HuggingFace Buys Pollen Robotics, DHH & Bezos Founder Advice & a JCal Origin Story | E2111

26:12Yeah. Well, it seems like it's probably there's got to be different tiers too. I mean, it's a huge team in a big factory. I'm sure some of the jobs are more specialized than others. Okay. So back to the IP recap. I didn't get to do the IP recap, Alex, because I was literally had so many people complaining and congratulating me over the weekend. So back to IP. Jack's a friend. He's awesome. I don't know what part of IP he was talking about here is the challenge. So let's break it down. Did he say anything in the follow up tweets? In follow ups, it looked like it was about AI. Like we the only way we are going to compete with the Chinese is if we get over this obsession with copyright.

26:50And yeah, OK, that's what I thought. That seems to be where he was coming from to me. It is. When you are a billionaire and you've made all your money in software and building software and you're in the technology industry, you very quickly lose any respect for, if you had any to start with, for artists. In Silicon Valley, people think artists are to be used because artists are so dumb that they've built all these platforms. The platforms aggregate all the value and YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok laugh at how stupid artists are for letting them build trillion dollar, hundred billion dollar, 10 billion dollar franchises off the backs of content creators.

27:34Content creators are dumb. And content creators need to show these platforms exactly that they're not them. And what they should do is get together. Mr. Beast. I don't know. Charlie XCX. I don't know who the biggest. Colin and Samiri. Well, they're not huge. I'm saying the ones who actually drive all the TikTok influencers, the top 25 TikTok influencers and Mr. Beast and 25 other people should leave those platforms. Now that content is that now that software is so easy to build with AI, they should stick it to them, leave those platforms and premiere their stuff on their own platform. That gives a hundred percent of revenue or 95 % of revenue.

28:09It's tough though. I mean, there, there have been, there have been groups that have tried to do this. Number one, the Try Guys was a sort of an infamous example. They built up a huge audience on YouTube. You know, the Try Guys, they were on BuzzFeed originally. It was just, they'll go out and try any crazy thing one time. It can't work with one person. It has to be a consortium of the top ten. Dropout. The College Humor guys went and built their own subscription platform. Dropout does okay. Yeah, I think you need to mix in a record label, too. Because that way you can get all the music off. I feel like right now, the reporting circle between music comes out, YouTube ranks of views and revenue kind of goes back in the music industry is a hard thing to break.

28:47But I think that would be clutch. So creators, some artists, a record label or two, you could do it. There's a very simple way to do it, which is, hey, we're going to put 50 % of our content on the platform we own. We'll keep 50 % on the existing platform. And every time we'll say, watch the follow up or the behind the scenes at this new place. And if, you know, there was a consortium that did that, you could actually teach a lesson to the technology. I'm not singling out Jack here. This is like pervasive. Zuckerberg would be the bigger version of this. but jack himself owns title and he's friends with jay-z and and kendrick lamar go ask kendrick lamar and jay-z if they think that somebody should be able to take their music and put it for free on the internet right and then what that would do to the culture if those people couldn't make money right and then you know i saw elon retweeted it and elon in fairness has exposed all of the ip uh all the patents for self not self-driving for a lot of tesla's patents but as we just said in the earlier segment, I don't think the self-driving stuff is open source.

29:47So people, again, are speaking out of both sides of their mouth. Jack owns Tidal, right? It's still owned by where I believe? Block, yeah. By Block. Okay, if he feels that way, then go to Jay-Z and go to Kendrick Lamar and ask them if they're cool with all their IP being free. Right. Okay, founders, let's keep it a buck. Finding the right developers is tough. It's hard, especially when you're trying to run and scale up your startup, you got a lot to do. And Lemon.io is going to save you time. They're going to save you money and a ton of headaches. And they're great at what they do. They've done work to find and vet developers who are experienced, result oriented, and they charge competitive rates.

30:27And you also know that great developers can be hard to find and integrate into your team. So Lemon.io handles all that for you. Startups choose Lemon.io because they only offer handpicked developers with at least three years of experience and who are the best of the best, the creme de la creme. A bunch of launch founders have worked with Lemon.io and they had great experiences. Here's your call to action. Go to Lemon.io slash twist and find your perfect developer or tech team in 48 hours or less. And Twist listeners get 15 % off their first four weeks. Stop burning money. Hire developers smarter.

31:03Visit Lemon.io slash twist. That's the nature of IP. Artists need to be protected. If China doesn't protect IP, I don't like what Sam Altman and Jack and other people are doing here. I think it's dirty. I think it's a really dirty move to say, because the Chinese are thieves, that we're not going to be able to compete. And we as Americans should hold a higher standard. And I believe this in IP. I believe it in due process. I believe it in many different spaces. You don't get to take the low standard China has for IP or the low standard that El Salvador has for human rights and due process and then apply it to America and say, and point to those bad actors and say, that's what we should do.

31:47Josh Wolfe from Lux Capital says, Jack may be smart. This is his stupidest take ever. And I just want to say that other VCs, Jason, are on your side here. But like I said, I don't understand his intent here exactly, right? And so I have to talk to him first before I actually understand. Sometimes people make tweets and they're, you know, they do have a point like, right? He has a choice here. If he truly believes this, Jack has enough money to go buy Jay-Z's catalog. Right. Go buy Jay-Z's catalog and open source and give it as a gift for free to the world and let anybody sample it and use it however they want.

32:18Yeah, he doesn't want to do that. Okay, let's move on to the next story. All right. One thing we've been talking about on the show a lot is lack of exits. Jason, in the first quarter of this year, we saw some IPOs, We saw some M &A activity. It was going great. Yeah, it was going great. Things have changed a little bit in the last couple of weeks. All right. So there's a group called Sutter. They're a secondary trading platform, Jason, and they released their Q1 report showing the most in-demand secondary companies. And I wanted to show this to everybody because there's a bunch of Twist 500 companies on here.

32:48But also, I think it's an interesting look at what VCs are trying to scoop from the secondary markets, which is a key place for liquidity these days. Now, at the top of this list, there are some names you kind of expected. SpaceX, Andrel, Anthropic. But then there are some surprises. XAI ranked higher than I expected it was going to, given its youth. Figure AI, the humanoid robotics company, Jason. Glock with a Q is on there. OpenAI ranks under Stripe with sixth and seventh place. I thought this was a fascinating list. Anthropic is at$61 billion. Is that the share price or is that the market cap?

33:22Let's see, SpaceX, that's market cap. Last public round, yeah. Yeah. Okay. Private round that we know of the valuation publicly. Got it. Okay. Uh, EV expected value, last round expected value, I think is what there should be by EV there. Yes. So, um, there are tons of these secondary markets there. It's kind of like a little bit of gray. There's some weird stuff going on here. And so if we were to look at this, uh, Andrew at 28 billion SpaceX at three 50 and a figure at 39 billion figure at 39 billion does not make a lot of sense to me. that's a pre-revenue company, right? So that's the one that stands out.

33:56I mean, XAI does have some revenue and it owns Twitter. So it has billions of revenue there. So that makes sense. Defense Tech, they have billions in revenue, Andrel. SpaceX has billions. Stripe has billions. OpenAI has 10 billion. Rock is crushing it. So when I look at these, the only out of the top 10 that stands out to me here as maybe you would debate is figure AI. Just so you know how these are driven, secondary markets here are driven not by venture capitalists, but by high net worth individuals. And so if you're a high net worth individual, I can go on these and they get pitched on them all the time and I can buy these, pay massive fees, like typically maybe 5 % to 10 % to buy them.

34:41And then a 20 % carry or 10 % carry, or you may just buy them without carry. And when I go buy a million dollars worth of Andrel, you know, and I own about 7 million worth of Andrel right now. I'm joking. That's my guy, Bob Merleckey. If you were to go buy a million dollars worth of Andrel on this, you're going to pay like$50 ,000 or$100 ,000 in fees to get in there. So it's a bit of a racket. A lot of founders don't like this. And they don't like that these markets are doing this because it just creates a bit of chaos for them. How much of this do you think, because like you said, this is not VC driven.

35:12This is just individuals who have the money to throw around. How much of these do you think is driven rather than based on the fundamentals of the companies by their notoriety and prominence in the culture? Because I can't help but notice a lot of the companies near the top of the list, they're brands that are recognizable in the world. Your Stripes, your Open AIs, your ByteDances, your Neuralinks, they're all famous companies. I would say the panache, the patina, the branding is but 20 % of this. It is playing a factor, but a lot of this is cause and correlation. So the reason some of these are famous, like SpaceX and Stripe, is because they've been private for so long.

35:53Both of those have been private for well over 10 years now. Those two companies have been private for a long time, which means they have a large number of shareholders. They've got a large number of shareholders because they have so many employees. employees vast over four years typically if a company like stripe is 12 years old you might have an employee who has had three different grants a four-year grant a four-year grant a four-year grant maybe they've had if it's a really high-performing employee maybe they have four grants where they overlap somebody told me when nvidia was private that like jensen would just drop extra shares on people he had like a pool of shares that he had like god power on he didn't have to go to the board or anything he would just be like you did a great job boom i'm doubling your shares and he wouldn't even do it he'd have somebody go do it for him so he was just like dropping these kind of things on people but there's many many sellers in these companies because they've been private for so long a company like figure ai they raised this round and i think ruloff did a tweet about how spvs were ruining the industry because there were no lead investors i think this is kind of a sub tweet i haven't spoken to roll off about it i'm obviously friends with Ruloff.

37:01Ruloff, when he said this, at the same time, I was getting pitched on figure AI at 30, 40 billion. And here's the tweet. We remain destined to repeat the mistakes of the past. SPVs are making a comeback where the lead investor speaks for less than 10 % of the capital, yet eagerly lines up the latest set of tourist chumps who think the story will end differently this time. It's only been three years, head exploding emoji. I think he's talking about figure AI here. At the same time he made this tweet, people, I understand, were trying to lead figure AI's round at a reasonable valuation, say 10 billion.

37:34And listen, this is no shade at the founder of and the team over at figure AI. They should go for the greatest valuation they can get. This is their right. That's a marketplace. However, it is a pre-revenue company. When pre-revenue companies that have serious competitors are raising at a very high valuation, that is going to get the knives out and it's going to get the more than the knives. Actually, you will get a little haters on the margins. The microscopes come out and the microscopes today are not the microscopes of yesteryear. It's not a spyglass. This is one of those scientific microscopes like, you know, at Stanford that really get in there.

38:09And then you're going to start getting the real colonoscopy going on here. They're going to really examine this company and say, if this company's worth 39 billion, it's pre-revenue. What are the details of this? And they're going to start getting very granular into justifying that. And the VCs could be a little upset that some person they consider a knucklehead offers them 40 billion when, let's say Sequoia or Andreessen Horowitz had offered to fund this thing at 20 billion. And they really were going to give them credit. Like, okay, you have zero revenue. In my understanding, somebody fact check me, please, that I heard they were pre-revenue.

38:45I think they had a BMW deal. I have context on that, Jason, let me share that really quick. Yeah, please fill me in so I make sure I get my notes correct. So this is from a story about the$40 billion valuation round that you're referring to and how it's coming together. There's mentioned this piece about SPV, people getting in for as little as 100K, and essentially what appears to be, from what I can tell, a hunt for capital at that price. But the thing that I want to highlight is details are a little bit vague and the company likes to talk. So quoting this Wall Street Journal post, in a March 31 post where he shared a video of the Slender Humanoids working on assembly tasks for BMW, the CEO wrote, this isn't a test.

39:19This is what autonomous robots in production operations look like. Later, a BMW spokesman said that the automaker had three of the robots at its facility for a technical evaluation. So to me, there does seem to be a little bit of a disconnect between promise and reality. He's getting a little ahead of his skis and that makes this entire thing to me a little sketchy. Although I will say, it is a twist 500 company. So I don't want to be... Listen, there's no doubt it's a great company. It's no doubt that they are one of the top 10 robotics companies, I think, probably pursuing the space and they've cashed up.

39:51Here's the challenge. We've talked about this countless times. If you oversell something while selling shares, shout out to Nicola, people can consider that to be securities fraud. Now, the distance between the two statements you just read us. I will give my judgment. This will be an official judgment. I need to hear the first statement again from the CEO. And I will tell you if this is securities fraud or not. The CEO Adcock wrote, quote, this isn't a test. This is what autonomous robots in production operations look like. Turn the music up! Exclamation point. OK, this isn't a test. And BMW said.

40:32BMW spokesman said on April 1, the automaker had three of the robots at its facility for technical evaluation. Quote, only one is used at a time, but the robot has practiced picking up and grasping parts during non-production hours in our body shop, the spokesman said. The following week, the BMW spokesman said that he had received an update from colleagues at the plant and that there were now more than three robots on site. He said they were being used in non-production and live production situations. Pretty close. It's a, this is a bubble case for sure. This is Definitely a bubble case. Because he said this is not a test.

41:09Then the BMW spokesperson explains exactly a test. Yeah. They came back and said we're using it on both live production and non-production. And then the last one he got saved. Yeah. That's the distinction that really matters. The final words save him as not guilty. Give me the final words again. The final part of that statement from BMW, the cleanup. Right. It feels like that was afterwards that they were like, oh, we got to throw him a bone here. No, no, not even throw him a bone. When they saw that BMW quote, the lawyers that figure or the lawyers at BMW or somewhere in between, some counsel probably said, wait a second.

41:48Our understanding is this is not a test. You just said it's a test. We're raising money at a$39 billion valuation saying you're our key customer. Can you please make sure that what you say is accurate in the press? The final sentence. The following week, the B &W spokesman said that he had received an update from colleagues at the plant and that there were now more than three robots on site. He said they were being used in non-production and live production situations. Right. Okay. Now they're in live production situations, which means not a test. So, not guilty. This is not securities fraud. The reason I am harping on this, and I don't want to create another parmalucky situation.

42:32No, man. A CEO is really upset. Brad Adcock watching this right now, like, no. No, the point I'm just trying to make here is a partner can say something out of school. Like BMW is their number one customer. Right. This raise is happening because of that BMW relationship. When you look at those SPVs, the people investing in the SPVs are investing because they're seeing those tweets from the founder. If the founder tweets, you know, this is not a test and the BMW says it is a test, then the person who bought the shares at$39 billion can get a lawyer and then say, hey, I want my money back because you said it wasn't a test.

43:13BMW said it is. That is the ultimate, ultimate way you can buy shares in a company with an option to get your money back, right? Now, when the BMW person says, no, no, it's in production, now you have no recourse. The CEO said it's not a test. The person from BMW said, we're not testing it. It's in production. Then you have no case. You have to understand there are bad actors out there as well. As a founder, there are bad actors who will take every single thing you say on Twitter. And there are lawyers who will be more than happy. Sure. A big targeted company with a big valuation and a billion or$10 billion in cash, and they will go dunk on them.

43:55So just, and if you're taking money from civilians through these SPVs, which is Ruloff's point to tie both points together, Alex. Ruloff is explaining those people are not making economic decisions the way VCs do, which is to get returns for LPs like Harvard or Ford Foundation or CalPERS and retirement funds. They're not, and sovereign wealth funds, they're not making economically sound decisions at all times. They're making decisions based on emotions, based on how, as you said, how high profile is the company. So if a founder is out there increasing the profile the company, which is the job, and you take money from Sequoia or Andreessen Horowitz, they're not going to sue you.

44:36They're professionals. They know. They've done the math. They've penciled it out. They've made, hopefully, a thoughtful decision. Civilians are like, YOLO, 100K. Then you get 100 YOLOs, and you raise 10 million, and then there's five other SPVs doing that same thing. Man, this really does complicate things. We run SPVs at thesyndicate.com all the time at a very small scale. The average one is$700 ,000. We're putting money into seed stage companies, not late stage companies, which is where the average tech size in R is a 7K. And you are YOLOing. And we say that. Only invest money you can afford to lose.

45:11These are typically companies that are either pre-revenue or have a small amount of revenue, hundreds of thousands a year, low millions. I'm actually in the SPV business as well as the fund business, but primarily the fund business. So yeah, interesting. This is a very interesting situation. Be careful out there, folks. Yeah. Be careful out there. And also I think SPACs and SPVs are things that people should use if they're incredibly sophisticated in very rare circumstances, when they make sense, not if you're a dentist. You know, there'll be out of these SPACs, there will be a FedEx, an Amazon, there'll be some great company that comes out of this.

45:45Uh, these SPACs, you just have to assume an 80 % failure rate. Now, when I say 80 % failure rate, I mean a zero. Yeah. Lose all your money. Right. Space tourism. When I saw that one come up, I was like, That's a Hail Mary. If you're betting on that, you should expect it to be one in 250. Now, if you're betting on Joby, I would take it from one in 250 down to one in 50. And that's just what I do for a living is to make these assessments. It's taken me a lot of pain and suffering to get that skill. Right. Yeah. And there are so many. A lot of lessons learned along the way. There are so many companies, Lon, that I thought were going to do so much better.

46:24that went to zero. And there are so many that beat my estimations unbelievably that I would have put behind those other companies, man. There's so much randomness in this. And the randomness is really the founding team. I found some fun videos on social media that directly relate to found up starters. We call these startup insights. I found a really good one this morning from David Heinemeier Hansen, friend of the show. DHH. Our old friend, DHH. This is from a recent episode of his rework podcast, he talks about the inherent contradictions in being a founder. The inherent contradictions in being a founder.

47:01Go. Let's go in assuming it's going to work. If we go in assuming it might not work, you know what? You're not going to put your all in to it. And if there's anything you need these days, it sure as hell is you're all in. Everyone else is putting in their all in, their best thoughts, their best competence, all this stuff into it. You can't show up half-assed and then expect that there's going to be a prize for you. That just doesn't work. And you actually need that conviction because you're going to have sort of a dip in motivation of like, oh, I think it's not going to work. Oh, this is a great idea.

47:26Like it's going to fluctuate, right? So you need to go in with that conviction, like whether it fluctuates, whether it goes up and go down, I believe this is going to work. And then also, again, knowing it probably won't. It probably won't. And when it doesn't or does, you're going to be happy either way because you did it in a way where you did it with integrity, regardless of what that means to you. You're not doing it in a slimy way. You're not doing it in a quick scammy make a buck kind of way you're doing it in a way where you go like you know what i could put my name on this if there was a little box a little plaque i'd proudly write made by david on it so people knew who made it i'm gonna be hiding behind something i'm gonna make something i'm proud of because that's just gonna make me feel good about it i also think it works in the market when you're authentically excited enthusiastic and integral about what you're building and then i'm gonna build it in a way that if it does not work i'm gonna be better now than I was when I started.

48:18So I thought this was a really interesting sort of insight. And it reminded me a little bit of that Rick Rubin book, The Creative Act that we like to talk about, where it's making something that you feel proud of regardless. That's how he recommends getting out of this sort of contradiction is as long as you are happy with the work that you did, and it's something you're proud of, and you're happy to put your name on it, it doesn't matter at the end so much whether it works or not. And I like that approach. Yeah. You know, David's been through the ringer and he makes a couple of really solid points here that you have to keep in mind.

48:51If you're not fired up with enthusiasm, you're going to be fired with enthusiasm. It typically refers to employees, but in general, you know, you shouldn't do a project unless you really have that all in. And you notice he mentioned all in many times. Like the reason I named the podcast all in, you know, is for a reason. you do need to be dedicated and you need to be all in when you're going for a startup. Why? Because he points out it's a roller coaster. And you do need to recognize I'm going all in with the understanding that there's an 80 or 90 % chance of failure. But no matter what happens, I put my name on the back of it.

49:30And Naval was on all in a couple of weeks ago. He sat in the sack seat and he talked about the social network he created for himself. I forgot the name, of it. I had it on my phone. They sold it. Spent a lot of time on it. And basically, it was going to be an audio version of Twitter where you have conversations on there and it would be more thoughtful. AirChat. AirChat. Thank you, Alex. And AirChat was pretty cool. And he said, you know, he tried. He wanted to do something important in the world. He wanted to feel like he was doing something of substance. You know, he sees Elon, he said, and he feels like pathetic sometimes that he's not making something and he's got to go do something that he really feels.

50:11And he put his name on air chat. He was on it constantly. I had conversations with him on it. And you know what? Social networks are like the lightning in a bottle of all lightning in a bottles. Like you literally put a thousand bottles out, lightning hits one of them and the other 999 shatter. And his was one of the 999 that chatter, but he said he felt really good about it. And I think that's one of the things to keep in mind. It's a great quote from David Hanmeyer Hansen, friend of the podcast. I just want to say, I really want him to follow me around and kind of keep me in line. I feel like if I ever slacked off, he'd be like, you're not on.

50:45All right. Sorry, DHH. In honor of Jeff Bezos and Blue Origin's big day, we got one more clip here. This is from last year's New York Times Deal Book Summit. And here is Jeff on overestimating risk versus underestimating opportunity. I think it's generally human nature to overestimate risk and underestimate opportunity. And so I think entrepreneurs in general would be well advised to try and bias against that piece of human nature. The risks are probably not as big as you perceive, and the opportunities may be bigger than you perceive. The second thing I would point out is that, you know, thinking small is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

51:30Yeah, this is something I actually had a conversation with Elon about on his plane 15 years ago. We were, he was working on Tesla and was trying to get a CEO. And he was just saying, people always overestimate the downside risk, was the way he phrased it. Got always stuck with me. It is true. If you fail spectacularly, nobody remembers. You remember. You think it's a big deal. You will think about it constantly. It's the equivalent of somebody going to a party and literally trips and falls. And then they ruminate about that. Rumination, right? And rumination is a real blocker for success in life.

52:15Obsessing and ruminating over, ruminating just means thinking over and over again about something. and when you ruminate over your perceived failings of yourself uh you will then start to feel worse about yourself and you'll over index on it and what i have learned is that it's much better to celebrate all of the victories even the little ones so we've been sitting here as we build out the studio and i've been celebrating the little victories oh we got the lighting better oh we got the flags up oh we now have this oled oh we got a better shot over here oh alex is wearing a college shirt, not a t-shirt on your place.

52:50You know, it's just all the little tiny things. Your perception is that everybody's staring at you constantly and obsessing over you, but actually no one is ever thinking about you. They're thinking about themselves. Spotlight syndrome. Yeah, exactly. And so that is a helpful thing to remember because I do sort of, you know, I feel like insecure social anxiety and you just got to get over that because nobody's actually looking at you. Let's turn this around. So Jason, what you just described is something that I actually personally struggle with. Like I'm a big ruminator by, oh yeah. I'm an insecure introvert.

53:22I just pretend. I'm curious about you though. Like do you, how do you avoid rumination? Like personally? Oh yeah. So it was very simple. I am super self-aware and I've always said like, I'm a kid from Brooklyn who somehow figured out at a very early age how to start his own magazine and be an entrepreneur because I was unmanageable and nobody taught me anything about entrepreneurship. except watching my dad run a bar, which was chaotic. And I built a mythology for myself. And my mythology was, man, the kid from Brooklyn did okay. I was going to be a cop. The expectations were incredibly low. And my Lord, out of the gate, I started to exceed them.

54:03And now I still champion that mythology for myself, which is, can you imagine a kid from Brooklyn became a millionaire, has everything you always wanted, has a beautiful family, has great friends, and can do whatever he wants. And life has two of the top podcasts in the world. And, you know, he gets to ski in Japan. And I take the time to just appreciate how much further I am from the expectation people had for me. And I went into my college counselor, my high school counselor at Severian High School in Brooklyn. This is why I don't donate money to Severian High School. Specifically because of this instance and others.

54:43And they ask me every year. and in the like famous alumni glass thing they have sure they have chris mullen and then somebody told me they had me and a story about me there you go where they you know just talk about famous people at my high school yeah high school you're a notable alumni i'm a i'm like the number two notable alumni if you look at the people who went there chris mullen olympian incredible nba player jay cow okay very flattering i'm still not buying you they pitched me i'm building the computer science wing with jason collicanus they asked me for 10 million bucks or something oh wow i've giving them zero dollars for you know oh you could have like the calicanus memorial library basically yes and i'm just like yeah no i'm 10 million dollars whatever they wanted for a high school that literally takes me on doing all this and you know listen when i went to the uh the person who was the college counselor i said they said well what are you thinking and you were required to go twice that was a requirement yeah no my school had a similar so i went to there this is when i'm sophomore, junior.

55:39And I said, you know, well, I read about Brown. And in Brown, you can make your own degree. And I'm really interested in computers and I'm really interested in psychology. I was wondering if there's anything where you can have like the psychology associated with technology. What a forward thinking major that would have been. This is the age of 15 years old, 16 years old. Do you want to know what the guy did? he laughed in my face really he laughed at me why he went what was brown super outside of your like what was your gpa two point something yeah it was terrible yeah that's a little three whatever anyway he laughed at my face there is no way you would ever get in there have you taken the police officer's test oh that's not very nice or the firefighter test you should encourage somebody chips on shoulders put chips in pockets this mother could believe that did not even for a a second.

56:33He could have just said for but 60 seconds. It's really interesting. What did you hear about Brown? How did you hear about it? Have you looked into the requirements to get to Brown? Is there a second place you could go that maybe you could do a year or two and then get into Brown? That's the approach. What other schools have interesting programs aligned with what you want to study that you could get into and then transfer to Brown? So he gives me this, you know, this nag and I just thought to myself, and this is when it became J-Cal versus the world. or it was did you a favor well yeah in a certain way and i had started to take martial arts and run marathons and i started to get my chutzpah up and i was like you know what if everybody thinks i'm not gonna make it i'm gonna just prove it to them i got a little started to get a little chip on my shoulder and so i went on my own and i figured out oh i could go to fordham university i knew some friends who were in fordham in jesuit school and so i started going up but i i um my friend was at Fordham and he was teaching the Taekwondo program there, the Taekwondo Club.

57:36And I was in the Taekwondo Club at Severian High School. So I started going up there every couple of weeks and I met with this guy. The counselor there was Edward M.J. Boland. I got to find out where he is now. Somebody can find him if they can. I want to send him a gift basket or something or just say hi to him. And I started going to his office because I had applied for admission to Fordham. and edward boland was the guy there and they sent me a letter and said you didn't get in but i had set up a tour with him and i said to him hey um i i had set up a tour but you reject him he goes oh well the tours have nothing to do with the acceptance you didn't get accepted because we know we have people with higher sats and higher gps i said oh so i can't take the tour even he goes no come up and take the tour so he met me he took the tour i took the tour i said to him, you know, any chance I can get in, you know, and he said, well, you know, traditionally, we don't take a student like you.

58:29And I said, well, what about non-traditional? And he looked at me and he's like, that's a good question. I don't know. And he said, well, where have you been accepted? I said, Brooklyn College. He said, I'll tell you what courses take at Brooklyn. If you get straight A's and you do really well, then we'll consider your first sophomore. I said, I hammered this guy. I brought him three letters of recommendation three months in a row, and I dropped them off in his office. I literally went to his office unannounced. Hey, Mr. Bolin, it's Jason Calacanis. And he looked at me and he didn't recognize me.

58:57He said, I came last month. Remember I had that you guys rejected me at totally broke out? Yeah, yeah. I said, I did really well. Here's my report card for my senior year. And here's a letter of recommendation from a place where I had a job. I said, oh, that's great. What are you doing here? He's like, I'm like, I take one dough. And he said, oh, you with your friend from the psychologist? Well, I said, yeah. He said, oh, that's great. Nice seeing you. Next month, Mr. Bolin. He's like, you're back. I'm like, yes. He's like, another recommendation letter? I said, yeah i gave it to him i get a call on august 10th never forget it my mom says jason fordham's on the phone i run to the phone i said mr boland hey um how's it gone and i give him a third letter he said i never told the story on the air he said uh jason i wanted to let you know i'm leaving fordham university oh no i said he put in all that legwork yeah put in all that legwork i lost my my rabbi he's gone i said oh i'm sorry what happened he said oh i i got a job at yale he said you got a job yeah i said that's a better school than fordham is it yeah i said congratulations he said yeah and i had um i had one request for fordham when i was leaving i said oh what's that he said i wanted the most promising non-traditional student to get in oh i said who did you pick i swear to god that's what i said he said you w i said what he said yeah you're in Fordham.

1:00:18I said, I'm in Fordham? I said, I already signed up for Brooklyn College. He goes, well, you can get in if you want. I said, okay, what do I do? He goes, go to the Bursa. Do you want to go to Rose Hill? There's no housing available. Or do you want to go to Lincoln Center? I said, well, I can't afford the housing anyway. Where's Lincoln Center? He said, where's Lincoln Center? You're in New York, right? Yeah, Lincoln Center. He says, it's the Lincoln Center. 16th Street. I'm like, oh, Columbus Circle. He's like, yeah, it's a block off Columbus Circle. Oh, the B train goes there. I have to. He's like, OK.

1:00:45I was like, OK, I'll go to Lincoln Center. I said, what do I do? He goes, go to the birth star. They got your name there. I said, OK. He said, goodbye. I said, mom, I got into Lincoln Center. She goes, I can't pay for that. I said, I don't know. Figure it out. I went. I went to Fordham. And that's when I learned that there is a whole system, Alex, out there. and you can either be a victim to the system or you can believe in the system or like neo in the matrix you can bend reality and i decided i would see how far i could bend reality it was literally that moment in time those two events led me to believe that i could bend reality to what i want it to be and it was it made me so dangerous because then i was like well i could just start my own magazine.

1:01:34You just start my own company. I could have Sequoia as an investor. I could do whatever I want. And it just started to snowball. And so once I started to have that mindset that there was a reality available, then like this whole rumination or feeling bad about myself when I did something stupid or I mispronounced somebody's name, I was like, well, who cares? And I just started to view myself as a samurai or a Jedi knight operating in the world as a Ronin. That's where I have my lack of rumination from is that they laughed in my face and told me I couldn't do it. And then I bent the spoons. And then I just literally in my mind just thought I was a Jedi Knight.

1:02:09It is normal for people to think like, okay, what did I do wrong? Why did he laugh in my face? All this stuff. And I realized the reason he laughed in my face is because he's part of the system. And the system is often wrong. It's just a system. Like, yeah, the system's wrong. And it's just a system. It's an abstraction. The whole thing, all of society is just some crazy abstraction. action if you want to go to japan and ski you can get on a plane with a one-way ticket go to japan and start skiing and i met this guy john who owns the ewanai resort he did that and then he bought the resort you can just go do things yeah he bought me when i took three or four years yeah four or five years to convince the village to let him buy this shut down ski resort now he runs my favorite place in the world when i all right everybody this has been another exciting episode of this weekend turn up.

1:03:00Guys, stop ruminating. You just do f***ing things. Let's just do things, okay? That's the deal. That's it. We'll see you all next time. Bye-bye. Bye. Bye.