AI on the blockchain, Waymo's rise, and the truth about tech layoffs | E1996

0:00and in fairness to jessica the job of the editor-in-chief is to always have the back of their writers so she's saying like we got it right what did we technically get wrong and it reminds me of the story we talked about the other day where you know they put the maga hats on felicia and ben horowitz and i said you know that could have been more clear but somebody you know like the editor-in-chief is probably like hey listen it's obvious because there's two blue smurfs on there you know people that's an illustration and we put in the you know tiny little minus one font size that this is an illustration so you know people uh defend themselves the truth here is the company feels like it's a little shady oh Oh, Jason, going with the British understatement there.

0:44A little shady. Dude, this guy is, this firm is essentially underneath a canopy of trees. There is so much required shade to discuss it. This Week in Startups is brought to you by Lemon.io. Hire pre-bedded remote developers. Get 15 % off your first four weeks of developer time at lemon.io slash twist. .tech domains. Don't miss our Jam with JCal contest. To apply and get more details, go to jamwithjcal.tech, brought to you by.tech domains. And Command Bar. Seamlessly integrate an AI-powered guide into your software, making navigation intuitive and interactive. Visit commandbar.com slash twist to get a custom live demo.

1:32All right, everybody. Welcome back to This Week in Startups. He's Alex Wilhelm. I'm Jason Calacanis. we are going to talk about a lot of news today uh this week in startups you can find us on all the major podcast platforms and youtube and tiktok and all those other places for clips uh but what do we what do we got on the docket what are we going to talk about so we're going to start with the current uh kind of cause of the day the uh the thing that people are talking about which is the information a scoop on bolt what's real what's not and some criticism of them it's kind of what's trending on twitter today or x if you will then waymo and their rapid growth and also a couple notes on open source self-driving which is a whole new category that i dug into today for us then we're going to talk about layoffs and then from there we have some notes on a major deal that happened called tabular databricks bought it some notes on that but first things first jason people are beefing okay so this brouhaha i saw shiel i think monat is how pronounce his last name i'm not sure um i've met him once nice guy um he has been getting into it with everybody explain what's going on here all right so the information is a technology news website um i have a bunch of friends that work there i'm sure everyone's heard of it it's behind a paywall they have a kind of a hard paywall model a bit like the financial times if you will and they have a focus on scoops and when they broke some news yesterday that uh bolt was seemingly raising$450 million at a$14 billion valuation, it sent enormous waves around the world of technology because one, everyone thought Bolt was doomed.

3:06The CEO, Ryan Breslau, originally a co-founder who left, got sued, was supposed to be coming back. And then also the dollar amount didn't make any sense? Who's going to give this company$450 million? And then also the valuation didn't make any sense because why would it be worth$3 billion more than it was when it was a much seemingly healthier company back in the day so jason my thought reading this was huh what the hell and i i didn't want to like i hadn't done any reporting on it so i didn't want to say to my friends well what's this but i was i was very perplexed when i saw the headline certainly perplexing let's start with what does bolt do this is a fintech startup was founded in 2014 the guy who started is ryan breslow he is a unique uh snowflake in all the world he's the guy who said that um y combinator paul graham and everybody were part of some bully stack they were like the mafia and tech and they were trying to kill bolt there was another startup called fast and what these i guess uh startups did was when you get to a checkout the idea is to help help you check out faster and i see this all the time because i guess shopify when i buy a shirt like this one from roan or cuts or some of these brands and i go to log in it already has me cookied and i'm logged in already and then it sends me an sms on the checkout page and says hey just type in this sms code to your phone number and we'll verify it's you through two factoring and you're off to the races that makes it really brisk to check out that reduces friction and merchants like that because if you have to put in your credit card log in every time it's a pain in the neck so there was fast i think that company went under there was bolt and there's amazon checkout and shopify checkout so there's big players in this and then there were these upstart players.

5:05I thought these companies had gone out of business. I'm being honest. Well, there wasn't a lot of revenue behind them, but there was a lot of, I think, enthusiasm at the time for making e-commerce faster, easier, cheaper, better. Because keep in mind that we're talking about the 2021 era, which was very close to COVID, supply chain disruptions, people ordering more. A lot of future e-commerce growth got pulled forward in the market. And so everyone was like, oh man, we got to get on this. I think if memory serves, The thing that made these companies look very attractive was they told people, hey, we are building out this enormous user base as we do one click check a network.

5:42But I think what they were doing was they were creating profiles for people for them when they checked out using Bolt or Fast or whatever. So it wasn't like Jason was going to a website and signing up for Bolt. He was just trying to buy something somewhere else. And then they were counting him as now a Bolt user. And so to me, there was always a little bit of BS in this, but also fundamentally adjacent point solution, incumbent competition, and I would say to some degree replicable by a functional development team. So the companies got big, raised money, and then kind of fell apart. And so when they said they're back, it just, not a single ounce of it seemed to mesh with my understanding of where the market is today and where e-commerce is today.

6:23and just to give people back to the business model you as a merchant let's say you were one percent of the user base like you were a large merchant and you had a i don't know a million customers and bolt aspired or fast aspired to have a hundred million customers and you were contributing your million customers to you know their checkout you would then also be paying fast or bolt in this case bolt i think a transaction fee i think it was two percent or something so now you're paying two or three percent for your credit card two percent to bolt maybe you're paying some amount of uh shipping and everything like that so that two percent depending on the business could be material and i guess that's why people got excited about this hey what if a certain number of transactions go through this and every time you get a new user if you were doing acme company i was doing delta company let's say we had no overlap you know you were selling sneakers and i was selling coffee mugs you know thermoses and we had zero overlap you would be saving me time and i would be saving you time if our users went to each other's website so that's kind of cool i guess but i never thought the value prop was that good i'll be totally honest um i don't know that this was like an actual acute problem in the world i don't think it was i think everyone just wanted amazon's one click checkout solution they wanted to bring it to their website.

7:47And I think, you know, when we were watching Amazon at that time, post those insane growth numbers, everyone wanted to buy to the Apple, you know, and maybe people were being pressured to have exposure to the burgeoning e-commerce startup sectors, they wanted to pick one company to back whatever. But in the end, a lot of capital got effectively incinerated. And in the case of Bolt, when they raised that really, really large series E, some of their investors said, Hey, we think that you were not entirely upfront and clear about your company's performance to date. And therefore we bought in at too high of a price.

8:18And then there was also, Jason, there was a loan from the company to the founder. So here's a question for you. If one of your founders that you've invested in came to you and said, hey, Jason, we just raised a bunch of money. I want to loan myself$30 million from the company. What would be your response? Yeah, that's dangerous. Because you now have a CEO with$30 million in their pocket. And they have to pay interest on that loan and they're distracted, right? So there's the distraction of 30 million dollars in somebody's market also somebody didn't buy the shares it's a loan so now if the ceo goes and blows that money and can't pay it back what do you do the ceo comes to you and says hey listen by the way i blew through the 30 uh i need another 30 i can't service the 30 like i need you to extend the loan and then you have board members who are massively conflicted because they have to manage the ceo and let's say the ceo is not doing a good job and you want to fire them but they have a 30 million dollar loan you call the loan when you fire them let's say the ceo is doing a great job and he says i want another now i want a hundred million dollar loan it is ridiculously bad hygiene that's why other parties goldman sachs morgan stanley whatever might give somebody and you saw this in the we work uh tv show some third party bank who says hey both shares are worth this we work shares are worth that i'll give you a 100 million dollar line of credit against your private company stock they'll do that with the venture capitalists i've got people come to me and say hey this is what your holdings your future potential on the first four venture funds are you know do you want to have a loan that you can go start spending some money and pay us you know when it was two or three percent no big deal but now six seven eight percent a little bit of a bigger deal bigger vig so your company has to be growing faster than that vig a little bit harder to do in a higher rate environment but it's just horrific terrible disastrous conflicts on a board of a private company as we say in the business no conflict no interest so what happens is board members sometimes will pay off bribe uh otherwise influence the founder by giving them these kind of loans or buying their shares and it's really problematic i'll leave it at that the way that this was described to me back in the day was secondary is a bad idea it disaligns incentives full stop the exception being if you want to de-risk a founder with 500k a million dollars something small so they can school a house something very basic enough money to give them more focus on the business and less distractions in their personal life that was the only exception made to me 10 of your holdings 10 million bucks no problem in my mind so if your holdings were worth a billion and you sold 10 20 30 million no problem if you sold 100 million now you're like well this person's buying jets they're distracted and maybe they don't care about the outcome as much so that that's the balance that people find.

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12:36And twist listeners get 15 % off their first four weeks. Stop burning money, hire developers smarter, visit Lemon.io slash twist. also just a note about this people borrow money against their public equity holdings all the time and that makes way more sense if you're thinking about this they're liquid and you can tell what they're worth minute by minute private shares are illiquid harder to value and as jason said much more conflicted anyways the company is probably not raising the 450 the investors don't appear to be entirely uh they're not your sequoias jason these are not these are not firms that we expect to have this kind of capital and this was all in a letter to shareholders right the preferred shareholders got a letter and it said and i'm looking at this uh newcomer eric newcomer story we are finalizing a 450 million dollar series f funding round from uae and uk based investment firms okay that's weird because they're just describing geographies not the actual firms which will elevate elevate our total valuation to over 14 billion a considerable leap from our 11 billion dollar valuation during series e1 round in 2022 that's a little bit weird language by the way considerable leap who wrote this in addition to the investment from these investment firms two investments in five words not good we just say in addition to the investment from these firms both may receive additional amounts from existing both investors who may participate in series of funding around yes then this is where we get to the pay to play bit so keep going information around with a credulous headline this morning bolt near deal to raise 450 million at 14 billion they have since updated the story so i guess this is where maybe they felt that headline was not accurate or they didn't do enough work what do you think next is important here so then shiel uh an investor that you know and that i know and i'll just i don't want to be in the game of of of you know pumping up vcs but shiel is is in my experience very nice and patient and is giving me kind guy yes yeah he's giving me time when he doesn't need to and so i i bring that up just because when he goes critical on twitter it's a it's not a normal thing for him he's not a guy who's out there flinging mud usually anyways um shiel said that uh the information kind of rushed out this story here's his tweet that we're uh talking about right now and that he says then it wasn't true the money and investors aren't real eric got the story right and then he says look i would have been completely fine with it if they acknowledged they got it wrong and issued a rejection instead he says jessica lesson who runs the information um was smug in his words and incorrect saying that the details were correct and then he's like hey yeah but they edited it afterwards then we get to a response here jason jessica responds and and then he goes look one when accused of smugness don't start with as said yesterday i'm referring to the piece not the headline and then two he says you know we all make mistakes people in your newsroom disagree with you on this and so the the bump bump sound you just heard was she'll throwing his friends under the bus because that bus is going to back right back up to the newsroom with jessica interesting at a trail meeting tomorrow morning glad i'm not going to be in that one um i i do really do agree and i wanted to read all that because i think she'll is is dead on if you make a mistake people actually i think have a pretty big band for saying oh okay cool if you go like watch this i made a mistake my bad we're gonna fix it but but there is this era in the current moment that we're in and this goes way beyond jessica to be clear uh people um we're in the age of bluster and bs and no shame and i do think this is partially driven by our recent political climate but i think people just have this like you know show no weakness never admit a weakness or a mistake always punch back twice as hard and it just i don't think always leads to the results that people would like and i think this is one of those cases you are referring to the trump look of never apologize they hit you hit twice as hard you know he's a he's a he's a counterpunch or whatever they say about him and so yeah i think and in fairness to jessica the job of the editor and chief is to always have the back of their writers so she's saying like we got it right what did we technically get wrong and it reminds me of the story we talked about the other day where you know they put the maga hats on felicia and ben horowitz and i said you know that could have been more clear but somebody you know like the editor-in-chief is probably like hey listen it's obvious because there's two blue smurfs on there you know people that's an illustration and And we put in the, you know, tiny little minus one font size that this is an illustration.

17:19So, you know, people defend themselves. The truth here is the company feels like it's a little shady. Oh, oh, Jason, going with the British understatement there. A little shady. Dude, this guy is, this firm is essentially underneath a canopy of trees. There is so much required shade to discuss it. I mean, okay. ryan also went out and founded another company called love that he raised money for i i just i i wonder what it would be like to wake up with the sheer level of confidence that some people have in in their own infalliability because ask adam newman i i've never met adam um well no i mean these these are the same type of entrepreneurs which it's like i threw a hail mary pass one time right so the hail mary in this case might be that series e f you know two or whatever in you know in peak zurb when they hit 11 billion dollars and then they think well i can hit half court shots i'm steph curry i should shoot from the logo steph curry doesn't shoot from the logo he shoots as close to the three-point line as he can get an open shot from he's not saying like i'm just because i can and i have hit a full court shot a half court shot that's not my default i'm going to try to you know be a consistent discipline player and so yeah this guy's a little bit um effervescent and the firm seems a bit on its surface shady um when i read the language there you know you and i are writers we pay attention the person who wrote that was not a good writer just from that little thing where you know they say these investment firms investment investment firms those are little details that tell me this is not well written or edited and then to say a uae firm that's like saying a canadian firm what does that even tell you as a preferred investors like we i mean they could have said middle eastern investors they could have mina investors european investors i mean it just the whole thing screams and then that pumping it up like what did he say it's an extreme increase in valuation like when i hear that kind of nonsense i think it's a leap a leap you know like that's not how normal people talk about fundraising when you talk about fundraising you just say we're raising x amount you don't have to say it's a considerable leap that's almost like um trying to get somebody to invest and you have to be very careful about that because if you're trying to influence people in making their investment decision then the way the law starts to work is maybe um you'll get held to a higher standard because you're giving investment advice i just got a secondary offering from a venture firm i'm in very high profile venture firm very high profile deal and they were saying we are considering selling some of our shares in this company you are in this fund um you have the ability to request to sell a certain percentage of your shares please this is not investment advice please consult with your lawyer accountant financial advisors to make the best decision for you and your circumstances we cannot give you investment advice like it is written by a lawyer and it is not saying a considerable leap they're not steering the witness this is why when i do j trading on the program i'm going to bring j trading back next year i was very happy with my performance uh i beat nancy pelosi i think that's big since you know i don't have any insider information um j trading.com but j trading.com is going to start in january again and i'm going to get some of your advice here of what i should be j trading but um yeah when i was doing the j trading i just told people like here's what i'm thinking but don't copy my trades unless you're doing it with money you can afford to lose because i've never publicly actively traded i've always been a private market investor and index funds for everything else so anyway that's thanks for coming to my tattoo no i i appreciate it the last thing i want to say about this is the the technology watching media world just seems much smaller than it used to be because here we have like the information right and we have eric and his newsletter newcomer which is very good and uh no i guess tech crunch could have weighed in venture beats still there kind of somewhere but i mean like it's not i remember the blog days man when there was like you remember like the giga oh network and like there was just so many more properties and more voices and and more like discussion and it just felt more alive than it does now and i wonder if i'm just looking at like what's left of media and just i'm slightly disappointed that there's just so few names out there like i'm glad the information is doing well they hired some of my friends they hired two of my last co-hosts on my last show jerks um i i cannot speak highly enough about the staff over there but i mean it's not that huge information can't have more than like what i don't know 50 60 people and it just made me kind of sad let me make you less said um i have been through this three or four times i had my silicon alley reporter print magazine i had in gadget sold it to aol i helped mike with tech crunch in the early days we did the conference together yada yada this week in startups for 12 years and all in and now the twist 500 i have you know been in the mix in this and watched it over the years and what i'll tell you is there is a um the media business got rocked because advertising works better much better advertising works much better on tiktok amazon uber meta and of course google than it does on tech crunch or business insider or you know pick your publication contribute what that did was it took a business that had a lot of independence and an enormous amount of people throwing money at them for advertising and to the point at which you know tech crunch writers started making six figures some of the top ones were you know there was a competition to see who could fund them versus who could land them as you know um writers when the advertising went away the whole thing blew up and now it's creative destruction and what you'll see is there's still a need for news there's still a need to understand the world so we're doing that here we have the twist 500 and we're going to hire a writer full-time to just work on the twist 500 and to cover each of those companies maybe do one company a day interview them and then add that to the database so we're taking a database approach and the podcast approach new model jessica with the information she worked with the wall street journal she hired those people she's like you know what if you can't afford three hundred dollars a year we're not for you full stop so she has less audience but she's got to have how many how many subscribers ten thousand oh a good number i don't actually know that metric i haven't pumped that out of my friends yet but you know there are two ways you can go one today is ads one is subscriptions and i spend you know years at tech range actually is my the thing i did there when i went back building a subscription business into the seven figures it's tough it's hard it's it's a grind uh we got there tech when she eventually chose to go a different certain path particularly hard though if you're doing both at the same time yeah that is a tension that i could never resolve well then you're sitting there and the tension is does this story go behind the paywall or on the free site the advertising sales seems like put it on the free site get more pages and the sales and the subscription team's like no it's a scoop put it back here and then the author is like well i want the maximum number of people to read it and then somebody everybody rips it off rehashes it and it gets aggregated and everybody's like well i only need the first three sentences here shiel is doing a better is doing such a good job summarizing you don't need to subscribe to the information if anything's important in the information it's going to get summarized in business insider or on twitter and you don't need to have it the end that is a good breakdown of the incentives uh conflicts and issues thereof but i do think though to have a successful business you have to pick a lane and just do it because the tension about uh in front of her behind the paywall i was the guy for years who went to people and was like may i please put a paywall on your story no okay like i mean that that was you know you go home with your hat in hand quite a lot now i had a team that was just behind the paywall but we needed more total stuff you know so anyways it's difficult and i i hope that everyone can can learn from this and we can all do better down the road and i really do hope that there is not 450 million dollars in very dumb money that people would put into bolt because i can think of a lot of things i could do better with that i want to know the revenue from this company and i just want to point out shield did another follow-up um and i you know who knows what's true here or not i'm not saying shield would ever lie or anything like that but i'm wondering what exactly is going on here.

26:18Here is if we could pull this up his update. And this update came out August 20 yesterday at 7pm. So last night, the actual deal proposed is even wilder shareholders have less than two days to approve a pay to play deal. We've talked about those here before. They need to invest more money into the company or both buys their shares for next to nothing. What this means is the existing shareholders if they don't put more money in those shares get wiped out right and so that's pay to play bresla would get a two million dollar bonus for returning as ceo what doesn't he own a lot of the company plus an additional one million of back pay what isn't he already rich why would they be giving him three million dollars 750k of back reimbursements and an 80k monthly travel security budget this can't be right this cannot be right is this purity who does he think he is taylor okay this must be he must be like this must be comedy right this is a joke shill's making a joke here yeah it's got to be a joke um bolt would invest in breslau's other company love and eco-friendly marketplace the terms are amazing bolt to invest 15 billion in love at a 1 trillion okay so he's joking yeah i guess but the rest of this seems pretty reasonable like you know lost 100 million dollars i can see that um 250 million the article claims that brad pamnani who refers to is representing abu dhabi pe funds but who's linkedin says he's with silver bear and investment bank plans to invest 200 million london fund would give 250 in marketing related services okay so this is all bs i mean joe lonsdale replies to that tweet goes can't tell if this is satire yeah joe we feel you uh i mean we're literally saying is a satire um and when i said shady before and you were like you know it's almost like they're in the amazon and those trees go up like a hundred and there's a canopy and then all the leaves like when you're really on the bottom they're like pretty pretty darn shady cloudy day shady in the amazon i wouldn't put five dollars into bolt at a 1.4 let alone a 14 so like i mean you're just sitting here scratching your head but it does again remind me of how much fun we had in 2021 as a broader ecosystem because my gosh, was it a good time.

28:32Okay, founders, I had Ramsey from Uptrends AI on the pod last week for a jam session. What's a jam session? It's where the founder pitches me their company and I ask them questions and we try to move the ball forward. We try to help them solve their problems. I was fascinated by what he's building because it's helpful for trading stocks, right? And even better, it uses one of those gorgeous stock tech domains. so if you want to come on and tell me about what you're building have your startup featured here on this week in startups uh join me join the jam with jaycal contest jam with jaycal.tech we need a couple more people you have to have under 2 million in funding and you got to grab one of those great dot tech domains head to jam with jaycal.tech and tell me what you're building and then we'll have you come on the podcast like ramsey did okay and then you pitch the world and it's great don't forget to get a great dot tech domain name apply for the jam with jcal session at jam with jcal dot tech all right let's talk about some good news talk about some good news so uh i'm an enormous fan jason of self-driving cars can't wait for them to be everywhere just to take the teenagers out of the suvs we don't need kids and tanks let's do this now back in may way most said that they had 50 000 paid rides each week then june comes around waymo says if you're NSF is now open.

29:49Come aboard. Hop into your Waymo. Let's go. Then, in August, they said they have now surpassed 100 ,000 paid trips per week. So a doubling from May to August with the addition of more space in San Francisco. But to me, that smells like product market fit, massive consumer demand. And I would say, given that there haven't been more headlines about Waymo's running into new children or dogs, that the tech is working at that level of capacity. Very exciting. yeah it's really great um to see all this autonomous stuff working which is awesome uh and if you hitting a hundred thousand rides a week across three cities i believe it's across three cities right la san francisco and then phoenix arizona now uh you have to put all this in context and we did this on a previous show uber is doing a quarter million rides per week quarter million rides per week okay so one percent of 250 million is 2.5 okay and 0.1 would be 250 so waymo is doing point 10 basis points right one tenth of one percent i think of what uber is doing right now uber is doing less than one percent of all rides uh in the united states like globally so ride sharing as opposed to driving your own car is like literally one percent of the overall market of rides so you know people are asking like how does this affect your uber investment you're still long uber of course i'm still on uber they're still growing 30 40 a year in terms of rides i think what's happening is this next generation or two will not have driver's licenses and they certainly won't own cars and autonomous will be part of the mix i drive uh tesla full self-driving every day i can tell you it is absurdly impressive it's got i would say nine out of ten miles dialed in it does not have that last mile uh and those are going to be really the hard ones so i don't think the tesla full self-driving can be as meaningful as waymo is i think waymo has a lot more experience right now but i do think in china and some other places uh there'll be others and i think byd is going to be the big player here uh uber has ordered a hundred thousand of those electric vehicles with them that have autonomy there's six or seven players in china doing autonomy so i think china will be the the big market uh for this and i think we will go from one percent of rides being done by lyft uber waymo etc to ten percent and then the question is you know what percentage does uber get of that next nine percent my guess is they get three or four of the next nine percent which would put them at half the market share because there are seven or eight people i think who are going to reasonably get to the promised land of those seven or eight people i would say let's just say it's eight people get there in the next 36 months they're not going to be able to build enough cars for the entire market i think of those eight five of them will just put their cars into the uber and lyft marketplaces they'll just go to uber and lyft and say how many do you want and depending on jurisdiction they'll get deployed there um and you know then there's the cost then there's the cost of these cars um is the other main issue uh way most are like over a hundred thousand dollars all in and they have to be cleaned they have to be maintained and in the uber or in the ride sharing model those are the existing cars that people own they're being used when they're sitting there typically unused for some portion of time but the maintenance the storage of the car the cleaning of the car that's all maintained by the uber driver and the lift driver door dasher etc so i think this will grow to 10 of the market which means uber will be five times bigger is my basic premise in the next 10 years uber is five to ten times bigger and has five to ten percent of all markets and then i think tesla could be number two or even number one but i think the big winner is uber um and byd i think people are underestimating byd where do you so in in this stack rank of of major companies that we know uber tesla waymo and byd and also baidu with its apollo go um taxis which are in wuhan and actually i think there's 500 of them live there now where does waymo fit into this ranking because you didn't put them into your top two there which surprised me is are they third or fourth oh no i think i think they'll be top three yeah i think it's uber waymo tesla will be the three and byd those are your top four right there cruz seems to be asleep at the wheel so to speak um and um you know i think there'll be a long tail of other players i actually think this could all become commodified if somebody starts an open source project that actually works in the way android does so then you might have like a high-end version of this like the iphone version which would be tesla and raymo and then you might have this incredible global androidification of the industry where you id or somebody decides you know what we're going to open source this whole thing and uh you know that's that suddenly then all at once concept in technology yeah and so we looked into open source self-driving and there are a couple of names that are worth looking at one is called comma ai yep this might be yes yeah coolest company that i hadn't heard of in my life so if you haven't heard of them what they do is they have an open source bit of software they raised about 18 million actually ironically enough they raised one point sorry uh 3.1 from andresen back in 2016 to go way back in time but they've open source software and then they'll sell you a kit which we have up on the screen right now called the comma 3x and you just stick in the front and back of your car and you can have a car that has automated lane centering adaptive cruise control and lane change assist not level four self-driving to be clear but yep but it's going to keep getting better they do climb down over 100 million miles driven so i wonder if you're right the core substance here does get commodified a bit like how llms are now all pretty good and then the question then becomes how do you defend it how do you make it better but to me like once you solve this is there really a a better way to do it like navigation i'm sure that bing maps and google maps are roughly as good at getting me directions to boston from my house right and open maps is going to be there's an open mapping project so the open mapping project comma ai and we had george hoats h-o-t-z on the podcast eight years ago eight years ago with comma ai and he actually almost went to work for tesla i think there was a little dance publicly there but yeah i do think these open source projects the commodification in china tesla has a massive fleet already out there waiting to be woken up that's their secret sauce and you know the thing about tesla is when they do figure this out they have i think 30 billion dollars in cash they could just say you know what if you want to buy teslas feel free and hey but we're going to just produce a million cars a year and put them into the robo fleet and then next year we'll put two million into robo fleet next year we'll put three billion and waymo can't do that so you have waymo with a head start in terms of the number of rides but they have to buy are they on volvos audis i forgot what they're using and then i guess they're going to make their own eventually in partnership with people but you understand like they're you'll have to make these things put them into service and then a large portion of the time they're unused and then there's peak times and so you know it's it's going to be it's almost like thinking about e-commerce right if you were looking at target walmart and amazon you know and we were sitting here in 1999 2000 2001 2003 four would you want to own those stocks and the answer is yeah those three figured it out and right now man do those three companies crush it on e-commerce right people are constantly going to those three websites and shipping stuff to their house so um you know now you probably would want amazon as your number one but you would also want to know those other two stocks yeah i did a fact check on your tesla cash thing uh i regret you before me jason that you greatly underestimated it's not 30 billion in cash it's 30.7 billion come on man you gotta be better than that that's i mean it's just so weird my i have this like really weird thing where i remember certain numbers no no you are you were very close and 30 billion dollars to your point is 6x what alphabet is committed to uh waymo because they dropped another five billion dollars as a commit um during their last earnings call which was a lot of money to be there five billion dollars is five billion dollars but tesla has a lot of money so i'm excited about this one last note auto wear is another open source project um founded back in 2015 by shinpei kato at nagoya university and they are building something that i couldn't actually get my mitts around as much because it isn't like a hardware product it's an open source driving thing anyways the point there is lots of folks are working on this and so hopefully we do have a uh slowly then suddenly thing coming up because my gonna save a lot of lives too that's i mean that's the best part of all this so um you know i mean listen i i believe i i've been telling people i think uber hits 88 dollars and 88 cents in the next year um and because i like the number 88 this is good luck so when i buy in and play poker i buy 8800 typically because it's good luck so 8888 i think is it and then i think 10 years from now we might be looking at it you know an uber stock that's 888 why i just like the number eight i just like the number eight my so numerology has come to twist we are now just i like the number four so i'm gonna go with well i mean look anyway but you're a gambler i'm a gambler.

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41:04So I have brought to you a round that you will not like, but I want to talk about it anyways. So we're going back to the world of Web3 and we're talking about a company called Story that just raised 80 million dollars now the background for this is that open ai is now doing um customer tuning for their 4-0 model open ai just landed a deal with condé nast and anthropic is getting sued so i'm thinking a lot about ai models and data for training still and that brings us to story so andreason horowitz's crypto team puts 80 million dollars into story 2.25 billion dollar valuation and jason i'm going to walk you through what it does and then i want you to tell sorry did you say 2.2 billion dollar valuation no i said 2.25 billion dollar valuation so in the real world where that was a stock trading in the market you would have to have one-fifth of that in revenue so it'd be 400 million in revenue 500 million in revenue roughly okay got it yeah and you'd have to have just to have that you have to have sas gross margins so in your high 70s to low 80s and you would need to have probably positive free cash flow and at least 15 % growth and, you know, the retention of 100.

42:15The point is, it's a lot of money, you know? A lot of money. So, what are they building? They're building a blockchain framework that will tokenize, don't laugh, I'm being serious. They will tokenize IP to get it on the blockchain. No, I'm not. Is this like you're punking me? No, I swear to you. It's just an ICO. Okay, keep going. Sorry. With the Breslau story and this story, I feel like we're just like going back to an era where i was banging my head against the desk in confusion but sure keep going then they're going to monetize the ip that is on the blockchain by quote giving creators the ability to set the economic terms for how ai can use their ip and then all of this is programmable so you can call it if you need to and then and then access it and um really slick website i court pulled this up because i think they put a lot of clearly budget into graphics and the reason why that uh and reason has done this chris dixon and carol woo from their team yeah said that uh you know these ai systems today are likely trained on original human created content but often don't credit or cite their sources if there's no attribution or compensation what incentive will there be to publish original creations on the open internet okay so i agree with that i like adventure capital round not a big crypto guy but hey you know i'm flexible uh knowing all that jason how much money would you put into this deal at the terms that andrewson horowitz just accepted oh on these terms 0.0 um and i would say this is foolish um and i chris sticks is a smart guy but i think yes they have a giant vent i think they have a giant fund of lp money sitting there and they need to put it to work and they need to make big bets here but if they put 80 million in at a 2 billion plus valuation they own three percent of the company three percent okay nothing it's nothing it's less than a seed investors target for a seed round it exactly i mean y combinator owns seven percent of a company for 125 so if you just think about where you're putting capital this is dumb um now listen i we haven't i don't know the founders they could be the biggest geniuses in the world this could be sergey brin and larry page and maybe it's worth overpaying but i don't think so um and i do think that although this idea makes some logical sense um i think and i do think it should exist and i am an investor in a company that is doing a clearinghouse model like this and i think there will be many clearinghouses one for books one for music just like the music industry has clearinghouses so the clearinghouse concept will exist large brands new york times and county nests will cut direct deals reddit because they can twitter etc and those people will go direct and then there'll be the meat the fat medium the medium part of the tail and then the long tail will need services like this i think it's going to be a grinded out business i don't think it's going to ever make the amount of money necessary to get a what needs to be like at least a 10x a 10x here means this becomes a 25 billion dollar company a 25 billion dollar company would need to have five to 10 billion in revenue it's not going to have that there's not enough money here but we could be missing something the other weird thing i don't know if you saw the sec was looking into some vc firms in the crypto space i'm not saying that there it's injuries and horowitz but i you know the idea i have here is i think the sec is very interested in uh venture firms putting money into crypto projects having tokens and selling those tokens to retail or to anybody and i've talked about it more here so i i don't do crypto deals at all people send me crypto deals i'm like i'm out why because they're overpriced like this one two they are incredibly speculative and none of them literally none of them with the exception of coinbase maybe some nfts companies that are now close to worthless or extremely low value the only thing that's worked is the uh crypto exchanges in other words the marketplace where they sell the tulips works i think there's one other thing that does work which is okay tell me please stable coins i think stable coins have done quite well sorry i forgot stable coins yes circle is a company that's going to go public i mean we're actually we're going to have spoiler we're going to have circle back on the show in the not just future yeah you're getting that locked in extra right now and so circle coinbase and then the list gets pretty short frankly i mean i know yeah kraken okay fair enough um but again that falls into your exchange that's an og business model that's that has one foot in fiat and one foot in crypto doing quite well and so to me that's that's like a hybrid versus a full crypto business um by the way on the sec thing were you referring to the point in which the uh the sec was looking at vcs to see if they were acting as unregistered securities dealers there's that piece uh and there's the uniswap news that came out a couple of days ago yeah uh so block tower reported this there was a um a podcast where somebody talked about it and what i believe is happening and i i did listen to the podcast where this person talked about it uh speaking on the unchained podcast on wednesday ari paul the chief investment officer of block tower capital said the sec have launched a quote bunch of investigations into vcs for acting as unregistered securities dealers as you're saying the discounted token deals that some vcs inc with crypto project puts them in violation of the regular regulators strict securities laws paul says and so what's happening here is if you were to buy you invest in one of these companies and then they have a token where does the equity value sit alex is the equity value in the corporation that you invested in let's i'm going to make up a company now this company is uber coin and it's going to make a decentralized ride sharing network you put your car up there you have users it matches them it puts it on the blockchain and you don't you just disintermediate uber there doesn't need to be any central location you just add your card to the blockchain and it knows the location blah blah blah okay silly idea but whatever okay i invest 80 million dollars in there and i own three percent of the company like this deal we just saw and then they launch a token and the token has you know they they launched 10 billion at 10 cents each so there's a billion dollars now in value in the token and i as the vc get 10 get my three percent of those tokens so i have i gave you 80 million to invest in the company but because i own three percent of the company they said i'll give you three percent of the tokens as well there's a billion dollars that's 30 million dollars in tokens and uh the token spikes goes 10x now i have 300 million so i sell half my tokens i make 150 million i'd send it to harvard and yale and you know mubadala whoever the lps in my fund were and they get that money from the public consumers randos bought the token then the token collapses and becomes worth you know one tenth of one cent yep and you know that is that's an engine that takes money from people who don't have a lot of money but are chasing the gen bet you know philosophy of chasing a big win oh good call yeah it takes that money from gen bet funnels it through a fee structure involving vcs and founders and then it takes most of the profit from those poor people and gives it to foundations that have tens of billions of dollars it's not exactly economically accretive the way you lay it out i'm not i'm not stoked by this model that you're describing if that had occurred would gary gensler elizabeth warren aoc you know in that contingent of people who let's say are what do they call themselves democratic socialists i i don't think gary gensler would would account himself wouldn't he considers himself a capitalist whatever but i mean those people who kind of support this legislation who represent constituents yeah they're going to look at that and be like wait a second wealth transfer and they're looking for the wealth transfer to go the other way they want to see a more balanced society what you described sounds like stealing from the poor and giving to the rich it does sound a lot like that what they want to do is steal from the rich and give to the poor so this is going to cause if this is true and this and any venture capital fund did this the optics would be so crazy that if this and that's why i think the sec started double clicking and asking questions and you know i've had the sec come to me um you know and other folks um and when they think they see fraud and this is a case where i think i had met with a founder but i didn't invest but they knew i had met with the founder sure how did they know i met with the founder well obviously they got records yeah that i was on their calendar and high profile name you know sec calls you uh and then i'm paying a two thousand dollar attorney and i'm submitting information saying yeah this is my notes from the call and here we are and then you never hear from them again so you just send it in and they ignore you afterwards precisely wow it's kind of like i don't want to say they're on a fishing expedition because i don't think that they have some nefarious purpose but that's how it feels to you because you naturally as a curious person are like why are you asking and they're like yeah we're asking and you're like great am i involved in this is somebody in my organization involved in this it well we didn't invest why would you want our information like yeah information and you're like okay okay it's like if you see a cop car parked outside your house and you're like did i break the law did i do anything wrong except for me just eating donuts anybody but your blood pressure goes up several gradations and your doctor begins to get mad so i have to ask you are you talking about solana in this analogy that we're uh no actually wasn't you know and uh i think that one has come up because some of my besties were involved in oh they had invested in a a fund that then were investors in solana and so far everything i know about solana has been on the up and up but you know all it takes is like because i had said on the all in podcast and it became like a clip um where i was like i don't understand the valuation like are you guys wrong this thing are you selling it and we kind of joked like ah because if something doesn't make sense in terms of valuation you sell your shares going back to the ryan breslow thing and 14 billion dollars interesting if you were a shareholder and it was worth 14 billion and somebody offers your secondary you'd be like okay that's how much do you want exactly and you know i had that happen once or twice you know during peak zurp some people offered to buy us you know buy some of our shares we took advantage of that secondary uh and then i you know i had people who were lps or people who were in syndicates hey why are we selling 10 or 20 percent because you as the fund manager are trusted to make these decisions for better or worse and so you know you sell just a little bit of your calm or a little bit of another company or a little bit of your uber you have to then justify it and what i would just say to people is we don't know what's going to happen in the future but we do know that this offer came in and these offers don't come in too often therefore we thought it was prudent to sell 10 to 20 of our position and if the offer comes again at a higher valuation or the same we might sell another 10 or 20 so that's always been my philosophy which is you know on the way up you can pair your position a little bit do you feel like an idiot if it goes 10x after you do maybe but it depends on where you put that money if you took that 10 you sold at a peak valuation and put it into nvidia and then that went 50x you would feel pretty smart right so you always have to ask yourself well what did you do with the capital after you got it back and then some industries you just have to return capital at some point or you're not in business.

54:52If you're a private equity firm or a venture firm, if you do not get DPI, as we discussed the other day, you're out of business, right? So you just - Oh, absolutely. I think shaving off 10 % to de-risk and return cash to make everyone happy makes perfect sense. It's the old farming point. Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered. And so I think a slight de-risking is okay. But that's also my personal philosophy towards risk, which is I like to have a roof i like to have a job you know i'm not i'm not willing to to have the variance go so high that it all goes away to any point i bring up solana not to accidentally subtweet um your friends that was a mistake but um the thing no no no i mean i it wasn't the intent i mean but the reason why i bring it up is i think there was like a big venture investment i think and treason was involved there was a token pre-sale for solana and it was called a dc coin for a long time in the crypto community now it's street cred seems to be pretty good but i was always kind of curious if you bought it and then you sold some and then it turns out that it was a security how much liability might you have retrospectively and i don't think that's been fully teased out by the legal system yet uh one last note for me on story we've talked about tolbit we've talked about human native these are companies that are building trad web platforms to let people take their content and put it into the bucket and then get some payment for it we are now going to get to see a natural experiment between a database that is private and a database that is public and we will see who comes out on top um we did have tolbit on the show a couple weeks back lovely people and we'll see how they're gonna do you know the other thing about these pre-sales is when you do a public offering you have a lock-up period you have audited financials you have like a a road show you have filings with a lot of these um uh pre-sales there was a massive discount there were not lockups or the lockups were negotiated one-off in other words you're the founder i'm the vc you got five vcs you got three angels you cut two three different style of deals with us i say i'm going to buy you know 10 million of the tokens but i don't want a lockup period the other people say i just want to buy a hundred thousand tokens okay but you got to be locked up for two years you're like okay well i guess that's all i can get can i get 18 months like okay now the person who wasn't locked up they start selling on some schedule and then the other people we're locked up don't then collapses you get the idea of what can happen right when robin had went public it was like 50 60 dollars before we distributed at i think i don't know it was 18 or 22 or something in that range well i mean but that valuation was never real you know kathy wood was buying a 50 60 a share if i remember correctly and then it came back down it was it was like a one day spike you know and so again we have to then go to lps and they're like didn't hit 60 I was like, yeah, there was like an AMC weird thing that occurred that we didn't get to participate in because we distribute in six months, the end.

57:46Well, that's good to have a pattern. I mean, companies, I forget if it was Sequoia or someone else, they were now going to hold equities in their companies that invested in after they go public. And then because they did that, they got their face ripped off and the market turned. As long as you're consistent, I think it's fine. As long as you have like, we do this, we do this, we've all agreed to this. but i think if you try to start timing the market after an ipo if you're a private market investor you're just asking to make a mistake because that's not your game that's not and some people are good at the game you know you look at a sequoia they have heritage they had a family office offering and they were very good at it and they knew holding google and other things post going public was a good idea so you know hopefully you know and those investors i think get to choose if they want to be in that public thing or not well i mean as again back to about clarity optionality and you know just just being above board basically everything that's not going on in the bolt deal leads to very good business results normally speaking just do whatever ryan doesn't and maybe that'll work out for you and uh we have one final story i think oh yeah we're just something really quick about layoffs just because i wanted to touch on this because i have a we've been talking a lot about static team size you're on the show basically companies not hiring more as they grow you get more leverage out of each employee greater profitability and jason likes to say about how ai is going to help people do more faster so each person's more productive you can essentially have leverage and then jason i'm watching some companies in the tech world that are big names cisco and intel just just take out the knife like they're trying to cut off an arm absolutely brutal and so um cisco's cutting seven percent after it cut rolls in february intel's cutting 15 000 people and they're trying to save 10 billion dollars next year here's my here's my question i get static team size because often adding people is just is at least a less productivity and more complexity and so forth but if you're looking at a company like intel that is clearly behind the innovation curve yeah and you're slashing that many people we have a chart here of the biggest tech layoffs of the year you can see that intel and cisco are both rather high on that list yeah this is by raw numbers right you have 26 000 people at dell which is 20 yeah so there's percentage and there's one number these are big percentages and big numbers to your point about the cleaver yeah just i mean blood's flying here and so when you see these these these massive layoffs is it the company saying that we made a mistake and we overhired and we're just trimming the fat or are they saying we can't afford to do what we need to do with these people or 15 000 people from intel and 7 000 from or sorry 7 from cisco it's just an enormous production talk to you about this permission to speak freely no go for it okay i'm gonna say something i'm gonna say some things that are gonna hurt some feelings okay there's a war right now there is a war between management and shareholders and employees in america okay it's a war and it's a multi-faceted war but people because this is their paper it's their jobs it's a very sensitive topic right and it this is a multi-variable war there's work from home and return to office and then there is efficiency there's age discrimination and then there's top heavy organizations and then there's natural efficiency you know there are people like jack welch russ and peace at ge who felt five percent should get cut every year there are people like netflix uh patty mccord and you know the team over there they felt you had to everybody on the team had to get rehired every january you had to state your case if you wanted to keep going at the company so what we're seeing in the market right now is um you never waste the crises and because of the overhiring in tech the legacy companies are looking and they lag but they don't lag forever they saw what twitter zuckerberg microsoft and google did in terms of right sizing they saw the productivity gains and they said you know what we want a little bit of that we want a little bit of that because management knows that in a company like a cisco right when you brought up cisco we're in town there are people who've been there for multi-decades and i i have great sympathy for these people because there are generation they're boomers they're gen xers and then even millennials and like i told you we took you in the gen x draft because you're cool af um and smart but the millennials can claim you as well the point is boomers massively overpaid at the end of the career less energy less desire to crush it generally speaking i'm painting with a broad brush here then you go to gen xers maybe they're slightly overpaid you know and you've been at a company and then they're looking at this next generation or you know the ai native generation that people talk about sunday mandra was talking about that on the ai program recently just this you know ai native generation is more efficient and so i saw this in the pc era where you know legacy people didn't have computers on their desk and gen xers who didn't know how to use computers were 10 times they're just not wasting the crises they're using this as a way to get rid of the over in their mind the overpaid old people okay i don't want to hurt anybody's feelings but there are people who you know were at intel or cisco for 2030 maybe even more years they got five six seven percent raises every year they doubled their salary every seven eight years they got stock options and now the company's like you know we just don't need this many people because your job is now being done by ai and so they're just trying to get rid of all of that what they consider fat dead weight overpaid old people and just cut them that it's really brutal and then i watch these people because they're on tiktok crying i have a great sympathy for them and you know it's almost like it's hitting my age group too i know people who are in their 50s you're in your 40s you know like people in their 50s are starting to feel this i have contemporaries who are like i don't know if i'm going to be able to get another job i don't know if i'm going to get a job at the same salary what am i going to do because i still want to work 10 20 years and so and then forget about like international and globalization where you could hire people in portugal manila south america and canada at a 25 to 75 discount to do that same work and you know ai doing some amount of so the work continues and um oh okay i have a couple a couple of thoughts about that i did so capitalism is do you think it's true what i said i mean the thing the thing that i that i quibble with is the amount of people because cisco couldn't have had enough people that have been there for 20 30 years to fill the the the scale the cuts we're talking about intel didn't have 15 000 of them so i think they're probably also cutting down some other places and if they are making these cuts as absolutely painful one or two time things to clear up cash flow to put it into the right part of the business to grow okay painful i get it but if the company was so poorly run that up until 20 minutes ago they thought they needed all these people because they hired them they stopped them they insured them etc i i doubt their ability to actually chart the right path forward and then the third thing that i've seen at companies that go through layouts having been at companies have had layoffs is once you begin to do that all the people who can leave go oh it's that now okay and then they bounce and you end up cutting what you think is the dead web but then you lose the top of the pyramid and you're gonna lose some great performers who feel like there's a yeah you go i think anything under 10 in this kind of market is probably pruning and you know when you're in that five to ten percent it's kind of in the jack welch pruning not a big deal efficient when you get over 10 something more is going on also people were hired gotta remember we went through a very competitive decade where people were rightfully so you know and it's a pendulum but talent was scarce and there was massive competition and what did that lead to it led to people correctly getting the best deal they could in the market and maybe leaving jobs to get you know 30 40 percent raises and they do that twice in a decade and all of a sudden you know somebody who is making x is now making x times three and then people wake up and go wait a second how did this person wind up getting the salary wait a second that's a big number oh you just you just explain something to me this is why everyone gets a one percent raise because that way you can never end up doubling your like i i had my last job which was owned by yahoo which is owned by apollo um like the end of the year will come around and they'd say we really appreciate your contributions you get 2.25 which is more than most people they got 2 and you look at them you're like bro inflation's five like what you're gonna pay me less cost of living adjustment it's like half of the cost of living adjustment yeah and so i think that's probably been instituted to avoid the situation that you're describing in which if i got a seven percent raise every year i mean i would retire making the oodles of money you know that would be fantastic but not super viable that's why people always say you have to if you want to get a big jump in pay and you're an elite performer in the top 10 you have to basically go out and test your worth in the market and you know that's a fine thing for people to do and struck me as inefficient though from the corporation side because you know how much it costs to staff up to have an hr department to source candidates to bring them in and then they leave because you won't give them more than a two percent raise the incentives there are strange but jason you asked for a question we have one um uh our dear friend uh mr or mrs um patushi let's say okay um hey jason what do you think of future uses of blockchains that deal with storage would it replace today's clouds and does it seem cool to store yourself on a blockchain but not sure to invest in it essentially uh do you think that file coin is the future you know sorry i just read storage keeps getting cheaper and cheaper and more reliable and so anything to do with blockchain and storage you know and making it theoretically cheaper is um just not gonna work because uh every time i go to put a hard drive into a new computer into a rack or a server i have i'm just like what have you seen how cheap hard drives are oh it's it's absolutely insane like uh just give me the price of a two terabyte uh drive right now what would that cost us a two terabyte drive i don't even know if they make two terabyte but i'm gonna think it's 50 bucks yeah 10 terabyte drives i think uh most popular hard drive size now you need a probably eight i think eight is oh you're talking about portable that means it's got to have a power supply and i'm saying that i found a two terabyte one it is portable and it costs 80 so the point is that yours is going to be 35 yeah so you know um if you were to look at the cost of you know i don't know like i think eight terabyte or the standard enterprise ones now an eight terabyte might be 100 to 200 bucks four terabyte 100 bucks so you know we're down to guess that's like 10 bucks a terabyte 20 bucks a terabyte yeah it's 20 bucks a terabyte right now i mean it's bonkers uh so blockchain this and this is the thing blockchain is a very inefficient database style it's because you're replicating it across many servers it's immutable it can't be changed or it can't easily be changed you might be able to change it with like all the servers agreeing to take something down if you if you architect it that way but almost nobody wants that database format the only people who want an immutable public blockchain is people who you know want to know the custodianship of like i don't know an nft and it really matters that you can see who it changed hands with and it seems like it's obscure like nobody wants it and so that's that's always my thing we bitcoin is now a almost two decades story and we don't have crypto writ large is a two decade story we don't have anything outside of stable coins and exchanges to show for it all right i have a spite i have a spicier question for you so keith critsellus asks do you think the net job destroying companies or automation things like ai and robotics should be taxed differently than job creating companies now this is this actually fits into my unified theory of uh economics human progress and robotics that i haven't written down yet but i'm curious what you think here jason uh yeah i mean it could come to that i think that's you know why sam altman did the ubi thing i think there are some delusions of grandeur here where it's like we're so amazing at what we build that we're going to get rid of so many jobs that therefore we have to be the god kings and queens and float down and sprinkle all of you know a small percentage of the money we make on you peons to let you live at home and suckle uh you know the teeth of ai's you know it's a little deranged if i'm being honest um but that is an interesting idea of you know putting a tariff on a robot that kills jobs and then redistributing that well it's not insane to think that the you know there's an analogy here alex you could take the toll road and say we're going to charge for this toll road and put that money or some percentage of it toward public transportation so you're paying to go in the fast lane five bucks a day we're going to take two dollars of that and make it for the subway system and people have thought of that kind of scenario and i kind of like those i like the idea that the congestion tax in a city like london or manhattan would go towards improving public transit so you have this thing where like the billionaires you know mike bloomberg is zipping down broadway in his you know maybach i don't know what he drives or whatever he gets driven in you know his suburban and he doesn't hit as much traffic but he's got to pay 20 bucks to go in that zone right and these d-bag bankers in london go in the finance center they i think they pay 50 bucks as a congestion fee or something crazy like that like a day to drive their ferraris there yeah yeah yeah let me let me ask you before what is the cost of the congestion pricing in by the way jason called the lawyers d-bags not your friendly friendly alice over here i'm oh it's actually not that bad let's see the london congestion costs are as follows standard charge 15 per day auto pay 14 per day and late payment after the day of travel 1750 so it's 15 pounds a day which is a little bit more than dollar so it's 18 20 it's 20 bucks but if that 20 bucks goes towards making the tube better kind of like it the tube's great my first time on the tube having spent a lot of time both on amtrak and the new york subway and calteran and bart i was like wait a minute you can have a really nice subway this place is spick and span it was warm it was lovely there was no didn't smell like pee you know i was in manhattan for two or three weeks with my daughters and you know i'm team uber obviously but you know it's like in manhattan and there are times when taking the subway five stops is a lot faster and even going to brooklyn to see my family um i took the subway i would say three out of four times now it's literally taking 100 or 200 uber black which is what i take i take the uber black most of the time it's not it's it's not cheap but it doesn't make any impact on me but i prefer the subway because i want to get there faster and i like the subway i like seeing other humans i like being part of the mix i don't know i don't want violence or a crazy person attacking me or my daughters but i kind of like it i like the vibes i like being on the subway my daughters prefer it as well so yeah i remember in san francisco uh during kind of the peak of the last the pre-covid tech era when i was there you know if it was less than a mile and it was across anything in soma it was always dramatically faster to walk because traffic was so locked up because not only was the slow once you got into your uber but they would have to start seven blocks away on the wrong part of market street and then noodle their way over to you and then i i actually i think i lost a bunch of weeks i was just hiking everywhere across the city so you know that's what works out hey and i just asked chat gpt 4-0 and when i open a new window it goes there uh and i asked it where does the congestion charge money go how does the government spend it and according to chat gpt 4-0 public transportation improvements walking and cycling initiatives, environmental programs, ultra-low emission zones of electrified buses, road maintenance, and traffic management technology.

1:15:12All that hippie communist stuff we don't do in Texas. London's congestion charge generates approximately 230 million pounds annually. Wow. Amazing. That is pretty amazing. And then they net 155 million of it after operational costs to invest in public transportation and cycling. so i kind of like it so if you in the to the original question if you have you make robots if you got the optimist or the humane and it takes a factory job maybe that goes towards um re-education or food stamps i don't know like i mean would a 10 percent tariff on it just to slap figure out what the replacement cost is tax 10 of it they get a 90 savings the robot company makes a sale everyone wins tough tough to do um all right everybody thanks for tuning in yeah twist 500 twist 500 twist 500.com we've picked over 80 of the companies we're looking for a full-time journalist to join us here um we'll probably work for alex and uh do one interview a day if that sounds interesting to you email alex at launch.co or you have you alexw at launch.co um if you're interested we're looking for somebody full-time to do this okay maybe it's all right everybody that is our show we are back with more interviews more news and the twist 500 before you know it, stick close to us.

1:16:30We are on YouTube, every podcast app, and social media. We'll see you there, Jason. Bye. Bye-bye.