Meta's Moderation and Nvidia's Domination | E2069

0:00look at this folks there's no one in the driver's car with a crazy spoiler obviously a lot inspired by tesla from byd they kind of steal everything but watch that what it jumps also this look this is a this is a mclaren not a tesla jason this does solve the enormous market hole for billionaires running from the cops who are on a poor road who need to jump over a pothole to prevent capture or a spike strip oh the spike strip if you're in a spike i like it i'm punching it up so yes That's what this is for. If you're running from the cops and a spy show, no, this is like Batmobile level stuff. There's no functional use for this thing except for us to talk about it.

0:42Well played BYD. This is the point of CS. Come out with a feature that we can't help but talk about. This Week in Startups is brought to you by Gusto. Gusto is easy online payroll benefits and HR built for modern small businesses. Get three months free when you run your first payroll at gusto.com slash twist. Oracle. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, or OCI, is a single platform for your infrastructure, database, application development, and AI needs. Save up to 50 % on your cloud bill at oracle.com slash twist. And Squarespace. Turn your idea into a new website. Go to squarespace.com slash twist for a free trial.

1:22When you're ready to launch, use offer code twist to save 10 % off your first purchase of a website or domain. Hey everybody, welcome back to This Week in Startups. I am in a dark hotel room in Niseko on Wednesday here at 10pm at night. Alex is in New York, it's I guess 8am there. We're taping the show a little bit on an odd time for those of you who like to watch it live. this week in startups is on youtube and x and we go live to my personal linkedin as well yep but here we go there's a lot of news going on i am in niseko which is in hokkaido which is the northern most part of uh japan and i am skiing for a couple of days yeah where the greatest powder in the world exists i left niseko two years ago it was covered in powder i showed up again alex it was dumping powder ah and i was out there today and i did a couple of hours a couple of runs and then tomorrow i'm doing something very special it's called cat skiing so i'm going to be on a cat which is that machine with the tractor wheels and so it's very strange and um it turns out in japan they had many many ski resorts those ski resorts a lot of them shut down because of population decreasing and there not being a lot of families and skiing is like, it's a family activity as well as like for individuals.

2:43So one of these ski resorts that shut down, they have just one of the lift lines open. All the other lift lines are literally down. There's no lift cable and it's just the lap day. So it looks like something out of the walking dead, like an abandoned ski. Right. Right. And so what they do is they just take eight people up. There's two cats. They take you up, you ski down, they take you back up, you ski back down. But every time you go on a trail, you're the first person to touch it. We call that in the industry, in the business, first tracks. Yeah. People will line up for hours before the ski mountain opens to get first track.

3:21So you're basically guaranteed to get full tracks. So I am - I've been in those cats, but I've never done that type of ski. But I just, we were talking literally last show, I think about the chaos and the crisis at Vail over there at mismanagement. And then over in Japan, there's not enough people. I feel like there's a marked opportunity here to take folks here from there. Interesting you say that. The majority of people who are skiing here are Chinese and Australian and American. And it turns out during this time period, during the ski season, it's gotten so popular because it literally is the best snow in the world.

3:58The volume of the snow, Alex, is like 22.1 to the volume if it was water in like other places it might be 10 to 1 15 to 1 5 to 1 so it's in other words fluffier yeah it's a very weird thing you hit a foot or two of this powder and your skis disappear but nothing else changes you're just floating on it so it is like the most amazing experience i have um and i feel very privileged to be able to do it all right tell me the truth how much did the niseko ski tourism advocacy board slip you under the table for that because that's a real and you're making me want to go i mean i don't want to endorse it because i kind of want to gatekeep it um as the kids say these days but i gotta be honest with the audience it is like one of the wonderful things i get to do every couple of years the second time i've done it and maybe i'll get to do it two years in a row but uh yeah it is just my passion and i really enjoy it and it gets me gets me through the year i just think about going for a week to japan and doing this and now my daughters want to go because i've been skiing with my daughters a whole bunch in tahoe and i'm really excited to take them to japan someday so anyway um this is all great but you know i felt really bad because i was started taking pictures of all this uh-huh and then i saw mark sooster a friend of mine venture capitalist that he was like leaving his house and he was scared of this fire and i'm like what fire i mean i was on a plane obviously and you know wasn't up on what's happening in the pacific palisades in malibu i used to live in brentwood brent was the town just east of pacific palisades and there is a fire raging as we speak yeah and a lot of homes have been lost and i think there's some deaths of of people and property damage is colossal and uh you know obviously animals and people's pets so i just felt really um i don't know let's have some context here jason so here is um here's a map of los angeles sure and here is pacific palisades up here uh now for those of for those of people who are not in the u.s i think they think of la as kind of a monolith can you just for just 10 seconds just tell us about palisades santa monica and what this means in the la context yeah so when you live in la you either live on the west side or the east side that's delineated by the 405 freeway and then there's the 10 freeway north of the 10 south at 10 okay so you get those is like uh almost like a four quadrant and in that top left quadrant is the what i would say is the most um the best place to live let's just put it that way uh santa monica a beach town many people have been there and just north of that beach town is the town of pacific palisades and then to the east of it you have brettwood and you know the getty centers up there on the hill and when i lived in brentwood um in that area that you're just showing there you know and i lived in a corporate apartment in santa monica when i was doing weblogs inc back in the day it's like a two thousand dollar a month apartment i was negative twenty thousand dollars in my bank account before we sold it and uh you know it's a great moment in my life in the early 2000s living there um you know they would it would be fires once in a while on the hills but they never made it to Brentwood they never made it to Pacific Palisades really they they were something that happened way up in the hills um or you know or more east inside the inland and over time you know I started hearing people talk about because I had a wood shake roof wood pieces of wood right you know okay and um I didn't have a lot of money at the time it was my first home and i would they would get dry and they would crack and i would have the roofer come and take like a fix it and they would just touch it up for me i said listen you've been touching this thing up for a couple years now you can't i can't work on it anymore because there's an ordinance because of the brentwood fire you can't have a shake roof you can only repair up to 30 of it and i've done that a number of times here you gotta get this done with composites and and fake ones and i wound up doing that but i was kind of bummed because i just loved the look of the wood shake roof but i looked online at the brentwood fire and this is something that happened you know many years ago i don't know if it's the 40s or 50s but it had gone down from the centermonic mountains and burned a bunch of houses and gosh you know there was this whole thing with trump saying like you got to rake the leaves you know he says things in a pretty bombastic way and here we are a week or two away from him taking office again he's not wrong forest management matters my best friend's dad was a professor of forestry at oregon state growing up and i learned a lot about this yeah yeah so this is like one of those instances where he says something and you're like what rape the forest like is that's going to stop a forest fire actually correct and it turns out in la they have this like tragedy of the commons where you know there's a lot of land between people's homes and they don't really enforce enough people cleaning up the debris and there's a lot of debris up in those hills and then you have a santa ana winds something lights on fire a couple of of these and then there was the other ratio the electric cables were above ground so the housing prices went up and up and up these houses became worth a thousand dollars a square foot then two thousand dollars a square foot so these are five or ten million dollar houses we're talking about here but um you know they they were saying this was going to happen at some point you know it was pretty well known that these mountains were not cleaned up all that often and the power lines were above ground same thing we have in the in the Bay Area or we have, you know, have had in the Bay Area.

9:35So it's just a real tragedy. And I just hope everybody's safe and that they get this under control, but it's getting really, really bad because the winds are kicking up even more. All right. You didn't start your company to run payroll. Did you? Of course not. We all know that. Gusto is here to help. Gusto is going to help you run your payroll and handle all your benefits, onboarding and HR all in one place. The market agrees. 300 ,000 businesses trust Gusto today, and you can too. As your startup scales, Gusto is going to grow with you. You got state and federal taxes handled for your staff around the country.

10:14Gusto does all that. And hey, maybe it's finally time for you to offer a 401k plan for your team, right? Gusto's got you on that. And you might need to get your compliance sorted, right? Well, three out of four employers say Gusto helps them be government compliant. And even better, Gusto is simple, easy to use software. So you can focus on what matters, building your startup. So here's your quick call to action. Do you want all Gusto has to offer with no hidden fees? Well, how about a discount? Try Gusto and get three months free. Gusto.com slash twist. That's G-U-S-T-O dot com slash twist. I mean, it's funny how three of the major American economies, Texas, Florida, and California are suffering from climate change related insurance issues from different, different, different issues, you know, earthquakes and fires in California, hail in Texas.

11:06And then of course, hurricanes and other sorts of wind and water in Florida. Extreme weather is a pattern. Yeah. Well, the thing that I learned about this, I forget which insurance executive I was talking to. I think this was back when I was covering a lot of the insurtech companies back when Lemonade and Metro Mile were kind of competing for market share. And he said, the thing that's killing insurance companies in the housing market is not just the super extreme stuff that makes all the headlines. It's the less bad stuff that's now coming at a higher intensity. So a big hailstorm, for example, you don't read about a hailstorm on the news, but if it takes out, you know, 10 ,000 windshields and hurts, you know, 5 ,000 roofs, that takes a whole area of, of, uh, low risk insurance and really changes the economics of it.

11:47So it's, it's an issue all over the place. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, uh, thoughts and prayers, as we always say and uh hopefully you know better systems to to help these things i would i did look at one time when these things were occurring in the north bay for fire i i had seen they use these blankets to go over cars to put them out i don't know if you've ever seen these fire blankets and they there's a thing there's a thing called fire blankets you can pull it up on youtube and basically it's a it's a fire resistant blanket it has long cables on it you and i were firefighters there's a car on fire in the middle of broadway we unroll this thing you take one and i take the other we're 30 feet away from the the fire and the car on fire from either side and we drag it over the car lay it over the car and it puts out the fire because no oxygen it's like a weighted blanket these things are incredibly incredibly effective and i said to myself it'd be really interesting a blanket like this to go on top of somebody's home ah because it wouldn't make economic sense but here we go that's what looks like a rivian here yeah and these electrical um ones are really important because those fires um can take a lot of what they don't work for water but anyway you see them running that blanket oh this is brilliant because it'll cut the oxygen flows oh and then it crimps ah i love that you crimp it at the bottom yeah it really works these are fire blankets i started looking for a fire blanket to go over houses but i think we could also start thinking about just like in florida they're weatherproofing some of these homes by having the first floor 10 feet be like a pass through for water and then you're basically live on the first floor is essentially 10 feet up so that if there is a flood you know or flooding you can survive it i i'm gonna have to do the thing that we do when we discuss something but we have to anonymize it ever so slightly i spend weekends by the coast often and uh on that particular drive there is a house that was built in the last 10 years and unlike every other house in this region between rhode island and massachusetts if you will it's jason it looks like it's designed for the zombie apocalypse like it's it's got these huge pillars and these stairs going up and if there was a hurricane that pushed water up 40 feet by the time we reach that elevation and then the second floor of that house it it doesn't matter so it's like bulletproof from a hurricane perspective and i love it but it does look a little dystopian in a way it's not beautiful it's not aesthetically pleasing what people have done for that issue is they they actually close it off and you use it for storage or whatever or like a garage or whatever but it's made so that if the water does come up the panels or some number of the panels can just break out and the water just flows through yeah so they have like a wind breaking out and uh in skyscrapers they have floors that are designed just to let wind go through right correct yes and so basically you have this whatever kind of panel there but the panels if pushed you know with your hand very hard or with water they just pop off and then the water flows underneath so there's a bunch of startup opportunities here as we talk about on this week in startups you put your put your mind to these and there were when these fires were occurring uh my house had a sprinkler system on top of the shake roof and it wasn't working it had been disconnected by one of the owners but at some point they had put literally a rooftop sprinkler system because after the brentwood fire whenever that was they were scared and they put sprinklers on the roofs for the shake roofs but then it turned out they got rid of the shake roofs you didn't need to have that but there could be other fire retardant stuff you could put in tahoe and in the mountain regions where you have all these fires so there's a big opportunity i think for startup founders to start thinking about composite materials fireproofing these things floodproofing these things and that's a way where you maybe don't need insurance because hey this thing can survive the major things and maybe have a high deductible or something there's a lot going on in the news as well you're not kidding though one last thing on this there's that sauron system that's coming out that's the new like security system for people that's a i think it's a startup i wonder if we're gonna see similar things like that like you know here's the fire department in a box for your house type thing for certain higher end customers.

15:54Anyways, yes. Lots to talk about on the show. I want to start Jason with something from CES. We had a founder on the show a week or two ago, CEO of the company behind Codium. They built the Windsurf IDE that I tested with and built a little app. Yeah. Well, they got a shout out from someone who we all know. And I thought I would just play this because it's kind of a fun little shout out to a Twisted Fender company. Here's Jensen. Really fantastic stuff. Codium, every software engineer in the world. This is going to be the next giant AI application, next giant AI service period is software coding.

16:2830 million software engineers around the world. Everybody is going to have - That's enough of that, but it struck me as so fun to see. We just had them on and no offense to us. I mean, I like to think that our words carry a little bit of weight, but Jensen on stage in front of literally every single press in the world, that's about as big of a shout out as you can get, I think in technology today. congratulations to that startup um if you can and you know the number of developers in the world is 30 million it's a very small number there are cities in china that have 30 million people like many of them uh and so it's but 10 or less than 10 of the population of the united states are developers globally so you know being able to expand that number dramatically through software uh through ai is going to have a profound impact like super profound impact on the world and that's i think going to be a very world positive one well that's great maybe being debated right now that's world positive i think is the announcement has put out like a five minute video which i guess uh we got to talk about here at the top of the show because everybody's talking about it yeah and i maybe you could just queue it up for the audience if yeah they've been under a rock uh and obviously this is close to your art because you're a journalist and i've been pretty vocal about this kind of stuff too and it hits on so many different things from you know media fact checking standards misinformation disinformation uh and of course something you know that's the number one item in our constitution uh free speech free speech yeah and so here we go zuckerberg uh i guess is uh gone based and he's gone he's gone something i I want to get to your tweet about it, but let's just break it down for people.

18:11So first of all, Facebook is moving away from third-party fact checkers. They are moving towards the community notes model, originally called Birdwatch back at Twitter, community notes under X, and has very much become associated with the Musk X era of social media, if you will. And what I thought was very important in Meta's commentary, the announcement of this, they didn't say, you know, we are looking at the market and learning. They just said, X community notes, we like that, we're going to do it. And I thought that was kind of very clear and honest of them. They are also going to be allowing more total speech.

18:47They are changing their speech rules for their platform, making them more expansive. We can talk about what they've changed in detail, Jason, if you want. But the gist here is that automation and more moderation thereof haven't worked for Facebook and Meta the way they wanted them to. So they are going to essentially let people be a bit more freewheeling, a little bit more self-policing um starting in the u.s other jurisdictions of course have different rules but that is i think a fair top level summary of the changes on the content moderation side yeah it's um it is a let's start with community notes it's an incredible project uh predates you know twitter turning into x and it's it's actually an open source project so i don't know if you're aware of that uh and it's um which means anybody can use it i'll just send you the link here you can pull up the github page um or if you're typing github community notes anybody can go find it and so i i believe anybody can go take a license to this and use it it's a very fascinating piece of software and i'm are you part of community notes by chance i do not believe that i am okay you can apply to be part of it and what's really interesting about it is when you see a you can go and like look at community notes yourself or um when you're reading a tweet if you see a proposed community you can click on it and you can actually rate it hey everybody it's 2025 and ai is officially everywhere from medicine to self-driving cars if ai hasn't hit your industry yet well you know it's coming fast but ai needs serious computing power so how do you stay competitive without breaking the bank and what if you could cut your cloud bill in half that's right 50%.

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21:06Oracle is offering to cut your current cloud bill in half if you move to OCI for new US customers with a minimum financial commitment. But act fast. This offer ends March 31st. So see if your company qualifies at oracle.com slash twist. That's oracle.com slash TWIST. And what happens is people are rating each other they've invited a small number of people into it who they trust who they know who they are and when you look at one you might say i think that this is a good correction because it's easy to understand it's factually correct and it's site sources so it's it's kind of like inspired in some ways by what wikipedia does um we have reputation and a community of people kind of debating stuff and these things get kind of voted up and down to which community notes gets seen so to game it is extremely hard just like gaming the wikipedia was extremely hard for a long period of time now you do have an issue with wikipedia now because it's there's a bunch of people who you know baked accounts for many years and then they do edits for pay let's say um and you know maybe community notes will have that issue down the road it's none of these systems are perfect, but it's, it's, it's really does pretty well, uh, community notes, I think.

22:25Whereas fact-checking through multiple organizations, I think when they decided to do that, it was, and this is where like Zuckerberg's motivation comes into play here. And, and that's the really important thing to think about. Zuckerberg really cares about business, really cares about winning. I believe his primary directive is winning. he's got i don't know close to three billion people using these platforms he was more than happy uh and and this is what i wrote here you know listen zuck kicked trump off the largest platform in the world when that was the popular decision this was my tweet you know when i was a little jet-lagged here now he's bending the knee and firing the censors he enabled because that's the popular decision he is the definition of a front runner of kamala one he would be doubling down on censorship.

23:14I actually believe that. I believe, you know, he is the motivation here, I think. It's not that he wants to do the right thing, or he's suddenly seen God, or he's had an epiphany, because the timing of all these things simply correlates with who's in office. Oh, absolutely. 2016 was when fact-checking began on the platform after a wave of misinformation or disinformation or just crappy information. And then now with Trump coming back, and I'll say uh some pretty mean things i mean trump threatened to put zuckerberg in jail yeah so back to like you know i don't think we can i don't think we can say you know don't take him seriously literally threatening someone with life in prison jason's a big deal like come on of course but i will say like just for the sake of the next four years like he i'm gonna just say like he says bombastic stuff he's not able to do that but what he would be able to do is maybe uh break facebook apart or pick the people in office that might have that, just like Biden picked Lena Kahn who wanted to break things up in big tech and not do M &A.

24:19You know, he will have his chance to pick people like Brendan Carr or whatever, who match his philosophy. So it might not be the God King comes down and Biden says, break up Google. It might be Biden picks Lena Kahn. Lena Kahn says, we're breaking up Google. And the same thing goes for Trump, right? That's kind of how our democracy works for better or worse. I mean, can I quibble with that just a little bit? I think that having someone come in with a particular antitrust perspective is more meritorious than going in with a particular animus against one company or an executive. And Trump agrees.

24:52That's totally fair. That's totally fair. Trump agrees that his threats work. Quoting from Politico, incoming President Donald Trump said the new approach was, quote, probably due to threats he made against the technology mogul. So Trump thinks he got his pound of flesh here. And I think this sets the tone. I'm not even making a judgment here. I think this sets the tone for the next at least year of Trump's administration, because he'll have a grace period before presidents become less popular as the terms go on historically. So he'll have a period of time when Congress is under his party. He's a newly elected president, not stuck with years of incumbency.

25:26And so I think during that period of time, we will see more of this. That's disappointing to me as someone who likes the free market versus kings. now the good news here is um i don't think they were actually using any of this fact checking for anything it wasn't actually being implemented on the site in any major way it was strictly a way for them to deflect or pretend they were doing something what did matter was the decisions they made and and we talked about this on the program many years ago was this oversight board uh which you can go see at oversightboard.com zuck funded this but to the tune of like 150 million it was originally like 10 or 20 million there's a i saw 280 is the latest number that i saw now that's probably the total over time i saw once but like a lot of money a lot of money to put a bunch of like let's face it like very elite academic people into a group and say hey when we make decisions for these what is it almost 3 billion people using our platforms yeah and it's well over 2 billion you know we're going to let you adjudicate some of them and give um you know your decision as opposed to us making the decision and fact checking you know is different than the terms of service but let's pause for a second these are all companies that get to choose how they operate them reddit is pseudo anonymous they you don't have to use a real name linkedin gotta use a real name okay yeah one's a message part about video games and whatever and the uh or you know originally it was a video game about like hobbies passions the other one was like a business network like this is that where you got to have real names like what's the point and so you could have all these different things exist but this is big because it is the largest and if you were to look at zuckerberg's decision making he also it's super important oh here we go uh oh my god it's over 3 billion 3.29 billion this is a q3 number and that was a five percent year over year so we'll have to see what it is now in uh at the end of 2024 but that's the latest from their earnings report 3.29 billion people jason is more than uh well there's about eight and a half billion people on the planet something like that yeah if that number isn't right uh i plead the fact that we are doing this nice and early well anyway i mean it's literally there in the document so um over three billion people using platform he kicked the president off uh for the safety issue the open board the oversight board said hey that was like a weird decision like maybe in the short term like if you thought there was going to be another january 6th and you know maybe trump would incite it that was actually the common thinking man i know that's not something people really want to talk about now they kind of memory hole all that moment in time but there was a moment in time republicans and democrats were in unison like hey trump might say something even crazier and cause like January 6 times 10 or 100.

28:24There was like an actual fear from Republicans, from Democrats, both sides of the aisle, and the media like, oh my God, what do we do here if he quits? Everybody, instead of coming to the Capitol, everybody come to this location, everybody come to that location. Let's give him hell here. Let's give him hell there. It just felt like he was out of control at that time. I'm talking about Trump here. And that this could be crazy and maybe even more people would get hurt or people could get killed, right? um because he had so many followers and that's when twitter banned him youtube banned him it was it was in unison everybody banned him you know at the same time the oversight board then came and said hey we're going to uh overturn that basically here's our advice and then there was this whole thing where is that going to take their advice or not i just want to put it out there so people are super crystal clear he's the god king he has what's called super voting shares he controls and rules this three billion person network with an iron fist however however if but 10 percent of people were to stop posting because they disagree with his decisions yeah he would change his decisions he cares about winning that's why the number is so big that's why it's 3.29 billion yeah because he cares so much about that number going up he's addicted to that stuff i know him i know how he thinks uh and you don't need to be a genius you don't you know i don't have a personal relationship i don't overstate it here but i i know him since i since he started his career yeah um you know in fact the first time i met him was when he it was a private social network he wanted to win more than anything he wants to be accepted he wants to be popular all this stuff and the reason he has three billion people is because he's willing to do whatever it takes so as an entrepreneur listening to this week in startups he's like the perfect example of somebody who's a win at all costs.

30:12And he sees now that winning at all costs meant kick Trump off the platform because that was the popular decision to censor people. That was the popular decision. Do not let people talk about issues that they can talk about on other platforms, which is his right. It's his business. All right, founders, let's kick off the new year by talking about your website. If you're launching something new in 2025 or you need to refresh your brand, and I bet you do, you need to use Squarespace. Squarespace makes building a stunning, professional website ridiculously easy. Whether you're selling products, offering services, or just sharing your ideas, Squarespace gives you the tools you need to make it happen.

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31:29That's squarespace.com slash twist. if you own shares in it you're along for the ride but he's in control but remember as users at any point in time users could opt out of using that system if you don't want him to be so powerful all you have to do is do what I did I don't go on Facebook but once every couple of months in fact I just had to reload it because they'll get into my Instagram I had to do it because I was authenticating so we could stream to our i started to get restreamed to go to my instagram and trying to figure it out it doesn't work very well um but we'll get there you can just not use these products or services and i don't and you don't and you know what i think there's going to be many people who just say you know what i just don't think i want to use his product or service and then he would change his decisions if you don't like them or you can compete and make your own products i and you know what now we have blue sky now you have you know you created threads you have blue sky people can create any you have uh mastered on i mean these things don't have insignificant number of people and i just read that blue sky is raising at 700 million dollar valuation yes so we'll talk about that in a second but yes not as insurmountable compete with zuckerberg as you think it's true but there's a lot of things there for you to comment on i'm sure you have some thoughts i have so many thoughts but like the thing the thing that i the thing that i don't like here is that i think that we're speaking occasionally in too broad of terms like for example um that facebook is now a free speech haven it's absolutely not so for example uh you can't have uh female presenting nipples on instagram now yeah free the nipple was a whole movement right right and so i just i just decided i remembered that and so i went to the facebook trend sorry the meta transparency center under the community standards section, subsection, adult nudity and sexual activity.

33:22And they say we restrict that because some people in our community may be sensitive to the sort of content, particularly due to cultural background or age. Fair enough. But that is making a value judgment that limits speech based on the corporation. And so to me, watching them say, and I went through this morning, the changes that Facebook made to its hate speech rules. You can now dump on trans people as much as you want. But you can't have nipples because one is politically expedient and the other is bad for business. And to me, this is not free speech. This is just a company following the trends, trying to maximize income.

34:01I don't want to give them the moral imprimatur of free speech when they're not doing it. Absolutely. He cares. The reason there will not be a nipple on there or a female nipple, I should say, is because it's not good for advertising. Exactly. complete. Disney, Ivory Soap, Apple, they don't want to be near breasts. And so this is the reason. And other platforms might have no problem with it. They get more traffic, they get less advertising, they make that decision. But I think it's super important for people to give him zero credit on a moral basis that he's making some great moral judgment. It has nothing to do with this.

34:39It's just breast tax, folks. He's just going with the crowd as to what is best for shareholders in business which means you should buy the stock you should own the stock i own the stock it's going to do phenomenal um i feel guilty owning it but it's a great trade and it will keep growing and he'll he'll always win because he's always going to do this it has nothing to if democrats win next time and they say you know what we want to have this set of topics be the ones that we censor or we whatever they what is it called when you deep promote something uh uh, uh, de-boost, shadow ban, de-prioritize.

35:18De-prioritize. There you go. That's the word. Yeah. We're going through all the ways to move stuff down your feed. Um, it's early and late guys. We're doing our best. Well, I, here's what I think. I think ultimately what we're going to see with social networks here is the idea that I think all the social networks are going to just start to move to, it's going to be more like Reddit, maybe 4chan like X, where there's just a, you're going to have to, as a consumer understand it's the wild west these are these they're this idea that it's going to be groomed and clean like linkedin or like facebook used to be where you know if you said something about the covid vaccine you might get kicked off or deprioritized or labeled you know all this kind of stuff is just it's it's gonna lean towards free speech which i like you know that's my personal belief but i also believe people should be able to do what they want to do i kind of i kind of like having multiple choices i like that linkedin doesn't have fake names and i like that they don't have nudity on linkedin or other you know like spicy content or whatever on linkedin because i'm there to do business i also like that reddit has pseudonyms because people i feel over time can be honest about their reviews of stuff and i can click on their profile and see what else they wrote and yeah i i understand i might be getting duped there might be somebody in there who's getting paid off by, I don't know, some movie to write something, but I don't take it all too seriously.

36:46It's like one little piece of information for me, Reddit, LinkedIn is one piece of information and then I come to my own version of the truth. So you're going to have to like lower your standards as to like how valid the information is on these. I just find the, I know this is my Boy Scout-ness coming out and we've talked about this before, but I do find the posturing annoying. like like adding dana white to the the the meta board is such a sop to trump to try to buy favor with the incoming administration it's just it strikes me as a little bit gross like for example if dana white savvy i see this i started i was like well that's a savvy move now he's got like what happened to merit what happened to merit what happened to only hiring people who are good if Dana White was a lefty for a board it's just about access and power and he gets more power and more access right he's got a he's he had ground to make up here just like Tim Cook's got ground to make up here right so they're all giving a little donation here inauguration whatever it is and in this case you get Dana White on your board Dana White's obviously good friends with Trump boom and Trump probably prefers community notes and he came out publicly talking about this hey this is great look i you know yeah they sent the republican they sent the republican on to fox and friends to pitch this to jump it's lit to me business savvy should not be predicated on kissing political ranks and i i think that like it's i i wrote about this i'm like this is probably a good business choice but i do not like that our system our system is allowing this to be the business norm because i don't think it's healthy and it boo Jason I say boo to it but I will say Mark wins and Mark keeps winning and Mark has all the shares um one last thing about this before we go you said about owning uh meta stock here's an example about how we all do so I pulled up the fidelity um total market index fund and if you look at its holdings here you will see that two percent of it is in meta only behind Amazon on microsoft nvidia and apple so if you buy the market you're buying a lot of zuckerberg and i think that's that's very interesting by the way um magnificent seven anybody i mean just just look at this it's crazy it is crazy yeah we were talking about that on all in or chamath was talking about all in and just what an amazing um uh how weighted index funds are getting to the mag seven but these companies are getting wildly profitable and they're going to continue wildly profitable because of ai like we talked about here um so more to come on this decision but it is his network if you don't like it create a competitor don't use his network stop complaining about it everybody i mean listen he and the great part about this is like all these people went to like threads and they're like zuckerberg's got our back you know it's gonna be better and i'm like no are you sure okay the biggest lesson of of meta throughout all its iterations and histories is never trust that trust it as a platform because they will never you trust you suck is a really good operating system unless unless you are the person who's running reality labs because then he has your back to the tune of several billion dollars a quarter he does believe in that one yeah yeah all right um where do you want to go from here jason we can talk about um some nvidia stuff we can talk about some couple some funding rounds that are coming up anthropic blue sky we got the nvidia stuff was was really interesting there were there were two pieces i thought were super interesting one he made a mac mini that cost three thousand dollars that's like absurdly powerful and then the other one is he seems to be making like real world models and simulations that i believe are open source and this is something that could be incredibly beneficial for people building robots or self-driving cars if there was an open source way to understand the world then collectively more people could build things that move around the world whether it's a drone or a tiny robot or a burrito delivery robot or a walking dog or whatever so i think those two were the most interesting to me i don't know if you had any other stuff that you thought was interesting i want to talk about the the project digits and If you don't know what we're talking about, here is NVIDIA's latest toy that everyone's going to want.

41:22Forget the Apple Vision Pro. This is going to be awesome. So what they've done is taken a single Blackwell chip, their upcoming awesome AI supercomputer chip, and stuck it in a box that you can buy for your house. So instead of having to go to AWS or Azure and rent an instance and fire it up and pay them, you can for$3 ,000 get a NVIDIA GB10 Grace Blackwell super chip, which has a petaflop of AI computing performance. Basically, you can run a 200 billion parameter model at home for 3K. Now, this is definitely going to be a bit of a gimmick and probably not going to change the world. But Jason, if you're a company that has developers working on AI, you're paying them 200 250 a year probably yes so can you afford gk for one percent or a fraction of a percent to have this on their desk exactly i'd say the thing that's really interesting about things that start as toys or as hobbies this feels like the raspberry pi yeah it feels like you know the pc in the early days you know these things were toys and you know people were tinkering with them and then an application comes out and then people really want it and then everybody has to have it the palm pilot you know and the general magic machines were like these little digital assistants they were pdas personal digital assistants they had a dictionary on them a calendar on them they weren't connected to the internet you had to plug them in with the you know a big fat cable into your computer to get the data to sync it never worked it took an hour you know and then all of a sudden now we all have iphones and android phones in fact i got by the way i got the google pixel 9 fold uh-huh have you used one of these foldable phones yet uh my father-in-law has one i don't know if i've actually taken it out of his hands and used it it's incredible really oh okay i thought it was a gimmick i thought it was stupid and now i have one and the google 9 integration with gemini uh-huh is like everything that alexa and siri should have been times 100 it actually works now so you know when we were like doing testing previously we had sunny on and we're like asking it to do certain tasks it just wouldn't do it yes now i'm starting to ask tests like hey open google play and download this app for me and it did it and i was like whoa or it pulled up the page and i had still to click the install button that's better than siri which give you sorry yeah series should be three bing results yeah yeah exactly it's like i don't know i'm gonna search the web maybe but so it's actually understanding like the operating system and like jumping out and actually actually doing functional things for me so and then when you're using your phone and you're on the when it's closed you have a screen and you know you could just use it like that you answer the phone or you text but then you know you're sitting in your bed or you're in line at Starbucks or you're having a Starbucks or here I was having a coffee, you know, in the seco, you know, after skiing a little bit, I open it up and I open Slack and I start talking to you.

44:33I start talking to other people and the keyboard splits and goes to either side and I'm thumbing and then I'm using speech to text, which kind of works now. And I get this screen that's kind of like, remember the iPad mini that people kind of liked as like a big iPhone and it's pretty great. but you couldn't carry an iPad mini with you because it didn't fold. And this thing folds and it folds and I don't feel like I'm going to break it. It feels sturdy. Now the last one I saw Marquez was just saying it was garbage. So this works. The reason this relates to this Blackwell thing is I think, you know, putting out this little hardware as a 1.0 kind of play with it kind of thing.

45:18You might have people start playing with this and somebody builds an application that everybody's like i gotta have that i need that yes and i'll buy it i don't know what that is but three thousand dollars is a lot of money but not for the hobbyist crap you know the hobby people spend a lot of money on a lot of things like i ski i spend thousands of dollars a year on skiing like tens of thousands with traveling cycling people buy ten thousand dollar bikes and they lob them so i think this is kind of like reminds me of the muscle car or pc movements if you remember like people used to change their carburetor they would put in better tires they would change spark plugs you do all this kind of fun stuff in the pc era people would add a hard drive they would add memory chips to get more memory this is all done by opening the computer up and putting in cards and you know there was always very complicated in the 80s and 90s to do this stuff i think that's what i see with this blackwell what are they calling this device project digits and it's going to be made by third parties so i think it's kind of like the microsoft model like oh oh yeah the ur thing and then have oems built oh that's even better so that that's that's kind of a shot across the bow of like the pc industry or whatever because what if this thing can it run windows why if i recall the research i did the answer is no it sits next to your uh mac or windows pc got it back to your point about toys to tools gen one okay gen two if it runs linux and i can or chrome os or something or somebody puts in you know some other raspberry pi like device and it comes as one unit sure and now you got a mac mini that can kind of do both and you know these new mac mini m4s i was talking about them on the show how incredible they are yeah those i i saw somebody stacking those connecting them together and then running llms on them that's awesome when you see this kind of hobby stuff going on oh man get curious get curious very easy to dismiss but get curious because somebody's going to take three or four of these things and put it in a car or do something with it and it's going to be magical so you know like if you put that three thousand dollar thing on uh you know a bicycle or a motorcycle or something what's it going to be able to do you put it on a drone what's it going to be able to do you put it on a boat you know i'm picking things that move around the real world the robot this this could escalate quickly folks i think this is like nvidia's at the top of their game with a lot of money being having a lot of fun and running a lot of experiments you know what the same thing happened at google with project loon google fiber google city remember they did google city i do nobody remembers any of these projects anymore except you and i who were passionate about these projects and cover them yeah you know what you know what all those projects wound up being waymo forget every project google was project x what was the lab called google x right and so uh google glass was in there project loon project loon was a a balloon that would spread wi-fi didn't work starlink works better wing they had a drone delivery service hey maybe that was too early right yeah glass was too early um but these moonshots if 19 of 20 didn't work and we don't even know what other ones were in there you know well let's assume there are 20 and waymo works which it is apparently working pretty well so don't work to do all worth it that's what i'm that's the vibes i'm getting from nvidia and jensen right now i cannot agree more i i was blown away by the sheer scale of things they announced i mean we haven't even mentioned for example the foundation models they put together their computer vision stuff they had autonomous driving announcements they dropped an entire new line of um pc gaming gpus that i'm gonna buy by the way i'm gonna get one but i do want to go back just for a second to the idea of the foldable phone because i found something for you jason oh but i think you're going to love so uh lenovo had a rollable laptop concept and this year at ces they announced that they are actually going to build it it's going to launch this year for 3500 and i have the video for you and i think that you're gonna love this because i rollable pc concept wait a second that's not standard laptop watch this

49:47look at that look at that oh my god for people who are watching thank you the screen of a laptop is extending like a shade you just press a button and it adds several inches to your laptop screen genius so this is the type of thing that i'm sure apple will eventually make in seven years after android um but this does mean that eventually my macbook pro will have a screen that expands because do you recall back when android phones were getting bigger and everyone called them phablets as a diss yes and now now my iphone is the huge the the fact that apple doesn't have a foldable phone i to me is crazy right now yes they would make one that'd be extraordinary it would sell like hotcakes and i think maybe what they're doing is waiting for this to be a little more rugged i think the issue is like will they break or not um yes yes this second one feels super rugged i've had it for a couple of weeks now maybe two weeks and it feels solid i've opened and closed it you know 500 times you know i don't feel like it's and i open it close it all the time 10 times a day no problem boom boom boom boom boom and it's really nice and you know what i it's like silly stuff but like watching a youtube video or an nba game you know what i was on the plane usually i would take out my laptop if i want to watch the next game or a movie if i've downloaded something and then i have this i open it up i can watch the movie on it it's really nice um so i you just nailed it if you if apple makes this we don't need ipads anymore not that we need ipads now but they go away um i want to make a quick technology point though because you just reminded me of something i had a moment when i was blown away by technology and i want to give a shout out to some some stuff that doesn't get a lot of love uh slack and ios so i was um i think it was monday night i was taking care of the girls and i was talking to bianca on the investment side because she's the local god king of software and i had a question about coda and good we were going over this and i literally have a baby in a carrier i'm sitting in the living room on the floor and i'm talking to bianca on my phone and she screen shared into coda and i just i knew it i knew it existed but i hadn't had it shown to me as it was so slick so fast so high res we were a voice chat with video it was just i was like okay this is has zoom built in with huddles and huddles you can do screen sharing and you know what slack does a really bad this is what happens when a startup gets bought by a company and they stop doing keynotes like jensen's doing you don't get this like fervor around a product anymore and so these great product announcements you just don't have them this is why like independent companies can kind of thrive and they they get more aggressive and releasing more innovative products whereas in a big company like if i asked you who's the ceo who's running slack you wouldn't know nobody knows who's running slack i read her name uh i read an interview with her i think a month or two ago yeah and where's the is she doing a keynote where she releases 10 new features no well no because mark does the keynotes over there there you go right and so you really it's very hard for companies to have 10 different products and have all of them really aggressively going after different markets like but zoom is keeps adding a ton of features and you do see you know zoom getting credit for them you know to a larger extent they did add channels to zoom to kind of like counter what slack was doing and they don't work it's a janky bad product the ux is terrible yeah it just doesn't work the calendar in there works pretty good in zoom i find i find myself i used to open my google calendar to get to zoom now i go to zoom it's got my calendar in there and it kind of worked pretty well so sometimes like i'll find myself changing my behavior and going there that's when you know you have something that that's when i'm willing to actively change my behavior by the way uh one last thing from the previous segment you said that you were using voice dictation inside of slack um i'm using it generally on the operating system level i think apple's is solid and google's is just transcendent like okay because i don't i I don't think anyone should give you more tools to send more slock messages.

54:30Because I think that's the crisis. One last thing on the NVIDIA point though, because we have a couple of companies on the Twisted 500, Etched, Rebellions, Mythic, Samba Nova, that are building AI-specific chips. And I was pretty excited about them because I thought, look, here's like so many different ways to go about this model of trying to have faster, more efficient, better AI-crunching chips. and then nvidia came out with their series of ces announcements i just kind of sat back and i was like good luck to the startups because this is a company that is really firing on nine out of eight cylinders right now and i just i hope someone can knock a piece off of them but well there are going to be cases where you know you can make unique silicon cheaper in a vertical and faster cheaper better faster so you know it's not like you're going to build a hundred thousand of you know one of these chips but you know for inference you have grok uh which sunday's working on and they're starting to put in a lot of hardware now you've started to see them there on their account if you follow sunday you know you see him shipping a bunch of these things to different parts of the world and building data centers and then in the teslas they have their own card with their own chips on it so you're starting to see people say you know what i don't want to give 50 of my margin to nvidia if i build my own which by the way is what steve jobs realized at a certain point hey how much are we giving to intel how much are we giving to qualcomm you know some of these things are patents you can't get away from them but you know the the idea that apple would make their own chips was kind of crazy yeah there's sandeep mandra and he is shipping racks on racks on racks of um raw inference service so when you ask a query this makes it go really fast to have those when you build it they're not for building a model they're for inference but i mean inference is going to be much bigger than the market yeah yeah um so a lot going on i did see byd launched a batmobile did you see that it was in the thread that you shared with me i'm gonna pull it up for us yes shout out to alex and the team maddie everybody doing a great job we try to get 10 better a week here two percent better three percent better every episode compounding three episodes a week we can be 10 better if each of these episodes is three percent better let me know how you think we could be better just add us and mention us you know if you want better show notes you want better chapters whatever it is better topics we always want to make it a little better for you to learn and just get an edge when you're building your startup um but this byd um i saw in the show notes and what is happening here yeah make it full screen look at this folks there's no one in the driver's car with a crazy spoiler obviously a lot inspired by tesla from byd they kind of steal everything but watch that what it jumps also this this is a mclaren not a tesla it looks like a mclaren right i was looking at the interior oh yeah the interior straight rip straight ripped of it yeah so just for those people who aren't watching this thing looks like a mclaren it's got a spoiler like an aftermarket spoiler that's huge so it looks kind of like a batmobile and i guess you press a button and it jumps up two or three inches off the ground but because it's going so fast a couple of inches of altitude gives you quite a lot of of horizontal distance so we can jump over potholes jason this does solve the enormous market hole for billionaires running from the cops who are on a poor road who need to jump over a pothole to prevent capture or a spike strip oh the spike strip if you're in a spike strip i like it i'm punching it up so yes that's what this is for if you're running from the cops and a spy show no this is like batmobile level stuff there's no functional use for this thing except for us to talk about it well played byd this is the point of cs come out with a feature yes that we can't help but talk about why do you need your car to jump two and a half inches in the ground and then land properly it doesn't make any sense so why would you do that do you press a button on the steering wheel i'm throwing away my subaru oil slicks and a machine gun what is this sky hunter it makes no sense to me but i love it i i absolutely love it and if you want to know what it is it's the byd supercar um young wang u9 and it can jump apparently according to our notes six meters forward uh on the show notes point though you were talking about that when i was pulling up that video uh we forgot to change the permissions on the second iteration of this so people could leave comments and i know that because someone emailed in so i think that goes to that people like it so uh we are going to keep doing this if you want to follow along thisbeaconstartups.com slash docket we'll have the latest docket up top and we're going to have a historical archive of preceding dockets down below so if you're watching an older show want to see a fact chart data point it'll be there we're going to keep doing this it's been it's been good fun um can i squeeze in one tiny note about a different story before we go yes and then And I want to tell you about the minivan in Japan that I'm losing my mind over.

59:48Okay, I can't wait for that. Really briefly, two things that came out from the world of AI economics that I think are worth discussing. One, Anthropic is, according to reporting from the journal, in talks to raise about $2 billion more from Lightspeed,$60 billion valuation. Company is on a roughly$875 million run rate. Why do we care? Because they raised$4 billion recently from Amazon. Well, the thing is, they have about a 69X run rate multiple, which is very, very expensive. And I wanted to compare that to OpenAI,$3.7 billion run rate,$157 billion valuation, 42X. So then I asked Jason, why is Anthropic being valued at a higher run rate multiple than OpenAI?

1:00:31My thought was, Anthropic makes most of its money B2B, and OpenAI makes most of it from - It's more sustainable than out against Gemini and Grok. Precisely. And Zuckerberg. which we just mentioned, kid likes to win. Oh, look at that. Wow. So Sam Altman tweeted, and same thing, we're currently losing money on OpenAI Pro subscriptions. People use it much more than they expected. The$200. And Pro is the$200 a month version of OpenAI that has more O1 access. So they're losing money hand over fist. I guess people think they're making$6 billion this year or something. They're going to double it. I don't doubt those numbers.

1:01:04I do doubt that you're going to be able to charge for these things and make a profit off of them because i think people with existing businesses franchises are just going to make them free so twitter will have it free apple will have it free google have it free google already makes it basically free i pay for the 20 one but yeah when i was close to free it'll be free eventually uh microsoft will make it free uh somebody said that sam who's been tweeting about agi a whole bunch might be trying to raise that 300 billion is the word on the street um well that would explain a lot of the hundred billion okay so let's war game that um if you buy into a company on the private markets at 300 billion dollars you're expecting at least a trillion dollar company yeah or trip your money for sure yeah if you're putting 10 billion or 20 billion into it yeah so a trillion yeah yeah there's about 10 companies yeah but i mean if not open ai in the ai game yeah who would you put up there because because um xai is worth oh crap i forget 40 50 yeah anthropics worth 60 i mean i just think we're losing the script a little bit on these valuations and uh people are withholding you know their disbelief and putting that on the side and saying hey we have preferred shares we put 10 million into the 10 billion into this thing's not going to be worth less than 10 billion or whatever the preference stack is now 50 billion 30 maybe it's 30 billion thing's going to be worth more than 30 billion we'll at least get our money back we'll take a flyer i i'd do it i'd do it all right yeah you might you might japanese minivan would you like i just sent you the link i haven't pulled up let's do it you do okay so i i've been riding in these in japan um it's called the alphard like alphard you're a butler kind of thing it looks like a standard mom minivan soccer mom minivan soccer dad minivan i'm gonna hit play on this while you talk play you don't need to have the sound on it and um it has the most comfortable seats in the back so when you get in this thing and it's so easy to get in and out of it's where do you see the cabin oh you basically have these incredibly luxurious seats that and a tray table.

1:03:29It's basically like a first class seat in a minivan. And you're completely inconspicuous from the outside. On the inside, it looks like a private jet. I want this so much. You lay down in these seats. There's two seats, captain seats, and in the back there's a regular bench. There's two captain seats that have a control panel where you can with the led you know and you just set the heat you can lay down in it it is like the greatest first class seat on you know uh emirates or you know whatever incredible international airline and it's two hours from the airport to niseko i slept like a baby for an hour and a half that never happens to me i get car sick i was playing chess and doing slack and tweeting nonsense uh about zuckerberg and i didn't get motion signals so i'm trying to figure out how do i import one of these this is my dream car why are they not selling this here and i was looking at getting a sprinter van like an executive coach to drive around it you know what those go for actually i don't 250 000 because they're all custom made they're not made in factory this thing's a minivan yeah yeah the totality of the genius is they just put two unbelievable seats in that they go for sixty thousand dollars so i don't know who can get me one well i know who's your ally in this it's eric bond from hustle fund because i like eric he's smart he's also the only guy i know who's a minivan enthusiast and he every time you talk about how many kids you have he's like have you bought a minivan yet he's insanely on point about it and maybe he has a point maybe i've been wrong this whole time about minivans here's the thing minivans are very easy to get in out of the sliding doors are everything and uh having a work chair slash sleeper thing is extraordinary uh this could would be an incredible seller here in the united states and i like that you wouldn't know here's the thing vans are smoother than suvs oh yeah vans are so smooth when you're just they're buttery smooth on the road uh now i don't know about safety but anyway shout out to our friends over at toyota uh for making something unbelievably cool that i am loving oh and it's it's kind of like high and low shout out to akira kurosawa since i'm not my japanese name high low high end low end same time absolutely brilliant we'll see you next time in this week in startups i'll be back in a couple weeks i'll be going to the inauguration uh not the actual inauguration but i'll be doing a bunch of podcasts when the inauguration we'll probably do a this week in startups from there as well uh so be prepared uh and we are doing the show notes if you want to see them thisweekinstartups.com slash docket go there thisweekinstartups.com docket and you'll see what we're going to have on the show and we start six hours before then you can also see stuff in the show notes you can see those show notes in the docket when you open up your app if you're using a cool app it has the notes there the one thing i want to try to put in the notes as we get 10 better a week 3 better an episode two and a half percent better an episode is um putting images into those so there's some advanced things like we do chapters on this week in startups but you need to have an advanced player that has chapters and you can also put unique album art so i think you can do album art per episode we got to figure that out and we got to figure out how to enhance those uh show notes inside of the podcast notes but for now this week in startups.com slash docking get in on the docking tell us what you want us to talk about give us like little nooks and crannies check maddie and the researchers team work maybe we missed a citation or you have better data for us we'll see you all next time bye bye Thank you.