WeRide IPO, Polymarket + Perplexity, the Trump Bump and more! | E1992

0:00If they do but one bump of Trump, they will become addicted. but one bump trump of bump now if you think about the trump bump and doing trump bumps what happens is it rewires your brain it creates a sense of euphoria yes now it'll create a hangover the next day and you will feel brutalized but what happens after this bump is your ratings go up and it's going to lean your coverage to positive because you want more trump bumps and he brings the bumps. There's going to be five bumps per every half hour, or you're going to be doing 10 bumps an hour. It's pretty intense. This is going to make Keith Richards and Kate Moss jealous.

0:43This is a lot of bumps. Elton John is going, whoa. This Week in Startups is brought to you by Google for Startups. Accelerate your startup journey with the Google for Startups cloud program. Get up to 200K in Google cloud credits or up to 350K for AI startups, plus training and guidance. Apply at startups.google.com slash twist. 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 2 report fast. Twist listeners can get$1 ,000 off for a limited time at vanta.com slash twist. And Assembly AI. Get maximum value from voice data with Assembly AI.

1:27Build powerful products and features for your end users on the industry's leading speech-to-text models. Get 100 free hours to start building at assemblyai.com slash twist. All right, everybody. Welcome back to This Week in Startups. I'm back, Alex. As you know, I got COVID. Yes. Pretty brutal. Luckily, we had a lot of banked episodes. We always banked three or four episodes. And you did a great episode where you interviewed three members of the Twist 500, the 500 most important private companies in the world. Well done. Yeah. Huntress, Sierra, and Tolbit. So a couple of cybersecurity companies and one company that wants to aggregate essentially media companies to kind of put their data together and license that out to AI.

2:10Really a lot of fun. I love talking to founders. It was actually four different Twisted Founder interviews over two shows. Because we also had the Gusto chat with Josh Reeves. Nice. He's interesting. You know, we have a lot of folks on the show kind of show up. You can tell they're caffeinated. Woo! Where do you look at? You know, fight and kick it up. His style is so much more like, I'm building for 20 years. We're going to go, that's our direction. We're going to roll. And so you almost want to like nudge him into saying something a little bit spicier. But he's like, no, man, my model works.

2:38We're a$10 billion company. Yeah. Yeah. So. Gusto is amazing. I mean, I've used it now in, of my own companies, a couple. And just great product. You know, that whole space of payroll combined with HR. it's just such a great category. I can tell you 20, 30 years ago when you started a company, it was just a pain in the neck because you had to have an office manager, an HR person, real estate, signing a real estate lease for three, four, five years, putting down one year of rent and what's called a letter of credit. All of this equaled about a half million dollars when you were starting out, right?

3:17And an accounting department. So it was very strange. Now, the idea that you would hire an accountant in-house, an HR person in-house, have real estate holdings, have leases, it's just all been abstracted. And that means more people could start companies and get to product and focus on product more. So it's just great change. Just to throw in one more point about that, I love going back and reading books about startups in the 90s because they say things like, well, we had to raise a bunch of money to go buy servers. And I'm like, oh, right. And then they debate co-location fees and worry about their uptime.

3:48I mean, you know, you never hear of a founder who's just woken up like 3 a.m. to go fix the servers because Amazon's on it or Azure's on it. You know, it would be interesting to see how many different expenses that a 1996 internet startup had that have now been completely abstracted to the point of being either an API or a managed service. Yeah, it's it's definitely a half million to a million dollars per year of operating spend in dollars from the 90s and 2000s less. So you're correct. the first company we had we wanted to do email and we had the silicon alley daily newsletter this is before there was sub stack and mailchimp so what we did is we set up a bunch of qmail servers in the closet and it was about forty thousand dollars worth of them we got a dedicated t1 that was fifteen thousand dollars per month but i put all that together and it was probably and then we had a sysadmin my friend brian alvey set it all up for us so you know talking about a hundred fifty thousand dollars a year to maintain this probably between people and costs etc or more no maybe 200 000 and uh but we said we're going to make 10 000 a week in advertising that's a half million dollars so we'll break even you know when we get to the 20th week of the year 30th week of the year everything else could potentially be profit so yeah it's just fantastic that you can go faster and and it's so cheap like mailchimp cheap substack free i really think that deep in my brain stem that software is by too cheap by a factor of 10 compared to like the productivity people get out of it compared to the old costs i mean if you were to just look at the power of email we use beehive uh now for the twist 500 which used to be called the ticker and we use coda for the database and if you were to do this in another era you know it would have been a quarter million dollars in you know software developers to build that platform or in the client server era you know,$50 ,000 to buy the server software and you would sign a five-year deal.

5:45So a quarter million dollars for five years. And now, you know, you're talking about hundreds of dollars and even, you know, MailChimp, I loved MailChimp. We used it for a long time, but, you know, for newsletters, which are free, Beehive became, and Substack became better options, I think, for people because they're free and free is a pretty good price or close to free, you know, essentially free even the paid version of p hive or what you pay in 10 of your you know paid subs to sub stack it's such an affordable fee that more people will use those products therefore they make up for it in volume so yeah good on technology yeah okay so i we didn't mean to start here we have other stuff that we actually have notes on and plans stuff we haven't talked in two weeks so you had a nice break i take it a little vacation i did i went up to uh north massachusetts to a lake and a cabin and a golf cart.

6:33My first time ever with a golf cart. Nice. It's just an adult go-kart. It's amazing. It was so much fun. My daughter loved it and it was just a blast. I now have decided that we need to redraw all American cities, strip out all the roads, replace them all with golf cart tracks, and we should all just be cruising with one foot out the, you know, out the side at like 11 miles an hour while drinking coffee or margarita. It's great. I love it. I love a certain speed and the speed I love is somewhere between 15 and 30 miles an hour uh this is what an electric bicycle goes when i had my vespa in new york you know it was topped off at 35 i had a little small one um and i do like that i like that speed for cruising because you can take things in you get where you're going you're not like zip zip zipping but you're kind of zipping and it's a nice feeling i i'm a fan of the that middle that mid speed yeah Yeah, no, I'm with you on this.

7:29This is why I think when you're on the highway going 75, it's so boring because you can't actually focus on anything. So you see nothing. But if you're going 15 or 20, you can see every single squirrel, rabbit, dog, you know, it's all, it's with you. So what we're saying, friends, is go out there and touch grass. But on the show today, lots of good stuff. Lots of good stuff. Jason's unified media strategy slash the Trump bump. then we rides ipo polymarket and perplexity everyone's two hottest companies out there today to chat about a bunch of money going to europe and venture capital i don't know how to enter this other than saying that something happened last night that a great many people tuned into and uh yeah you had a thought or two about it well uh elon did an interesting uh conversation with trump and he pitched it as a conversation as opposed to an interview which i think is similar to what we do on all in as well which is it's a conversation as opposed to an interview where one person is preparing questions and knocking the other person off face kind of thing but they went for two hours there was a lot of like um hand wringing and uh prognostication afterwards and people are wondering why there was such a strong reaction to it okay i'm sure you have feelings you and i are both media guys um and tech guys so we have a lot of opinions on these things i just want to point out you know what i've experienced firsthand with trump and that i've been talking about for a couple years which is the trump bump i believe anybody who has a media property if they do but one bump of trump they will become addicted but one bump trump of bump now if you think about the trump bump and doing trump bumps what happens is it rewires your brain it creates a sense of euphoria yes now it'll create a hangover the next day and you will feel brutalized but what happens after this bump is your ratings go up so when we had trump on all in you can just look at it statistically they could probably edit 50 000 and subs in other words 10 more subs to the youtube channel those episodes went straight to the top and you can see the trump bump for weeks afterwards where people are still coming back to that episode it you know it kind of lingers i think it's probably got a million or two million uh views on youtube alone so then your mind as a person with the media property is well when can we have trump on again and this is the uh yeah there's the trump interview i don't know what does it say there in terms of how many million views okay 3.1 million views and it's an And it's a month old.

10:02The average all-in episode, I think, on YouTube, just the YouTube portion, is$400 ,000 ,000,$600 ,000 ,000. So it's roughly five times. All right, everybody, you know, being at a startup is a team sport. You're not going to get there alone, man. You got your founders, you got the early team members, of course, investors, most importantly, that first couple of customers, right? And you all work together to get your company off the ground. And I have great news for you and your team. Google for Startups Cloud program is now a partner here at this week in startups. And listen, you all just want to know the number.

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11:15You're going to find out everything about this amazing program, Google Startup Cloud Program at startups.google.com slash twist. Okay, very simple. Hit the rewind key, bookmark this, write it down. I want you to sign up right now. Pause the podcast because these are big numbers, folks. They really want to support you. I don't know how long they're going to do this for. So startups.google.com slash twist. All right, let's get back to this amazing program. So when you see everybody doing this, there's two ways to go. You can either, if you have an avenue to engage Trump like Fox does or Tucker Carlson with his new independent show, Megyn Kelly, if you can get him, you're going to be nice to him.

11:56You're going to be engaging with him. And it's going to lean your coverage to positive because you want more Trump bumps. And he brings the bumps. You know, he comes, you know, there's going to be five bumps per, you know, every half hour. Are you going to be doing 10 bumps an hour? it's pretty intense you know like this is gonna make keith richards and kate moss jealous like this is a lot of bumps elton john is going whoa uh now you go on the other side you're rachel maddow you're anti-trump you've considered him a threat to democracy whatever you're on the other side of the spectrum you can't get him on your program obviously he's not going to sit in all likelihood maybe one out of a hundred times but you're going to get excited to you know if you write something critical, boom, all of a sudden your ratings go up.

12:41Now, MSNBC, Fox would be the two perfect examples, or maybe New York Times and Wall Street Journal. But I believe the media is so obsessed with Trump bumps. They're so addicted to the Trump bumps that there is a unconscious emergent behavior, which is he fills so much of the room and you get so many ratings, you get paid subs on the New York Times Guardian and Washington Post. Remember, they were actually saying, if you want more coverage of trump's crimes like literally that was their pitch subscribe help us cover trump's crimes more like literally was in the in the marketing so i think both groups are going to be responsible if he does get elected again for playing a big part in this one group for engaging him the other group for attacking anyway um it's an underreported story i think and that's a lot of what happened last night because the media business is a little bit threatened by the fact that sources are you know giving interviews maybe not to mainstream media and going around it to more direct you know the direct aspect of it it's a little threatening but i think it's the bumps that's the major issue what is your take on it so the last thing you said a lot of people view the media world through their own personal lens uh which is kind of grievance forward um that the media hates substack because blah blah blah the media hates first of all the media is the least cohesive coordinated thing ever so there is no media right the other thing though is i think a lot of what you're saying about the trump bump is correct but i think it's it's more of an example of something that's a little bit broader and more common which is the sheer power of celebrity and i would say that the trump bump that you're describing is similar to coverage of taylor swift for example sure um i think also coverage of elon himself if you put elon musk in a headline you will get a lot more people paying attention to you yes this becomes a thing that the media could better ignore or not pander to if they were in better financial straits but right now with social media no longer being an effective driver of traffic and attention everyone's fighting for the same four boxes in a google search window yeah and so if all the people in the world are searching for musk trump or iphone 17 or i don't know musk tesla or pick your thing or taylor's concert then you almost can't not do some of that because that's where the the people's attention is is going so i put the trump bump in under that kind of like broader umbrella.

15:19Sure. There is an example, though, to your point about people joking about wanting Trump to come back to be reelected because it'll help them. And the only example I can find of this was Axel Springer's CEO a couple of years back. He said this and then he was like, oh, I was kidding. I was kidding. And everyone was like, well, we know you guys. We know you actually want him back because it would be good for your business. But as a last note, the average journalist is, I think, concerned about having something akin to stable employment much more so than setting media policy on this level but i'll cop to it if four people got in trouble and three of them were well known and one of them was not i know which one i put me at the end of the headline because i would like people to read my story which is clicks but i think that's become a relatively cheap and low rent attack of trying to cover things that people care about and i think that the media should do a combination of things people care about and also things that they don't care about yet and that's why i read the economy yeah totally well said and i think you know the you know a lot of things in life are financial it's resource-based and when you have competition like the media does now and it you know it's it's a it's death by a thousand podcasts and sub stacks and beehives and you know twitter handles and tiktok you know personalities you know it's literally death by a thousand cuts just like the networks experience when cable came out and that is at the core of this they they can't afford to keep the lights on in many cases that's why independent media is doing so well because if you do happen to find your niche in independent media and you keep your cost structure low like you know this week in startups has nine eight employees i think three in sales five in production me and you i think it's nine of us yeah you know it's a pretty big team nine people but it's not 900 you You know, it's not 500 miles to feed.

17:15One third sales and 25 % producers. I mean, that's literally like bringing money in, keeping everything going, getting it edited, getting it online. And to us. I mean, honestly, I think we're - Couldn't be more bootstrapped, right? I think you and I are the least important parts of the show, to be totally honest, because without the other people, no show happens. I want to talk about the actual interview though. I tuned in for a little bit. Yeah, I heard some of it, yeah. What do you think? Well, I'm just - Or the conversation. Remember, it's not an interview, it's a conversation. Right, sorry.

17:42Sorry. Okay. So depending on your framing, yeah. I just want to say that Elon's level of patience was greater than I expected. I tuned in during the nuclear power climate change thing. Yeah. And the former president said something along, I'm going to paraphrase gently here, that the sea level is only going to rise by an eighth of an inch in 400 years, which is wrong by a factor of, I don't know, 50 or something. Farcical. And Musk, in his infinite patience, kept dragging him back to nuclear power like no nuclear power is good and chum's like well i i heard that fukushima is actually now on mars and elon was like i just don't as bad as you think and i he kept just yeah it was it was very patient i think you know elon is not obviously an interviewer by trade but you know he's a friend of mine and we've had countless conversations he's a great conversationalist and i think when you're interviewing the president and specifically that president right 45 having also had uh the privilege of doing it uh one and only president i probably will ever interview but you never know um i haven't really tried he is got a playbook like a medium right and his one of his great skills is his ability with these anecdotes and comedy and a little bit of timing is like a routine he got it from howard stern actually which was like a major media influence in the 80s and 90s and into the 2000s in new york city i was there for it i grew up on stern trump was a regular on stern and trump loved stern like at his wedding type level of love for him yeah you know it was really into him and there's a famous moment inside of the movie private parts where pig vomit uh who he named his producer played by paul giamatti is like what's going on and he's like the ratings are up he's like how could the ratings be up what are they saying they're like well the people who love them listen for 70 minutes on average and you know the average commutes 40 and and he's like why why do they listen he's like well number one reason given want to see what he's going to say next yeah and he's like okay tell me about the people who don't listen he's like yeah they listen for 95 minutes he's like what they listen for 25 minutes longer it's like yeah it's like well why do they listen he's like number one reason given they want to see what he's going to say next?

19:59Right. Trump took that playbook and it is why people listen. What will he say next? All right, founders, do you want to sell to bigger customers? Of course you do. You want to get that ACV trending up, up, up and to the right average customer value. And you want to lower your churn, of course. And if you want to get to major buyers, you're going to need to clear those compliance checks. That means you have to have your SOC 2 sorted out. What's SOC 2? It's just a standard and ensures that companies keep customer data safe. If you aren't SOC 2 compliant, you're not going to get the big deals. But Vanta makes it so easy to get and renew your SOC 2 compliance.

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21:14That's vanta.com slash twist for a thousand dollars off your sock too. And it is effective because I was watching political Twitter. I was also taking care of the baby my wife had a thing so I was solo caring for Ada's sleep schedule but he called Gavin Newsom Gavin Newsom and that exactly that is such a teddy small minded hilarious thing that everyone loved the flip side though is he does have an exposure problem because he's been going out there on the campaign trail for so long now when I tune in i i kind of it's almost like you're going to like see the same comedy set for the third time it gets a little flat it can be you know what if you if you do see a comedian do their shtick uh or and i see this with old people old people kind of run out of life experiences so they tell the same 17 stories you go see your grandfather and he's like oh you know can i have a tell you about the fire that i rent to and i'm like yeah yeah grandpa and he's like let me tell you we He doesn't even hear you say that you heard the story 17 times.

22:24He's going. My dad is also in his 70s, and I have heard the story of how they redid their cherry cabinets in their kitchen probably four times. I'm probably going to get it four more times. What I do like about that, though, is that it was something new. It was casual. And you have to ask Trump two or three times to get through his shtick, his bit, his anecdote, whatever it is. And I did that successfully. i think twice in the interview and you know i was i only have 15 minutes of the 60 minutes we had with him or something yeah yeah yeah you know but you saw when i got him to i nailed him on down on abortion and i nailed him down on immigration and then i was gonna go january 6th but we ran out of time and i i was firing off the last couple questions trying to get him in and you know i would have got him on january 6th as well but you have to ask him three follow-up questions and elon did that last night and i didn't talk to elon about techniques or anything but he did a very good job of bringing him back and kind of but spaces is peculiar because you also don't see the person in the reaction in a normal conversation we know when we're going to move on to the next thing and because you know the person's like okay got it you know you you have all kinds of techniques as an interviewer to um you know move the conversation forward in other words to interrupt the person to stop them and you'll hear me on all in when i have to deal with three my three partners who are you know like they all want to talk for five minutes each and if they all talk for five minutes each and now we got three five minute monologues and it really is a terrible experience for the audience when people do that so i interrupt and i try to move the conversation get the ball to move around so one person is not carmelo anthony you know the ball and they dribble the ball for 21 of the 24 second shot clock which is just not good basketball you want i understood that reference so you know on the margin some people will get mad at me because they're sax fans and i interrupt the sax or they're freeberg fans and everything but when they get to two three four minutes you know like okay we should move the ball here there was a little bit of that going on which is very hard spaces is a little bit like a cb and you don't see the person so you're like okay uh tell me about your thoughts on the border over but people don't say over and so you you could kind of step on each other a little bit with that kind of talk radio format yeah what's great about it is you can pop it up it's freewheeling the limitation of it is you don't have visual cues and it has a little bit of a cb radio and i don't think either party were using headsets so i got to talk to elon though really what it has to be optimized for headsets as much as people don't like to wear headphones or whatever it would really help if they put in earpieces or had a stick microphone of some type but anyway those are technical issues overall go in your child's room find an iphone case that's just laying there somewhere find the headphones that they never took out because they want to be they want to be cool and have airpods plug those suckers in oh the old school ones it's free and it's actually b plus audio quality and it's the cheapest and best way to simply go from yeah talking to your phone like this which i saw trump doing pictures of him doing this space and i wanted to be like dude come you're the worst you have the worst for av quality i when i saw that i cringed i was like oh my god he's on an open air microphone in a you know giant room yes that's going to create distortions and that's why i think it sounded a little bit like he had a lisp did you notice that and people were talking about this lisp thing and i was trying to figure out is this like dentures a lisp or a little echoey in the room or some combination of it i i never got the definitive yeah from drink i would have said he had a scotch or two but he doesn't drink so it wasn't that doesn't drink so it wasn't a he it does sound a little bit like that as well like as if you were on drunk history and just a little bit just a little like five percent if it sounds like me after i've been to the dentist and they've numbed part of my face so i'm i'm gonna put a dollar on dentures which is a perfectly reasonable thing to have if you were elderly i'm not judging um but also if you are going to go on a space with a million people and the richest man in the world and you're trying to run for the biggest office in the world but on some damn headphones and fix your teeth like i mean come on uh if that was what it was but i didn't i thought maybe i was hearing things or was my phone connection and then i saw the headlines and there was a large number of headlines that mentioned it as well so anyway uh overall there's a lot of other news today you know where do you want to go in terms of the big news i i'm really fascinated with self-driving and there's some ev company you and i love public companies i'm fascinated with the tipping story i'm fascinated with uber's earnings and you know what's going on in self-driving where do you want to go today we're doing we ride uh we ride i never heard of this company what is this jason So Jason texted me yesterday.

26:58He's like, hey, who the hell's WeRide? Why are they going public? What do we know about them? And I was like, well, I have the F1 filing up. I haven't read it. So I promise I go through and take a look for us. WeRide, it turns out, is a unicorn Chinese self-driving company, raised$1.1 billion,$5 billion valuation, is going public in the US this week. We haven't seen a lot of IPOs, Jason. We've been struggling, suffering from a lack of filings and kind of good listings. So we care a lot. And the company in this case is going to be raising a lot of money. The actual IPO itself is going to be about a hundred, 110 million, depending on underwriting shares and so forth.

27:35As you can see on the screen, they do quite a lot of different autonomous driving stuff from robo taxis up to robo street sweepers, which love it. Yeah. As long as they don't run over my dog, I don't know. Yeah. No, no running over dogs. That would be bad. yes but also there's a concurrent place placement of like 340 380 so this is going to be a serious offering in terms of capital rates okay so we've never heard of this company this leads into my theory about ride sharing now i'm obviously uh still a big shareholder at uber and believe in the company i'm obviously a big tesla fan i don't own shares in tesla full disclosure very complicated for me if your friend is the ceo of that company and you have shares you could i understand you get dragged into all kinds of craziness.

28:18It's not that I don't believe in the company. You own enough Teslas that everyone knows you like them. I have four. That's the most of anyone I've ever met. Two collector's editions that I don't drive. Number 16 of the Roadster, number one of the signature Model S is the first Model S ever available to the public. And then I have a Y and an X. And when I've had the Y and the X, they both came out to the very old. When you do your will though, can you leave me the Roadster, the first one? because that's okay i just have to let me just change the will because i have i gave that to my oldest daughter but i'll just switch that over to alex got it yeah thank you cross her name that that's the one that's based on the lotus exige yeah it's the orange one it's amazing um so putting all that aside there's a big question you know waymo's impact on uber and lyft tesla having the robo taxi event i think in october and november they pushed it back two months my theory has always been there's going to be five players to pick a number that i think figure all this out at the same time and by same time i mean within an 18 month window in other words okay they all get there in the same window to exploit the opportunity right if you if you get there three four years after waymo maybe you're going to be too far behind but if you get there in the same 18 months of waymo i think you're good and waymo is there right and waymo it's been there for maybe a year of like really good solid no crashes thank god nobody's died not no major you know except for the hippies in san francisco being like it blocked uh you know an emergency vehicle then you look and it's like it didn't block the emergency vehicle anyway i see you like i think no no i i i agree with you on the hippies i grew up in oregon i i am familiar You can smell them coming.

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31:27along with the Dutch. Those are the three categories I can't take. And so I just, it makes me so mad. You can say it. They're the R word. Reductionist. I was like, well, Jason, that's an interesting point. We're going to move on now from that comment. Reductionist, we'll take it. I felt like some people are trying to bring the R word back. Ignore my friend here. Just ignore. You don't need to. You don't need to bring the R word back. Reductionist, yes. They are slow downerists, if you will. Yes, they're decels. You know, And so I believe this WeRide, which is an obvious Waymo knockoff, it looks exactly like the Waymo.

32:02It's got the same exact design. This is proof positive, I think, that this technology is going to be commoditized at a very, very fast rate. Yes. And I was driving my Tesla in Austin. I shipped it to Austin. And I was doing some 30 to 45-minute rides. So I said, okay, let me just see if I can get the whole way there. Yeah. The pickup and the drop-off is super challenged. when you're not in a contained space like San Francisco or a city because driveways, parking lots, like these things are hard to navigate, you know? And people have gates at their houses or you're getting to the airport. It's super complicated.

32:39So I think self-driving has got a lot of work to do. I won't call it the last mile. I'll call it the last hundred yards. Yeah. The hundred yard problem is real. Putting that aside, I would say one intervention and I'm on the 12.3 software. So I got to get 12.4 and five. I don't know why I'm not upgraded yet, But I think, you know, and watching the things online, it seems like you're going to have one or two interventions every hour or something, which means they're getting very close. So then it becomes a deployment problem. And then if five people do get there, already Uber did a deal for 100 ,000 BYD electric vehicles with self-drive.

33:14100 ,000 of them, like already. And now BYD might have big tariffs coming into the US, but around the world globally, they don't have that. So you're going to have BYD, Waymo. Waymo already has a deal with Uber. I don't know if Cruise is going to get back into it. You have this company that we just found out about. That's a knockoff company. There could be maybe seven to 10 people who get there. And then whoever wants to win is either going to have to build an at-scale competitor to Uber and Lyft and DoorDash or sell to DoorDash, Uber, and Lyft. I think half of them are going to do the latter, which means the real impact we're going to see alex is going to be the number of rides and ride sharing autonomous and regular is going to boom and the idea of owning a car is going to become kind of silly yes like uh and right now i think the total number of rides in the united states i'd say the ones that are done by uber or lyft versus private citizens you know or other means in cars it's probably one or two percent Yeah, I was going to say one to a hundred, you know, but I mean, once you have self-driving, even if it just doubles it, that takes us to two out of a hundred.

34:22So there's going to be a couple of fun tipping points. One is when is the majority of Uber's domestic rides done autonomously versus with the human driver? And then when is self-driving the majority of all rides in the US? That's going to be much longer. But both the things I'm very excited about. You nailed it, though. The point about these companies is when can they build up a fleet that uses their technology to really try to capture a bunch of the market before someone else does? So WeRide is not a great company financially. They actually had less revenues last year than in the year before.

34:56And in the first half of this year, they shrank again. So why is everyone piling in to give them$500,$600 million in this IPO? I think it's because they want to build out their massive robo-taxi fleet. I think this IPO is literally a fundraise to put the cars on the road because their tech goes from L2, level two, self-driving two, level four, which in theory actually gets beyond even occasional human intervention. Now, that's what their prospectus says. I'm not endorsing that, but that's the claim. So you take an L4 level company that has self-driving revenues, but sorry, autonomous robotaxi revenues that are minimal, put a pile of capital behind it.

35:34To me, it smells like a build out. and that's why i think they're going to try to win but as we've discussed the chinese market is relatively self-contained so you know waymo in the u.s tesla in the u.s brews in the u.s jason i'm so excited it's gonna be so much fun uh and you know right now the number of people dying in car accidents 30 40 000 a year has stayed static so you wonder why is that staying static when people are drinking and driving less turns out still a ton of people drinking driving yes it's also distracted driving yes um and so distracted driving i think is keeping our death toll high while drinking and driving might have gone down a bit because people who are drunk are like you know what unless i'm justin timberlake and i'm really smashed in the hamptons i'm going to call an uber you know justin timberlake suffering i don't think he can afford an uber at this point he would much rather get pulled over by the cops and get arrested and lose his license and cause a massive PR thing, then God forbid, one of his friends pulls him aside and says, hey, dummy, no need to kill anybody in your car.

36:36There's this new Uber thing and Lyft, you could just press a button or you're Justin fricking Timberlake. Anybody at the club will drive you home in your own car and then they'll take an Uber and you take a selfie with them. Wake up, dude. Wake up, dude. Well, I mean, the other side of that is once you reach a level of fame and success and wealth, pick a category or power, you do begin to think that you are in fact different and different rules apply. And I think keeping your head is the hardest part of that. And Justin Timberlake's been a name for what feels like my entire life. Well, he screwed up.

37:07He did give us a good meme though with the, this is going to ruin the tour. What tour? The world tour. I've seen that repeated on the internet. I really enjoyed that. Just put some numbers on it. Federal Highway Administration says Americans take over a billion trips a day in a cars. 400 billion trips annually and uh uber reported 7.6 billion dollar trips this is 2022 data so it's much higher but anyway uh about 2 billion rides in the u.s a couple years ago so maybe there are 3 or 4 billion rides in the u.s which is exactly one percent you nailed it alex so you and i are both very close it just it's funny to me because i bet you for some people it's zero zero zero zero zero and for some people it's 85 so there's a class of folks out there who don't like driving like myself who will take an uber when it's raining because i'm not gonna walk or my wife's gone or whatever and i bet you know i for me i will go more places so this is not just a replacement it's also it's going to boost the total tam for uber so i guess if uber nails the self-driving use case this feels like a 2014 conversation uh if uber nails the self-driving use case man their market's huge just astoundingly large 2007 i think is when that darpa you know uh self-driving contest was kind of going on and everybody was sort of laughing about the cars driving off the side of the road and we're here 15 years later and i just took a ride from like the lake in austin lake travis to the airport with one intervention and now the pickup and the drop-off would not have worked in either of these cases so the last hundred yards have to be solved which i think is going to be brute force like okay this is how this airport works exactly what uber wound up doing They had to like define each airport manually, send somebody there, take pictures of things, explain to you where you go kind of thing.

38:48On highways, I wish people were forced to use level two on all highways. I think level two, which is the car takes over two functions for you, should be required on highways, which is lane assist. It keeps you in your lane and then adaptive cruise control, which means it doesn't let you plow into the person in front of you. Those two things. I don't know why those aren't by default turned on in all cars. So Jason, do you ever drive a manual transmission? Sure. I learned to drive on Oregon logging roads and my dad's F two 50. You know, great car to learn to drive on because it had enough torque that you really couldn't kill it.

39:26And so you could really learn to shift on it. It was great. My dad will probably never stop driving stick. And so when I think about L two and how just obvious it is for you and I, that everyone should have this. I think we just got to keep in mind that that car culture is so core to the identity of so many folks. And they're just not going to let go of it. Like it doesn't matter to me. I don't derive any of my self-worth from it, but I'm just one person. So I'm sympathetic to the other side of that, but you're correct. Um, but I'm going to move us along, talk about two of your favorite things, generation bet and also the world of AI because polymarket and perplexity are teaming up and did you know mr galganis yes that uh polymarket is built on ethereum i did not know that so people are placing real money bets on this prediction market on you know is biden going to drop out or is jd vance going to get replaced or who's going to be the vp pick all these kind of real world events politics comes to mind now but other things can come up like sports and stock markets and all kinds of other profits, but they use Ethereum as the ledger is what you're saying?

40:33So this was news to me. I was prepping some notes on Perplexity, the AI search engine, Polymarket, the prediction market. They have a partnership. So I was just digging in and I saw that they're based on Ethereum. So I went to Dune, which is the blockchain analytics service that we all know and use. And I pulled a graph of how much people are using Polymarket over time. and then also the total transaction volume that's flowing through it. This is the Polymarket daily volume chart. But Jason, isn't it cool to see a startup that's raised a bunch of money and have public data of how it's doing? This is the coolest thing because now I can see the inside information.

41:07And as you can tell, doing quite well lately, total volume has absolutely gone through the roof. And if you look at daily active traders, it's also showing quite a lot of just very strong performance. Amazing. I love it. yeah it's not quite a hockey stick but it's getting close um i think this is really interesting i love the idea of people placing bets they'll get things wrong you know people thought shapiro was going to be the vp candidate not um walls yes so why well it turns out like it's a very personal pick that an individual made it's like somebody picking what dessert they want to have like this could be the best dessert at the restaurant but the person might have a preference for you know tiramisu over the sorbet exactly you know everybody could say like hey this sorbet they're known for it it's world class they they buy their tiramisu from the bakery down the street it's mid doesn't matter kamala harris wants to have the the tiramisu she's gonna have it so that was a perfect learning moment for the markets which is even though this person is the consensus this is a choice that is not based on the consensus or what makes the most sense necessarily what makes the most sense for an individual yes and so that's good to learn and this is the generation bet concept which i'll uh i'll debut here for the first time uh you helped me i gave a talk at kpmg last week and uh i was in park city they asked me to do it i don't do a lot of these folks i get paid a ton of money to do them but i only do them for friends like once or twice a year but i asked alex to help me out on it thank you for the help and one of the themes um you know that we've been working on here on the show static team size where teams stay the same size we talked about that a whole bunch we're trying to codify that one of the ones i want to codify here is generation like generation x or generation y generation bet what is gen bet it's the people who grew up on robin hood buying crypto nfts and prediction markets and price picks you know and um what's the other one that's draft kings and sports betting and all this the this group of individuals and i was interacting with some people in the audience this is like serious people 200 really senior executive like ceo vc leaders of public companies all kinds of stuff and i said listen how many of you have a child who is wagering a bunch they're in their 20s or 30s and you're a little bit concerned about their stock trading options trading nft trading crypto trading sports betting or prediction markets man a lot of people in the room came up so i did like a little i did a little audience work and i was talking to this one woman and i said well why are you concerned and she said well you know it's like he's really into it and i said is he up or down said well so he was down but now he's way up and i said okay what you've experienced with your 27 year old or something is this individual is now a financial like it's almost like they went to World War II and they came back as vets.