Negative Venture Returns, GM Kneecaps Cruise, and Finix joins the TWiST500 | E2059

0:00a portion of it is the regime change in Washington and a portion of it is there's a lot of buyers When there's a lot of buyers, they set a new top, they drive prices up. And so if you're like Tiger and you offer, you know, you compete to beat the entire venture community to put money into a SaaS company before it goes public, let's say it was Asana or HubSpot. I think those were public already, but that was the kind of businesses they were interested in, the Zendesk, SaaS kind of companies. If they were pursuing that and they wanted to beat everybody at the table, those people have to deploy capital as well.

0:32So they keep top ticking the market. They keep pushing it up. Their bid is going to be higher than everybody else's because they want to win. They want to deploy the capital. Remember, they're getting 1.5%, 2.5%, who knows what their fees are on$12 billion. That's so much money. A quarter billion dollars a year in fees. I mean, if it was 1%, it would be$125 million a year. A year. This Week in Startups is brought to you by OpenPhone. Create business phone numbers for you and your team that work through an app on your smartphone or desktop. Twist listeners can get an extra 20 % off any plan for your first six months at openphone.com slash twist.

1:09Vanta. Compliance and security shouldn't be a deal breaker for startups to win new business. Vanta makes it easy for companies to get a sock to report fast. Twist listeners can get$1 ,000 off for a limited time at vanta.com slash twist. And CLA. Innovation takes balance. clients. CLA's CPAs, consultants, and wealth advisors can help you get from startup to where you want to end up. Get started now at claconnect.com slash tech. Hey, everybody. Welcome to This Week in Startups. I'm your host, Jason Calacanis, with my co-host, Alex Wilhelm. We've got a packed show for you today. Tons of news and a great guest.

1:48What's on the program today? Alex. So today on the show, we have Tiger Global getting defanged and all the data that's behind that. We're going to talk to the founder and CEO of a company called Flight that we're very excited about. Then we're going to add Phoenix to the Twist 500. Then GM kind of gives up on his robo-taxi dreams. And if we have time, if Jason and I don't yap too much along the way, the new head of the FTC and what he promised, Trump. So it's going to be an absolutely packed show. All right. Let's get to our first story, Alex. Yeah. So we're going to talk about a name that has not shown up on this show in a while, but It used to be something we couldn't get away from, Tiger Global.

2:27Jason, one of the best parts of pension funds attached to states like California is that they will often disclose data on how their investments are performing. They have to legally, right? Required or not, we get the data. And what that means is you and I can see inside of funds that we might not otherwise get data from. So the latest is that CalSTRS, which is the California State Teachers Retirement System, has data on Tiger Global's 2021 era$12.7 billion fund and a few other funds that are a$12.7 billion venture fund. $12.7 billion venture fund. The perfect size of a venture fund was like$400 million, remember?

3:12And that was considered the ideal size. Fred Wilson talked about it. The first round team talked about it. That's 300 or 400 of these 400 or 500 million, $250 million funds. And they deployed it really quickly. So we think a lot about venture capital funds having, I don't know, a 10 or 11 year timeframe. Jason, what would be the average length of investing you would do for a fund? Like three years? So there is, you deploy capital typically over three to four years for a fund. Yep. Then that's when you kind of plant the seeds and then you harvest in the second two-thirds of the fund. So let's say you spent three or four years planting, and then you're going to spend another, you know, call it eight years.

3:54These funds typically last 12 to 15 years. At 15, they kind of close out. They buy out the final positions for a dollar and everybody writes it off and you're done. They're timed as 10. They typically have extensions, but yeah, Tiger, because there was so much money flowing into funds and there were so many great deals and founders were raising so much money and founders were being offered so much money and the market was ripping and free money was everywhere, Tiger decided to do an experiment, which was to deploy capital as quickly as possible and basically just take the entire cohort that had reached series B or C in 2020, 2021, 2022 timeframe.

4:29And we saw a lot of our portfolio companies get offers to raise 50 million, a hundred million from not just Tiger, but KOTU and a number of other firms that decided to write$50 million,$100 million checks, not dissimilar to what Masayoshi-san did with his fund as well. Yes. So how did that all work out? Well, we have some data now. Now, Jason, there is the J curve that does come into play here. So you never expect a private investment pool to have very positive returns. At the beginning, you're talking about fees, some things are going to go sideways immediately. And so on the back half of the fund's timeframe, it tends to get better.

5:07That said, when we compare Tiger Global's PIP 15, its 2021 fund, it's not doing well. So recently, CalSTRS marked its investment from 93 to 65 million. It's a net IRR of negative 15%, which I believe makes it a bottom decile fund. Four years in, Jason, is enough time, I think, to say that if your IRR is poor compared to your peers, something's wrong and we're not looking too soon to the data, is my read. This data is very early. So in fairness to them, you know, looking at it, they are literally in where the J curve begins. If they deployed this in 2021, is that what they're saying with this fund?

5:46is that it was deployed in 2021. We're sitting here, it's about to be 2025. So it's a three or four year fund. In other words, they just finished that deployment cycle or how it would typically run. But they did 315 startups in 2021 alone. So that's a pretty consolidated moment in time. And what you want because of time dispersion when you invest is if you were investing over, say, I don't know, 36 or 32 or 48 months, right? Four years. You might peak in, you know, the market might peak in month 24, then come down and be, you know, the valuations might be half that for the next 24 months. So blended, you know, you might've been slightly up paying above market by 25%, but not a hundred percent or 50%.

6:37If you catch my drift, it's effectively dollar cost averaging for literally dollar cost averaging for venture capital yes and so and then also it increases your chances of hitting an outlier because there are a certain number of outliers created every year which means every year a certain number of them get product market fit every year certain ones get what we would call market pull in the industry market pull is when people are just uh calling up saying do you have this product can i get this product throwing money at you signing up without you doing any marketing. Facebook, Uber, Teslas, any great product.

7:10Airbnb had this viral word of mouth. People just sought out the product without them having to do it, and that's market pull. Hopefully, they were looking at companies with market pull. I think the criticism was, how thoughtful can you be if you're investing in a company a day, including on the weekends? Yes. And how much diligence can you do, and how big does your team need to be? we are a team here of i think 12 investment executives we do 100 investments a year and we've run programs like founded university launch accelerator which are like y combinator tech stars and then even a pre-accelerator uh a startup school if you will so you know we are an at-scale investor but i think they had the same number of people or less doing three times the number of deals in a year and these are more complicated deals but what they said was hey if you're at 10 20 30 40 50 million in arr we'll just give you credit for a valuation that will be coming in two years and deploy the capital and i guess that's the challenge everybody saw in this approach we all saw it there but i will tell you it only takes one so if one of these turns out to be hubspot or one of these turns out to be a tesla or an uber or an airbnb and they invested in you know the one to ten billion dollar range you know there could be a hundred bagger in there there could be a 20 bagger in there.

8:24And maybe that makes up for a lot of mistakes. We'll see. It's true. I do want to go back to episode 1207 from Twist because you were talking to founder of funds Everett Randall at the time, and you spent a lot of time talking about Tiger. But the quote from the show that really stuck with me was, if there's no adult in the room, what happens when things go wrong? And I wonder what fraction of Tiger's investments from this fund from the 2021 period when it deployed it that don't need help because you talked about staff sizes i doubt their staff to help even a third of those companies and if two here's what i heard a lot of people who are at peak zirp funds have left now why would you leave well your track record for that fund that you'll have to live with forever would be based upon those investments.

9:10And if those investments were all at five times the proper valuation and you knew there were a lot of duds and you know, you would be fighting tooth and nail for the next eight years to finish that fund. And your reward for doing so would be, you would return one X, you would just get everybody their money back, or you would return 1.5 X. Well, you know, then you got the carry is only that small amount, right? It's not a three X fund, a four X fund. And so a lot of people who felt their funds were underwater, especially if you were like a rank and file person, it's kind of like being on a basketball team and like you lose your all-star, you know, like their knee blows out and then like somebody else retires, whatever.

9:50And you can't win. You're like, you know what? I'm not resigning with this team. I'm going to get traded. I'm going to go work for somebody else. And so a lot of people, I think, and I don't know specifically with Tiger if this happened, but I think what I did here was a lot of people were like, yeah, you know, not my problem now I'm out. Founders know that every missed call is a missed opportunity. Customers don't want to wait. They will call someone else if you don't pick up. But if you use open phone, you're never going to miss another customer call. And guess what? It's super affordable and easy to use.

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10:56What an amazing offer at openphone.com slash twist. that's o-p-e-n-p-h-o-n-e dot com slash twist for 20 off for six months if you are the founder of that company as you point out what do you do well people need to say like oh my god you you lost your consigliere you lost your priest you lost your rabbi at this organization so then who do you talk to now there's somebody else there who's a custodian of this and they didn't do the initial investment and that hike you went on through the headlands in san francisco for three hours and you hung out at burning man or in ibiza and you went crazy and had a great time and now you built all that fabric yeah and it's gone and so now you have to start over and this happens when your company gets acquired as well you know you could lose the person at aol or microsoft who bought your company some mid-level manager comes in it's not their project uh like cruise which we'll talk about in a moment.

11:53And they were saying, you know what? This isn't my problem. I'm going to cut this thing. There's no way for me to win. I'm not going to clean up somebody else's mistake. I've been in a board meeting when there was an investor who was a custodian and they always dialed in and then they always did not listen. And they would get called on occasionally and you have to back up and explain to them why. So I think if you lose your price, if you lose your consigliere, you really are adrift and that's not what you want when you are in trouble. Now, how did this happen? Well, Jason, I think that there's some data that shows off just kind of what's going on.

12:22And you and I were talking about this chart. So this shows the Wisdom Tree Cloud Computing Index. What's that? It's just the Bessemer Cloud Index in index fund form, and it tracks software companies, more or less, that went public. We also have the NASDAQ here, and I put a little time box around the period in which we had the absolute peak of enthusiasm towards late 2021, and then how rapidly, within 69 months, everything changed. And so I guess what Tiger ended up doing here was really effectively and efficiently and aggressively buying the top and that will happen to everybody if you have a period of time but it just looks so painful in retrospect i mean they they graded the top you know um it's in a way what's happening with bitcoin right now if you go all in on a space and we're talking about mr uh mstr micro strategies michael sailor there's another company or what it's called lava mama can't remember Mara.

13:16They now are buying, I don't know if it's billions or hundreds of millions in Bitcoin. They're, I think, responsible for this top in Bitcoin. A portion of it is the regime change in Washington, and a portion of it is there's a lot of buyers. When there's a lot of buyers, they set a new top, they drive prices up. And so if you're like Tiger and you compete to beat the entire venture community to put money into a SaaS company before it goes public. Let's say it was Asana or HubSpot. I think those were public already, but that was the kind of businesses they were interested in, the Zendesk, SaaS kind of company, Salesforce, next Salesforce, next HubSpot, next Asana, whatever.

13:57If they were pursuing that and they wanted to beat everybody at the table, those people have to deploy capital as well. So they keep top ticking the market. They keep pushing it up. Their bid is going to be higher than everybody else's because they want to win. they wanted to play the capital remember they're getting one and a half percent two and a half percent who knows what their fees are on 12 billion dollars that's so much a quarter billion dollars a year in fees i mean if it was one percent it would be 125 million dollars a year a year and i'm assuming it was two but let's say it was one and a half two i mean you're talking about a lot of fees 10 of that fund 20 of that fund will go to fees over 10 years depending on how their fee structure and people could have negotiated that but at the top of the market people don't sweat the small stuff right so now for founders who took that money is the question and i had to mentor a lot of founders and i said listen if you're going to go with best price least rights just know when this all blows up we're going to have to clean it all up so make sure you have a lot of runway you know what we had a lot of firms take the best price highest price per share at the lowest rights board observer seat one board seat not two that kind of thing and so now i've been spending the last two or three years with those companies that let's just come up with a number they're priced at a billion and raised a hundred million and then the market and headwinds started and people started laying people off your number of people who have seats for your sas product goes down so you're working really hard you cut half your staff and you bust your ass at let's say acme sas company sure and this year's revenues 10 less than last year's Then next year, you're at the same level as last year, but still 10 % less than two years ago.

15:39So your best day when you made 50 million was two years ago, or let's say 25 million two years ago. Then you went down to making 21 million. Then you went down to 18. Now you're at 18 again. You got to build back up. So it can be a little depressing, not only to be an LP in these funds, but you're diversified. it can be super depressing to be a gp in this fund because you don't know if you're ever going to get a return and then if you're a founder of one of these companies you're going to run a company that's sideways for four freaking years yeah to get back to growth because you were going for it they told you to hire another 50 sales people to hire another hundred developers to go international and then maybe the market wasn't there your product wasn't tight enough you went too fast car flips out and then we go we have to basically pull you back down to a reasonable amount of spending to try to figure this all out.

16:29I am on the board of companies and I've been involved in meeting with companies in the same position. You know what happens next? The founder leaves. Because the founder's like, I've already fully vested. Yeah. We should talk about founder investing at some point and people that want to change it to avoid having early founder exits leave a lot of dead cap table at seed stage companies. But that's for another day. The thing that I took away from this is no one, and I'm glad you brought up Masayoshi earlier, no one has cracked a foolproof method for deploying essentially infinite capital in the private markets at scale quickly and not losing their shirt at the later stages.

17:03I do think accelerators tend to do pretty well, but I just don't think series C or D plus you can do it and make money. And I guess now we're just watching Tigers LPs sit and kind of cry quietly in the corner until all this shakes out. But I bet you they'll go back to at least one X by the end. Yeah, I mean, this is why people like venture as a cohort. If you hit something, you could get back in the black again. You could get lucky, hit some huge pot, and you're back in the game, right? So a way to look at this is if you were allocating to venture 15 % of your portfolio, 20 % of your portfolio, 10 % of your portfolio as a major LP, you know that over time, you've got, let's say 20 venture, let's say 10 venture funds you work with, and they come back to you every two or three years with a new fund.

17:53So, you know, over 10 years, you're in 40 funds, maybe they got a little frisky, there were 50 funds, each fund represents 2 % of your return. So you could have 10 funds, not return, you know, but half, you know, and then the top quartile return 5x and you blend out to beating the market, you know, and tripling your money over 10 years, hopefully, as opposed to just doubling your money as you might in the stock market in the same period of time. We got a question from the chat, uh, LinkedIn from LinkedIn. We go live on LinkedIn, uh, ours and Lee asks, what's your expectation guys on valuation decline from 2021 to 2025?

18:28Some of these cohort will try to make IPO or MNA next year. So I wonder how much equity will be destroyed in the upcoming year. Your thoughts, any thoughts on that? Yeah. Well, the equity is already destroyed. So if you go public at a lower price, that's not the equity being destroyed in that moment. That's just realizing what it has been worth. So I wouldn't blame the exit point as the equity or value destruction. I don't want to get ahead of my skis, but there has been in the last month or two, an appreciation in public revenue multiples for software companies. It's not huge. It's very encouraging.

19:01If that keeps up, Jason, even another 1x, I think we could see a lot of liquidity in a lot because that's going to make a lot of things easier to do. I'm just not confident in how the economy is going to play out next year to make a real production you i'm super confident that the trump administration and the group of people around them want to see mna come back and be vibrant and they want to see regulations go down and they're putting people in there who are pro business pro mna pro vibrant markets and so yeah we need more companies going public and we need more mna so let the games begin i think literally next year is going to be like a starter's pistol for mna teams at all these giant companies who are going to be able to call somebody in Washington who they might know, or they've been at Mar-a-Lago the last month or two and they've been hanging out there.

19:53I saw a report Marc Andreessen said he spent half his time in Mar-a-Lago the last month. Did you see that report? Yeah. This is why I call it the Musk A16Z administration. Founders, do you want to sell it to bigger customers? I know you do. You got to get that ACV trending up. And you want to push your turn down, right? Sounds good. But to sell to those big buyers, you need to clear all of these compliance checks. You know that. That means you got to have things like SOC 2 sorted out. What's SOC 2? It's a standard and ensures that companies keep their customer data safe. And if you aren't SOC 2 compliant, you can kiss those big deals goodbye.

20:30You're not going to land the lighthouse customers. You're not going to be able to operate at the highest end of the market, but Vanta makes it really easy for you to get and renew your SOC 2 compliance. On average, Vanta customers are compliant in just two to four weeks. It can take months without Vanta, and they automate compliance for GDPR, HIPAA, and more. So you can sell to bigger customers in whatever markup your startup is going after. Vanta is going to save you hundreds of hours of work and up to 85 % on compliance costs. Stop slowing your sales team down and use vanta get a thousand dollars off at vanta.com slash twist that's vanta.com slash twist for one thousand dollars off your sock too well i mean it's everybody administration then because keith for boy jacob his husband his partner you know they're everybody's down there even the people like aaron levy who you know was a vocal kamala surrogate supporter whatever he was uh donator and pinkis who you know legendary democratic fundraiser for obama hillary and even uh biden they've all flipped now and they're like you know what uh we're gonna split this team to go super pro m &a so i expect the market and i expect m &a ipos to rip in the next four years doesn't mean we won't have tariffs or inflation or other issues but i don't think m &a is going to be the issue anymore.

21:48And so all this backlog, if you didn't die, if you made it, you just have to, what I was telling people is make it to 25 alive, which I heard was like the slogan in Hollywood as well. Make it to 25 alive. And a lot of options are going to open up. And the option is going to be if you have a 10 to$250 million software business, you're going to have Mark Benioff. Hello. You're going to have Salesforce come in HubSpot. Anybody with a hundred billion plus market cap is going to come knocking. And that's going to include Uber, Airbnb, looking to expand their businesses. You heard that Expedia rumor previously, DoorDash, Amazon, they're all going to be, and Andy Jassy is going to be like, hello, anybody home?

22:30Oh, Whole Foods. Yeah. We'll buy that. Remember when they bought Whole Foods for 10 billion? You'll see a lot of these$10 billion little pickups. So it's going to be great for business. So the next FTC leadership class is coming into view. Big news. Andrew Ferguson will be the next chairman. He's a current commissioner on the FTC and Trump said over on Truth Social that Ferguson has, and I quote, a proven record of standing up to big tech censorship and protecting freedom of speech in our great country. In terms of how I think about people, this guy's going to be very pro-business. He voted against banning non-competes recently and he voted against the bill that made it easier, sorry, the bill, the FTC action that made it easier to cancel subscriptions.

23:10So if you're comcast great that's gonna be lovely but we also got our hands on his pitch to trump about what he will do as chairman of the ftc where did this come from it got leaked or they released it or well leaked or released is an interesting question that i don't think i'm qualified to answer but well we've both seen that many times journal in my journalism days where you get a leak from like inside of motorola somebody would give us information about their next phone it was a leak Yes. I don't know if this was a leak or a leak, but Punchbowl got it and everyone's been taking a look at it.

23:47So there's a couple of things here that I think you're going to absolutely love. He mentions here how he wants to end Lena Khan's war on M &A. Fantastic. That's exactly what you're talking about. Also ending the FTC's attempt to become an AI regulator. That struck me as pretty interesting. but then this is why i get a little uh curious about what big tech means because you said you know anyone over 100 billion dollars next year is going to be on the phone looking at incremental revenue talking acquisitions absolutely but here he says that he wants to focus antitrust enforcement against big tech monopolies especially those companies engaged in quote unlawful censorship so what what does big tech mean i don't know if anyone knows i mean what he's referring to there is Facebook and YouTube specifically and Twitter back in the day, canceling Trump's accounts.

24:35I'll just translate it for you. This is a document for Trump, right? This is a pitch to Trump for his services. What does Trump remember? After January 6th, that horrible day in American history, Trump had his accounts suspended on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter. And I don't know if anywhere else, I don't know what else was like a major platform at the time, four years ago he was basically ghosted like milo yiannopoulos or you know pick a person alex jones they just gone which is a private company's right to do the republicans have twisted this a bit where they're like you have the right to do it except if you do it so putting the hypocrisy aside that you know a tiny business making cakes in you know whatever state in the south you know doesn't have has the right to turn down gay customers do you think that's abhorrent do you think that's a civil rights penalty or do you think that's respecting a business owner's right to do to work with the customers they want we could have this debate all day long sure what people have come to this is their justification in their minds okay because you're probably saying hey is this hypocrisy their justification is at a certain scale these sites are so powerful that to be removed from them you are essentially being removed from the public square so they want facebook youtube and people at scale let's say over a billion users over 500 million users whatever it is you have to justify or be transparent about why somebody is removed and have a process for them to be put back on platforms appeal etc which you remember alex zuckerberg who was pretty cowardice in this he's like yeah we're banning trump then he's like i regretted trump's a badass and then in between he hired a group of like academics to create a board of people who would make these decisions for facebook and then they think they disbanded it or they just ignored it a lot i remember they'd be like you shouldn't do this and facebook was like eh we want to um by the way on the whole aaron levy and um zuckerberg changing their tune they're just afraid of retribution right like this is this is political fear to a large degree i mean okay um that would be a cynical take sure you could we could have that take i think the other take is which would be mine um my personal belief is if your candidate doesn't win you should support the other candidate and push them towards their better angels and what they can do that you believe is in the best interest of americans that's the approach i'm taking which is the same approach i took last time so i think zuckerberg you know some people might say he's really scared that he's going to get broken up and therefore because of what he did to trump there's an argument there uh the jd vances of the world have been pretty hardcore that these things need to be broken up they have too much power and they determine an election and so you know they do think he's probably nervous about that haran levy running a sas company i don't think he's nervous about that i think he probably thinks it's cool that smart silicon valley people and a former venture capitalists are venture you know the vice president and that they're going to have some influence here as opposed to career politicians i guess i do have a cynical take because yeah um i've been watching things i think is the way i put it uh but i think you raise some good points and i want to add a little bit more from what ferguson said in this document by the way i would think you're right just to make that summary you're probably right zuckerberg is scared and then i think the rest of the people mark pincus who now is saying hey listen i support this and this or me i support these two or three things i may not be like a trump guy or a mega guy i'm a moderate but i do like these two or three proposals so that's what's happening now pincus myself or you know someone like aaron levy you'll see us cherry picking these are the things that i think trump could do in the trump administration and jd could do that would be positive for business the world humanity the market is pricing in some cynicism like uh shout out to tesla but i don't think every percent of appreciation since the election is predicated on uh changes to its business fundamentals versus lack of regulation is going to be is the big you know the the people who are in highly regulated businesses self-driving finance you mentioned before subscriptions if you're in one of those businesses especially finance you know it's going to be gangbusters now like yeah you know although trump has he does he vacillates between the populist comments and the thing so there's you know as people have said and i'm not the first to point this out there's something for everyone when he describes his position and i'll give an example of it he he has publicly come out and said things about like predatory credit card prices and that they shouldn't be allowed and then he's saying we're gonna have less regulation we get rid of all regulation finance companies gonna be able to do great so somewhere between these two is going to be the reality all right everybody welcome back to the program steven estes is with us again he's a principal at cla they're a professional services provider they specialize in cpa tax consulting and wealth advisory his areas of expertise lie in vc-backed startups vc funds high growth startups with complex tax issues in multi-state and international filings.

29:51Welcome back to the program, Stephen. Hey, thanks, Jason. Appreciate it. When you look at these growth periods, when startups start rapidly growing, how do they screw it up? First and foremost, the sales tax. There was a big shakeup in that about four years ago. It opened the floodgates to states really being able to force small companies to collect and remit sales tax in a lot of different states. When we had the pandemic hit and the rise of remote work, that really intensified that as having employees in various states creates the requirement to collect and remit to sales and customers in that state.

30:20So that was huge. And then secondly, I think really just how to handle the issuance of equity to key employees. It amazes me that founders don't know more about various restricted stock awards and stock option plans that are out there. Safes have been a godsend when it comes to keeping 409A values low for early stage companies. But a lot of founders don't have a clue when it comes to how a priced round can negatively impact your ability to bring on those critical hires because it really massively increases the tax liabilities that come with the receipt of equity in those companies. All right. You need a trusted advisor.

30:54Tax is accounting. You don't want to play games with this stuff. Get it right. Get a great partner like CLA. Go to claconnect.com slash tech and let them know your boy Jake Al sent you. Once again, claconnect.com slash tech. We're going to deport 15 million people. You're xenophobic. You want everybody dragged out of the country. He'll say that at one rally. And then I'll say, you know, hey, and JD will come out and say, you know, we're going to start with a hundred thousand, 500 ,000 known felon criminals who've attacked somebody in the United States. We're going to find them and get rid of them.

31:22Probably somewhere between the two, right? So you can pick where you want to interpret the bombastic, colorful things he says, and then we'll see what he actually does. I think that's a very illustrative set of examples because in one, you have things that are diametrically opposed. For example, capping credit card rates at 10%. and on the other hand, go wild to the fintech or the financial sector. On the immigration point, both of those options are pointing in the same direction. So I think there it's much easier to say somewhere in the middle. When it comes to things that are diametrically opposed, I'm just curious.

31:57Now, we'll find out. So Ferguson, back to him. He said in his pitch to Trump that he wants to quote, pursue structural and behavioral legal remedies under the antitrust laws and the FTC Act to make sure large platforms treat all Americans fairly and to prevent them from using their market power to box out new entrants and stymie innovation. How do you do that without regulation? I struggle. This document that I read, Jason, just goes back and forth on so many things. He said he wants to end Lena Kahn's politically motivated investigations right under the bullet point that said, investigate and prosecute collusion on DEI.

32:33I mean, it's a job application. so how can you not care about your own intellectual like like i don't know are we talking about politicians here or we're talking about ethics professors i think we're talking about i'm talking about being a human if i said to you jason we're gonna you have a very high moral ethical bar alex i know this and you are a man of logic what you have to learn is politicians number one jobs and people who work in politics the number one job is to stay in power and the way you stay in power is being flexible intellectually and being able to say both things at the same time and hold space i'm being precocious here you have to hold space for as you called it diametrically opposed things or things you know the the level of cognitive dissonance a person like yourself who is logical who loves numbers and facts and truth the challenge you'll have trying to understand what politicians are doing is they're not looking at the facts or the logic or looking for hypocrisy or things that are you know uh would they don't have cognitive dissonance they just say everything and then they figure out what they're going to do later and i think that's what it is after you get the job he's going to figure out what his what the positions are it's going to be choose your own adventure next year then okay choose your own adventure bending towards much less regulation smaller government less taxes so if that what if you're in that group of people and i it's important to kind of distance yourself from the personalities involved because i feel like it's there's a lot of baggage and for good reason scar tissue baggage whatever you want to call it i like to divorce myself or just say if any presidential candidate were doing this it was bill clinton and he said we're gonna have less government we're gonna lower regulations and we're going to lower your taxes, I'd be like, high five.