This Week in Startups - TWiST News: Serve Robotics, High Skill Immigration, and the Trump Trade | E2042

Episode Date: November 11, 2024

This Week in Startups is brought to you by… Beehiiv. Power your newsletters with AI tools, referral programs, and ad network features—all in one platform. Get 30 days free and 20% off your first 3 months at https://www.beehiiv.com/twist Vanta. Compliance and security shouldn't be a deal-breaker for startups to win new business. Vanta makes it easy for companies to get a SOC 2 report fast. TWiST listeners can get $1,000 off for a limited time at https://www.vanta.com/twist Cloud Devs. Building the best remote team is tough, but you don’t have to do it alone. Visit https://www.clouddevs.com/twist for an unbeatable offer on hiring elite Latam talent today. * Todays show: Alex Wilhelm joins Jason to discuss Serve Robotics’ self-driving robots, delivery economics, and building while public with CEO Ali Kashani. Then, the pair dug into high-skill immigration under the upcoming administration and massive price gains in stocks and crypto assets. Alex wondered if the stock market isn't overvalued, full-stop, but both hosts agreed that enthusiasm is hot heading into the new year. * Timestamps: (0:00) Jason and Alex kick off the show (7:27) Serve Robotics' Ali Kashani joins to discuss Serve's latest developments (10:38) Beehiiv - Get 30 days free and 20% off your first 3 months at https://www.beehiiv.com/twist (12:37) Expansion challenges and navigating regulations (20:42) Vanta - Get $1000 off your SOC 2 at https://www.vanta.com/twist (22:19) Business model, future plans, and partnerships (29:14) Cloud Devs - Visit https://www.clouddevs.com/twist for an unbeatable offer on hiring elite Latam talent today. (30:41) Coopetition in the robotics and delivery space (35:16) Autonomous deliveries forecast for 2030 (49:17) High skill immigration and global talent competition (54:19) Leadership styles and labor market shifts (1:07:16) Government's stance on cryptocurrency (1:13:25) Blockchain innovation and tokenizing venture capital * 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 * Mentioned on the show: https://investors.serverobotics.com/static-files/96eeebc1-712f-46fe-9aee-c1242bddea38 https://www.vebulabs.com/autocado https://a16zcrypto.com/posts/article/a-positive-path-forward https://www.longtermtrends.net/market-cap-to-gdp-the-buffett-indicator https://www.npr.org/2024/11/11/nx-s1-5186522/tom-homan-border-czar-trump * Follow Ali: X: https://x.com/ahkashani Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alikashani Website: https://www.serverobotics.com * Follow Jason: X: https://twitter.com/Jason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis * Follow Alex: X: https://x.com/alex LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelm * Thank you to our partners: (10:38) Beehiiv - Get 30 days free and 20% off your first 3 months at https://www.beehiiv.com/twist (20:42) Vanta - Get $1000 off your SOC 2 at https://www.vanta.com/twist (29:14) Cloud Devs - Visit https://www.clouddevs.com/twist for an unbeatable offer on hiring elite Latam talent today. * 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

So the robots have the same kind of sensors you have on self-driving cars, like LiDAR and cameras and more. So they're actually quite smart by themselves. The video you just showed, by the way, I should say that was my brand new car being used as a test subject. So I have a lot of confidence in this. This weekend startups is brought to you by Beehive. Power your newsletters with AI tools, referral programs, and ad network features, all in one platform. Get 30 days free and 20% off your first three months at beehive.com slash twist. 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 $1,000 off for a limited time at vanta.com slash twist. And cloud devs. Building the best remote team is tough, but you don't have to be. to do it alone. Visit clouddeves.com slash twist for an unbeatable offer on hiring elite Latam talent today. All right, everybody. Welcome back to this weekend startups. I'm Jason Kalakanis. And with me, my co-host Alex, Alex, did you have a good restful weekend? How are we doing in Babyland? Tell me. I hosted my lovely parents for the weekend, Jason. So while I did

many family oriented things, rest was not one of them. But good news. My soccer team won yesterday, so I'm wearing my New York, New Jersey, Gotham shirt because Go team. Is it male or female soccer? This is female soccer. So it's the National Women's Soccer League. My spouse and I are big fans. And I don't get to watch a lot of sports now because of the kids.

So it was fun to watch it. But same question to you. How was your weekend? My weekend. Wow. Let me think that through. I had a nice dinner Friday night with my friend Kimball Musk. at his amazing new restaurant in Austin.

I'll give him a plug here. It's called The Kitchen. And I think they opened in two weeks, but I got to dine with him twice this week because we were working on the menu. I cook with Kimball sometimes when we hang out. And we always cook this tomahawk steak together when we hang. And so he put the tomahawk on the menu.

So I highly recommend the tomahawk if you go to the kitchen, Austin, or the pork chop or the duck if you're into meat. Those three dishes are just outstanding. If you're a vegan, go for the cauliflower. They have like a cauliflower that they, I found myself addicted to. They make it like a smash burger. It's crispy in all the little mixing crannies. And I don't know how they do it.

If they use like an air fry or something, but it's so crispy. Amazing. So the kitchen. This food scene here in Austin has been unbelievable. Everything from like fast, you know, tacos. you were asking about tacos. Like there's a quick serve restaurant here called Torchise Tacos. It's a little polarizing, but I like it.

It's like, you know, as far as like an in-and-out burger kind of experience, it's kind of like that of tacos. Really great for tacos. But then there's like a bunch of taco trucks and everything. So I am, and I did a bunch of, I've been doing rucksacking. You know about this rucking? Have you heard of rucking? Well, my brother's in the Army.

So yes, I have. And I'm also a huge fan of this. I have a way to invest. I take it out on pretty much everything. every stroller walk, Jason. So the question is, how heavy is your vest or pass? Yes. I started by using my wife's pack, and I think it was like 10 or 15 pounds, like sandbags or whatever. And that was like, you know, I felt it a little bit, but then I went up to this 35-pound wolf tactical, like manly military-grade rucking vest. And it has weights that come in and out of it.

And I have to say, you know, I'm focused on three things right now, personally, sleep, exercise, and diet. So I got eight sleep dialed in. I, you know, lost the weight and did the Mondriarno, but I'm just trying to eat generally, you know, more clean food, if that makes sense. Less processed food, more clean food. Sure. And then, yeah, working out.

And it turns out, rocking is just so great. So a lot of times when you are text, you and I are texting in the morning going over the docket. And man, what a docket we have today. I, and I'm really excited to talk about it, especially immigration, which I threw in the docket for last minute. But we got a lot of stuff related to this new Trump administration. But the rucking is a great thing, I think, for old guys, over 50 crowd, over 40 crowd, for dads, because when you put on a 25, 35 pound vest, I realized I lost 43 pounds.

So the amount of weight I lost is even greater than the rucking vest. And now when I use the vest, I am exhausted and I realized, no, I know when I was overweight and you can go back and look at old episodes and see me go from this style face to Ernie and then back to Bert from 14 years ago to now. It's just me going yo, yo, yo, yo, yeah, yeah, yeah. But now I'm on the other side because I really like this rucking. I think it's really great. I just walk around my ranch.

I do the perimeter walk, which is like a ranch walk. I don't have a ranch water after. That's a different thing. But, yeah, I think it's going to get me in great shape, knock on wood, for ski season to be, you know, just having your body under this load of weight, but then being able to take it off. So anyway, I highly recommend looking into that. Shout out to, I don't know, if Peter Attia and Kevin Rose and all that crowd are into it. But I'm not sure where I learned about it. I think for my wife, but I think she may have gotten it from Pita, or Tia.

So anyway, really feel great. I'm really feeling like great energy. I feel like I'm adding muscle, keeping well, getting good sleep, scores, shout out to eight sleep. Everything's going in the retraction. I love to hear that. I'm a big fan of a weighted vest and also farmers carriers and just kind of weights in general. But I do have to say, you did go from, I'm cooking with Kimball Musk.

I love my tomahawk steak. Also try the pork chop to 10 seconds later. I'm working on my diet. So help me. I think protein is great for the diet. Okay. I think the only issue I had, and everybody's different, was I would get the snack attack. I constantly had hunger voices in my head, you know, cheeseburger, fries, chicken parm, hamburgers, you know, ice cream, whatever, cookies, just what they call food noise.

So when you go on a gLP, the food noise goes away. And so I now, when I'm off the g-lps, I don't have as much food noise. So something's changed where I don't know if it's just getting all that fat off my body. But yeah, I think it's- Well, either way, I'm stoked for you. And I'm going to eventually end up in Austin the next six months to see my brother. I will demand that we do a ruck walk together when we do so. Well, we'll do the ruck walk, and then we'll do Salt Lake and Terry Black's barbecue.

Two great ones. I can't wait to have you out here. Done. All right. Let's get to the docket. There's a lot to do here. I know we also have a great guest. So let's get to work.

So quickly for everyone listening, we're going to talk to the CEO and co-founder of Serve Robotics, all about food delivery and automation. Then we have a couple notes on the Trump trade latest there. What's going on in the world of FinTech. Also, notes on immigration policy and how they will impact startup founders. And with as much time as we have left, notes on AI's rapid advances, viz, Open AI.

And what that might mean for social. startup and software development. But Jason, let's welcome first our guest to the show. I have Ali Kashani here. Dialing in from Palo Alto. He is the CEO and co-founder at Serve Robotics, which people might recall was originally the Robotics Division at Postmates, which was then purchased by Uber. And then the company was later spun out and is now a public company.

Ali, hey, how are you? Thanks for having me, guys. Excites for be here. So maybe we can start by just telling us, you know, what you are working on. and how close you are to it sort of hitting the mainstream, which is where all these conversations wind up going, and I'm assuming we have some great collateral of your robots at work. Absolutely.

So we are making this shopping-sized-card robots, and their job is to bring you whatever you need, your food packages. It's the last-mile delivery robot. If you go to Los Angeles, you actually see them all over the place. We've been growing about 20% months over months for like almost three years, in our delivery volume, and we are the largest partner on the Uber Eats side in autonomy.

So the robots are level four autonomous. They're moving around in Hollywood and many other neighborhoods in LA as we speak. Define level four for the audience. Yeah, so level four means that the robot is not going to make all decisions by itself, but when it's in its operating area, When it's basically within an environment is familiar with, it can do things by itself. But whenever it doesn't know what to do, it can call home and someone would remotely step in.

Level 5 is the highest level. That's basically sci-fi. And level 2 is your Tesla. You hold the steering. You're in the loop all the time. Level 4 is where you actually hand over responsibility completely to the machine for extended periods of time. And these machines are monitored. And for people who are just listening right now, it looks like R2D2.

It looks like R2D2, if it had four chunky tires, like you might have on a stroller. I don't know if you have kids, Ali. Do you have kids? I have two teenage daughters. Oh, okay. I have three daughters, one teenager and two behind it, but yeah, Godspeed. Teenage daughters, good luck. And these have the chunky tires that Alex, you probably have with your two young children.

when you want to go rolling on your stroller. So for people who don't understand what it looks like, chunky stroller tires with treads, and it looks like a little R2D2 unit, it opens up you could fit. I think maybe two bags of groceries, and I understand the larger one can fit a pizza in it. Is that true?

Yeah, they can fit like four large pizzas, two big shopping bags. They're pretty spacious. So I'm really curious about those acquisitions. We switch to Beehive, and it has been huge four this week in startup. We have this Twist 500 newsletter I've been working on this entire platform where we're trying to find the 500 most important private companies.

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We really love the product. So the company, I know, just announced the purchase of another firm called Vibu. and when I think of serve robotics, Ali, I think entirely of the robots we just discussed. The little key robots that are out on the sidewalks delivering food, but you guys just purchased Vibu,

which is making something called the Auto Cotto, and we have some B-roll of that here. But it's a robot that takes all the avocado as in a Chipotle and then does a lot of the manual work so you can then turn them into guac. How does that fit into what you're working on? And how much did you pay for the company?

Yeah, great question. So we've been more big picture, we've been trying to bring robots to real-life applications. In the case of our delivery robots, they're literally operating on sidewalks and public spaces as we speak. But one thing you learn when you're working with restaurants is that you need to meet them where they are. And they're not just sitting there thinking about, oh, what am I going to do for my delivery? And then what am I going to do for my kitchen? They're sitting there thinking, I need to bring automation and efficiency to my entire kind of set of problems that I have. So we had this opportunity to acquire Vibu. I

known the founder of Vibu for some time. He was one of our first investors, joined our board. So we've had a very close relationship and had an opportunity to bring them on board so that we can offer this holistic solution to restaurants so that we can be the partner that they work with when they're trying to solve these problems because they do have limited time and bandwidth to do this work. So, avocado is great because it actually helps restaurants like Chipotle. They're doing a pilot together, process avocados about twice as fast. Yeah. But there are other things in the Vibos umbrella that we are also going to be working on. So how fast can you scale these robots?

Because I know that the daily active robots for serve, for the on-the-ground sidewalk robots are growing, I think it was 21% in the last quarter compared to the preceding quarter. Will the autocados have a similar growth trajectory to them? I definitely think that would be the case. Now, they're in a pilot phase right now with Chipotle. But if they pass through the pilot process, which is a very well-defined stage-gate process,

Chipotle has thousands of stores in the country. So it's just a matter of manufacturing and scaling it up. Our delivery robots, we have a contract with Uber to deploy 2,000 of them, which we are doing next year. So we could be the largest autonomous fleet in the country next year because of that contract alone. And these operate on sidewalks at a limited speed, I think, slower than humans or about the same speed as humans, five miles per hour. Am I correct? Yeah, it's like a fast walk. not kind of stay with it, you have to put a little bit of effort.

Got it. So five miles an hour-ish, six miles an hour. And there are remote operators, less people think that this thing is going to smash into, I don't know, even if it's smashed into a toddler who has happened to like walk in front of it, it has the ability to stop. And it wouldn't do much damage if it did. I mean, my bulldog would certainly do more. I can guarantee you that.

But talk a little bit about the human in the loop currently. How many interventions do you see? And then what are the nature of the interventions? Is it people still kicking the robot and messing with it? Or is it they've just got to avoid a garbage can that's fallen over on the street? Yeah, you touched on a couple of really important things. So first, these robots have about 3,000 times less kinetic energy than a car. I mean, a really simple way of thinking about it is every time you're getting your car,

to go by a carton of milk. You are really accepting the risk. That car could come in contact with other people, and that obviously could be a really bad outcome. Versus these robots, when we replace that car, we are already making roads safer because we have so much less kinetic energy. Force equals mass time acceleration.

This is a formula of physics that nobody can get away with. These things don't weigh a lot, and they don't go very fast. Exactly. You eliminate death. Death is not a possibility. here with these robots. A bruise, you could potentially get a bruise, perhaps. That's right. Exactly right. So that to me is the biggest safety kind of benefits, but we still don't want to bruise people. So the robots have, you know, the same kind of sensors you have on self-driving

cars, like LiDAR and cameras and more. So they're actually quite smart by themselves. The video you just showed, by the way, I should say that is, that was my brand new car being used as a test subject. a lot of confidence in this. And humans' job is less about safety because they're not there in real time to see everything that the robot does. Their job is to solve that long tail of problem. So when a robot doesn't know what to do, that's when they ask for a remote operator to step in and help. Okay. And they use the remote control, right? Yeah. They basically have a joystick. They can command the robot to do stuff. Yeah. Okay. So, but Ali, so I'm very impressed with the safety features that we've discussed. And I know you guys are scaling it at manufacturing. So

My question is, why aren't we seeing more serve robots out there than we are today? You guys are talking about getting to 250 in LA in the first quarter of next year. Why isn't it 2,500 or 25,000? You know, to get the entire operation and make it commercially viable, make the cost work, the unit economics, it takes some time. It's most this kind of tech cycles, and I actually saw your episode with Skydeo. It's that kind of 10 years it takes from the idea that's super-excife. to when you actually have all the pieces working.

And we're in like year seven, year eight right now. So it's basically that ramp up moment that's happening finally. And now it's been a lot of question about can we get access to capital to go ahead and ramp up. This year we raised about 80 million, most of it after we've been public. So that has now given us the ammunition to start the scaling up. Okay. So now that you have the capital, technology works out, the next two years are going to be a rapid growth in number of robots. How much work is it to add a municipality?

I know you guys are looking at Texas as an expansion route. Is there local regulations a la what Uber had to go through earlier on to deal with, or is it a bit more green field for you guys to expand into? Actually, there are no laws by default that make these robots illegal, and it has to do with the fact that they don't carry the kind of kinetic energy, they don't move at the kind of speed that cars do. However, we've learned from scooters and other folks where we actually try to engage ahead of time.

So we reach out to the municipalities like when we can, came to LA and said, hey, guys, we're going to be coming here. We don't think there's anything against, you know, what we are doing, but we do want to be collaborating with you. And in every time we've actually tried to outreach, try to reach out to cities, they have actually told us that we can go ahead and operate. We have a 100% batting record, basically. So in the case of LA, they gave us initially a letter that said, yep, totally fine. You can come operate here. Over time, we worked with them and put a permit program in place. So there's no legal limits. It's actually much easier to do compared to the other other options. You've flipped the standard

operating procedure, which is beg for forgiveness as opposed to ask for permission. Yeah. And I think this is like very notable in the startup space. When you are coming into a space, you have to kind of read the room, Alex. And the room in this case is Airbnb, Lyft, Uber, and Waymo have and Tesla, and everybody's already come into these municipalities and started talking to them crews about autonomy, about ride sharing. And they kind of, it's a different moment in time in the 2020s now than it was in the, what do we call them, the teens? Yeah, I guess the teens, yeah, it was the teens, teens, and now we're in the 20s, I don't know, but Roaring 20s, but it was the aughts than the teens, now the 20s. So in the roaring 20s, people kind of expect

this stuff. How many interventions per hour do you have to do in Los Angeles in this current test? That's a good question. We don't measure it that way. We actually look at the output in terms of how fast are we getting deliveries done, are we on time, and then is it safe? And then we let the operators decide what they want to do rather than try to track metrics where we would then try to enforce them to not intervene. That's not a good outcome. So instead, we actually look at the output. But there are certain things like crossing intersections. I always want people involved. I want them to be watching the robot, it's really the only unsafe kind of moment for robots, not because the robots aren't safe, it's because the cars aren't safe. So we want people to be

involved in that moment. Founders, do you want to sell to bigger customers? I know you do. You got to get that ACV trending up. And you want to push your churn down, right? Sounds good. But to sell to those big buyers, you need to clear all of these compliance checks. You know that. That means you got to have things like SOC2 sorted out. What's SOC2? It's a standard. And he sure is that company, keep their customer data safe. And if you aren't SOC2 compliant, you can kiss those big deals goodbye. You're not going to land the lighthouse customers.

You're not going to be able to operate at the highest end of the market, but Vanta makes it really easy for you. To get and renew your SOC2 compliance, on average, Vanta customers are compliant in just two to four weeks. It can take months without Vanta, and they automate compliance for GDPR, HIPAA, and more.

So you can sell to bearer customers in whatever markup your startup is going after. Vanta is going to save you hundreds of hours of work and up to 85% on compliance costs. Stop slowing your sales, team down, and use Vanta. Get $1,000 off at vanta.com slash twist. That's vanta.com slash twist for $1,000 off your sock, too. So when you talk about, you know, sort of growing the company, is the plan for you to own and operate fleets or to provide fleets to, I don't know, cloud kitchens, to provide them

to grab or, you know, pick the. other provider, because it does seem like you're an arms dealer here. And I guess the question is, as an arms dealer, do you want to create a nation state and go up against DoorDash and Uber eats? Or do you want to provide them to those players and let them brand them themselves? How do you see this shaking out? I really don't want to make things other people have made. And, you know, trying to build the channels that DoorDash and Uber's and other folks have built doesn't make any sense to me. That's not really very at value. What I do want to create are robots that can exist in human environments.

And food delivery to us is just the first step. So right now, we plug into existing business models. Uber, our first partner, they pay per delivery to their drivers. So we charge them per delivery. And this fleet that we have for Uber is actually shared. So 7-Eleven can tap in and use it. They're also one of our partners. There are other folks like we've talked about like Shake Shack.

So they can all use the same fleet. Now, there are some folks who may want an exclusive fleet. Let's say if you're working with Walmart, we had a pilot with them a couple years ago. In that case, the robot is in their facility and it would be dedicated to them. So now they are paying per hour for those robots. And then the ultimate kind of vision for us is that we would then open the platform for other people to build their own robots on top. Magna.

Do you know Magna? I don't, but that's a brilliant concept here. Tell us to. Yeah, Magna is a Tier 1 automaker, the largest in North America. And they have actually licensed our tech stack to build their own robots. It's very exciting. They're also assembling our robots. So we have a separate partnership where they make our robots for us.

But they are going to use our technology now to build robots for their own application. And to me, that's the ultimate vision for us. Food and food delivery to us is the first killer app. We're building the killer app end-to-end, make it work, proving it that this works, so that other people can come in and use our stack to build other kind of applications. That's fascinating. I want to go back there. I'll lead to the Uber point about how you guys.

get paid a per delivery fee compared to the drivers that get paid a fee. How much cheaper is it for Uber to send a delivery through your robots versus a human? It's a, we don't disclose the price, obviously, but what I would tell you is it is cheaper today, and we are basically splitting the saving with them. So they, you know, get cost benefits from using robots. And of course, you know, that also gives us sufficient, you know, revenue. And then I think over time, as we put more robots out, more folks are going to use the robots. So in a way, Uber is helping us bootstrap the platform so that there are lots of robots out there. And then other folks can step in and also use the same robots.

And Uber is still a large shareholder in the company, if I recall correctly. They are, yeah. Uber and Nvidia are two largest shareholders. They have, I think, somewhere in the 20%, 25% ownership together. All right. I want to talk about one other thing you guys have announced recently, which was a partnership with a drone company to use your robots to bring deliveries to a drone. And I think we have a video of this. I asked this in politeness not to be rude,

but is this eye candy and a gimmick, or is this something that people are actually going to be using in the nearest future to actually get stuff brought to their homes? Well, look, we are starting with a pilot, so, of course, we've got to prove this. But this has actually been a pet project of mine. I've been trying to make this happen, reach that to the folks at Wing, which is Alphabet subsidiary.

and worked with Adam and his team, and we've put this pilot together, which should start actually operating in Dallas in the coming weeks. But there's actually a bigger picture here, which is, again, when you go to a restaurant and say, I want to automate your last-mile deliveries, they're not thinking about, okay, I work with you for the half of the deliveries that are short distance.

By the way, half of all deliveries in the U.S. are less than two to an half miles. So those are the robot deliveries. But they're thinking about all of their deliveries. With drone, the benefit here is that we can do the short distance with the robots, but with the other long distance deliveries, the robot picks up the item, hands it to the drone to complete the delivery. Now, I should explain why the robot is even needed. It's very difficult for drones to get to the restaurant because restaurants are always in,

you know, urban environments, busy environments, there is no dedicated real estate for a drone or even a, you know, self-driving car to show up there and get right in front of their door. We solve that problem. We grab the item because we can go to all the front doors effectively with the robot without any changes to the infrastructure. And then we can take the food to a nearby loading area like the video you just showed. So essentially, Jason could get barbecue delivered to his house outside of Austin from an Austin-based restaurant through this partnership in time. Exactly, exactly. So tell us about bicycles and motorcycles that can drive themselves.

And I'll ask the producers to, I'm calling it. audible here, see if they can find this one. There was a really interesting one. I forgot the name of it, but if you just Google, where you YouTube, self-driving bicycle, self-driving motorcycle, there's probably 10 people working on them. It would seem to me that one of the limitations you have is sidewalks. Sidewalks make it safe, but not everywhere has sidewalks. And so have you started looking into, I'm sure you have, this new technology for bicycles, electric bicycles, and motorcycles slash Vespas, you know, scooters to be able to ride themselves and how close is that technology? Yeah, I mean, the broader question of what is the right form factor is an important

one. I haven't seen a ton of traction right now with bicycles and two-wheel kind of modalities right now because what happens if they fall? I guess that's the, it's a big problem. our robots right now complete more deliveries than even human couriers in terms of percentages. So when we take on an order, 99.9 or 99.8% of the time, we actually successfully complete that delivery. Humans are about like 98%. So we are 1.9 better. But that's because the robot cannot fall down. It doesn't get stuck. In fact, the drive train is designed for the sidewalk. The big wheels you mentioned are an important part of it. It can navigate all the difficulties of a side buck. But in future, when you want to go upstairs, for example, I think you're going to see

new form factor, maybe legged and wheeled robots like that. I'm not as convinced that it would be two wheels because two wheels has its own limitations, but it's probably not going to be our current form factor. So it's going to evolve. Okay. I want to sit on, so I was thinking about what if we put a chair on the serve robot versus having if you had a bicycle act like a serve robot, but is there a future in which there's like a version of what you guys have that I can just take in a bike lane and just sit can go slowly throughout my city because I would love that. You've just reinvented the scooter.

It's the lazy. I want a mobile. You want to throw. Yes. You want him to put a backrest on his robot so that you can get on top of your, there's one of these self-driving machines. It's fascinating technology.

But, you know, the obvious solution here is there are trikes, three-wheeled motorcycles and four-wheel ones. There's all kinds of weird ones you can do. Yeah. Are you looking for an unbeatable deal on senior talent? Well, if so, you need to look outside of your borders. According to G2, cloud devs is the best place to hire top Latam talent.

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and congratulations on the massive progress. I think one of the interesting things to me, Alex, is about this space is there's just so much innovation occurring that there's a lot of seemingly conflicts, but it's co-optition, and it's such an amazingly dynamic space and one that's worth studying for entrepreneurs.

When you have a co-opetition-type market, you'll have a company like this building robots with somebody who builds another version of their own robot, just like Android provides their operating system to Samsung, and they also make the pixel. Then you'll have somebody like Cloud Kitchens, having, I don't know, a certain famous burger joint in them, but that burger joint might also have a direct relationship

with DoorDash, Uber Eats, and swerve, right? So what you see is a lot of overlap. I notice a lot of restaurants are now driving people to their website so they can use the white-labeled version of DoorDash or the white-labeled version of Uber-Eats and they eliminate the service fees. So it's a very interesting space, huh,

where everything's a bit conflict, no conflict, no interest? Yes, you would say? I 100% agree. Our thesis from the beginning was, I don't want to do or make the stuff other people are making. We should find the gaps and try to play in that space because then everybody becomes a partner. So, for example, we don't make a consumer app. So we're not competing with Uber. They're the perfect mechanism for customers to go order food.

Why would we make that ourselves? And I've seen people in the robotic space that have actually decided to make their own apps for the restaurants and for the customers. We stayed clear from that because we want to play nice with everybody. There's a lot of problems to solve, and we could just focus on the white space. What's the average delivery time or the delivery distance right now, ballpark? The robots go about over a mile right now when they completely deliver, and I think from the time we pick up an order to the time we drop it off, takes about 18 minutes on average.

See, I think that this is the perfect app, Alex, for McDonald's and Starbucks. I believe McDonald's and Starbucks are so ubiquitous that they create, become the place that houses these because you have to house them somewhere and recharge. So if you did like a meta deal with Cloud Kitchens, Starbucks, and or McDonald's, you would basically have the country blanketed and a place where if you could co-habitat with them, a place for the robots to get cleaned and to get charged. Yeah, that's like a piece of this, cleaning and charging and maintaining robots. Exactly.

At night, when the robots come home, someone has to clean them, make sure they're in good shape for tomorrow's work. Tell them how good they did. Right. A little pat on the head. I didn't think that Robot Shepherd was going to be a job category in 2025, but here we are. But just to build off Jason's point, though, we're talking a lot about commercial real estate and the decline of malls and what to do with some of these big buildings that we don't quite fit into our current economy. I mean, Jason, why not just turn those into drone depots and then link them to. You know, stores that are nearby.

A store, you know, there's a storefront or two available on every block in almost every major city that can't get rented. See, you take one of those, you gut it, you put a bunch of these robots in it. It's a no-brand. When do you think this, when do you think in your estimation, the majority of Americans and the majority of two questions, majority of Americans and the majority of deliveries will be. done autonomously, either through your service, drones, cybercabs, crews, etc. I think, yes. Yeah, it's a fair question, and we're usually wrong about these timelines because we don't get the exponential part really well.

But I think by the end of this decade, you're going to see people be deeply familiar with this technology. Everybody has kind of experienced it one way or another. Uber, obviously, is really leading the charge. They have eight AV partners now. Weimo, obviously, is on the right side doing a lot of incredible work. We are on the delivery side, the largest on the platform. So I think by the end of this decade, you're going to have this fairly ubiquitous.

So five years, will it be the majority in five years? It didn't line, because we could bet this right now. We could bet low. Yeah, it's fair. I would say there would be majority in areas, like the urban areas we operate. They could absolutely be majority. New York, San Francisco, Santa Monica. You believe the majority will be under five years.

So before 2030, they'll be the majority. I just want to say, I'll be a public company. Right. This is an opinion. More speculation. I've got you gambling. You set the over under. I tell you what, you set 2030 as the over under.

So January 1st, 2030, Alex, you and I will bet it. Okay. Barbecue lunch here. Done. Okay. Limit, upper limit, $100. per person. Okay, ladies are invited.

Tell me, could be sushi, whatever you want. You're taking the over or the under. Oh, I'm taking the, it happens faster, which I believe is the under.

The under, right. Okay. So before January 1st, let's do it. 2030, you believe I'll take the over. That's correct. The majority of deliveries,

we're just going to go with deliveries on, you know, food deliveries will be automated. Hey, listen, this is amazing, great work, and you're going to free up

people to spend more time with their families and do other things and increase safety so that we don't have cars. I mean, a lot of the debts and accidents that have been going on is because, you know, God forbid, like an Amazon truck driver is going too fast because they're, or UPS driver, they're under too much pressure, and they're driving a giant tank, and, you know, they make some tiny, tiny, tiny, minuscule era, and, you know, it's terrible loss of life or somebody gets really hurt. So I think what you're doing is just so awesome for safety. I appreciate you telling everybody about it.

Anything we can do to help you? You're hiring for any sticky positions there, Ollie? Always. Robotics, software engineering, hardware engineering operations everywhere. We are growing really fast. So, folks, please visit our website. There's a lot of jobs there. All right.

There you have it, folks. And we'll see you soon, Ollie. Well done. Good guest, Alex. Was that one of your pickups? I do not recall the original point about it, but I'll take the points. Nicely done. I want to go back to co-opetition because I think that's the exact word I've been looking for when I think about Waymo and Uber.

Because seeing them work together to me on one hand makes so much sense. But on the other hand, I'm like, Uber, are you letting the wolf into the sheep's pen? You know, are they going to take your lunch? Because they do with their own business. But at the same time, they work together, you know? It's a great point. And what you have to do is look at the game on the field. So they'll say, like, politics make strange.

bedfellows, and we'll be talking about a bunch about politics in a moment, it can make very strange bedfellows. You could have Democrats suddenly become Republicans. Cheney suddenly become Democrats. It can cause like very strange partnerships because people want to win is one of the great things about capitalism. And, you know, if Tesla decides, hey, or Cruz decides, we're going on and on our own, we're not going to work with Uber, Lyft, DoorDash. Well, then the other partners are going to say, okay, well, then it's, you know, it's a lot of, an advantage for us to work with them because we get to not have to worry about signing up restaurants or getting people to download an app, man, we could just get all these cars on the road real fast and start making money. And I think there's enough money in this that if, you know,

it's much better for Uber to not make the self-driving technology and for self-driving folks to not try to replicate what DoorDash and Uber have already built and just sell into it. But it does make everybody on their toes. And I think you would not see people maybe signing up to work with each other if it wasn't so competitive. And that's like a great dynamic to have for consumers. Yes, exactly. It's going to be great for you and I no matter what. Even if Uber and Waymo get into a spat later on, I don't care.

I get more self-driving cars faster in an app that I use cheaper. What's your wait time typically where you are? Oh, gosh, three to five minutes. It's really great, actually. There's a lot of Uber's in town. They're super easy to get to. And I live in a relatively accessible part of town, Jason. So there's not a lot of delay.

So Uber is honestly great here. I sit my mom to the airport in Uber this morning, you know? I am where I live out in the hill country in Texas outside of Austin. Yeah, seven to 20 minutes to get an Uber. Oh. If I do an airport, and it's been a major adjustment, I didn't realize how entitled I was. I have been living under this belief that you should be on your way to your destination

within three minutes of making that decision. I never, you know, well, like you, right? Like I should be able to be inside of an Uber maximum five minutes. This idea that you would sit there and look at the screen and wait for 15 minutes for the person to get there is like, what? I live in the burbs. I live on a ranch. I'm 30 minutes outside of Austin. you know, downtown Austin.

So it's a little bit different. And this is where I think self-driving could be really interesting because you could deploy robotaxies, Waymo's, into the, you know, sticks, into ranch country, and just have them hanging out because you don't have to have a human there waiting for an hour for a ride. And so that's going to be part of the magic here

is a whole different group of people who have not experienced Uber Eats, DoorDash and Lyft and Uber as a default are going to suddenly have that as a potential default. And that's really, you know, that bell curve, we'll have the team pull up the bell curve of technology adoption. It starts with the vanguard, you know, early adopters, and then you get the early majority, the later majority,

and then you get the laggards. And so if you've never seen this bell curve, we're now on the back end of that bell curve. We're on the laggards. Like, who doesn't have broadband? Who doesn't have a smart? It's like 10% of people. And so there you have it, folks.

The classic innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards. And then you have market penetration there on the chart. It makes a nice bell curve. And different technologies go up and down the slope at different speeds. I think chat GPT has probably gone really fast on this because students and, you know, parents have found out about it very quickly. in a city, Uber and DoorDash, man, they were almost instant. Self-driving will take a little bit of time. Yeah.

You know, it's interesting you're talking about parking a self-driving car in a certain market or a certain location where there might not be a ton of regular demand so you wouldn't have a human there. That does open up really interesting variations on what the car could be. Because if I was out in Hill Country, I probably won something that's four-wheel drive, maybe has a truck bed or whatever. Sure. And if I was going in.

Sure. But you could also have like a special, like your own like Uber Lux version of Waymo that only had, I don't know, Bentley's or whatever that were self-driving. You could only have those in certain areas. Like, yeah, you could. Yes, Atherton. Parkam in Atherton. Just think your Bentley. You self-driving.

Rolls-Roy says a ride. I mean, I would love to go to SFO and have, you know, the suicide doors open. It'd be great. But it does make for a lot of cool opportunities. I hope people build more than just one fleet of Honda Accords, you know? You ask me to prepare some stuff on this. So the two news items that are, I think, big on the personnel side. Last week, Jason said that one way we're going to track what the Trump administration will do is through the lens of personnel appointments.

Who's in the cabinet, essentially? And the two that I saw, one, breaking news. This is not fully reported out and confirmed yet. But yes, Stephen Miller from Trump administration one. We'll be back in Trump administration two. I heard that he's going to be the deputy chief of policy, I believe. So I will back check that, but he's coming back, an immigration hawk, if you will. And then also Tim Homan is going to be the new border czar.

He was also in Trump administration one. And according to an NPR article that I was reading just before we went on air, he has warned undocumented immigrants to, quote, start packing. So I think, Jason, looking at those two, the lens towards, I would say immigration, both legal and illegal, is relatively negative or you might say conservative. Yeah. I think the laws will be enforced is what we will see happen immediately. So I think the southern border will be closed, as opposed to the last four years where it was open. It's kind of not debatable at this point. And we can argue over the statistics if it was 5 million or 15 million. It's some many millions of people crossed into the country illegally. So then the next step is, okay, well, what do you do about that? Step one is going to close the border. I think we all agree Trump's going to do that. And it's percent of Americans are in favor of that. They want people to come through legally. It's unfair.

And I have a lot of friends who are immigrants. They feel it's profoundly unfair for people to sneak in versus actually going in, you know, legally. So, okay, I get that. The next piece then becomes criminals. Okay, if you're a criminal and you came to the United States or you're high skilled, which would be like the two ends of the spectrum. You got somebody incredibly high skilled and or a financier who wants to invest in the United States. So somebody wants to build hospitals in the United States or work in a hospital as a doctor or nurse, and we need those high-skilled immigrants. I think we all agree, like we should go recruit those people. And then on the other side, if you're a criminal and you beat up some cops like they had on TV or there's Venezuelan

gangs, you know, in Santa Monica that have been caught doing home invasions, nobody's disagreement that those people got to go immediately. Arrests. them, deport them, no problem. Then you got this piece in the middle. And this is what I think is going to be all consuming in the new year. So I'm predicting we're going to have the 72 million people who voted for Kamala and the 75 million Americans who voted for Trump going to war for 2025. This is an early prediction over this issue. I hope we do not see. people being dragged from their homes, families being deported, and then, you know, people taking videos of it and just the brutality of that.

You know, somebody's hardworking dishwasher at a restaurant. I remember my dad in his restaurant, no Americans would take the job. And this was the 80s and 90s to wash dishes. It was all Mexicans who were here illegally. And, you know, people's nannies or how. housekeepers, just people who are in those frontline jobs. If we deport them in some very large way, I could see this being quite chaotic. So I am hope, you know, my big hope is to not have chaos.

Yeah. I saw your chaos. And I've just, you know, I'm basically putting it out there for anyone who will listen. Let's do what we can agree on. Close the border. Let in high-skilled. and get rid of criminals. That's a lot of work, those three things.

And then for the rest of the folks who, yeah, they did break the law coming in here, we need, but maybe they're good citizens and they have the great potential to be great citizens, we can maybe have some grace or thoughtfulness about how we adjudicate their cases. Because this could get a little chaotic. And I know that for some Americans, they feel like they're taking their jobs. And for other folks, you know, they feel like a lot of immigrants feel like, hey, I waited and you didn't. So I get all that. And none of that is wrong.

I mean, in fact, all of that is right. I don't, there's nothing that's not factually correct there or logical. But I'm thinking emotionally. I'm thinking emotionally. I'm thinking compassionately and empathetically. and also for the good of coming together as a country. If we are dragging a million people out every couple of months, you know, families, kids, I don't know if that's going to work. I did hear one interesting idea from a friend, which I'll put as the Tony Shea idea, which is if you're here illegally, you have X number of days to report in, be processed, have your application, you know, processed if you're coming,

here for compassionate reasons, whatever, and then we will pay you $5,000 or $10,000 to go back to your country and get back in line. So you get a little pocket change. The pocket change of giving $10,000 or $5,000, that might seem infuriating to people until they understand that the price tag is somewhere between $50 and $150,000 per person to deport them. Yeah. So it might actually be a 95% savings to just give them a token spending cash. I know it sounds like a big number, five grand to an illegal immigrant. They got paid five grand. They got rewarded for coming across the border.

A way to look at that is what my friend Tony Shea, rest in peace from Zappos, did. When you finished your training, he would say, okay, you did your whatever, six-week training. Here's $2,000 if you want to, we'll give you $2,000 in cash right now to not come in on Monday for work if it's not for you. And like one out of ten people took the 2K. So he pre-sorted people who weren't committed by giving them. them an incentive to leave early. I'm going to get off my soapbox here. I'm praying for the best for everybody, which I know infuriates people, but I have a big heart, and I care about people. I think what you're outlining, and I don't mean this sarcastically, kind of harkens back to

the George W. Bush compassionate conservatism concept, and I don't think there's bad, only bad parallels. I think there's some good stuff to be said. I also, I agree with most of that, But the thing that I'm a little bit concerned about, Jason, is going to make to the high-skill immigration point. You and I were both reading an article earlier today from the last day of October. So what is that? Just about two weeks ago. Yeah.

That was discussing how Trump's closest advisors were working on ways to limit also high-skill or legal immigration. And one of the things that was called out by Wall Street General reporting was the potential to decrease the number of green cards that are given out for technology workers. And so I'm going to be very curious to see which side of the Trump, I don't know. 1.0 or 2.0. I think it's a way we could frame it. I like that. 1.02 crowd, which would be Steve Bannon.

Mm-hmm. And what's the other guy's name, Steve Miller? Steve Miller, yeah. He's the one who said America is for Americans and Americans only. And I just thought you're like within spitting distance of the Statue of Liberty. and you're in New York City, the capital of immigration in the United States.

You know, historically. I mean, maybe the border is, more people come across the border now. But historically, you're right by Ellis Island where my both of my... Yeah, all of my ancestors came through, and my grandfather got arrested so. James John Kalakanis was brought a lot.

He was a chief engineer in a merchant marine. He went through Ellis Island 30 times. Oh, wow. his hit the hit the what he was carrying in those ships at the turn of the century when he came here and they misspelled our name wrong at Ellis Island it's with case not sees was humans so he came from Venezuela Ireland Italy Spain bringing in you're tired your poor yeah but the thing if we do limit high school immigration though Jason my read is that it's going to be harder for founders to get green cards to come to launch your Y Combinator you build here and this is going to be just great new for Canada, Mexico. So it's interesting you bring that up. Canada would be the waypoint. It has been, and I, you know, over the last 10 years,

anytime I go to Canada, I've had multiple people say, hey, please send us people who can't get into the U.S. Like, there's literally somebody from the government in Vancouver said to me, Jake out, big fan, thanks for coming. I was there for a visit. I had a nice lunch with the politicians there who were trying to drum up business for Vancouver. Hoover versus Toronto and Quebec, et cetera.

And they were telling me that if I emailed them, I could CC the person who was trying to get a visa and that they would zip, zip, zip, try to make it happen. And I was like, wow, I've never heard that in America, but okay, they said they're shutting the border in Canada. I think Trudeau. Is it Trudeau? Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. He said they're going to shut the border for a couple of years. I guess the populist movement is there as well. So something interesting. We do have whatever the United States loss is in bringing founders over here will be Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Dubai, Doha, and Saudi and London and Berlin's gain. You know, I just saw a very interesting story. Speaking of Saudi Arabia, Jason, I didn't actually throw this in the show notes, but I'm just going to bring it up because I think it fits into your thesis about the Middle East. CNBC reported this morning that Silicon Valley's general catalyst just made their first investment into a Saudi Arabian startup.

And that, to me, felt a little bit seminal. Actually, it wasn't just G.C. It was also Bain Capital's first investment into Saudi Arabia. The company is called Lean Technologies. And I think it raised a series B worth $67.5 million. But I think that just goes to show the global competition for talent, for startup capital, for funding, for building. and I just hope that as we change our immigration policy, we keep the door very open for everyone who wants to come here

and start a company, start a business, and not to bring it up again, but I like the green card idea, and I would not mind seeing that. To your business plan. Or if you, they literally not just put it on your degree, the green card. Yeah. If you get a term sheet for over a million dollars,

staple it to that as well. So clip this and send it to Trump and to my friends who are helping Trump. would be a great idea. Am I think... Some of the Jason, I know on all-in some of the folks there are going to be doing

a little bit of work for the Trump administration and I think we're sorting out what capacity that will be. Does that stretch to you as well? Or are you not in that... No, or are people that are going... No, I'm not working on anything

with the Trump campaign, nor have I been asked, nor would I. I am rooting for Trump to do a great job. I am hopeful that he has evolved since his first term, and I am genuinely rooting for my friends to be a great influence and to see as much of Trump 2.0 and as little as Trump 1.0 as possible.

And the way I define Trump 1.0 is just chaotic and divisive. Whether you believe the media made him divisive or he's just naturally that way or people don't get his jokes, whatever it is. I just don't want to see the chaos during his first term replicated in the second term. Because that was bad for everybody. The country did not make progress. where I don't want to see the country and people wasting time on issues that we essentially agree on, but we're like arguing and fighting over, you know, the little details of the margin. So I am rooting for him.

I don't think the other guys, I think they were pretty clear that they don't have plans to join the administration. It does seem like, you know, maybe asking for advice. That's kind of what I meant, an advisory role, because I was going to ask if you were going to have input on, pushing our favorite green card policy forward. Because if you did, I didn't mind. You know what I'll do is I'll write it up. Based on what I said today, I'll write a blog post and then I'll send it to my email list. I have a substack, calicannis.com.

And then I have another, or you just go to calicanus.com. And then I have one that's like I was going to use for just my thoughts after each episode of All In. So I have like a Jason's All In newsletter. So maybe I'll put it on that one as opposed to my Jason on startups. but I have two or three mailing lists over at Substack. I don't know how I separated them. Well, fine.

I'll be in the show notes. I'm just hoping that voices of reason can advocate for high school immigration and more of it. I'm a little bit worried by the news reports of that we've seen. It does seem like these would be the spiciest people, right, who would be going for the most extreme interpretation of, you know, we're deporting everybody. And, you know, this is one of the big challenges with Trump as a leader. is, you know, he says things in such a bombastic way. And then we see, you know, if Peter Thiel's correct, do we take them literally or seriously? In this case, I don't actually know if it's

literal or serious. Yeah. Nobody's, I can't seem to get that piece of information. Are they literally going to take 15 million people out of there? Or should we take it serious that they're going to shut the border and do what I described, let in high-skilled, kick out people who are criminals and then be compassionate, thoughtful with everybody in between. Because I really do not want to spend the next year or two with the entire world watching the United States at war with itself over people's nannies, housekeepers, dishwashers, busboys, carpenters, you know, construction workers being dragged off work sites during their shift. That's going to be crazy.

Like seriously crazy. Highly inflationary, too. If labor prices go up super dramatically inside of this nation, if we lose 10 million of our workforce, that's going to be tough. I mean, that's an interesting point. Every single industry.

So I have two thoughts on this, and I don't think anybody can tell us what's exactly going to have, but it's great that you brought this up because I was literally thinking about this on my hike. If a bunch of white-collar Americans are going to lose their jobs because of AI. You know, you're not going to lose your job to AI. You're going to lose it to somebody using AI. So some video editor can edit, you know,

10 times as much, you know, or takes them one-tenth of the time to edit it. You don't need as many video editors. Where are those extra surplus video editors, journalists, writers, researchers, whatever going to do with their time? They might actually be insented to go work at, you know, a chip fab or a Tesla factory to make cars or to take plumbing jobs, electrician jobs, and actually get a trade job that pays twice as much and has a pension. There could be a lot of interesting maneuvering from the white collar to the generation tool belt, as we talked about. Yeah.

So that would argue for maybe it's perfect timing to close the border, not let us many people in and give Americans first shot at those jobs, what I'll call frontline jobs. That doesn't mean their entry level. Frontline means, you know, in the kindest interpretation, like blue-collar jobs, I get. But frontline jobs. You're out there doing stuff in the real world. Yeah. It's going to be, I don't know, what do you think of that theory, that that could be what

people are thinking. White collar jobs are going to be going away. We want to save the plumber, construction. construction worker job, dishwasher job, waiter job, chef job, short-order chef job for Americans. And would Americans take those jobs? And then you would have to have businesses raise those wages in order to get Americans to do it. Because you don't pay, you know, it's not like you can pay somebody 12 bucks, 15 bucks cash for those positions or 20 bucks in cash. You're going to need to make it a $35, $45 an hour job to be a dishwasher. In Los, I remember a restaurateur telling me,

in San Francisco, they were paying $40 an hour for zero for a dishwasher. And the last two hours were in the overtime bonus, which were $60 an hour, one and a half times pay. Because I think in San Francisco, if you go past 10 hours in like, you know, typical 12 hour shift at a restaurant or, you know, if it goes from 8 to 10, whatever it is, the last two are going to have to be time and a half or something. So I think it's very interesting to think about how we'll have different labor demands in the future. But I think it would be very hard to get industries to accept paying double or 3X, but they're paying for labor today if we had a shift in the workforce that you're

describing. And so I wonder if going back to our interview and the AutoCado machine, if we're going to see at once, you know, automation reduced the need for white collar jobs and automation reduce the need for blue collar jobs. Because then, yes, having fewer laborers does ameliorate the impacts, Jason. your point. But I don't think it solves the core issue of just needing fewer humans to do the work. Right. Because you're getting, hey, right now the guacamole, half the guacamole work or more, two thirds of it, like the guy was just spicing the guac. He was spicing the guac. He didn't need to

peel it, cut it, get that, you know, whack it and get the seed out and scoop it out. Man, that thing did a lot of the work. So you're right. And then if you don't need delivery people, zipping around on bikes in Manhattan, they're going to start using little R2D2s. Yeah, maybe that's what happened as, you know, happens as well, is we just think less manual labor. And then every country becomes a bit xenophobic, circle the wagons, shut the borders, nationalism.

And, you know, I don't know that that makes the world worse. Japan did it. New Zealand and Sydney have done. New Zealand and Australia largely do it. Those countries would prefer to keep their culture and to assimilate a very small number of people. It's just here in the United States that we have this very open-minded, expansive view of it.

I've learned over time that there are other countries. Finland, I think, is falling into this now. I think Sweden has now fallen into this of like, you know, we have a culture here, and if you want to learn the language and assimilate, yeah, we'd love to have you, but you've got to learn the language, you know, kind of forced assimilation.

You got to prove it to us you want to be here. Yeah. They're not going to give you the test in Spanish or French or German. You're going to have to take it in, you know, whatever, Japanese. Or Japanese, yeah. This is actually an important point for people who are American to keep in mind because I was, you know, I'm born here, lived here, raised here. And I've always had a very American view on what it means to be an American, which is if you're here, you're an American. Congratulations.

Huzzah. That is just not how a lot of other countries think. and Reagan actually said this. Reagan said, you know, if I went to Turkey or I went to other countries for 20 years, I wouldn't even count then as someone from Turkey, but you can come to the U.S. and be an American. And I just thought that everyone thought that way, naively, unthinkingly, uncritically. And then you travel some, you read some news and you realize that's not the case. But it will be a bummer, I think, Jason, if the nation that was the most open and welcoming became overly not welcoming. I think that would be to our detriment, even given the labor stuff that we're describing. We're the most distinct. that. Let's keep the best of America being the place that accepts people and growing. We could have a billion people in this country. We got the space for it. And I think if we really wanted to have a goal as America, it should be to get to 500 million Americans as quick as possible. Let's go. But do it as quick as possible with high skilled people. Like imagine we said, you know, we got 340, 50 million people right now. We're going to try to get to 500.

in the next, I don't know, call it 30 years, 5 million a year. So we want to actually have 5 million people immigrate here. We're going to build new cities. We're going to build 10 new cities of 10 million each. And that's where these people are, Americans will get for a shot at it, but we're going to build 10 cities, you know, or revitalize 10 cities, Detroit, et cetera.

Like we revitalize 10 cities, put something there, you know, really be thoughtful about building housing. in those places, high-speed rail, whatever it is, and just start from scratch to build some really great infrastructure here and set a really audacious goal. That would be American dynamism. That would be an addition of American dynamism. So I'm going to write two blog posts. I need you to hold me accountable because you're my writing partner on these.

I'm going to write that down so we don't forget. I do want to get to one more thing before we take a couple of audiences. The stock market's gone crazy, right? The stock market's gone absolutely crazy. And crypto's gone crazy as we predicted. as we predicted. So just for everyone knows, some level setting here, Jason, and then we'll talk about what we think about it. But 52-week highs for the NASDAQ, the Dow Jones, the S&P.

We're seeing equities just rally very seeply in the wake of the Trump election. We have a chart that I pulled from wide charts showing off a couple of markets. And also, I threw Tesla in there because they've seen really rapid appreciation in the last couple of days. And then we also have a chart going over fintech stocks, the public companies that are in the fintech space. your coin bases. And as you can see, if you're watching the video here, dramatically up into the right. And Bitcoin. Yeah, there's Robin Hood. I, you know, I'm never sold a share of my Robin Hood. And I've been, I was down at low single digits when I put a J-traded in. I bought more. And now it's back above 30. And I've always just thought like Vlad and the team over there

are just so good. And they released a desktop version and everything. They just never stopped releasing great product. Coinbase, never, I mean, even with all the regulatory distractions they've had and cultural wars inside their own company. Ryan, it's just always been a really good product guy and keeps adding product. PayPal, I'm not so sure about. A firm is back. That's interesting.

Why are financial things coming back, Alex? What's the thesis here? Ah, the expectation of lower regulation, but let's be specific. If you think about what the Biden administration has done when it comes to consumer finance, They've wanted to do things like capping interest rates, eliminating what they call it junk fees. Those are all things that you could construe as incredibly consumer-friendly, things that I would have really appreciated when I was broke, frankly. But those are not great for business if they were making money off of those fees, those income streams and so forth. So the expectation is a firm can probably charge higher rates, be a little bit more aggressive.

Robin Hood can do things like the prediction markets they got into at the end without getting into potential regulatory issues. So it's kind of Katie Bar the door, and everyone's very optimistic. And just because you mentioned it, crypto everybody, Bitcoin's up 24% in the last week, and Ethereum's up 35%. And Jason, I heard that you actually still own some Bitcoin. So I'm curious what you're going to do with your... It's funny. People are... Yeah, you know, I've made some spicy tweets about Bitcoin, and we had Bitcoin on this very podcast in 2011.

And I wrote a blog post, the world's most dangerous open source project, Bitcoin. with this blog post. But I also said to people when crypto was crashing, China had banned it a couple of countries. I said, you know, I think Bitcoin Zero is the likely case. I don't see governments being willing to hand over their currency to an anonymous project where 50% of the coins are unaccounted for. Like, this sounds crazy.

Based on what I know about governments, they accumulate power through a currency and weapons and nukes, you know? Like, that's basically a population and geography and natural resources, you know, down the line. But currency and weapons and army, those are the two things that make a nation state.

I don't believe a nation state would actually sanction or allow one of these currencies to replace their dollar. And sure enough, the United States has allowed people to buy Bitcoin, Ethereum, and any number of tokens. and Gary Gensler and is obviously, you know, going to be replaced at some point soon. And I don't know how his term works exactly, but I think we have a situation happening while we're here that Bitcoin, my Bitcoin zero being the majority case, which I believed in, you know, through 2015 through 2018, I just thought, there is no way China, the United States or European governments allow this.

And I put it at 60, 70% Bitcoin Zero. Now I put Bitcoin Zero at like under 10%, like maybe even under 5%. Because I think it's too big to fail now. And governments have embraced it. I never thought they would. I can't believe it. And it's going to be so disruptive for the United States government if they keep printing money the way they are.

And I don't think Trump's going to, I hope he does. But I just based on what I've seen my entire life, with the exception of Bill Clinton, I don't think they're going to be able to stop the runaway spending. I hope Doge works, and they do. Doge the Department of Government Efficiency. But I don't think it's going to be that dramatic if it does happen at all. You know, it's really interesting that you're talking about the government position because this really was, for lack of a better term, the crypto election. And I know we're talking a lot about, you know, Trump versus Harris and tariffs and all that.

But underneath all this was a lot of advocacy done by the crypto industry. Yeah, you know, lots of money. And lots and lots. Well, if there's one thing that, you know, crypto vCs have, it's, they have capital and they put it to work, you know, and points to that. But people like the new senator, I'm going to try to pronounce your name here, Lombus, I believe, wants to build a national Bitcoin Reserve. Trump went to a Bitcoin event and said, we'll never sell our nation's Bitcoins.

And so I can't tell back to your Trump One, Trump two kind of thing. Trump one was very anti-crypto, Trump two theoretically in favor of it. I'm curious to see how far that goes, because if we do actually at the federal level embrace this particular cryptocurrency, I mean, that could be big for every startup in the sector, every VC who's invested in the sector. I mean, that can really spread out. I think if you're in the government and you want to maintain control of your country, I think it's fine to own some Bitcoin. I think doing your own, you know, national crypto project, which Trump has been alluding to, not his personal ones that are like a personal grift and whatever Trump coins he's doing or sneakers or watch. Trump cards that he was like doing like that. Let's put those aside. But like an actual U.S. EUSD. Sure.

Well, no, they don't want to do that. They don't want to do a, oh my gosh, I'm going to butcher this acronym, a central bank crypto token. There's like a CBBC or something. The idea is keep that third party in the hands of Circle and other companies that are regulated, but then not directly the federal government. And then they just buy U.S. government debt with their reserves, which is pretty cool. But that's pretty far from Bitcoin, which is non-Banky.

act, non-regulated, and, you know, pretty distinct. A possibility of where this could wind up is if governments truly feel threatened by it, is you just put a 10% tariff, since we're getting into tariff territory, a 10% tax on crypto. When you buy it, you pay 10%. When you sell it, you pay 10%. Then it's at a 20% disadvantage to the dollar. So it's, you get all these advantages. It's not a dollar, but it's kind of an angled a bit, right? It's kind of throttled. And you already pay a certain percentage right now to transact on it.

But a federal tax, in addition to capital gains, or maybe remove cryptocurrencies capital gains and you make it ordinary income, there's all kinds of different ways for the government. I'm not saying I'm advocating any of this. I'm just saying less people clip this again and make a clip of me, you know, in debt, faith. But that is how it could be countered. But for now, if you donated 20% of your Bick's, coin to get Trump elected last year, you're up 30, 40 percent now. So that was probably a good trade.

And I think that's the big money in politics we're going to see happen over and over again, which is people made some pretty good trades here. If you were Jeff Bezos or Elon or any number of people or the people who support Trump directly, Jeff Yoss with TikTok, these were really in the money trades to support him, and I think the Democrats have to look at their anti-capitalism, anti-crypto, anti-innovation stance, and realize, that's part of why they lost. You know, the anti-crypto stance, I think is kind of dead. I don't know if that really persists, because think about it four years from now, let's say

Trump doesn't try to go for a third term that we're all worried about, and let's say J.D. Vance loses in 28. Just bear with me here. Does the incoming Democratic president go back and try to undo four years of pro-co policy? No. So I think that conversation is now effectively. The horse is out of the barn. The horse and the Bitcoin horse left the barn because they said it's not a security.

And Ethereum is not a security. Ripple, they're still saying is a security because it's centralized and people who are directing it as opposed to like the whole Howie test nonsense. So that's really important, though, because Andreessen Horowitz wrote a long post. their crypto team. And they said, I'm going to quote here that entrepreneurs should now all feel empowered to explore all of the groundmaking products and services that blockchain's enable, including tokens. And that's... I'm here for it.

I said from the beginning, I thought Dow's were really interesting. And I very much wanted to start, I wanted to tokenize our funds for venture capital. Okay. So Launch Fund 4, which is a $45 million early stage vehicle that goes into Found University and Accelerator companies. and, you know, companies of people in my network and friends who, you know, start companies and I have special access to, if we could tokenize it and any American could buy it, I could raise a hundred million dollar fund and never go on the road pitching LPs because I could have literally, you know, a million people give $100 or $100,000 people give $1,000. And I would love to have a hundred thousand people give me a thousand dollars per fund and let them trade those tokens as they wish.

If they think we have a home run in there, you know, knock on wood, we hit another Robin Hood, Com, Uber, Thumbtack, Athena, whatever. And, you know, they want to trade every day, the tokens available to trade and you could speculate on it. You could build a position in our fund. You could clear a position in our fund. That would be awesome. It would be great.

Well, if you take the crypto positivity at the Trump campaign and then cross it with something that we talked about, I think it was a week or two ago, the Tim Scott Bill and the Senate that was going to make it easier for people to invest in private companies. You could actually not have the accredited investor test, have a tokenized fund. And it would essentially be completely open access to anybody with a phone. That's a very different world. Yeah. I would very much like to explore this. If there's somebody, because I got pitched on this five, six, seven years ago where people were pitching me on tokenizing funds. And I was like, but the tokenization doesn't help me.

It just creates more overhead, more expense. But I would very much like to have a j-coin where people could buy the j-coin. The coins could buy equity and startups. And then people could trade them. And, you know, I would just publicly share everything we've invested in. And you could just go to this. I wouldn't give decision-making over. But I would really, you know, the problem was this was going to add a million dollars in expense.

to the starting of a fund and then probably a quarter million a year. So you would be at like $4 million in expense, you know, and then customer support and everything, maybe $5 million expense over 10 or 15 years to manage this. It'd be like a half million dollars a year on average to manage the project, which I guess if you have a $100 million or $200 million fund is okay, but it was just prohibitively expensive. You know, it's funny that you bring.

up the J-coin idea because going back to, I think it's 2014. Yes. So just over 10 years ago, I wrote this for TechCrunch. I think we can pull this up. I jokingly introduced CrunchCoyn, and it was going to be the native currency for TechCrunch employees, and you'd have to get paid in CrunchCoin, and that was the only way to buy tickets to our events. And it's funny. That's a good idea. This is still like, it was an April Fool's joke 10 years ago. And maybe it's not going to be an April Fool's joke in five more years. The world's crazy, man. I love it. Um, I, I, you know, this will be something great that comes out of the Trump administration and his term. If they can make crypto, uh, safe for retail investors by forcing them the people who launch the products to have their names on them, to have insurance, to have a board of directors, but allow anybody who wants to buy, let's say, under a thousand dollars personally of any token.

let every person be able to spend 10% of their yearly income on any securities they want and YOLO, because then the most in American could lose would be 10% of what they made that year. So if you're a, I don't know, plumber who makes $100,000 a year, $150,000 a year, and you want a, you know, Yolo $10, $15,000 into Dogecoin or Bitcoin or Ethereum or my coin, J-coin and well, if you lose it, guess what? No vacation for you this year. You're doing a staycation. Yeah. And then next year you get a vacation because you chose to make a bet for you and your family, right? And maybe it pays off and then you can buy a second and third home. So I like treating people like adults. And I think there is an adult path here that Trump can set up with the accreditation

test and limits on the amount you can invest per individual. Problems. solved. Yes. Now, Jason, we do have some good audience questions that I want to get to in a second, but I want to wrap with a kind of spicy take on the stock market. If I can just squeeze this in. So enthusiasm, we discuss. Stocks are up. People are very excited about, you know, less regulation and maybe less red tape in general in the economy and all that. But there's an interesting counterfeit that people are talking about. And it comes from Warren Buffett. So right now, Berkshire Hathaway, which is the anti-start up, if you will. It is a holding company of Canada. generating assets as opposed to a high growth, cash consuming business.

But Warren Buffett's a well-known investor for a lot of reasons. And right now he's sitting on a record amount of cash. And the reason- $300 billion, $400 billion? $350 billion, something crazy like that. That's a big number. And the reason why people think that Omaha's Oracle is doing this is because the Buffett indicator is incredibly stretched.

And I have a chart here for everybody. The Buffett indicator, if you're not familiar, is just the market capitalization of U.S.-based companies. divided by GDP. Or if you want, it's the Wilshire 5,000 divided by, you know, current GDP. And Jason, we're at essentially 200% plus of this ratio, which is incredibly stretched compared to historical norms. So just to be a contrary and just to be a Debbie Downer here on the show, I wonder if

people are properly understanding that stocks were already a little bit expensive on a broad basis going into the Trump administration. And that could limit upside. And then that could mean that's a lot of the enthusiasm, the host of the hostages, the hostages, for dealmaking and IPOs might be dashed because if stocks end up going down just because of fundamentals, we won't get all the candy

that people expect to rain down from the skies. He likes, your take is correct. Buffett likes to buy things on sale. He doesn't believe Apple is on sale anymore. He thinks it's fully valued. He has concerns about people. I think this story has a lot to do with Apple and him falling out of love with Apple.

Okay. And so I think he cleared that a lot of that position, and maybe even all of it. And that had done incredible for him. And I think he's probably looking and saying if I have a bunch of cash and meta goes back down to $100 a share or Apple loses half its value,

I can buy it again. Or there might be other companies he could buy a significant piece of when they're at a discount. So that's probably what's going on there. I think, you know, the spending of the government has been so dramatic and there's so much money in the system that the money always makes its way to equities because, you know, putting it into a 10-year, you're going to make 4.X. Putting it into your cash in your bank account is close to 5, I guess, in just having cash.

So until the rates come down, people are going to just keep putting money in equities and in cash and I don't see a world in which meta, Apple, Tesla, etc. take a nosedive. I could see them correcting 20% or 30%. And maybe that's enough

for Warren Buffett to make his move. Oh, man, if stocks go down by 30%, I'm going to stop eating, just like, and buy more. That would be the logical thing to do, yeah. That's my day. Yeah. I mean, me too. I did the exact same thing.

I was like, these companies are on sale. I bought meta at $91, et cetera. And all of it did amazing. I basically two X in two years. It was bonkers in terms of return. All right. It's been a great episode. We do it live Monday, Wednesday, Friday, but this week will be Monday, Wednesday,

Thursday, correct? That's correct. We move the all-in tape. And for people who know all-in tapes on Thursday. So if you want to know my personal schedule, It's typically Monday, Wednesday, Friday, twist. And Thursday is all in, but one of the other besties had to switch. So I think we're taping on Friday, so I moved the twist taping to Thursday.

You'll see us all here back on Wednesday, about 12-ish my time in Texas, Texas time, 1 p.m. East Coast, 10 a.m.ish on the left coast. He's Alex. I'm Jason. Cautious optimism. Dot news if you're into. News. Cautomism. Not if you're into it. If you get to this point in the pod, you're into it.

Go sign up right now. If you got a couple of shackles, throw a hundee into the pot and motivate Alex to keep writing every day. And we will see you next time. Bye-bye.