case scenario. Okay, sure. I'll trade you her. I will sacrifice her on the altar of my love for capitalism, but if we're going to stop subsidizing her or not subsidize her, then we need to not subsidize you and your friends via the carried interest tax loophole.

Okay, I'm fine with it. Done. Because then we're actually talking about cutting. Honestly, I think we should go to a flat tax. I think capital gains income should just become one tax. Now, I know that's controversial for a lot of people. Carried interest is controversial. It just, I think simplifying it, we get so many gains that would be worth it.

Yeah. All that being said, you know, I do think capital gains and investing in companies is why we have the most vibrant and the most unicorns in the mag seven. or here, but I don't think it would be existential if we change those. So I'm fine with it, right? Everybody's got a belt tighten. If we want to get 36 trillion in debt down to 25. Can I gently push you on this stuff? I have a question for you. Okay. Please. So going through this story, just prepping for our show today, one of the parts, one of the reasons why I love this job, Jason is whenever we broach a new topic, I have to go out and learn things. So I get to kind of

go out and just, you know, poke around. So I found a Hado. Institute website all about cutting government spending, and this is actually data from 2016, but they were in favor of cutting rural subsidies, which would be encompassed things like this, and they said that that was worth about $6.5 billion back in 2016. But the same Cato Institute page said that they want to cut agricultural subsidies as well, which are about $30 billion a year. Now, cutting agricultural, oh, okay, that's political suicide because of the way we handle primaries in this country. It's all political. suicide to talk about any austerity measures.

But if you notice, this whole discussion of Doge, I think Trace is back to, maybe three years ago, we were doing our like concerns or whatever on All In, and Freebrook sort of talking about the debt a whole bunch. And I was like chirping on about it as well. I think Chumot took the other side of it a little bit, like, hey, we can have a little more debt. But then we all realized, hey, wait a like with COVID and like adding a trillion per administration and there's no slowdown. Like so we thought, oh, you know, there'll be a little extra COVID spending. Makes sense. We'll pay it down because we're America. We kick ass. And people are just like, you know what? Yolo, let's keep spending. I think what you have to do is get in office and then engage it. And if you notice, who's leading the charge

on this? Elon Vivek. And a lot of people in my extended circle and a lot of people who are capitalists. And so I think it's going to take business people who realize the danger of this debt. And then people who are in office who are lame duck. Trump is in his second term. He doesn't have to run a third time. Yes. So he can actually take this on. I don't think in his first term, you can take this on if you want to win a second one.

If you want to win a second one. Yeah. If you want to win a second one. And you know what? I heard from an insider that cannabis legalization was something that Obama wanted to do from somebody who was one of his mega donors, like one of his, whatever they call those super super PAC donors, whatever. people who are the super syndicates, you know, who get all these 250K checks together.

The bundlers. The bundlers. I heard from a, you know, a very high profile bundler who was trying to bundle me. I don't like to do that. Sorry, that's really funny. Invest in stores. I don't want to be bundled. Anyway, the bundler said, it was one of my issues.

I said, you know, I kind of feel bad. Like, I think all these kids who are in jail and it happens to be black kids and brown kids more than white kids who are selling dime bags on the corner. And then I see all these white entrepreneurs, I don't mean to make it a race issue, but it is. were getting funded at that time to do cannabis companies. And I'm like, wait, this seems profoundly unfair. Just anybody who's in a nonviolent cannabis thing should be released from jail, obviously.

And they didn't have to happen. But they said to me, Obama can't do it in the first time. He's definitely going to do it in the second. He didn't wind up doing it, I don't think. No. The federal cannabis legislation. But now, all these Republicans are smoking weed and taking gummies and tinctures and everything. And they realize it's not, you know, as harmful as alcohol in all studies, basically, you know,

and all things have downsides. But I would say it's probably well-agreed. No worse or better than, say, alcohol. Most people would say alcohol is worse, I think. If anyone thinks that cannabis is worse than alcohol, come talk to me. I'll give you a lot about this. Actually, the Doge point's very interesting.

The founder of, I think it was Loom, had a viral blog post the other day about how he was trying to sort out his life post-acquisition because he suddenly had all this money. And I just pulled it up, Jason, because he has this great quote about working with Doge. and he was just trying to find himself after the acquisition, and he went to go work for Doge for a couple of weeks,

and after he gets associated with Doge for a minute, the next four weeks of my life consisted of hundreds of calls recruiting the smartest people I've ever talked to, working on various projects I'm definitely not able to talk about and learning how completely dysfunctional the government was. It was a blast. Now, whatever you think about federal government, it's growing efficiency, whatever,

it's very interesting to get that glimmer of information from Doge, because I don't think we know much about it. It's been kind of underwraps for a little bit. I'm very curious, but that gave me a lot of hope that there's a good level of recruitment going on. Jason, you might have more visibility into the back channels and your group text than I do. But it did feel like Dogeville went a little quiet for a bit. And so I'm glad that that tells me there's still a lot going on. I think everything's gone quiet because they have to get these nominations done.

And there was a public, I guess they called her the ice queen or something, the woman who's the stuff. Yeah, she was like, no more tweeting. Because we got to get these nominees through. Just everybody pause on the tweeting. It was the public statement. I saw there was a memo or something. Yeah. And so I think everybody's kind of like, well, we're not even in office yet. We can wait the five, six weeks. And then we'll start putting our stamp on things. So we don't just have nonstop chaos on the intral web. So I think that's what's happening. But I got a lot of people asking me, hey, I want to do this. I want to sell my software into it. I have two software. I have two portfolios. companies that want to help or that I assume want to help. Yeah, one of them has been public about it. Density.I.O., which says, you know, people counting in spaces. And I'm like, wow, this could be incredible. Like, let's donate or at cost or whatever or on the come. You know, we could do it on, you know, like on contingency, measure all the usage of all this office space and then start

getting rid of the unused office space, which is billions and billions of dollars, I believe. Right. And then Deep Sentinel, you know, you got all these crazy security needs at these buildings that nobody's going to, but they need to have security. Well, you know what? You don't need to have dozens of security guards. You could have one. And then you could have monitored, AI-based camera systems where you make those security guards super efficient and we could start a lowering costs there. Now, I know that means some people might lose their jobs or like, you know, facilities might become available. Then they could be available to do other more important work than playing candy crush at three in the morning watching a bunch of cameras that don't change, that AI can

watch for the changes and surface those. So that's Deep Sentinel's the other company that we're Every time I've watched a spy heist movie, the Candy Crush playing security guard misses the critical moment of theft when the Mona Lisa makes it out the back door. So not a big fan of that as a general point. I want to actually grab the conversation by the, by the head here and pull it in a different direction, Jason. Did you see the recent reporting from the Wall Street Journal about the depth and scale of Chinese hacking into American infrastructure? I did not. I mean, I saw it going by on my feed, but I didn't read any stories on it. So educate the audience here. What's going on? So we've all heard about Salt Typhoon, which was the reason Chinese incursion into American

telecom networks that went very, very deep. And that led to the government saying, hey, everybody, make sure you're using the encrypted chat, which people found ironic because the government has often been opposed to encrypted chat that they can't crack. But hey, you know, potato, potato. What's interesting is it seems that there is a consensus rising that Chinese penetration and I would say meddling in U.S. infrastructure has reached a new cadence, a much faster pace. and it's very, very dangerous. And Jason, to put this into geopolitical context, the expectation is that if China was to invade Taiwan to try to take it over, they not only want to block U.S. communications and activity,

but also cause mayhem domestically to throw the U.S. people off their game. So disrupting cell phone networks, water, that sort of thing. It's all actually incredibly scary. And reading through this piece, I was just kind of angry because it seems that given U.S.'s technology primacy in the world, that we should be better on. off. And so I just was kind of sitting here going, what can we do? And then I remembered ironically the launch of healthcare.gov, which was a flop. So when Obamacare came out, they had a website where you could go on and get a plan and they launched it. And it didn't. It failed. And then

they did bring it a bunch of nerds, our friends, to fix it. I think we need something akin to a cybersecurity doge project. Like what if we got all of the smart cyber kids six months, Pay them nothing. Give them a gold star. Because I think Doge has made going to the government, if you're a technology person, politically okay or socially acceptable, or maybe even encouraged.

I think we need a cybersecurity Doge movement because we are not ready for Jack right now. Seems like a great idea to me. It seems like something we need to focus on. I mean, it's pretty obvious that we're getting hacked pretty heavily. And, yeah, we should totally do a Manhattan project on that. And you've got to make systems that are redundant.

I think one of the great things about the United States is when you have 50 different states, we talked about this over and over again. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, we're kind of like South America or the EU in some ways, the United States, more than we are, you know, France or Germany or Canada. We do have like a pretty disparate operating system

going on here in experiment. We really, you know, if you want to take down the entire grid in America, you're going to need to attack a lot of different. different pieces of it. True. So in some ways, that's a feature, right?

It's just, there's not a lot of surface area to take down the entire grid. So single points of failure, there aren't many, but where they are, we should be more and more vigilant.

And this is where technology comes in. I was mentioning Deep Sentinel and Density. . Both of these rely on AI and sensors. Yeah. Cameras, you know, more advanced types of sensors.

Plus, we have drones and all kinds of other things. This is going to be unbelievably effective to put sensors. Mm-hmm. around reservoirs and fly drones automatically, 24 hours a day, or those, you know, robots. Remember we had the dog-like robot that I was $1,600?

We take that dog company, which I want to have them on the pod, you know, and you release 10 of those dogs into the wilderness. You know, you release 10 of those around, you know, some water basin or reservoir to just run around. And then you fly a drone every hour and you put up some sensors. somebody hops the fence with some terrible chemical to pour into our water stream. The dogs are going to catch him. I hadn't even thought of that. Yeah, I mean, that was always the quintessential thriller. Like, there's a great thriller, Black Sunday by Frankenheimer.

And the idea is like a blimp goes over, I'll leave it at that, like the Super Bowl. Yep. To do a terrorist attack, you know, since we have these terror attacks going. The large body of water, critical infrastructure, electricity bridges, etc., skyscrapers, football stadiums, water. These things could affect a lot of people, as opposed to, as terrible as it is, driving into a Christmas fair,

you know, or down a busy street, you can kill dozens, but not thousands, right? Thank God. So, yeah, we could use technology. I mean, those dogs cost $1,600. You know, if you put 10 of them around a reservoir, I think it's enough,

and, you know, five of them are out, five of them are charge a man. It'd be just beautiful, beautiful ways. And the thing I want to say here is, that's not just a, a non-human solution. a better solution and the dogs don't get tired. But I'll just read the paragraph that maybe just kind of get chills. So this is from the journal Chinese hackers had gained the

ability to shut down dozens of U.S. ports, power grids, and other infrared targets at will. And that was according to Jake Sullivan, Joe Biden's National Security Advisor. And then, then Salt Typhoon happened, which was the telecommunications act. We are getting creamed here. And honestly, I love our federated systems, Jason. I love our federated systems, Jason. I love I love the world 50 states. I love that different states have their own policies and so forth. But we're going to have to have unified action, I think, to build up a digital wall of sufficient strength that we are safe. And don't forget soft power. China's in decline right now. Why are they in decline? Nobody's investing in that country. Nobody wants to be an entrepreneur. I heard somebody

talking some nonsense like, oh, they're going to just fire up entrepreneurship again. And I'm like, really if you're an entrepreneur in China and you had your company taken away you worked for a company and you're part of the diaspora of ali baba or aunt pay you saw jack ma get whack essentially just disappear for a couple of years and he goes to do philosophy and paint oil paintings like you know what's up you know he could have been tortured he could have had all kinds of threats he i don't mean to laugh about that i know i said it after you were laughing but yeah you were not laughing at what i was saying but in real time, like, and there's that dog. Jesus Christ.

Every time I see that, I think, every time I see that goddamn thing, I think it's CGI. That looks like the Black Mirror episode. I just, I just, I'm, dude, it looks like, it looks like a chicken that has no head and has been de-feathered in a way. Love it. And it's, it's incredible. I'm, I'm obsessed with this. But that to me is like the promise of what, where this technology we've been talking about

robotics, AI, and connectivity all come together. It isn't just a take away jobs. takes away the worst stupid jobs that we have that we don't need people to do. It's going to emancipate us. Yes. I'm on my technology soapbox today, apparently. But here's the thing, soft power would really help here. If China's got problems with, you know, potentially a civil war happening because people don't have jobs. If manufacturing is moving to other locations, because people don't want to have a single point of failure, which is their right as a country, you know, and they're becoming isolationist, well, if we come in and say, you know what,

Listen, Trump's a pretty, you know, you don't have to like Trump, but he's pretty good at negotiating. I've come to the conclusion. He goes in there. He says, hey, listen, you know, maybe you want a little more investment. Remember China came to San Francisco and they were like that zero percent investment or negative investment, in fact, because people were pulling stuff out of the country, like Russia's experienced. You know what? Kind of sucks to be Russia and China and have people pulling their investment from your country and then less jobs, right? So, we, you know, a little bit of soft power here. Hey, Trump invited Xi Jinping to the inauguration a little bit weird, but okay.

You know, I don't think our president's going to his, you know, coronation, but whatever. I don't think he's invited. And invites an invite. Whatever, you know, if I don't go, it's nice to be invited. Look, you know, I'm not, it was Pete Trump. It was Pete Trump. I'm not, I am not a Trump fan, but that, that's hilarious.

I mean, 60% of his moments, what he trolls. We're going to close this, we're going to shut you down. By the way, do you want to come over for lunch to? Like, come on over. I love it. Fifty first state, Trudeau. It's a 51st state. come genuinely. in Moralago, buy a membership,

half a million dollars. Did you know that Baralago internships are half million dollars? I thought I heard. Look, do you know who always gets paid? Donald. The Don gets paid.

Yeah. So anyway, it would be kind of great to go do that soft power thing again with China. And then you can say, hey, listen, we're going to get investment

going here, a little private equity, a little bit of IPOs, hey, we'll work with you on the TikTok divestiture, whatever it is. Yeah.

How about, um, you stop sending the Penal precursors, they're in Wuhan. Can you just whack those, that syndicate? Which, by the way, if they can whack people for practicing a religion. Oh, they know. They know where they are.

Yes. They know what they're doing. Hey, so let's horse trade. No more fentanyl to Mexico coming to the border. And we want you to stop with the shenanigans, uh, in the hacking. And here's what we'll give you, you know. Can I, can I tell you though? Because you brought up the thing I wasn't going to bring up by, uh, implicitly.

So the idea of the dialogue back and forth. offering something, demanding something, standard give and take between nations. Here's a quote from Liu Peng Yu, a spokesperson for China. Quote, some in the U.S. seem to be enthusiastic about creating various types of typhoons, the spokesman said, referring to the names assigned to the hacking groups. The U.S. needs to stop its own cyber attacks against other countries and refrain from using cybersecurity to smear and slander China. I just, can you imagine what it takes to lie like that?

Like just so, so clearly just lie. I mean, we have to, you know, we do our own escapades around the world. I mean, we were tracking. I think there was a little tension when it came out that Angela Merkel's phone was being tabbed. We had to do some oopsies, yes. There, the NSA. Yeah, it was a little bit of like, hey, sorry, we looked at your text. Sorry.

I mean, she knows we're looking. Come on. She's looking at it. I mean, if she has access to Trump, she's lugging. So anyway, it is an issue. I think soft power wins the day in a lot of this. And the great lesson of globalization is you can take it too far and you cannot take it far enough. There is a very fine balance here where you, you know, you send too many jobs over, you get rid of too many factories, you build a dependency.

And then they get out of whack. So we still want to make cars in our country. We still need to make medicine here, but we still want to import some cars. And we still want to be able to import some medicine. You want to have some jobs done in India, China, you know, Portugal, Canada. and we want some in the United States. So it's a balance. And these geopolitical issues,

whether it's Russia, Ukraine, if you are having some business relationships, the upside of capitalism is the entanglements. No conflict, no interest. If there's conflicts, then there's interest. If we get rid of all the conflicts with China, well, then, yeah, they can roll into Taiwan

and we can roll into another place. And, you know, there's no business person saying, hey, we're Apple. If we get into a fight, you're going to lose all the jobs building iPhones and, you know, Americans are going to have to pay $3,000 an iPhone or not be able to upgrade him as fast. It's going to suck for everybody. There's a lot to lose here. I think the iPhone could be the number one reason. No, we don't go to war with Taiwan. I know it sounds silly. No, no, no. see Apple, those CEOs are going to call BWID and say, can we work this out? Because we're going

to have to lay people off if we don't. There was a metric back in the day that said, like, no two countries that both had McDonald's had ever gone to war. The point being that if you're part of the global economy, you don't, that didn't end up lasting forever, but it's a good point. It was a Thomas Freeman quote. It was a great memorable quote. Yeah, I believe it was Thomas Freeman. Yeah. Well, I used to read Thomas Freeman back in the day. I read hot, flat, and crowded back in the day. I'm very hopeful that you're right. I really do. But I'm, I'm going to be curious to see going back to our discussion about what we can afford and what we cannot, where we are willing to subsidize to maintain domestic production and where we are willing to not subsidize to not have domestic production because we ended up so dependent on China because it was the cheapest most free market way to get stuff built. And if we don't want that to be 100% then we're going to need to make a decision about where to spend. But let's put all that aside, Jason. And let's talk about something that was on your mind, which was apparently a dust dump in the. the San Francisco foodie

Instagram TikTok world. This was a very interesting story and I have all the clips and quotes, but I'm curious, first of all, why did this catch your eye? I think there's something very interesting going on right now,

which is the power of influencers is so great that you can destroy a local business or you can make a local business. And TikTok is kind of the new nerve center for this. Yes. Yelp, sure, people had complaints, you know,

and everything, but there's something about TikTok and its virality that there is too much influence from influencers in some cases. And then sometimes chefs want to stand up for themselves. It gets messy. And I just think it's a sign of what's to come, which is the human brain is not meant to take on a million people, a thousand people at once. The first time I really saw this happened was my friend Josh Harris from We Live in Public when he started producing himself with cameras everywhere 24 hours a day. You can go look at this award-winning documentary. I'm in A if you want to see a younger, Chubby, or Jake Al. We live in public by Ande Tumona. It won Sundance. I'm in the film. I was like kind of a narrator because I was Josh Harris' best friend at the time

or one of his best friends. The human brain can only take so much negativity directed at it. There was this also thing with Gawker in the OTS, has Jessica landed. This, Oh, I was on Twitter that day. Yeah. Yeah, there was this good person. She wrote a joke that was inappropriate, got on a plane. It was an off-color joke. It went viral while she was on the plane. When she lands, there's people from the press on her 12-hour flight waiting for her to land,

and this whole thing has Jessica landed, became a mean. Now, Gawker was abhorrent at that time. They were just really cruel to people. There's a whole litany of that. They also broke a lot of stories early. they outed Anderson Cooper and Tim Cook. There was a lot of weird stuff that went over there. This was one of the horrific things where this poor person was kind of destroyed.

I think they made a documentary out of it, actually, or some other kind of thing between the writer and the woman, Jessica. This kerfuffle that we're seeing here is indicative of the lack of empathy that happens in social media. But it has gotten extremely, extremely. From those days, you know, it might be tens of thousands of people. now it's hundreds of thousands, millions. The stakes are much higher now. Okay. And it happens much faster.

Let's just talk about the story. Okay. So to give a little context, there's a guy named Jeffrey Lee and written up by local media as quote, the creative force behind a restaurant called Jew Ney. It's in the Western Edition. I've never been there. I am not an al-Makasi guy. I'm not a sushi guy.

I don't eat fish. So I've never been. But it's fantastic. I've been. Thanks, Jason. I actually very much trust your opinion on this. So if he says it's good, it probably is really freaking good. Spectacular.

There were two spin-off restaurants that were kind of casual. One was called the Handroll Project. And then there was the Hamburger Project, which opened in late 2024. And that is what we were talking about. So what follows is a 53 second clip from a woman named Catwalk SF over on TikTok, describing her experience at this new restaurant. The SF Chronicle just reported that this spot sold a thousand burgers their first two days of business. So I followed the hype and I got in line.

The menu is simple with three smash burgers starting at 689 for a classic single. and you can upgrade your meal for $35 for little Tsar Nikolai caviar. I started with the loaded fries with cheese, sauteed onion, and HP sauce. I think they forgot the sauce on mine, and I just forget the fries if you're thinking about giving the spot a shot. Here's a look at some very sexy, crispy, lacy edges on the smash burger. I started with a single Wisconsin with sauteed onions, HP sauce, and with butter. This was good, not great.

These are thin burgers. They're giving Oz epic burgers. I'd order a double Wisconsin if I were to do it again, and I give it a 7.2. Here I am getting after the classic. This one has diced white onion and pickles on it. This was really not for me. It was all bread and not hot enough for me at all. I give the classic a 5.1.

It feels like a good review so far. There is a look at what I ate, not a slam for me. I saw a friend from the infatuation as I was walking out, and I'm excited. That is the original clip. And Jason, I thought that the starting point here was going to be much spicier. But that clip... Simple, easy, her personal opinion, she went fast. Now, I don't know if she's paid to do these reviews or what, but, you know, I think

this has become incredibly popular, especially, with, you know, Dave Portnoy doing his pizza reviews and the impact that has on businesses, he can make or break a business, right? So this has become something that chefs are aware of. Dave Portnard had a couple of flare-ups because he gave people low ratings or high ratings. It's very polarizing criticism, as we know from Antoni ego in Ratatatouille is a dicey business. But that one did not seem spicy or not spicy. It just seemed like just a person's impression of the burger.

Yeah, she gave a 7.2 to the first one. And by the way, shout out to her for eating two burgers back to back, bang, bang. I mean, that is, you know you're a food person and you can. Not on an oesmpic. I would have passed out immediately. Yeah, not an o'nosempic. Then the chef in question started to comment on her social, send DMs. And that led us to our second clip when she showed a number of these, Jason, and I think this shows a bit of the response to the response to her original review.

Am I the asshole for leaving an honest review for the viral San Francisco smashburger spot hamburger project. I tried it. and it just wasn't for me. I was there shortly after the grand opening, and they need some time to work out the Kings. This is what the owner wrote to me today. Because someone needs to tell you to grow up, it's pathetic being damn near 50

and trying to have influence over 20-year-old somethings to try to remain some kind of sense of relativity. All the chefs look down on it, and one of us has to tell you. Then he said, I said, instead you're attacking my age and weight. He said, that's just an honest review of what you put out there. Wow. And then apparently one of his kids left like a voicemail for her.

And there's other people that have tried to end with other notes about this guy in question. And it does seem that he's fired off at critics a number of times. And I'm curious where you think Blaine lands here. I think you've tipped your hand from the intro here. But after seeing that, what's your opinion? You know, I think there is a lack of empathy online. When you're face-to-face, you would never say the things you'll say online.

Absolutely. Everybody's going through their own personal journey, their own story. Somebody might have a sick parent. They could have a child, you know, having a tough time at school. They could be behind on their rent or their mortgage. It's hard to be a small business owner. And to be under constant criticism, also not hard. On the other side, it is just criticism.

Sticks and stones may break your bones, but words should never hurt you. So you should be able to, if you're putting yourself out there and you want to be viral and get a thousand burgers in two days, which if there are 15 bucks each, which is kind of what a burger cost these days in San Francisco or a $15 ticket size or a $25,000 ticket size. Sure. Hey, they made $25,000 in two days from a hole in the wall. Pretty good business. Live by the top, die by the top.

You got to be able to control yourself. And I do think, you know, saying things when you're criticizing something like she did, where she kind of frames it as, hey, not for me, or maybe they made a mistake where they're getting the kinks out. I think those are all good caveats to put in there. So the person could be under a lot of pressure. And, you know, I have great sympathy. I saw my dad go have a lot of pressure when the financial crisis happened in 1987 and he lost his second business. She's hard.

And so, you know, I have empathy for everybody all around. My understanding is the chef now has left all these because he's been getting so much hate for trying to counter the criticisms he's gotten. Gosh, I mean, I'm sounding to sound like a softy, but a little bit of grace for everybody here. Maybe a little bit of reconciliation, maybe a beer summit like Obama did where, hey, why does she come work there and make some burgers and work the front? line and why doesn't he make her a three star and invite her to go have Omokasa. That's how I would handle it. I would have invited. Hey, listen, thank you for the review. We appreciate the attention. Sorry, we only got a 7.2. Here's what we're trying to accomplish. We'd love to invite you to come as my guest. If you're into Omokasi, because I do appreciate you giving us a little attention.

If you can give us a second shot in 30 days when we've got everything up and running, hey, you can pay for it or it's on me. Here's a coupon code. Just, you know, show this year. And there's a way to handle it with grace, I guess. That's like jujitsu. That's like taking the incoming and turning it into something that like works out in your favor. I do think, though, that you have touched on something that's super important, which is that it is so easy, I think, to be someone who has never received a lot of online hate. And presume that that actually has no impact on you because it's all digital. Now, in this case, I think Jeffrey Lee, based on everything that I saw, went too far and was a bit of a jerk and should have had.

his wrist sloped firing him, maybe a bit excessive. I thought the reviews were... I'm absurdly excessive. I wonder if he, I think he might be doing a little supuku there where in order to keep the restaurants going and not have them have a problem,

he said, you know what, I'll just resign. Got it. Is he actually resigned? I don't know. He's got ownership in these things. Relieved? But...

Yeah, so... Maybe he just needs it. Maybe he needs a month off to just take a breather. It's a hard gig, right? But I think you know that. But most people don't have your skin. And that's the thing. That's why I'm glad you're being empathetic because we, yeah, the last show we were talking about how you won't close your DMs. And I'm like, close your DMs. And you're like, no, I want to know. I want to know who the anonymous accounts are who are saying this stuff. I have security protocols like anybody in my profile here. If somebody, I had somebody, I'll just tell a little story here. I had somebody docks me based on a picture of like my backyard. This person, I'll just tell a story. Okay. Person is upset because of something I said on the show. They decide to docks me. They decide to put my personal. primary residence is worth $10 million,

what do I know, blah, blah, blah. And you know how they got my photo? They went back two years. When I took a picture of the tree line in my backyard, they reversed him and searched it, and they tweeted it. This is on July 4th weekend. I say to the guy, I looked the guy up,

I Google search him, because I have security protocols. So now I've got to get the security company involved to find out if this person's going to do. jump my fence. Right. Right. Okay.

You know, and I have security. I have guns. I got cameras. I got alarms. I have a security detail. I mean, I got it all. I don't talk about it.

I'll talk about here for a brief second. I finally got on LinkedIn. I look at the company. Hey, that company looks very familiar to me. I clicked the company. I know the CEO. We work for it. Ha ha ha ha ha ha.

I screenshot it. Checkmate. I send it to him. And I say, hey, dipshit. First of all, happy independence day. Number two, your boss and I had drinks. at this conference, played cards, yada yada, and I'm about to email them what you just did.

What do you think their response is going to be to you doxing me? He says, are you going to do that? I said, well, why don't you call me? So I get off the treadmill, July 4th. I say, hey, dumb, dumb. Do you realize how dangerous this is for me? I have kids. I know you don't have kids, and I know you're probably 24-year-old.

And he goes, no, I'm actually married. I just had my first kid. I said, oh, that's great. a blessing. How old's your kid? This is four weeks. I said you got a four week old kid. It's July 4th. And you're doxing me, knowing that I could have my kids get attacked. This serious shit here, kid. And I said, so you're married. I said, I tell you what, go talk to your wife. Tell what you did. And ask her what she thinks is the best thing for you to do. I get an apology. letter from him with his wife, Cece.

Yeah, they're, you think? And I said, consider it lesson learned, water on the bridge. I wish you great success with your four-year-old. I encourage you to have more kids that are a blessing. And next time I see your boss, I'll tell them what an amazing individual you are. And I wouldn't ever mention this again. Wife will pass back. Thank you, Jake.

By the way, he's one of your biggest fans. And I just think, and I'm like, what? Yeah. Okay, so I was with you until that last sentence. Now I'm perplexed. Well, I'm bringing it back to Grace. All right. Hey me. I think sometimes people will lose their logic, et cetera, when they're online too much. And this goes back to We Live in Public. You watch the We Live in Public show, and you see people lose their minds when they're online too much. They say things that are over the line. And the empathy, it's the, I wrote a blog post at the end, you know, two decades ago called The End of Empit.

I think Mike's indicated on TechCrunch at some point. And I just said, listen, you know, the end of empathy is here. You got to really remember there are humans on the other side of this. And they all got their own stories. Now, this sounds crazy for me because I'm a full-contact guy. But the reason I tell you this is, as full contact as I am, you know, I always think about the humanity of individuals. What are they going through?

I just think, what's my worst day? And then I double it and say, what if that person is going through that? And then I just put myself in their shoes, right? And it's a Christian thing. I grew up a Catholic. Yeah. It was drilled into me, turned the other cheek, you know, do on to others. all these great principles that Christ,

and I'm not a religious person. Spiritual, not religious. But Christ has some pretty darn good concepts and ideas, whether he's a historical figure or he is the son of God, wherever you want to put him on the spectrum. If he was a fictional character, like Batman, that's some good ideas. So you don't have to be religious to take some of those ideas to heart.

As we go into the New Year, in a contentious time, I brought the story up because I just want everybody to think about the humanity on the other end And that's why I tweet the DMs I get. That sometimes say horrible things about people because I always want people to remember there's a human being on the other side. And every time I tweet those,

I get 100 other DMs with people saying the nicest kindest things to me. I saw you got those eight DMs. Yeah. He tweeted them. I want to let you know, hey, here's a story of how you had a positive impact on my life, et cetera.

And be kind to each other. Be kind to each other. I think that's where we could end the show. I want to get your take on everything. One tiny little thing about this, because I do not have to have security. I do not have to do a lot of things that you do. And I honestly don't think that I aspire to what it would require to have the need for that. Because you and I are a little bit different in a couple of ways.

But I do have a very private spouse who works in healthcare. And that means she has a lot of patient contact, which means she has very different privacy rules than I do. And she's always giving me a hard. time. Like, don't post that, don't post that. I almost can't post pictures at all because she's so worried about what's in the background and what people, and I've always been kind of like, oh, it's not that big of a deal. Yeah. But your story just scared me straight again. So I'm going to go ahead and go inside after this and give her a big hug and tell her that I'm going to post no pictures ever again, because that is really, really scary. Because I have kids too, man, and there's

nothing I wouldn't do for them. I think people are overall great human beings. True. And even when they have a bad day, I still think they're great human beings. Like this kid who was in this finance company, I think actually is a good kid who had a bad day. Yeah. And if we're all going to get judged on our worst 10 moments in our life, we're all going to fail. And we're all going to fail pretty equally, I think, on average. So when somebody screws up like the chef or the kid in private finance, or maybe I did, I said something spicy about a CEO, and maybe it was a little too person.

and it upset them. You know, like, whenever this stuff happens, I always think, just dial it back. And I always try to be judicious when I say stuff now. Forget the beer summit between the woman and the chef. We need to beer some of you and Palmer Lucky to quash that beef because I feel like it's living over your shoulder. Well, no, it's just only because people keep riling it up.

They keep riling it up. Would I have said the things as spicy as I said them 10 years ago? No. No. Could the press have been wrong in that instance? And I was commenting on stuff that's wrong. It is quite possible. If it is, I, you know, I totally apologize for it.

You know, that's it. Let's leave on this beautiful positive note. And I'll just say this. Don't forget everybody. Jason will be on different country for a bit. So the next show will be on Wednesday. It's going to be in the morning if you're here in the U.S. So you will get to see me before I've had my seventh cup of coffee.

So you welcome. You've never seen that before, everybody. We found the only time that was kind of okay for both of our schedules and y'all. So we're doing our best to make sure that we're bringing you the twist love. So shoot us some notes. We will be on YouTube then. But Jason, fly safe in the meantime and have fun skin. All right. My brother, uh, I just want to say going into the new year, what an amazing job you've done. Oh, thanks, man. All right. Everybody, this has been Twist. He's X.com slash

Jason. I'm X.com slash Alex. We're back on Wednesday morning. Fly safe. We'll see you then. Tootles. Bye, bye.