Is Project Europe a YC Riff? Nick Denton is Back! And more! | E2096

26:25I mean, you were you were a I think a double hitter as well on me. You were a double hater, weren't you? Oh, yeah, I definitely get it from from from both sides all the time. You hated both. All right. So other stuff in the news, we got inflation data. Yeah. So running people through the headlines here. So CPI, the consumer price index was up 2.8 % year over year in February, below a 3 % rate in January. That's what you want to see. You want to see that number go down better than expected on the core front, which strips out a couple of things to give you a less volatile number. It was a plus 3.1 % year over year, again, better than January stocks.

27:02Jason, pretty happy with this. The expectation that is if inflation comes down, there's room to cut rates. So tech stocks are up today. Tesla rebounding from its prior declines. Nvidia, rebound defense prior declines. So a couple of stocks we've seen trade pretty hot lately are regaining some territory today. And I'm sure that's popular with investors around the world. I don't look at the stock market day-to-day all that much. Certainly, I'm not day trading. Great companies are going to grow through these. The most important things for founders in the game and startups listening, just focus on your customers.

27:36And all this meta stuff that you see, like inflation, et cetera, It's fine to understand it. It's fine to geek out on it, but probably not going to change your day-to-day. You have a certain amount of runway. Raising money could be affected on the margins by it, but great companies that are growing, let's call it in the early seed stage, 10 % month over month, which is a pretty easy bogey to hit. If you're growing 10 % month over month, you're doubling every seven, eight months, you're going to be just fine. So eyes on the prize, focus on your growth, focus on your team. It's a big news today.

28:08And we're going to bring Harry Stebbins on to talk about this. Couldn't quite get them on for today's show. We tried like hell, but didn't quite work out. The point is Project Europe. Now we've talked a lot on this show about American dynamism, Jason, how American companies have the leading market caps in the world. America's leading the AI race, blah, blah, blah. Big deal. So the thing is in Europe, there's a new effort called Project Europe, and it's about 120 European technology folks, like the leaders over at Shopify, Klarna, Mistral, and they're teaming up to invest and mentor younger European founders.

28:38They're putting together a 10 million euro fund that'll put 200 ,000 euro into individuals who are building stuff. And critically, they're going to assign a founder who's already been successful to that young founder to provide mentorship. So it's kind of like a hybrid venture capital teal fellowship model to build more startups in Europe. And I think this is brilliant. Sounds like founder university a bit. I like the mentorship model. That's always good. when they do this Project Europe thing, are they taking equity in that person's company or is it a grant is the question? Are they giving people 200K like a grant, which is what Teal Fellows does with 100K, I believe?

29:1790 % sure this is equity. This came out literally this morning, so we're still chasing down every single details of the terms. But given that 20VC, 0.9N adjacent are all putting their capital into it, I don't think they're going to be giving away their - And it's just a Y Combinator knockoff with a different spin. So not impressed. If it was 100K or 200K that you just gave as a grant to the person, that would be disruptive. Doing this, not impressed. It's just a Y Combinator knockoff. Founders, let's talk about building your brand here in the real world. We know digital ads are amazing, but if you want to stand out in 2025, maybe you need to think a little bit bigger.

29:57And a great way to do that is out of home advertising. Yes, you know, those really impressive billboards you see everywhere, or even the beautiful murals that everybody loves. This is how you build a brand. AdQuick makes out-of-home advertising easy, measurable, and fast. They've taken the headaches out of OOH. You've probably heard OOH, out of home, by combining ad tech precision with real-world impact. So now, planning, deploying, and tracking your campaign is as easy as running digital ads. with AdQuick, they're going to hyper-target your campaign in minutes. Then they're going to use their data and technology to ensure your ads reach the right audience every single time.

30:37Plus, they're going to give you real-time insights to measure performance and optimize your spend. So whether you're building brand awareness or looking to drive customer action, right, you want to acquire customers, you can see why AdQuick is trusted by everyone from the fastest growing startups to the S &P 500. Take your brand to the next level with AdQuick, the smarter way to do OOH. And just for Twist listeners, AdQuick is waiving their fee on your first campaign. That's an amazing offer. Get started today. AdQuick.com slash Twist. That's A-D-Q-U-I-C-K.com slash Twist. So Harry, after dropping the news, the Financial Times cover it and stuff to cover it, said that in the first couple hours, he had another four dozen founders paying wanting to join.

31:19His argument is that Europe can build. I'm much more bullish on this than you are, Jason, because I think what they need to do is reverse the brain drain and stop having people leave Europe, go build in Silicon Valley. And with more capital, more mentorship, and frankly, better vibes, like optimistic feeling, I think you could keep a lot of folks in Europe. And I think also the rearmament of Europe, the removal of the German debt break, and I would say rising EU polite nationalism are all going to be things that consolidate and kind of help founders stay in building Europe, which is going to be good, I think, for American tech companies, more competition.

31:54And also, I think it's going to be good to have another poll apart from the China-Russia axis. So I'm surprised you're not excited about this. I thought you were going to be all like, woo! No, I'm just thinking about it pragmatically in terms of innovation. The reason I'm not impressed is it's not innovative. It's a copycat kind of thing. And it's self-serving. So in order for it to be a movement and be disruptive, the reason Peter Thiel's was so disruptive is it was a grant. And what he did that was really interesting about it was those people became loyal to him because it was a grant and he was still able to invest in them, but you still had then wild cards like pirate wires, I think came out of it or other things that weren't necessarily financial.

32:37So it just feels derivative, not particularly innovative. And if you're a founder, first-time founder, and you stay in Europe, that's a bad decision. It's just a terrible decision. Coming to America, coming to California, coming to Texas, coming to New York will be much more creative to your business. Terrible idea to stay there. If you're a serial founder, fine. If you're in the Nordics, perhaps. If you've got an investor there who's a lead investor who committed to you, great. But for every Klarna, for every Spotify, it's de minimis the impact those European companies have had. Even like London?

33:16You don't think like London you could start? The problem is they're all anti-entrepreneurship there. The reason why this is notable in Europe is because they're so anti. The reason this is needed in Europe is because they're so anti-entrepreneur. When you're in London and you say you're running a startup or you're an entrepreneur, people look at you like you're a charlatan, like you're a con man, like you're a grifter. Entrepreneur equals grifter in a lot of these markets. I'll leave the Nordics out of it because they have a special sensibility for design and a special sensibility for building product that I think is very unique to them.

33:50But they just, they don't have big winners coming out of Europe for a reason. It's because they treat entrepreneurs terrible there. Harry and the Spotify people are the opposite, but it's just, it's too many headwinds. And I think when you're an entrepreneur, what you want to do is remove as many of the headwinds and things that can flip the car. And you want to increase the number of things that could be tailwinds. if you're running a company in Europe, you're going against the jet stream. You're going to burn twice as much fuel. It's going to be slow and dogged. Might be to your point, Alex, that there's some great change that's going to occur and Europe's going to get their act together and be more entrepreneurial.

34:29I doubt it. Europe is Epcot center right now, as far as I'm concerned. It's a place for tourists to go and get to see this old world charm and you can bounce from country to country and it's quite charming, but they treat their entrepreneurs terrible. Okay. So I'm not going to try to go through that, but I think the idea here is there's a lot of people who want to change that. And so here's hoping that that works out. But I do want to say, Jason, if we lost 60 % of our audience, because you're not picking a left or right side here in the States, I think the other 40 % were the Europeans who are also now gone.

35:02No, no. So hello to nobody. I think they are exactly agreeing with me. I think anybody who's a European an entrepreneur or a VC is probably nodding because Jesus, they want to regulate every company. They want to make it harder to build platforms. They don't have section 230 like we have here. You can't fire people. It's not as fluid as an environment. The regulations are crazy. You can't do M &A. It's just the worst place to do business. It's a terrible, terrible decision to do business in Europe as an entrepreneur. Just, you got to go where the action is. It's like, if you wanted to be in hip hop in the 90s, you go to New York or LA.

35:42If you want to be in tech, you come to Austin, New York. You know, maybe you go to, I mean, I would say Dubai or Abu Dhabi or Riyadh. If you are a European entrepreneur, you go to those three cities, they're going to throw money at you. They're going to celebrate you. They're going to give you a golden visa and you're still going to be able to fly home and ski wherever you want or go like, you know, spend your summers in Italy. I'm glad you've given me this opening because you've mentioned Riyadh in this context a few times. And I know things are changing in the kingdom. Like, I understand than you could imagine.

36:13I understand there are progressive people now sort of looking to, well, in some ways progressive. But like, how far along would you say that process is what a Western person today going to Riyadh find a traditional kind of city where they can do all the usual things they're used to doing in a normal way? city. So let me work backwards. Dubai will feel just like New York to you. I feel like Dubai, we've sort of established is this kind of very like Western friendly, like you can get a drink at a bar and like people dress however. Is that Riyadh as well now? That's what Riyadh's chasing. And I'd say they've closed 80 % of the gap.

36:51And so when you look at what they've done in Dubai, Riyadh's just right on that track. And they are particularly obsessed with entrepreneurship and creating companies. And we'll have a big announcement about some work we're going to do in the kingdom that I've chosen to do. I'm going to make the announcement next month, but I have been spending a little bit of time over there. And I believe company formation in that region is absolutely critical for democracy in the world. That whole region has its own power base. Plus, they're trying to get pulled towards China, India, and Russia. on the other side, you know, in the BRICS kind of situation.

37:33And on the other side, they're trying to get pulled into the West. And who they align with in the future is going to determine, I think, human rights. It's going to determine democracy. It's going to determine, you know, peace. And it's going to be one of the great forks in the road, I think, you know, in our lifetimes is where do those countries end up affiliating themselves with? Now, they're their own entities. their monarchies, et cetera. But personal freedoms, economic freedoms, those things are all starting to happen in a major way. And I'm particularly excited about it as somebody who worked at Amnesty National and cares about human rights and cares about entrepreneurship.

38:16Yeah. Yeah. But I can't bring edibles to Saudi Arabia, so I'm going to politely pass for now. I mean - Interesting you bring that up. I think that their view on alcohol has changed, and tourism is the big attraction there. So they're doing new cities like Neom and stuff like that. So in those cities, Westerners are going to be able to have alcohol. And I think you can assume that cannabis or other things will come after that. I did this tweet the other day. I got a huge reaction on my Twitter where I said, hey, here is my protocol. You know, like Brian, everybody's got to have a protocol. Since I'm an influencer now and a micro celebrity, I got to have a protocol.

38:56Very simple. Sleep, exercise, diet, meditation. Focus on those four. And then I gave sort of sub things that I'm working on. Everybody knows I'm on a health kick and I'm doing it for myself, for my daughters, my family. I just want to be around and I want to be healthy in my older years here. Man, has it worked for me? I got a 99 sleep score. That's off the charts. I slept with the bulldog last night. It dropped down to the 80s. What am I going to do? Max was in the hospital. He's safe now. He had a pneumonia. Happens. These bulldogs are like fine-tuned machines. like they're like Ferraris or something.

39:27They're always in the shop. So I felt like I needed to sleep with them. But, you know, I kind of did this protocol and I have, and this is kind of a startup. My understanding is Brian Johnson, who's going to come to the all-in thing tomorrow night here in Texas, that he is making$100 million a year on the blueprint. As I said, maybe pull that up one more time so I can read it. I have those top four things I'm focused on. But then I'm telling people, hey, listen, see if you can add two or three of these things without your phone. Play a game. I played Clue with my twins the other night. We had a riot.

39:58Read a book. You'll see some more physical books on the shelf here. I'm just starting to get into just 15 minutes of actual physical reading, as opposed to audio books, which I do when I'm hiking or driving. Listening to music. Shout out to my friends at headphones.com, Andrew over there, who I'm going to do a partnership with, because I've been so taken by, he's very generous and sent me these$5 ,000 headphones. And I listened to them and man, I'm really hearing the music and I'm using CoBuzz. I'm going to become an influencer in this space next. cook some meals together, share a meal with folks you love.

40:27I have institutionalized my Thursday night dinner with my friends here in LA. Lon, you've come to the ATX Supper Club. We have a six-person dinner. We book out the best restaurants over like the next 12 weeks. One of my friends is doing that, William Barnes, who worked at Uber, and we're good friends, and he's here. So we just go every Thursday to a different restaurant, hang out with animals or kids. I do that hiking, walk in nature. I do that every day on the ranch where I try to. These are the things that are going to help you. Sleep is the new drug in the startup community. People are leaving events at 10 p.m.

40:58saying, I got to get a good night's sleep. I got to get a good night's sleep. I'm tracking my score. You measure it, you manage it. Whoop, hate sleep. They all do a great job, as does the Apple watch in doing this. But anyway, I like Harry. I think he's got great intent here. Can't wait to talk to him about it. Maybe he's floating a balloon. We'll see what the terms are. And then so the terms on the 200K also important. Yes, very important. Okay, moving on. I'm going to throw this in because I think it really matters. Anthropic, Jason, the AI foundation model company backed by Google, Amazon, lots of investors, et cetera, has grown its annualized revenue, according to the information from about a billion dollar run rate at the end of 2024 to 1.4 billion.

41:36As I said earlier, 40 % growth from a billion dollar foundation in less than a quarter is insane. And frankly, I think this kind of makes a point. I think their valuation now is somewhat reasonable. The question, of course, is can they keep this pace of growth up? But holy crap. That's a lot of revenue really fast. If it's true, it seems like that would be really great revenue growth. I'm assuming this is not for the consumer product, this is for the API, and that they've seeded the consumer product race to ChatGPT and Gemini and Grok, yeah? Yeah, so OpenAI makes more of its money than, sorry, more of its money from ChatGPT subscriptions than its API, and Throbics the other way around.

42:15But keep in mind, they also dropped Claude 3.7 and then also Claude Code, and they are inside of a lot of the breakout stuff. So everyone's talked about Manus. Well, that's some Claude technology built in there. We had the CEO of Replit on the show. That's Claude, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So people are really using what they built to make products. And that's why I think it's durable and not churned at risk. The great news for startups is you can get these API credits from Google Cloud, which we've had a partnership with. You can go to getstartupcredits.com. I put all the credits that we're doing at getstartupcredits.com.

42:51You sign up there, you get white gloved, just doing this as a service to our founders. So go to Get Startup Credits. You can get the Google credits there, other credits. People are giving AI credits out to startups, you know, like Candy, which is great. And, you know, people are building their systems so that if, you know, one service gets too expensive, they can move to another or one is better, you know, at images than voice, you can move it around. And so the big winner in this race is going to be startups. They're going to keep lowering the prices. They're going to keep increasing the value.

43:29And I have always believed that the application level is where the value is going to be. I think that these companies are in a race to the bottom. And it's getting so cheap. When we had Raul from Superhuman Online, he said, they're writing their summaries for your emails ahead of time. Most people, like you do a Google search and it does that little real-time snippet from Gemini. So they're not wasting time, you know, building these results ahead of time. I don't believe they're doing that, like in caching them. It's getting so cheap that it's going to run on your M4. You're going to have a local version on your phone ripping through stuff.

44:08And so, you know, let's say you wanted an analysis of every MP3 on your phone, every audio file, it might just do that in the background and have it sitting there for you. Why wouldn't it do it? If it was going to do an analysis of your photos, you know, normally it would wait till you query, hey, show me all the bulldogs. It might take the top 10 queries, top 20 queries and run them every day and then present you with the results in a proactive way, like a great employee might, a great team member might be proactive. So we're going to see some really interesting things happen here as this stuff plummets in cost.

44:40And it's still trading at what, 40 times revenue, 50 times? About 40 right now. But given that their base case is about 2.2 billion in earned revenue this year, their more aggressive case is like 3.7. So to me, that multiple is going to come down precipitously. And I think they're building not just a technological mode, Jason, I think they're building a brand. Like I think Claude's, the Claude family of models, people just trust and like because they're good and they have taste. And so I think that's really worth something. There's more competition to come. I think, you know, what we saw with Manus recently, that's got millions of people on the wait list.

45:17And it's like an, you know, agentic, which just is a fancy way of saying agents, which is a fancy way of saying does stuff. Personas that persistently do stuff. We used to call them cron jobs back in the day, just jobs that run every hour, run every day. And so, you know, Lon, you frequently will look through like, you know, the subreddit for entrepreneurship and startups and this week in startups, and then we have other communities, you're going to be able to write an agent. We could do it right now. Maybe Lucas from our team, who's good at this, could write an agent that goes to you give it all the places you like to look.

45:50It goes to those places in the morning and sends you an email or post it into our production team. Here's the interesting new discussions that I found. And then you click from there. So that first level sort, it might do for you. And that's really powerful stuff that's going to happen or is happening right now. It's an interesting thing. We were talking about this a little bit before the show with these AI models and branding because some of them, just like you guys have been saying, they're kind of more discreet. It's not like everybody's going to Claude.com and using it. A lot of good products that people like are being built on top of Claude, but Claude's kind of this discreet layer.

46:31So it's interesting how some of these AI companies like ChatGPT are already becoming brand names that are very familiar, household names. They're very visible. But others like Anthropic and Claude growing just as fast, if not faster, but kind of under the surface. Like everyday mainstream people might not have heard of Anthropic or Claude yet, even if they're using a tool that was built on top of it. The number of people using ChatGPT every day is extraordinary. I think they were in the top five or 10 websites in the world. It was six or seven on the chart we were looking at the other day. So they have an incredible consumer business there, independent of anything else.

47:12And the chat GPT is kind of like the verb. It's kind of like saying taking an Uber. And they also bought chat.com. So this is the innovator's dilemma that Google has. When you do a Google search now, I think it does a snippet every time, right? If you're logged in. Pretty much. Yeah. Well, no, it's worse. It gives you a snippet, Jason, and then it gives you four ads. So like that's, they really do not want you to use the blue links because that's not the Google offering now. Sigh. Yeah. So, I mean, I think people, you know, ChatGPT's got really good consumer adoption. But by the way, before Google came out, Yahoo had all that user adoption.

47:50So it's quite possible that there'll be a better product than ChatGPT and that whole thing could just collapse. We were saying Grok is nipping at their heels now. Grok, you know, inside of X, where you press that button and it gives you the context. We talked about it on All In last week is a really killer feature that I think most people who use X haven't even realized, but there's a little Grok AI in the top right of every tweet. So take my tweet where I did, you know, hey, here's my protocol. If you pull that tweet up and you hit the Grok button, I'm curious what it says there. Here is the Grok summary and response to, Jason, your formula for a good life.

48:28And yeah, it is a reasonable encapsulation of who I am and it gives you a good starting point. That's not a really great one because what I'm saying is really simple. How healthy do you think that Jason is? That's funny. Yeah, here you get a little bit of a deeper one, but if you were to pick, let's say Zelensky talking about something, and you want the background, that's where it gets really interesting. Or if you were to, you know, click on talking about Columbia losing like its grants or something, that's when you could get into like a really good background because you might not know if you look at, I retweeted somebody from Columbia who lost their grants.

49:12And he's like, oh my God, this is so shocking. And I'm like, Columbia's got a huge endowment. They could easily afford this. Like, and these elite universities, like they i don't know why the taxpayers are paying for elite universities with hundreds of billions of dollars to do their research they should be given the grants from their endowments which just continue to grow to a level of absurdity i'm going to put that aside for a second but if you were to find one of those yeah this is me saying hey fafo and it thinks it's fell fast fell off and that's a very polite that's a really polite edit there grok yeah that was a pretty good that's f around find out but okay if you click on the quote i was retweeting that's the one to click on because here with this person you know uh professor uh edward go or goa this is where it's a money look at this a columbia university bioengineer professor shared an email from the nih announcing the cancellation of his integrated musculoskeletal training program this really explains the background in such a great way this is like if i were to send it to one and say what's going on?

50:18Or you, Alex, and said, hey, what's going on here? You would write me back. Here's what's going on. That's really compelling for me. How long until X and XAI are the same company? Because we know there's like financial ties, there's product integrations, and it really feels a little arbitrary. I think the X shareholders got ownership in XAI. And XAI needs to be, I'm not an investor in either, but I know the guy who's running it and a lot of my friends are. XAI is doing something interesting, which is I think they get X's corpus, which is a huge advantage. So the huge advantage is what I was talking about on Glenn Beck today.

50:53The huge advantage is if you have a real-time data source giving you information. And so whoever's got real-time data, whether it's Reddit or X or Facebook, they're going to have such a huge, huge LLM advantage. Yeah. Well, they have a couple hundred thousand of my tweets, Elon. Where's my check? Everyone on the XAI investment team, you're welcome for all my tweets. Okay, so Pokemon Go, the company behind it, selling the games to another company for$3.5 billion. Yeah. Oh, wow. That's Niantic. Niantic is selling its games business. Yeah, Sian Bannister was an investor in that. So they're selling that.

51:27Pokemon Go, for people who don't know, is the first augmented reality game to hit scale. These things were going on in Japan for a long time. Augmented reality when you put digital assets in the real world through the camera. And you remember, people were like driving around trying to find these Pokemon Go characters and getting in car accidents. It had that huge pop culture moment. I mean, Hillary telling people Pokemon go to the polls. It was like a big deal. I, in my mind, think of it as being like it fell off and it's not a big deal anymore. But that's not actually true. It still has a huge fan base of people that remain obsessed with playing it and are still driving around looking for Pokemon.

52:05It's just like it stopped being a headline, but it remains like a huge mobile. who bought it so scopely okay which what's that well it's owned by savvy games group what's that it's the saudi pip ah the uh the investment fund in saudi this is their sovereign wealth fund which owns a everything from sports teams to doing the investments in neom i think it's sort of the umbrella it's run by a gentleman named yasser who i met when i was there and uh They have a group, Senobal, that does the venture stuff. So they have a dozen activities they are investing in that they believe will be the businesses of the future when maybe pulling oil out of the ground isn't necessary, right?

52:52Or, you know, it runs out, which they think is a 30-year story, 40-year story. And games would be one of those. And so remember I said earlier, this is not dumb money. There's a perception in our industry that the money coming out of the MENA region is like dumb money. They'll just invest in anything. You go there, you secure a bag, you leave. Au contraire, mon frere. These are some of the smartest people I've ever met in business. For decades, they've been sending people from Abu Dhabi, from Saudi, from Qatar, to the West to become educated and to work in places. And then they come back. So they're boomerangs.

53:28And they have this King Abdullah scholarship. There's all these scholarships. And when I meet people over there, Oxford, Harvard, University of Hawaii, everything in between, literally, it's not just Ivy League schools. And then they've worked at Google, at Sequoia, wherever, top venture firm. And then they've gone back. They're not just putting money into venture firms. They're on the boards of companies. They're doing company formation. They're doing roll-ups like this because of the sovereign wealth funds. They can take a 20 or 30-year view of investing. So they're not just giving money to Masayoshi, sound like they did for his giant fund.

54:06They're now making thoughtful decisions and rolling up companies. That's what we're seeing here. That's what we're going to see a lot more of. And for context about the roll-up part of this, so Scopely, the company that's actually buying the Niantic gaming assets, I believe is the company behind Monopoly Go, which if you're a hardcore gamer, you've never played, but that means that you're outside the mainstream. it's I think the second or third highest grossing mobile app in 2024 and to the point that Lon made about Pokemon Go still having staying power I think it was the 13th highest grossing game and keep in mind that's hundreds of millions of dollars like mobile gaming is huge and I really gotta agree with Jason I am a bit more critical of media governments than some folks in this space but hey what I will say here is this is smart this is buying a serious company doing a serious roll up.

54:57I have to say, if you're going to diversify off of digging stuff out of the ground, great place to do it, great use of money, no complaints. It's a brave new world, folks. We are not living in a unipolar or a bipolar world where it was like Russia and the US. It's multipolar now. And that's a lot of, I think, what's informing this administration, whether you like it or not, whether you agree with it or not. We all understand it's multipolar now. There are regions that have their own sovereignty. And the EU now, as you pointed out, Alex, I think very correctly, is like, you know what? The United States is not the piggy bank.

55:35They're not going to fund what we want to do. You know, we have our own world. We'll do what we want to do. Canada's like, oh, you guys want to neg us? Great. We have a lot of hydro. We'll just turn off your electricity. We'll sell it to somebody else. Like, I think the United States sometimes believes we have a little bit more influence than we actually do. And that people, you know, will just do whatever we tell them. They will not. I think it's the people our age that remember a time when that was still kind of true. Like if you grew up in the 80s, the 70s, the 90s, America was kind of the, you know, the pivot point around which the whole world sort of was organized.

56:14And we still think of it that way, but it is not true anymore. It's not true. And the EU can go it alone. If we don't want to back Ukraine, if we don't want to be involved in that. You know what? EU has plenty of money. These are sovereign countries. They have a vested interest in containing Putin. They're going to do it themselves. They're going to make their own weapons. They don't need us. But the tension that I find here is that the US is saying, multipolar world, go off and do your own thing. And then we're turning around and saying, EU, stop finding our companies. Well, do you know how you have influence over those things?

56:49By having soft power. And if we don't have that, then we're going to have to eat some crow along the way. I'm not taking a position in this conversation, but I'm just saying you can't have a win-win when you're not going to win. Yeah, the idea that we're going to be able to be splashy-cashy around the world and buy influence, that's ending. We're broke as a country. That's just the truth. We don't have the ability to spend like we used to. And so whether you agree with the velocity and the chaotic nature of the current administration, which, you know, if you ask anybody who's a Republican, like, they're like, yeah, this is chaotic.

57:28Putting all that aside, we're in a multipolar world right now. South America is going to make their own decisions. Canada is going to make their own decisions. Obviously, MENA, India. India is like, I think, really the most interesting one to look at. They are going to make, everybody believes like, oh, we have influence, whatever. India is like, yeah, we're the largest country in the world. We're the fastest growing economy. We have the most number of people going from poverty into the middle class, going into the upper class. We've got this great education system. We've got a driven... India is the America of the 21st century in many ways, in a way that maybe China isn't because it's more democratic, right?

58:05It's not a perfect democracy. You can look up the democracy ratings. China can never really compete in a sustained long-term fashion in entrepreneurship because they keep rug-pulling the entrepreneurs. If you rug-pull the entrepreneurs and you don't have a vibrant investment system and that's top down, it can't really be vibrant in the way a competitive playing field in the United States is or in Europe to a lesser extent or MENA, the Middle East, North Africa region or India. India really is fascinating to me. I need to spend more time in India and Singapore. I'm going to go to Singapore for the first time and then I need to spend some time in India.

58:39I really think that's the economy I have the least knowledge of firsthand and I need to get up on. Yeah. All right. Just before we jump, I do want to say there's news that TSMC is working with other chip companies to possibly put together a deal to buy a chunk of Intel's foundry business. Great. We'll see about that, but something to keep an eye on. And then Gail Slater was confirmed to run antitrust of the DOJ. Okay. She's a little more hawkish than I think Jason's going to be excited about, but her term will kick off. Something to keep an eye on. And then Jim, three models from Google, apparently very good, very cheap, and very efficient.

59:14It's going to be really interesting in terms of Gail Slater. There's a lot of saber rattling. This administration is going to be very pro M &A. They just like to have their, they like to have influence. I think this is like why the tariff thing is so appealing to them, because having a tariff system means everybody's kind of got to come and bend the knee and negotiate. M &A is the same tool. Now everybody, whether it's Bezos with Amazon, you know, or Zuck with Meta, you know, the weathervane of, you know, the political weathervane known as Mark Zuckerberg, you know, he's going to want to buy TikTok.

59:50He's going to want to put a bid in. He's now going to have to go through Gale. He's going to have to bend the knee. He's going to have to come to Mar-a-Lago. And this, you know, kleptocracy approach is very real. And you're going to have to bend the knee and you're going to have to come. And this will give the president undue influence, I think, over this corporate landscape. Net-net, Trump likes influence. Trump likes money. Trump likes success. I think they're going to let it rip. They're going to let it rip. Anyway, this has been another great episode of This Week in Startups. He's at Lons, L-O-N-S on X.

1:00:27He's at Alex. I'm at Jason. We're all in the four or five letter club. 4.3 letters between us on average. And you can read the docket that Lon and Alex put together at thisweekinstartups.com slash docket. Yes, sir. All right, everybody. We will see you next time on This Week in Startups. Bye-bye.