This Week in Startups - Twitter accepts Elon's buyout offer, EU's new algo rule, Pipedream Labs: Hyperloop for package delivery | E1443

Episode Date: April 26, 2022

First, we cover Twitter's Board accepting Elon Musk's take-private deal (1:41). Then, we cover a new EU social media regulation that will increase algorithm transparency called the Digital Services Act (41:34).  Our startup of the day is Pipedream Labs which is making a Hyperloop for package delivery (53:37). (00:00) Jason and Molly intro today’s big news stories (01:41) Elon Musk has acquired Twitter (10:58) Coda - The All-in-one doc for teams, get a $1,000 credit at https://coda.io/twist (12:14) Billionaires buying companies (23:15) Ourcrowd - Check out the deal of the week at https://ourcrowd.com/twist (24:22) Should Twitter expand its paid product? (27:00) Doing a little dunking… (33:30) Rocket - Go to http://getrocket.com/twist and use promo code TWIST for 20% off your first placement. (33:47) Elon’s back and forth with the Saudi’s (38:00) Bill Gates’ short position on Tesla (41:34) EU requiring tech companies to explain algorithms (53:05) We Live in the Future: Pipedream labs is building an underground delivery system (1:02:17) Thesyndicate.com/climate update FOLLOW Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis FOLLOW Molly: https://twitter.com/mollywood

Hey, everybody. Welcome to Monday this week in startups. We had to record this episode twice. So there might be a little bit of consistency problems in the second half, but we re-recorded because right after we got off air, Elon Musk's deal with Twitter was approved at $54.20 a share. We covered some other things in the episode, Molly. Yeah, we're going to have a good time talking about that and what we think could happen, a little pros and cons, but we still, I think, agree that ideally pros. There's also a whole Elon Musk lightning round, and then we end the show with a startup. We live in the future, and that future is sick, pneumatic tube package delivery.

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

Our Crowd Helps you invest early in pre-IPO companies alongside professional VCs. If you're interested in investing, you can join Our Crowd for free at OUR-C-O-WD.com slash twist. And, Rocket To hire in today's competitive market, you need to hire in today's competitive market, you need to outstanding recruiting. Rocket's expert recruiters paired with ML candidate matching set them apart from the rest. Get 20% off your first placement at getrocket.com slash twist.

Okay, Molly, in the top news story of the day, Elon Musk has officially acquired Twitter for $54.20 or as we like to say in the business, 5.420. 5.420. Yeah, I mean, listen. And like, this appears to be a papered deal. There is a press release. Parag Agrawalawal, the CEO of Twitter, has tweeted about how this appears to be the case. Twitter has evidently canceled its corresponding earnings call, which we'll get to in a minute.

But yes, here are the facts as we know them at this point. The transaction was unanimously approved by the board just a week after that same board approved a poison pill to try to stop this purchase. Slow down, slow down. Probably more accurately. But yes. Maybe slow down. Yeah, exactly. Maybe like make sure it was real.

And make sure that... Turn out to be. Yeah. Make sure it's real. And yeah, I just shake the tree. See if another buyer wants to beat 5, 420. Yeah. Exactly.

And not surprisingly, no one did. Elon secured $25.5 billion of fully committed debt and margin loan financing and is providing an approximately $21 billion equity commitment. Okay. After the deal is completed, Twitter will become... a private company, just like that. The purchase price represents a 38% premium to Twitter's closing stock price on April 1st, 2022. Well, who could have seen this coming?

Well, I mean, it's, as I said on All In podcast a couple episodes ago, I was fairly certain that unless there was another buyer that Elon would be able to close this deal without any inside information, he tends to get stuff done. sometimes the timetable is variable. Things take longer than Elon expects sometimes. Stuff driving comes to mind. Other times, things happen quicker. Here's an example of something happening quicker. Or hitting a million cars a year. I think Elon's been ahead of schedule on how many cars he can deliver now.

So, absolutely fantastic. I think it's going to be great for Twitter, the product. I think it'll be great for Twitter, the employees. I think their stock options will be worth more, ultimately, because I think the company will, if it does in fact go private, which I think is going to be a big part of this, they can make very long-term decisions. And then who knows?

It could become a public company again. I mean, that does happen sometimes in these situations. Something goes private. You clean everything up very quietly without tipping your cards, without explaining to the public markets, about having the stock go up and down and make employees' stock options, go underwater, above water, and causing that chaos, now they can just, you know, very quietly and deftly,

do for this company what Elon did at Tesla, which is run it super professionally. And, you know, we had Michael Dell on the program. He talked about how hard it is to pivot and to iterate on a company when it's public because analysts are smart and dogged, and they will watch every move and criticize it. And that's why he took Dell Private for some period of time before it went public again. Yeah.

And that is why Elon himself evidently tried pretty hard. And we'll talk about this a little bit later in another little flash roundup of Elon News, tried pretty hard to take Tesla Private, presumably for similar reasons, that it is in fact kind of exhausting to deal with the kind of short-term shareholder situation. Now, we would be remiss if we didn't say that there was also a bit of, of a lot, a good amount of gnashing of teeth and freak out about this development, right? Like, one, is there a part of American society that a billionaire, a tech billionaire doesn't know it at this point? But two, people worrying, you know, that one of two things will happen,

that one, there's your optimistic view, grounded in, we should reiterate, grounded in the things that Elon Musk himself has said, which is that he's going to clean up the bot problem and make the algorithms transparent. Yep. There's also the less optimistic view that like all of the moderation guardrails might come off, which are grounded in his comments about free speech, which are vague and, you know, not 100% understood. And that now there's a whole, you know, there are people tweeting like, okay, where are you

going to go next? What's going to be your platform of choice? Discord is trending as a result of this, right? Like there are definitely a lot of people who are like, I'm afraid this is going to turn into 8chan and I need to get out. Well, I would argue like the, the system can only get better from here. I mean, the amount of bots and brigading and madness on the platform is already acute. And it has been for a decade.

The technology you're saying can only get better. Yes. I think the situation can only get better because they're not successfully policing the platform today. And I don't think any amount of policing is going to work. I think you have to have, you know, I think you have to attack this on a technology basis. You have to not let people create tons of accounts and you have to have a path towards people

to use real names and be verified. You don't see a fraction of what we see on Twitter on platforms like LinkedIn or Facebook or other real name platforms. And so if there is a path for people to get like Twitter Blue to pay, and Elon us talked about this publicly, to become very,

or if there was two levels of verification, the classic blue and let's say a light blue, you could just put your credit card in, you pay 50 bucks a year for Twitter, now you're verified. Now, if you, like yourself, Molly, would like to have a cleaner experience, you can say, I only want to have replies posted to my tweets from verified users. Just like now you can do it with only people who follow you, even though people don't really use that. So I think you'll see the crypto scams and all this other spam go away. very quickly. I don't think it's a terribly hard technical problem. I think the reason it hasn't gone away is because it would kill Twitter's numbers. So Twitter management has always lived in constant fear of the stock collapsing because they stop the bots. And if the bots make up 5 to 20 percent or the anonymous accounts equal 10 to 30 percent, if you were to deprecate them or make it harder for those accounts to be created, what would happen? The stock price would plummet. Wall Street would say you're not growing anymore. So this has been like a crack. pipe that Twitter's been on for a long time, which is, you know, just trying to, you know,

get the product to grow. The pernicious nature of that crack pipe is the more you allow those bots to run amok, what happens? You drive good people off the platform. You do. And you end up with just this kind of reinforcing negativity. Like, remember how it used to be fun to fight on Twitter? I like an argument. Sure, why not? A debate is great. But not there, right? It's just is, like, it's not fun to have, imagine if you're trying to have a dinner party and you were having a philosophical conversation with your friends and you're arguing about this or that and you're like, I'm taking this side of this position. And then a thousand people ran in through your front door and started throwing like poop on your table like a bunch of monkeys. Then all of a sudden your dinner

party isn't that fun. And you're like, you know, and I'm just going to keep this to that like all my all my spicy takes now, I have in group chat. Like, correct. And so, So be fun again. And the algorithm comes to mind here. So Elon has been very clear. And again, I just encourage people to look at what he's tweeting. He tweets, he's tweeted more in the last month than the last three CEOs combined in the history of Twitter. I am not kidding.

If you took all of Jack's tweets when he was CEO, Parag's, Avs, and Dick Kossalo, she put all those tweets together. I think Elon has engaged more people and tweeted more in the last 30 days than all of those CEOs together, all four of them. And he knows the platform better than they do in many ways, because as a power user, he's used it to great effect to get attention for hiring people for his projects or selling cars and generally getting attention for his vision of the future. So the algorithm, though, he's been very clear. This should be transparent and all shadow banning, all moderation should be clear. And so that is a no-brose. brainer. And again, I would just listen to what he's saying, what he's saying, what he said about

Tesla wound up being true about Tesla, what he said about, you know, the rocket ship company came true. Starlink came true. People are using Starlink. And what he's saying about Twitter will, of course, become true. He's got a great sense of humor. And we're friends, obviously. So I say that, you know, just as a friend, he's got a great sense of humor. And as an executive, he does what he says he's going to do. So he does what he says he's going to do. And now if he's going to do the, if he's going to make the algorithm transparent, if he's going to make all of the actions about censoring or turning off or suspending people more clear, he's going to do that. And that would be great for everybody. If you're a startup, you know you have to save where you can. That's why

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I.O. slash twist, and you'll get $1,000 in credits. So generous. That's Codda. I. Slash Twist to get $1,000 off. Thanks for supporting the show, Cota. Yeah. It should be more clear.

I mean, nobody doesn't want more control over the algorithm, right? I'll hundred, listen, I'm pro. I am pro all of these. Yeah. However, in the, in true dinner party fashion,

we should acknowledge the weirdness of billionaires continuing to buy every part of billion of American life. Like, that is weird. Two. I mean, there's always been that way, Molly. Like, to look at the.

There's great sense of humor. and then there's like troll and shit poster and Pito Bear. Like there is no question that Elon is also a troll and a shit poster and it distorts people's impression. Well, you know him. So you have the sort of the other side of the coin, whereas a lot of people don't. So in that sort of like, I don't know anything. I only know what people think about things. People think a lot of things about him.

And I'm just super curious to see how this is all going to unfold as a product and a personality. You know, I get people's concerned about billionaires buying things. By the way, it's always been that way. You know, we, we had Hearst and everybody else owning media channels, you know, for hundreds of years. So let's not pretend like people of means can't buy, you know, big things. Let's also not pretend that one individual can change the world with one essay, one video, one interview, one protest, etc. These things are also true. And so there is a counterbalance.

And I don't know. Let's look at the last time this happened, Washington Post, the Atlantic. Have these products become better under Lorraine Powell, J. jobs and, you know, Jeff Bezos or not? I would argue those products are much better of late. So, I don't know, what are you doing? Molly's Washington Post a better product and the Atlantic a better product? The Atlantic is fantastic and the Washington Post is revived and journalists are getting paid and he seems to have stayed out of their business. I'm not like, I'm not, again, I'm just pointing out the last time that happened, it was the gilded age that preceded like a great

depression. You know, I mean, when that stratification happens and privatization, it's just a, it's like it's a spectrum and this is sort of like a new high on that spectrum, I definitely think that he is getting more heat than other billionaires who buy a lot of stuff. I mean, here's, and it's probably because he is so visible and I'll take the counter to it. Is a shi poster in a troll. Here's what happens when you're highly influential and you've got money and you buy something like this. You really have to be thoughtful about it because there's going to be a ton of scrutiny. So when David Bradley bought, the Atlantic

and then he sold it to Lorraine Powell Jobs or I think most of it he as a high profile person David Bradley who I know he was incredibly thoughtful Lorraine Powell Jobs is being incredible thought

Jeff Bezos is being incredibly thoughtful you have to be incredibly thoughtful about this or else it can blow up in your lap and even controversial folks like the Intercept which was funded by Pierre Omidyar I mean that was a really you know edgy publication

right like yeah And I think most people would say the world is better because it exists. So in the examples I gave of the last four ownerships that I can think of, it's gone in the right direction. Which one hasn't gone on the right direction? Facebook, right? That's the one where I think we're all like, ugh, that's kind of a bummer. So is the Washington Post public?

Like, is this the right? Is this the right corollary? Like, they didn't. Like, Orion Powell Jobs took a majority stake. Yes. But she didn't like buy it wholesale and take it private. No, no, the Atlantic was already private, but she controls it now. So she asked the jury, she controls it.

And David Bradley, who was, I don't know if he's a billionaire, but certainly a centa millionaire, worth hundreds of millions. He bought it for $100 million back in the day. I remembered that number. And he did a great job stewarding it up until this point. So generally speaking, you know. Washington Post is public. I'm not sure about that. I don't think so.

Washington Post. Unlike Amazon, no, the Post became a subsidiary. It did go private. Okay. Yeah. So similar. Yeah, listen. I'm not...

And the New York Times is controlled by a family, and most people argue they are thoughtful and do a good job. I mean, you can critique it, I guess, on the margins, but... Yeah, I think I think the fears are overblown. The thing about Elon is that he's very polarizing. I think we should take these arguments at face value on some level and take them apart. It doesn't necessarily mean... I'm not sitting here saying it's going to be a net negative,

but I think that it's reasonable to be like, huh. Someone just came along and was like, like this better than you do. I can be a better steward. I'm going to buy it. And now a lot of people are consternated for lack of a better way to put it. I think the folks who are hand-wringing are just virtual. I think it's virtual signaling on Twitter.

I think it's virtual signaling on Twitter. The product has been a disaster for a decade. We all use it in this disastrous broken format already. I think it's only going to get back. better. So, you know, it's one of these platforms that's full contact. It's one that uses words, not images and videos. And so, you know, I think it's going to be absolutely fantastic. I think, you know, he's going to bring a level of transparency. And we talked about before on this show, you know, the really hard decisions that the owner of these services have to make. And I can only

think of two censor? We, you and I talked about this previously because we had to re-tape today's show, but I think we should revisit the discussion we had on the specific instances of what what people are calling bans and censorship. Bands and stuff. You have Trump being banned. The second one was Hunter Biden's laptop and the New York Post being banned. And the third one was the discussion over the lab league theory. And was that suspension for zero hedge, which people claim is a Putin mouthpiece. I'm not certain. But anyway,

if you look at all three of those, man, these were hard decisions, weren't they, Molly? Yes. I mean, these were unprecedentedly difficult decisions. In the case of Trump, insurrection. Yeah. To overturn a free and fair election.

Like, you make that call. I dare you, right? Hard call to make, and people's lives were at risk. People's lives are at risk. And that was, I mean, was made universally. I wouldn't have made it a lifetime ban. I would have made it a two-year ban or something and then doubled it each

time he did something stupid like that. That's just my personal feeling. But that was a hard decision to make. And then the New York Post one was a hard one. Yes. And the New York Post one, you know, maybe you could refresh people's memory. What Twitter said at the time. So this New York Post story came out that was like, oh, we have the contents of Hunter Biden's laptop, which had been this big sort of Republican

bugaboo. Like, this is going to prove that he's totally corrupt and this is going to end the Biden candidacy. And effectively, U.S. intelligence agency has got in touch with Twitter and said, this is a hack and leak operation. This is, this is, you know, Russian interference in our election in the form of a hack and leak, much like the Podesta emails and the Clinton emails back in the day were. And so then Twitter was like, okay, we don't want to. And they said, if you link to this, you are linking to stolen information. So Twitter was like, we don't want that smoke. Yeah. They blocked. links to that story. And remember, this was during, to set the table for that decision,

we had proven that the Russians tried to interfere in 2016. We knew that Trump had asked the Russians to hack Hillary Clinton and the Clintons and the DNC. And we knew at that time, shortly before it, that Trump himself had asked the Ukraine to hack or censor Biden and release information and that he was withholding aid to them for which he was impeached. So, you know, when you look at that collectively and put aside your partisanship for a second

because it does turn out that Hunter Biden is a wildcat who was absolutely grifting off of his dad's name and he's under investigation by the DOJ, everybody knows that. So maybe, you know, it'll turn out that like, oh my God, this guy is the most corrupt guy on the planet and he'll go to jail. Let's put that aside.

for a second, partisanship, because both things could be true. Yeah. How do you make that decision as a platform? It's a very hard decision to make. You've got the DOJ or somebody from the FBI calling you saying, that's stolen, don't link to it. We're in the middle of an election, and we know that the last election was interfered with. Do not participate in this.

And then in addition to that, it included revenge born and, you know, selfies and naked photos, which is also against, linking to that is against the terms of service of all these social networks for good reason, obviously. You don't want to encourage people to use them for that. So you put all that together. What a hard, hard, hard decision to make. Content moderation is a nightmare.

It is a nightmare. And so I think it is fair to be, Elon Musk is very thoughtful and his companies tackle incredibly complex problems. Yeah. This is an incredibly complex problem. You know, at times. And other times, it's very simple. If you dock somebody,

if you're a bot account and you're spamming, super easy. So I think there'll be a series of things that are exceptionally easy to fix. And I think if they move from an advertising model, or you keep the advertising model, but if people can pay 50 or 100 bucks a year, or if you're someone like me with 500,000 followers or you've got a couple of hundred thousand, you know, would I pay, I don't know, $1,000 a year,

$5,000 a year to get, you know, a much better package of customer service of, you know, well, no, it can be optional. Metrics, et cetera, and to have a blue check mark, yeah, of course I would. And if you're a company, you know, they already spend money on third party tools to the two and of hundreds of thousands a year. So Twitter should sell, you know, analytics tools and give incredible customer support and insights to companies and companies and high profile people would absolutely pay for it. So there's so many wins here.

And yeah. So what's the other reaction? We'll get some live reactions here. Well, let's talk about the fun conspiracy theories too, can we? I'm sorry, conspiracy theories. Not even the conspiracy theories. But, well, first of all, this isn't even a conspiracy theory. This is just the other interesting wrinkle to this, which is Zero Hedge tweeting and reporting.

And I think Perragg confirming that Twitter will not hold its earnings call. That's interesting. That, right. So on the one hand, you can be like, well, yeah, it's being bought and taken private. So why have an earnings call? But it also, Nick raised the point, producer Nick, that maybe the earnings were indeed so shitty that the board got an early look at him was like, let's sell.

Yeah, who knows? I don't know. But I wonder. That's a conspiracy theory. Yeah, maybe. I think, do they, will they ever do another one? Is the question. I wonder.

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Like imagine you paid $100 a year and you could actually have somebody email you. back from Twitter support would be pretty amazing, right? Or if you paid $5,000 a year for a business account like mine, and I was able to collect more email addresses or know my users or sort my users, or maybe I could DM all my users, how great would it be if you had a paid account? Because I used a third-party tool called social metrics or something like that back in the day to email everybody who was following me, hey, I'm having a book signing in New York. And I emailed every person in New York.

I'm having this book signing. here's a link if you want to sign up, and hundreds of people showed up. What if that was a paid feature? What if I could say, I could DM if I paid but a penny per follower, which would be $5,000 a year, $500,000, if I paid $5,000 a year, but I could DM, you know, up to 1,000 of my followers, up to 10% of my followers anytime I wanted. Wow, that'd be incredible. Oh, my Lord, that's the killer idea right there.

It is. Because then you don't have to collect email, right? Like, everybody's in the business. If you want to be building a community or essentially the business of collecting email so you can have a powerful email list and cause and action. And if you could do that. I just created the killer feature. If only I knew somebody who worked.

Do you need to make a call? If I knew somebody who worked at Twitter, I could send him this idea. Do you want to just give them a little, give him a quick call? Give a quick call. But seriously, like, Twitter could have killed LinkedIn years ago. Imagine, too. And imagine, like, stopping. imagine stopping the perverse incentives of like,

oh, we hired this person because they have half a million or a million Twitter followers when we know nothing about whether those followers actually translate into engagement. How many, I mean, I used to get offers. I had like, I don't know, a million followers on Google Plus. Remember when Google Plus existed for like five minutes? Yes.

They were like, oh, yeah, you should. None of those were real. Like people were like, oh, we notice you have a million. Do you want to do this job? And I'm like, sure, about eight of them are real. So if you're, if you think, tell the realness because you would share something and nobody would click on it. Right.

It was all like weird semi-English marriage proposals. We're all of my Google Plus interaction. So the idea that they could be making decisions based on actual metrics on Twitter instead of what is bots and what is fake activity. Like, can we do a round of dunking? May we do a round of dunking? Yes, yes, yes, yes. Okay, here we go.

All right. So on All In Episode 76, I wrap the show by asking my besties to predict what would happen. Sack said, no deal, because it was really. against Elon the fixes in. The Democrats. His crazy conspiracy theory. Biden did it. Biden would put his thumb on the scale.

I was like, wow, you've lost it. Freeberg said no deal because Twitter's board would run a drawn-out process and find a better offer. Shemot said no deal because Twitter would reject the deal against their own best interest with resulting years of lawsuits. What did J-Cal say? Well, let's play the 27-second clip. My prediction is the board. to fight it. Stock collapses.

Nobody thinks it's going to get done. Elon lowers his offer and he wins it by the end of the year and gives him a lower offer. You didn't like it before? It always with the optimism. Now we're going 49. That's very Michael Corleone. Now the offer's 49 and it goes down $2 every quarter until you guys

acquiesce the end. It's trading at 30. I lower my offer. I just love when you get all mafia. You're like, oh yeah, it goes down $2 every day until you finally like, you will, you're okay. I try to not curate this,

uh, yeah, my, I try to tamp down the Brooklyn inside of me, but that would have been my shirt. Beautiful. It's beautiful. And he didn't even have to.

He did not even have to lower the price. It got done. No, like a day. I would never, um, I would never, um, I would never dunk on a fellow podcaster.

Uh, but everybody's favorite, uh, pundant, uh, which, you know, I think this is like,

who was the guy who was the S&L guy Andy Kaufman I think Profji is like Andy Kaufman I think it's like a giant performance art to get every prediction wrong just to get ratings right so it's kind of like he's trolling everybody but Profji said that this would never happen

this deal could never happen and the market said it would never happen here's 33 seconds of ice cold ice from profcchain. I don't think this is a serious offer and the market doesn't think it's a serious offer. I think this is the first time I've ever seen. I don't know if you've ever seen an offer to take a company private at a 20% premium. And on that day, the market actually takes the stock down because the market looks at this

and says, okay, let's look at the words. My best and final offer. That sounds true. Deals never get done on the first offer, meaning he isn't serious. And if I'm going to have to reconsider my share position, this sounds like, to me like the market has interpreted this and I think correctly as I'm about to sell my shares and as a result the market has gone. All right.

There you have it, folks. From the professor himself, how many ice cold takes. Did you do that just now? It's just so many ice cold takes in one clip. It's just he got it so wrong. And to his credit, Profji and RIP, your third TV show that failed in a realm. wrong again he writes on his Twitter so one thing you could say about Proffji is that he always owns

he owns it he owns his terrible takes and the deal did get done at the price it did get down on the first try and he was completely wrong I honestly I'm gonna give him this one though to be fair like who it's like it's a little unfair because he's up against you you know all the cards on the table right I don't I'm trying to think what my I think there's as good

a chance as any that I would have been like, I don't think this is a serious bit. I'm not really sure. Because who knows? I mean, I think your point, your point is actually probably the one to hold on to, which is that he does what he says he's going to do. Like that, I think, and there have like funding secured that, you know, as has now been revealed, and we'll talk about this a little later in the show. He meant that. When he said that, he meant that. He actually meant it. Yes, we'll get to that in the second because those texts have been leaked. But I just want to say, It's really valuable to just start being like, what if you take Elon literally and seriously? Literally just take him seriously and literally.

He's not making jokes. He's just, you know, sometimes he's wrong. Like, you know, some things take longer than he thinks, but he sets aspirational targets. Sometimes he hits him. Sometimes he's late. It is what it is. Yeah. But, you know, just so you know, thank you to CNN Plus for allowing us to use that 33 second clip.

Rest him, he's CNN Plus lasted shorter than Elon. Musk's bid. The bid got done in less time. On the first try. Okay. And then, I just want to say that take aged just like milk on a hot summer's day. Just another classic, Prof. G.

Hey, Prof. G, can you say that just please, Profi, just say there is no way inside will become a top 100 site in the world. Just say that. If you could just say that. You can get there. It's so much easier. We should, though.

I mean, I want to be respectful of all those CNN producers who've been laid off. And also, we should probably hire some. Let's get them. Whoever was Proff J's producer on CNN Plus, hit me up. I want to hear the inside stories. And I have a job for you. We got work for you. Come see me.

I'm at the Plaza Hotel. You ask for Frank White. So a little more fun happened on Twitter about Twitter. Your bestie David Sachs and Kara Swisher having a rare moment of agreement. David Sacks tweets, crazy thought. What if Jack masterminded this whole thing? Incentives do seem to be aligned here, maybe take it private, decentralized.

Kara Swisher response for once, me and David Sachs agree on one intriguing conspiracy theory. This is like Knives Out, Internet Mogul's version. Well, that's true because Kara and David don't like each other. They couldn't be on further sides of the aisle. And I'm friends with both. So there you have it. Yeah, I don't know if I, you know, David's been getting into these conspiracy theories a whole bunch now. So I don't think Jack mastermind the whole thing. No. I'm sure, you know, Jack is supportive

Elon. And I wouldn't be surprised if Jack was involved in the future. Why wouldn't he be? So, yeah. I think mastermind is probably strong. Did he encourage it? Do their incentives line? Might he come back? Absolutely. But I don't know about masterminded. Yeah. When you're growing your company, two things are true. Hiring is incredibly important. We all know that and it can really be frustrating and slow you down. Well, Rocket is a startup focused recruiting agency that uses machine learning to supercharge its team of 60 recruiters and then they can help you find and close amazing hires. And all of this is white-gloved service. You're going to meet better candidates and you're going to lower your number of hiring mistakes, which are the

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Anything could happen, I suppose. But here's our discussion of Elon's back and forth with the Saudis about taking Tesla private. Turns out he had the receipts. And we'll talk a little bit about the back and forth with Bill Gates shorting Tesla. Ouch, that's going to be a hard one to cover. Enjoy the rest of the show, everybody. So we just do like a little lightning round of, I mean, Elon is the news gift that never keeps giving. So there's a couple other Elon-related news things in one.

Please don't re-aggregate the stuff. I don't want to talk about my friend too much, but no. I will just give my, I'll give my quick take on each of them. Okay. This one I think is actually, this is a redemption tale in some ways. And Elon Musk actually talked about this at that TED talk. When they got

done with talking about whether he was in a by Twitter and completely mangling concepts around free speech, they they talked about this thing where he got in trouble with the SEC because he had tweeted funding secured and funding was not secured to take Tesla private. Now,

as a result of this shareholder lawsuit, a lot of these texts are coming out, some of which appear to validate what Elon said and that TED talk and what he has apparently always maintained, which is like, I really thought funding had been secured. And in this case, it's evidently because of a conversation that he had had with the managing director of Saudi Arabia's public investment fund.

Yes, I'll Rumaean. in which effectively he was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, we had a conversation. I'm just going to, I'm going to go ahead and paraphrase. Elon was like, dude, we talked and you told me you were 100% in to give me the money to take Tesla private. And then Al Rumaean wrote back and was like, you don't get off the bus without a transfer buddy. And Elon was like, you are throwing me under the bus here, man, because they issued this sort of weak sauce statement saying like, well, I don't know, we might be interested, but funding is not secure. Let's not get ahead of ourselves here. So they had, yeah, I mean, this was obvious.

Like, they had told him, you know, that they were in. They said this in front of the CFO of Tesla. And so maybe it wasn't papered, but they had given him the agreement. And I think this is why he's got this really deep grudge with the SEC. And so, you know, yeah. Yeah. I mean, really, like... I mean, why would you tweet that you have the funding secured if you don't?

And he did. You know, but man, you got to have the paper. Maybe. The paper. You don't get off the bus without a transfer. Well, you know, I think, you know, some people are, you know, the handshake deal is a handshake deal. So, yeah. Oh, yeah.

I mean, listen, that sucks. That's, that's, you know, shady business dealings by the Saudis. Shocker. Shocker. Shocker. But, um, but, yeah, it is. So, okay. And then, I guess, uh, there was conference.

of what I said last week about Bill Gates' short position. Yeah. So, anyway, obviously, there was a lot of discussion about this going on amongst friends of mine. And, yeah, so it was obviously leaked, was not leaked by me, but somebody leaked tweets or text exchange with Gates. The question is, when did Gates buy these shares? When did he short the stock? And to cover this, now that they've had such extraordinary results, this might cost Gates like billions of dollars to cover this position.

So. I wonder. Yeah. He had a half a billion. I mean, if he put 500 and then the stock tripled, he would owe a billion dollars. If it 10x, he would owe a lot more. So, you know, 4.5 billion or something. Like covering it is really hard. Yeah.

So. I mean, that's why I call it betting. I think that's all the text line you can do. I believe it really is. Now, on to a very interesting story coming out of the EU, which is so. And paradoxical. Basically, Elon confirmed all this on Twitter, which is in the process of buying, apparently. And all of this was leaked on Twitter.

And when it's his own personal, okay, when it's his own personal news service, we'll know why. You know, it's going to, I think what you'll see is all the bots and the brigading is going to be really hard to do in the future. I would say, we're sitting here a year from now and Elon's been working on it for a year. I think the number of bots will go down by 80 or 90% and the issues around brigading of fake bots because every time I get into a conversation with Saks and I basically take screenshots of one or two just to prove my point of people who created their accounts

in the last six months who have zero followers or 15 followers and the 15 followers are all bots and these right-wing lunatics and also people on the left of course basically the lunatic fringe they are just exceptional at creating legions of bots. Twitter allows them to create legions of bots because it makes the numbers look good, increases the number of tweets,

increases the number of new accounts. So, you know, somebody who's on the right or the left, they create 50 bots. They have them all set up on their computers somehow, and they just flip between the accounts, and then they will reply to my reply with six different versions of the same thing. Now it looks like I'm losing the argument,

and then Sachs is like, all the bots. And I'm like, Sachs, you're liking bots. Like, it makes it look like, I mean, I don't think sacks has bots, obviously, but his stands are creating 50 bots. And then they're like, oh, J-Cal is a libtard, blah, blah, blah, blah. And he's fat. And I'm like, okay, it was fat, not fat anymore. I love how you always give the credit. Like, I love how you always both sides this and say that it also happens on the left because like, well, I do have it. I did, I do have it happen in San Francisco politics. But I would say it's probably 80. it's probably 70, right, 30.

I mean, there have been lots and lots of studies on this, to be clear. Like the disinformation that is being there, this is a verified phenomenon that is not both sides. Well, also, like, Sachs is like, there's no Russian interference. I'm like, are you deranged? Like, how can, and he's like, tell me the top three Russian bots. I'm like, do I work at the CIA? Like, they're shutting them down in real time. Like, yeah.

Obviously, if you want to know which bots are currently spreading misinformation, you might want to talk to the CIA, FBI, et cetera, who are responsible for breaking the bot rings along with Twitter. CSA, they got a lot to say about it. They got a lot to say. They know who it is. Speaking of all this, I read that the EU is now,

and the EU is a finer filter on, you know, tech companies. They created like GDPR and, you know, they're kind of like the Apple of privacy, and they just hold the line a little bit tighter than, say, US regulators. Tell us about this new Digital Services Act, because I think that this is going to dovetail with Elon's plans for and Jack's plans for roll your own algorithm. And I think this could be quite interesting.

This is a huge deal. And it's so woulda shoulda, coulda, because it's the kind of regulation that had it occurred here in the United States five years ago, six years ago, two years, ten years ago when everybody was calling for it, it actually would have. addressed many of the things that made Twitter so effective in terms of, and Facebook, made them so effective in terms of platforms for misinformation and disinformation, and might have even, you know, left Twitter's board in a better position than they're in now. The upshot of it is that it's called the Digital Services Act and it will cover how companies should police content on their platform. It will include obligations to remove illegal content and goods more quickly.

And that gets to, for example, like Google and all those pharmaceutical ads. also explain to users and researchers how their algorithms work, actual algorithm transparency, and then taking stricter action on the spread of misinformation and potentially disinformation. It only applies to EU citizens, but much like the GDPR will probably lead multinationals to implement just kind of a one policy that conforms to the European standards

and that applies here as well. And it seems like a net good. Yeah, and I think the hard part is going to be like many of the actions taken inside these algorithms are very complicated and I'm not sure that these companies are going to have an easy time explaining what they're doing. And the explanations of these algorithm tweaks could be quite embarrassing and or a cookie jar moment. In other words, Zuckerberg or somebody at Twitter or somebody at YouTube might have said, we need to hit our numbers. How do we get more increased minutes per user? And they said, well, you know, there's these like clusters of like-minded people.

So, you know, if we dial that up, now the downside might be you might send people to misinformation or Alex Jones or, you know, conspiracy theories. And they're like, okay, well, people can decide for themselves. So it's a conspiracy theory. we want more minutes, as opposed to making the decision of, well, we don't want to send people to low source to anonymous or lower quality sources just to increase our minutes. Like, nobody's making that decision inside a company who's got stock options. You know, it has to hit a target.

So this might result in, let's just say, people leaking how these algorithms were made. And there probably is a bunch of cleanup going on right now, Molly. Oh, I'm sure. At some of these organizations, they're like, what's the, do we have a log of all the discussions about tweaking the algorithm? Can we purge that log? And nobody talk about how we tweak the algorithm except in this like skiff. You know, those skiff rooms?

Like, there's going to be a skiff room at Google and Twitter and Facebook and YouTube. Burn it. Burn it. Where they're like, yeah, six people can go in and no devices and we're going to talk about how we make these changes. And then the changes occur. and then whatever tweaks happened that wipe out what we told the algorithm to do.

This is going to get gnarly because what if somebody was like, you know what's really interesting? It turns out people who listen to you know, this conspiracy theorist or people who get outraged, if we put something that's outrageous, yeah, those people come back to Twitter the next day.

Like, it could be that somebody was like, you know what, if you want to get people to come back tomorrow, show them something they hate today. And they'll come in and check in it on tomorrow. get them to respond to, you know, this craziness and they'll come back tomorrow because they're outrage. So show them more outrage. The ironic part about that is that all of that has already come out about Facebook. Like all of that. That was all what Francis Huggins leaks were about, were that for years now people have been saying to Mark Zuckerberg, hey, we keep showing people,

you know, we keep radicalizing grandmas. We keep pushing people to anti-vax groups. We keep pushing people to more and more extreme positions. And if we stop doing that, it will slow down growth. And every time Mark Zuckerberg is literally in these leaked documents being like prioritized growth. So I can't imagine. And what I'm really curious to see actually will be the advertising algorithms. And I hope that I have not dug all the way into the Digital Services Act. But what I really want to see is that as well. So not just the content that we see, but the ads. Because I don't know if you remember this, but back in, I looked it up real quick, 2018,

because I'm obsessed with this story. In Europe, Jeremy Corbyn, who is like the labor, the lead of the labor party, right, in the UK, members of his own party

tricked him into thinking that they were pushing a platform that he wanted them to push, but they thought it was a loser. So literally, his own party, by buying micro-targeted ads on Facebook. So that when he went on Facebook,

he lived in an alternate reality where he was like, oh, labor is we're doing a great job of pushing these messages. But they weren't. They were literally just pushing them to him. So sick. It's so sick.

I mean, literally that one-to-one targeting is incredible. I had somebody who tried to do that with me on like Google, where my search results would be like their startup or something. So there was like this micro targeting you could do. And this is called lookalike audiences for people who are not familiar. You can take like an email list. So let's say you had a thousand people who were on that this week in startups list.

Then you say, hey, tell me people like these people. Then what Facebook's algorithm would do is look at the friends and say, okay, who works at startups? Or just show anybody in this network of people related to this thousand emails, show them this weekend startups ads. And if they click on them, then examine what the relationship between that person and the original person on the list was and find more of those people in that person's list.

And then it would go spider out. This is one of the great innovations of advertising of all time. And this is why people think their phones are listening to them. It's not that their phones are listening to them. It's that the social graph is being worked. So if you care about, I don't know, the Corvette, the new Stingray, okay, great. Jason brought up the Corvette Stingray, you know, at his poker game. And then Jason did searches for the Corvette Stingray, clicked on the ads.

So then the advertisers then said, tell me. more people like Jason and it picked up the poker group friends and showed them Corvette ads. Now they think, oh my God, our phones are listening. No. It's, they're looking at signals for me. It's your location correlated with your interests, correlated with your searches and everything you've bought in the past and it goes on and on and on. So I'd love to see, I mean, go a step further, right?

I want to see the data gathering algorithms. Like all of that should be transparent. It will. Good for society. It is good for society. And I will just say that researchers have been screaming for this for a decade on these social platforms. If the U.S. had done regulation like this back in the day, so much about our discourse, I mean, it's just a miserable path dependency to think about that. We were just like,

oh, it'll be fine. And you know what? This also shows is that there are paths to unravel some of the negative effects of social media. And the amount of time you spend online is driven, I think, by these algorithms. And so maybe if you choose to not have your content, selected for you by the algorithm, and you select your own algorithm. And when you turn it on, just like when you turn on a browser, it says, you know,

would you like us to be the default? Or in some cases, I think Google did the power move of like, what would you like as your default search engine? They know they're the best. So it's 90% of people are going to do it, but you could pick Dock.com as your, you know, um, you know, search engine if you were so inclined,

uh, which is pretty good from what I understand. Or bang, isn't it for years? So, you know, there you have it. Like, there could be a, when you sign up, it says, hey, do you want the default YouTube algorithm or here are some popular algorithms made by other users? And this is a Disney algorithm. The people at Disney, imagine that like as an opportunity. People are going to be the same thing though. Like, it's just going to end up the same place. Or it could be one made by the EFF. It could be one made by common sense media.

So I don't know if you use common sense media. And this is a tip for everybody. Just type in the name of the movie, Common Sense Media. And actually, it's kind of like Google will auto completed for you. So I went to see what's the new Jared Leto? Morbius. And, you know, I took another kid who's a friend of my daughters and they're both 12-ish. And I was like, Morbius, common sense media. And the parent was like,

oh my God, is this like really scary? Like it looks really scary from the trailer. And I was like, well, common sense media says it's 12 years old and above. And so God bless the people of common sense media. I mean, I really, actually, I need to join this and donate. I'm going to make a note to do that But anyway, they And I'm going to say, I don't know This is a two-star movie

I thought it was great I couldn't wait to see this I loved it I loved because I thought it was like a very unique character in the MCU the cinematic universe And I also thought like wow, Adam Newman has a future

as a anti-hero I kept I kept getting I kept hearing saying Rivga No I'm the

because you drink your blood. You drink the blood. You like it. Bye, bye, bye, bye, bye, bye, bye, bye, bye, bye, bye, bye, bye, I want to, like, not only do I want to invest in whatever Adam Neumann does in the future. I want to, like, I'm all in on the Jared Letto catalog. Like, I just want to watch. I love Gerald Leto. Oh, oh, we drink. We drink. We drink. We drink. We drink. We drink. We drink blood. We also drink tequila. Oh, yay, stick tequila. You're going to love it, Rifka. I drink it. We drink your tequila. You take a shot of tequila. I drink your tequila. I drink your tequila. I'm getting myself a bottle of that Don Julio in 1942 for my birthday

because I'm a big tequila fan I'm writing that down. Hold on a second. Are we still going to Top Gun? Are we going to do that? We will do the Top Gun. Yes. The Mollywood Top Guns

screening. Birthday. I want Don Julio. You'll give Don Huilio. You drink their good stuff now. Send Lon Harris a Don Julio. Oh, yes. Send Molly a Don Julio and send

me and Don Julio by Wednesday. So on Thursday, show we can Don Julio. You are so smart. We're going to Don Julio, the season finale. I love you. I love this job.

I love you, Nick. I got my, I got my Cafe Dumont, by the way. You did. Oh, you got a cold brew that, man. So fantastic. I know I'm making my cold brew this afternoon for tomorrow. Cheers.

I'm having ice coffee now because I forgot to make cold food. No more bottles of ice coffee. Only make your own in batches. No more bottles than you. Hey, Molly, I found a really groovy. We live in the future. Our future. TV show.

Streamers contact me, Jason at calicanus.com. This is going to be, this is all trademark. This is our new show that we're doing a pilot for. Okay, whoever produced,

what's the best magazine style show ever made? Anthony Bourdain, I guess. Anything better than that? I mean, 60 minutes, honestly. All right. Old school. 60 minutes.

If you're a 60 minutes producer or you worked on Anthony Bourdain show and you know what you're doing, email me. I'll hire you to produce We Live in the Future. as a streamer show, and we'll do the first pilot episode. This would be a perfect, perfect company.

The company I saw online, and the founder had actually reached out to me, so I missed this investment like an idiot because I get too much inbound. But that's okay. There's always time for a make-good. They just raised $1.6 million, I believe, and it's called Pipe Dream Labs. I'm calling this Hyperloop for delivery of packages. Molly, walk us through this. Okay, so Pipe Dream Labs.

is making a subterranean package delivery system like the boring company, but for packages. And if you, none of you are old enough to remember this, but a long, long time ago, banks had drive-thrus and you would go to the drive-thru and you would put your like check or your money or whatever in a little tube,

in a little container. And then you'd shove it in this nomadic tube and it would just get like sucked up back to the teller and it was the coolest, greatest thing ever. And now these people have made that are trying to evidently make this for package delivery? This is amazing. And bonkers.

Because where are they going to, where is it going to all? Okay, so it's a tiny little electric powered system. Transports packages at 60 miles an hour in 12 inch PVC pipes. So packages can be up to 10 inches in diameter and 16 inches long, aka almost all the crap you get from Amazon. They're starting out with these neighborhood portals. So it won't necessarily be a tube right to your house immediately. But eventually, it was.

it will be like a freaking mycelium network like the mushrooms do. Yes, yes. This is so genius because, this is amazing. You know, putting a 12-inch pipe underground, that's not that hard to do. Now, these things have electric motors and they have wheels on the top and the bottom. So they kind of just zip, jume. They don't even need to go 60 miles an hour.

Let's be honest. This would be on a short 10-mile track. Yeah. But let's imagine you did this in Manhattan. Or let's imagine you did this. in your suburb. So now you are building a planned

community and you have an Amazon warehouse or a Target or a Walmart. And Walmart says, you know what? I will pay

to subsidize this for the community for the rights to have us connected first. And we'll put a what, we have a Walmart warehouse here,

whatever's closest. Would absolutely do this. Now, Walmart has all of this stuff in a robotic facility themselves or Target or, you know, whoever, or Cloud Kitchens. Now, Cloud Kitchens makes a burrito. Boom, they drop it into the tube. It's in your house within 10 minutes. You need milk. You need three lemons because you forgot lemons. You could be doing very small package runs for free or for a dollar and pay for this. This is not cars and trucks on the road. This is literally just no traffic.

It doesn't add to climate emissions. Now, imagine it in Manhattan. You have unlimited numbers of doorman buildings. That's a non-gender version, doorperson buildings. Cossierses. There you go. You got the concierge downstairs. Boom.

You put one of these into the lobby. And you don't need to have it go up to every apartment. You got two, three, four hundred apartments in this building. You just build a straight shot to the Amazon warehouse, straight shot to whatever. And boom, now the apartment next to it wants to get on because everybody in this apartment gets it as an amenity. Now you only have to build a little tube from one to the other. So it spreads like a little network like the internet. The first building to get it, yeah, it has to do it.

But look at this map. If you're watching YouTube.com slash this weekend, look at this brilliant map. What they did here is they built a grid system. And so let's say you lived in a neighborhood that didn't have door persons or concierges. In other words, lower income, middle income, normal people. Not a fancy, fancy, fancy Manhattan with door people. Okay, I get a package. I walk three blocks and there is a kiosk.

The kiosk hands me my thing. That's not a bad option either. Not really, no. Will you click on the link that says, is this using new infrastructure? There we go, under the frequently asked questions. I mean,

obviously it's some new infrastructure. Yeah, I think you would have to build the infrastructure. I'm thinking about our investment here and how expensive the infrastructure is going to be. Well, I mean, 100% in on this.

Like, this should happen. This should 100% happen. Yeah. Oh, here we go. How will you pay for the infrastructure installation? The Pipe Dream infrastructure is designed to be usable by other utility companies, electric telecom, gas water, sewer if needed.

That means that the majority of the physical infrastructure will be financedable using conventional bank loans, most likely originating locally wherever the system is installed. This will also ensure that infrastructure is not wasted and costs are recouped if pipe dream migrates to an alternative delivery method or goes out of business. Huh. So they would lay some underground piping and then you could use that for electrical. I guess what they're saying is, is. If they go out of business, somebody else could use it.

So you don't have to worry about it because it's a 12 inch pipe. Yeah, it makes a 12 inch pipe underground. Sure. Yeah. And these things also do not need to be underground necessarily. I mean, I know it would be an eyesore, but it is possible, I guess, that if you had an elevated highway or something this could run along the elevated highway underneath it, I mean, who knows? So I was starting to think of it as a fifth element thing where you could just have the sort of the blade rounder aspect.

But you know what this tells me, too, is that drone delivery, not happening. clearly not happening. If we need pipe dream, drones are not working. Well, I mean, this was Elon's argument with the hyperloop, which raised money last week. The hyperloop is not, and these pipes are not going to have a problem with weather. So if you have flooding, if you have tornadoes, if you have snow, easy, be easy, lemon squeezy. So congrats to the pipe dream. I know it's a pipe dream right now, but it's a dream worth pursuing chances of success or love.

but a glorious future if it is achieved. And this is what we need more of. You know, founders doing really crazy shit. And let's see if it happens. But this is the kind of crazy that I'm here for. I love it. Digging is better than flying. Let's go.

Well, let's think that through. I think there would be in some cases where the drones could do better. Yeah. And that would be suburban areas or the, you know, backcountry in the country. because a drone flying 10 miles with your package over a bunch of farmland, you can't build the pipe system there, right? It'll be just too hard to dig up the earth. It's kind of like fiber, right?

Fiber works in a city, starting to work in the suburbs, never going to work in the country. Yeah. So, you know, it's a big combination of things. I mean, it's just like climate, right? You need every solution. You need multiple solutions. And that means there can be lots of winners, and we're here for all of them. Yeah.

We're here for them. And, you know, and they're, I think food could be the really interesting thing here. Man, you imagine McDonald's or whoever is on this tip and you just throw, you know, five in and out burgers into one of these little robots and it zips five in and out burgers to you. It's still hot. Oh, my Lord. I mean, it's bonkers what this could mean if they were able to do this. The flying gritos. I mean, if you, I love the idea of a planned community too where this is the package delivery system.

Like all those, what's the one cul-de-sac that's trying to do the really eco-friendly plan. plan community, like build these in and then have them terminate in the homes. Yeah. What I like about this too is because of the smaller footprint of it, you have to balance. Like, you're obviously not going to be sending a dishwasher through one of these things. That is still be done by regular delivery or a painting or something. But what this will also do is make people think about packaging. Because if you're putting things in, you know, giant boxes of cereal are not going to fit in this thing.

But a bag of cereal without the cardboard box around it will easily fit. And so, and these things. I think we'll be able to create little chains. So let's say somebody has six or seven of these, boom, you know. Love it. Yeah. We will live in this future. Yeah.

We hope we get there. All right, everybody. Great show, everybody. The syndicate.com slash climate launched its first deal. And we can't say the name of the deal. We don't want to tip the cards of the company. But I think the reaction, based on my email box, was extraordinary. A lot of people, very excited about this SaaS climate company that shout out to Kelly and Molly and the team for getting that teed up.

And the founder emailed me, texted me this weekend, was very excited. So I'm super excited. How do you feel, Molly, making a first big bet? It's amazing. I feel amazing. I mean, I cannot. This will be the end of month four. Yeah.

And we're just doing it. We're doing all of the things. There are two deals and one in the pipeline. Like, it's all, it's actually, I know you guys. think all I do is sit here and spar with Jason. But in fact, his promise to me when he pitched this job was we podcast in the morning and we invest in the afternoon. And that is exactly what we do.

And it's the course. Or in my case, podcast in the morning and ski in the afternoon. Right. Depends on the day. Listen, I'm in semi-retirement. Oh, my God. Yeah, right. I am going to take up the summer.

I'm going to take up kiteboarding, I think. I think that'll be my afternoon delight now for the summers. Try to get some kite boarding in. Do you have to like take lessons? Have you ever done that before? I got to take lessons. You know, I did it twice. You got like a trainer?

I was on Necker Island twice. A friend of mine had rented it for his birthday and I was lucky enough to go. It's quite nice. And I did kiteboarding both times. And the same thing happened both times. First day I get out there. I learned how to use the kite. You have to be on the first day you're on the,

sand, just learning how to use the kite. Because kite boarding is like two things. You've got to board, so you've got to kind of learn how to surf, basically. And then you have to learn how to hold a kite. And when I say kite, I mean parachute. And the kite, when it's windy, will literally pull you into the air

100 feet if you screw up. So it's incredibly dangerous. And the way the kite works is, if you pull down on that bar, the kite gets more taught and catches the wind, and you go flying. If you let go, then it loosens the tautness of the strings and the kite just falls to the ground and

you don't go flying. Everything in your system tells you to do the reverse. Right. Why don't they design it that way? And now you're 20 feet in the air. That's why they have like the instructor attaches themselves to you and they have their hands on the bar or whatever. Then day two, you learn to drag yourself in the water and then maybe someday afternoon day two or three, you put the board on and you try to get up on the board. Both days, the wind died that both times I did it, the wind died on the second day. I couldn't get to, you know, the promise land, except for one time I got out on the water and I got up on the board. And for six or seven seconds, it was the most magical experience like in sports I might have ever had where it's just

all of a sudden you're flying. And you've got the board, you got the parachute perfectly angled and then the board lifts and you're just skimming across it. I mean, you're going fast. I mean, it might only be 20 miles an hour, but it feels like you're going 100. That's so fast. And it was pretty great. And so there are places here in the Bay Area, like literally right in the Bay between Oakland and the SFO Airport, and then there's one in the east if you go towards Sacramento. So I'm, I had a instructor from Florida, reach out and he said, listen, I'm a big fan of the show. I'm a kite port instructor. You tell me where. I'll be there. Free of charge. I'll be your personal instructor. And I was like, wow,

It's pretty great to be J-Cal. It's great to be J-Cal. It's pretty great to be J-Cal. So shout out to my new kiteboarding instructor. But yeah, I think I can take that up. You know, I want to kind of stay active and, you know, that kind of stuff and be healthy. So, also I find it's good for my brain. I feel like the performance on the pod and my clarity,

if I'm doing a little bit of like just an hour and a half to three hours a day of some Zen thing, man, I'm more dialed in. And I'm going to go to the Warriors game this Wednesday. So I'm pretty excited. I would have liked to see them sweet, but you can look for me behind the Warriors bench, getting thrown out of the game somewhere around the third quarter. Don't get thrown out of the playoffs. I will not get thrown out.

I will not get thrown out. All right, let's go. Let's go. Congratulations. If you are an accredited investor, you want to join the syndicate, read Molly, and I's deal memos. We write them together with the team. The syndicate.com slash climate. I think you can sign up as well, even if you're not accredited.

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Head over to the syndicate.com slash SaaS, S-A-A-A-S to apply to raise from the SaaS syndicate. and you can join Jason Syndicate of over 9,000 accredited investors at the Syndicate.com. Producer Justin here, know a cool startup? Check out openscouting.com, where anyone can refer a startup to our investment team here at launch. Even if you don't know the founder, if you're the first to flag a company for us and we decide to invest, you'll get 5K in cash or 10% of our carry. Hey, everybody, producer Rachel here. Are you an early stage startup that has product and market, some traction,

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