TWiST News: Reddit Earnings, Apple Intelligence, and more AI money | E2041

0:00this is the new uh i got the mac mini because i've always loved mac minis isn't it satisfying when you open a mac product they make this i don't know if you know this but they work on that sound you just heard so that was the sound of me opening that box that the mini came in and that sound when you open it is designed to let that puff of air out and then this is supposed to be another this um paper that they put on top of your device or the film they'll put on top of it that's also designed in the unboxing experience to have a sound associated with it do you hear that yeah it's so satisfying this week in startups is brought to you by runway looking to up level your financial planning runway is the modern and intuitive way to model plan and align your business for everyone on your team sign up at runway.com twist to get your first three months free linkedin ads to redeem a 100 linkedin ad credit and launch your first campaign go to linkedin.com slash this week in startups.

1:08And 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 SOC to report fast. Twist listeners can get$1 ,000 off for a limited time at vanta.com slash twist. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to this week in startups. I'm here with my co-host Alex Wilhelm. He is Alex on Twitter or x.com i am at jason x.com slash jason x.com slash alex he writes a newsletter it's called cautious optimism cautiously optimistic what it help me out this branding is always getting me i'm gonna get a sign behind me that it says it out loud idea i wouldn't be better than well cautiously optimistic cautious optimism cautious optimism because i the problem is i'm used to saying i'm cautiously optimistic but it's cautious optimism.news is your newsletter yes sir people can sign up for this and it's great because alex is researching the industry every day with his daily email if you get it you're kind of getting either what we talked about on yesterday's show mentioned or perhaps a peek at what will be on the next day's show so it's a nice compliment to the pod uh we have a big docket today this big docket energy let's just i mean we could sit here and talk about trump we could talk about the election or we can just get back to tech news i say we just get back to it i'm totally totally here for that yeah but jason my question is where do you want to start we have a feast in front of us so pick a course uh you give give me some choices here let's tell the audience what's on the docket and then we'll and then hey audience you can tell us always in the youtube if you don't subscribe to this week in startups on youtube go to this week in startups hit subscribe hit the bell monday wednesday fridays we're locking it in news at 12 p.m texas time which is 10 a.m pacific time silicon valley time and of course new york east coast time that's uh 1 p.m so you look for us right around that time today was 12 30 because i wanted to get a little extra into the docket uh but we're trying to lock into three days a week, Monday, Wednesday, Friday.

3:14And yeah, at that standard time. Yeah, absolutely. So on the show today, Jason, we have Apple Intelligence, Signal, and Consumer Privacy in the era of AI. Then we have notes on Reddit and Toast earnings from a product perspective. I love both of those. And Amazon might put more money into Anthropic. I have the information there. And also some notes about the future of AI regulation. And I know you just said no Trump, but if we have time, we can talk about tick tock and what might happen to the social media phenom in the new administration of course that's a great subject i think starting with this signal discussion uh obviously a lot of people are using signal to protect their privacy previously people use things like telegram or you know other messaging platforms but they generally don't have disappearing messages point-to-point encryption so signal is one of those great uh products that i think people trust now should you trust anything i don't trust anything i assume all my tweets all my texts will become tweets eventually and if you go through life like that you'll be in pretty good shape nothing i say in private group chats that's spicier maybe on the margins 10 spicier than what i say publicly it's a pretty good way to live but what i've heard on the back channels is on signal groups and other places people are saying hey apple intelligence has been reading me my messages if you use airpods do you have the latest airpods alex i don't have the latest airpods but i am now on ios 18.1 perfect so you have apple intelligence the latest airpods are amazing i've gone from pixel buds back to the airpods because of this reason uh for when i'm doing podcasts or listening otherwise i like to use my fancy focal uh batays you know really cool headphones that i have putting that aside i do like listening to my podcast and doing phone calls with these apple airpod fours they will read you your messages and it asks you alex sent a slack would you like to read it so instead of just reading it it asks you and the way you can fire it off is you just nod or you go like this so when i'm with my kids if i'm like you know i don't know i'm kind of chaperoning and they're playing with their friends or something i might have an airpod in well just one sometimes two and they're playing and they don't want me around or just you know i'm hovering around the periphery and i'll just nod and then i hear your message to me it started doing that for signal messages and so then people were like wait a second i see apple is listening on an operating system basis on your local phone to this and then people are now sharing the train apple intelligence screen so we should show people where this is on the phone hopefully we have that and the notes of which screen you go to to show how to turn this off but it was turned on by default is the claim of many people i can't remember if this is being turned on or turned off but let's pull up that screen that everybody's sharing so if we look at this alex it says learn from this app and then it says very tiny allow siri to learn from how you use signal to make suggestions across apps so it's studying your behavior of what you do in there okay you send to your group chat of your fraternity or sorority or your kids group a lot of kids groups in here uh you know for schools and then it says suggestions show on home screen suggest app suggest suggestion notifications allow suggestions and content from signal and shortcuts for the app to appear in search and in widgets these suggestions and shortcuts are based on how you use the app so this is a long-winded way of saying apple is now studying your use apple i think anticipated this but it has not stopped people from thinking this is a leak so take us through what the media coverage has been of this alex and apple's response to it because if i'm hearing about it in group chats over and over multiple times and i'm seeing it on reddit threads in cyber security forums and then apple has released a security paper on it there's something here and it's worth us meditating on yeah absolutely so people might recall we talked about this actually i think about a month ago jason this idea that apple intelligence was going to learn from you as you went through things and we were concerned about the privacy of it taught people how to turn it off i think the concern that people add here is that Apple was turning this on automatically for Signal if you turned on Apple Intelligence.

7:44And I think that's a mistake from a design perspective. The other thing that came out when I was prepping for the show is that a lot of people think that Apple has offered a reasonable set of privacy guidelines for their use of AI, which is on screen learning and so forth or on device learning. But people are still very concerned that some AI processing, if you will, some of this learning that Apple Intelligence wants to do will be done off device. Now, Now, this kind of boils down to how much do you trust Apple and how much do you trust their private cloud compute setup? Going through privacy-minded forums, talking to people about this, my impression is that Apple's setup is the gold standard for this type of technology.

8:24And I think that's where the media commentary has come from that you're asking about. And I think the media has been very positive about Apple's work here, but I don't think that general media privacy educational awareness is particularly high. and so i think apple's getting a lot of credit from the media for saying hey we're going to take a look at this we're going to be serious about it i don't think that's convinced the actual privacy advocates and i think that's why it's showing up in your group texts and also over on you know the defcon side of reddit for example okay so uh what that means net net is apple has said so to translate a little bit of this into plain english if i'm understanding correctly there is a private cloud that apple is using and then there's your phone they are contending apple um that all of this processing is happening primarily on your phone so if it's learning about how you use signal and it's reading to you your messages from signal that's occurring on your phone which is yours which is encrypted which even apple can't get to yes but but there might be times when they have to go to the cloud and when they go to the cloud they are claiming that they have a private cloud to do this and they've released the paper we'll put that paper in the show notes so to your point this comes down to do you trust apple and their approach to ai i would not trust as but one example google i wouldn't trust because i think they've used data before to kind of market ads so i would be very concerned with google because of what happened with incognito mode as well sure where people at google used to joke like incognito mode is not incognito and then i wouldn't trust open ai as well because i think they're kind of cutthroat reputation wise but i might actually trust apple hey founders let me ask you a question do you know how much money your startup has at this very moment or do you know how next year's hiring is going to impact your burn rate if not you're stuck in spreadsheet how i know it i've been there and it's super risky So let me tell you about this amazing software I just discovered called Runway.

10:49Runway. Like how much Runway do you have for your startup? It connects all your data sources, obviously your bank, obviously your accounting, but also your HR software, your CRM, all of it. And then once you have all that data, it's going to help you model your finances in plain English so you always know where your business stands and you can just crush those board meetings. You never look foolish trying to find information. You're the pilot of this startup. And when you go in to the cockpit, you want the pilot to be able to tell you the airspeed. They want to tell you your altitude, etc. It's complicated, but Runway makes it all super simple.

11:26It's not just finance and a bunch of P &Ls. It's actually data you can use. And customers like Superhuman, AngelList, 818 Tequila, and Revenue Cat love this product. So just because you're a startup doesn't mean you can run your accounting on the back of a napkin. If you want a personalized demo, I want you to head over to runway.com. What a great domain name, runway.com slash twist. And they're going to give you three months free right now. It's an awesome product. I wish all of my startups used it, honestly, because then we would know exactly how much runway we have. If you know your runway and you know all your data cold, you can just make better decisions.

12:03And that's what we all want to do is make the best decisions we can with the best software and the best information we have. Go visit runway.com slash twist. So I think the delineation between advertising focus companies, i.e. Google meta, for example, makes a lot of sense. I agree with you on open AI. Apple has made such a push, though, about being the privacy first provider for mobile operating systems and hardware for so long that they should have pretty good consumer trust here. But I don't think that's enough to make us feel good. So I guess the way that I'm going to approach this, Jason, after going through my settings today and tinkering with it is that for all my messaging apps, I'm just going to have Apple intelligence turned off, period.

12:41But I don't actually care if Apple intelligence knows what I use in Google Maps because it might help me get places faster. So I think that's where I'm willing to give up a little bit of my privacy ethos, if you will, for convenience. but if you're going to use signal which is as you said indian encrypted and very well known for that i just don't understand why you would want to give any technology company even one as high-minded as apple might be access to that information it just doesn't feel right well and i think the hacker community is maybe they're going to fall on the side of turning this off and there was one interesting comment on hacker news um hacker news uh news at y combinator.com sometimes you'll get you know some really thoughtful people who either work at apple or have worked there or worked at these big tech companies or compete against them and there was some commentary about it's not transparent or the person said it's in transparent uh nobody knows what apple is doing in terms of sending stuff up to the cloud or processing it local so i think that would actually be interesting if it actually told you hey we're sending this up to the cloud to actually work on it we're not or if there was a way to say i don't want to you know as great as computing can be i just don't want to send my stuff up to the cloud and i think this is going to be the major vector that now people are going to have to contend with if you have an ai on your phone built into the operating system or built into your desktop as microsoft and apple are doing as well and you can download chat gpt's mac app and it will watch your screen and we've seen claude can you know take over your browser it's going to know everything you're doing on your computer and sending some amount of that up to a cloud which means it could be intercepted so it's almost like we've all got a keystroke logger watching us now and the idea is the i mean I'm starting to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but in order for AI to do its job, it's going to have to study you on your computer.

14:47And so you should be thinking everything I do on my computer is now being watched by AI. If you turn it on, you can turn Apple intelligence off, for example, and you can even turn off Siri. So you can kind of go back to a phone if you want, but I think it's pretty clear from the trajectory of these products that they are going to get built into to the browser at every level and your phone and your desktop OS and so forth. What I would like here, Jason, is if Apple would allow me to have my own private cloud compute set up. Like if there was an Alex version of that, that I could pay for, I could approve queries going up and down.

15:22I'd feel okay-ish about that. But a nebulous quote-quote private cloud somewhere else, some of my AI work going off device just doesn't sit well with me. But I wonder how much of this is just you and I and people that we know in the technology world thinking about this versus the average person. I pulled just some fun data and I looked at Google Trends. And if you look at searches for Apple Intelligence and Perplexity, this smaller AI search engine that's a startup, they're actually about even in terms of total searches right now in the US. And by that, I mean, people aren't searching for Apple Intelligence.

15:57They're not really looking for it. So I think the average consumer is going to turn it on and forget about it. So interest over time, there was a spike in Apple intelligence. That must have been the keynote. Everybody must have Googled it. And then it came back down and perplexity. Yeah, slowly, I guess people are interested in it. But this shows the two consumer products have no, these two consumer products have no traction. I guess putting it up against chat GPT would be another interesting vector. I bet you ChatGPT is going to spike against this, which means they are the leading consumer brand by far.

16:33For sure. But what's amazing to me is Apple has the hardware. And Apple has such an enormous megaphone in the press. They have an enormous ad budget. They're talking about Apple intelligence. And it's getting the search volume of perplexity, which is just a startup. One that's growing quickly. Shout out to them. Not trying to diss. But there's a difference in scale between perplexity and Apple. And so I was shocked to see how little interest Apple intelligence is getting. but i do think as well one last thing if apple's going to be serious about ai it's going to have to resolve these tensions because the technologists are the power users they buy the expensive phones expensive laptops and they don't want to give up on privacy or even give a little bit and so i think this is you know going to be a recurring topic for consumer and enterprise hardware for the next 10 years probably frankly yeah so what you can see here is uh let me do uh Yeah, 12 months.

17:23Let's see 12 months. As you can see, ChatGPT has massive interest over time, and these two are just a little blip. You know the best part of that chart, Jason, is you can see summer. You can literally see students leaving school, and then you can see them going back to school. Fascinating. If you put it at five years, we'll see the inception of ChatGPT. There it is. Wow. It's like nobody's interested in it. Also, all-time high. look at look at right now that is not a lower peak that is a higher peak yeah that is that's impressive and that's why open ai is worth 157 billion and perplexity is worth possibly nine yeah uh interesting under yeah that is um pretty amazing if i've never seen a consumer product like grow that violently um if i were to remove these two and then add another product that consumers love like bitcoin oh okay see yeah so this is super interesting this is an interesting way for people to understand technology trends is with google trends you see this massive spike uh if you remember maybe uh in the 2020s people like forgot about bitcoin that had that big rally in peak zirp came back down and uh you know it's kind of locked into a small group of people and then you could add to this uh something like airbnb and be interesting to see like on a consumer product basically yeah that is not bullish for airbnb i'm not going to lie that is not this is people searching for research so i think what happens with certain trends is like you understand what airbnb is so this is only five years and when airbnb came out it probably spikes so in fairness to airbnb i think everything kind of settles in to most people know about a technology and then it doesn't come up as a trending topic anymore okay throw in uber then because i'm curious if that if that is a similar dynamic to it because i mean people use uber and airbnb you know all the time so let's see yeah see it's like super steady yeah last five years people know about these products so when something becomes a standard because this isn't showing searches just raw searches it's people searching for that term if you have uber on your phone you're not searching for uber anymore if you have an airbnb account you're not searching for it anymore what i think people are searching google for is things that they've heard about from a friend that they want to download and try oh okay okay so this is people that either downloading the app the first time or downloading it say again if they got a new device and had to replace their applications i think that's probably what's happening like when's the last time you search google for uber or airbnb or bitcoin you know probably you don't do those searches too often because you already you know have those products or services and have made a decision about them typically people are googling stuff and coming up in google trends when they're investigating something and so so by that logic then chat gpt given its enormous search share is still reaching a lot of net new people who are therefore doing early research about it that's crazy that's crazy i think that's what that shows yeah if you were to look at it um you know on its own is people are still looking at it also over time as people know about it have it bookmarked type it directly in and this relates to another story uh darmesh from hubspot the co-founder have bought chat.com and he's all pretty public about spending like 10 million on it um and then sam altman just tweeted chat.com and it resolved to judge gpt and i had said i think here are an all-in sergey should just buy chat.com and build a separate brand for their ai efforts or by genie.com or something but i just thought like get chat.com and buy it and i guess sam altman heard that news and did it himself what do you think he paid you have a guess i mean i would bet you a dollar it was a structure set up in some capacity i wonder if dharmash is trying to milk this for like equity down the road because he's a smart guy i've met him we all know hubspot would he rather have a check or some stock so that's yes that's why he's already made a ton of money i would think he wants upside i would take it all i would take it all in like low cost warrants or margin or something but what a great purchase and also i wanted to show you i i just got something uh unboxing videos now coming to twist this is the new uh i got the mac mini because i've always loved mac minis and the fastest mac you can buy is now isn't it satisfying when you open a mac product they make this i don't know if you know this but they work on that sound that you just heard so that was the sound of me opening you know the case of the that box that the mini came in and that sound when you open it is designed to let that puff of air out and then this is supposed to be another this um paper that they put on top of your device or the film they'll put on top of it that's also designed in the unboxing experience to have a sound associated with it do you hear that yeah it's so satisfying yeah but supposedly this five inch i think it's five inch by five inch by two inch is now the most powerful mac you can buy that is insane to me and so impressive also it's just a gorgeous okay i love the brushed aluminum look to it i love the shape of it i've also i've always been a mac mini fan and i'm very jealous that you have one and i do not um they start at 599 which makes it i think the cheapest way to get into mac os now and you can put it on any monitor so yeah you know that's i think one of the magical things about this is dell makes much better monitors than apple makes at a much better value you can buy a 50 inch dell for the same price as a 27 inch apple monitor and the dell ones much better in my experience so i'm going to put this on the dell 50 inch and then see how it plays but i i do think this could be um apple's best product of the last couple years i think that's that's uh that's pretty mean to the apple vision pro jason um yeah i i think apple needs to get more entry-level computing products in the market so So I think that's a way for them to just sweep up more users and tip over into a significant amount of desktops from Windows.

24:07And lower price entry points for college kids, for families. It's just such a good idea. Hard to agree there. Also, I just want to say that I recently experienced the Apple unboxing setup because I had to buy a new iPhone because I knew Apple intelligence was going to come up on the show again. So I went out and got myself a 16 Pro Max. You leapfrogged me. Yeah. So here it is. I'm back on top. And I was so thankful because today you're like Apple intelligence. And I was like, see, I bought a phone because I knew it was going to be back on the show. And I didn't want to tell you twice that I was running an iPhone 11.

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26:18Okay, let's talk about Toast. So Boston-based company, everybody, you may recall from its 2020 kind of like, oh God, COVID hit restaurant business to 2021 IPO. Jason, what I find great about this company though, is how multi-part it is. And this is one of my favorite parts of its S1 through to today. So if you don't know, Toast doesn't just offer swipes. It doesn't just offer payment, what are they called? POSs, point of sale terminals. It offers a suite of software products. It offers payments, other fintech offerings like loans, and it also makes hardware as well. So it's a really cool kind of multi-part business, and it's crushing the world right now.

26:58It's a very cool product. And I always like to think about, you know what are the product lessons here toast has uh 189 million dollars in services and subscriptions up from 131 million in q3 of 2023 so they're cruising into you know they'll be at a billion at some point right they'll hit 250 million next year and they'll be at a billion dollar run rate and it's a really interesting sas product because you have point of sale um as a category pretty well-known category right sure but once you have a restaurant then you have to think well what do i do next what do i do next so people come to the counter but people also sit at tables so if you've ever been to a table during covid toast lets you scan the menu order an individual item and then open or close your tab and so there was a great in san mateo i used to go to when i lived in the valley i would go to this awesome um beer garden and you know i could order a schnitzel you know or fries or whatever for my guard for my daughters but if they wanted more i could just order that one dish without having to talk to the waiter and i said wow this is an incredible company i got to go invest in it they wound up going public i never invested in it yeah but then i started drilling down into it and they found another use case one is managing online menus and you start thinking about like all the places your menu signs up now so they do menu management as a vertical then you have employees and employees get tips as we all know and europeans make fun of us like they flip over you know the device in their hands when you're paying by tap and they say oh it's going to ask you a couple questions yes you know that awkward moment where now your tip the person is standing over you watching you give the tip i mean this is like one of the weirdest um uh manners and morals and you know weird ux decisions ever i wonder if tipping's gone up or not um i have a story about that actually so on the tipping front um a well-known venture capitalists jason who you would probably be on a first name basis with i was talking to them i'm just going to keep them anonymous because they were just talking to me about this uh their daughter works uh over the summer at an ice cream stand one of those seasonal things that they pop up and he told me that they switched from cash to cards and people then switch from paying from cash to cards and they have the same terminals they turn around you can tip and this guy told me that his daughter has seen her tips fall apart and i that blew my eyes i did so much more with my card because i just tap and then i hit 20 and i move on with my life but that that story shocked me so i would have said i bet tips are way up but i'm not sure it's true in every case well what this point of cell system does is it also manages hr and it manages splitting of tips and so the reason i bring all this up and i thought it'd be an interesting discussion for us is sas companies have this major problem right headwinds etc and then there's a really interesting concept here that founders have to deal with all the time do i build the next adjacency or do i make the current product better and the answer is yes yes and it's just how often do you add an extra product and what's your product velocity and this is why as investors i've trained our team at launch to really look at product velocity how quickly do products get shipped and then how what quality do they get shipped at and if you can ship reasonably good products and features at a really good cadence you're going to beat everybody around you and i think this company is doing pretty well it's got a 21 billion dollar valuation right yeah my ballpark correct yep now Now, they are at ballpark 750 million a year in revenue.

31:03So this is a really, really juicy valuation. Am I correct? Oh, you're a little bit low because that's just their subscription revenue. That's the software side of it. On the fintech side, Jason, which is payments and so forth, they did over a billion in revenue in Q3 alone. So they get a percentage of that? Yeah. So they take a fee and a cut of payments that they facilitate through their terminal. now it's hard to chase down the exact pricing i try to for us but i believe it's set at a custom rate for each uh individual company that they work with so it's hard to tell exactly what that costs but the the fintech side of the business is the majority revenue driver on it but it's lower margin than software revenue right so i'm guessing that billion is their take so that makes more sense to me and then they have 50 million in hardware sales this quarter so if you were to put those three numbers together then their valuation is uh if they're at 1.25 billion they're making what is that six billion a year uh in five billion a year run rate five billion a year yeah they're doing four times top line revenue that makes much more sense to me and i'm guessing they're profitable or close to it yeah just a dps was a little bit low in their most recent quarter um but the company is uh profitable enough that no one's worried about it given its growth rate I don't think they're enormously profitable on a gap basis, Jason, but I don't think they're being judged on a gap basis, just to be clear.

32:23The thing that blows my mind, though, is Toast's business is growing very, very quickly. It added 7 ,000 restaurants last quarter. They're expanding not just into things like menus and so forth, Jason, but into a capital program. They have now set up to help you handle your payroll if you're a restaurant. So they are going very, very deep on this vertical and adding adjacent verticals like hotels and so forth. all of that gross payment volume about 24 revenue growth was very very solid and they're worth 4x revenue it's i'm such an idiot because i was talking about this company when it was at you know 15 a share now it's 36 i really have to do more public market trading um i don't know if this is a good deal or not right now but uh and i don't want to give any financial advice but i think this company is a really good example of relentlessly adding features that delight customers that lock them in so there's multiple reasons to add additional features one of the reasons is if you keep adding features it's hard to rip a system out and so once you use slack as an example and slack costs uh i don't know 15 bucks a month per person 10 bucks a month per person depending on which program you got you got a 30 person company you're spending 4 000 a year it's like not that much money there's free versions or there's a hundred dollar version you could download or a 99 a 999 dollar one you could pay one time for sure there's plenty of competitors to it but if you're getting enough value and it's got enough hooks into it where you've got enough things feeding into it and you like to use huddles or you like to use their i don't know remind you features ripping all that stuff out becomes very expensive so there's two really important piece of advice here one you have to nail your core product which for them is the point of sale system but once you have you have to get really good at having multiple teams attack other verticals and then you can look at your competitors and whatever they're charging for you can just abstract and put into your product for free in zoom another perfect example of doing this they added transcripts and they added chat rooms like slack they edit automatic transcripts and automatic summaries and so doing that over time makes your product more defensible and if you have it all comes down to product velocity so one of the key key key aspects of being a great startup and we're here on this week in startups and we're talking about a large public company is can you go fast can you go into demon mode as elon says can you hit speed and iteration and just release new products that are solid at a regular cadence and if you do venture capitalists really like that and of course you have to turn them off sometimes if they actually don't but when you look at toast's offering now they also allow you to manage into toast all of the orders from doordash and uber eats so again one system of record and they just keep adding those features squarespace uh product i love does this as well they keep adding features so they added e-commerce and selling subscriptions on their product, SEO, metrics.

35:33So you don't have to buy the second, third, fourth product. And these platform companies always do better than vertical companies, but vertical companies and having a beachhead where you can be awesome and better than anybody is how that process starts. Yeah. So anyway, there's the lessons I think from Toast. I just want to underscore one thing you said about the hooks that they have into companies. They just put out a new feature in the last quarter or two called branded apps that helps individual small restaurants or very small chains have their own application, which they said in their earnings call, boosts return orders.

36:06So essentially not only can having hooks in your customers help keep them with you, if you help them do more business, it'll drive more payment volume, for example, back into tow. So it works out for everybody and it's very efficient. I'm very impressed with this company, Jason. It's very different than it was when it went public in just a couple of years. And that's product velocity. So I think you're dead on there. Founders, do you want to sell to bigger customers? I know you do. You got to get that ACV. trending up and you want to push your turn down right sounds good but to sell to those big buyers you need to clear all of these compliance checks you know that that means you got to have things like sock to sort it out what sock to it's a standard and ensures that companies keep their customer data safe and if you aren't sock to compliant you can kiss those big deals goodbye you're not going to land the lighthouse customers you're not going to be able to operate at the highest end of the market, but Vanta makes it really easy for you to get and renew your SOC 2 compliance.

37:02On average, Vanta customers are compliant in just two to four weeks, can take months without Vanta, and they automate compliance for GDPR, HIPAA, and more. So you can sell to bigger customers in whatever markup your startup is going after. Vanta is going to save you hundreds of hours of work and up to 85 % on compliance costs. Stop slowing your sales team down and use vanta get a thousand dollars off at vanta.com slash twist that's vanta.com slash twist for one thousand dollars off your sock too do you want to talk about reddit really quick i do because my understanding is they figured something out uh and that's really interesting since this company has been around for 20 years almost it's been around for for so long i forget what it was like to not use reddit daily it was so long ago that reddit took off that its old competitor was dig yeah june 23rd 2005 was when reddit launched wow um so it will be next june a uh 20 years old oh and by the way dig launched december 2004 so dig was six months before uh yeah long long time ago but the story with reddit um is that it has seen insane user growth and i think the reason why we talk about Reddit so much now is that it has reached real mass scale.

38:20In fact, Reddit is, I think now, Jason, just mainstream media. In their most recent quarter, they said that daily active users were up 47%, which is very, very close to half in the last year to just under 100 million, which is 100 million daily people. That's absolutely insane. Also, who would have thought 50 % growth this late in the company's history? it's pretty crazy uh right now the stock is at 133 dollars market cap of 23 billion this is another one i was considering putting a j trade in and i you know i stopped j trading because i was too busy and i'm i'm an idiot because i really do have some insights here the reason i know reddit was a good buy and i don't know that it's good by now that it's tripled in value um it was trading you know a year ago at 40 so it's now triple that price or more uh 3.5 times more is because i was seeing all of my searches wind up directing me back to reddit so if i was looking for headphones or i was looking for music to play on my headphones or i was wanted to talk about barbecue in texas or i was looking at hiring people in texas and austin i just found myself winding up on a subreddit yeah uh and i think this has something to do with a counter to what's happening in AI.

39:40Yeah, to a large degree. So one thing Reddit pointed out in its most recent earnings was that in 2004, and I'm quoting here so far, the word Reddit was the sixth most Googled word in the US. And that's because people have been appending Reddit to their search queries to essentially get around Google trying to offer them up stuff. They just want the human stuff. They want the actual stuff from people. And so ironically, I think Reddit backwards built Mahalo because you wanted to do human-powered search i did build human-powered answers and then google is the mechanism by which people reach them so it's kind of the same thing yeah and i think that's like really the lesson here reddit has not changed in 19 years so back to startup lessons we talked about product velocity and adding features what reddit did really well is they focused on that core feature which was community now i'm not saying they didn't add features but the ux has stayed remarkably the same and they learned this because dig famously released the version 4.0 or something that changed everything and made it feel more like facebook and kevin rose essentially left the company after that i believe and the whole thing just started to come apart yeah if you have something that's working and growing more than i don't know in the early days of a startup 3x year over year you want to keep doing that if you're growing double digit percentages per month 10 to 20 per month carry on keep doing what you're doing because it's so rare for something to grow 20 percent month over a month or even 10 and that means that 10 every 7.2 months you will double your size very few things double every year and to double every year uh for reddit was just an extraordinary thing now they did add a lot of extra features and there were a lot of things that were going to kill reddit obviously it almost got killed by like a lot of the dark stuff that was going on there misogynist stuff violent stuff they kind of got the community under control and that's where 4chan came out where they were like hey anything really crazy we'll do over at 4chan we don't want that level of crazy like trolling okay sure violence not okay real world swatting not okay you know telling somebody they're fat or stupid or mocking them okay right they kind of found an okay place for an anonymous message board uh to operate and it's pseudo anonymous and i think this really relates to what we're seeing with freedom of speech you have so many people complaining about x right and oh my god there's misinformation etc but you don't hear people saying that about reddit and i think part of that is the expectation was that twitter was going to be you know more real names and super moderated yeah but reddit nobody has that expectation when i look at a reddit thread i assume there's marketers cloaking themselves i assume there's people with multiple accounts but that overall the community sorts through it enough that it's an okay place to start my information journey i wouldn't do anything blindly on it yeah but if people were talking about their favorite songs to listen to on high fidelity headphones i'd be cool with it so maybe what do you think about pseudonyms because it's not anonymous in that every post you make is anonymous they're pseudonyms so you can look at the history and you can build up reputation so maybe you could yeah unpack what your thoughts are as a long-term community member on the internet i've been on reddit for an incredibly long time so i've seen its various um permutations and one thing that i think is under discussed is how important moderators are of individual subreddits.

43:18Big time, yeah. So the reason why I think X is more a conversation and a political football to some degree about how it handles moderation is that it's a company versus a collection of individual communities. And so if I'm on the progressive metal subreddit, which I love, there's a couple of diehard fans who moderate it. They set the rules. You don't like it, make your own forum. But if you're going to be on their collection of digital spaces, that's the rule set. So I think they kind of federated out the responsibility for moderation in a way that has up and down worked pretty well. They did have the API kerfuffle sometime in the last year.

43:54They were going to change the rules and people were mad about that. And Reddit got into a fight with its moderators, but that is mostly calmed down. and i also just think that because it is pseudo anonymous to your point people have a simply lower expectation of informational fidelity because it's people i think it's people should post more jason when they're behind a pseudonym versus their real name yeah i think you can see that on x if i see someone whose name is clearly a you know an allusion to anime or historical figure or random whatever it's never the smallest person that i get mostly well and you also have to worry with pseudonyms combining pseudonyms and this is one of the concerns i have about x and reddit is if there's a financial incentive and you have pseudonyms then people can anonymously make money okay why is that a problem for somebody to anonymously make money most people would say alex well it's great you know people don't have to worry about losing their job because they have a left wing or a right wing or a particular passion that would get them you know i don't know we're in their privacy but what it also does is it can create a very cynical approach where i think people on x a lot of these anonymous accounts and the anonymous accounts on reddit you can build up reputation and then sell it to the highest bidder and this happens in all systems whether it's the russians paying off podcasters covertly or just revenue sharing where you get a piece of the advertising or affiliate revenue where somebody could build up a reputation in your metal forum then they go over to another one and say they love these headphones but they work for that headphone company right yeah and so i do worry a little bit that the incentives are now perverse and it's perverse in an alex jones kind of way alex jones his stock and trade was to go after conspiracy theorists now i like a good conspiracy theory like anybody right um there used to be this great show that leonard nimoy was the voiceover for god what was the name of that show do you remember i've never seen the show you're talking about it was a syndicated show where it was like mysteries leonard nimoy mystery show in search of thank you producer stewart coming in hot with a great addition in search of uh and it was so awesome you can we'll throw up the in search of screen or something or an episode guide here to show you what it was and like some of the topics but in search of was such a great conspiracy show where leonard nimoy would talk about aliens or lochness monster you know all these things and as a kid i loved i thought it was awesome that like maybe there were these mysteries that were unsolved mysteries um and in search of you know kind of did that um i think that's like what alex jones did too right he was like let's go in search of these things that is some 1997 word art style graphics there you could tell that's not a recent recent image you know just i'm curious and i i'm not trying to prime you to criticize a friend of yours here so this is not me kicking up dust but yeah on reddit if you go around making posts that are reposts or stealing something from a different you know subreddit to put it somewhere else it's called karma whoring and it's looked down on because karma is the reddit kind of like on-site yes currency if you will that's the reputation that you earn and then people will trust you or not by karma it'd be a great idea for x or twitter to have karma uh or a reputation like that and they could do it actually really easily via community notes and community notes has been awesome like i get community noted sometimes other people get community noted and i find it's pretty accurate and attaching your community notes record to your profile page is a brilliant idea and that's literally what karma does right yeah people can literally go see uh what you've posted how it's done your overall results both for comments and posts but over on x where you and i have spent the majority of the last 15 years uh you can be anonymous and you can post and you can get paid for it and i think that combination leads to people posting i would say even shriller stuff than they otherwise might have the spicer it is the more engagement it gets if it bleeds it leads yeah correct and so just like fox news or msnbc can go with uh you know a spicy headline that may not be exactly attached to reality or just an opinion and how do you wind up on those shows it's by having a spicy opinion and so it's a long way of sort of i know this because i get invited to them yeah and the republicans like jesse waters they invite me on every week they're really kind i love doing it i just haven't had the time i'm going to do it again i like going on there um and being a little adversarial and talking about my criticism of say trump or you know kamala or the democratic party i kind of like it because i'm independent and but they love me because they like having somebody on who's not 100 in the bag for trump and not 100 dnc yep they kind of love that moderate coming in with a little nuance um but my point about alex jones was if you follow this thread eventually what people do is they just make stuff up and then you become a fictional author and that's my fear with what's happening on x with people getting paid or uh you know anonymous accounts on uh reddit pseudonym accounts is that or wikipedia now is having this where in order to get your wikipedia page changed and everybody thinks you can trust wikipedia trust me i have a page on wikipedia it is run by my haters and people i've beaten in business or people i've fired with you know enthusiasm let's say from a company they're motivated to edit that page and then i have to hire people if i mean if i wanted to make changes i haven't but i've had people pitch me on it and they're like here's our approach to how we would change your page we have these 50 editors who are on payroll who are making edits across these four accounts for the past 12 years on vpns to protect their privacy and we can start a discussion about five issues on your page and then slip in three or four things you want that have nothing to do with that but that come from a story that we write on another news source and you're like really and they're like yeah we're going to release a press release then we're going to pay a blogger to write the story then we're going to have you know a discussion about it on reddit then we're going to put it on your wikipedia page and we're going to cite like two of those sources or whatever and i'm like wow you can't trust anything and alex jones eventually created the fabrication that the parents at sandy hook who lost their children were actors and that they never had kids to begin with that's kind of where this madness event eventually winds up if you don't put protections in place so the good news is if you're sharing revenue on x they know the person's name they have to send the check to a bank account they have to you have to put your driver's license in so although you're pseudo they kind of know who you are and then elon knows your followers yeah yeah exactly and so this is where i think if you have you know my belief is if you make over a certain amount of money in any of these systems or you have a certain number of followers i think it's kind of i prefer that people use their real names and own their words i do understand there could be repercussions and i do understand the founding fathers wrote some papers anonymously so absolutely there's something to be acutely aware of as a consumer of content is that there's massive manipulation going on and people taking sides you have to make your own decisions yeah and that's why i really like having a like a personal blog like i think a lot of people just have like their own you know first firstlast.com because here's my thoughts without any filters without any pseudonyms without any platforms i i love that but looping back to reddit really quick and talking about product uh reddit has not changed visually much but they have made some interesting changes one thing that really struck me was the impact of their use of ai translations they said they've been working on essentially translating all of reddit into other languages and there's some pretty positive results really yeah so they want to grow their international uh user base you need to get off the english-speaking internet at some point in time and expand out to the broader world so why not use machine translations across the site to turn the whole dang thing into pickle language suddenly your tam goes up more people can hit you via search and i think they can keep the user growth going for some time they're also doing stuff like ama changes and so forth but it was the translations that really caught my eye jason so they are going to automatically translate to more than 35 new locales in europe asia and latin america i'm reading from tech crunch here uh wow so those are not going to be perfect but they're better than nothing oh yeah and so here's how it works folks uh apparently you pick a post and if you're in the app this is brilliant uh so here you can look at the original or you can hit the um sliders i guess and click translate and pick a different translation yeah and read it in your native language so this occurs on a case-by-case basis uh not they're not reprinting the entire index in another language but that would actually be really interesting to do and would previously have been not possible yes um or very expensive to do very expensive to do um this would actually be interesting um how this would work in the real world in terms of seo if you took the entire corporates or let's just say you took the top thousand subreddits sure you took their top 1000 posts in the past year and you just used ai to republish them put them into the google search index i wonder if google would index translations automatically in those conversations and then how would you deal with people in france taking a thread like we just had about toast let's say toast goes to france now they want to reply to the americans who've had their posts translated then the americans would see a french post but on the english subreddit you would then translate the french reply into english and then say show original then you could have a conversation going on yeah in one thread between japanese french and american consumers of whatever rock band you're in think about how that would make the world a lot smaller wouldn't it well did you ever read any douglas adams the science fiction author i don't know if i've read it i think i started hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy at some point but i don't know if i ever finished it oh well i know what i'm gonna get you for christmas then um douglas adams had a little uh part in the story called the babble fish it's a little fish you put it in your ear and you can understand all languages it really does feel like we're getting very close to just the internet being understandable in that way i i use a lot of translation to read like i don't know chinese communist party meeting notes and so forth but the thing that you're describing inside of reddit as a way to auto translate and allow people to converse across languages i don't think i've seen yet but i would freaking love to use that that would just be awesome i would love to talk to more people why not why not i i it feels like we're right there and this is an interesting product discussion and you know when you start getting resources as a founder i think this is what makes founders really dangerous and this is why profitability is such a great thing for a company to hit because then you can start taking swings at the bat and try different concepts see if they work as experiments and then use them or lose them and so as we talked today about you know um making a really great ux and understanding hey this is our beachhead market conversations and tools for the community leaders who are moderating those you know then moving on to the next piece which is can you get the other stuff right of adding new features they never really um they have not they've seen to drive even though discord has been like constantly nipping at the heels of reddit it's almost like it's two different use cases and i see so many of the reddits having a discord associated with them and then i see them having their own internal chat i wonder how that battle is going on because that's an example of like discord is been built off the backs of reddit and reddit is kind of i wonder how worried they are about discord so i would say not too worried right now and i i do track a lot of indie video games jason so i'm on their subreddits and their discord.

56:54So I've actually kind of spent time across this divide and the discords tend to be way more moderated because they're often run by a corporation or a fanatical group of diehard fans of a thing. And I think the reason why they're more heavily moderated is because they're chat versus forum postings. And you can much more easily moderate a flow of forum posts than real-time conversations. And so I think Reddit ends up being a lot more freewheeling if more public. So there's a trade-off there, but I don't think Reddit's that worried because they're growing faster than Discord is and they're much larger.

57:25The thing that I would be concerned about is what if Reddit decides it doesn't want Google's piddly 50 or$100 million a year, builds an actually good search engine on top of itself, cuts Google off, and then rides away into the sunset with the world's best search product? I think that's probably, if you were to look at the valuation of Reddit, $20 billion plus versus the open AI or perplexity valuations, 9 billion and 160 billion for for open ai yeah you know you have to think if i'm reddit i would not let anybody use our data i would build a search engine right at the top and i would go right at them and that would be you know if reddit really was ambitious and wanted to go for it i would cut off all people using it i would put the entire site um behind a paywall at some point which is going to screw up your google traffic and they have a lot of flow true traffic obviously with putting them there so they have to be delicate with google there but i think um you know figuring out how to not piss off google and add ai features now i i'm curious when you go to reddit it never summarizes a thread no i've never seen do that no and that is the feature i really want like why doesn't reddit when you're at the top of a really good thread okay right a um write a really good summary superhuman does that um i use speechify when i go to a web page it does that automatically i didn't realize speechify was doing that but they whatever page you're on if i'm logged into an ft or an economist story they write me a little summary of it it's really cool um that would be the tldr uh thank you campbell uh in the chat room for mentioning that what a great feature that would be um let's look at the numbers here they're they broke a billion dollars in ad revenue a year so uh q3 revenue was 348 million jason and i believe 315 of that was advertising so yes they're over the billion dollar run rate and that's the thing their revenue from data partnerships in the quarter was 33 million dollars amazing i mean that's not that much $33 million in data revenue is pretty significant.

59:42And if you times that by four, it's 120. And they have 101.2 billion. So it's 1%. No, it's 10 % already. 10%. Yeah. It's already 10 % of their revenue. Okay. So that's an interesting decision that Steve's going to have to make at Reddit. Does he keep allowing people to use their data with certain conditions like a link back? or does he um you know uh go for it and compete against them what's very interesting about that is uh that i have recently started asking interesting questions like if i were to go to chat gpt i could ask give me the top 10 um headphones for hi-fi music as per discussions on reddit.com let's see if it because I know they have a deal right i don't think chat gpd has a deal with red i think it's google specific i don't think they have a i don't think they're the same transaction but i will double check that while you search okay so i'm going to do two things here um remember i said if reddit wants to i'm sorry if sam altman wants to start ending his problems with the use of other people's data without permission he needs to go all in on citations right yes i've been saying this over and over again and pull yours up and let's see it yeah all right what you got um let me uh screen share here so this is like really interesting to see that they're starting to cite reddit and they'll put it at the top level but sometimes they ask you to click it i think it needs to be at the top level varying attribution seems like a bad idea to me but here let's see what it shows here um so you asked it what are the top rated headphones across categories and it did give you the source yes so i ran your search again for hi-fi because i know that's what you wanted and to me like this is what i was looking for in terms of of sources but i don't see a reddit so put in here um a link to related reddit discussions and let's see what happens uh because if they are into the api they and if they've indexed it they should be able to do this so here we have that's awesome yeah and so click it and let's see if it actually takes you to a reddit thread let's see if it opens it and it it opened a completely random link so that's i had that happen myself where it wouldn't give me the link so if you say to chan gpt show me the urls of those um it will actually show you the urls but it some reason it gets hyperlinks wrong all the time it's so strange how can you see this jason can you see my screen yep okay so if i click on this it's taking me to my roommates always come in my room to hang out while i'm trying to write okay so there's work to be done send somebody send this clip to sam altman and the open i quality team i mean you found interesting discussions you got the links wrong uh but if you say at the bottom here show the links show me the actual urls of those links it might actually um show you the actual urls and if it does it properly uh yes it's not showing you the actual urls if we click on sources we get it's supposed to show you the sources on the right they don't get that right it's so weird um and you did a web search there so you're using the new search functionality so lots of work to be here but you see where they're trying to get to yes and open ai is building in public so it doesn't work but sam waltman learned this a long time ago at reddit watching and sequoia you know scouts like watching all these companies just you know make progress like this it's really great i want to make one more point though because do you recall the search off that we did i think was on wednesday comparing perplexity and open ai search and google one of those four queries we didn't get to it but it was an open ai query and it just failed several times i could not get it to answer a question that perplexity and google were both willing to and it wasn't it wasn't it trying to like mother hen me it just the the back end just couldn't do it and so i think it's interesting remember what topic it was was it flights or travel i can't one second i just need to quickly pull back out my notes here i know that when i asked it about election uh security ah uh it was like yeah you should go to this website so for me it was how to help a colicky baby was the search that i was trying for and google was okay perplexity was okay chat gpt search said unable to display this message due to an error and i got that repeatedly trying that search because i didn't want to just cop out and you know drugs and crap but there's some weird bugs in there i wonder who's uh running qa um yeah it's um it's gonna be a little bit more work uh but this is one of the thing that things that's great about open ai's philosophy is they put these this stuff out there they test it you know they're willing to have it break in public i think we're kind of entering a yolo kind of environment for these llms and i'm okay with it actually i think if you take any of the responses at face value i mean you're dumb it's kind of like listening to politicians or the media you know the opinion media i want to separate like actual journalism from opinion media but when you like look at like all the feedback we're getting you know you have to go do your own research you have to come to your own conclusions even with these tools but man these tools are making things so much faster so you really have to use them what else do we have on the docket here i want to talk really quickly about um kind of what we just got towards which is ai regulation and then also anthropic so just news first jason amazon might invest more in anthropic they're an open ai competitor uh the news item here is that billions of dollars are potentially on the table but amazon wants anthropic to train on its own tranium chips and not nvidia's chips and to me my my read is this if amazon is able to set terms for the anthropic investment that means that it has more leverage which means that anthropic is not doing as well as it might have hoped to because you don't get bullied around by your investor unless they have um something over you yeah uh okay and then uh on the ai regulation front there's a lot of commentary right now and i think a lot of people are kind of curious what the new administration will mean for ai regulation and i'm curious what you think here because i'm reading a lot of competing things on one hand we know that the technology advisors to trump um are pretty pro tech uh for example uh michael um kratzios is one of the people that are working on trump's technology uh transition team and he used to work for teal capital so there you go but on the other hand jd vance has been um skeptical of some major tech companies and also elon musk who is in trump's ear was in favor of california's controversial ai bill that eventually got vetoed so it's not as simple as you might think to kind of figure out where ai regulation might come down in the current administration and so i just kind of wanted to get your take my guess is they're going to be they're ultimately going to be the party of less regulations and removing regulations so in almost everything i think they're going to be get out of the way of business it's not the government's job to take care of citizens you know um and which products and services they purchase um and i just think they're going to try to on the margins remove existing regulations and certainly not add regulations that's what they say they're going to do once in a while you know trump will say bombastic things well i'm using the term once in a while um generously yeah the entire discussion right now i did a tweet about it around immigration is a really interesting illustrative example for the next four years we're going to be having the same conversation on repeat which peter thiel summarized as take trump seriously don't take him literally so when we look at immigration steve bannon said very clearly like we're going to export 15 million people trump said that at his rallies jd vance said something different at all in summit where he said like we're going to you know do it like a sandwich we're not going to try to eat it in one bite we're going to take small bites the first bite's going to be people who are committing crimes right violent gangs great nobody wants violent people in the country illegally easy um so then the question is after they get the 500 ,000 let's say that's the number some people say it's a million obviously 500 ,000 like super violent people who never should have been let in then you have 15 million supposedly who were let in over the last four years um i don't doubt that number is not directionally correct maybe it's seven million maybe it's 15 who knows let's just say it's 12.

1:08:49So what happens with those 10 million people are they actually going to drag them out of their homes literally on social media have a family or a kid in public school be dragged out with their mom who's working you know in an entry level job or a dad who's working in construction illegally you know laying bricks we're literally going to drag them out of the country family of three with a bunch of people in their phones taking video would be chaotic would also be absurdly expensive like it's going to cost tens of thousands of dollars to arrest each group then it's going to cost a hundred thousand per person to like house them for a year as you try to adjudicate where they're going to go so i think we're going to see a lot of proposals like we're breaking up big tech and then it's going to actually manifest itself as we saber rattled at meta and told them we don't want you you know taking republican voices or conservative voices off the platform and then zuck will bend the knee and say okay fine we're not going to take proud boys or oath keepers off the platform you know if people want to speculate about the election and was it rigged or not you don't lose your account anymore right so you can now on youtube you used to lose your account if you talked about election if you claim the election was stolen in 2020 they would say that you were spreading election lies and they would suspend your account it was against the terms of service now it's not they changed their mind over at youtube so that's i think the reality of what they're going to do so in this case my guess is there will be no ai regulation from the trump administration i think zero yeah well the the only real question then is what happens to the biden executive order that was signed and i was just yes or uh one particular founder told forbes uh may habib um the ceo and founder over at writer uh they said that it was so weak that they may not even bother to repeal the eo because who cares ah which i thought was a really hysterical like we tried something in ai regulation once and we're done with that entirely it's going to be interesting but i do think there's competing voices inside the trump camp and i i will be curious to see who wins who wins when and which groups win the most often inside of what has happened historically i guess is the question you have to ask yourself so i always encourage people to just look at the history of things and then ask yourself what happened last time uh and last time there was going to be a big deportation there wasn't but the border was shut right and it was kind of shut in a controversial way you know people were separated all this kind of stuff but americans want that right and so or the majority of americans seem to want that so i think you know if we look at tiktok that'll be the really interesting example for me trump was against tiktok then he got a big donation from jeffrey yas who has a big ownership position and but you know they've been public about this you know anti-china position and china's influence here so what is trump going to do i don't know but i'll tell you that the bill that's the one i'm watching the bill in the house and the senate was very bipartisan yeah a lot of his party were vehemently opposed to tiktok and it's already on a timer to get banned so something will have to happen to to save it essentially and i think that the the best commentary that i read on tiktok and the trump administration 2.0 was that he just might not care now that the election's over and might just do nothing and just let his party's previous um decision earlier stand which would be bad for jeffrey yas but uh it would be too bad if one person can write a large enough check and change american foreign policy right i think that's always been the case is that big money interests can have massive influence uh the fact that biden didn't ban it during his term i think was because there were probably big money influences on the democrats as well to not ban it um and also banning it on a pragmatic basis was um untenable if you're running for office and you think tiktok is going to help you get elected so if you are going to ban they kind of quieted down on the tiktok stuff i noticed and kamala really embraced using tiktok she was like really posting many videos a day yeah because if you were to ban tiktok i think they had a fear a reasonable fear they would lose young people before the election because it's so popular probably i i have a conspiracy theory here sure i think jeff yass wants secretly for it to have the pressure and this is a very nuanced position here but i think he wants the pressure on tiktok to go public so that he can liquidate his position as any reasonable investor would want to with such a huge hit yeah or liquidate some large portion of it without the valuation being uh crushed so the very delicate dance if i was a shareholder would be well we don't want to ban it but we probably do want to make sure it's secure and you would want to keep that pressure going so that the ccp releases it to go public and you can cash your shares in and the ccp doesn't say you know what this is an asset for us we cannot give it up it's too valuable of an asset yeah the fact that the ccp hasn't left the board the chinese communist party has not left the board and they have not let it divest proves to me that it's an intelligence asset that is the conclusion i would come to because any other reasonable person would take the chips this company goes public it becomes a 500 billion dollar company 250 500 billion like out of the gate and the excitement level would be unbelievable oh i mean we're talking about reddit right now i mean a tiktok scale and the addiction of that platform when those numbers come out man people are gonna buy that stock up like crazy it would be the hottest ipo the only hotter ipo i can think of would be spacex i would say it's like spacex and then tiktok and then you know stripe or the top i was just about to say stripe exactly yeah like compared to tiktok like it's tiktok's a consumer brand it's got global potential it's super addicting it's super innovative all due respect to stripe it's a finance back-end company that you know nobody really uses every day it's not like you have a billion people using that product every day as like i oh did you stripe it nobody's saying that like on the consumer basis you know people are building in so um i i'm looking at this first example there's going to be like a little score card and we should actually keep a score card here let's actually let's do a score card we can make a punch list here we're into score cards let's keep a score card immigration a high skilled immigration we'll do ones that are related to tech high skilled immigration is one uh we'll track tick tock divestiture we'll track the um starlink broadband rural broadband we'll track that one we'll track tips and no taxing of tips and no taxing of overtime those are all promises made by the trump uh campaign that we should just track and see if they actually happen how many days after they come in office and we can just track how many days till this happens if at all and you know that's kamala was promising 25 000 in startup funding for black americans and 25 000 for first-time homeowners like i would in good faith be tracking those as well if they were going to give startup financing or they were going to give 25k for home buyers i would track that in relation to zillow or redfin so this isn't a partisan exercise this is a holding this new administration accountable to the promises they made that are related to business and finance Are there any other ones that you would add to that list?

1:16:58Yes, but I want to think about it for a minute before I say it out loud. But I will be very curious to see about the taxes on tips because that is a very, very expensive proposition from the federal budget level. And it's not the constituency of people that donate a lot of money. So I'm curious to see if that one gets jettisoned. Back to our point about cynicism. Well, you know who would benefit in a major way from no taxes on tips would be... the people who use toast and the POS people because they would be like, yeah, I now know that this barista is making, they were making$5 an hour in tips.

1:17:36So when I paid them 20 an hour to be a barista, I know it was 25 and they were netting 75 cents of that. So net net, they were making, you know, call it$17 an hour after taxes, right? 75 % of$20 would be 15. and then yeah maybe they get give you know a little bit up in their tips so you'd be at like 18 and change now in that same form you'll be at 20 because there'd be no tax on that last five dollars so the 15 would get taxed at 75 net 25 to the government or maybe 70 maybe it's 70 30 would go to local and depending on what state you're in so maybe they're getting 14 plus five is 19 versus two which would be 16 yeah that's a major difference um it's a major difference those are all republicans or a large percentage of those would be republicans or trump voters right when we say trump voters now what we're really saying is the majority of the country when you say trump voters we're saying 55 60 of the country um so if that's the case gop members uh they're going to benefit most from it where are you getting the 60 number Well, if half the country voted for, if Trump won the, I'm taking into account GOP members who didn't vote for Trump plus the people who did vote for Trump.

1:19:03So what did Trump win in the - 51%. 51. That was the last time I saw. So I'll be curious to see what his approval numbers are because your point there implies that they're going to be very high. i i mean his approval number what will trump's approval numbers be based on because if it's 60 gop trump then it should be 60 i i think probably 60 of the country is either a conservative republican or a trump voter because i'm taking in the 51 who voted explicitly for trump yeah and then giving him a little extra credit on the margins for having some number of people who didn't vote for him or didn't vote who are also republican okay i could be wrong but i just and a lot of democrats voted for trump this time right non-republicans voted for him well it'll be interesting to see and we'll get the data starting in january on how popular he is and that'll help us understand what do you think his popularity will be based on i have the i have an answer what curious you based on or where does it start in the uh in the poll in the opinion polls yeah i don't not where it starts but just if we if you judge the next four years yeah what do you think at the end of the four years the average american will vote will judge him on oh what will he be judged on oh yeah yeah like what would be if which is another way of saying like what would the republican party yeah tell him to focus on in order for jd vance to win president you know in 2028 right like so what would be the t up to a successful term what would a successful term look like in terms of the border yeah would be one i would think that's something that seems to be on everybody's mind inflation going down and the wars in ukraine and the middle east maybe those would be three things i can think of off the top of my head inflation economy yeah you know your pocketbook foreign wars those seem to be two big ones and then the border those three i think will be how they'll judge him you're missing something what do you think i think those are the most important ones i was just going to say inflation gdp growth and the unemployment rate i was going to be more narrowed down onto the uh the economic issues if you were to look at those economic indicators rank them what would be that most yeah i would say inflation first job creation second to gdp third in terms of importance first yeah job data then gdp yeah i'm going to agree with you i think the most when i look back on this election and i was having this discussion on all in yesterday which will drop this afternoon we were like sort of doing the handicapping of everything and i've come to the conclusion you there seems to be three different buckets you could put into uh why one party one one candidate one over the other the candidate the campaign how the campaign was run i think are you know they kind of the platform like what they were running on what issues is kind of separate from how they run their campaign the tactical decision so if we were to put those into three buckets you have the personality of kamala and waltz versus the you know personality of trump events that's one the candidates themselves then you have their platforms and then you have tactically how they ran their uh campaign in one case you know uh doing podcasts and one case not doing podcasts right or doing a lot of long-form podcasts etc versus not doing them in one case running you know these rallies and you know maybe on the margins a little bit of uh hate speech or you know xenophobic stuff uh just you know spark the fires or flames a little bit in one case trying to be maybe above the fray so if you look at those three what do you think were the most important if you rank them candidates for trump's victory you know it's the real answer is i could spit out a ranking for you until you you know and answer the question but i wouldn't have a lot of conviction behind it because one thing that's very interesting about trump is his he doesn't seem to fit into normal political physics like the the normals of gravity don't seem to apply to him in the same way that they do to other candidates uh and so i don't know i really don't know the thing about trump is that he's been consistently a surprise to himself to the market to voters to myself to party officials to pundits um so i don't i don't think i fully understand that well enough to give you a good answer yes i've come to the conclusion please that candidates matter right i think kamala was the wrong choice i think they should have done a bake-off if they had done a speedrun primary i don't think she would have come in the top five i think there's like five better candidates shapiro uh dean phillips you know gavin newsome i think there was a bunch of people so i i put first that but i think the second thing is really this tweet i did today um which i'll share here um because i think this is something that we are underestimating no i'm curious the price of a cheeseburger and fries at mcdonald's ah if that doubles during your term how do you think americans are going to look at their last four years and here end of 2019 price of french fries at mcdonald's buck 79 mid 2024 price 419 chicken sandwich buck 29 then 389 yep uh big mac 399 to 749 those are increases of 134 287 respect uh respectively so if you and a cheeseburger went from a buck on the i guess the dollar menu to 315 and you know i don't know exactly how perfect this is this is from the poverty finance community on reddit as you see there um but i looked it up in like 10 different places and it's directionally correct i don't think anyone on a gravitational basis can win if the price of mcdonald's doubles the number of people who go to americans who go to mcdonald's i was asking this question as well according to chat gpt which gave me some sources 87 of american households visited mcdonald's at least once between june 30th 2023 and june 30th 2024 in other words like in the past year 87 of americans visited mcdonald's did you go to mcdonald's in the last year oh yes i did too sometimes i get sad i need fries fries are incredible filet of fish outstanding that is your worst that is your worst opinion i have to say like i just don't like the burgers at mcdonald's they're not why would you ever get a mcdonald's burger if you could get in and out five guys yeah or shake shack i think like there are just tremendous burgers out there no i understand one seven dollars for a big mac and the other ones might be 12 so if you're saying the reason you're doing it is because you can't afford the 12 burger or a shake shack or$10 burger, whatever it is.

1:26:27I get it. But the fries is a whole different story. McDonald's fries and the filet of fish, just unbelievable, unbelievable sandwich. We have to wrap. We'll talk more about these issues coming on, but I'll say that I don't think it's possible to win an election, like you said, with inflation the way it is with prices like that. But this also underscores why I never understood gas prices because people would talk about gas prices like they were this existential cost in their family budget and they never were for me and so i never got it but then i realized that people are often pretty broke and so if gas goes up they have to drive the same distance emotions too it's how you feel and like how does it feel to pay far have did you ever pay over five dollars a gallon for gasoline i never drove in california yeah i remember filling up at close to six dollars like um before going to tahoe i had to get some gas whatever i was in the city yeah whatever like uh i'm rich i don't care like i'm just gonna fill out but i saw it and then my credit card i i couldn't fill the tank and i'm like why can't i fill a tank it's like oh it went over a hundred i have a gasoline powered car i have a suburban which is the largest safest car you can buy i believe so i got one of those to have my go car and to like you know drive in tahoe yeah in the snow um because you can fit a lot of people in it three rows um the reason was there was a limit at the gas station of a hundred dollars so i had to then take a different credit card if i wanted to fill up the last third of the tank right and do that because six dollars times i guess a 20 gallon tank or maybe that's a 25 gallon tank is over 100 and that was when i first realized like oh my lord like this emotionally had an effect on me now imagine you actually are living paycheck to paycheck which i have in my life yeah same and that happens and now it's like i can remember going to the gas station and putting in ten dollars worth of gas because i needed the other ten dollars or twenty dollars in the 80s or 90s to go do something else yep um yeah i did a lot of that with my brother and his uh jeep wrangler we would get to the guys for like a dollar 37 they were like sweet gas we can get a whole gallon uh to be young again what a great episode thank you to everybody in the comments uh i didn't see any questions here but fusion hd fusion hm says jason wants liquidity you're damn right i do i love liquidity i named a conference after it liquidity is a great thing i you know i do want to see liquidity for a lot of founders and for lps so they can invest in the next generation of companies uh and were there manny any other questions we should answer here anything interesting come in not that i saw but i will just say everyone we do have some notes on a couple of startup deals and i'm trying to get the um the ceo of command bar which just sold the amplitude uh to come on the show to talk about how that deal came together lessons learned and getting everyone ready for what is supposed to be m &a palooza in 2025 that's i think a topic we should talk about on monday is just what we think is going to happen in m &a and the return of the spack zombie companies yeah trends that we should talk about on monday m &a and the spack attack.

1:29:58A lot of the SPACs that washed out, some of them turned out to be great companies and are staging massive rallies. I have so much to say about that, especially in the case of root insurance, but we'll keep it for Monday. I'm Alex over on X. He's Jason. This is twist. If you're not subscribed to us on YouTube or your podcast app, you're making a mistake. We're back on Monday. We'll see you guys then.