SPEAKER_00: all right everybody welcome to the first episode of this week in startups for 2022 it is molly wood's first official episode and she's a managing director here at launch the investment firm that i started so we're going to do a full news show today molly tell the audience what we're

SPEAKER_02: going to be talking about so much tech news is off to a hot start in 2022 quick commerce startup joker lost 159 dollars per order in the us in august we're going to talk about whether that is or is not a large number it is startup valuations also large numbers we've got charts from pitch

SPEAKER_03: book and the wall street journal covid policy and testing failures which is tech adjacent don't

SPEAKER_02: worry open sea freezing over two million dollars of nfts going against decentralization according to some and a dramatic reading i think this is going to be our new thing of an anti-web3 twitter exchange between aaron levy box ceo and brian chesky airbnb ceo who gets a little bit of the beavis and butthead

Jason Calacanis: treatment for me if i'm being 100 honest stay tuned this week in startups is brought to you by

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SPEAKER_14: you want to read the first story you want me to read it yeah tell me about this story i'm so uh this is absolutely amazing and also i confess i had never heard of this company so joker is that we're calling it yeah it's joker wow that's an unfortunate um convergence of occurrences because joker and this is not a joke haha quick commerce startup joker apparently uh lost 159 dollars per order in the united states in august this is according to the information which obtained some internal documents that is not per customer it's per order they basically pulled a brand list remember when brand list sort of had to admit that they were actually you know using 60 times more per order than they thought this was sort of like that it is an astonishing amount of money to be losing even for one of these quick commerce companies that is trying to sort of do deliveries what within 15 minutes like super fast 30 minutes or less sometimes as fast as 10 to 15 minutes they are different business models there's also one called go puff the uh different from uber eats or doordash they don't hire part-time contractors and buy third-party goods they actually have their own inventory which they store in least warehouses called dark stores it's kind of the ghost kitchen model of super speedy delivery the drivers don't use their own vehicles uh joker gives them e-bikes and in 2021 they launched in 10 cities across the u.s and latin america new york city mexico city lima the capital crew which sound to me to not be very easy cities to do super fast delivery in yeah let alone all of the other concerns that they have here but yeah it's it's um they're they're losing massive amounts of money i think yeah 74 million dollars just in the united states and 84 million in south america all right so there's a lot

SPEAKER_24: to unpack here um there are two major concepts in startup land and now that you're going to be an investor you're going to hear these terms come up over and over again molly uh one is unit economics

SPEAKER_25: which i'm sure you've heard of before which is on a on a transactional basis like what happens okay you made a pie and you eight slices and each slice cost you you know 75 cents what is it or 50 cents to make what is the person behind the counter cost etc and you break down in each unit what's your profitability and so it's very important for a company uh that's going to do a lot of transactions to have the unit economics really dialed in and you can really um refine those unit economics over time so in this case if they are buying the bicycle how long does the bicycle last how many rides does it last what's the maintenance of it okay it lasts for a thousand rides and then we have to replace it and it costs a hundred dollars so it's 10 cents a ride and you start figuring out your unit economics that that's one um and then there is asset light versus asset heavy marketplace so a marketplace uh where you used to work uh is not that kind but you have you know two different sides of the transaction a store which has a bunch of items in it and you have a customer who's buying stuff from that item so airbnb is an example ebay of a marketplace asset heavy means you own the assets so asset heavy would be well there's a factory where amazon not a factory there's a warehouse where amazon actually stores stuff uber eats or doordash as examples are asset light they don't have to inventory the food right the food is made by a restaurant or 7 11 or walgreens and it's delivered so this is an example of somebody saying i'm going to make an asset heavy marketplace and i don't know my unit economics yet and so this is pretty brutal like how could it possibly cost that much money well they may be inventorying a lot of um a lot of in of this inventory to go faster and make it more predictable which is how an entrepreneur thinks they get really addicted to like well it's just easier if i make this full stack everything from top to bottom i own the bicycles they're full-time employees they get benefits they get vacation once you do that you've added 30 to the cost structure people are out for four weeks of vacation and days off you have to really start accounting for all that stuff and but now the converse of it is if that um that might be month one or that might be quarter one of them deploying in one city which means they had to pay a lease they had to fill the inventory it might drop down by 90 percent in month in quarter two and then it might drop another 90 percent in quarter three as they put all those fixed costs in they filled the inventory up so i would take the number right now as probably indicative of an early stage startup maybe give them a little bit of a break and they'll easily get that down but the thing that i would be very concerned about is can this be done

SPEAKER_24: asset heavy i'm not certain it can be done asset heavy which is why doordash um and other folks are not in the um inventory game the inventory game right there and and also there's cloud kitchens um which travis started um and i won't talk too much about that but obviously travis is a close friend and

SPEAKER_30: um they're not doing the delivery they just rent to entrepreneurs uh culinary entrepreneurs the space

SPEAKER_25: so if you're a culinary entrepreneur and you want to start a burger business and you want to start molly's burgers and you want to put it in 100 cities you can go to cloud kitchens and have 100 you know little workstations in a cloud kitchen one brand and they will support you in your journey but they're not going to make the burgers themselves i think and they're not going to deliver them it

SPEAKER_14: seems like a company like joker and we'll sort of i'm very curious to see whether those economics can i mean it's like there's two questions one is how do you manage your inventory if you have to get everything to someone within 30 minutes like that seems to me that you have to stop a lot of stuff maybe more stuff than is actually efficient on top of that delivery has always been a bit of a loser as a business historically way back in the early dot-com days right it was like if you want to lose a crap ton of money try to deliver stuff fast yep so this has the hallmarks of both of those things e-bikes are

SPEAKER_02: kind of a new wrinkle that could be a little bit better in a time when most companies have tried to

SPEAKER_23: solve the delivery thing by being a marketplace yes and you have to i mean people are just not paying

SPEAKER_30: attention to what happened in the past if you're going to inventory this stuff in a city that is the only way to do a 15 minute delivery so that means you need to have manhattan real estate

SPEAKER_25: so they're trying to find manhattan real estate that's really cheap so when cosmo did this in new

SPEAKER_24: york they had warehouses or like you know kind of spaces really janky spaces on like 10th avenue

SPEAKER_25: 34th street when that was not a cool area when it was not developed and you had those kind of areas now what they're doing is my understanding is they're finding bodegas and corner shops korean groceries all these kind of like niche things that exist in new york city and they're kind of taking them over and saying hey can we buy your bodega from you and then we're going to just shut the front doors and then we're going to make that our delivery place so there's a little controversy about that i've heard of like kind of gentrification or taking over like these local

SPEAKER_24: businesses that have a certain ethnic flavor um but that's another wrinkle in this is

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SPEAKER_25: reason why i think not to um cheer for the home team but i think the reason uber's model works better is because walgreens already exists so they did a deal with walgreens and i ordered from walgreens the other day we had an ant in the station because it was that raining thing in the peninsula yeah and when

SPEAKER_30: it rains the ants are like where can we go anywhere in this person's house so all of a sudden you have ants everywhere and then we also ran out of laundry detergent and i was like ah i gotta get this laundry

SPEAKER_25: done now i gotta get these ants out of here now i did the ubereats thing and i joined ubereats prime

SPEAKER_24: which and i was just emailing with uh dk tk dk over at uber uh name drop about some ideas i had for their uber prime because they basically have this uber for a hundred bucks where you don't have to pay a lot of fees i think that that's gonna be like it's gonna make uber go crazy because they have this asset light and they have everything at walgreens the only problem was that as i was checking out they're like hey would you like candy and ice cream and i was like yes so i was like i really from

SPEAKER_30: office eating at the poker game the other night like those uh haagen-dazs bars and i was like i really want those haagen-dazs bars so i tried to order the haagen-dazs bars and they sent me the wrong thing they gave me like chocolate ice cream and a thing and not the haagen-dazs bars like how do you get that wrong so you still have that chopper issue like i don't know if you'd use instacart out in the east

SPEAKER_13: bay but oh yeah like yeah so that instacart where they in real time will tell you like hey do you want to switch this i didn't set this and you want that and it's drive it's really driver by drive i

SPEAKER_14: mean it's yeah it is not a it's not a perfect system i think from anybody but no if but as a consumer certainly and somebody who's interested in the economics of this it feels to me like leveraging the existence of lots of inventory and bringing it to people who want it is a much simpler and then taking a cut in between is a much simpler proposal then we're going to stock our own stuff we're going to have a time promise which god help you depending on what's happening in your city we're going to pay for hardware and we're going to pay for drivers that said and it's a fair note even in our document i would be curious to know how much ubereats was losing in the early days how much doordash was losing

SPEAKER_58: for order i find it hard to believe it was 150 no way no way this is like one of those weird numbers

SPEAKER_24: you have to we were both you were a journalist i was a journalist for a long time we get crumbs of internal information and we try to build a story from what we see in the real world what executives

SPEAKER_25: tell us what customers tell us and then once in a while you get this leak and it's important to know that when you get a leaked email sometimes there's an agenda so this could be a disgruntled investor um who has some beef and maybe they sent the worst possible spin of this it could be an employee who got fired who leaked this so you got to keep that in mind when a piece of leaked information happens and it's in a very negative light you got to think there are qualified investors at this company who are aware of this problem and if they're sharing it it might have been it might have been in the context of we started at we were losing 159 per order now we're down we were down to 15 in

SPEAKER_61: the second quarter and now we're down to three dollars but the journalists only got the first part of that right so yeah like we don't know the context however we don't know that objectively

SPEAKER_64: that's a big number it's a big number and also the way they're running the business is asset heavy

SPEAKER_25: and so we do know that so when you triangulate and try to figure out this puzzle of the business which you're going to be doing as an investor now working with me on investing in companies that's what you're trying to do is actually triangulate and find the truth can this be a business that's profitable it can't you can't make this business work with full-time employees i'm certain of it i if you did have full-time employees i think the delivery fee would have to be 30 bucks and so then it would only be rich people who don't care about if they're ordering a hundred dollars in groceries a thirty percent tax on top of it which listen there are probably ten percent of people or ten percent of

SPEAKER_58: deliveries are that right you really need to get to can you make a sustaining business on ten percent of

SPEAKER_25: deliveries like that no you're counting on a lot of rich people well and then if you think about the brilliance of the uber model they already have the drivers out there so now when you log into your app my understanding is it's like if you want to have you know they gamify the uber app for drivers i think it's like you turn it on and it's like oh here's an uber eats ride here's an uber grocery ride and here's an uber x ride so now you think about the number of calls you can get the number of calls goes up and speaking of which yes i think we have a segue here we do a good segue is always great so uh well the

SPEAKER_02: segue is this idea of gamification and incentives because a thing that is still happening somewhat astonishingly is this ongoing bad behavior about tip baiting which is something i think i covered in like 2020 which is well we'll let a driver for one of these services explain it a 39 second clip

SPEAKER_71: we'll be right back one of the worst things that you can encounter as a delivery driver is tip baiting in these food delivery apps the customer has the opportunity to reduce or increase the tips after drop off tip baiting is when a customer offers a large tip to get their food faster and then take away the tip at the end while it's good to protect the customer from having bad service by holding a tip over your head it leaves a big opportunity to screw over the driver with tip baiting unfortunately there's not really anything you can do to fight it because the customer holds all the power my best advice would be to find an area that doesn't tip bait and stick around there today i made 19 deliveries and 11 hours and five minutes making 225.58 putting our 84 day running total up to 17 230.63

SPEAKER_25: cents i think what's interesting about this is he's making 25 an hour delivering working whenever he wants so this whole idea that like the gig economy is like oppressive and killing people and unfair like he said he made 200 something in 11 hours so he's i just divided by 10 over 20 bucks yeah it's over 10 but it's over 20 bucks an hour that's pretty amazing when you think about it as an on-demand being able to work anytime you want but this is such an easy solution for this tip baiting

SPEAKER_14: get rid of tipping it's the worst thing in society just i mean yeah like it the fact that this this person is able to make this good living now is great but that should not be tip dependent because it

SPEAKER_02: and that tells me that he could have a great day and i know some people who drove for postmates during the pandemic when stuff was really rough right one got load laid off they were just like we have to

SPEAKER_14: drive for postmates and it was very clear to them immediately that the whole game is the tips really so you and then you live and die by the tip because the tip can change after the fact or the tip can just

SPEAKER_02: not get processed because you know it sends you that thing that's like rate and tip and if you don't then the driver doesn't find out they either get nothing or they or like 10 hours later or 10 days later and they might all of a sudden have a tip pop up and so it's a it's an inconsistent revenue stream i don't know if it's economically possible to just pay people a flat rate maybe it's not which is a thing that people have been arguing about and why california is trying to like pass all these gig worker laws and it's i think it's because of that insecurity yeah of income and i don't know how you get rid of tip baiting like we should everybody should get a chance to tip according to the service

SPEAKER_80: if you're going to have tipping this was a big debate i had with travis in the early days of uber

SPEAKER_24: that i lost because i'm from brooklyn where everybody gets tipped and my dad would tip everybody yeah it was like you know being in like a goodfellas movie so the first time i took a flight i the flight attendant brought me a diet coke and i'm kid you not i'm 14 or 15 15 years old

SPEAKER_83: and uh it's 1985 i'm flying to florida it's my first flight and i took two dollars out of my pocket i folded in half and i put her hand i said that's for you sweetheart like my dad would say and she

SPEAKER_84: took this she took the two dollars and she held it over me and she dropped it on my left she's we

SPEAKER_83: don't take tips and i was like you don't take tips every time ever and she was super nice to me after that she's like it's really nice sweetheart this is back when people called each other sweetheart in the you know in the 80s and uh it was a different time okay don't mention me but

SPEAKER_25: everybody got tipped so my whole life my dad made me tip people so when i would go to a restaurant he would give each of my brothers two dollars every time they changed the bread he would make

SPEAKER_24: us walk up to the busboy and give them two dollars wow and he'd say you know they work really hard they're only making like whatever 20 a shift give them the two bucks um and we were just trained to tip tip tip tip tip and so anyway i just love tipping but i would have these debates with travis

SPEAKER_30: and i was like i want to give a tip he's like it's gonna creates too much cognitive dissonance you're leaving the the whole idea is to take out friction that's one more step then we have to remind people to tip yada yada eventually he lost that battle but he was in your camp which is just included in the price of the thing which is what they do in europe what danny meyer tried to do in new york it's i think both models work when i go to europe and i don't have to tip i'm always giving like a little extra and people think i'm ridiculous uh yeah people should be given a living wage and i like tipping but this tip dating thing is an easy solution if somebody pulls this more than once right if you change your tip down the second time you do it you should just say to give the person

SPEAKER_24: a warning people consider it tip baiting if you do this and explain to them the term and say you know

SPEAKER_30: uh it could decrease your ranking in the service if you do this and just like you have a ranking as a passenger they should have a delivery ranking and if you tip under whatever the normal amount is you should just have a lower ranking so that people can pass on delivering your food i would actually

SPEAKER_02: argue that you can even go a little further back in the transaction to solve this problem which is don't specify your tip in advance if it's a tip and not the amount that the driver should be actually getting paid like the fact that the tip is already assumed up front yeah that's weird too right why did

SPEAKER_30: they do that what i think they but why did they do that because it used to be like when you're taking uber i don't want to pay them well no no but why did they put it yeah but i mean why did they put it in the front why did they front load it right i don't know is the question because they don't

SPEAKER_100: front load it on cars i think they front loaded it because people forgot to do it at the end

SPEAKER_02: probably and and then the payment was even more insecure because if you forget to add the tip later but so then the problem is if you can use a tip to bait a driver you've already got a problem you've already created a perverse incentive with tipping which is oh i will deliver this sooner and take more

SPEAKER_70: care with it because i'm getting a better tip as opposed to because i'm getting paid enough to do this

SPEAKER_60: right that's not how a tip should work that's not how a tip should work a tip should work it'd be it's a little extra on top for great service exactly but i like tipping on the way in i'm a big tipper

SPEAKER_02: on the way in i'll just i mean i'm a big tipper like i want to be clear i wouldn't i don't even change my tip when it's bad service because i feel too guilty because i didn't go get my own groceries like i'm exactly the sucker that they're talking to with the tips up front i'm like we'll get 15 i'll

Jason Calacanis: make it 18 like yeah i i'm a dumb dumb but it's because i think these people should be getting paid more

SPEAKER_24: yeah and they're actually doing fine you know that's like one of the great things about capitalism is like because of the competition now they can't get drivers and so the rates just keep going up i

SPEAKER_25: mean the amazon workers factory workers starbucks nobody can find people so they just keep raising

SPEAKER_24: the rates and now like really the minimum wage in cities is really over 20 bucks now it's not even the 15 that san francisco and seattle and a couple of other people places have uh put it so pretty

SPEAKER_107: amazing to see that i think that's like one of the great things that happened in society it's also because we don't have immigrants coming into the country anymore i think but that we have to pay

SPEAKER_24: more interesting uh it's a uh it's a balance right like if we have 11 million job openings and americans don't want to take menial jobs anymore which they don't seem to want to do right that's true yeah are we gonna there seems to be some balance here i think we have to look at i i think it should be dynamic immigration i don't know why this is so difficult to understand but if we have too many job openings if we let more people in and then if we don't have job openings then we close the spigot a little bit like it should be in proportion to the number of open jobs we have trailing last three years so if you average the last three years the number of job openings then we could actually have a point-based system like canada new zealand australia and let people

SPEAKER_61: in based on what we need but anyway i'm open i think we have some of that i know i listened to i

SPEAKER_02: i had a lot of i had a lot of conversation back to you at your end of the year show about that because i was like well yes but you still need a system for asylum and refugees like you just still need no no

SPEAKER_00: you should totally carve out 20 for people who are going to get tortured if they go back to their

SPEAKER_14: country and then we do have some point you know we have the h1b visa and then that's totally gamified

SPEAKER_114: and they use a lot of whatever whenever there's an incentive people will twist the game here's what

SPEAKER_30: you'll learn as an investor you'll be on the board of a company at some point somebody will bring up h1b visas and they'll be like how little can we pay them how much are we saving exactly and you're like that's not what this is for but they're like but that's what it's about it's about indentured servitude for elite workers and it's like these poor people from india who are the the main victims

SPEAKER_24: of this it was they had to leave the country within 30 days if they lost their jobs yeah and

SPEAKER_30: these i remember when i was in i t the i t people were like they're those guys are taking the weekend shifts they're coming in on sunday to put this stuff together yeah because we'll fire them if they don't like i was in the room when these conversations happened with managers when i started my career in my 20s fixing laser printers and it was like what they're like yeah these guys can't say no

SPEAKER_24: these indian guys we have that if they say no we kick them out of the country i'm like what you know like yeah and they get paid less than you do and i was like but they do the same work and they work the weekends and we don't like yeah they're lucky to be here like it was a really it's i mean that was like one of the when trump said they're abused i was like i went on cnbc and i said that's kind of right you know they are pretty much abused hey everybody i want to tell you

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SPEAKER_24: i guess we should talk about these valuations medium valuations of us seed and early stage startups have gone bonkers and pitchbook provides some data wall street journal uh did a good story on it but a couple of charts we'll show you uh this is the median valuation of us seed and early stage startups uh and you can see uh something crazy happened in 2020 uh into 2021 where we had this 12 to 15 million dollar valuation for early stage companies that means the total enterprise value the value from the company is let's say 15 million dollars so if you put in 1.5 million dollars as an investor you earn 10 now it's over 25 million dollars this is for the same companies versus in some cases companies with less performance so why did that happen we can talk about that in a minute uh there's more money chasing these startups because they've done so well and this is what happens in a bubble uh more people want to invest and really it's about the output so if you look at the price to sales ratio uh price to sales ratio is uh the value of the company to its uh sales how much revenue it has and if you look at the public markets it's grown to over 15x from just a couple years ago being 5x and so the outcomes are three times bigger and the early stage valuations are you know basically almost double so that's what you're seeing and a record amount of money is being invested it was 92 billion i think uh was invested and so it's doubled year over year for a couple years and just five or six years ago we were putting 30 billion dollars uh so i don't know if you have any

SPEAKER_02: questions about that molly but you know the main reason i was interested in this i mean i'm just interested in this in generally because there's so much money sloshing around and it does seem like there's some people are like i don't even know where to put my money at this point so sure startup sounds great yep um nft why not but it raises for me a question that perhaps we can explore i'm going to drop it here but we don't spend too much time on it but a question to explore in the sunday show

SPEAKER_14: possibly is is this kind of fundamental question of how is valuation determined like i think when you ask about when you try to figure out how vc works that is probably one of the more interesting and

SPEAKER_133: mysterious and contentious and controversial and fundamental it's super simple um at the earliest

SPEAKER_24: stages valuation is a function of the market the demand for that startup and that founder and that's very hard for people to admit uh because they would like it to be more of a formula like we see in public markets so in public markets you're like okay how many pelotons were sold how many teslas were sold how many people subscribe to netflix and let's do some back of the envelope math it's a lot

SPEAKER_00: of fun right you can be like hey each pel we did a thing where each peloton uh subscriber was worth thirty five thousand dollars then the stock crash and now they're worth like five thousand or ten thousand it's like okay that makes more sense to me right at these early stages you yeah you can just take them all the different metrics and then just start dividing or multiplying and come up with some and

SPEAKER_25: then you can compare so how does a netflix subscriber to a disney plus subscriber compare okay

SPEAKER_24: why does netflix get such a huge premium for their subscribers versus the disney ones well maybe that won't last and maybe that's an opportunity to invest in one public company versus another in a private company you don't have a lot of metrics you have a founder or a couple of founders you have a market you have a product you may not even have a product you may have a mock-up so then it becomes what is the demand for the shares in that company for the potential so what i always tell people is you're either selling your potential or your performance once you are this company joker that

SPEAKER_25: we talked about earlier joker has a certain number of deliveries now at a certain point it's not about the potential anymore it's about what's your unit economics and we have some numbers there so we can

SPEAKER_24: start doing math once there's your profits and you're charging for the product you can start to do that math before that you're selling the potential and the potential can be determined by the team the

SPEAKER_00: founder themselves the track record and then how many other people want to buy the shares and then the people who want to buy the shares like clubhouse was a dogfight between bill gurley and mark andreason and i think they got a hundred million dollar valuation when they had like a thousand vcs and you know early adopters on and you're like how is that worth a hundred million you're valuing a thousand people on the service are you valuing each person has a hundred thousand dollars doesn't make any sense yeah but it was that team had done other great products and there were multiple people willing to bid on it so i got bid up just like any other auction so when i work with

SPEAKER_25: founders and they're like why can't i get this valuation i'm like well you can look in the mirror you're a first-time founder so sorry to break it to you but i'm the only guy on the phone

SPEAKER_24: and you don't have three term sheets so if you want to really get a something going here you need to have three different people give you a term sheet and coordinating that is so hard molly like you get one term sheet and they're like you have 48 hours to sign this so you really have to have you have to know people in the venture market which these serial entrepreneurs at clubhouse did then you really got the marketplace because like yeah we're not sure if we're raising we have our seed funding we're funding it ourselves but we may raise and they're playing it coy and then people start giving them term sheets and like yeah we'll consider that but they're not up against it like a first-time founder who's like oh my god if i don't take this term sheet of a million dollars for ten percent or a million and a half or ten percent i'm gonna have a problem and so what you learn as an investor is don't sweat the valuation too much if it's a great company with a great team if you paid i invested in uber at under five million four and a half million if it had been 10 million i would have made half as much money but it still would have been a big number right so you don't sweat it if it's a great

SPEAKER_00: company if you can get in you get in and you just enjoy the ride i love it okay more to come more to

SPEAKER_14: come on this i have just so you all know i have a list of like 75 specific questions that we're

SPEAKER_02: thinking of making into their own segment which is just like please explain i mean i have a lot of follow-ups on valuation yeah but we should keep going with the news and keep going through the news

SPEAKER_159: here oh rapid test go ahead you take this because you had covid okay so as a person who just took it

SPEAKER_14: sounds like 10 days at least uh worth of rapid tests yep you apparently were either stockpiled

SPEAKER_02: them or were one of the lucky ones because as omicron is spreading i i just i had a fit about this on twitter yesterday because a friend of mine texted me and was like okay we just did the holidays thing and then now there have been like three positives in the extended family and we're trying to figure out if we have it no rapid tests available anywhere no pcr tests available anywhere through doctors or one medical or anything finally they found a place where they could do local rapid pcr tests for three hundred dollars per person and then the follow-up to the per person she's like a thousand dollars later i guess we're going to try to go get these rapid pcr tests so we can find out if my kid

SPEAKER_14: can go to school on monday then the follow-up that i didn't even tweet is that they got there and there was a four and a half hour long line made up of people who had pre-paid for appointments who were stuck in this car yeah so she like got on the phone they requested a refund and left and what is astonishing about i mean this is just astonishing so and i tweeted that this was a big part of why my mom who had who almost died from covid in october oh my god i'm so sorry i didn't know that it was

SPEAKER_58: terrible so she had delta she had delta yeah which is brutal totally you know i mean she and her husband both double vaxxed but very immunocompromised she has type 1 diabetes which is a huge

SPEAKER_14: indicator for you know bad side effects she's exactly the person that like high vaccination rates are supposed to protect because somebody can still get very sick so she did she called me on a

SPEAKER_58: thursday she's like you know my husband and i both have cults i'm like you know i'm cold you have covid like you're in north dakota the vaccination rate is like two so go get a test they she's like well we drove around to a bunch of stores we couldn't find a test and the doctor told us that

Jason Calacanis: we couldn't come in because we have symptoms so they didn't get tested i mean could she have tried

SPEAKER_14: harder probably but at some point they're sick so then by monday she's in the er with a blood oxygen

SPEAKER_31: level below 90. oh my god that's almost dead wow almost dead almost a ventilator oh my god it took him

SPEAKER_133: 15 hours to find a bed because the icus were so full i mean it just was like the whole thing

SPEAKER_14: california no north dakota in north dakota okay yeah so hospitals were full low vaccination rates you know the whole thing but a huge part of the like had she been able to get a test on a thursday knowing that they were both high risk particularly her they could have gone and gotten monoclonal antibodies then and instead of almost dying having two courses of money she got the full presidential package remdesivir the steroids two treatments of monoclonal antibodies like but that actually

SPEAKER_178: could have been mitigated by three days if she had tests by three days if she had had tests

SPEAKER_58: instead of a 10 day hospital stay and really like i mean i got very lucky because sorry she went

SPEAKER_181: through all that which is crazy and thank god she's okay what i had done was because i was regularly

SPEAKER_24: testing at the house uh when people came by i was just ordering the binax i was just buying those you know a dozen at a time and just putting them on a shelf just so we had them um and and during early in the pandemic i had a hookup from finland and korea um who was sending me the early kits for

SPEAKER_25: 25 each and half of them would get caught by the fda or whoever in customs but i guess technically

SPEAKER_24: they were coming in uh in an experimental kind of way or whatever uh that was like in the first couple of months somebody's like hey jacal you want tests i was like yeah sure um and i was testing pretty

SPEAKER_00: regularly but i was taking these every day to try to figure out when i could see my family again and i thought i just felt a little guilty about it's one day i did it twice because i was really desperate to hang out with my girls so i took it in the morning and i took one at night

SPEAKER_30: anyway um but the craziness of this is we have like only three or four vendors unless i remember

SPEAKER_24: that have been um actually okayed for this we could be making these for two or three dollars each the fda both administrations screwed this up they're both incompetent it just shows you what controls big health has over our government and we can't even where's the executive word why didn't

SPEAKER_25: trump do an executive order war times act and why didn't bind it biden because you know what they're both in the pocket of big health i i'm an independent in my thinking i think both political parties are

SPEAKER_24: grifters and i think they both wanted to see their big health contacts make bank and they wanted them to

SPEAKER_30: have these really profitable tests as opposed to just what's the point of this wartime act yeah right like they said oh we have this wartime i'm gonna have the wartime act that's the perfect case okay yeah take your factory stop making whatever other tests you're making and make a billion of these and we're

SPEAKER_25: going to buy them for you for five dollars each and we're going to send them to everybody's and we were saying this on the all-in podcast during the thing like we should just have amazon or the u.s postal office 20 service yeah put 20 of these in everybody's yep uh thing is mailbox and then i mean you know the out we would know when outbreaks were going to happen i mean talk about a colossal

SPEAKER_24: failure for a country with as much money as we have a billion dollars we would have spent on that could have saved a trillion dollars in stimulus later or a hundred billion it would have been the greatest investment ever but this is the corruption we have in our own government referring

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SPEAKER_30: tennessee or visit 1-800-GAMBLER.net in west virginia and germany has 80 tests and the german

SPEAKER_02: government was giving them away for free like there are so yeah there are so many parts of this like yeah we there was the mentality of of the magic bullet and we just got to prioritize vaccines and

SPEAKER_14: everybody will get that and apparently nobody in the biden administration read the internet and understood that the anti-vax movement has been building online for like over a decade and was going

SPEAKER_02: to be kind of a big deal and then there was the failure to nationalize testing i mean abbott

SPEAKER_14: which makes tests rapid antigen tests yeah less than a year ago was laid off the majority of its staff and was destroying testing what supplies oh yeah destroyed them

SPEAKER_32: because they were like oh we don't need testing now because we have vaccines and nobody sees delta coming even though every epidemiologist that i follow on twitter has been saying for a year and

SPEAKER_02: a half wait for it wait for it the virus is going to mutate because we don't have global vaccination rates like the idea that anybody is saying we didn't see these highly transmissible variants coming is like i'm sorry do you guys not have any doctors at the office because like i i don't i have these moments where i'm like i don't want to get all my information on twitter and yet i feel like i live in the future yeah because i mean what did you think was going to happen so we had this phenomenal moment in the united states where because i've been obsessed with

SPEAKER_14: testing since the start of this because you cannot manage what you do not measure where on december 6th someone in a white house press briefing asked press secretary jen saki shouldn't we just be sending tests to every american and here's 49 seconds of her astonishing response crazy look at what

SPEAKER_201: we've done over the course of time we've quadrupled the size of our testing plan we've cut the cost significantly over the past few months and this effort to uh to push uh to ensure insurers are you're able to get your your tests uh refunded means 150 million americans will be able to get free tests complicated though why not just make them free and give them out and have them available everywhere should we just send one to every american maybe then then what ha then what happens if you if every american has one test how much does that cost and then what happens after that

SPEAKER_205: all i know is that other countries seem to be making them available for in greater quantities for less

SPEAKER_201: money well i think we share with the same objective which is to make them less expensive and more accessible right uh every country is going to do that differently and i was just noting that again

SPEAKER_213: our tests go through the fda approval process crazy i mean yeah and she's so like dismissive dismissive

SPEAKER_222: yeah it's so snotty it's like such a bad luck by the way two weeks later only two weeks later only two

SPEAKER_02: weeks later when they were like oh we've approved two new at-home tests and so we're gonna expand production and make at-home tests available for you know like a billion more a year and i think even some

SPEAKER_14: comment like we're gonna send some to people yeah which will by the way all of this will happen after omicron has peaked right after the national guard has to be sent in to staff hospitals la county

SPEAKER_02: is already at more than 90 of capacity and their icus are almost full all of this testing capability which could have for example kept my mother out of the er is going to come too late yeah because we just apparently were like vaccines are plenty that'll i'm sure that like it's when you're fighting a

SPEAKER_219: war raging why would you not have every weapon available if you know that just go for everything

SPEAKER_24: like we test things one you know you have the vaccine you have the the new pill that pfizer has you got the monoclo just try everything throw everything at it and let's get everybody back to

SPEAKER_233: life the good news is how omicron is a big nothing burger like the people who are getting it no if you're

SPEAKER_65: back if you're back sorry if you're vaccinated if you're vaccinated because the people who are in that

SPEAKER_13: hospital i think 94 of them are the unvaccinated right 94 of the deaths are the unvaccinated but

SPEAKER_02: six percent are my mom okay well okay so if you're immune to compromise those hospitals are full so if i break my leg yeah that's totally an issue system right it's it's not it is thank god it does appear to be a mild illness in the vast vast vast vast vast majority of vaccinated people who get it and that's great but just by sheer numbers it's sort of like how we know that aliens exist because there's just so many like mathematically speaking they're out there and mathematically speaking you know

SPEAKER_58: hundreds of thousands of infections every day are going to mean hospitals fill up yeah the good news

SPEAKER_24: is this omicron if you are not immunocompromised and your vax or triple vax yeah it is what they found is it's upper respiratory so i was watching i love this guy scott gottlieb who's on the board of pfizer

SPEAKER_30: seems super credible to me because he's always been like very like down the middle because this is upper respiratory it doesn't go into your lungs which is exactly the experience i had and the other people

SPEAKER_24: who got it at sax's uh spectacular christmas super spreader tm um that's his big christmas super

SPEAKER_241: i listened to that show i was like i'm not i'm not talking about that one i don't care you would have gotten it anybody would have gotten it he's really taken the you know the republicans are

SPEAKER_00: just they're hardcore about it they're like it's it's like a it's a brush fire for them they're just like let the fire burn we lose a couple people you're a mom my dad's got diabetes like

SPEAKER_30: ah whatever they're just you know collateral damage but the fact is because it's upper respiratory

SPEAKER_24: you never you have this incredibly like symptoms but infants don't do well with upper respiratory and if you ever had a kid when they had uh any kind of like a flu upper respiratory you know like you may go to the emergency room so now we're seeing you know hundreds of kids have gone to the emergency room

SPEAKER_133: now because of this so i'm also like i'm not really ready to write off 1400 americans dying every day even

Jason Calacanis: if they're not vaccinated right like they don't deserve that um you know my feeling on it is i

SPEAKER_30: might take the other side of it which is like what more do you need to see to get vaccinated like if you are going to hold the line that you refuse to get vaccinated in the face of 1400 people dying a day you're like somebody who doesn't wear a seat belt in my mind or smoke cigarettes like are we going to

SPEAKER_133: stop society for you i like 100 here's our first disagreement oh no no i don't i 100 agree with you

SPEAKER_58: about this choice idea right you don't get to choose to make yourself like a living weapon

SPEAKER_250: not with my mom in your line of fire yeah that's that's crappy that is your man are you are you for

SPEAKER_02: mandatory where do you draw the line we're making things a lot harder like i think that okay i think

SPEAKER_14: i like that the fact that we've made it socially more difficult and i think we could do even more than that i think if we're going to have like if we're going to say businesses have to mandate vaccines

SPEAKER_02: then they have to mandate them and it can't be the like or also test right we're giving we're saying we're still giving people this option of like you have to get vaccinated or you have to you can test

SPEAKER_14: every week like no if you're doing it then do it and if you're going to issue an executive order that says business is over a certain size which i think the federal government is 100 you know able to

SPEAKER_258: do then don't give them all these outs we'll see i mean it's gonna go to supreme court it's gonna be interesting to see if they can actually force companies to do this yeah i mean is it interesting

SPEAKER_262: i mean we've mandated seat belts yeah like maybe you do it the same way and you're just like there's a

SPEAKER_24: fine that's not a yeah i have a hard time with the concept of like holding somebody down and forcing

SPEAKER_64: them to get a shot um even though i believe in vaccines a hundred percent like and i'm triple vax

SPEAKER_25: and everybody i know and if i had a friend who wasn't vaxxed and i did have a friend who wasn't vaxxed i sat him down and i was like listen yeah i agree with you 1400 people dying a day and a billion

SPEAKER_13: people have had these vaccines like which group do you want to be part of right i agree with you and

SPEAKER_14: i don't think that we can force people and hold them down and i don't think we should do that and

SPEAKER_02: also we need to throw everything at this problem right like the easiest way to not get polarized by the vaccine because every time we do that we just fall into the same trap which is that vaccines are the only solution which is not true testing is a massive part of the solution right like therapeutics are a massive part of the solution that came way too late like the fact that we now only now are getting pills is way too late so like we actually need to and frankly i think this will help with

SPEAKER_179: the vaccine debate de-emphasize how do you feel about going back to school because that's been the big

SPEAKER_107: controversy now and my kids are going back on monday they were supposed to go back this week but i'm taking them skiing for an extra week because you're so because you're trapped up there so

SPEAKER_275: trapped up here basically it makes it sound like a treat for the kids he's like yeah we can't

SPEAKER_276: leave actually there's can't leave it's too much now uh no they cleared the roads it's fine now it was

SPEAKER_24: there was there were three days and we're talking about tahoe had a blizzard and there was like

SPEAKER_232: seven or eight feet of snow in three or four days we were literally trapped in our house and then a couple of friends of mine had lost their power and uh where i am i guess we have our own power

SPEAKER_107: grid or whatever power backup and so we were fine so i was like literally going to be hosting

SPEAKER_24: another family and i was like i have covered but i'm staying downstairs but if you want to stay upstairs it was like a kind of crazy situation but um i i saw eric adams the new mayor of new york

SPEAKER_30: was just basically took the position of listen there's more harm being done to kids and they're

SPEAKER_107: going to get cove this is what i thought was this is definitely more harm happening like this losing of iq points is crazy and obviously it skews towards kids who can't afford tutors or supplemental help which now we're really doing a disservice because those schools were not good for

SPEAKER_30: underprivileged kids already but the thing i thought was a pretty interesting take which was eric adams said the first time i'd actually heard it was kids who stay home from school wind up getting covered just as much because they're hanging out with their kids you know and going to the movies and doing other things or seeing kids otherwise or getting it from their parents so it's not like

SPEAKER_24: it's any different going to school than being at home and i was like it kind of makes sense to me i

SPEAKER_275: don't know if that's true or not i mean that is highly dependent on the behavior of the families

SPEAKER_02: in question that's a sure what i think though is that look omicron in the early days of the pandemic i was sort of like oh my god you guys that it is not a magical beastie that's going to leap on you in the grocery store and like get you right it doesn't work that way like it's not a lot of oh my blah blah no no omicron is a magical beastie that's going to jump on you in the grocery store and you're going to like i don't there is not a scenario in which kids are going to be able to stay home and not get it and so they should be in school as long as they can but that said we're deluding ourselves if we think that's going to last because there are going to be because people will get sick and or have to isolate there aren't going to be enough bus drivers there isn't going to be enough teaching staff like we should prepare for some disruption yeah without

SPEAKER_70: a doubt and the teachers are just not going to show up i think this is why i'm so yeah i mean

SPEAKER_03: this is why i'm so irritated that we did an all that we did hybrid work as a society but like an all or nothing response to return to school right like you need to be able to give kids the option i understand that this is difficult and it's tricky and it takes some work and you need more technology we need more money for schools all of that is true and we are going to have to figure out as an adaptation to what is about to be i mean it's just like climate you need every solution and

SPEAKER_02: you need to adapt your lives to it december is going to be hard yeah for for like a long time this is the year by the way remember last year they were like oh we're going to have like the covetous flu yeah and it's going to be a disaster and nobody got the flu because they were at home yep this year is the year i know of a household where they have one side has coveted and the other side has the flu right this is the year where this is gonna happen double down

SPEAKER_291: and then the emergency room is getting filled up or whatever yeah it's also okay nothing nothing i'm sorry i looked at the comments like a fool oh well be careful there could be some anti-vaxxers

SPEAKER_30: in the comments it's not even that no people have strong feelings about yeah apparently whether

SPEAKER_281: we need more funding for schools which yeah that's a no-brainer yeah as a woman who ran her school's

SPEAKER_110: auction for three years yeah anymore is it a public school or charter or public public yeah they definitely need more money um 100 percent i can't yeah i can't even anyway yes fair enough tech show

SPEAKER_298: uh we're a tech show yeah but i mean testing the testing thing though the testing thing is

SPEAKER_02: unquestionably like it is one of those where the technology met the bureaucracy and came to a dead stop i'm sorry i said you know you can you're not you're not on public radio anymore you can say

SPEAKER_77: whatever you want here oh that's so great yeah you can you could drop f-bombs you can don't tell me

SPEAKER_303: that because yeah this is this is the great thing about being an independent podcaster now you don't have word i'm so happy right now it's great yeah well you know and it's also the grift and the

SPEAKER_24: corruption you know like if you ever want to see grift and corruption like when something is a really

SPEAKER_00: easy problem to solve and you have unlimited resources like we have here in the united states or seemingly unlimited resources to solve some of these problems and it doesn't get solved like it's kind of an occam's razor here like why didn't they follow the money right speaking of following the money opensea froze 2.2 million dollars worth of stolen bored ape nfts uh art gallery owner todd kramer had his nft collection stolen from his hot wallet after falling for a phishing scam according to yahoo on december 30th um hot wallets are connected to the internet but a

SPEAKER_24: little bit less secure metamask is a hot wallet coal wallet is not connected to the internet so ice cold disconnected uh until it is manually plugged into a computer so the less convenient but of course more secure and uh this could have been obviously avoided if kramer was using a cold wallet kramer tweeted to openc employees in the company that he was hacked along with the numbers of the apes and mutants that were stolen because they're all numbered and you know like guess any other serialized collectible uh the tweet has since been deleted for some reason yahoo reported that openc responded to this by freezing 16 board apes and mutiny nfts which are no longer able to be traded openc's intervention wasn't well received because users saw it as going against decentralization a core tenant of web 3.0 software engineer grady booch uh commented on todd kramer's tweet about the stolen nft quote silly me and here i thought the code is the law and that one of the very ideas of cryptocurrencies was the elimination of any possibility of centralized intervention hypocrites every one of you nft collector kw dot soul also commented quote who was able to freeze the nfts feels pretty anti-crypto to be asking third parties to do this and ideally they shouldn't be able to this was just extremely poor opsec on your part true decentralized ownership no one should be able to step in good luck so i don't know what you think about

SPEAKER_311: nfts and decentralization but um yeah code is a law except when it's not right well the code is a lot

SPEAKER_03: until you have created products and you're selling them like is if openc is a marketplace aren't they

SPEAKER_02: at some point i mean this is the i don't want to derail our conversation but everything is moderation at some point if openc wants to exist as a for-profit platform yeah it wants people to feel safe on its platform and it wants to be able to or is you know fee it feels at the the people who run this company that they need to step in when theft or fraud occurs and make the marketplace safer and more appealing so that people will continue to spend money there and so that they will make money it is that is

SPEAKER_03: that you know the antithesis of web3 does it matter when you build a business your incentives change

SPEAKER_24: absolutely and the i think this is like a religious thing for certain people in the crypto community which is we want to eliminate centralized control it's been a big debate um and when you eliminate centralized control a lot of bad stuff can happen uh there are some good things that can happen but you know if you look at whether it's selling of nfts or content like there's a reason to have uh a database that can change as opposed to an immutable one like what if somebody slanders somebody what if somebody doxes somebody this idea that you could have a twitter that's you know not censorable um it's like well what if somebody gets doxed and i don't know what if somebody's well and even if we

SPEAKER_02: take it out of twitter and the idea of what you say i mean airbnb look at airbnb as an example right all of a sudden they had people on their platform who were trashing houses or people on their platform who were not representing the houses like they were supposed to be so airbnb the platform there is no they can't be hands off they can't be like a completely neutral deliverer of services for both sides without stepping in and moderating on some level whether it's like oh we have to have ratings or we have to have a punishment system or we have to let you you know give or insurance or insurance exactly like if you're going to be a marketplace i mean i have this sort of theory that like everything is everything is content moderation because if you're going to sit between two

SPEAKER_14: entities and try to make money off of them you need to exert control on the entities on either side

SPEAKER_03: reasonable control yes reasonable control the question is how much and what about what do both

SPEAKER_24: sides want like right i don't know that anybody wants to live in a world where uh somebody who hacks your bank account can't have that transaction reversed and i think this is where like web 3.0 hits a little bit of a wall which is you know these non-centralized systems have a lot of risk involved in them and they have a lot of anonymity or pseudo anonymity yes every transaction is on a blockchain but you can create unlimited wallets and you can you know be anywhere in the world and you can be beyond jurisdiction so there's going to be a lot of pain and suffering because there's no insurance because there's nobody checking the transactions because money laundering you know dark money terrorism can all

SPEAKER_00: flow through this stuff and that's the naivete of a lot of people who are in the space they just haven't lived long enough to see the ramifications of you know an unregulated system regulations exist in a lot of cases because people have been hurt and they want they want some level of regulation people want a rating system on airbnb they want insurance i had one of my places used for i had a we were had a place we were using as an airbnb our old house and somebody threw a party and did like six thousand dollars worth of damage and it was covered portioned by the person who threw the party

SPEAKER_107: illegally uh or against the terms of service and then also because there were some insurance from airbnb it was great it was like okay well we just the two carpets that were ruined we just got brand new

SPEAKER_312: carpets it was actually kind of great and it's listen like it's okay to want a totally decentralized

SPEAKER_03: like it's okay to want that and it's okay to go off and do it but as soon as there's money to be made the incentives are going to change that's all i'm saying as soon as you want to be the platform that sits in the middle and makes the money you're going to have to make hard calls speaking of airbnb we

SPEAKER_24: got really good on the segway 2022 year of the segway last night there was a funny anti-web 3.0 exchange i don't know if you've been following the oh we did because we talked about it when you did your your pre-episode your episode zero uh so this web three you know banter keeps going between like the web 2.0 gen xers and the you know anarchist uh web 3.0 true believers uh box ceo aaron levy who is hilarious uh and airbnb ceo brian uh chesky who is brilliant uh had a back and forth where they

SPEAKER_240: literally trolled the out of web 3.0 people and i guess we're supposed to do a dramatic reading here so i'm going to be levy uh and you're going to be chesky you gotta you got time to think about how you're going to interpret this but here's my best aaron levy the web is amazing you can build something

SPEAKER_121: of value for billions of people i i picture him with a lot of energy i know aaron he's a lot of fired up dude yeah he's fired up so i'm going to do my best aaron levy and fired up the web is amazing you can build something of value for billions of people leveraging endless distribution channels architecture options open source and protocols and definitely scalable infrastructure

SPEAKER_336: everything gets cheaper and faster every day in that case let's build the entire thing all over again oh we're just starting to feel like things were getting too useful for consumers enterprise and developers good time to pivot oh everyone should vote on every single decision that won't take too long to rebuild too simple we need some opaque financial incentives in the mix to spice

SPEAKER_82: things up that's a great idea let's financially incentivize early adopters so we never know when we get to product market fit the current ways is too easy love getting confusing early product

SPEAKER_240: signal as a founder that can't control for wildly independent variables this conversation is in public right we're using dms i mean it's so great i mean what i love about this is um you know anybody who's built a startup and hit scale like these two gentlemen have

SPEAKER_24: um it it is amazing what we've accomplished since 1992-93 when the web first you know started to take over from aol you know delphi and other dial-up services and we were like well if we could get

SPEAKER_30: if you could i remember the moment when databases got hooked up to the web browsers or when images or video were supported and i was like oh man if only you could store videos oh if only the bandwidth was cheaper and all of that has occurred in 25 years to the point at which now you can build a service that

SPEAKER_24: a billion people use with 10 people and people have done that instagram hit a hundred million people famously with i think 15 employees and uh the idea that you would then rip it apart and then put a

SPEAKER_30: opaque financial incentive in the middle of it what these individuals have learned over time is like you do not want to confuse the incentives and everything's working wonderfully so why

SPEAKER_24: what is the actual value we're creating here decentralization okay we've already talked about like is that actually valuable okay yeah and maybe for some systems it does yeah and this immutable

SPEAKER_70: database like we spent all the decades trying to make databases reversible i know i mean the problem is like faster the problem is like everything it why did it become a religion why did it become partisan like why because it's because of the money the financial because of the money exactly so like

SPEAKER_02: take it out of that and ask yourself does decentralization help in some cases yes does it help to take the middle man out of sending money between countries absolutely sure does it help you know to to create a system by which a transfer can occur without a bank taking a cut in the middle in fact if if that cut ends up being as much as the money you're trying to send sure there is value in that tweak is there value in an immutable database sure if you're trying to figure out like where does your food come from to make sure i don't get e coli from right that's like a really valuable use for an immutable database providence yeah i don't like there is no reason whatsoever that we can't tweak the system that we have yeah but the very idea that web3 has to be well first of all maybe we should just not let anybody start calling it web3 because that all by itself means

SPEAKER_275: it's like a revolution yeah something's wrong with the existing thing yeah can it just be an evolution

SPEAKER_03: that's kind of a big deal and helps some things and isn't great for others and we're just like

SPEAKER_24: working our way through it yeah um i think it's because of the amount of money and the m the multi-level marketing nature of this it's you know when you buy this nft because it's anonymous this is what people really don't want to talk about i would say 90 95 of the projects we've seen icos 95 were scams or unqualified people people lost their money nfts i predict 95 same thing um and then bitcoin ethereum and the other coins that have reached some stability maybe it'll be 50 will lose their money or

SPEAKER_30: eighty percent who knows um and when you when you look at that amount of grift and that amount of

SPEAKER_24: motivation well what behavior comes out well this toxicity comes out because if you're saying well these nfts or these icos are you're you're you're screwing with my paper you're screwing with my bank

SPEAKER_30: account and that's where people get really upset and then they create thousands of anonymous accounts and this is what the toxic bitcoin people do they believe in bitcoin toxicity which is anybody who doesn't believe in bitcoin do psyops on them you reply to them and say have fun being poor you reply to them and say you don't get it okay boomer and you try to make the attacks more personal and

SPEAKER_24: then what they do is they run these attacks because i know i've been on the other side of it every time i would say hey listen if you want to put one percent of your wealth into bitcoin and you want or two percent or three percent you can afford to lose it sure have fun but you know i wouldn't be ninety percent bitcoin because this thing could go to zero it could be replaced by a better

SPEAKER_25: technology and they would do coordinated attacks against me you know make memes or whatever because they know i have some influence and now i'm maybe i'm tampering down or maybe i it could create a contagion of people saying yeah you know it does jason's making sense like why every other technology

SPEAKER_00: is replaced aol got replaced yahoo got replaced someday google and facebook facebook's being replaced now you know by instagram and tick tock why wouldn't bitcoin get replaced it would seem logical that bitcoin would be replaced after 10 or 20 years like any other technology or why wouldn't bitcoin turn out

SPEAKER_03: to be unbelievably valuable if it can figure out how to transition from an asset class to a currency

SPEAKER_02: which is going to be like a hard jump to make that hasn't ever occurred before but it doesn't mean it's impossible like that could happen too but the modern iteration of fanboy yeah is so loaded with technology weapons like i remember years ago writing some review of like a nokia phone that people are still mad about on the internet right it was like brigading in the comments i mean listen i have written articles comparing xbox to playstation like i'm i'm aware of what the fanboy can do the fanboy has a lot of bot tools now that the fanboy did not previously have yeah and it is really a shame because what it means is we can't have like an honest exploration of the benefits and drawbacks of these technologies both of which exist in probably equal amounts without just getting like shouted out of

SPEAKER_24: the room all right and then just to put a button on this chris dixon who uh has been the target of a lot of the uh attacks by jack he is at a16z uh tramath made a funny joke at all in not knowing who he was chris dixon is like super i mean he's not toxic but he's super pro crypto obviously he's made that his chosen career and invested i think hundreds of millions of dollars in his crypto projects um he decided he would attempt to dunk and say who owns web 2.0 and listed the institutional

SPEAKER_00: shareholders for square now block and uh aaron levy's box.com to which he got massively dunked on

SPEAKER_14: by everybody i mean who owns anything man a small number of extremely wealthy people in institution

Jason Calacanis: that is the case with cryptocurrency right now too like come on yeah i mean a16 owns well that was

SPEAKER_00: really jack's point is like a16z is buying all these tokens early and it's just you know hey meet the new boss same as the old boss type situation all right right thanks for tuning in everybody

SPEAKER_308: i think we did about an hour i think that's enough show for one day more than enough show but it moved quickly and that was just a very quick conversation so i had a blast i think we have poked

SPEAKER_231: everybody in the eye in every audience nobody every audience segment was addressed today um yeah i'm not

SPEAKER_00: i'm not sure who we left out of here oh you know what we could do a bonus segment about the insurrection

SPEAKER_365: no we'll leave that for another day not our show you're easy on china today we're easy on china today

SPEAKER_00: china will be on the docket china will be on the docket for sure uh lots of china news all right uh we'll see everybody uh soon email producers at thisweekandstartups.com if you have uh ideas for guests or whatever if you're a pr firm please don't ever email us we do

SPEAKER_110: not take uh requests for guests be on the show to sell their ebooks thank you thanks to our producers and it's going to be a great 2022 thanks mom thanks happy new year