TWiST News: Face Robots, Solar's Growth, The Polymarket Mess, and YC's Latest Call for Startups | E2044

0:00If you walk inside a Starbucks, right, you can have free Wi-Fi and free electricity actually too. I think that over the next 20, 30 years, whether it's SMRs or renewable penetration, big nukes getting bigger, I think we're going to see energy prices really go very close to zero. And I think electric vehicles and the home, we have a much more sophisticated world. This Week in Startups is brought to you by Fundrise. Fundrise provides access to diversified portfolios of private real estate to all investors with their industry-leading, easy-to-use platform. Sign up today at fundrise.com slash twist.

0:39OpenPhone. 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. and linear linear helps product teams focus on what they do best planning and building great products streamline issues projects and product roadmaps in a tool your team will actually enjoy using get 25 off at linear.app twist all right everybody welcome back to this week in startups i'm your host jason calacanis with me my co-host alex wilhelm and we have a full docket how are you alex i am good i was typing up until the very last minute to get all the notes in we have a surprise guest lots to get to jason but first i want to show you my new favorite robotic demo because i think everyone deserves a laugh this week so uh generative ai great at text generation understanding written words but what about your face jason well it turns out that some folks over at columbia university have made a robot that can do a couple things one is it can mimic you very directly and very quickly two words here uncanny valley how does that make you feel to start i think it's great it's awesome um it looks like uh the movie i robot right which was asimov uh it's clearly somebody in that lab where is this taking place china or myu or mit this is the creative machines lab at columbia university oh okay well i was triangulating from him we wound up on 125th street uh congratulations uh to the team there that looks awesome and i i do think it's close to hitting the uncanny valley and if i went to a mcdonald's and interfaced with this person or interfaced with this at a starbucks or at a counter at united airlines or whatever southwest i would have no problem with that i think it'd be pretty cool yeah it has 26 actuators to actually make the face and here's the coolest part jason uh as of later this year emo this robot has quote learned to predict a forthcoming smile about 840 milliseconds before the person actually smiles so robots can now anticipate your facial movements which means that i think our future of using humans for human facing interactions are coming to an end so everyone please welcome your robot overlords welcome to the future i mean i think one of the things we're going to contend with and i'm not trying to be too humorous here is we have population declines young people maybe are not seeing the value in starting families maybe marriage feels a little weird to folks we might be the last generation that felt that was like what you're supposed to do is kind of like the default you get married you make babies you go to college make babies get a career going so i think if you look at young people today maybe opting out of careers they're not as career focused their work-life balance focused everybody you know i interview i would say two out of three young people are like hey tell me about life work balance i'm like that doesn't exist at my company but if you want it at yours please by all means start a company and compete against us number two they don't seem to be on the marriage track number three they do not seem to be on the owning a home or having kids track and now of course there's all kinds of reasons for that financial owning a home is hard in this country unless you're in texas side note there we'll get into real estate another show but i think it's interesting about this alex is uh and again this isn't to make uh light of the situation in any way but companionship is complex you're in a relationship with another human being for an extended period of time it's dynamic people evolve and you have to work at a relationship you don't have to work at a relationship with a large language model it'll just do what you want it to do it'll be what you want it to be and then you add to it this face and if this face starts talking to you and you get more warmth and care empathy from the llm which the llm if we're going to sit here and say llms like we said on yesterday's show can do surgery as good as the best most perfect surgeon waymo wants to make the best driver in the world and jovi wants to make the best pilot in the world the singular well i think columbia with that face and the llms and a bunch of other projects we've seen are going to make the perfect companion and then that'll make all of us highly unpredictable you know variable humans uh maybe for young people they'll just want the comfort of the perfect companion yeah maybe the good news for you and i though is that um no one's going to let robots play poker with us at the table.

5:32So if we're going to do our favorite form of gambling, we're going to still need friends. And that is bullish for human interaction. No droids. We don't like your kind here. Welcome to Moz Isley. Get the hell out, C-3PO. I mean, quite literally, if C-3PO sits down, I'm done because I can't do math better than a computer. All right. Let's put that aside. On the show today, my friends, we have the rise of global solar with a very special guest that you may recall from the Liquidity Summit earlier this year, than a media deal we didn't see coming that involves someone named alex jones we'll get into that uh the latest on the poly industry yes well industrial complex startup industrial complex jason galgett is invested in far too many companies white combinator it's a global industrial complex jason's here to sell you some supplements by the way in case you were curious and uh to talk about the sexuality of frogs um the massive poly market and then uh we're going I wrap up this week and start with a note on why Combinator's request starts.

6:28Venture capital is one of the most lucrative asset classes in the world. Why? Look at today's public companies. Nearly all of them raised capital when they were private. Don't I know it. Uber and Robinhood are the number one and the number two hits. I invested in both of those, as you know, when they were private companies and before they even launched their products. And for venture capitalists and their backers, this is great, right? It's great to be me. Trust me, I love my job. But what if you don't have enough capital to back a venture fund or start one? And I'll tell you something, it's really hard to get into the top quartile funds.

7:01You have to know somebody who knows somebody and you have to write a giant check and you might be able to get into it a couple of years from now. How do you get in on some of these deals that institutional investors like endowments or sovereign wealth funds or high net worth individuals are doing? Well, if you don't know a guy who knows a guy who knows a gal, you aren't going to be able to buy shares in say that next hot AI startup until it goes public. But now there's another option, the Fundrise Innovation Fund. This is a$125 million fund. That's like a medium-sized venture capital fund that holds shares in some of the most exciting pre-IPO tech companies in the world.

7:36It's specifically designed for individual investors. So now you can get in early at fundrise.com slash twist. That's fundrise.com slash twist. Carefully consider the investment material before investing, including objectives, risks, charges, and expenses. This and other information can be found in the Innovator Fund's prospectus at Fundrise.com slash innovation. This is a paid advertisement. Jason, why don't you introduce our guest and then I'll talk about what we're talking about. All right. My good friend, Phil Deutsch, has educated me tremendously over the last two decades on how energy works.

8:15And when an energy story happens, the first thing i do is just i try to level set and understand the dynamics because when you're just reading the press you know you assume what you're reading is pretty straightforward you read maybe a government press release like we did this morning and today i want to talk about headline that keeps coming up which is one of my favorite countries australia and australia has been having these moments where the overwhelming majority of their electrical um of their electricity is coming from solar and then in india my understanding is a lot of people are hacking together their own solar panels really crummy batteries and going off grid and then i'm here in texas and having a lot of conversations with friends i just actually was talking to bill gurley and we were talking about solar at our ranches and you could actually if you have enough space you got an extra couple acres you could actually build your own solar farm and then give back to the grid anyway all of this is fascinating to me and i think very world positive welcome back to the program phil deutsch thanks jay cal great to be here uh alex why don't you tee up just some facts on what's happening in australia because we've been trying to get to this story for two or three weeks but there's there was some other stuff going on in the country and it keeps getting pushback but yeah big big picture there's something like four million homes in australia have now uh have residential solar solar panels on their roof and on a penetration basis i think there's 30 or 40 million people there i'm not sure how many households but it's a large number of households walk us through the numbers all right so back in 2011 australian rooftop solar was kind of expected to eventually reach four terawatts of generation in australia that was going to be about 2 % of total generation, according to the reports that I found.

9:59A decade later, it was actually 6x that eventual target. So the growth in Australian solar production has been absolutely crazy. And I think last year, rooftop solar panels that are part of the national electricity market were worth 24.6 terawatts. That's an enormous amount of generation, tons of power. And that works out to just about, I think, 12 % of homes generating electricity, and that's 3.7 million households. And then most recently, Elon Musk actually highlighted a data point from Western Australia that caught our attention, Jason. And it was that on one day this week at 1.30pm, and time does matter for solar stories, distributed solar PV accounted for 2.12 gigawatts of output, which was I think about 81 % of total generation, far outstripping what was generated from both natural gas and coal.

10:50So for a bit of time, Western Australia was essentially one large solar panel chase and we've had the same thing phil in germany where germany had renewables as a cluster tip over to the majority and then in texas i think we have the largest install base of solar here in texas quite paradoxical i guess in some ways um i guess my first question to you phil is what's your take on what's happening in australia is it a monoculture with you know a very supportive government everything aligned in terms of subsidies and they're just going forward does it have to do with geography and solar uh just working really well because they have a lot of space it's a large large land mass and they're close to china maybe they get cheap solar panels pretty easy explain to me what the theory is here uh what can we learn about australia and is it in any way a roadmap for the rest of the west or even india and china First of all, it absolutely is.

11:47And let's break it down two things. First of all, when you install solar or wind, most of your cost is all up front. It's a fixed capital cost. Sun doesn't cost you anything. The wind doesn't cost you anything. So you produce no matter what. And so the more you install it, you're going to have these things when the wind blows, so the sun shines where you're going to have a lot of production. So in the United States, both in California and Texas, we've already had moments where electricity prices have gone negative because the turbines get a production tax credit, so they want to sell up until negative one cent.

12:23So just the sheer amount of renewable power in any jurisdiction can cause these weird abnormalities when you get negative prices when they get to be a huge part of the supply. That occurs today. And that's going to occur more and more in the world the more renewable penetration we have. the second thing is this residential solar where you put the panels on the on the houses which is what you're quoting australia so if you give me one second here it's kind of an interesting problem you decide to put uh panels on your house and let's say the panel the electricity costs you just for argument say 20 cents per kilowatt hour in palo auto where you used to live where i live electricity probably costs us 40 cents a kilowatt hour so you say great that's a win for me i'm going to put my panels up now the problem is your panels don't provide electricity at night or maybe when you have uh the coal plunge going and the washing machine and the home theater but at that point rely on the grid well your yoke utility says of the 50 cents i was charging with the 40 cents for your kilowatt hour at home, two-thirds of that was for me to have the grid ready for you.

13:35So if I let everyone just switch to home solar without picking up any part of the grid, I'm going to destroy my business model. And so there are places in the world where the utilities are going under because people are getting out of the grid and they have to think about that. They're called stranding costs. How do I pay back all these wires and infrastructure? So when you have this residential solar, the ultimate question is, how much does a homeowner have to pay for the grid that is using LESA? So that's the real question. If you talk to someone who likes residential solar, they say, screw you.

14:11It's my house. I can do what I want on it. I should have to pay you a penny. If you talk to utility, they say, you should be paying me a lot of money per kilowatt hour. So in Australia, they have a very good rate. They have very good rebates and tariffs that encourage solar. We used to have that in California, and the utilities recently amended that. It's something called MEM 3.0. And when we put down the rebates and the government support, there was a slow and residential solar. Actually, Phil, I had that chart for us. Let's pull that up, John, if we could. Just explain this chart for folks who are watching the YouTube video.

14:46The bars that are blue are the old regime in California regarding how much you could get paid for having rooftop solar. And then the yellow bars mark the new regime in EM 3.0 or what's called NBT in government lingo. But Jason, what matters here is after this change was announced, there was an explosion in people putting solar out because they could get the earlier rate. And since the rules have changed, we've seen a decline. And if you observe the size of the orange, the yellow bars, I mean, compared to historical blue bars, you can see a decrease in install. So Phil, it seems that in EM 3.0 really smashed the install rate of rooftop solar in California.

15:22Yeah, exactly. And basically just a question of how much of the savings is the homeowner getting? And then three took away some from the homeowner, really. But I think it's like the most interesting thing is when you think about a house that could have an electric vehicle with it, a power wall, and residential solar, that's really the wave of the future. You really love to have all that stuff on site. The question, though, really is how expensive is that? The EV and the Powerwall probably pay for themselves because you're comparing yourself to gasoline. I think the question of residential solar on site is a harder question because just think about it this way.

16:03If I were to take a couple acres of Jason's Ponderosa, I could lay down fields and fields of solar. Whereas if I did it with my little small trailer park home in Atherton, someone's going to get up, put nails on the roof, and do a whole bunch of fixed costs. So it's much easier to do solar at scale. That is a very interesting concept. When I started talking about solar recently, I immediately started the discussion with the roof of our house. And they were like, Ruth, just find an acre in the quarter of the ranch. And you put the batteries there. You put the solar panels. and i was actually talking to freeberg about and he said one of the incredible gains that you get from having space is that power walls and other units that are meant to be inside the house are designed to be incredibly small in terms of footprint for obvious reasons you don't want to give up a bunch of square footage to it but doing that doubles the cost of them and makes them much more expensive than if you just put them into i don't know a container a small shed a shed you just spread them out and those are much cheaper i guess the long and short of this is if you were running the united states and we started looking you know 10 20 30 years out we know that we're going to have a massive demand for all these data centers uh we know that we are an energy exporter uh we have tons of natural gas we've got tons of oil we're doing pretty great all of a sudden after all this fear and hand-wringing so it's a two-part question number one why did we have so much fear and hand-wringing for so long in this country and in the world writ large about peak oil and that the entire world was going to be thrown into chaos at the you know 10 years after the millennium and that the united states was going to have to fight all these foreign wars and bring the oil back and now we're sitting here and everybody got everything wrong and then we'll go to part two which is okay we got everything wrong over the last 30 or 40 years our lifetime has been filled with fear uncertainty and doubt about energy and we solved it all how do you think about the next 30 or 40 years of our lives yeah i think in the first part you're absolutely right we got it wrong and we continue getting wrong every estimate for solar is always too low and you see with evs jason people just don't understand how fast a j curve works when you're in it so i think the good news is technology wins it just wins it doesn't matter who's in office what interest rates are technology wins and it has in energy be it cracking or solar panels and so what do i think in the next 30 years let's say if i say 30 years i won't be around for it when i'm wrong so i'd like these 30 years um i think electricity is basically free so we don't think of it as a cost which is like wi-fi remember in the beginning of wi-fi how much it just would boingo shout out to skydain we had to give 30 bucks a month and i think a go-go in flight was probably 30 or 40 bucks and you could get a membership for 50 and share it at your company the sky still makes me send them checks for some reason but he now doesn't be a poker game but yes so but now if you walk inside a starbucks right you can have free wi-fi and free electricity actually too i think that over the next 20 30 years whether it's smrs or renewable penetration big nukes getting bigger i think we're going to see energy prices really go very close to uh zero that after you've been advertising upfront costs and you'll see a lot of carbon free sources so i'm very very bullish on that and i think electric vehicles and the home we have a much more sophisticated world i mean you're the expert on this but i think it's highly unlikely that my grandchildren drive their own car it'll be autonomous electric i think elon seems very compelling of that to me go to waymo it's hard to imagine going back in some ways and so i see a world with a lot of energy choice and technology just continues to surprise us on the upside i'm very bullish it's interesting you bring that up i had a dream the other night that i was in my self-driving car on the way to a dinner in texas and i was watching because i had just fallen asleep watching the nyx game um and uh shout out jungle cat um and i had this dream and in the car the entire nyx game was on the windshield yeah with all the statistics and everything was on the display panel so instead of speed and everything i was just looking at the player stats and and the shooting percentage and everything and i woke up in the morning and i was just super delighted to think god we're going to recapture a lot of all that productivity and time and distance is going to shrink in many ways yeah yeah i mean if you think about a two-hour car ride you go to see a movie because as you say as though you're at the game maybe there'll be a workout in the car i don't know maybe like the plinstone when you look at the um i call it the skiff um it's kind of like the job of the huts skiff that he takes to the sarlacc that uh uh elon made the the the sort of bus i don't know what he called it cyber van what was the name a skiff as you may know is a secured facility in the intelligence world but there's that there's a different kind of skiff yeah you have to tell a lot of the people who've been nominated for that i think that word later but well and we also have the cyber van it could be a skiff of a skiff yeah this could be a skiff but the those have like a great potential to be a living room poker room workout room and and distance could be covered.

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22:20Well, that's all built into open phone. And if you've got an existing phone number, they will let you port it over at no extra charge. Get 20 % off your first six months. what 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 as we wrap here with you what's going on with nuclear in the united states we're seeing customers show up in terms of big tech with big iron saying we'll pay and they're becoming customers of these small modular reactors and maybe asking them to turn things on or put data centers next to existing nuclear power plants did you think we'd see in our lifetime from the 1978-79 no nukes concert shout out to jackson brown and bob dylan with the greatest performances of tangled up in blue ever was at the no nukes concert and i was very inspired by that concert as an eight or nine year old when it happened and my whole life i was like yeah no nukes thumbs up and now we realize well that was a huge mistake that celebrities got behind and now people are starting to uh say hey maybe i'll i'll buy a small modular reactor i'll put a deposit down google microsoft everybody seems to be getting in on this is it going to happen we'll be sitting here 10 20 years from now and there'll be many more nuclear reactors in the united states you heard sacks probably on all in say not in my backyard i don't want to be anywhere near that well i actually heard sacks also yeah i think sacks also said he's afraid to fly that's what i really took away from that those planes in the air are scary scary actually it's a true story i've been on flights he's not a he's never been a a calm flyer let me say the following when i was in high school i worked on the senate energy committee on what we're going to do with nuclear waste we've done nothing in 40 years and i would have said three or four years ago new power it's insanity i mean it just doesn't we're not going back down that wormhole but this really begins with data centers the amount of energy that's being demanded by the hyperscalers carbon free is unfathomable it is going to be the biggest thing i think to hit energy since fracking it really is unbelievable and the hyperscalers have said we need baseload carbon free power that is reliable and that's brought them back to nukes for reasons that you've discussed, Bill Gurley, first discussed.

24:43And so, but you want it, modular is better than large because it fits the data center sites. Now, in full disclosure, we have an investment in X Energy, which Amazon and Dow are involved. So I don't want to be accused of talking to my book without disclosing it. But I think what you're really seeing is it's data center driven. They want power. They want it reliably. They're willing to pay for it. And they're innovative. And that's really the change chase. And that's a whole other show. but the data center stuff is what's really uh spurred on uh the new discussion so we will be sitting here in 10 to 20 years in all likelihood with new nuclear plants in the united states and to your point about waste it's just it's just that's not the best answer probably but it's certainly one that works and the amount of waste required is not that big and it can be controlled but yes to answer your question 20 30 years from now i believe we'll see material increase in electricity can be to the power um as we demand more electricity the whole world is electrifying there's just no doubt alex anything left for you before we dismiss phil and let him get back to work i'm gonna just point out that you know elon musk recently did a chat and this was a chat on october 29th and he said yes we are going to need a lot of energy but he argues phil that quote long term almost all the energy that we're going to get will come from the sun and his argument is that if we're ever going to go up the Kardashev scale from zero to a type one, type two civilization, it's going to be essentially all solar based.

26:14And so I'm also a SMR, a nuclear energy bull, and I'll just say YIMBY to this, not NIMBY. My backyard's good to go. Put a reactor here. I'm fine with it. But is this a temporary fix until we sort out solar generation and storage on a mass scale? Essentially, our SMR is a bandaid to get to our solar future. Well, I mean, I don't know what time frame elon's talking about he could be talking about a century so i mean i don't think of band-aids over 20 or 30 year period i think we're talking about 20 or 30 years more so he's a visionary i'm not a visionary i i don't think that we're going to be in an all solar world uh you know over the next 50 or 60 years that that's i mean i'd have to that that seems a bridge too far for me but look a man it's not to be trifled with when it comes to seeing the future all right so a couple generations more nuclear power and then perhaps a solar future jason either way you slice that it's green energy that's low carbon so i think either way i'm happy i'll give you one prediction i don't believe that there's ever been a data center built of scale the united states that's not connected to the grid they all connect to the grid i think musk will do one that's not that's my prediction you believe he can build a hyperscaler a massive data center for ai that is not plugged into the grid wow that let me tell you i don't know if he can but i'll tell you if anyone can he will and i suspect he must be thinking given everything he cares about carbon free anti-government scale speed try and control as much as he can on the private side if anyone's going to do it it's going to be him and i suspect it will be of interest well if you think about it let's think out loud about this incredibly bold prediction if you had a battery factor a battery factory and let's say it happened and solar and yet solar and let's say your battery factory happened to be in a very sunny state like i don't know nevada and let's say you had a couple of companies that had a big need for electricity for ai xai twitter slash x and of course tesla well if you have the batteries coming out the back of the factory and you just sell one and keep one and then you're making the solar panels here is he making the solar panels here i wonder or you're importing but the problem he's gonna need i think he's gonna need natural gas jason which he might not but he's used natural gas in his plants in california i mean he can't get away from he can't get some natural gas going but i mean if literally the factories there and the and the right batteries are coming out the back the batteries would never see the sun they would literally just go to their eventual wrestling point at the end of the conveyor belt that's brilliant so so if you think about nat gas nat gas is priced by location and in some places it's very very cheap because no one uses it there so if you were to build a data center where there was abundant nat gas and if you were someone like musk who was willing to take some technology risk and wrap it it could be pretty interesting now that's really kooky talk but it's pretty interesting well and if you if you look at nat gas correct me if i'm wrong but there are there's some burn off from when you're when you're like flare off or something flaring flaring is what you think of yeah and i don't know the how much of that there is but some amount of that could go into batteries and he's doing some really incredible stuff with battery storage in australia so this becomes like really interesting if people are buying the natural gas great but if they're not buying it it can keep flowing and then flow into the batteries and then you smooth out the curve really interesting uh the world's going to be amazing if energy gets close to free i mean this will change geopolitics forever yeah but look it's already negative in certain things and as you know that's where a lot of people think about bitcoin mining and how to think about that so you know just uh the one way to think about it we said this at you know the summit everyone in the world thinks of data center size it's not by square footage or how much they cost it's completely done by how much power they use and so the world of tech and energy are now really fully integrated and every hyperscaler is focused on energy yeah amazing and you know the what could happen also with desalinization of water and then you know that's an energy problem from my what i understand and some countries israel other you know islands they're they're all desal and they have to burn oil to do it now you'd be able to do that with batteries solar renewables nuclear and if water becomes free or solar by the way or solar i think israel uses that gas by the way but yeah but that's why the fusion obviously the next step is fusion right yeah that would be even another bridge so well anyway i mean phil do we do we need fusion i mean the thing is i was very optimistic that we're going to get to more commercially viable net positive fusion reactions in the next 10-15 years.

31:18But after just looking at the growth of solar power generation, both here and abroad, improvements in battery technology, and even though in SMRs, I wonder if we need fusion to complete a green energy revolution at all. For me, that's too hard. I'm very confident tech wins, but for me to say which tech should win and that I know more than the guys at Commonwealth Fusion versus you know so and so new thing that that's not something that i've thought as much about i think right now there are a lot of really smart people running it really interesting problems uh and there's gonna be a lot of success it's gonna make us happy yeah extraordinary that so i really appreciate you sharing your knowledge here um where can people learn more about your uh firm um and i've got to give you a plug i don't know that you need no no no plug at your next summit that's good enough for me we'll see you next all right thank you to my guy take care well that was amazing huh alex it's just really great to have an expert on and you know kind of fill in our gaps right and which there are many well i mean i just want to point out that phil dialed in from a uh a fancy airport lounge and so if his audio quality if you're on audio wasn't as up to our usual par that's because we had him on like an ipad in an airport because that's how dedicated phil is to coming on the show um jason one last thing about this solar energy generation we found some data from the statistic that shows that a in 2023 the share of global generation from solar was over five and a half percent and you know 10 years ago it was uh 0.8 now a lot of work to do but i'm just very encouraged by this and my point about the fusion thing wasn't to dismiss or dis fusion startups i think they're awesome but i just like that we don't have to solve commercially viable fusion generation in the near term to help the planet and get more power because we need more power and greener power so yeah i mean one of the things i always like to focus on you know i really don't like politics pretty icky right um and i don't like to spend time with politicians there's been some reports that i'm vying for a position in the administration um i can assure you those or false just like i wasn't i asked you that on the show like two days ago and i was like i'm not i didn't realize that multiple newspapers have said that i'm vying for a position in the um in the administration i'm not i'm i'm supportive uh and i and i hope them for the best and if they did ask for help i would help on the margins in an advisory capacity i guess as an american if i was called to help in some way i would um but i like to hang out with technologists i'll be honest and the reason i like to hang out with technologists is every time i see a big problem and you know i get to play my small part by talking about it here with you and maybe um highlighting um some of the innovations and maybe placing a bet on some of them that that feels like a very uh a high use of my time a really good use of my time and i am just astounded that a lot of the things we've have been pulled are uh intractable i guess is a good word yes are not at all intractable and so if we are sitting here and we were told our entire adult lives and and as long as i can remember from the oil crisis which i remember in 1976 or 1977 i remember my dad having to go get or get gasoline and it was based on if your license plate ended in an even or odd number i believe and i was like oh my god this is like dystopian we're not going to be able to travel in the car and it wasn't that bad you just couldn't get gas you know three days a week and you get the gas the other four days or whatever it happened to be long story short uh during the gas shortage and the things you know and there's no nuke stuff or technology reigns supreme and entrepreneurship and capitalism i gave him a little speech yesterday just going to give it again any problem that you think is intractable get off your ass get a team together and take a swing at the bat and we'll give you the first 100k and there's a bunch of people out there who'll give you the next 500k and then there's people who are designed to give you one to three million and then there's people who are designed to give you 550 so on and so forth capitalism and entrepreneurship and democracy are the messiest most effective operating system and stack in the world oh hard to appreciate it yeah and i just want to give a shout out to a company we talked to um a couple weeks back which is exowatt they're doing um storage of solar power using solar lenses not solar panels and storing this in the form of industrial heat which they can use a sterling engine to power industrial facilities just one example of founders that are building domestically uh awesome ways to collect and then disperse energy so i i'm actually very optimistic about power generation in the next 10 years like because smrs are awesome fusions making progress this is blowing up and there's so many cool ways people are approaching storing energy not just batteries there's compressed air storage there's all sorts of awesome things so frankly i really do think that we're going to see as phil said essentially free electricity i think by the time my kids go to college we're going into the golden age i've always said it's going to be the roaring 20s and it's it's we're soaking in it put aside all the strife around you know woe ideology identity politics um maga you know all these other um culture wars all of that pals into comparison to the power of a small team to build a technology product or service and change the world all of this is like for me wasted wasted energy if all the people complaining about this stuff incessantly and arguing and fighting just built a couple of startups we would solve the issues we have around education incarceration housing all this stuff is so solvable and almost all wars are fought over resources on the margins you get some religious ones here or there those are a little kooky and hopefully they're in there you know the end as religions move from reading 2 000 year old books literally to maybe interpreting them and here we are.

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38:08Half of YC companies build with Linear. That should tell you something, and it powers Cash App, Scale AI, and Vercell. So here's a call to action. See for yourself why product teams love Linear. Visit Linear.app.qist. l-i-n-e-a-r dot a-p-p slash twist to try linear for free with your team and get 25 off your first year that's linear dot app slash twist jason before we move on from the green energy thing there was some late breaking news before we jumped on which is that uh the latest reporting indicates that the trump administration intends to kill off the 7500 story yeah yeah i think also Reuters wrote about it and I'm a little bit disappointed by this because it felt to me like a pretty effective place to put some of our national capital to encourage a shift towards EVs.

39:00So I think just personally, philosophically, this doesn't track with my view of where we should be going. But there was an interesting tweet from Spencer Hakimian from Toulouse Capital Management and he thinks that you can't repeal this because it won't pass the house given how many companies that have EV factories in the South. both and so i think we're going to see a very interesting political test of a trump administration uh objective and something that might be a little bit harder to pass to the house than you might have expected i'm just kind of curious where this goes and who wins in the near term okay this is a multifaceted story i believe i don't have any inside information unless anybody think i talked to the administration or to any particular friends of mine um very simple uh you can buy a used ev right now for 10 to 25k my model x i've had forever with which has relatively low miles on it like maybe 50 or 60 000 miles is worth like 15 000 to 20 000 for a model x it's crazy how uh many of these evs are available at such low prices and the battery packs everybody was like oh battery pack after 10 years is done it's like quite the opposite they seem to be like maybe 10 degradation which which means they're perfect for a city car or even like a suburban car no problem that's a suburban car maybe if you had to drive i would say three four hours a day yeah you're gonna probably want to get a newer one with a 300 mile battery pack as opposed to the older ones which had typically 150 to 250 mile battery packs um so i do think maybe these are unnecessary now i don't like you i don't mind um spending a little bit of money of taxpayer money to do this because it will take literally um it'll it'll give back i think years of life to people in certain cities where we used to have smog problems and it sounds crazy but there was a study done out of berkeley i don't have it in front of me here but this study showed that in shanghai and cities in china where there were smog problems it was literally taking it was the equivalent of people smoking a pack of cigarettes a day or two packs of cigarettes a day depending on which city you're in this is a 10 year old study was about i talked about it here on the show as those cities have gotten cleaner and they are really pushing evs there that means everybody gets back like years of their life and you know these are cities with 20 30 million people in it so if everybody if 30 million people get back five years is 150 years you know 150 million years of um human existence which is just beautiful to to survive that so um but if you look at what he said with the cyber taxi that they can make those for 30k maybe it gets to 20 if there was a $20 ,000,$30 ,000 EV right now, they would not be able to keep them in stock.

41:54I believe the reason Tesla stock is, you know, so high is because they will, and I have no information, always give that disclaimer. I'm just guessing that that cyber taxi, there's going to be a hatchback, like a two-door version of that with the steering wheel. Just a guess. Because if that existed, I would have ordered two on the first day i literally would have ordered two and had those for you know me to drive and the bigger cars for when i'm with the kids and just take a smaller car that's zippy with two seats in it why not i would love to have like a two seat thirty thousand dollar car to just zip around in long way of saying when the free market solves a problem i think it's a good idea that we step back there are lots of dynamics that we're going to see over and over again you pointed it out this and so this dovetails with doge so both of these impact elon and his role i think this is brilliant because it gives elon the high ground in terms of well if i helped you know trump with his administration and i'm helping cut costs and i was the first one who said you know what i wouldn't be surprised if elon tweets like yeah i'm in favor of it take take the subsidies away from everybody the government doesn't need to pay for them anymore if he said that that might take it might give a hit to tesla stock i'm unsure how much of what they do you know the subsidies drive at this point but um it would be the high ground and the same thing with uh rural internet i mean i said this publicly what why are we paying for rural internet when starlink exists and there's five competitors to starlink that are in some process of uh getting their satellites out in fact spacex is putting them up for them so why on earth would we get involved in rural broadband and run fiber lines when those same people are ordering starlings today while they wait for the government to run a twenty thousand dollar fiber line this is why doge is so brilliant if they get it done these are the kind of low-hanging fruit just cancel these and and you pointed it out perfectly will politicians under the direction of trump vivek elon start giving back money and not taking the money that they fought really hard for for their constituents to you know uh bring jobs to their region to bring economic value will they give that money back and let the taxpayers not have to pay as much tax that's really fundamentally what we're going to be talking about here and it is a tragedy of the commons uh because everybody has to agree smaller government less spending and you can't have like alabama state of colorado yeah you give up x y and z we're not giving it up we need it more than you and that's the standoff that we're going to have over the next couple years it's going to be messy as hell it's going to be very very messy as hell but i i just do think though that there are sometimes we use money in a way that does help accelerate change that can be very positive and i'm i'm worried of the following possible chain reaction tax credit goes away every non-tesla major american car company pulls back from electric and then the electrification of the american car fleet gets set back 10 or 15 years and we have more pollution and more dependence on the variability of oil prices which we are the biggest producer in the world now hell yeah but is that the future we want to be leaning into or more into electric and solar and green and so forth i think you and i share a perspective on the fate of the plan let me ask you a question on that yeah do you believe it should be a state's issue or a federal issue the tax credits for evs and the standards for them because we do have in california yeah like i wonder sometimes if the federal government you know is too big too involved and that states could mitigate this and if in texas they don't have a tax an additional tax and additional rules on how clean gasoline is people can live in texas and make their decision if you want to pay for a five an extra dollar per gallon of tax in california and have cleaner air and have different standards for how many miles per gallon it has to be would that not be better and then car companies could say you know what screw we're not going to make this model of car if you want to have a suburban it's not available in california but it's available in these other states california gave us some standards we didn't want to hit but you can buy into these other states and then people like you know it's too frustrating to live in california california's got to react to it and we keep the 50 states dare i say this parallels the abortion debate um and then it parallels the gambling, online gambling debate, and it parallels the debate around cannabis.

46:40And it seems like the way to make progress sometimes is to let the states find it out and let them come to their own conclusions on a very local basis. I don't know your thoughts. Well, I think letting the states lead is often a good way to go about things. I mean, why has Texas always had outsized influence on American education via textbooks? Well, they have a unified system, they buy a lot of textbooks. And so Texas's educational standards have long had outsized influence on the rest of the nation. Yeah, if you're into keeping religion out of schools, it's one of your things you keep tabs on.

47:13But California has even more population than Texas does. I think California is 39 million. Texas is roughly 30 million. These are the two largest states of population, by the way. Florida's number three, then New York. But we're always going to have large states wanting to push their own perspectives and agendas. So, ERCOT in Texas, Texas independence, woo, you know, we can do it on our own. And then California, the sixth largest economy in the world, has its own standards. I think it would be a mistake for the federal government to say to individual states, you can't have stricter standards. But I think it would be difficult if we could say there's a federal standard and you could have a looser one at the state level because then you have a tension between who's in charge.

47:50So, I think California should be allowed to have its own rules and should be allowed to throw its weight around because that is one of the laboratories of democracies one of the states so i'm hoping and getting back into politics i'm hoping that the trump administration doesn't preclude california's ability to set regulations about cars like we're hearing they might because that would set us back even further so i don't know i want self-driving electric cars and big batteries that's what i want here it gets me there faster by the way uh good job producer john berkeley earth uh 2015 article air pollution location equivalent in cigarettes per day in u.s the average person because of pollution in this 2020 2015 article was smoking 0.4 cigarettes a day in shen yan the worst ever recorded who is the equivalent of smoking you want to guess or are you looking at it i saw it oh 63 cigarettes a day that's three packs of cigarettes beijing average four uh on a bad day 25 oh so you just think about that you know you're and and the tragedy of this is we're going to tell your kids not to smoke cigarettes and then you live in shanghai or beijing or wherever and or one of these other you know industrial cities and uh they're your kids babies are smoking 60 packs of cigarettes a day that's not good um jason you've smoke cigarettes before i presume and yeah i like a cigar uh okay you know to this day i'll still smoke a little cigar once in a while yeah i used to smoke cigarettes before i i gave that up did yeah for oh i used to drink a lot and the two kind of go hand in hand yes they do let me tell you if you smoke a pack of cigarettes which is 20 you feel it the next day you don't feel really i i always did like a pack a day is a lot of cigarettes that's that's how many cigarettes is not discernible you smoke two a day you wouldn't feel it the next day because for me it was always paired with alcohol i can't disassociate the two but my point is a pack a day is a lot two packs a day is a lot 60 cigarettes a day i mean that's that's like you're being punished by your dad and he puts you in the closet because he caught you and he says okay you smoke these three packs and then you feel so nauseous you never go near him again that happened to me with uh when i i did three shots of gin when i was like 13 or 14 years old and man maybe it was like five shots and i just never i see i see that tanqueray bottle that green bottle i literally will feel like i'm about to pass out there's some other things on the docket i wanted to get to i think this polymarket story is super important because um well yeah i hate to everything seems to go back to politics this day but uh you know these days but polymarket has captured people's imagination you know where i stand adults should be able to do what they want with their money and we should allow accredited uh non-accredited people to become accredited through a simple test and um yeah there's so many ways to skin the cats i don't know why you can go to vegas or you can do online poker in i don't know three out of five states but you can't place a bet on the election it seems kind of stupid to me but uh there seems to have been an fbi raid on the ceo and this is all confirmed now i think uh maybe take us to the story the fbi raided the ceo of poly markets home kicked down the door at 6 a.m and took his devices i heard i don't know if this was all true but this seems pretty dramatic and it happened five days after the election and polymarket was the number one of the top searches on the internet and they obviously predicted absolutely correctly you know in those final couple of weeks months the election results i mean down to the state it seems they got right in some cases so yeah sorry okay so the fbi carried out a search of shane copeland's house he lives in new york city now keep in mind he is the ceo of polymarket polymarket is putatively not open to u.s residents and there's been quite a lot of back and forth between government sorry regulatory bodies in the american government and so-called prediction market so jason that's polymarket and also calci which critically uh has been open to people in the united states so there's a lot of back history here jason and i don't know how much of the commodities futures trading commission or cftc we want to get in here but the gist as far as i can tell is that looking broadly at prediction markets and the u.s government the cftc felt that these types of wagers on what are called i think um event-based binary options essentially you make a bet doesn't mean happen doesn't mean not happen um should not be allowed to target elections because there's concern that if you introduce gambling on or investing, if you wish, on elections, it can increase the chance of meddling.

52:53And this is also, by the way, something that comes up in sports a lot. It's why athletes aren't allowed to bet on their own games, etc, etc, etc. Google Shohei Otani baseball gambling if you want more on that. But the CFTC got its butt kicked repeatedly in federal, in different courts. And so by the end, you could, on Kalshi, I believe, bet on the election. Now, Polymarket, different. And I think this is going to hinge, probably, Jason, on if Polymarket did enough to prevent US citizens from using its service. Now, I know you're a poker player, and I know you've played online. I'm sure you remember Black Friday and how we all had to go use VPNs for a while.

53:32Do you think that's the same issue here with Polymarket? i i suspect that's what's happening um the regulatory bodies should not get to determine how americans spend their money uh except maybe on the margins on you know extremely dangerous things but i don't see the harm in placing a bet on political candidates you can do it in vegas you could do it outside the country so it's going to happen no matter what you do and maybe a little transparency, maybe upper bounds or limits on them. So if you bet over$100 ,000, you have to have your name associated with it or there could be other rules because yeah, perhaps at the edge of the margin, I don't know, some incredibly wealthy person could manipulate the market if it didn't have enough liquidity to give a perception that a certain candidate was running.

54:25Let's take it out of the presidential politics. Let's pick a smaller one like the mayor race or something. and so a rich person runs for mayor they get 10 rich friends to place bets on these markets in a very coordinated way they paint the tape you can look that up it's a way of making or wash trades trades that make it look like there's more volume than there is this is something that happened in crypto a whole bunch people thought oh my god i'm going to buy this nft it's traded 50 times um in in the last two months so i'll just be the 51st trading but i'll flip it and it turns out the other 50 trades or the same two or three people with 10 fake accounts each trading it and then you're the what's called the bag holder wash trading painting the tape these things exist there's regulations around them for a reason the same regulations could apply to prediction markets and just like you're not allowed as an nba player or an owner i believe or a referee to gamble because we saw what happened with the tim donahy nba scandal i think he was telling mobsters i believe uh or gamblers um who was going to be the umpires who were going to be the officials at a basketball game and based on who was officiating a game you could get a bet in early because you knew their patterns this is like really really you know interesting sharp because if you get a two three four percent advantage and you're placing a lot of bets over time it can be a tremendous advantage putting all this aside um i suspect what happened here because it's now conspiracy theory corner time everybody's paralleling this to the hunter biden laptop case in which the fbi was able to get that story banned or you know the link to the story in the new york post ban and they were able to do that because they said hey this is russian interference that seems pretty logical because trump himself did ask russia to hack hillary's thing and the russians were doing all kinds of shenanigans they always do shenanigans they're like it's kind of what they do right it's what the place is run by a kgb agent doesn't mean that trump is a manchurian candidate but it you could you could believe trump is not a manchurian candidate and there's no p-tape and then on the other side believe the russians do interfere and of course they do so the fbi has got egg on its face as do all the people who signed off on saying hey this thing is not real turned out to be real they shouldn't have banned it public should have been able to figure it out but that was a really difficult decision to make i think a couple of weeks before an election in fairness but it does seem like there was some conspiracy or cover-up there now everybody's saying this is a conspiracy or cover-up so what do we how do we process that because i'm starting to think about it in game theory and i and i'll give you my position on after you queue it up but there's a lot of conspiracy corner going on here i don't have my tinfoil hat i've got to keep one here but if i put my alex jones tinfoil hat on oh the globalist uh conspiracy uh polymarket and put the sharp money on peter tail and i mean like where are we supposed to even go with this right like they did they is this venge is this revenge because trump won i don't understand i don't think that they've got the cause and the correlation i think they may know the correlation but not the causation here anyway tell me what's going on the reason why politics is inescapable in this case is that polymarket is backed by a founder's fund founder's fund of course is associated with peter thiel and there's a lot of money from the world that went into backing a trump victory so if you are shane copeland and you just got raided by the fbi and they just took your devices and you want to rally people to your side what do you do?

58:09You get on X and you make a tweet that says, and I quote here, it's discouraging that the current administration would seek a last ditch effort to go after companies they deem to be associated with political opponents. To me, this is the epitome of what is usually dismissively called virtue signaling. And I don't think it's what's going on. So people talk a lot about government and how they use the law. My favorite example of this recently is that when Hunter biden was in trouble with law uh joe biden was like well it'll play itself out and we'll see what happens and let that process go letting his son get essentially pilloried in the press and in court and look terrible and he kept telling him i love you but we'll see this through that's the guy we're talking about not the type of guy who waits until after an election to go after a thing the timing just doesn't make sense to me here so shane 10 points for for rallying you know your team to your side good job grabbing the news cycle i just don't think that it's true you know i believe that many conspiracy theories um come true but the majority don't okay so let me just put out my general concept on conspiracy theories sometimes yesterday's conspiracy theory is tomorrow's pulitzer we saw that with the catholic church i talk about that example all the time you know people thought it was a conspiracy theory that that was the world's largest pedophilia ring turned out to be true so let's put it aside and congratulations to the team of the boston globe incredible research and investigative journalism for decades to to uncover this incredibly just abhorrent uh you know a cover-up that occurred in the catholic church put all that aside in this case i'm trying to figure out if you were going to do this you're the fbi and it's a conspiracy theory okay what are you trying to accomplish this is a conspiracy theory and you're going to do you go to do this fbi who are doing this would hurt their team and they would stop it before it could hurt their team but there would also people have to also recognize that the overwhelming majority of law enforcement is conservative like 60 or 70 percent like are conservatives jason just to add to that the divide the classic divide is that the fbi is more conservative and the cia is more liberal just to give everyone some yeah i wasn't aware of that but i just know from being in a family of law enforcement and being around it my whole life pretty conservative like very conservative very conservative like the only time it wasn't conservative where maybe in like the northeast you would have like a union and the democrats would fight harder for getting a union you know pay increases and the republicans want smaller government this is historical this no longer applies it seems the government you know would be you know save the government money was the classical you know not give into the unions and their demands putting all that aside on a game theory okay you want to do what now punish them stop them because the election results are done or is there is there some greater conspiracy here where we don't know but maybe they have evidence that there was a coordinated effort to manipulate the market and they want that to be on record between now and the new year when trump takes over the justice department so let's say there was some coordinated attack and i don't know shane became aware of it or something or there was market manipulation but i don't think the market manipulation would have any impact on the election so i don't think the prediction markets influence people's voting i don't i mean it's such a niche thing that like am i going to not vote for kamala because i see the prediction market is 60 cents to 40 cents i don't think so if i'm a democrat i'm going to vote for her if i'm a republican i'm going to vote for trump like it's already baked in and then the moderates in the middle who are like quirky people like me um i don't know where you stand on that but you know the people who are double haters is poly markets having no impact on me my all my best friends were lobbying me to come out for trump publicly and i didn't do it that would have a much bigger influence on me is my profile friends asking me to support trump and me taking all these arrows because i refuse to so yeah i just can't figure out the logic of this case which is another way of saying it's probably true that people cheated and pretended they were outside the country and placed bets i don't think that's poly market's responsibility i'll be totally honest if people cheat and they get fake id and they go to a bar and the bar checked your id or they check id on a regular basis and you order a drink that's on you that's on the person who came through and so i don't know i i think that this to me it smells fishy but we don't have complete information let's wait for complete information i bet you this is like a ticky tacky i think this is most likely a ticky tacky there were some cases of people using a vpn and somebody said hey shane we caught some people and he probably said okay yeah ban their accounts or yeah let's you know refer it to the compliance department which is what i would do as ceo so this seems very strange to me um and i like the idea of waiting over speculating even though I just speculated for 10 minutes with you.

1:04:01I know. I know you and I can't help ourselves. Two things to add to that really quick. One is main character syndrome. The prediction markets inside of, I would say, right-leaning venture circles have been anointed with the mantle of Oracle. And they are now treated as essentially reality writ chart. Cool. I think they're neat. I attract them. I use them as one data point in a mix. But hey, a lot of people really do think that they are the future so if you are that person especially if you're the center of the storm the ceo of the company itself probably you feel like you're a nail and everything else is a hammer i get that the other thing that i'm going to say is the cftc had a a settlement with polymarket i think this was back in 2022 jason i think it was like a i'm sorry it was like a 1.4 million dollar settlement but the point is they've already been on the cftc's radar so i think that's calci right and as the other one predicted yeah i mean there's been like oh wait did you say polymarket or predicted polymarket polymarket yeah because predicted also had a judgment against it i think and kalshi obviously had a legal battle to do all this so i i want to say one more thing though which is that i don't think the regulators here are the devil i know that's not a popular sentiment in technology right now but i think they're trying to enforce the rules as they're currently written So maybe instead of constantly just, you know, whacking regulators with sticks, we should go to Congress and shake up the actual underlying rules that we're using and then allow for transparency in the prediction markets to allow adults to do whatever they want without the concerns that we have about transparency and wash trading and manipulation and so forth.

1:05:43but no I don't think most people pay attention to this at all I don't think it changes votes and I think this is this is peak nerdery and I bet you it comes down to KYC which which is pretty frequent in the world of fintech that is probably correct I and by the way I know Shane I've met him he was on the live stream if you're running a big enterprise like this and it's going really well you don't need to break the rules like there's no upside in him breaking the rules so i don't i mean i would be incredibly incredibly shocked and disappointed frankly if there was anything that he did was that was not by the books when you run a prediction market i knew this because you know i was an investor in uber which was known to you know have uh some disputes with regulators from time to time oh really yeah and you know what you do you have a lot of lawyers you're buttoned up yeah you're very thoughtful about these things even though from the outside it may look chaotic you're very strategic like you have a lot of people discussing every one of these issues and doing the right thing and yes maybe saying we disagree with how ride sharing works in san francisco or how you interpret it or how the taxi lobby interprets it in new york and how our attorneys and we interpret it and we are willing to fight that fight um long long story short let's wait for the facts to come out folks um let's not jump to some crazy conclusions here uh on either way i think it's going to be a ticky tacky minor thing um that's going on here and sometimes the fbi you know um goes on little adventures because they get some tips or something like that and it all turns out to be like either like a ticky tacky fine you know here's your hundred thousand one million dollar fine you could have done a better job here and here and that's just part of business so i'm guessing that's what this is going to be some ticky tacky little thing where somebody signed up now there should be some thoughtfulness around the wells in the system when we started this any wells in the system the percentage of wells the protocols you're using i I know they use a specific protocol, the UMA protocol here, the transparency, all that stuff should be above board.

1:08:02And people should know what's going on in these marketplaces, because I do think any system that could be abused will be abused. And market manipulation would probably be not foreign actors, more likely foreign actors looking to make money. so a lot of times when foreign actors get involved in this what people forget is sometimes they're from regions where the foreign actors are like the mafia in that country and they like money yes and a lot of the hacking that occurs is more about money than the nation state and the nation state allows these hacking groups to use hacking to make money and then they get to use them also for other nefarious things like hacking into a political candidates you know gmail which they did i think for jd vance and uh trump this time around and none of the press would print those hacks am i correct and that's that's how that one wound up ken ken um i can't pronounce his last name can can it will stain something like that um dead posted and then ironically got in some trouble uh with social media bosses uh but i think we now have kind of decided that nation state-based hacking materials probably shouldn't be used um i have various conflicting views about that because on one hand you know availability of information on the other hand rewarding foreign actors it's it's dicey but i i do think we're going to learn a lot more here and just to wrap this up the u.s attorney's office and the fbi as of the time we compiled our notes but now we go uh had not commented so more to come here we will be tracking the story we will talk about it more And if this is political meddling into polymarket, we'll call it out as such.

1:09:43But I agree with Jason. I think this is going to be something much more ticky tacky and regulatory. We're going to talk about it on All In tomorrow. I saw it's on the doc tomorrow. So if you want to hear the besties as well, I'm going to have this conversation all over again tomorrow. All right, Jason, just to wrap up this week, I want to end with kind of a good old fashioned startup topic because this is This Week in Startups. And you and I both read through the latest Y Combinator request for startups. They put this out under the banner of it's the golden age for building. And just quoting from them, it seems like we're entering a golden age of building and we can use it to build things and make the country better.

1:10:16So to me, very much wrapped up in that mantle of American dynamism. And I think it's a medium good list, but a little bit less out there than I expected. How do you want to do this? Do you want me to tell you what I'm thinking or do you want to take the first stab at this? Okay. Okay, so YC requested startups. And this means, hey, if you don't have an idea, here's some places you might go look around to, you know, markets, basically. And so just to give people some context, Y Combinator is an accelerator. We have an accelerator as well. It's called the Launch Accelerator. And sometimes founders come and they have skills and you have a team, but they're not sure exactly where to look for an opportunity.

1:10:58So sometimes this can just creatively get the juices flowing. And so here we are. I think maybe tell me, why don't we do this? You tell me which one you think has got the most potential to build a unicorn startup, and then I'll give you which one I think has the most potential. Okay, that's really tough because I have several favorites, but I shall pick amongst my children, and I will put stablecoins in the number two spot, and I'll put space companies on top. Okay, so you got space companies and stablecoins. So let's start with space companies. some of the bullet points here say capitalize on 10x launch cost reduction okay we know that that's what spacex has enabled you can get things into space this is a continuing discussion there's tons of companies already build businesses around satellite applications okay satellites are already up there you build the business around the existing infrastructure create infrastructure for routine space access okay so i think this is an interesting idea it's kind of in the review mirror already i think founders already know about it on stable coins you have build business focused stable coin management platforms okay platforms that allow you to use stable coins within a business in other words stripe for stable coins interesting um i think if there's going to be a stripe for stable coins stripes going to launch it i think we're going to see coinbase stripe robin hood i don't have inside information on it but i wouldn't be surprised if every fintech company has their own built-in stable coin i know ftx was working on one um develop easy integration tools for developers focus on cross-border payments and requirements yeah these are all interesting um i i take it though you don't seem that stoked about my choices i i'm i i think maybe i'm a little jaded because i'm in this business that i think these are obvious um space and stable coins but i i think stable coins is actually probably more interesting than space because i think space everybody's aware of i haven't really thought about stable coins 2.0 It's the first time I've ever heard somebody say stablecoins 2.0.

1:12:57Tell me what your thoughts are on stablecoins, since I find that a fascinating place for startups to be built. Okay. So if you aren't familiar, stablecoins are digital currencies that are pegged to a specific fiat currency. Mostly, Jason, this is the dollar. It's by far the most popular stablecoin peg. And so that means you can buy a token that is worth a dollar and then you can exchange it back for a dollar. So these companies essentially take in actual currency, hand out digital tokens, and then sit on the reserves, make a lot of money. Circle, we've had Jeremy Allaire on the program, I think several times.

1:13:30They can build big businesses. Very cool. That's all stablecoins 1.0. I think what happens with stablecoins 2.0 is we begin to see other countries that have their own currencies lose their local primacy. And by that, I mean, once you let people around the world anywhere execute their financial life in dollars, they're going to. It's more stable, it's more accepted. And so I think stablecoins 2.0 are the startups that are out in developing markets that bring broad access to the dollar or perhaps the euro, pick your currency, to the local market and disrupt entire economies that are currently priced in the local currency.