Twist News: Fusion, Rural Investment, and Applied AI | E2068

0:00But most people don't have your skin. and that's the thing that's why i'm glad you're being empathetic because we yeah the last show we were talking about how you won't close your dms and i'm like close your dms and you're like no i want to know i want to know who the anonymous accounts are who are saying this stuff you know i have security protocols like anybody in my profile here i'll just tell a little story here i had somebody docks me person is upset because of something i said on the show they decide to docks me they decide to put my primary residence is worth 10 million dollars what do i know blah blah blah you know how they got my photo they went back two years when i took a picture of the tree line in my backyard they've reversed image searched it and they tweeted it this is on july 4th weekend i look the guy up i google search him because i have security protocols so now i gotta get the security company involved to find out if this person's gonna jump my fence right right okay i finally got on linkedin i look at the company hey that company looks very familiar to me i click the company.

0:57I know the CEO who we work for. This Week in Startups is brought to you by PrizePix. Run your game. The best place to get real money action while watching your favorite sports. Download the app today and use code TWIST to get$50 instantly after you play your first$5 lineup. Lemon.io. Hire pre-vetted remote developers to get 15 % off your first four weeks of developer time at lemon.io slash twist. And Vanta. 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.

1:33Hey, everybody, welcome back to this week in startups. We taped on Sunday, because I'm going to be traveling, I'm going to be in Japan doing a little skiing, last minute trip for a couple days, but I will be recording the show, we might have to change the times a little bit because I'm, I don't know, 10, 12, 14 hours ahead of when we normally do it. but fear not, we will keep you updated. And with me again, my amazing co-host, partner in crime, Alex Wilhelm. How are you doing, sir? Happy Sunday. I'm doing fantastically. I love working on a Sunday because I feel ahead for the week. And the good news for you and I is there's actually lots to talk about.

2:04I was a little worried, start of the year, Sunday show. Is it going to be a lot of us telling jokes, but no, lots of news. I just want to say buckle up because it's going to be nuts this year. I'm just letting everybody know right now, the inside track is it's going to be chaotic in 2025 which means uh we got a lot to talk about a lot of change is going to happen and one of the changes i i asked alex to do somewhat last minute was to start sharing our docket publicly with you our amazing audience and then to just really show you behind the curtains what uh we're going to talk about about six or twelve hours in front of the show which is when alex gets working on this this week in startups.com slash docket this week in startups.com slash docket will redirect you to a notion page shout out to our sponsor and partner notion which is where we keep the show notes and you'll see him building the docket in real time and what that'll do is you'll get to follow along as we talk about these topics if you're an insider you'll get smarter and what my big hope alex is is that you all will be engaged as producers we did a really interesting thing in the first couple of years of the show i was figuring out what the business model would be to pay for the team yeah and we had this concept of anybody could be a producer of this week in startups and i had cribbed that from adam curry who was doing that on his no agenda podcast at the time and uh i wound up handing that because i we had so much advertising i didn't need the money and i thought i'll just go with ads but the one thing that i think adam curry uh and john c devorek ah john devorek yeah what they got right was they have such an engaged audience i forgot about no agenda for a couple years and then i started listening to it again and it's actually quite good and what i love about what john dvorak who i grew up on uh he used to write for pc magazine which was a print magazine about pcs and i always idolized john dvorak jim seymour all the guys who wrote these columns because i was obsessed with pcs in the 80s and my dream was to someday be a columnist in pc magazine and of course adam curry was hey it's adam curry watching the v he was a vj and i was like well that's a pretty cool gig too so i love both of those guys uh you know they're like probably a decade or two ahead of me in careers and i just thought they were great broadcasters and writers putting all that aside that's such an activated audience and they do something called value for value so you can provide value to them by writing show notes or suggesting stories or making album art and then or you can make a donation and then they shout you out on the air i'm not planning on doing that But what I think is really interesting is that they just take the top 100 people who love the show, like the 0.01 % or the 0.1%, whatever it is, and they've really engaged them.

4:42So that's what I'm hoping to do is take the Noti gang, we have notifications turned on, and just activate you in helping us build the docket because, hey, you might see us make a mistake, or you might, you know, in the notes, or you might ask ChatGPT something and have a great question for us. So instead of waiting for on air to do that, or your letters to the editor after the show is published, well, why not show you the docket ahead of time? And so anyway, that's the goal. And we'll see how this experiment goes. I think it's really fun. And what it's going to make me do, Jason, is use less shorthand.

5:17Because sometimes I might write something in an abbreviated form for you and I, like I might say trad infra and mean server tech from the 90s in context. But I'm going to have to be a little bit more explicit. it and i just want to share with everybody we went through the permissions that are available for uh non-staff members on the page and we're currently set to comments so you should be able to drop a comment if you're listening to this please send me an email alexwlaunch.co um if you can or can't leave a comment i do want to see how it's testing it's a little hard for me to test with my own account um but would love your feedback there and i will see those live as we're going through work.

5:53But Jason, there is a story that is bubbling up on rich person Twitter, and I need you to explain to me what's going on with Veil and why does everyone hate the CMO? I've pulled their earnings. I have looked into this, but it seems very strange. So give people a taste of ski Twitter. Sure. There was this very innovative thing that happened a couple of decades ago, which was the season pass for skiing. Now, if you were skiing in Wyndham, like Scott Adams, he lived in Wyndham, new york and i used to ski there you could get a season pass but then epic and veil resorts put together a consortium of mountains and they bought a bunch of mountains and you could buy the epic pass and there's a competing one the icon pass and then there's another one called like the indie pass i think these all cost 300 to a thousand dollars and it means unlimited skiing okay but what it meant for the mountains were they got to take the money in advance this is a very important note that anybody who's an entrepreneur understands why this is important cash flow and secondly subscriptions so at the beginning of the season now vale resorts or any of these ski seasons ski companies get all the money in advance i have to buy my ticket my season pass i think by november or else they stop selling them so you can't go skiing in january it's not gonna go for a week i'll buy the six hundred dollar pass no if you snooze you lose if you wait till the mountains open you then have to pay per day lift tickets today in america are 150 to 300 per day you're only on the mountain from nine to four you might get like four hours of skiing in you know based on parking and everything so you're talking about it's costing 50 to 100 an hour you have a family go out it's a hundred dollars a day to rent skis it's absurdly expensive this is a elite rich person sport but you buy the season pass a local one for three or four hundred dollars and you own your skis you buy a season rental season rental for my kids 150 bucks their lift tickets 300 so i'm in for 450 yeah yeah they've skied i don't know eight days so far and we'll do a spring season for another five days they do 12 let's say they do 15 days hey for 500 bucks pretty good deal right such a good deal that now too many people buy these passes and there's no incentive for vale resorts which owns the epic pass to sell less of them because they get all this money in advance it's all guaranteed so if it's a bad season let's say it's warm and they don't get as many ski dates it doesn't matter all the money comes in advance they get to sit on your money make interest on it and they don't have to take loans out to run it anyway cash flows the business but there's two problems number one vale is a cheap ass organization in my estimation they made a couple hundred million dollars and they're fighting in park city which is their premier location really or one of their premier locations with the um ski uh patrol when i found out what ski patrol gets paid it's less than a nanny gets paid it's less than a housekeeper gets paid it's not that there's any i'm not saying anything derogatory about that but these are you know serious professionals who go ski and rescue you if you get hurt 23 bucks an hour they get paid they're asking for 25 this cheap vale resort which has hired according to what i've read online the chief marketing officers from comcast which is one of the most hated organizations for trying to unsubscribe you know and just known for terrible customer support so vale has the worst vale resorts which run epic pass has the worst customer support and then they're at war with the people who run the mountain the lines were extremely long to get up the lift the line should move brisson and why were the lines long they oversold epic passes like they always do it's a holiday and they had to shut down multiple lifts because they didn't have their ski patrol not having ski patrols like i don't know like not having your ambulance corp so look at this chaos people are furious i think there's going to be many lawsuits anyway none of this matters well it's all a one percenter problem but there's a lot of startup lessons in this insanity good ones and bad the epic pass was like unlimited skiing so i've skied 17 days now i go out for an hour and a half but i couldn't do what i do which is skiing for an hour and a half a day if i had to pay two or three hundred dollars a day because it just wouldn't make economic sense to do six runs for three hundred dollars but if i can buy a pass and if i go out for an hour or two and it starts raining or it's too windy i can just come home yeah let's talk about prize picks It's the best way to get real money action while watching your favorite game, which for me is the Knickerbockers.

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11:29Download the app today and use the code TWIST to get$50 instantly after you play your first$5 lineup. That's right. $50 bucks guaranteed you don't even have to win price picks run your game anyway long story short incredibly innovative to do the epic pass incredibly cheap this is a terrible organization that has run horribly yeah they are cheapskates they have horrible food on the mountains horrible parking they treat their staff terrible and it's kind of like comcast was for cable modems for some period of time where everybody hated them yes or verizon or the wall street journal trying to cancel your subscription.

12:05Just a very non-customer centric organization, but that has an incredible value prop. So I'll leave it at that. I'll throw this in because I saw this before I saw your tweet about it. And I was like, okay, this is funny to me. I grew up snowboarding. I grew up in Oregon, near my bachelor. I've been to Beaver Creek. I love the mountains. Hell yeah. And then I looked up their earnings and I was kind of curious. I'm like, are these companies struggling financially? Is this actually a burden on them? And the answer was no. So they paid a$2.22 per share cash dividend, bought 20 million of their shares back last quarter, and they're expecting to have total reported EBITDA in the current fiscal year, Jason, of about$900 million.

12:42So I think they can afford$2 per hour to their ski staff to avoid a PR catastrophe. That's the thing. They didn't just shoot themselves in the foot. They shot their brand in the foot. Ugh, what a mess. Well, now people are saying we should boycott Epic next year and go Icon and use the Icon mountains and teach Val a lesson. i don't think that'll work because they made these passes so cheap and then people might live near you know one of the other mountains so they kind of have in some ways a lock on these things but i do think if there are ambulance chasing class action lawyers out there may i point you to an incredibly juicy target um which is veil resorts the company the stock ticker uh is mt oh mt i I looked it up before.

13:25MTN. And let's see, five years. I'm looking at the five-year stock. It's down. Yeah, if you bought the stock in 2021 for$272, you've lost half your money. You've lost half your money. So this organization, their stock price tells you that they're mismanaged and not run well, I think. Yes. Correct. And they probably should, there should be some stock shareholder lawsuits here, just based on the just utter incompetence of this. There should be a no vote. and listen i i have an epic pass for i don't know six seven years and i love it but this is a terrible organization it's a disgrace disgrace ad as we say in brooklyn disgrace ad.com i own the domain disgrace ad and i am going to redirect it i don't even know how to spell that word but you should redirect it to veil's ir page well it used to be that disgrace ad d-i-s-g-r-a-z-i-a-d.com I redirected it to Jake Paul after the Jake Paul Tyson match, which I thought was a fraud, a literal fraud.

14:28I don't know if I'm correct or not, but I'm going to take Disgracia.com, disgrace. And I am Jake Paul. You're off the hook. Val Resorts, you're on the clock. All right. So I want to start with something very optimistic. We have a lot of actual hard news to get to, but just before we jumped on air today, a really interesting interview with Sam Altman dropped Business Week. Jason got him for a very deep on-the-record interview. We're going to talk more about it later on in the week, a couple things about AI, but I want to drop some sunshine in your lap by pulling out this quote about fusion. Bloomberg is talking to Sam Altman, hey, what are we going to do about chips?

15:06What are we going to do about energy? And Sam just shoots back, and if you're watching the video, there's text, but I'm going to read it for everybody. So energy, Sam says, fusion's going to work. and then business week says on what timeframe? And here's Sam Altman, soon. Well, soon there will be a demonstration of net gain fusion. You then have to build a system that doesn't break. You have to scale it up. You have to figure out how to build a factory build. A lot of them, you know, regulatory approval and that will take, you know, years altogether. But I expect Killian and other companies will show you that fusion works soon.

15:39That Jason would change the world as much as Chad GPT, if not more. Yeah, and Sam Altman made a bet on a fusion company, a very large one on helium energy uh yeah and it was disclosed it was a personal one so i don't know but my understanding is he went all in on this he might have made like a nine figure bet like a hundred million dollar bet yeah so and you know you can talk to a bunch of folks some people think the fusion timeline is a decade some people think it's five decades the truth is china is approving a massive number of not only nuclear power plants but coal power plants and solar and they're forcing evs so you got to go after everything yeah hopefully the united states can get past the grifting the virtue signaling and just all energy matters all energy sources matter just go after everything because what's happening is even if you don't like fossil fuels the united states is leading oh yeah with some european countries in terms of the reduction of them clean air etc we're going to solve all these problems so a little bit of fracking a little bit of oil offshore drilling i'm not worried about because you have the natural counterbalance of technological innovation so i do think we want clean air and clean water and we don't want to pollute but you don't have to sweat some amount of fossil fuels because solar is so cheap yeah and nuclear is getting approved maybe not by our country as fast as we like it by emerging markets and there's a belt and road concept that china is doing and what it basically means is spreading influence by giving people resources and that belt and road goes through asia to africa and back and i think they have 150 nuclear power plants outside of china they're building oh wow so that's a lot this is where you could really spread influence if you want to spread influence the united states should be the leader in nuclear and then obviously fusion like we are for evs and batteries along with china and we should be trying to sell these things and get unlimited energy for everybody i'll get off oh yeah of my speech here and thank you for coming to my tech i just want to throw in that people often underestimate how much oil the u.s produces when we discuss this this topic so i just pull up some data from the government in 2023 so this is about a year old we produced 22 percent of the world's oil which is double the number two country which was saudi arabia and then russia's number three also time 11 how is that possible because we were sitting here 20 years ago in the early 2000s everybody's talking about peak oil we're going to run out of oil and there is going to remember the peak oil discussions documentaries it's going to throw society into this cataclysmic thing then what happens you find more oil you figure out ways to clean oil you get solar going you get batteries going and everything works out eventually so here's the chart look at that so this is a chart showing u.s oil production from 2011 through 2022 when it doubled.

18:35Going back to the 1900s, we produced very little oil. It peaked originally in the early 70s and then declined through 2010 roughly and then shot up to all-time record highs in the last couple years. Shale oil, fracking, offshore drilling, better technologies, deeper wells. Pick your poison, but the point is the US is on top of a thing that we didn't really want to be on top of, but lights need to turn on as Jason's Christmas tree once again points out to us today. uh we are going to move into a golden era of abundance we're kind of soaking in it right now it's just very hard to appreciate the human mind is designed to look for bad news we have a yes a bias towards negativity why do we have that i've said it a million times on this program the people who are conservative and scared and anxious didn't cross the river and get eaten by the crocodile so in our dna is to be conservative to be scared but you know one of the things that elon said to me 20 years ago we were on a flight together we were going to do something and he said you know it's really interesting to me how much people overestimate the downside risk and he was about to go bankrupt with tesla and he said you know like the downside is i go bankrupt but i can start another company and so it's not life or death i mean he was worth a couple hundred million maybe 100 200 million at that time you know from paypal and whatever but he had poured it all into these companies and that always stuck with me take more risk take more risk now you look at his personality he takes out a lot of risk right as a society we are programmed in our dna to not take risk we should be taking more risk so to sam altman's credit putting a hundred million of his own money if he's worth a couple of billion and now he's worth maybe 10 20 billion with uh you know depending on what you think chad chapita goes i mean it's a it's a worthy bet if it's a one percent chance it works out and we have unlimited power well that was like that's a one in a thousand chance you make that bet yes people's minds are not designed to do this we We are in the age of abundance right now as we speak.

20:28The fact that we, as a society, can complain and hand-wring about the topics that we are obsessed about in this country is part of our privilege and the abundance we are living in. That doesn't mean they're not real problems. That doesn't mean people aren't suffering. It doesn't mean horrible things don't happen in the world. But let me tell you, there's a reason why everybody in the world wants to come here. Yes. Still to this day, with as problematic as things can be. All right, founders, let's be real. Finding great developers is tough, especially when you're trying to run and scale your startup and raise money.

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21:42Just 1 % of their candidates are accepted. And if something goes wrong, Lemon.io will find you a replacement developer ASAP. A bunch of launch founders have worked with lemon.io and they've had great experiences so here's your call to action visit lemon.io slash twist and find your perfect developer or even a tech team in just 48 hours or less and twist listeners get 15 off the first four weeks stop burning money hire developers smarter and visit lemon.io slash twist the abundance mindset thing has become actually an oddly recurring meme in my mind because i'm playing factorio at night after i get the kids in bed.

22:20I love it. What's factory explain what factorio is factorio is a factory building game. It is essentially the OG factory building game. Yeah. I'm still obsessed. I'm playing a 25 X science game. If you know what I'm talking about, but the thing is whenever I run into a problem, I try to finagle with what I've built. And every time I do that, it's wrong. No abundance mindset. If you're short on something, go build 10 times as much as you need. And I keep having to teach myself this lesson and in fact it was oddly abundance pilling me so shout out to the team over at wubay all right uh jason so lots to talk about today we have ai taking on the health care task world we have startup shutdowns ups and how to handle rural deliveries the ups and downs of online engagement via a chef in san francisco where do you want to start you know what i think the rocona one okay dovetails with what we were just talking about so maybe this lady will make you pick next.

23:13All right. So Jason got into a conversation with one of California's congressional group, the well-known Ro Khanna. He is the representative of California's 17th district, Sunnyvale, Cupertino, Santa Clara, parts of San Jose. If you don't know why that matters, well, Sunnyvale is where Yahoo was based. Cupertino, of course, is where Apple is. Santa Clara is another big tech city. So Ro, Jason, is probably the most visible congressperson from silicon valley is that fair i would say so and he um is a friend of the all in pod where we talk about politics a whole a whole lot and he spoke at one of our events i think was two years ago he did the all-in summit and i think incredibly highly of him he's on the left but he's kind of a centrist and he's very common sense and he's focused on what matters and so he started talking about ups closing facilities and this caught my attention because we're 36 trillion dollars in debt as a country and he says in this tweet ups plans to close around 200 u.s facilities including in places like somewhere in ohio iowa uh this will hurt rural businesses we need federal incentives and regulations to keep shipping centers open in rural america we need a rural new deal and i just thought to myself do we and i wrote a little little bit of a response to it which is you know i'll just summarize it in my own words yeah please i chose to live in a rural area for the first time in my life i've always been a city dweller or you know infill areas you know san mateo outside of san francisco which is still a city really but it's kind of like a bucala kind of city brooklyn new york city manhattan etc los angeles brentwood but now i live on a ranch in austin which is about 30 minutes outside of the city center And the trade-off you make when you move outside the city center is you get less services, but you get more land.

25:04You lower your cost of living massively, but you give up the fact. And the thing I miss most is San Mateo has 200 Asian food restaurants, my favorite cuisine. And I can't order ramen, Korean sushi rolls, sushi, you know, Korean barbecue, soba. from restaurants that are dedicated to those specific dishes yes and i can't get them to my house in 20 to 40 minutes in fact all i can get on uber eats to my house right now is i kid you not carl's jr mcdonald's and starbucks all right that's the american trifecta right there you can clog your arteries and get the jitters at the same time so you know i i have to come up with a solution for this i might get like a chef to come twice a week and prepare some meals i don't know what i'm gonna do uh it's a little bit of it's the only downside but i have a couple dozen acres all to myself that i can hike on right and so i think this idea that all taxpayers should subsidize me out in the hill country uh you know in the in the in the ranch land of texas by putting up a couple of ramen and sushi places that i love would be ridiculous and so he sent me to a sub stack i looked at it i was like you know what honestly this poor you know entrepreneur living on the sticks who has to pay very little money to live out there cost of living is dirt cheap land etc i feel bad for her that she's got to ship her items and she's got to drive one hour to go to a depot center that doesn't take the exact size box that she wants and doesn't have the it's an inconvenience for her and i just thought to myself you know what raise your prices if your product's good enough it takes an extra day to get there but we can't have every person whose business takes a hit or has to drive an hour we i'm sorry we don't have the ability as a country anymore to subsidize everybody the federal government should not be solving these kind of problems so i just respectfully and i use the word respectfully i was disagreeing with roe yeah your thoughts on all this all right so i did i had to do some research because i had not looked into ups's business in a long time.

27:13It turns out, and this was to my surprise, Roe's actual post was about an article from March of last year. So first of all, we're going back in time, nine months to when UPS announced this. UPS as a company is doing quite well. It is changing up its business, Jason. It's selling off parts of itself. It sold off Coyote Logistics to a company called RXO. So it's currently in a mode of curtailing unnecessary activities, working on profitability and trying to invest in automation. We've talked about this on the show before, back when they were at the port strike or the threatened port strike. So this is something that we are familiar with.

27:46Now, when it comes to subsidizing companies, so they keep open facilities in rural areas, I think we can't afford. So I tried to figure out where rural money comes from in the US. And it turns out that the USDA, Department of Agriculture, has a rural development group that does a whole bunch of different things. And the USDA, the last time I checked the federal spending data spend about four percent of our money so it's a fraction of a fraction of a fraction so i would say directionally i agree we spend too much money we need to spend less but i think that when it comes to rail and and delivery infra we probably unlock more inside of the heartland than we lose by subsidizing them now of course it could be a boondoggle ups is a private company i don't want to just give them tons of money for no reason jason and i are both capitalists uh but in this case i was sympathetic the problem is and i know this is the flaw of my argument everything probably has a reasonable argument for it and so it's hard to cut money without stubbing some toes if this was a profitable endeavor for ups they would not be retreating to a smaller number of centers so if they thought there was a business opportunity they would do that and this area is serviced by usps the united states postal service which is already subsidized I mean, we lose a lot of money on that already, but that's not as good for, you know, maybe they don't do fast enough shipping.

29:12The free market will sort all this out. It is not the government's role to be in there picking winners and losers and subsidizing. It's the free markets. And Amazon is doing drone delivery, which means they can eventually do drone pickup. True. There are self-driving cars coming and there are self-driving trucks coming. so amazon and zooks will be picking up all this rural stuff in a truck okay that has no humans in it and they'll be doing it for half the cost that ups is right now and ups is not the leading shipping company is it i think fedex is larger yeah and then i think amazon has their own delivery now they don't just rely on ups they have their own drivers so we have the most amazing vibrant competitive logistics industry, I think, in the world in the United States.

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31:17If you choose to live rurally, that is a choice you're making you will get slower service but you will have acreage that costs i don't know a thousand to fifty thousand dollars an acre yeah and you get to live in the most beautiful unbelievably vast landscapes of america you make that choice you have to give up something and what you're giving up is convenience and speed but fear not technology is going to save the day eventually for this i just think we got to make hard choices in this country stop trying to subsidize it i say cancel the entire broadband subsidy thing and let people buy starlink or the other five competitors to starlink if they want broadband enough of this okay and i don't think we should be subsidizing people in the cities either okay no subsidies let's let's slow down on the subsidy everybody's got to tighten the belt all right so i will i will trade you uh What's this woman's name?

32:12Meredith Nunnick Hovens, Barnswallow Flowers, if you want to look it up, in Oskaloosa. That's a town I've never been to. I'll trade you with her business and let it die off by not subsidizing UPS. No, no, it's not going to die off, by the way. She just said it would be one day extra, but okay, go ahead. Let's just take the worst case scenario. Okay, sure. I'll trade you her. I will sacrifice her upon the altar of my love for capitalism, but if we're going to stop subsidizing her or not subsidize her then we need to not subsidize you and your friends via the carried interest tax loophole okay i'm fine with it done because then honestly i think we should go to a flat tax i think capital gains income should just become one tax now i know that's controversial for a lot of people carried interest controversial it just i think simplifying we get so many gains that it would be worth it yeah all that being said you know i do think capital gains and investing in companies is why we have the most vibrant and the most unicorns in the mag seven are here but i don't think it would be existential if we change those so i'm fine with it right yeah everybody's got a belt tighten and if we want to get 36 trillion in debt down to 25 can i can i gently push you on this i have a question for you okay please so going through this story just prepping for our show today one of the parts i one of the reasons why I love this job, Jason, is whenever we approach a new topic, I have to go out and learn things.

33:33So I get to kind of go out and just poke around. So I found a Cato Institute website all about cutting government spending. And this is actually data from 2016, but they were in favor of cutting rural subsidies, which would be encompassed things like this. And they said that that was worth about six and a half billion back in 2016. But the same Cato Institute page said that they want to cut agricultural subsidies as well, which are about$30 billion a year. that's now cutting agricultural oh okay that's political suicide because of the way we handle primaries in this country it's all political um suicide to talk about any austerity measures if you notice this whole discussion of doge i think traces back to maybe three years ago we were doing our like concerns or whatever on all in and freeberg started talking about the debt a whole bunch and i was like chirping on about it as well i think chamath took the other side of it a little bit like hey we can have a little more debt but then we all realized hey wait a sec with covid and like adding eight trillion per administration and there's no slowdown like so we thought oh you know there'll be a little extra covid spending makes sense we'll pay it down because we're america we kick ass and people are just like you know what yolo let's keep spending i think what you have to do is get in office and then interrupt and then engage it and And if you notice, who's leading the charge on this?

34:54Elon, Vivek, and a lot of people in my extended circle, and a lot of people who are capitalists. And so I think it's going to take business people who realize the danger of this debt, and then people who are in office who are lame duck. Trump is in his second term. He doesn't have to run a third time. Yes. So he can actually take this on. I don't think in his first term you can take this on if you want to win a second one. If you want to win a second, yeah. If you want to win a second one. And you know what? I heard from an insider that cannabis legalization was something that Obama wanted to do from somebody who was one of his mega donors, like one of his, whatever they call those super PAC donors, whatever.

35:29The people who are the super syndicates, you know, who get all these 250K checks together. The bundlers. The bundlers. I heard from a, you know, a very high profile bundler who was trying to bundle me. I don't like to do that. Sorry, that's really funny. Invest in store shops. I don't want to be bundled. Anyway, the bundler said, it was one of my issues. I said, you know, I kind of feel bad. Like I think all these kids who are in jail and it happens to be black kids and brown kids more than white kids who are selling dime bags on the corner. And then I see all these white entrepreneurs, I don't mean to make it a race issue, but it is.

35:58We're getting funded at that time to do cannabis companies. And I'm like, wait, this seems profoundly unfair. Just anybody who's in a nonviolent cannabis thing should be released from jail, obviously. And that eventually happened. But they said to me, Obama can't do it in the first time. He's definitely going to do it in the second. He didn't wind up doing it. I don't think. No. federal cannabis legislation but now all these republicans are smoking weed and taking gummies and tinctures and everything and they realize it's not you know as harmful as alcohol and all studies basically you know listen all things have downsides but it's it's i would say it's probably well agreed no worse or better than say alcohol most people would say alcohol is worse i think if anyone thinks that cannabis is worse than alcohol come talk to me i'll give you a lot about this actually the doge point is very interesting um the founder of uh i think it was loom had a viral blog post the other day about how he's trying to sort out his life post acquisition because he suddenly had all this money and uh i just pulled it up jason because he has this great quote about uh working with doge and he was just trying to find himself after the acquisition and he went to go work for doge for a couple of weeks and after he gets associated with doge for a minute the next four weeks of my life consisted of hundreds of calls recruiting the smartest people I've ever talked to, working on various projects I'm definitely not able to talk about, and learning how completely dysfunctional the government was.

37:16It was a blast. Now, whatever you think about the federal government, its current efficiency, whatever, it's very interesting to get that glimmer of information from Doge because I don't think we know much about it. It's been kind of under wraps for a little bit. I'm very curious, but that gave me a lot of hope that there's a good level of recruitment going on. Jason, and you might have more visibility into the back channels in your group text than I do, but it did feel like Dogebook went a little quiet for a bit and so I'm glad that that tells me there's still a lot going on. I think everything's gone quiet because they have to get these nominations done and there was a public, I guess they called her the ice queen or something, the woman who's the...

37:54Cheapest stuff. Yeah, she was like, no more tweeting. Because we gotta get these nominees through. Just everybody paused on the tweeting. It was the public statement I saw there was a memo or something. Yeah. And so I think everybody's kind of like, well we're not even in office yet we can wait the five six weeks and then we'll start putting our stamp on things so we don't just have non-stop chaos on the interweb so i think that's what's happening but i got a lot of people asking me hey i want to do this i want to sell my software into it i have two software i have two portfolio companies that want to help or that i assume want to help yeah one of them has been public about it uh density.io which says yes you know people counting in spaces and i'm like wow this could be incredible like let's donate or at cost or whatever or or on the come you know we could do it on you know like on contingency measure all the usage of all this office space and then start getting rid of the unused office space which is billions and billions of dollars i believe right and then deep sentinel you know you got all these crazy uh security needs at these buildings that nobody's going to but they need to have security well you know what you don't need to have dozens of security guards you could have one and then you could have monitored AI based camera systems where you make those security guards super efficient and we could start lowering costs there.

39:08Now I know that means some people might lose their jobs or like, you know, facilities might become available, but then they could be available to do other more important work than playing Candy Crush at three in the morning, watching a bunch of cameras that don't change that AI can watch for the changes and surface those. So that's Deep Sentinels, the other company that we're investing in. Every time I've watched a spy heist movie, the Candy Crush playing security guard misses the critical moment of theft when the Mona Lisa it makes it out the back door. So not a big fan of that as a general point.

39:33I want to actually grab the conversation by the head here and pull it in a different direction, Jason. Did you see the recent reporting from the Wall Street Journal about the depth and scale of Chinese hacking into American infrastructure? I did not. I mean, I saw it going by on my feed, but I didn't read any stories on it. So educate the audience here. What's going on? So we've all heard about Salt Typhoon, which was the recent Chinese incursion into American telecom networks that went very, very deep. And that led to the government saying, hey, everybody, make sure you're using encrypted chat, which people found ironic because the government has often been opposed to encrypted chat that they can't crack.

40:07But hey, you know, potato, potato. What's interesting is it seems that there is a consensus rising that Chinese penetration and I would say meddling in US infrastructure has reached a new cadence, a much faster pace. And it's very, very dangerous. And Jason, to put this into geopolitical context, the expectation is that if China was to invade Taiwan to try to take it over, they not only want to block US communications and activity, but also cause mayhem domestically to throw the US people off their game. So disrupting cell phone networks, water, that sort of thing. It's all actually incredibly scary.

40:42And reading through this piece, I was just kind of angry because it seems that given the US's technology primacy in the world, that we should be better off. And so I just was kind of sitting here going, what can we do? And then I remembered, ironically, the launch of healthcare.gov, which was a flop. So when Obamacare came out, they had a website where you could go on and get a plan and they launched it and it didn't, it failed. And then they did bring in a bunch of nerds, our friends to fix it. I think we need something akin to a cybersecurity doge project. Like what if we got all of the smart cyber kids six months pay them nothing give them a gold star because i think doge has made going to the government if you're a technology person politically okay or like socially acceptable and maybe even encouraged i think we need a cyber security doge movement because we are not ready for jack right now seems like a great idea to me it seems like something we need to focus on i mean it's pretty obvious that we're getting hacked pretty heavily and uh yeah we should totally do a manhattan project on that and you got to make systems that are redundant i think one of the great things about the united states is when you have 50 different states we talked about this over and over again yeah yeah yeah you know we're kind of like south america or the eu in some ways the united states more than we are you know friends or or germany or canada where we do have like a pretty uh disparate operating system going on here in experiment we really you know if you want to take down the entire grid in america you're going to need to attack a lot of different pieces of it true so in some ways that's a feature right it's it's just there's not a lot of surface area to take down the entire grid so single points of failure there aren't many but where they are we should be more and more vigilant and this is where technology comes in i was mentioning deep sentinel and density.io both of these rely on ai and sensors yeah cameras you know more advanced types of sensors plus we have drones and all kinds of other things this is going to be unbelievably effective to put sensors around reservoirs and fly drones automatically 24 hours a day or those you know uh robots remember we had the uh dog-like robot that was 1600 we take that that dog company which i want to have them on the pod you know and you release 10 of those dogs into the world robotics you know you release 10 of those around you know some water basin or reservoir to just run around and then you fly a drone every hour and you put up some sensors somebody hops the fence with some terrible chemical to pour into our water stream the dogs are going to catch him i hadn't even thought of that yeah i mean that was always the quintessential thriller like there's a great thriller black sunday by frankenheimer and the idea is like a blimp goes over uh i'll leave look at that like the super bowl yeah to do a terrorist attack you know since we have these terror attacks going the large body of water critical infrastructure electricity bridges etc skyscrapers football stadiums yeah water these things could affect a lot of people as opposed to as terrible as it is driving into a christmas fair you know or down a busy street you can kill dozens but not thousands right thank god um so yeah we could use technology i mean those dogs cost$1 ,600.