TWiST News: Netflix Goes Live, The FCC Revamp, Free Speech, and Regulatory Shifts | E2046

0:00All right, everybody. Welcome back to This Week in Startups. I'm your host, Jason Calatanas. With me, my co-host, Alex Wilhelm. How are you, Alex? I'm fantastic. We have a really diverse and interesting show today, so I've gotten to learn a lot of things. We have a really big show. First of all, Netflix's live event, Bet and Data Thereof. We're going to talk about the incoming new head of the FCC and his views on tech and a recap of his time here on Twist, Jason. Much ado about censorship over in the UK, the former Uber exec that might head the Department of Transportation and also how much ground VCs need to make up in exits.

0:36Jason, hacked docket. This Week in Startups is brought to you by Coda. Coda empowers your startup by bringing words, tables, and teams together. Strategize, plan, and track goals effectively with all your valuable data in one place. Go to coda.io slash twist to get started for free and get six free months of the team plan. Lemon.io. Hire pre-vetted remote developers. Get 15 % off your first four weeks of developer time at lemon.io slash twist. And Kite. Looking to get out of the city? Rent a car with Kite. Kite delivers rental cars to your door. No counter, no lines, no hassle. Download the Kite app today and use code Jason to save 10 % on your first rental.

1:21i think the main character this weekend was mike tyson and netflix uh i was on many group chats where people were sharing screenshots of the new not the rainbow spinning wheel of death on your mac for those of you who've experienced that this was the red spinning wheel of death on netflix everybody was getting error codes the picture quality was terrible on netflix for the mike tyson versus jake paul fugazi fake fight um the fight was terrible huge disappointment the two women who fought before mike tyson were incredible oh my god that was one of the best fights i've ever seen in my life but the mike tyson fight was a fraud and i guess it's good that um netflix is stress testing their system take us through the numbers how many people tuned in for this fraud okay so we'll get into that fraud we'll get into exactly that because i want to get your thoughts on the quality of the event but um this was a huge smash hit for netflix jason so according to preliminary data they're going to tell us more in a couple days when they kind of justed through all the logs but they think about 60 million households watched there was a 65 million concurrent stream peak which is totally nuts and because you mentioned the undercard the fight between taylor and serrano that was watched by 50 million households which netflix was very proud to say was they think the most streamed women's sports event in history uh that's incredible yeah those two women put on a spectacular show i'm guessing they got paid a fraction of what tyson and jake paul got my understanding is jake paul got 40 million for this fraud and mike tyson secured a 20 million dollar bag which i'm happy to see uh that mike tyson can pay his bills uh whatever but my lord it was a terrible fight uh waste of time it was a disgrace disgrace the odd as we would say in italian slang in brooklyn it was a complete disgrace why tell me why um it was clear that jake paul was not fighting it was clear that mike tyson threw like 20 punches he was unable to fight so they were basically just trading on mike tyson's reputation uh being an absolute murderer and just you know maybe he can land one punch but i mean i think there was one jab where you saw mike tyson hit um jake paul and his head tilted back a little bit but jake paul said i think the next day that he didn't want to embarrass uh mike tyson so he didn't fight him he didn't actually throw a bunch of punches so you know the whole concept of a fight is that you're supposed to leave it all out there like the two women serrano and uh taylor was it serrano taylor i want to go see the first fight of the serrano taylor because this is the second and um putting all that aside i guess the this is k fab is i guess what we would call these exhibition fights that jake paul does they're just fake fights um he's a fake boxer it's all fake which is kind of a bummer because the fight before it was very real yeah um i but the good news is you didn't pay 99 for this or whatever 79 whatever pay-per-view is if you had paid for that you would really be upset i think but it's free and it's on netflix so this is great for netflix netflix stress test their system and fouled a bunch of people probably got fired whoever their partners are on the cdn side got fired yeah it's got to be really uncomfortable today but that's part of you know learning is i think did they win an nfl contract or a sports contract yeah as part of this next deal the future of netflix live events the upcoming two major events that i think we care about here are two games on christmas so if you want to watch chiefs stealers or ravens texans on super 25th netflix will have those i agree very much the stress testing ahead of those is very important because those are not fake fights those are very serious teams in a very serious league uh also and this was news to me jason i didn't know that netflix had a deal with wwe's monday night raw starting in january of next year now i've never been a pro wrestling fan had friends growing up they were big fans um but that's going to be a recurring event so i do think that netflix is really leaning into live sports broadly although i'm just disappointed that the fight wasn't much because there was so much excitement about it there was that big uh pre-fight slap it did feel a little bit manufactured you might yeah that's k-fob right it's the whole concept of like we're all in on it like rest professional wrestling quote-unquote professional which is fine i mean if people want to like get into the storylines and they're great athletes doing you know essentially ballet or coordinated you know physical contact whatever i'm okay with it um if everybody's buying in for it but this was presented as a fight so i think that it was a bit of a fraud uh so what do you think about betting though because people the handle on on this fight was enormous so if it was a fake fight how do you feel about sports betting on it it seems a little okay so that's also risky because if jake um who won the fight he would have actually gotten a knockout probably in the second or third round if he had gone full out because he was fighting an old man who couldn't defend himself uh and as the commentators are saying you know his legs were very weak as any 60 year old's legs would be versus a 28 year old or whatever jake paul is so i think jake paul just by physically bumping into him swinging at him whatever would have knocked him out so there was probably gambling on a knockout and so by jake saying i purposely didn't knock him out because i have respect for him that's kind of like throwing the fight so i do think that complicates the betting a lot of my friends were gambling on this putting a lot of money like a lot of friends putting you know 5 10 25k on this fight and almost all of it was on jake paul because they just knew like there's no way for him to lose even if it was two to one or whatever so he had to put up 200 to win 100 i think putting all that aside i think that we might be on the precipice of sports events regularly becoming as large as the super bowl if they are free and included in bundles so i think disney needs to pay attention to this with hulu i think netflix needs to pay attention to this because if you have a footprint like netflix has or disney disney has 150 subs and i think netflix has 250 if i'm ballpark correct you can check those numbers i'm on it yep and so if you start thinking about those numbers and you start thinking of how easy it is to put an app on your phone and how global these services are and the fact that sports are not um culturally or language don't have culture and language barrier boxing is boxing soccer is soccer football is football basketball is basketball it's very much like nature of documentaries there are two things that work really well on a global basis in other words you don't need to localize them sports is one um and nature documentaries are the other so shark week is shark week you can do any voice dubbing so this is i think a really turning point moment or should be for these streamers they should be thinking of every sports they should be uh bidding on them massively and if the nba or nfl was available on these services without payment with advertising i think the nfl games would double their viewership i think the nba games would triple or quadruple their viewership the fact that these things have payments behind them throttles them so in order to watch nba games i pay 300 a year 250 or 300 for nba lead pass to watch every nick game without ads okay great i'm i'm five percent of the audience that wants an ad free experience with the local cameras but you start thinking about like how many people could actually be watching these games all of the leagues have gone for max dollars from subscriptions this might actually be a mistake we might have underestimated how big these audience could be could be on a global basis 60 million people if there had been ads in this there were no ads right i didn't see any ads i think it was ad free i believe it was that for yes but there were tons of sponsorships so every like ring um the ropes on the ring had logos for meta on them there were logos everywhere but imagine if this had been sponsored for 60 million viewers you know if tesla or uber or amazon i'm trying to think of people disney people who have global footprints a marvel film my lord like getting 60 million people in one night is a very hard thing to accomplish i don't know the international numbers here i suspect half the audience was u.s half was international i don't know that do we have any conception of what the international national split was no because the data we have is still preliminary so in a couple of days so everybody is listening we will find that when it comes out and bring it to you on wednesday or friday for our future live news recordings, but the data just is a little bit early.

10:55The thing that I'm a little bit concerned about because I'm also a sports fan and I watch a variety of different sports, it's just the fragmentation of it. Like it's cool that Netflix has some upcoming NFL games, but I hate having to think like, okay, this is Thursday night. Does Amazon have that contract right now? Or is it on? And so as a viewer, it gets kind of crappy. And the NWSL, a league that I love has had this problem all year and I've watched a lot less. So to me, the idea of opening these up to audiences on the major streaming platforms does make a lot of sense. Like Netflix, we all have it.

11:26It's like water at this point. You just have a sub to Netflix. So that tracks well. But like, if I watch MLB on Apple TV +, sometimes I don't have that. And that's a little disappointing that I have to have more recurring subscriptions to watch sports. I just wish that everything had the League Pass model, Jason. Like I got, if I was watching every Warriors game, I just spend the money and then watch it on my own time and not have to just federate across services. Yeah, it's a little annoying. They're obviously maximizing profitability right now. Do you spend too much time tabbing between your team chats, documents, spreadsheets, databases?

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13:20And Coda builds these systems of record for us really quickly. So here's your call to action. Coda empowers your startup to strategize, plan, and track goals effectively and build the systems that you need to hit those goals. So take advantage of a limited time offer just for startups. Go to coda.io slash twist and get six months of the team plan for free. That's coda.io slash twist to get started for free and get six months of the team plan coda.io slash twist i think where this winds up is amazon will be the home of the nfl apple will be the home of soccer ml major league soccer you know netflix will be whatever the nba or major league baseball they're just going to own the entire thing and i think that would be brilliant there was a rumor of the nba and espn i think maybe spinning out espn from disney and maybe the nba owning it or something which is a little bit weird because they're supposed to be reporters reporting on the league so that always creates a little bit of friction where if you have a big contract you can't be critical of the nfl or you know there was an issue with um you know brain injuries and i think you couldn't talk about it on certain networks they kind of banned people from talking about it or you don't even have to ban it i mean everybody who's getting paid five million dollars to be an announcer knows don't bring that up it's uncomfortable you won't get invited back you may not get that five million dollar contract right it's it's also the uncomfortable nature again not to make it's political but everything seems to be going back to it you know if you're anderson cooper or farid zakaria on cnn and you're making 20 million a year 10 million a year these are big salaries do you think they're going to be the ones who do the investigative report on pfizer No, not when Pfizer's a third or 50 % of it.

15:11Those stories, you know, if something hits a certain benchmark, you have to report on it. Of course they will. But they're not doing a 60 minutes, nor a 60 minutes doing some big expose. Maybe Frontline would do that. So does it mean it's censorship? It's kind of like self-censorship or just editorial steering. What are your thoughts on that? Oh my gosh. I mean, this comes up all the time. it so one of the tensions all right so i'm gonna talk a little bit about myself here but jason i think you'll forget behind the scenes let's be honest with the audience here right no so i ran tech crunch plus for a while and one of the reasons why i really believed in building a subscription pillar at tech crunch my historical home publication and i love the people there was that it would reduce our dependency on advertising incomes and also on events Advertising incomes go up and down based on the economy.

16:04When the economy is good, ad dollars fall from the sky. When the economy is poor, they're impossible to find. And that's really hard to build a company on a boom bust income cycle. So that's the thing that subscriptions do solve. And then there's events. TechCrunch hosts, has hosted, does host events around the nation and around the world. I've taken part in a lot of these. And we often have people come to the events that we report on to talk, to be interviewed, to sit on a panel, to judge startups, whatever it is. but there's a natural tension between reporting on people vigorously and vociferously and trying to get them to come to your event so you can sell tickets so people will come to hear it from them and a long way of saying access journalism and this was if you were too critical of a subject steve jobs famously uh you know steve jobs shows up for your event or doesn't show up your event that's the difference between that could double ticket sales to land you know bill gates or steve jobs at the peak and there were journalists or commentators who had those relationships who got paid seven figures so less anybody think that you know journalists or publications are not impacted by the reality they are and so you know yeah whether it's espn tech crunch wall street journal everybody gets impacted some ways by this uncomfortable relationship and the way that this is usually set up is that the business side and the editorial side of a media company are distinct but i think jason made a good point earlier about not being an idiot and destroying your own income stream and so yeah when i think about this there are those tensions it does impact everything that you see and read but netflix i'll just say this uh if i was the biggest online streaming company in the history of the world uh i would have had my live streaming set up um in better shape because it was pretty embarrassing how poorly they did and they have to do better just have to they have 280 million subscribers globally yes this is i think the largest subscription business outside of china that's ever been built china obviously has china and india have you know billion uh citizens so when you start getting to those numbers you know who knows i don't know the phone companies there but they might have more than 280 million subs but this is an amazing feat And I think what Netflix is going to realize over time is that pushing people towards the advertising tier, and I think Disney is realizing this, is going to maximize revenue.

18:31So some number of people paying$6.95 with limited ads or ads, people paying zero with a lot of ads, insufferable ads,$6 with some ads, and then$12,$15 with no ads is going to be the perfect, perfect way to thread the needle. if netflix had a free tier right now that was ad based with a lot of ads but you didn't get the first run shows you only got like the second run shows or it had like a limited amount of the archive whatever there's some way to do it i could see them having 500 600 700 million subs and i think spotify is a good example of this because i believe spotify has a free tier and the free tier has an enormous number of people in the advertising tier so this is obviously the way this is going to go if you were to look at um the nfl as an example thursday night football amazon prime sunday afternoon evening games paramount plus and fox sports sunday night football nbc monday night football espn when i was a kid i remember my dad was like big on monday night football because when monday night football came out it became such a phenomenon that the bars were packed and this was like the late 70s i think it came out and it was great for my dad's business because sunday people did come into the bar to watch the games and the bookie was there and that's how you place your bets you know it's like two for one kind of situation you can place your bet have a drink and watch the game it's a three for trifecta and then all of a sudden monday night which was the deadest night of the week became such a hot night you got 10 monday night football games 12 monday night football games was awesome for business all of a sudden monday night became like a Friday or Saturday night was awesome for the economy.

20:19I think they've watered that down a bit with like Thursday night and all these Saturday games, everything else, but they're going to cut the NFL into as many little pieces as they can and find the highest bidder for each one. And people have made some hay in recent years about a slow decline in kind of like cable viewership and also NFL viewership. And the best example of this that I've had to explain to me was the NFL is the most popular thing on paid television. And so if it declines, TV declines and vice versa. So they're very, very tied at the hip still. But I will say Netflix getting into live events, full stop, I think is brilliant because what they haven't had since Stranger Things Wednesday or one of those occasional hit shows that really just takes over the zeitgeist is a way to get everyone there at the same time to drive that intense hive of conversation and communication.

21:05And so, yes, it is bad they had streaming issues, but it's also very good that so many people show up that they had. And they also still are with dropping the entire series at once. When they do a Stranger Things or something, they drop all nine episodes, 10 episodes. So you can watch it. It's not like HBO with House of the Dragon, where they do every week. It's not like those, that kind of a vibe, right? Well, that's how they just disrupted the industry. It was just by saying, F it, here you go, here's the whole thing. And everyone loved it. But I hear more commentaries still on social about the shows that are released incrementally.

21:37And I can see this in my spouse who loves to watch the show Ghosts. and every time it comes out, she's ready to go right there. And so they get her more often, more frequently over a longer period of time. We're all sorting out, Jason, bundling and unbundling again here in the world of media. And this is the latest iteration of it. One last note. I'm less receptive to ads than you are. And I just want to say that, well, I pay for Prime. I pay for Prime for, I don't recall what I didn't pay for Prime. I'm very annoyed that they just decided, Alex, you've been a dedicated, lifelong subscriber, and now we're going to make your service worse.

22:10that still really grinds my kids. You're saying Amazon Prime, you have no choice but to watch ads on some shows? You can pay more if you don't want ads, but they've debased the service that I've had for a long time. Got it. I can take the Amazon shopping experience going to hell. I can take the UI being chaotic. I can take half of it being ads for low cost Chinese dropshipping sites. Fine, fine, fine, fine, fine. But now when I watch my shows, they're like, and we just wanted more of your money, Alex. So screw you. And I'm like, come on, guys. Come on. uh i'm just happy that there's an ad free tier available spotify is such a huge business 343 million ad supported monthly active users 61 million uh they have 220 million paid globally 61 million so you put those two numbers together i mean talking about close to 600 million people are using spotify between the the paid subs and the ad supported ones there's going to be a number of these businesses that hit a billion.

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23:49And great developers are so hard to find and integrate into your team unless you're using Lemon.io because they handle all that for you. They only offer handpicked developers with three years of experience at a minimum, and they have to be in the top 1 % of applicants, right? Something goes wrong, don't sweat it. Lemon.io will find you a replacement developer ASAP. So many of our launch founders have worked with Lemon.io and they've had great experiences. So here's your call to action. go to lemon.io slash twist and find you're a perfect developer or the perfect tech team in 48 hours or less that's right and twist listeners get 15 off the first four weeks stop burning money hire developers smarter and faster at lemon.io slash twist let's relate this to the the current ai boom jason because you know we're still figuring out how ai is going to monetize you and i both pay for uh chad chpd subscriptions at the corporate level and the personal level i think that's worked out pretty well i'm almost surprised at how how well ai consumer services have monetized on the subscription basis without having to revert to ads because i don't for me thus far ai has been an ad-free experience and i wonder how long we can keep it so pure and lovely i mean social networks were ad-free at the beginning uh and so was google search yeah so almost always when these services come out you have enough venture capital to back you if you're growing i would say low single digits a week or double low double digits a month month over month then you have earned the right to not monetize and just burn money so if you can grow your service one to five percent week over week 10 20 30 percent month over month but just let's say 10 percent month over month there are vcs who have seen this movie before youtube spotify google search facebook instagram and they'll just be like you know what don't bother advertising keep growing because the longer you wait the more pent-up demand you get and when you do turn on ads you're going to be hitting 10 million 50 million 100 million users and you really can get big ads so it's very hard to to achieve product market fit so what you want to do as an investor is give the team the ability to just do that one thing well in a consumer-based service and and i think um a lot of folks want to not have to earn money and just build their startup you you earn that right by having industry leading growth yeah so this idea that you can have a no growth startup and not charge no bueno but if you have really good growth they will suspend disbelief uh but anyway this is definitely the trend to watch and And I do think advertisers are going to swarm these things when they start hitting Super Bowl-like numbers.

26:44And this was, I guess, like a half a Super Bowl, right? The Super Bowl brings in over 100 million people to watch something live. I don't know that Jake Paul would have drawn this. This had to do with Mike Tyson, but there are other people who could draw this. I think there's other celebrity boxing matches that could do this. I'd flip it around. i i wonder how many people would show up to watch and i say this respect to his fighting career elderly mike tyson versus somebody i wonder if this is really just the ability of of jake paul to attract such outsized attention to his antics over the years that he's the real draw i i bet you if it was mike jessen versus rando fighter it would have been 10 as big and that speaks to by the way the power of online culture well i mean i think you do get that you get the gen xers and boomers who got to witness mike tyson coming into this combined with the millennials who know this so maybe that's maybe it's like a little bit of both but i think mike tyson versus holyfield or anybody doing like one of those kind of exhibitions would have drawn similar but i could be wrong okay last thing does netflix ever go pay-per-view i'm curious because if they're going to spend all this money on these events does it just fit into their natural monetization strategy i'm torn on that i mean they have so many paid subs that why even bother you know like you have so many billions in revenue that even this thing if it costs them 100 million to do this yeah who cares do it quarterly for 400 million a year do something some tentpole like this if you reduce a million let's see if the average person spends 12 on netflix a month or let's say 10 bucks 10 bucks because you have the international of the pay tiers whatever i'm just gonna say eight bucks eight bucks a month is a hundred bucks a year hundred bucks a year is a million subs four times a year would be four million subs 400 million four million if four million less people churn because you do a tentpole like this which is but one and a half percent of their user base paid user base if you reduce churn because you do something crazy like this and it keeps you from pausing your account or cutting your account probably worth it so when you start thinking about it that way they have so they have an ability to outspend everyone else based on a legit business now if apple chooses to lose money or amazon chooses to lose money on these things because they can okay that's different but it actually turns out they could actually economically make this pencil out which is nuts well it's awesome but i'm just going to say if the argument is that adding friction to an existing paid consumer subscription is often the wrong choice take the ads out of my prime amazon listen to jason why now what i mean if you i don't know what netflix's revenue is right now across those 280 million subs because i do know that there there are very low fees in india and asia and and other regions and the west is much more expensive so but if you start thinking about you know how much revenue they have yeah um it's about 10 billion a quarter by the way so 40 billion a year i mean that's a lot of money to be able to spend and i wonder what the total revenue for the nba is like what they get from you know all the games combined i wonder what their license because you know the nba a lot of the folks have their own cable networks like the knicks have msg network and they make money off of msg1 msg2 you can people subscribe to those through cable systems all over the world you can subscribe direct there's going to be an argument at some point for one of for someone like netflix or youtube to just jump the fence and just go to one of these you know uh one of these leagues and just be like we'll take it all we'll just take the whole goddamn thing here's 10 billion a year we'll take the whole thing and can you imagine the number of people if one service had the nfl uh it would be bonkers and everybody's got a smart tv that was the other limitation of this was people getting the show 10 years ago the idea of doing this kind of stuff was really hard because not everybody had a smart tv i just bought a new lg tv here at the ranch and it came with everything and i'm like oh i gotta go dig out the apple tv and i haven't gotten to it because you know the apple tv is in store somewhere i'm trying to find it but it's got everything in the menu so the whole thing is just sitting there and i don't need to because it's on the remote control netflix and then there's roku you could put a roku on your tv for nothing and it's built into many tvs yeah so the idea that you can't find it or your dad can't find it or grandpa can't find it that's over too so it's a brave new world my lord it's going to be awesome for i think this could be awesome for producing shows that just wouldn't normally be economically possible or spreading these leagues if you're running the nba if you own those teams you got to be thinking at some point what would it be like if we gave up all the paid subs and had a global footprint and it was just a that nba league pass was a free product with an ad supported tier and everybody could watch every game and you lost my 250 i think you'd make it back in advertising globally well the question then becomes how many more geico ads can i possibly survive before i die if you travel a lot.

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33:37Download the Kite app or book online at kyte.com. That's kyte.com. Go ahead and download the app now so you have it ready to go. Use the code Jason at checkout. You get 10 % off your first rental, which could be significant. Don't forget to use the code Jason. Download the app, KYTE.com right now. One of the biggest stories out in the last very recent time period is that Brendan Carr, an FCC commissioner, is going to be the next chairman of the FCC. And just so everyone knows, we had Brendan on Quist episode 1870. If you want to go back and watch that interview, lots about Starlink, lots about TikTok, Jason.

34:10But I have gone through his positions. I have notes on them but i just want you to tell me why on twitter you were so abouillant about brendan getting the nod you said boom i believe yeah i mean for me this is great because two of my uh pet peeves here government waste right um and tiktok i think he were very aligned on in terms of government waste this rural broadband thing has made me lose my mind the idea that we are going to spend 10 20 30 000 to put people on broadband in five or ten years and they've installed none of them they canceled the starlink contract because it wasn't fast enough now i got starlink at my house as a backup it's plenty fast over 100 megabits down 10 megabits up i could be doing the show from it i have done the show from it when i lost my spectrum line and i and i flip over to starlink that's how i use it currently all of these people who are in rural areas are already using starlink and before that they used um data capped high earth satellites so the idea that our government would do something like rural broadband and then waste our money our taxpayer money to bring a cable modem to somebody's ranch i live on a ranch i would be like infuriated if the government spent twenty thousand dollars ten thousand dollars to bring people their lines when there is a viable option now the problem with our government is they set these things in motion and then the free market solves the problem and we don't reverse the spend i don't think starling should get the contract i don't think the fiber companies are the cable motor because you know i think she got the contract nobody the problem's been solved there's also three or four competitors to starlink that are all in the process of building their constellations why on earth would we do this and if we did want to because of the digital divide if i don't know the 70 80 90 bucks a month for a satellite connection was too much okay give them a voucher for 40 a month for it and call it a day and do it for five years and then we're done it's ridiculous ridiculous and this is i think why although i i've had my problems with trump and and his personality and january 6th and any number of things i do think the one thing that could be absolutely fantastic and i am rooting for him and vivek and elon and trump and everybody involved is to lower the footprint and the size of government and government waste and i think this might be one of the great examples of it the idea of spending billions of dollars of taxpayer money on broadband when the problem's been solved it's the same thing with the superchargers why on earth are we doing superchargers or just elect ev chargers when the free market i see so many startups alex that are putting these things in you don't need the government to subsidize it maybe 15 years ago that would have been a brilliant idea in 2024 2025 you don't need the government to subsidize any of this there's plenty of free market capital available sovereign wealth funds venture capital funds and consumers paying for it we've already passed the rubicon here we just know going back there's plenty of evs there's plenty of people with credit cards who will pay for an ev charging station hotels will pay for ev charging stations to get customers if you put an ev charging station in your hotel and this started maybe 10 years ago you put in tesla chargers you put in regular charge point chargers the j2s you get more customers the hotels are willing to pay for it there's a lot of hotels already out there you don't need to pay for it no all that tracks with me i did dig deep into the the starling contract fiasco and and honestly if you want to read up on that we'll throw in the show notes there's a long history of the fcc but uh very much agreed on less government waste but what i'm what i'm surprised by is how strident brendan carr is on certain technology issues that i did not expect him to be by the way i don't know all his positions the tiktok position i do know we'll get to that i'm sure oh yeah no tiktok no problem there totally agreed but so here's an excerpt from car and he wrote uh the fcc chapter in the project 25 manifesto which i read through today so if you want to read this it's all in there it's his notes but car heritage foundation wrote something called project 2025 project 2025 is something that trump disavowed because it's a bit radical we had the heritage foundation on to talk about their election uh stuff that was great with hans um so it is obviously concert the most conservative i think think tank and one of the best funded, but obviously some aspects of Project 2025 are on the menu.

39:11Yeah. I mean, for example, Carr wrote the FCC chapter for that, and now he's going to be FCC commissioner. No one's surprised, by the way, that Brendan Carr got the tap here. This was kind of expected, but here's what he said. And tell me, Jason, if this doesn't sound a little bit like a Democrat. After Google manipulates search results, a small business can see its web traffic drop precipitously overnight for no apparent reason. On Facebook, social media posts are left up or taken down. Accounts are suspended or permanently banned without any apparent consistency. Out of the blue, YouTube can demonetize individuals who have risked their capital and invested their labor to build online businesses.

39:45Now, those are all criticisms of individual choices that businesses have made that they think are in their own best interests. And here is Carr saying that they are acting in a manner that is in Congress with his politics. And so to me, this smells like government involvement in technology in a way that if it came from a democratic administration would be relatively controversial so i'm just surprised that a guy who can write that as his view and put it in print is such a supposed ally of the tech industry i feel like i'm missing something here i can tell you what it is please um when trump got banned from all platforms this was a controversial maneuver yeah uh if i take you back in time some people have memory hold it um which means they don't like to think about it but people were very scared when january 6th happened that there could be a civil war you know you have all those people breaking up the the capital mob behavior is such that you could have more mobs break out by the way we saw that with blm you'd have a riot in one city and then you'd have a riot in another city and remember that whole time period where every weekend there were different protests and then some percentage of protests resulted in bad actors you know uh i don't know all the actors but i think antifa was one of the ones that was particularly violent and i don't know if that's an actual organization or a loose affiliation of philosophies antifa is a loose affiliation it's not a okay so yeah people claiming to be antifa you know just started lighting stuff on fire great we all agreed none of that should happen but people thought hey trump's going to tell the next group of people to go to the next city to do a protest and yeah maybe the capital or the city hall in new york city will burn down or get broken or people get shot so they banned him on all platforms for two years and then they undid those bands over time because they were nervous that he might uh you know prompt people to do that incite that's the word incite people to do more damage the republicans have never gotten over this they believe this was like the ultimate form of censorship so they at one point and you're you're absolutely correct in pointing out the hypocrisy of this at one point they're like hey total free speech at another point you know they might be like hey or and free speech includes to your point private companies being able to do what they want with their services so you know this bakery will not make a a gay wedding cake but facebook can't not have whatever you know people on its system so there's an inconsistency here the way it's been explained to me i'm not saying i agree with it is those platforms have such reach that they now need to have some process by which they've vanquished people so if alex jones is vanquished seems like a reasonable thing to do if you were running a private business if you're having a dinner party or you know you might not want him there you might not want him on your platform you know pretending that parents whose kids have been murdered were actors crisis actors like this is dark stuff so um that's the reason they want to hold youtube facebook specifically those two platforms accountable for when they ban what they believe conservative views from the platform that's that's what that's all about and that's why and that's always been like an issue for them since trump got banned across it um i do think it would be better hygiene for these platforms i don't know the government has to be involved if they just said if there was a process by which they adjudicated these cases that would probably be good but honestly if you're if youtube suddenly banned my account i guess i could sue them but it's a private business and that's not going to work so um yeah i i kind of believe in the free market and if people don't like how facebook runs it they could be on twitter and x and twitter and x are the and reddit are allow pseudonyms linkedin doesn't facebook doesn't instagram does like you could have all different options out there for people but this is like a pet peeve of the republicans and conservatives and i understand why they have that position and here's how they i feel like slightly like i'm walking into like uh like upside downville because for people are like oh my god i'm so glad that rfk is going to lead hhs because he's going to get the chemicals out of our foods i'm like bro when i was growing up that was the crunchiest liberal position that was the tivo wearing patchouli oil you know and i'm like what's going on dippy thing like yeah my mom would not buy red dye yellow red and yellow dye number five my mom would not allow us to have eat any of that and now that's a republican position and republicans are certainly the union and the working man and hispanic immigrants like that's their audience so congrats way way to have the biggest open tent and now we're seeing on the democratic side they're like you know what we need to open this tent up aoc is taking her pronouns out and saying like maybe we should be more reasonable so but the funny thing is when we talk about the eu and we talk about the eu on this show on a regular basis and just you have said you know more regulatory focus less free market but they have a thing called the uh very large online platforms threshold which brings on another set of regulation that impacts those platforms this is a bugaboo of american technology but here we have the guy who's going to run the fcc seemingly endorsing per your view a relatively similar setup and i'm just kind of like what this is why it's intellectually inconsistent and you're right to point it out and it's it's an important discussion because this is a nuanced discussion if a bakery doesn't want to make a cake for a gay couple um yeah that's abhorrent and i'm not for it but i understand if they were like devout christians or catholics this might you know be against you know their religious beliefs okay we give a pretty wide berth for people to have those beliefs even if you don't like them um and you can go to the bakery next door there is no when you talk when if you get banned from facebook the app store youtube and previously twitter you're basically gone you are out of all i mean you could pop up a website which alex jones did but i don't know if you remember for like two or three years and i know that some people on the left love this donald trump milo yiannopoulos alex jones they were just kind of out of the zeitgeist that noise those individuals were not part of the public square now is that fair or not i don't mind racist lunatic uh offensive people being on my social network because i can block them or ignore them where i can't and i don't mind them being on my radio either because i can change the dial i'm i'm pretty hardcore for the free speech here but um i am too which is why i'm i'm just again like other things carl is talking about include like letting people um empower consumers to choose their own content filters like i'm kind of in favor of that but again absolutely i've that's been my position from the beginning which is let let people pick their algorithm when you go if you use an algorithm i believe that's an editorial decision and i think if you use an algo that should break your 230 protection unless unless your algorithm is transparent and when you load tiktok youtube twitter whatever it says we are going to give you this you can choose between these three algorithms educational enriching most popular or let it rip you know like or none and i just want my reverse chronological feed i'll build my own feed that should be how this works i believe if you want to keep section 230 but that's not the pro the pro business viewpoint is that companies should be allowed to set this up as they think is the most profit seeking yeah and we're talking here about really telling companies how to run their business.

48:10And it's wrapped in this idea of, oh no, conservative speech is being censored. But to me, it's just the same substance with a different sauce. And so like, this is why I know I want to make this very clear. Free speech is a nonpartisan issue because both of the American political parties love to beat the drum about free speech. And then when it's inconvenient, pretend that their inconsistencies don't exist. So don't trust anybody on free speech except for yourself because this stuff drives me literally bonkers because i'm much like yourself jason one of our biggest intellectual agreements is free speech and no one in the american spectrum is is good here and it's frustrating to me yeah i mean i love the fact that x is a great you know platform for free speech my experience has been degraded in there because of it because people feel very free to say really gnarly stuff in my replies and i have to do a lot more scrubbing and blocking and i and i you know don't enjoy my experience on x as much on a day-to-day basis as somebody with a big following because it's just a little bit gnarly my i mean if you look at my replies people are pretty pretty brutal and and it's like psychologically you know i'm a i'm a pretty resilient happy guy but looking at 50 comments every time you tweet something that are like you're an idiot with tds it's just like well i used to enjoy the conversation here and i used to have like a thoughtful conversation and now it's just and it's the same with threads i go over to threads i say something and i get every liberal friend of mine who's like why are you here i'm like sorry i didn't mean to i didn't realize that exclusive dinner party or what um let's touch on tiktok really quickly because i want to get to the censorship thing and stick on that theme from the uk perspective but jason brendan carr uh i would say on the on the far extremes of anti-tiktok agitation personally i agree with him i think his comments on the show about how they've repeatedly not shown their trustworthy data make a lot of sense um and i'm in favor of divestment or banning tiktok so here's my question that i have for the world not for you but just for everybody trump is going back on his tiktok stance and has very publicly and here we we have brendan carr who is uh on the other side so i'm gonna be curious to see how that tension is resolved i would watch that one yeah yeah that's the one to watch because jeff yas reportedly made a big donation to a super pack he's a big shareholder private equity guy in tiktok trump was obviously had the position to ban it divest it whatever then he flipped hey tiktok's very popular it's a great service all of those things can be true at the same time i kind of have the inside skinny on this i think i think i have enough information to know what's going on here all the shareholders want to maximize their profit like any shareholder does in tiktok of course they secretly want it divested they don't have the leverage to force china to do that so what would be the logical thing it would be for there to be this tension to get the company public to allow them to sell their shares and to not have it be banned to satisfy you know not having an adversary have something as powerful as tiktok under their control to be abused at the same time being able to sell your shares that's kind of what they're vying for i think and so it looks weird to us okay and this is like 4d chess but wouldn't you it'd be kind of like you have to sell all your shares right now at the peak it's like oh oh no oh this is brutal right okay fine i'll divest you know it's like pretty great to divest and get your cash out of this thing that's that's the key thing because if you have shares in bite dance as jeff yes jeff yoss is it yoss yes anyways that i think yoss y-a-s-s i think yeah probably yoss you're right anyways he's got bite dance shit and you know what's really hard to do in china jason is get your money out so if there's a forced divestment you get a chunk of the equity suddenly it's liquid that makes more sense to me than arguing the bite dance side of things here also we'll have to see a conflict between trump's general china hawkishness hawkishness and uh the tiktok issue so quite a lot to say there um we'll be watching that space now uk censorship you asked me a question jason said out have people been arrested for social media posts in the uk and the answer is yes they have and i i have i have the examples here if you want me to run through what happened and what please because this is something that i keep seeing on twitter people discussing these knocks at your door in the uk you said something on twitter that was spicy or facebook or wherever and the police show up to talk to you about it now we're not talking about a threat like a bomb threat we all know that that's you know in the united states or uk no bueno you're gonna you're gonna rightfully get a knock on your door and get arrested for putting in a bomb threat we're talking about somebody saying i don't like x type of people or x people should get out of my country that is hate speech or it's offensive speech and you and i would never say it but you know, it is free speech and it's a different level of speech in the UK.

53:42So I've been hearing over and over again from people from the UK. I was on this trigger nometry podcast and they were telling me it was true. And I was like, can I get some examples of this? Cause I, I see people saying it, but I haven't seen the example. So I'm very happy that you did the work for us. Okay. So the first person, according to the UK police, the first conviction for posting online in relation to the public disorder was Jordan Parler, age 28, jailed for 20 months, after pleading this is the guardian summary after pleading guilty to inciting racial hatred with facebook posts in which he advocated an attack on a hotel in leeds as part of the violent public desert that swept england at the time so the other guy that was um brought to the police in the same time period was uh tyler k 26 and um he called for mass deportation and for people to be set fire in the hotels that they were housing asylum seekers and here is one of the tweets set fire to all the hotels full of the for all i care if that makes me racist so be it so in both cases here it was not just saying i don't like italian people pick an example yeah it was much more an incitement to violence now there are a handful of other examples but all of this boils down to critically the public order act of 1986 over in the uk okay two key sections section 19 section 21 both of which say that a person is guilty if they intend to stir up racial hatred in their either distributed written material or recorded content.

55:15So quite literally in the UK, since 1986, you could get in trouble for inciting racial hatred. But as we said, this is the first time a digital example that has been brought to bear. And it was, I think, much more about an incitement to violence versus hatred. And that's the distinction and why I'm not freaking out about this, because I think my free speech absolutum ends when someone says we should burn their hotel down. okay yeah we all everybody i think a hundred percent of people are going to say threatening to burn a hotel down with or without like the actual intent to do it is problematic to say the least because if you say that and a mentally ill person says oh yeah i agree and then they go do it you in fact incited it now you could say the person is mentally ill but you do have to be thoughtful about these things and you know what uh this could happen here in the united states where if you make a threat against the president and threatened harm violence the secret service does visit you and they did visit um who was the comedian who had like a trump beheaded trump head and she held it up remember that yes but they also went to eminem's house um he he actually rapped about this and then and he had to say no i was talking about trump um using words not actions i i'm butchering the the lyrics quote there but this does so we have an equivalent here if you threaten violence against the president you or and i wonder if that goes to other elected officials i think it does if you threaten violence against an individual you can get a knock on your door so this example i think we would agree probably should get a knock on your door probably should have it taken down i don't know in this country if you would actually go to jail for that or not.

57:07So the critical difference between the UK and the US is that hate speech in the US is protected. Hate speech, as we noted in the UK law, is not. But where the two legal codes, and Jason, I'm not a lawyer, I did my best research here, so if we get this wrong, please let us know. But the difference here is that the similarity is that there's a concept of true threats in the US. So when your speech becomes a true threat, then you lose, according to the Supreme Court, your First Amendment protections. And that's why in the case that we described of people saying, let's burn down that hotel, to me, that does constitute a true threat.

57:45And I think this is one of those examples when it's very easy to say, oh, someone did a bad tweet in the UK, it's censorship. But a lot of the rules that have been put into place in the last couple of years in the UK to crack down on protesting and so forth have come under the Conservative Party. So keep in mind, this is also not entirely a partisan issue. but i think the u.s is a better system i think you should be allowed to say whatever you want i also think people should be allowed to respond and not invite you to their party if they so desire it would be interesting to see if a comedian like dave chappelle etc who frequently goes into comedy that might include ethnicities or gender or sexuality uh sexual preference etc all these identifiable groups i wonder if they would be arrested for doing that kind of comedy in a comedy club in the uk i really doubt it because i watch a lot of uk comedy and it's pretty rivaled at times interesting like if you watch question time or quite interesting or whatever there's a lot of stuff out there that's relatively i mean i would say that they're much more okay with making like um gay related jokes like not not uh homophobic jokes but jokes that might be considered to be on the margins in the u.s seem to be more tolerated uh but there's a joke about muslims or islamic immigration maybe not as much so uh i wonder if that is the case there anyway we we are neophytes in this we've started researching it please let us know if there's other tweets and examples because we have but one tweet that we've now shown if this is actually a very persistent thing i would like to see the 10 tweets and talk about each one of them um and how the law works there uh but there's one more example i'll just throw it in because for the sake of completeness so there was a 25 year old man nathan thompson from a place called newcastle upon tyne which is the best name for a town i've ever heard in my life well newcastle yeah very famous yeah well but upon time like it's like boring time yeah like why are you doing it like that um he got uh 16 months um i think suspended sentence for a series of offensive tweets he quote um according to a local news report celebrated adolf hitler nazi germany nazi germany white supremacist mass murders and promoted extremist right-wing material he's not going to prison but he did get in trouble um and i think under the uk's law as we have read it here on the show that would be illegal but again a 1986 law this is not something that was past in the last 20 minutes to make conservatives feel bad yeah so yeah it's an interesting um interesting situation i i don't have enough information on it it's great that we're getting educated on it and by the way like in germany and france i've talked about this before there are specific laws just about nazi memorabilia and you know hitler and all this kind of stuff because hey they've got a lot of trauma and and a lot of history there and they've written specific laws on selling of nazi propaganda i remember the yahoo auction site got in trouble for having people sell nazi memorabilia you know which in the united states would be totally fine and so there's a big question about that kind of stuff and even buying a leene riefenstahl film when i was getting into my film hour and i was thinking i was going to be a director i had read her i read a biography of her the wonderful horrible life of leanie riefenstahl and i was fascinated like she was this incredible director who i was kind of going down the rabbit hole of kurosawa and uh his influence on george lucas and then i found out that leanie riefenstahl had had an influence on george lucas as well and if you look at all the the stormtroopers and all those scenes they're actually scenes from a film triumph of the will which i i think i either bought or i rented on netflix when it was like a mail-in service and i watched oh yeah and i was like watching i said wow this is fascinating it is just like star wars where the way they line up the platoons of stormtroopers is literally and stormtroopers obviously relating to uh nazi stuff so it's very interesting um these laws and we'll keep monitoring them if you have any information on it you know he's alex on twitter and x and i'm at jason so just mention us the other examples because i think one of the things that's weird here is a lot of times when these things happen they don't share the tweets for some reason i don't understand that but i think that's a big part of this is understanding what the posts were yeah uh versus talking about what they said what did they say yeah like i would like to see the actual tweet in question here like when you showed the one like burn down the building he's like i don't care if the building burns down kind of like putting it in a hypothetical like i get the sense that that guy knew he was doing something spicy and try to you know put a disclaimer on it yeah well yes right because in the language there he did say i don't care if the building burned down or something if i remember correctly what you just showed he didn't say i'd like to go burn the building down or you should go build the burning down he kind of put it in a hypothetical kind of situation i think in the uk they give you a little bit less of a yes you can claim you didn't know what you were doing defense defense and i think that's just a choice that they made but let's move on to um yeah another very important story uh jason someone that i think you probably know could be heading for uh status in the next administration as secretary of transportation leading the dot this is of course emile michael a former uber executive not someone that i know personally but just context for everybody was a longtime exec over at uber during the hyper growth years uh was often called travis kalanick's right hand man critically also previously considered for the role of secretary of transportation under the previous trump admin lost then to elaine chow but now is i think the top of the list jason to take on that role and quite a lot of folks in technology are very excited about this including elon musk derek ashwashahi um sarah goa we have some tweets but um i take it you know this guy yeah i know him really well he is an aggressive deal maker of deal makers um brought uh uber to the middle east and did a lot of the um great deals was travis's right hand man for a while and he would be extraordinary to have like a business executive in that position as opposed to just you know some wonk uh you know politician because i think he'd actually get stuff done he would look at something like high-speed rail or self-driving or vtols you know and obviously like the dot doesn't do everything and a lot of things are local versus you know like california's got their own rules about self-driving or whatever but just to have somebody and they obviously maintain their own disastrous high-speed rail boondoggle but you know it'd be great to have more people who could aggressively come in there and i think brendan carr falls into this although i don't know what brendan did before he was in there but i just think it's you know for all the drama around these trump appointments there are some that are bizarre whack pack bizarre selections legion of doom whatever in people's mind uh rightfully wrongfully whatever but i do see like little bits of hope of efficient people and again i said it at the top of the show you don't have to like trump to like the idea of less government and less spending and getting the budget under control that's my number one issue so i got to be intellectually consistent i think someone like emil going in brendan going in uh vivek you on you know those kind of folks are going to come in and cut things the size of things and make it more efficient so yeah hopefully and it has to be done thoughtfully you can't come in there it's not a private company it's not like elon going into twitter you can't just go in and just nuke stuff right there's going to be a process here and the machine's going to fight it you know you go in and you say uh i want you to give back this thing that's in the chips act right i think we talked about this last week i think you pointed it out like okay i fought for that i got a bunch of jobs for my constituents and now i'm giving it back like you might have republicans who are like yeah i'm not doing it i had a very small majority in the house they did a lot of votes then it's only a couple of senators so if you lose even a handful of folks because your thing's going to impact their district or their state it gets tough pretty quickly.

1:06:11Jason, just to make everyone sure everyone's aware of this, the DOT is the Federal Aviation Administration, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Federal Highway Administration, the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration. It's a lot of stuff. This is an agency with 55 ,000 people. So a good, interesting test will be to the efficiency and waste point, how many people are still at the DOT and how much has this budget changed from 88 billion in 2021 by the end of the trump administration and i'm curious to see how much waste there is inside of a more targeted agency number dot pick any agency what do you think the waste is if you had to pick a percentage number what could be cut is yeah an average no give me your average what do you think the average cuts that could be made on a percentage basis and have zero impact on the services they provide and in fact make them more efficient because you'd be cutting x percent of people who were just not super dynamic and qualified to be clear you're talking about the administrative costs not the disbursements of social security checks like the actual dollar amounts that go to medicaid recipients and so forth um i guess there's two questions there so let's go with the institutions how much waste is there in terms of their operations and then you know like welfare checks going out we know there's some amount of fraud or waste there but let's put that aside okay so then on the personnel side i bet if we could with a perfect laser point scalpel probably excise 35 of people without any dramatic loss but i literally said one third in my mind so we're exactly in sync one third could be cut and it would be just as good it would have no impact so if you can find the right people though and i'm worried that what we're going to do is we're going to use more of a meat cleaver yeah then a salad fork to make a culinary based analogy but you know here's what happens i watched elon do this up close and personal okay i was there for the first 30 days of the you know uh twitter takeover yeah my involvement has been way way overestimated by everybody they don't really talk about it because people then think i'm trading on elon's fame or his name or you know whatever i was asked to help out i helped out on the margins one of the things i noticed when elon did this was you know he was incredibly thoughtful of that while cutting it to save the company because the company was hemorrhaging cash and they were planning on their own riff one of the you know before he bought it they were going to cut a very significant amount of people like we saw google and microsoft and everybody else do shortly thereafter um he emailed everybody and said hey we've made these cuts if we made a mistake and you should be here and your job is critical and you think we made a mistake we're going to make mistakes so simply email me this is my email and the remaining team and explain to us why you should be back in the office this week you know and we made a mistake and we will give you your job back you literally said that to them and you know what happened some people did they said hey i do this mission critical thing i think you know community notes is really important and i think community notes was one of them where there were some cuts in community notes and you know what you see elon talking about community notes all the time it was like oh okay and remember the community notes team coming in and explaining to him why this was essential and elon immediately was like this is essential carry on right this should not be cut and you see community notes is super vibrant and elon talks about it all the time and it actually kind of works i i've been community noted a lot of time and i and i'm part of the community notes thing or i get asked to vote on it do you get asked to vote on it as well i don't and i'm i i pay i pay i think you have to go in there by the way and uh opt into being asked to rate it so go into next time you see it next time you see a community note click on it and apply to be in it because i think they want you to apply they don't want just randos going in there but enough it's really Do you think that approach applies to 55 ,000 people?

1:10:25Okay, so just to, again, I'm not trying to be a pest here, but just trying to understand. Yeah. So let's say, what was the number? Elon cut 80 % of Twitter stuff? Yeah. So here, if you cut 20 out of the DOT. Okay, if you cut 20 out of the DOT and then let people - But you said to them, hey, we have to do a reduction in force. We have to stop spending this much money. We've asked the managers. We looked at who's actually showing up for work. we're doing return to office if you don't want to return to the office you can opt out and you kind of gave people like hey um to the managers i need you to cut you have you know if you have 100 people in your department you need to get to 80 please give us your submission and then they let those people go and they said to the 80 remaining hey with these they email those hey listen you've been let go but if you think you shouldn't have been like oh let us know why yeah write us a letter and three more three of them did it and they came back great so now you're at 83 and you save the american taxpayers 17 of the budget great 17 of the personnel budget and that's that's the thing that i think that people are slightly overestimating is how much money we spend on salaries versus programs and i you know i mean jason if we ran that playbook exactly across the federal government and we got rid of 17 so 83 stayed and 17 left across every department i don't think it would add up to a material sum against our outlays and it would be a start i'll take a start i'm here i mean i think you have to ask yourself if every administration adds eight nine trillion more dollars in debt if this one went sideways and added nothing that would be a huge win let alone if we could cut five ten percent a year for if we cut five percent a year you know somehow we could magically do that i mean that would be a miracle if we started paying down our debt oh my god what an amazing this is the this is the place where i resemble a goddamn reagan clone like this is this is my thing that i'm terrified about yeah but i i just think that we're talking about smaller potatoes and extending tax cuts when there is a multi-trillion dollar lever in not extending the tax cut and jobs act and to me it's a little bit wild that we're we're focusing on haircuts versus decapitations you know uh my guess is you you might not believe this but trump at times can be hyperbolic no yeah just buckle up for a second here sometimes he'll say things that are way hyperbolic and he'll say he wants to deport 15 million people and then he'll deport 150 000 felons criminals or in jail who never had their citizenship to begin with so i have a feeling it's like kind of one of these things hey we're going to make these massive cuts if they just froze spending and then made five percent cuts every year for four years that would compound to like a pretty significant turnaround since clinton balanced the budget and had a surplus so anyway i'm rooting for all the emile michaels yeah and emile michaels awesome so and you cannot like trump and like some of the appointments and i was about to argue it so one of the news stories that just came out it's a bloomberg piece came out yesterday that quote trump team is seeking to ease u.s rules for self-driving cars and if you were going to pick somebody to take point on that i think emil michael will be a pretty sure fit given that his time at uber self-driving cars and so forth and so here's a place i'll do it if the trump administration makes it easier to have steering wheel and pedal free self-driving cars i will give them five points awesome great so i mean this is and also a message to my liberal friends who are freaking out about all this he won he has a mandate he won by three million votes he won all three branches they get to give it a shot so support them and hold them accountable you can do both those things support them yes and hold them accountable the end we always have to do this when a Republican wins, but when a Democrat wins, Mitch McConnell doesn't let an outgoing, you know, Republican president nominate Supreme Court justices.

1:14:54So I'll take that if you can get your friends to agree to it too. In the meantime, I would like them to do that, yeah. Well, I'm not going to unilaterally disarm myself, I guess, but in a perfect world, yeah, hell yeah, I agree with that, because it would be lovely if we could all succeed together. But the Democrats, when's the last time the Democrats had all three branches? Did they have that recently? Early Obama, right? I guess, yeah. it's been a minute uh there was an interesting question that came out by the way i don't know this question here um hunter freeman says bike dance valuation still rising with lumen u.s restrictions why why is this happening what do you think i think why would this valuation go up i think the business is good and i think that there's also a slight reflation and excitement for technology products in china i think the government there realizes that they crack down way too hard on tech post Jack Ma making the most anodyne common critical of regulation of all time.

1:15:48And I think they're trying to reinflate the animal spirits and Jason, I'm not quite sure that's going to be possible. Um, and here's a chart showing, uh, changes to, uh, Biden's worth over time, as you can see, went up, went back down is coming back up again, but I think it's a solid business. Um, I think even a divestment of TikTok, they'd retain some equity ownership. So I can perceive it all going well for them. And frankly, China will always be a place where investors are willing to place bets, even with the issues, just because as Jason noted earlier in the show, the market's so big. Yeah.

1:16:16And what I would say here is the market is also pricing in a resolution. Yeah. So too big to ban would be, yeah, too big to ban. Yeah. Yeah. It's the too big to fail version, but it's the social media equivalent of it. You know, Jason, I got to say, I think this show today was reasonably upbeat. Look at us. Absolutely. Yeah. why not i mean listen again for people who are freaked out not saying you don't have a reason to be freaked out but uh let's be supportive of things we agree with and you should be vigilant about things you disagree with i think somebody should create a website of um all of the things trump promised if you like this would be like a really interesting thing to do with politicians and i haven't seen this done by like an independent person but this would be like a startup idea i would actually back if somebody just put quotes of everything a politician promise and then uh track them over time so kamala if she had one promised that 25 000 down payment right uh and she promised like some startup funding for african-american men okay great like put those things down let's track them over time the same thing for trump if trump said he's going to deport 15 million the largest deportation ever put that down uh and then if jd said hey we're going to do it one bite at a time like a sandwich we're going to take the felons out okay put that down as well put the quote to when they said it put the date put how many days it's been automatically and then track their progress and then you could actually give i don't know a scorecard but at least you could track these in a reasonable way and i don't know why that doesn't exist like so politified i just found this we can i'll throw it up on the uh who is politifact they get a lot of political fact is that a private organization is it uh from a university i don't know who runs politifact so here is the biden promise tracker now i don't know if they're gonna do the same thing for trump but it does keep tabs on what they've done and jason you're making a good point how partisan are they how not partisan are they how good of a job do they do on actually vetting these things um but you can definitely see that oh here it is it's it's run by the pointer institute ofst petersburg florida so that would be left-leaning i guess politifact is an american non-profit project operated by pointer institute they're like the um uh yeah there are what i do like here is the uh they really break down sources ownership how they approach things like i don't mind if someone is left or right leaning if they tell me how they approach data and making decisions because then i can i'm an adult i can bet from there you know yeah awesome uh all right what an episode uh we got a big lots of stuff on the docket for the rest of the week he's alex i'm jason uh send us your ideas for news stories and if you know who the main character is at the moment oh do we have nvidia earnings this week what's in the earnings of nvidia earnings this week i'm behind on my economic calendar work because i had a spit up a baby last night but um we will have all earnings coverage that's critical on the show we're going to do just the companies that are the most importance that are moving the markets right awesome so let's uh put that on the dock and then i know there's a lot of ipo action going on so let's go through that uh and we'll see you all next time bye bye bye everybody