Lina Khan’s Figma victory lap, Meta’s Superintelligence Team, BYD mega car-carrier video & MORE | E2160

27:29Pretty sure that was the series C. So IRR to September 2022 at the$20 billion exit price would have been 187%. That number is too high because it wouldn't have closed at that point. It would have closed actually about a year later. But I wanted to make the most positive case for that. Then I ran it at today's market cap this morning. so$48.8 billion, not the peak that it reached on Friday, just trying to be fair here. And that was IRR with the additional time of 106%. So in IRR terms, investors didn't do better if they bought it at the Series C and sold at the IPO than they would have at the Figma, sorry, at the Adobe price.

28:07But their total return was larger because it eventually became worth more money. So in case you were curious about that, that's kind of the way it shakes out. IRR is the internal rate of return. This means what percentage did you gain every year in your investment? This is the pure way to look at an investment. Because if you were to double your money in one year versus tripling your money in 10, the IRR is going to be quite different. One's going to be 7%. One's going to be 100%. In other words, what did you make each year? This is why venture capitalists, hedge fund managers, private equity, all of that looks at IRR.

28:46Now you can look at cash on cash. I like to do that as well. But if, you know, this is the obvious reality that people are ignoring here. And for good reason. Yeah, you never want to let the facts get in the way of a good story. So, uh, so that was actually a great get by you, by the way, very nicely done, because I was going to ask you about that because I actually didn't know. And you did it from series B or C. A different Series C. If you did it from the seed round or Series A, I think this would be even more dramatic, the IRR, for those people, obviously. But you split the baby. You went right for the middle.

29:19Well, I went for the first valuation that I could be confident about. I started at the seed round, but I couldn't figure out exactly what their seed. And also, by that point, there was only a handful of investors, and we're talking about the majority case. There's no crying in the casino. There's no crying in the club. Everyone did very well here. I just think that I think I think Lena Khan is getting kind of a bad stick because deal making under the new administration has been tanking. And if you compare growth rates and deal making in the 2003, 2004 range, it was going up. And now I have the charter from S &P.

29:56I'll just show you, Jason. It's going down. And so there was all this this complaint from folks like yourself who had a reasonable contention with the Khan FTC. I'm not dismissing what you're saying. But under the new administration, I'm hearing no complaint about meddling from the White House and trade policies that are damaging and dampening dealmaking. So I guess, Jason, I'll accept all the Lena Kahn criticism if there's some consistency in condemnation of the Trump administration for scuttling what was supposed to be a strong year for M &A in North America. And as you can see from this chart from S &P Global, it's not.

30:30For our industry, it's massive. This is probably the overall industry. So I can't speak to it because I don't know what's going on in other pockets of the economy and why. If you are a busy person, keeping track of where all your money's going is a constant hassle. Thankfully, now there's Monarch Money. This is not just another budgeting app. No, it's a complete financial command center for your bank account, for your investments, and even tracking your long-term financial goals with all your transactions clearly listed and searchable. No more jumping between apps, nope. And no more constantly re-entering your banks, login information, CAPTCHA, and what city were you born in, you know, the hassle.

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31:49That's 50 % off your first year at monarchmoney.com slash twist. I do know in our industry, we're seeing an incredible velocity when we look at those other charts that show M &A specifically to tech, and we've had them here, it shows it rebounding this year. And we've been tracking it ourselves, the number of IPOs, number of M &A transactions. We also have to look at the size of them. This is the other issue too, with these numbers and fun with numbers is we're going to have to look at, you know, maybe two-year increments if we bucketed them. and then by the size of the acquisition in our industry.

32:29Because the exits aren't all equal. And what we want to see is a good number of single and doubles. I'll call those under$5 billion transactions. And then we want to see the home runs and grand slams, which would be five to 25 billion would be the home runs. And then 25 billion to 100 billion be the grand slam category. Wiz is a grand slam. and then some of these other ones are you know home runs you know even instacart where the last set of investors got rocked but everybody else did or the early investors did well the late investors did poorly still a home run for the early investors and it's kind of like getting hit by the ball and getting on first base for everybody else you might score it hurts it hurts it's painful you got a lot of makeup okay well actually no we can extend the analogy uh all the investors who got hit by the instacart baseball then went out and back to trump which was a bench clearing dugout clearing moment and then we all had big scrap in the middle of the baseball field and home plate is democracy or something sure um anyways lena con took a lap and uh jason does not agree all right well it's not just me by the way vinod kosla i mean everybody was like and you know you got to ask she wants to be that she has that main character energy that i talk about um and i I put producer Oliver on a new project, which is to just get us the main character every day.

33:47And when we every day at two o 'clock in our docket slack room, he's going to talk about the main character so we can be up on this. She has that main character energy. So I think she's looking for a job where she's going to run for office. And when you run for office, you want to make sure you try to recontextualize your tenure. And I am not going to allow her to do that. I am going to ride her every time she slings this bullshit and correct the record. As long as you bring the same microscopic analysis and nicknames to the Trump administration. I have. I mean, I'm balls and strikes. Come on, man.

34:23I mean, I literally the whole administration is like, and even Jason Gallagher is like, their position on me is like, oh my God, we have to pay attention to this guy. I mean, no offense to the White House team. You know when you're hitting the right note, in my mind, as a moderate independent, when both sides are equally contemptuous of you. I think of anybody in public life. Is there somebody in public life, Alex, right now as a voice, and I'll just characterize myself as a minor one, who both sides hate? Is there somebody both sides hate more right now? uh um bob villain the the uk rap punk group that everyone crapped on for a while there that's such a deep pull none of us know it is there somebody of note of note like a commentator joe rogan megan cali well no they're all these i mean pick somebody who is um is there anybody who's moderate anyway the bulwark guy tim miller is he moderate i don't know i mean he's very moderate for the current era and i would say is he hated by both sides i don't know i think he seems to be he's too he's too he's too well he's nice he's well spoken so i don't think the left has any beef with people i i feel like you it's an impossible question to answer because it depends on what you consider to be people things people are mad at but i think the only example is the new york times which everyone hates i think you're right because the new york times now and cnn are both trying to get closer to the middle um yeah if you watch cnn they edit that guy who's like the full right-wing guy who just demolishes everybody who's like a socialist every time they come on.

36:04I forgot his name. I don't, I don't watch TV, so I don't know who that is. I just know it from the clips on Twitter, but there's a guy on CNN who is kind of famous for dunking. Um, one of our producers, we'll ask producer Claude to pull this up for us, but there is a, uh, I think the times is a good example of someone that, uh, everyone's mad about, uh, mad at all the times. Cause my, in my feed, people on the left are choosing the The Gaza situation, I guess. Well, they tend to write headlines that they on the left think minimizes from whence the bullets come. And people on the right accusing them of being too coddling towards Palestinians.

36:41So you end up there. Anyways, let's keep moving on. Yes. Do you want to talk about meta or the end of the early career job market? Hmm. So why don't we do meta first? Because I think people are - Sure, yeah, maybe meta is kind of interesting because there was that viral screenshot that I sent you over the weekend. And I asked you to use producer Claude and your own abilities and strategies to just make sure that this wasn't cap, as the young folks would say, that this is legit. So pull up that chart and just walk us through and tell us what's going on here. Yeah, so this is a chart, a table actually, that shows a lot of information about the purported new meta super intelligence team.

37:26This was shared. I saw it from D.D. Das from Menlo VC. D.D. is becoming one of the more prolific venture posters. I think we could say, Jason. Got it. He's leaning into sharing things that get attention to him and his firm. Totally fine. But when you see a chart like this, a table like this. Menlo. Menlo. Yeah. When you see a table like this, you want to go look at the information behind it and not just take it whole cloth. So Oliver and I, along with our dear friends at the AI model companies, did some work, and we found some names from the list that we had made that were not on this list and vice versa.

37:58So the actual answer is going to be somewhere between. But we did find a total of 51 people that are now working at Meta's ASI team. And Jason, it's too many names to go through. So we did some aggregate data analysis. Before we do that, let's just explain the table for people listening. You have the name, you have where they're from, America, Israel, French, France. I guess they're not using. Okay. American, Chinese, Brazilian. And what you'll see in that third column, that's the spicy part, is the absolute extraordinary number of people who are Chinese. I guess in ethnicity or nationality, two different things, right?

38:39You could have people who are Chinese American. In other words, they're born in America and American citizens, but they're of Chinese origin. Or you could have their Chinese and their citizens of China who are here on some sort of work visa. Then you have their tenure in days, which is crazy. YOE had years of experience. I guess that's what that means. Current job, prior roles, expertise, advanced degree, undergrad degree. And when you look at the advanced degree, almost all of them have PhDs, which is in purple. That's what makes this chart super interesting. So let's keep going. So we bucketed these people that we could find and fact check.

39:24So China, you're right, does lead with 23 of the 51 that we could find following in number of frequency. It's USA with 14, and then Brazil, Russia, India, South Africa with two, and then other nations with people that made it to the meta ASI team include France, Israel, Australia, South Korea, Germany, and the UK. Now, you mentioned PhDs. So what fraction hold an advanced degree? It's 80.3%. Now, I think this is both master's and PhDs, but the gist is these are highly educated people who went through traditional educational channels. The only person we could find who didn't go to college at all was Daniel Gross and Alexander Wang, previously of Scale AI, dropped out of MIT.

40:08And they are both incredibly young. They're in their 20s. Makes sense. Daniel Gross is more of an entrepreneur than a computer scientist. So he's a wild card on this list. He's the Joker's wild here. And I mean that in the best possible way. And then you have people who are dropouts kind of thing. 75 % have PhDs, 50 % or so from China. 75 % are first-generation immigrants. So this is super important, I think, when we think about policy and recruitment, which I keep bringing up. Had an interesting discussion with J.D. Vance on stage just two weeks ago. There's two ways to look at this data. Should we be concerned, and I'm sure there are people in the State Department who are, that you have our adversaries, our rivals in China, making up 50 % of this list.

40:58Of that group, how many are spies? Just to say it bluntly, how many are compromised and are spies? Now, this sounds like xenophobic and dramatic. There are people in our State Department, CIA, who are monitoring the communications and tracking these people. I can guarantee you that. Not all of them, but some of them. And in fact, these companies are probably tracking them. And if you think that this is crazy, just look at the history of Twitter, Facebook, Microsoft, finding spies within their ranks. It happens all the time. Yeah. Saudi Arabia, for example, got some people into Twitter back in the day, famously.

41:35North Korea has been placing, well, actually not spies, but workers in a number of companies as well. Which I think they were doing just for the salaries because they literally need hard currency. Yeah. They need money. So, but here it's like a very nuanced point because also what the Chinese government does, according to reports I've read, is they compromise these folks by going to their family members who are still in China and they put spurs up. Now, lest we pretend that the United States are angels in any of this or Israel is or Germany is or France, we all do this. We're all compromising people and planting people.

42:13We've got plants in China, Russia, everywhere. So this isn't like a one-way thing. Everybody's planting people everywhere. Everybody's spying on everybody. But you do have to think, wow, the majority of the team at, the majority of the team in Meta's AI group, the super intelligence group, is either from China or of Chinese origin. This means two things. One, what's going on with our education system. Two, if we are in competition, who is the loyalty for each of these people too? And knowing how aggressive the Chinese are in these matters, this is a massive red flag. And I'm not saying that in any xenophobic way.

43:00I know some people might take it that way. It's just the game on the field. The two rivals happen to be Chinese and American. That's it. I'm not bringing up the other folks on this list from brazil or wherever because there's like one from each country i mean russia would be the other one i would be concerned about because they are rivals and obviously you know we don't have a rivalry with brazil and australia at the moment we do with russia and china how many russians were on the list any used to be two okay two according i just love i love dd the the vc who shows on twitter he did a follow-up tweet and he says source colon anonymous meta employee yeah i love it um the source for what uh the chart they were talking about that we tried to verify so on the on the point about china though we do have a little bit of information that makes it clear uh where these people did their education so for example the most common university that we found was the shanghai jiotong university and um i'm so sorry everyone who speaks mandarin i'm going to ruin this but it's the take your best shot xinghua University in Beijing.

44:03These are all words that I've read in my head 48 ,000 times, but I never had to say live on a podcast. MIT, three, and then we have Nanjing and Nankai Universities coming in basically fourth and fifth. So it really does seem that Chinese universities are generating a simply amazing number of high caliber AI talent. Now your point about should we worry that it's half? Eh, I actually, I'm not worried in this case because there's a lot of folks that meta tried to go out and get and couldn't. So this is not saying that 50 % of the world's best AI talent is, you know, being born and trained in China versus the United States, for example.

44:39It's that 50 % of the people that Meta managed to hire for this team do have a Chinese background. Well, you know, and every time we find a spicy topic like this, my mind immediately goes to new products and services based on the insights, right? And so based on my insights here, I think the most interesting thing you could do is figure out what is the shortest period of time you could make somebody into a super intelligence qualified person going to a research lab and one of these universities get your phd is one path that's a seven year eight year path um can we do it in two and if we did it in two how and so this dovetails with some of the discussions we're going to have about mentorship in the end.

45:24And that was in my Nostrakanis presentation I did last week, which was the end of apprenticeships. And somebody could pull up that slide. The end of apprenticeships is a really interesting moment in time. And Generation Tool Belt, which we've talked about here countless times. Who's going to mentor people to this level of excellence? And then my second point is, if you did make that university, I wonder if you made that university, Oliver, you can bring that up if you want that slide. Although we don't have to even show it. It's just a pretty basic slide. If you do produce that level of talent, you have a pipeline for it.

46:02Yeah. Is AI going to become super intelligent by that time and all these people are going to be worth like a nickel? Well, I guess you could say that the race to ASI could be very expensive in terms of human capital, but then the race to ASI at the end, once we reach the finish line, we'll take all that human capital and render it useless. So - Well said. That's kind of what I'm getting at is that you could just literally, if these folks do their job, the reward is a pink slip. Yeah. Interesting. Here's your slide, Jason, and then I have a chart for everyone, but here's what you had in your latest KPMG, Nostraconis presentation.

46:38Oh, it's a side, Nostraconis. And I'm sounding like Dracula. I got to work on this. It's a side, Nostraconis. That's much better. Less vampire vibes than that one. But yeah, I said AI could be in the end of entry-level junior associate jobs. A partner at a promising law firm told me, this is Andrew Yang, former presidential candidate. AI is now doing work that used to be done by first and third year associates. Yeah. AI can generate a motion in an hour that might take an associate a week and the work is better. Someone should tell the folks applying to law school right now. And I actually was, my KPMG speaking gig, I was talking with somebody who worked at a university, which is the lowest cost law degree you can get at$13 ,000 a year.

47:22And I challenged them to say, and I don't know, is law school three years, I guess? Law school's three, yeah. Although people say it doesn't need to be. Got it. So that's 36K. I was just challenging the person and other people in the room. Can we do it for 10 % of that cost? Could you, with AI, train somebody to be a lawyer for 13K? So if you are out there and you want to build this product, I will give you your first 125K If it's just you and you get three founders together, all of you can code or design three people who build. Maybe one of you has a law degree and some domain expertise, but you don't need to have it.

47:59Actually, you just get that from advisors. If somebody presents me with those three people and you have a plan or an experiment to get a law degree to a person for$13 ,000, I will back that experiment knowing how insane and how much the system will fight it. And the odds are only 10 % that we'll ever make this work. because God knows those accredited universal can try and stop you. But basically what you want to be able to do is have that$13 ,000, prepare somebody, a$13 ,000 education, prepare somebody to take the bar and pass the bar. In under, I want it to be done in two years. so in one year less for 10 of the price do you want to have price how about half price i wouldn't even go to 10 half price which would be 36 is i divided by two so like let's just say 15k yeah for 15k in two years you pass the bar build that product or service one of my one of my best friends is a startup lawyer and he's based here in rhode island and he uh i think co-owns the practice.

49:11Do you want me to drag him on to explain to us how hard that would be? No. Okay. I want to bring the person who can tell me how to get it done. Everybody's going to fight this, especially people who are part of the machine. They always want to fight this. They're, you know, like they're going to be the, uh, the, the red cells, where's the white blood cells? What takes, uh, the, the white blood cells kills things. Yeah. Yeah. They're the white blood cells that will try to kill this idea i need somebody who's a lunatic who thinks it's possible oh that's why i that's why i was thinking of my friend because i think he'd be i think he'd love this oh he would okay we'd run it by him and then maybe we'll bring one okay if he if he's gonna tell me why it can't be done i know why i know all those arguments jason i i know you well enough to not pitch someone coming on to tell you no um because that would be boring also anyways this is this is the chart that i wanted yeah this is the number of ai publications by year by country and china's had a bit of a lead for a while.

50:05And then the U.S. is growing and India has also seen a pretty good uptick. I think that what this shows is that some of the public metrics that are associated with intellectual progress aren't so good. And an example of this is who has always had the most patents, Jason? It's IBM. How pertinent is IBM to this? Also, I used to work for a guy who worked at Salesforce and he described for me how that company goes about getting patents. And I lost all respect for that process. So I think that - Here's what else, go ahead, finish your thought. Oh, just proofs in the pudding. I mean, right now we are in a two and a half horse race.

50:43The US is the absolute lead in closed source AI. China is the absolute lead in open source AI. And then Mistral and France is doing both. Okay. Now, if we pull this chart up again, dump that chart into producer Claude and ask producer Claude to get the data for this and put it against population, which is to say the number of AI publications by year, by country, by population. You want the per capita AI papers per year by country. Yeah, because India has three times the population of the US at 1.44. China is at 1.4 billion people. They have three times the population of the U.S. and they have, let's see, we're at 30 and they're at 80.

51:30So they have about three times as much. India has less, right? So this is a hard one for an LLM to do right now. But if we could get that final years, what I would like to see is the final year, 2024, the final year's date, if we can source it against per capita, that actually would speak volumes. Then we would know on a per capita basis how many of these elite pursuits we have. And then this is why I always like when we look at Europe to do the statistics of unicorns by country by capita. It's really interesting. Per capita unicorns. So we talk a lot about power laws, you know, and how, you know, if you were an early stage investor in Figma, that probably returned your fund because it did so well.

52:14You know, good stuff. think about the the the incremental value of an ai paper right the average paper and then think about the value of the real seminal ones like for example attention is all you need that kicked off the llm revolution um it's uh it's it just shows that volume is not everything now producer claude points out that the nations that have the highest per capita uh when it comes to research papers here are singapore switzerland denmark sweden finland so what we're seeing here is what i call the small country effect. When you only have 25 people, if you do two papers, you look like you're a world-class research hub.

52:50We should set a floor of 100 million probably. Yeah, I would set the floor at 50 million, 30 million. I'd set it at 30 million because if you do 30 million, you take out Switzerland, Denmark, Sweden. Well, Sweden's at 35, I think. You take out Norway, you take out Netherlands, you leave the United Kingdom, you leave Australia. Yeah, 30 million is a number. But you also take out Israel with whatever, six to nine million people. Israel always punches above its technological weight. But China was only ranked 21st in per capita AI publications. The U.S. was ranked 17th, according to producer Claude.

53:22So it's interesting to see how that kind of dilutes under a larger population. I'll just say this. How great is producer Claude? I just want to give a shout out to our new producer, producer Claude, because for deep research, this would have taken like a producer a day or a half day to kind of find this information on the web and then, you know, distill it down. And now we can do it in real time. It just shows you where we're at as a, and just like that, producer Claude updates with the request of less than 30 million. Thank you to our partner, producer Claude. This is from producer Claude. This shows AI publications by country in 2024.

53:55And this is only with countries that have more than 30 million people. And this is a per capita number. So notably, notably, the UK has the highest number of AI publications per 100 ,000 people at about, oh, Jason, what's that, 13, then Canada at around 10 or 11, Germany, France, South Korea, then the US, and then Italy, which I made fun of earlier, Japan, Spain, and then China. So it appears that per capita, quite the different data set. Yeah. And, you know, the quality of then. Now, the next level to peel the onion would be like the quality of these. There must be, and it's above UNI's pay grade, but the quality of the citation.

54:35Like maybe the, you know, the, maybe there's a country in there getting citations for something that's nonsensical, right? Or just not relevant or not a highly cited publication. Who knows what the benchmark for that is? Let's continue on in our docket. That's a really interesting, lot of interesting things to think about with regard to immigration and what we're seeing in terms of our own countries. It means we need to get more of these people to the U.S. and make them aligned with U.S. values, get them to assimilate. Trigger warning for socialist libs. Assimilate means take on American values and bring some of your own values to the melting pot, which was a concept that will also be triggering to some people that when we all bring a little something to the soup, it's a better soup.

55:26Jason, I want to grab the wheel here for a second and just talk about BYD because we were looking at a story about BYD imports of EVs into Brazil, and we have a whole bunch of information about that. We can talk about that if you want. But I want to say an LLM point here. I was pulling information from BYD's investor relation website, figuring out how many cars they sell overseas that are electric. And I got lazy and I didn't want to do my own chart. And so I literally just had, in my case, ChadGPT. I'm like, can you just chart this data set for me? And look at what it made for me, Jason. It's so cute this this speaking of time saving this is a better chart than i could have made in uh google sheets and it took me about three seconds it didn't make the uh y-axis the way i wanted it to so i told this to change the y-axis start at zero i changed the headline via a prompt and here it is like this is all right this is a really interesting story this company byd is making incredibly cheap sexy cars that i probably wouldn't put my family in yet because of safety concerns.

56:30The last thing Chinese producers are interested in is safety. The number one thing they're interested in is cost and number two and number three are cost. So do not trust any Chinese product for anything that requires a lot of safety. I would have red flags up. They have a different view of this culturally and in business. It's like trusting people in the 60s and 70s in the U.S. when they're making like, or maybe the 50s and 60s in the U.S. when they're giving you advice on cigarettes and baby formula. Like, here we go. So here is, let's just play the video. Okay. Over 7 ,000 Chinese EVs just showed up in Brazil, but here's the twist.

57:16They didn't get unloaded. They drove off the ship themselves. Seriously. A few days ago, this giant ship pulled into Itajai port BYD's own ship the Shenzhen it's 200 meters long 38 meters wide Basically a 60-story building on water, but the real shock it carried 7292 electric cars all made in China not parts not containers a full-blown EV army dock workers were like this isn't shipping This is a landing and no cranes were used the ship has ramps front back both sides It's called ro ro roll on roll off the car just drive off in a line about 100 cars per hour like leaving a parking garage So why go all out because BYD's Brazil factory isn't ready yet and instead of waiting they said fine We'll build ships and deliver cars ourselves other car companies use shipping firms BYD They built a fleet and Shenzhen.

58:00That's just the start more are coming Changsha Xi 'an eight ships total a full-on EV Navy. This isn't just exporting cars It's China saying we don't just make cars we control the road in the sea now Here's the real question if a BYD EV pulled up in your city. Would you drive one comment below down? Okay, so can i can i fill in some gaps here please because you know i saw this video and i'm like is this real or cgi i sent it to junior producer oliver and i was like get on this just i'm busy i don't know if this is true or not and i think we found out that this is actually true okay so mostly not true nearly all true there's many facts in there jason there's there you can't it's not a blanket statement so here's what here's what we found out first of all yes byd owns a lot of boats they own six currently with a total capacity of 45 ,600 or 7 ,600 cars per on average.

58:51They are adding two more to bring their fleet up to eight and those will have an average capacity of 8 ,100. So yes, BYD owns its own fleet. Yes, they are large. Yes, they are going around the world. Now, is BYD exporting in volume to Brazil? Yes. They actually exported quite a lot of cars in, I believe it was June because the EV tariffs for imported vehicles were going to rise the next month. So they shipped a lot of cars there. Is BYD not making cars in Brazil? Not anymore. This is now wrong because BYD's Brazil factory as of, I believe, early July has put out their first quote BYD Dolphin Mini.

59:27So they are now also building cars domestically inside the Brazilian market. Now, one more claim. What about the cars driving themselves off? Are they all self-driving cars? I could find no corroborating information for that particular claim anywhere. So I do not know if they are self-driving off the cars, but yes to the Navy, yes to the exports, no to the Brazil can't make them, and unknown on the self-driving. There you go, Jason. Pull up the Yang Wang. Yang Wang U8. This is, or the Yang Wang U9. Yang Wang U9. This is like the craziest thing they produce. they're trying to get into the supercar space which is essentially when you know you're in like the top of the line ferrari lamborghini bugatti million dollar supercar race and this is their ev version which looks like a corvette that kind of ran into a tesla model s and then has a mclaren wing on the back basically yeah and so you know they're they're playing to win I think that thing costs a quarter million dollars US.

1:00:34That's it? Supercars typically start at 500 to a million. The new, if you pull up the Zora, which is the new Corvette that, this is the Corvette I think I'm going to get. I'll show it to you. I've been wanting to get a new Corvette. So it's the ZR1X, which they call the Zora. It just finished the Nuremberg. ZR1X. And set the record. Corvette ZR1X. When you see this beast of a car. Ooh, she pretty. Oh yeah. I'm going to get this. I need to have a place to keep it that's not the ranch because driving a low profile like this on my ranch is going to destroy it. But I've been hankering for a new...

1:01:10This is what you should buy while we're doing the car talk here. Have you seen the McLaren Senna? I don't know. I've seen the original McLaren. Those are like 250, I think. I have a couple of friends who had them. I'm trying to find a good picture of the Senna. The Senna is essentially their fastest track day car. It's basically all the F1 tech you can fit into a um their website surprised mclaren fix your website so you have better shots of your cars uh but here's a picture of the center i'll just pull up this one uh so you can see it this is the car that i would buy if i was going through my future midlife crisis right now please yeah oh wow look at that that is she's the most gorgeous car of all time they didn't make that many of them of course because that's a track car yeah but you can drive it on the road that's the thing It's essentially like a speedy track car, but you can also drive it out and about.

1:01:58And Austin's flat, right? Yeah, no, no, no. I mean, you could drive it. You know, what most people do with the Corvettes, and I had the E-Ray. The folks over at Chevy sent me an E-Ray to play with for a couple of weeks. I loved it. And that's what got me, like, you know, back into wanting to own a sports car before I die. So I can zip around a bit and have some fun. But you need a lift. You have to put a lift on it. so most people will lower their cars yes these new supercars are slow so low that there's a lift button that you can add for like three grand that stock it's an option basically so you lift it up a little bit so yeah this is a contender i like that jason i'm getting worried about you don't know if you're gonna raise fun five third act of my life and then you just said before i die Like, I mean, what's going on, man?

1:02:52I just am acutely aware through, you know, tragedies in my own life where I've had friends die too young that I just think about it now. That we're all and I should have been thinking about it younger. But, hey, the folly of youth, I just think, man, there's a certain number of years left here. And I've probably got less years in front of me than behind me. I don't think I'm going to make it to 108 and less science. So if I have less years, got to make them great. And I probably have equal number of adult years. Right. And I got, you know, I've been pretty, pretty darn lucky in this life. So, you know, you start to do calculations like there's, you know, like your retirement account calculation and like how much money do you need?

1:03:37And it's a rule of 4 % coming out of your principal. And every time I run those simulations are like, and I think about my current lifestyle and how I spend. And it's like, you're going to be dead with a lot. And I'm like, okay, what if I spent three times as much as I am used to spending? And it's like, still going to have a bucket load left. And I'm like, Jesus, I got to spend more money. And I'm so cheap that, you know, I drive a Model Y. I love that car. It's my favorite car ever. I drive a Model Y. And I typically keep my car seven years, but if you're going to be, you know, we're not going to be driving much longer.

1:04:12I might as well have something I like. I'm also, I'm going to buy, I decided I'm going to buy a 1969, pull this up, 1969 Corvette Stingray. So this, this is what I call a long nose car. Like this car is like, it's like enough room for like, you know, so much engine. They don't make those. And I'm going to drive it to, I'm going to buy it to drive it. So I'm not looking for matching numbers. i'm not looking for i'm looking for perfect suspension perfect engine drivable i don't care if the numbers match i don't care if it's the original engine or tranny prefer it to be a new one i think they call it a resto mod um yeah you restore it and modify it i would like it to have that aesthetics i think that might be the most beautiful car i've ever seen let's get back to the docket here for a second.

1:05:02Yeah, where the hell, how did we end up in Bitcoin anyways? Well, the BYD thing I wanted to point out because it does dovetail with tariffs and protectionism and ambition. China's ambition is to own all cars on the globe. America needs to think this through. Europe's going to block BYDs, I'm sure of it. There are reports that BYD is going to be available in the EU like 2028. They're going to block this. to the idea of having cars that cost half as much and are like this well built, like the same way Japan and South Korea and China are very, um, protectionist in letting you bring cars there, Singapore as well.

1:05:47The United States is just going to have to reciprocate with this or else there will not be a U S car industry. And there certainly will not be a German European car industry this there will be there will be because fiat jason is building the next uh hyper car let me show you what they're building who i present fiat i present to you the future of supercars it's the fiat topolino come on man i want this so badly look at that it's a go-kart okay i mean okay for europe and you're going to dinner yeah totally fine That's got to cost 15K, I'm taking it. It's like 15 or 20. It's a reprise of the Fiat Jolly, which is a car back in the day.

1:06:29Yeah, it's a city car. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But you couldn't get the Fiat Jollies unless you knew people because they were rare. And so they brought back the fun aesthetic for the EV era. I live in a city with small roads. I don't live in Texas. So that car is perfect for me. Here's the problem with that car. I've been watching some safety videos online. You know, I got kids. I want to like live as long as possible, yada, yada. that car when a you know suv or truck hits you from behind you're dead so true now if everybody drove those then we would be living in a disney bumper car world and that'd be fine there is an argument on small islands in small towns to only let those cars in i think it's a genius idea if If you lived in Kauai or Sardinia, whatever, just say the maximum weight of cars is X.

1:07:21Every car has to be this amount. And trucks can drive from 11 p.m. till 6 a.m. in the city on these roads. But everything else is golf carts. You could purposely make roads for that. But, man, the ambition of this company, BYD, the fact that they want to build their own shipping cars and driving people off of them just shows the ambition. I do think it also speaks to how quickly we're going to have autonomous cars and how quickly ride sharing is going to ascend. And I am completely diversified, folks. I have plenty of investments in all the players across many different vehicles, like financial vehicles.

1:08:01So I'm not speaking my book with Uber. But when you look at Volkswagen and you look at WeRide and Pony, BID, Tesla, Waymo, man, there's so many people going after this. There's so many cars that are going to be produced. All right, everybody, that's another amazing episode of This Week in Startups. If you want to participate in the docket creation, go to thisweekinstartups.com slash docket. Follow at TWI Startups. If you really help me when you see us tweet the docket for the day or the day before or the morning of, here's what we're going to talk about. I would love to get you in the replies telling us, hey, I would love to hear Alex and Jason comment on this or want to comment on that.

1:08:37Give us what you want us to talk about because it's a slow month in August. We need a couple of things to talk about. Although, gosh, it's been kind of crazy. We'll see. He's at Alex. I'm at Jason. We all have four or five character Twitter handles that tells you everything you need to know. Old school OGs. See you next time. Bye-bye, boys. Bye.