TWiST News: Serve Robotics, High Skill Immigration, and the Trump Trade | E2042

27:45I guess that's a big problem. Our robots right now complete more deliveries than even human couriers in terms of percentages. So when we take on an order, 99.9 % or 99.8 % of the time, we actually successfully complete that delivery. Humans are about like 98%. So we are 1.9 % better. But that's because the robot cannot fall down. It doesn't get stuck. In fact, the drivetrain is designed for the sidebar. The big wheels you mentioned are an important part of it. It can navigate all the difficulties of a sidebar. But in future, when you want to go upstairs, for example, I think you're going to see new form factor, maybe legged and wheeled robots like that.

28:24I'm not as convinced that it would be two wheels because two wheels has its own limitations, but it's probably not going to be our current form factor. So it's going to evolve. Okay. I want to sit on... So I was thinking about what if we put a chair on the serve robot versus having a bicycle act like a serve robot. But is there a future in which there's like a version of what you guys have that I can just take in a bike lane and just sit and go slowly throughout my city? Because I would love that. You've just reinvented the scooter. I don't know. It's the lazy. I want a mobile. You want a drone.

28:57Yes. You want him to put a backrest on his robot so that you can get on top of your, there's one of these self-driving. There you go. Yeah. It's fascinating technology. But, you know, the obvious solution here is there are trikes, three-wheeled motorcycles and four-wheel ones. There's all kinds of weird ones you can do. Are you looking for an unbeatable deal on senior talent? Well, if so, you need to look outside of your borders. According to G2, Cloud Devs is the best place to hire top Latin talent. That's Latin America, a market with millions of developers. Cloud devs is the largest pool of Latin American talent with over 10 ,000 senior engineers who are rigorously vetted for communication and problem-solving skills.

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30:16Just go to clouddevs.com slash twist to pay what's fair for your next five star hire. Just wrapping up here, and congratulations on the massive progress. I think one of the interesting things to me, Alex, is about this space is there's just so much innovation occurring that there's a lot of seemingly conflicts, but it's coopetition. And it's such an amazingly dynamic space and one that's worth studying for entrepreneurs. When you have a coopetition type market, you'll have a company like this building robots with somebody who builds another version of their own robot, just like Android provides their operating system to Samsung, and they also make the Pixel.

31:02Then you'll have somebody like Cloud Kitchens having, I don't know, a certain famous burger joint in them. But that burger joint might also have a direct relationship with DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Swerve, right? So what you see is a lot of overlap. I notice a lot of restaurants are now driving people to their website so they can use the white-labeled version of DoorDash or the white-labeled version of Uber Eats, and they eliminate the service fees. So it's a very interesting space, huh, where everything's a bit conflicted? No conflict, no interest? Yes, you would say? I 100 % agree. Our thesis from the beginning was, I don't want to do or make the stuff other people are making.

31:48We should find the gaps and try to play in that space because then everybody becomes a partner. So for example, we don't make a consumer app. So we're not competing with Uber. They're the perfect mechanism for customers to go order food. Why would we make that ourselves? And I've seen people in the robotic space that have actually decided to make their own apps for the restaurants and for the customers. We stayed clear from that because we want to play nice with everybody. There's a lot of problems to solve, and we could just focus on the white space. What's the average delivery time or the delivery distance right now?

32:21Ballpark. The robots go about over a mile right now when they completely deliver. And I think from the time we pick up an order to the time we drop it off, takes about 18 minutes on average. See, I think that this is the perfect app, Alex, for McDonald's and Starbucks. I believe McDonald's and Starbucks are so ubiquitous that they could become the place that houses these because you have to house them somewhere and recharge. Yeah. So if you did like a meta deal with Cloud Kitchens, Starbucks, and or McDonald's, you would basically have the country blanketed and a place where if you could co-habitat with them, a place for the robots to get cleaned and to get charged.

33:06Yeah, that's like a piece of this, cleaning and charging and maintaining robots. Exactly. At night when the robots come home, someone has to clean them, make sure they're in good shape for tomorrow's work. Tell them how good they did. Right. A little pat on the head. I didn't think that robot shepherd was going to be a job category in 2025, but here we are. But just to build off Jason's point, though, we're talking a lot about commercial real estate and the decline of malls and what to do with some of these big buildings that we don't quite fit into our current economy. I mean, Jason, why not just turn those into drone depots and then link them to stores that are nearby?

33:42There's a storefront or two available on every block in almost every major city that can't get rented. So you take one of those, you gut it, you put a bunch of these robots in it, it's a no-brainer. When do you think, in your estimation, the majority of Americans and the majority of deliveries will be done autonomously, either through your service, drones, cyber cabs, crews, etc.? yeah it's a it's a it's a fair question and we are usually wrong about these timelines because we don't get the exponential part really well but uh i think by the end of this decade you're going to see uh people be deeply familiar with this technology everybody has kind of experienced it one way or another uh uber obviously is really leading the charge they have eight av partners now waymo obviously is on the right side doing a lot of um incredible work we are on the delivery side the largest on the platform.

34:46So I think by the end of this decade, you're going to have this fairly ubiquitous. So five years, will it be the majority in five years? Good line, because we could bet this right now. We could bet less. Yeah, it's fair. I would say there would be majority in areas, like the urban areas we operate, there could absolutely be majority. New York, San Francisco, Santa Monica, you believe the majority will be under five years. So before 2030, there'll be a majority. I just want to say, I've got a public company. So this is right. This is speculation. I've got you gambling. You set the over under. I tell you what, you set 2030 as the over under.

35:27So January 1st, 2030, Alex, you and I will bet it. Okay. Barbecue lunch here. Done. Okay. Limit, upper limit, $100 per person. Okay. Ladies are invited. Tell me, could be sushi, whatever you want. You taking the over or the under? Oh, I'm taking the, it happens faster, which I believe is the under. The under, right. Okay. So before January 1st, 2030, you believe, I'll take the over, that the majority of deliveries, we're just going to go with deliveries, on food deliveries will be automated. Hey, listen, this is amazing, great work, and you're going to free up people to spend more time with their families and do other things and increase safety so that we don't have cars.

36:09I mean, a lot of the deaths and accidents that have been going on is because, you know, I don't know, God forbid, like an Amazon truck driver is going too fast or UPS driver. They're under too much pressure and they're driving a giant tank and, you know, they make some tiny, tiny, tiny minuscule error. And, you know, it's terrible loss of life or somebody gets really hurt. So I think what you're doing is just so awesome for safety. And I appreciate you telling everybody about it. anything we can do to help you? You're hiring for any sticky positions there, Ali? Always. Robotics, software engineering, hardware engineering, operations, everywhere.

36:48We are going really fast. So folks, please visit our website. There's a lot of jobs there. All right. There you have it, folks. And we'll see you soon, Ali. Well done. Good guest, Alex. Good guest. Was that one of your pickups? I do not recall the original point of that, but I'll take the points for it. Nicely done. I want to go back to coopetition because I think that's the exact word I've been looking for when I think about Waymo and Uber. Because seeing them work together to me, on one hand, makes so much sense. But on the other hand, I'm like, Uber, are you letting the wolf into the sheep's pen?

37:20Are they going to take your lunch? Because they do have their own business. But at the same time, they work together. It's a great point. And what you have to do is look at the game on the field. so uh they'll say like uh politics make strange bedfellows and we'll be talking about a bunch about politics in a moment it can make very strange bedfellows you could have democrats suddenly become republicans you can have republicans cheney suddenly become democrats it can cause like very strange partnerships because people want to win is one of the great things about capitalism and you know if tesla decides hey or cruz decides we're going on and on our own.

38:00We're not going to work with Uber, Lyft, DoorDash. Well, then the other partners are going to say, okay, well, then it's an advantage for us to work with them because we get to not have to worry about signing up restaurants or getting people to download an app. Man, we could just get all these cars on the road real fast and start making money. And I think there's enough money in this that it's much better for Uber to not make the self-driving technology and for self-driving folks to not try to replicate what DoorDash and Uber have already built and just sell into it. But it does make everybody on their toes.

38:36And I think you would not see people maybe signing up to work with each other if it wasn't so competitive. And that's like a great dynamic to have for consumers. Yes, exactly. It's going to be great for you and I no matter what, even if Uber and Waymo get into a spat later on. I don't care. I get more self-driving cars faster in an app that I use cheaper. What's your wait time typically where you are? Oh gosh. Three to five minutes. It's really great. Actually. There's a lot of Ubers in town. They're super easy to get to. And I live in a relatively accessible part of town, Jason. So there's not a lot of delay.

39:12So Uber is honestly great here. I sent my mom to the airport and Uber this morning. You know, I am where I live out in the hill country in texas outside of austin yeah seven to 20 minutes to get an uber oh if i do an airport and it's it's been a major adjustment i didn't realize how entitled i was i have been living under this belief that you should be on your way to your destination within three minutes of making that decision i never you know well like you right like i i should be able to be inside of an Uber maximum five minutes. This idea that you would sit there and look at the screen and wait for 15 minutes for the person to get there is like, what?

39:57I live in the burbs. I live on a ranch. I'm 30 minutes outside of Austin, downtown Austin. So it's a little bit different. And this is where I think self-driving could be really interesting because you could deploy robo taxis, Ramos into the sticks, into ranch country, and just have them hanging out because you don't have to have a human there waiting for an hour for a ride. And so that's going to be part of the magic here is a whole different group of people who have not experienced Uber Eats, DoorDash, and Lyft, and Uber as a default are going to suddenly have that as a potential default. And that's really, you know, that bell curve, we'll have the team pull up the bell curve of technology adoption.

40:41It starts with the vanguard, you know, early adopters, and then you get the early majority, the later majority, and you get the laggards. And so if you've never seen this bell curve, we're now on the back end of that bell curve. We're on the laggards. Like who doesn't have broadband? Who doesn't have a smartphone? It's like 10 % of people. And so there you have it, folks. The classic innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards. And then you have market penetration there on the chart. Makes a nice bell curve. and different technologies go up and down the slope at different speeds.

41:21I think ChatGPT has probably gone really fast on this because students and parents have found out about it very quickly. In a city, Uber and DoorDash, man, they were almost instant. Self-driving will take a little bit of time, but... Yeah. It's interesting you talking about parking a self-driving car in a certain market or a certain location where there might not be a ton of regular demand so you wouldn't have a human there. that does open up really interesting variations on what the car could be because if i was out in hill country i probably won something that's four-wheel drive and maybe has a truck bed or whatever sure and if i was going in print yeah sure but you could also have like a special like your own like uber luxe version of waymo that only had i don't know bentley's or whatever that were self-driving you could only have those in certain areas like yeah you could yes atherton I mean,

42:16I would love to go to SFO and have, you know, the suicide doors open. It'd be great. But it does make for a lot of cool opportunities. I hope people build more than just one fleet of Honda Accords. You know, you asked me to prepare some stuff on this. So the two news items that are, I think, big on the personnel side. Last week, Jason said that one way we're going to track what the Trump administration will do is through the lens of personnel appointments. Who's in the cabinet, essentially? And the two that I saw, one, breaking news, this is not fully reported out and confirmed yet, but yes, Stephen Miller from Trump administration one will be back in Trump administration two.

42:50I heard that he's going to be the deputy chief of policy, I believe. So I will fact check that, but he's coming back an immigration hawk, if you will. And then also Tim Homan is going to be the new border czar. He was also in Trump administration one. And according to an NPR article that I was reading just before we went on air, he has warned undocumented immigrants to, quote, start packing. So I think, Jason, looking at those two, the lens towards, I would say, immigration, both legal and illegal, is relatively negative or you might say conservative. Yeah. I think the laws will be enforced is what we will see happen immediately.

43:30So I think the southern border will be closed as opposed to the last four years where it was open. Kind of not debatable at this point. And we can argue over the statistics if it was 5 million or 15 million. It's some many millions of people crossed into the country illegally. So then the next step is, okay, well, what do you do about that? Step one is going to close the border. I think we all agree Trump's going to do that. And 80 % of Americans are in favor of that. They want people to come through legally. It's unfair. And I have a lot of friends who are immigrants. They feel it's profoundly unfair for people to sneak in versus actually going in legally.

44:10So, okay, I get that. The next piece then becomes criminals. Okay. If you're a criminal and you came to the United States or you're high skilled, which would be like the two ends of the spectrum, You got somebody incredibly high-skilled and or a financier who wants to invest in the United States. So somebody wants to build hospitals in the United States or work in a hospital as a doctor or nurse, and we need those high-skilled immigrants. I think we all agree we should go recruit those people. And then on the other side, if you're a criminal and you beat up some cops like they had on TV or there's Venezuelan gangs in Santa Monica that have been caught doing home invasions, nobody's disagreement that those people got to go immediately arrest them deport them no problem then you got this piece in the middle and this is what i think is going to be all consuming in the new year so i'm predicting that we're going to have the 72 million people who voted for kamala and the 75 million americans who voted for trump going to war for 2025 this is an early prediction over this issue.

45:19I hope we do not see people being dragged from their homes, families being deported, and then people taking videos of it and just the brutality of that. Somebody's hardworking dishwasher at a restaurant. I remember my dad and his restaurant, no Americans would take the job. And this was the 80s and 90s to wash dishes. It was all Mexicans who were here illegally, and people's nannies or housekeepers, just people who are in those frontline jobs. If we deport them in some very large way, I could see this being quite chaotic. So my big hope is to not have chaos. And I'm basically putting it out there for For anyone who will listen, let's do what we can agree on.

46:18Close the border, let in high skilled, and get rid of criminals. That's a lot of work, those three things. And then for the rest of the folks who, yeah, they did break the law coming in here, but maybe they're good citizens and they have the great potential to be great citizens, we can maybe have some grace or thoughtfulness about how we adjudicate their cases. Because this could get a little chaotic. And I know that for some Americans, they feel like they're taking their jobs. And for other folks, they feel like a lot of immigrants feel like, hey, I waited and you didn't. So I get all that. And none of that is wrong.

47:05I mean, in fact, all of that is right. There's nothing that's not factually correct there or logical, but I'm thinking emotionally. I'm thinking emotionally. I'm thinking compassionately, empathetically, and also for the good of coming together as a country. If we are dragging a million people out every couple of months, families, kids, I don't know if that's going to work. I did hear one interesting idea from a friend, which I'll put as the Tony Shea idea, which is if you're here illegally, you have X number of days to report in, be processed, have your application processed if you're coming here for compassionate reasons, whatever, and then we will pay you$5 ,000 or$10 ,000 to go back to your country and get back in line.

47:57So you get a little pocket change. The pocket change of giving$10 ,000 or$5 ,000, that might seem infuriating to people until they understand that the price tag is somewhere between $50 ,000 and$150 ,000 per person to deport them. So it might actually be a 95 % savings to just give them a token spending cash. And I know it sounds like a big number, five grand to an illegal immigrant. They got paid five grand. They got rewarded for coming across the border. A way to look at that is what my friend, Tony Hsieh, rest in peace from Zappos did. When you finished your training, he would say, okay, you did your whatever six-week training.

48:36Here's$2 ,000 if you want to. We'll give you$2 ,000 in cash right now to not come in on Monday for work if it's not for you. One out of 10 people took the 2K. He pre-sorted people who weren't committed by giving them an incentive to leave early. I'm going to get off my soapbox here. I'm praying for the best for everybody, which I know infuriates people, but I have a big heart and I care about people. I think what you're outlining, and I don't mean this sarcastically, kind of harkens back to the George W. Bush compassionate conservatism concept. And I don't think there's only bad parallels. I think there's some good stuff to be said.

49:16I agree with most of that. But the thing that I'm a little bit concerned about, Jason, is going back to the high skill immigration point. You and I were both reading an article earlier today from the last day of October. So what is that? Just about two weeks ago. That was discussing how Trump's closest advisors were working on ways to limit also high skill or legal immigration. And one of the things that was called out by Wall Street Journal reporting was the potential to decrease the number of green cards that are given out for technology workers. And so I'm going to be very curious to see which side of the Trump, I don't know.

49:521.0 or 2.0. I think it's a way we could frame it. I like that. 1.0 crowd, which would be Steve Bannon. And what's the other guy's name? Steve Miller. Steve Miller. Yeah. He's the one who said America is for Americans and Americans only. And I just thought you're like within spitting distance of the Statue of Liberty and you're in New York city, the capital of immigration in the United States. Uh, you know, historically, I mean, maybe the border is more people come across the border now, but historically you're right by Ellis Island where my, both of my, all, yeah. All of my ancestors came through and my, my grandfather, the guy rest his soul um uh james john calacanis was uh brought a lot he was a chief engineer and merchant marine he went through ellis island 30 times oh wow his hit the hit the what he was carrying in those ships at the turn of the century uh when he came here and they misspelled our name wrong at ellis island it's with k's not c's was uh humans so he came from venezuela ireland italy Spain bringing in, you're tired, you're poor.

51:02Yeah. But the thing, if we do limit high school immigration though, Jason, my read is that it's going to be harder for founders to get green cards to come to launch your Y Combinator, build here. And this is going to be just great news for Canada, Mexico. So it's interesting you bring that up. Canada would be the waypoint. It has been. And I, you know, over the last 10 years, anytime I go to Canada, I've had multiple people say, hey, please send us people who can't get into the US. Like, there's literally somebody from the government in Vancouver said to me, Jake, big fan. Thanks for coming. I was there for a visit.

51:38I had a nice lunch with the politicians there who were trying to drum up business for Vancouver versus Toronto and Quebec, et cetera. And they were telling me that if I emailed them, I could CC the person who was trying to get a visa and that they would zip, zip, zip, uh, try to make it happen. And I was like, wow, I've never heard that in America, but okay. They said they're shutting the border in Canada. I think, uh, Trudeau, is it Trudeau? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He said they're going to shut the border for a couple of years. I guess the populist movement is there as well. So it's interesting. I, you know, we do have, we do have, um, what, whatever the United States loss is in bringing founders over here will be Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Doha, and Saudi, and London, and Berlin's gain.

52:32You know, I just saw a very interesting story. Speaking of Saudi Arabia, Jason, I didn't actually throw this in the show notes, but I'm just going to bring it up because I think it fits into your thesis about the Middle East. CNBC reported this morning that Silicon Valley's general catalyst just made their first investment into a Saudi Arabian startup. And that to me felt a little bit seminal. Actually, it wasn't just GC. It was also Bain Capital's first investment into Saudi Arabia. The company is called Lean Technologies. And I think it raised a Series B worth 67.5 million. But I think that just goes to show the global competition for talent, for startup capital, for funding, for building.

53:08And I just hope that as we change our immigration policy, we keep the door very open for everyone who wants to come here and start a company, start a business. And not to bring it up again, but I like the green card idea and I would not mind seeing that. Staple it to your business plan. Literally, not just put it on your degree, the green card. If you get a term sheet for over a million dollars, staple it to that as well. So clip this and send it to Trump and to my friends who are helping Trump would be a great idea. I know on All In, some of the folks there are going to be doing a little bit of work for the Trump administration.

53:46And I think we're sorting out what capacity that will be. Does that stretch to you as well? Or are you not in that? No, I'm not working on anything with the Trump campaign, nor have I been asked, nor would I. I am rooting for Trump to do a great job. I am hopeful that he has evolved since his first term. And I am genuinely rooting for my friends to be a great influence and to see as much of Trump 2.0 and as little as Trump 1.0 as possible. And the way I define Trump 1.0 is just chaotic and divisive. Whether you believe the media made him divisive or he's just naturally that way or people don't get his jokes, whatever it is, I just don't want to see the chaos during his first term replicated in the second term because that was bad for everybody.

54:33The country did not make progress. I don't want to see the country and people wasting time on issues that we essentially agree on, but we're arguing and fighting over the little details of the margin. So I am rooting for him. I don't think the other guys, I think they were pretty clear that they don't have plans to join the administration. It does seem like maybe asking for advice. That's kind of what I meant, an advisory role, because I was going to ask if you were going to have input on pushing our favorite green card policy forward, because if you did, I wouldn't mind. You know what I'll do is I'll write it up.

55:11Based on what I said today, I'll write a blog post and then I'll send it to my email list. I have a Substack, calacanis.substack.com and then I have another, or you just go to calacanis.com and then I have one that's like I was going to use for just my thoughts after each episode of All In. So I have like a Jason's All In newsletter. So maybe I'll put it on that one as opposed to my Jason on startups. But I have two or three mailing lists over at Substack. I don't know how I separated them. Yeah, we'll be in the show notes. I'm just hoping that voices of reason can advocate for high school immigration and more of it.

55:45I'm a little bit worried by the news reports that we've seen. But it does seem like these would be the spiciest people, right, who would be going for the most extreme interpretation of, you know, we're deporting everybody. And, you know, this is one of the big challenges with Trump as a leader is, you know, he says things in such a bombastic way. And then we see if Peter Thiel is correct. Do we take them literally or seriously? In this case, I don't actually know if it's literal or serious. I can't seem to get that piece of information. Are they literally going to take 15 million people out of there or should we take it serious that they're going to shut the border and do what I described, let in high skilled, kick out people who are criminals, and then be compassionate, thoughtful with everybody in between.

56:37Because I really do not want to spend the next year or two with the entire world watching the United States at war with itself over people's nannies, housekeepers, dishwashers, busboys, carpenters, construction workers being dragged off work sites during their shift. That's going to be crazy. Like seriously crazy. Highly inflationary too. If labor prices go up super dramatically inside of this nation, if we lose 10 million of our workforce, that's going to be tough. I mean, every single industry. So I have two thoughts on this, and I don't think anybody can tell us what's exactly going to happen.

57:23But it's great that you brought this up because I was literally thinking about this on my hike. if a bunch of white collar americans are going to lose their jobs because of ai and you know you're not going to lose your job to ai you're going to lose it to somebody using ai so some video editor can edit you know 10 times as much you know or take some one tenth of the time to edit it you don't need as many video editors what are those extra surplus video editors journalists writers researchers whatever going to do with their time they might actually be incented to go work at uh you know a chip fab or a tesla factory to make cars or to take plumbing jobs electrician jobs and actually get a trade job that pays twice as much and has a pension there could be a lot of interesting uh you know maneuvering from the white collar to the generation tool belt as we talked about yeah so that would argue for Or maybe it's perfect timing to close the border, not let as many people in, and give Americans first shot at those jobs, what I'll call frontline jobs.

58:36That doesn't mean they're entry level. Frontline means, you know, in the kindest interpretation, like blue-collar jobs, I guess. But frontline jobs. You're out there doing stuff in the real world. Yeah. So it's going to be – I don't know. What do you think of that theory that that could be what people are thinking? White-collar jobs are going to be going away. We want to save the plumber, construction worker job, dishwasher job, waiter job, chef job, short-order chef job for Americans. And would Americans take those jobs? And then you would have to have businesses raise those wages in order to get Americans to do it.

59:13Because it's not like you can pay somebody$12,$15 cash for those positions or$20 in cash. You're going to need to make it a$35,$45 an hour job. to be a dishwasher in loss in i remember a restaurateur telling me in san francisco they were paying forty dollars an hour for zero for a dishwasher and the last two hours were in the overtime bonus which were sixty dollars an hour one and a half times pay because i think in san francisco if you go past 10 hours in like you know typical 12 hour shift at a restaurant or you know if it goes from eight to ten and whatever it is the last two are going to have to be time and a half or something.

59:53So I think it's very interesting to think about how we'll have different labor demands in the future, but I think it would be very hard to get industries to accept paying double or 3x what they're paying for labor today if we had a shift in the workforce that you're describing. And so I wonder if going back to our interview and the autocado machine, if we're going to see at once automation reduce the need for white collar jobs and automation reduce the need for blue collar jobs because then yes having fewer laborers does ameliorate the impacts jason to your point but i don't think it solves the core issue of just needing fewer humans to do the work right because you're getting hey right now the guacamole half the guacamole work or more two-thirds of it like the guy was just spicing the guac yeah i some guac he didn't need to peel it, cut it, get that, you know, whack it and get the seed out and scoop it out.

1:00:52Man, that thing did a lot of the work. So you're right. And then if you don't need delivery people zipping around on bikes in Manhattan, they're going to start using little R2D2s. Yeah, maybe that's what happens as well, is we just think less manual labor. And then every country becomes a bit xenophobic, circle the wagons, shut the borders, nationalism. And, you know, I don't know that that makes the world worse. Japan did it. New Zealand and Australia largely do it. Those countries would prefer to keep their culture and to assimilate a very small number of people. It's just here in the United States that we have this very open-minded expansive view of it.

1:01:38I've learned over time that there are other countries. Finland, I think, is falling into this now. I think Sweden has now fallen into this of like, you know, we have a culture here. And if you want to learn the language and assimilate, yeah, we'd love to have you, but you got to learn the language, you know, kind of forced assimilation. You got to, you got to prove it to us. You want to be here. Yeah. I'm not going to give you the test in Spanish or French or German. You're going to have to take it in, you know, whatever Japanese. Or Japanese. Yeah. This is actually a, an important point for people who are American to keep in mind because I was, you know, I'm born here, lived here, raised here.

1:02:15And I've always had a very American view on what it means to be an American, which is if you're here, you're an American. Congratulations. Huzzah. That is just not how a lot of other countries think. And Reagan actually said this. Reagan said, you know, if I went to Turkey or I went to other countries for 20 years, I wouldn't even count then as someone from Turkey, but you can come to the U.S. and be an American. And I just thought that everyone thought that way, naively, unthinkingly, uncritically and then you travel some you read some news and you realize that's not the case but it will be a bummer i think jason if the nation that was the most open and welcoming became overly not welcoming i think that would be to our detriment even given the labor stuff that we're describing we think on that let's keep let's keep the best of america being the place that accepts people and growing we could have a billion people in this country we got the space for it.

1:03:03And I think if we really wanted to have a goal as America, it should be to get to 500 million Americans as quick as possible. Let's go. But do it as quick as possible with high-skilled people. Imagine we said, we got 340, 50 million people right now. We're going to try to get to 500 in the next, I don't know, call it 30 years, 5 million a year. So we want to actually have 5 million people immigrate here we're going to build new cities we're going to build 10 new cities of 10 million each and that's where these people are americans will get first shot at it but we're going to build 10 cities you know or revitalize 10 cities detroit etc like revitalize 10 cities put something there you know really be thoughtful about building housing in those places high-speed rail whatever it is and just start from scratch to build some really great infrastructure here and set a really audacious goal.

1:04:03That would be American dynamism. That would be the definition of American dynamism. So I'm going to write two blog posts. I need you to hold me accountable because you're my writing partner on these. I'm going to write that down so we don't forget. I do want to get to one more thing before we take a couple of audits. Well, the stock market's gone crazy, right? The stock market's gone absolutely crazy. And crypto's gone crazy as we predicted. As we predicted. So just so everyone knows, some level setting here, Jason, and then we'll talk about what we think about it, but 52-week highs for the NASDAQ, the Dow Jones, the S &P.

1:04:34We're seeing equities just rally very steeply in the wake of the Trump election. We have a chart that I pulled from YCharts showing off a couple of markets. And also, I threw Tesla in there because they've seen really rapid appreciation in the last couple of days. And then we also have a chart going over fintech stocks, the public companies that are in the fintech space, your coin bases. And as you can see, if you're watching the video here, dramatically up and to the right. and Bitcoin. Yeah, there's Robinhood. I've never sold a share of my Robinhood and I was down at low single digits when I put a JTrad in and I bought more and now it's back above 30.

1:05:10And I've always just thought like Vlad and the team over there are just so good. And they released a desktop version and everything. They just never stopped releasing great product. Coinbase never, I mean, even with all the regulatory distractions they've had and culture wars inside their own company. Ryan has just always been a really good product guy and keeps adding product. PayPal, I'm not so sure about. Affirm is back. That's interesting. Why are financial things coming back, Alex? What's the thesis here? Ah, the expectation of lower regulation, but let's be specific. If you think about what the Biden administration has done when it comes to consumer finance, they've wanted to do things like capping interest rates, eliminating what they call junk fees.

1:05:53Those are all things that you could construe as incredibly consumer friendly things that I would have really appreciated when I was broke, frankly. But those are not great for business if they were making money off of those fees, those income streams and so forth. So the expectation is a firm can probably charge higher rates, be a little bit more aggressive. Robinhood can do things like the prediction markets they got into at the end without getting into potential regulatory issues. So it's kind of Katie bar the door and everyone's very optimistic. And just because you mentioned Nick Crypto, everybody.

1:06:23Bitcoin's up 24 % in the last week and Ethereum's up 35%. And Jason, I heard that you actually still own some Bitcoin. So I'm curious what you're going to do with your - It's funny. People are - Yeah. I've made some spicy tweets about Bitcoin and we had Bitcoin on this very podcast in 2011. And I wrote a blog post, the world's most dangerous open source project, Bitcoin, with this blog post. But I also said to people when crypto was crashing, and there was like a China had banned it a couple of countries I said you know I think Bitcoin zero is the likely case I don't see governments being willing to hand over their currency to an anonymous project where 50 % of the coins are unaccounted for like this sounds crazy based on what I know about governments they accumulate power through a currency and weapons and nukes.

1:07:17That's basically a population and geography and natural resources down the line, but currency and weapons and army, those are the two things that make a nation state. I don't believe a nation state would actually sanction or allow one of these currencies to replace their dollar. Sure enough, the United States has allowed people to buy Bitcoin, Ethereum and any number of tokens. And Gary Gensler is obviously going to be replaced at some point soon. And I don't know how his term works exactly, but I think we have a situation happening while we're here that my Bitcoin zero being the majority case, which I believed through 2015 through 2018, I just thought there is no way China, the United States or European governments allow this.

1:08:10And I put it at 60, 70 % Bitcoin zero. Now I put Bitcoin zero at like under 10%, like maybe even under 5 % because I think it's too big to fail now. And governments have embraced it. I never thought they would. I can't believe it. And it's going to be so disruptive for the United States government if they keep printing money the way they are. And I don't think Trump's going to, I hope he does, but just based on what I've seen my entire life, with the exception of Bill Clinton, I don't think they're going to be able to stop the runaway spending. I hope Doge works, and they do. Doge, the Department of Government Efficiency.

1:08:48But I don't think it's going to be that dramatic if it does happen at all. It's really interesting that you're talking about the government position because this really was, for lack of a better term, the crypto election. I know we're talking a lot about, you know, Trump versus Harris and tariffs and all that. But underneath all this was a lot of advocacy done by the crypto industry. Yeah. You know, lots of money and lots and lots. Well, there's one thing that, you know, crypto VCs have, it's they have capital and they put it to work, you know, and points to that. But people like the new senator, I'm going to try to pronounce your name here, Lumbus, I believe, wants to build a national Bitcoin reserve.

1:09:26Trump went to a Bitcoin event and said, we'll never sell our nation's Bitcoins. And so I can't tell back to your Trump one, Trump two kind of thing. Trump one was very anti-crypto, Trump two theoretically in favor of it. I'm curious to see how far that goes, because if we do actually at the federal level embrace this particular cryptocurrency, I mean, that could be big for every startup in the sector, every VC who's invested in the sector. I mean, that could really spread out. I think if you're in the government and you want to maintain control of your country, I think it's fine to own some Bitcoin.

1:09:58I think doing your own, um, you know, national crypto project, which Trump has been alluding to, not his personal ones that are like a personal grift and whatever Trump coins he's doing or sneakers or watch. Trump cards that he was like doing like, like the NFTs. Let's put those aside, but like an actual USD, uh, EUSD. Sure. Well, no, they don't want to do that. They don't want to do a, oh my gosh, I'm going to butcher this acronym, a central bank crypto token. There's like a CBDC or something. I think the idea is keep that third party in the hands of Circle and other companies that are regulated, but then not directly the federal government.

1:10:43And then they just buy US government debt with their reserves, which is pretty cool. But that's pretty far from Bitcoin, which is non-backed, non-regulated and pretty distinct. A possibility of where this could wind up is if governments truly feel threatened by it, is you just put a 10 % tariff, since we're getting into tariff territory, a 10 % tax on crypto. When you buy it, you pay 10%. When you sell it, you pay 10%. Then it's at a 20 % disadvantage to the dollar. So you get all these advantages. It's not a dollar, but it's kind of ankled a bit, right? It's kind of throttled. And you already pay a certain percentage right now to transact on it.

1:11:21But a federal tax, in addition to capital gains, or maybe remove cryptocurrencies' capital gains and you make it ordinary income, there's all kinds of different ways for the government. I'm not saying I'm advocating any of this. I'm just saying, well, less people clip this again and make a clip of me in that faith. But that is how it could be countered. But for now, if you donated 20 % of your Bitcoin to get Trump elected last year, you're up 30%, 40 % now. So that was probably a good trade. And I think that's the big money in politics we're going to see happen over and over again, which is people made some pretty good trades here.

1:12:05If you were Jeff Bezos or Elon or any number of people or the people who supported Trump directly, Jeff Yoss with TikTok. These were really in the money trades to support him. And I think that the Democrats have to look at their anti-capitalism, anti-crypto, anti-innovation stance and realize that's part of why they lost. You know, the anti-crypto stance, I think, is kind of dead. I don't know if that really persists. Because think about it, four years from now, let's say Trump doesn't try to go for a third term like we're all worried about. And let's say J.D. Vance loses in 28. Just bear with me here.

1:12:43Does the incoming Democratic president go back and try to undo four years of pro-crypto policy? No. So I think that conversation is now effectively— The horse is out of the barn. The horse is out of the barn. The horse and the Bitcoin horse left the barn because they said it's not a security. And Ethereum is not a security. Ripple, they're still saying, is a security because it's centralized and people who are directing it as opposed to the whole Howey test nonsense. That's really important, though, because Andreessen Horowitz wrote a long post, their crypto team, and they said, I'm going to quote here, that entrepreneurs should now all feel empowered to explore all of the groundbreaking products and services that blockchains enable, including tokens.

1:13:26I'm here for it. I said from the beginning, I thought DAOs were really interesting and I very much wanted to start, I wanted to tokenize our funds for venture capital. Okay. So Launch Fund 4, which is a$45 million early stage vehicle that goes into Founding University and accelerator companies and companies of people in my network and friends who start companies and I have special access to. If we could tokenize it and any American could buy it, I could raise a$100 million fund and never go on the road pitching LPs because I could have literally a million people give$100 or 100 ,000 people give$1 ,000.

1:14:09And I would love to have a hundred thousand people give me a thousand dollars per fund and let them trade those tokens as they wish if they think we have a home run in there you know knock on wood we hit another robin hood calm uber thumbtack athena whatever and you know they want to trade every day the tokens available to trade and you could speculate on it you could build a position in our fund you could clear a position in our fund that would be awesome it'd be great well if you take the the crypto positivity of the Trump campaign and then cross it with something that we talked about, I think it was a week or two ago, the Tim Scott bill in the Senate that was going to make it easier for people to invest in private companies.

1:14:50You could actually not have the accredited investor test, have a tokenized fund, and it would essentially be completely open access to anybody with a phone. That's a very different world. Yeah. I would very much like to explore this. If there's somebody, because I got pitched on this five, six, seven years ago, where people were pitching me on tokenizing funds. And I was like, but the tokenization doesn't help me. It just creates more overhead, more expense. But I would very much like to have a J coin where people could buy the J coin, the coins could buy equity in startups, and then people could trade them.

1:15:25And I would just publicly share everything we've invested in and you could just go to this. I wouldn't give decision-making over, but I would really, the problem was this was going to add a million dollars in expense to the starting of a fund and then probably a quarter million a year. So you would be at like$4 million in expense, you know, and then customer support and everything, maybe 5 million expense over 10 or 15 years to manage this. It'd be like a half million dollars a year on average to manage the project, which I guess if you have a hundred million or$200 million fund is okay, but it was just prohibitively expensive you know it's funny jay's that you bring up the j coin idea because um going back to i think it's 2014 yes so just over 10 years ago i wrote this for tech crunch i think we can pull this up um i jokingly introduced crunch coin and it was going to be the native currency for tech crunch employees and you'd have to get paid in crunch coin and that was the only way to buy tickets to our events and it's funny good idea this is still like it was an april fool's joke 10 years ago.

1:16:31And maybe it's not going to be an April Fool's joke in five more years. The world's crazy, man. I love it. This will be something great that comes out of the Trump administration and his term. If they can make crypto safe for retail investors by forcing them, the people who launch the products to have their names on them, to have insurance, to have a board of directors, but allow anybody who wants to buy, let's say under a thousand dollars personally of any token, let every person be able to spend 10 % of their yearly income on any securities they want and YOLO. Cause then the most an American could lose would be 10 % of what they made that year.

1:17:20So if you're a, I don't know, plumber who makes a hundred thousand a year,$150 ,000 a year, and you want to YOLO 10, 15 grand into Dogecoin or Bitcoin or Ethereum or MyCoin, Jcoin. Well, if you lose it, guess what? No vacation for you this year. You're doing a staycation. And then next year you get a vacation because you chose to make a bet for you and your family. And maybe it pays off and then you can buy a second and third home. So I like treating people like adults. And I think there is an adult path here that Trump can set up with the accreditation test and limits on the amount you can invest per individual.

1:18:01Problem solved. Yes. Now, Jason, we do have some good audience questions that I want to get to in a second, but I want to wrap with a kind of spicy take on the stock market, if I can just squeeze this in. So enthusiasm, we discussed, stocks are up. People are very excited about less regulation and maybe less red tape in general in the economy and all that. But there's an interesting counter bet that people are talking about, and it comes from Warren Buffett. So right now, Berkshire Hathaway, which is the anti-startup, if you will. It is a holding company of cash-generating assets as opposed to a high-growth cash-consuming business.

1:18:36But Warren Buffett's a well-known investor for a lot of reasons, and right now he's sitting on a record amount of cash. $300 billion? $400 billion? $350 billion? Something crazy like that. That's a big number. And the reason why people think that Omaha's Oracle is doing this is because the Buffett indicator is incredibly stretched. And I have a chart here for everybody. The Buffett indicator, if you're not familiar, is just the market capitalization of US-based companies divided by GDP. Or if you want, it's the Wilshire 5000 divided by current GDP. And Jason, we're at essentially 200 % plus of this ratio, which is incredibly stretched compared to historical norms.

1:19:15So just to be a contrarian, just to be a Debbie Downer here on the show, I wonder if people are properly understanding that stocks were already a little bit expensive on a broad basis going into the Trump administration. And that could limit upside. And then that could mean that a lot of the enthusiasm, the hope for dealmaking and IPOs might be dashed because if stocks end up going down just because of fundamentals, we won't get all the candy that people expect to rain down from the skies. He likes your take is correct. But Buffett likes to buy things on sale. He doesn't believe Apple is on sale anymore.

1:19:50He thinks it's fully valued. He has concerns about people. I think this story has a lot to do with Apple and him falling out of love with Apple. Okay. And so I think he cleared a lot of that position, maybe even all of it. And that had done incredible for him. And I think he's probably looking and saying, if I have a bunch of cash and Meta goes back down to a hundred bucks a share or, you know, uh, Apple loses half its value. I can buy it again. And so, or there might be other companies he could buy a significant piece of when they're at a discount. So that's probably what's going on there. I think, you know, the, the spending of the government has been so dramatic and there's so much money in the system that the money always makes its way to equities because, you know, putting it into a 10 year, you're going to make 4.X.

1:20:44Putting it into your cash in your bank account is close to five, I guess, if just having cash. So until the rates come down, people are going to just keep putting money in equities and in cash. And I don't see a world in which Meta, Apple, Tesla, et cetera, take a nosedive. I could see them correcting 20 % or 30%. And maybe that's enough for Warren Buffett to make his move. Oh man, if stocks go down by 30%, I'm going to stop eating just so I can buy more. That would be the logical thing to do, yeah. that's my journey oh yeah yeah i mean me too i did the exact same thing i was like these companies are on sale i bought meta at 91 etc and all of it did amazing i basically two x in two years it was bonkers in terms of return all right it's been a great episode uh we do it live monday wednesday friday but this week will be monday wednesday thursday correct that's correct where we move the all-in tape and for people who know all in tapes on thursday so if you want to know my personal schedule it's typically monday wednesday friday twist and thursday is all in but one of the other besties had to switch so i think we're taping on friday so i moved the twist taping to thursday you'll see us all here back on wednesday about 12 ish my time in texas texas time 1 p.m east coast 10 a.m ish uh on the left coast he's alex i'm jason cautious optimism dot news if you're into it.

1:22:25Cautiousoptimism.news. No, not if you're into it. If you get to this point in the pod, you're into it. Go sign up right now. If you've got a couple of shackles, throw a hundy into the pod and motivate Alex to keep writing every day. And we will see you next time. Bye-bye.