SPEAKER_00: I wasn't aware of the bee story, but I think we need to be thoughtful about this because this could come back and sting us if we don't stop buzzing around the issue and get to the heart of it, which is whatever happens to this specific type of bee, could the bee be moved?

SPEAKER_03: I mean, to be or not to be, that is Meta's question. But there's other, I knew if we went down the bee avenue, we'd end up here for a long time because we were stuck in honey.

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SPEAKER_10: All right, everybody. Welcome back to This Week in Startups. With me again, Alex Wilhelm.

SPEAKER_11: How is your weekend, sir? You know, Jason, my weekend was actually very rough.

SPEAKER_14: I'm not going to lie. Our newborn is going through a period of colic. Oh. And, uh, yeah. So, uh, going to work today has actually been lovely. It's been a respite from, uh, just for you. Yeah. This weekend was really hard. I'm not going to lie.

SPEAKER_18: Oh, man. I am so sorry. Well, you know, here's the thing. You know, since you have an older one is that it gets easier and easier. And, uh, you forgot, didn't you? How hard it is.

SPEAKER_12: I think you forgot between the first and the second.

SPEAKER_14: I think this one is, uh, so when it started off, our new baby was easier than our first baby. And now, now she's definitely harder. So it's, it's kind of a mixed bag, but, uh, apparently colic peaks at around three months. So it'll get easier in a bit. I'm just glad to be back at work. Yeah.

SPEAKER_22: Uh, well, uh, I hope mom's doing well. Good luck to the baby.

SPEAKER_00: Uh, it's part of growing up. Uh, you'll get through it. Yeah, you'll just have a lack of sleep, but don't worry, I will carry the show today.

SPEAKER_26: We've got a full docket. I've been there. My man, I'm, I'm eight years removed from it. My youngest are eight year old twins.

SPEAKER_28: Yeah. And it's so great to see all of the live viewers, uh, for people who don't know, Alex and I decided

SPEAKER_30: we would do this show live. So if you go to, uh, Twitter slash X and you follow TWI startups, or you go to YouTube and you follow the show on YouTube, you can watch the show live Monday, Wednesday, and Fridays, 12 central time, which is 1. PM Alex time, also known as Eastern time. Yes, sir. 10 AM Pacific time, known as Silicon Valley time. So 10, 12, one, whatever your jam is, join us. And, uh, if you're hearing this on the podcast stream, you're going to get the same show, except, uh, we clean it up a little bit in post production. So if you watch it live, we, we stumble, we try to pull things off, but it's kind of fun. It's like, uh, watching a little bit of CNBC. We're going to lock in next year to Monday, Wednesday, Friday shows, and we're getting

SPEAKER_12: close now, aren't we? Alex, we're getting, we're getting very close.

SPEAKER_20: In fact, we're doing, I think more shows, uh, right now than we have all year. And I got to say, humming along, having a lot of fun and, and I, I think today, Jason, we can provide people with a little bit of a respite from the other thing that's going

SPEAKER_12: on tomorrow. Hey, tomorrow is the election. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: I've spent the weekend, uh, since we, for the last two weeks, I've been trying to understand.

Chamath Palihapitiya: And we'll leave this on the show because I think it's important for all Americans to understand election security in America. What could be better. Sure. And what the reality is and what you're going to see for the next week or two, uh, and hopefully not much longer than that. There's a bunch of people arguing, fighting, sharing media about how insecure our elections are. And I take this as a positive. Alex, because we have so much scrutiny on the 50 different disparate systems, also known as our states. Uh, it's basically resulting in the election system getting tighter and better every year.

SPEAKER_30: 35 out of 50 states have voter ID laws, watermarked ballots, and are essentially impossible to game at scale. And that's the important caveat here. If you are worried about the national election for your candidate, whoever you got, and it's 50, 50 right now, respect to everybody for their choices.

SPEAKER_18: Um, you know, even if I might disagree with one of them, that's, that's America.

SPEAKER_40: But the good news Alex is, is even in your sleep deprived rough weekend state, you can cognitively understand that the lowest swing state is 13,000 votes and that is Georgia. And to swing Georgia would take 13,000 fake IDs, fake ballots, and some number of people to go execute against that plan. Is it possible?

SPEAKER_41: No.

SPEAKER_42: Uh, could people cheat and do a hundred or 200 or maybe even 500?

SPEAKER_40: Sure. I guess, but it's extremely hard to do that.

SPEAKER_45: And so I have been fighting the good fight on mine.

SPEAKER_12: Alex, you may have seen me on Twitter. I, I actually, what's funny is Jason, I'm now associated with you in a way that I haven't

SPEAKER_20: been before and so I'm catching your Twitter strays pretty consistently and, uh, you have picked the single most thankless political position and media job in the history of mankind. And I was gonna, I was gonna text you this, but I'll just do it live. I want to give you like three points for being on all in your other show. And which I would say the majority of the hosts there have one particular view. Yeah. And you have not gone along with them because you're having your own view, which I think is very respectable, but you're taking a lot of flack for it from, I think every single side, cause some people think you're a squish on the right or you're too conservative for the left. And it seems that you don't have that many friends and allies.

SPEAKER_03: So I'll say it 10 points, Jason, for sticking to your guns.

SPEAKER_46: I, I literally have the left telling me that I'm a sellout for the right. And I have the right telling me that I have Trump derangement syndrome, which to me is the greatest compliment ever, because I believe that both parties have been hijacked

SPEAKER_30: by the fringes. I think that's pretty obvious. And I don't like either candidate. I'm sorry.

SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna just stick to my guns. I don't like either candidate. I don't like how either party's behaving.

Chamath Palihapitiya: And I do think America will survive either candidate. For me, the number one issue is the spending. And I guarantee you, Alex, if you want to make a bet, let's see if you'll take this bet

SPEAKER_00: over or under $9 trillion more.

SPEAKER_28: At the end of this, you know, term, the next four years, 2025 through 2028, at this end of this next presidential term, we will have $9 trillion added to our national debt, which

SPEAKER_30: is basically the average of the last two years, which we've added about 16, 17, 18 trillion. We'll see what it winds up at. But basically, eight to nine trillion is what each president has done in the past two. I think we will be sitting here in four years with $9 trillion more in national debt.

SPEAKER_45: You take the over or the under?

SPEAKER_48: I think, and I don't like this answer, I'd take the over on that. Okay.

SPEAKER_18: So for me, I think we're going to wind up in the same exact situation we've been in, which is we're going to just bankrupt this country if we don't change it.

SPEAKER_28: And I hope, I hope the one good thing for me that could come out of the Trump, a Trump win would be if DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency actually happened.

SPEAKER_18: I mean, independent of how I feel about Trump, that would be an amazing thing. So I hope that happens. Um, and you know, I hope you all vote and I hope your vote counts. Yes. You know, that's, I think every American should want that for every other American.

SPEAKER_28: Hate to be Captain Nuance here, but I hope everybody's vote counts and I hope you do vote.

SPEAKER_52: Yeah. If you don't vote, don't call, you know, I mean, take, take, take part.

SPEAKER_20: If you don't vote, you don't get to complain, have a say and then complain, but don't not have a say and then complain. That's the only thing I can't stand. Uh, but if you were not in the US, you're probably saying, dear God, Jason and Alex, I know you're trying to keep it to a minimum, but move on. So I'm going to do that just for the sake of our European, African, Asian, and Latin American friends. So Jason on the show today, I have a video, sorry, AI generated video game. It's going to blow your mind. Then we're going to talk about Nvidia being once again, the most popular and sorry, most valuable company in the world and some notes on GPU clouds that are very interesting. Then what the hell is going on in nuclear power for AI? Cause it is a bit of a mess. And then finally, if we have time, I had the latest numbers from California regarding Waymo's self-driving ride growth. So quite a lot to get to.

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SPEAKER_20: Uh, but first Jason, I'm going to pull a sunny and I'm going to give you an AI demo here. Love it.

SPEAKER_03: And I want to know, have you heard of a company called Descartes? Descartes. I have not. Okay. So I'm going in Descartes. Put it in. It's not even spelled like Descartes, the philosopher.

SPEAKER_20: It's literally D E C A R T. So there's many jokes. Um, anyways, they have a new thing called Oasis. Oasis is a playable real-time open world AI model. What that means is it generates a Minecraft style game frame by frame. So this is a literally an AI model that's auto generating a game as you interact with it, which I think is pretty cool. And we have a video that we took of Stuart from the production team playing this earlier today. So we could avoid, there's a big wait list for this. I'll show, I'll tell you why in a second. But Jason, this is what it looks like. This is the current state of the art, if you will. Okay. So Stuart is going to pick mountain meadows and we will be transported through this wormhole type thing. And if you're on the audio, this looks like Minecraft. It, it looks very similar to Minecraft and it takes normal inputs. So Jason, first thoughts of the graphical fidelity.

SPEAKER_64: What do you see here?

SPEAKER_65: Um, okay. So it looks like my kids are playing Minecraft on their iPads, uh, or we're playing doom

SPEAKER_00: or quake 20 years ago, 25 years ago. Uh, and, um, you're saying this world.

SPEAKER_25: And the game itself was generated by AI.

SPEAKER_20: Yes. So the AI engine is taking the inputs from the player and the information that it has and re building the game around you as you play. This is really cool, but it also has some drawbacks. One thing it doesn't seem to have right now is any idea of permanence. So Stuart who played this for us, take this, take this little video is eventually going to turn around and what is behind him is not at all what was behind him before. And every time he turns around, it regenerates the world, but those see, this is for example, brand new. If you're watching the video, this wasn't there before. That's all new. Right. But, oh my gosh, Jason, we can now do this with off the shelf ish technology. And, uh, I think this is going to be in two years.

SPEAKER_06: Absolutely enormous. I was blown away by it.

SPEAKER_65: I mean, this is, I think what people believe using a computer will be like in the future,

SPEAKER_00: which is to say, instead of downloading apps, you'll talk to an AI. And it will build the app in real time for you. So they'll say, you know, I really like age of empires. I like a real time strategy game, but I'd like it to be based on, you know, pictures from

SPEAKER_18: my photo album of my extended family. And can you please invite them? And then it will just generate that for you. Just like right now, you could go in there and say, Hey, I'm doing some research on voter irregularities. Can you give me a bunch of information? And when I was actually doing my research on all the voter stuff, I was using ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and then having a check fax.

SPEAKER_40: And it's pretty interesting how we're getting closer now, you know, every six months in

SPEAKER_09: iteration to the hallucination and the accuracy issue.

SPEAKER_18: I don't want to say it's resolving itself, but it's slowly getting better. And so I feel like the citations, I'm seeing them more often and yeah, this could be one of these moments where, you know, if you, if you think about what we just witnessed and

SPEAKER_72: the fidelity of it, imagine also describing, I really love Star Wars and these three characters

SPEAKER_00: are meaningful to me. Can you make me an episode of the Mandalorian that occurs between these two episodes and, you know, make it super spicy and interesting for me in these ways. And I want Darth Maul to show up. This could be the future of Netflix and other platforms, whether it's games, music, or here, you know, here are games, but it could be music and you could see this happening on Netflix

SPEAKER_74: or Disney's app as well.

SPEAKER_14: I want to show one, one more thing. We have a chart, Jason, showing the number of unique users who have played the game that I just showed you.

SPEAKER_20: And it's a chart that every VC loves to see because it just goes in one direction. So here is the cumulative unique users that have played this Oasis game from Descartes. This is very impressive.

SPEAKER_12: So 1 million unique users in less than four days.

SPEAKER_01: Eventually, I believe, and I wrote a short story back in like the late nineties, early two thousands, when I was a journalist, I wrote a short story. I got to find it on one of my old laptops.

SPEAKER_00: And the story basically revolves around a kid who made a piece of software that a billion people downloaded and paid a dollar for. He made a billion dollars overnight and it was in his bank account and it was all in e-cash. And I think actually that concept is something we're going to see in our lifetime, which is somebody makes something on the internet, a billion people see it. We've seen it with songs like Baby Shark. Oh, God. We've seen it with viral memes, like David goes to dentist and stuff like that. But it's an only a matter of time before a startup does that same thing.

SPEAKER_18: And I think that's the great hope for venture capital today and angel investing is that what you're seeing there, and it's really great that you talk about as a, you know, venture capitalist going, whoa, wait a second.

SPEAKER_45: How did that, how many people did it hit in 79 hours? Did it say, what was the number? It surpassed 1 million unique users in three days and seven hours. Amazing. You know, and you think about what Facebook took to do that probably a year or

SPEAKER_18: my space, probably two years, you know, it takes a while to get a million people to do anything, but this is the world we will be living in. And a large portion of this is because of the platforms that are out there that are already at scale to share these things. So this probably went viral on some combination of Reddit, Twitter, Instagram, et cetera, tick tock. Yeah. And, um, this is our future is somebody like, gosh, I don't even want to say it, but the girl who had a, uh, on the street interview and became very famous.

SPEAKER_01: Yes. I recall that situation. Yes.

SPEAKER_00: And then, then she has a podcast now named after her catchphrase. Like. This is what the future is instant virality. And if those million people pay $10 each, imagine like that's kind of the next card to

SPEAKER_30: turn over here is a group of people releasing these things on tick tock. So as a strategy for startups, I think the takeaway here is if you make something compelling package

SPEAKER_00: it over and over and over again, in tick tocks, tweets, you know, other viral formats and share it over and over and over again and see if you can catch fire. And if you do, you could eliminate a round of funding, you could literally get rid of your series a and not dilute 20% and just go to series B. How do I know this? I had a company we invested in, um, and I called them an alicorn, a unicorn with Pegasus wings. And that was calm calm.com did a seed round. The next thing I knew they did like a 250 million round. They never did that series a in between. And what that did to the cap table was instead of everybody taking 20% dilution. And having to go on a fundraising tour, the app had, they had just figured out paid marketing really

SPEAKER_72: well and calm just surged from, you know, a couple of a hundred thousand in revenue to tens of millions without doing a dilutive financing round.

SPEAKER_12: Uh, one last note about this one though, just to add to the startup story you're telling Jason.

SPEAKER_20: So, uh, Descartes, the company that made the Oasis model is working with etched, which is a twist 500 company. That's building process, uh, sorry, uh, chips that are transformer specific. So literally all these chips can do is do transformer stuff. Now, Oasis was not running on etched hardware yet, but the companies did say that when etched their, their transformer ASIC does come out, um, this will run in a 4k resolution. So we'll see it again when etched has its hardware out, but cool to see a hardware startup and a software startup working together to make a hit AI products.

SPEAKER_00: If you will, I think I saw runway AI, another one of these cool AI companies, and maybe our producers will find it before the show ends. They had, you know, in their model for doing video, um, the ability to change the camera angle in real time. And I don't know if you saw that go viral, but that to me was a revelation because all of these AI video creation tools were doing five seconds and you couldn't really change it, right? If you got any, a video and then you asked it with the same prompt to make another video, it would make something completely different. There was no, uh, provenance or ability to edit it, uh, and iterate on it, which makes it worthless unless it happens to hit our home run the first time. Yeah, the ability to say, Hey, change the angle on this, or let's do, you know, a pan, tilt, zoom this direction that actually makes it usable. So I think we're very quickly, um, getting over the constraints that the software had, uh, and the GPU processing had, and the limits of the amount of hardware that was out there from, uh, what do they call them?

SPEAKER_72: Um, Neo servers or Neo clouds, Neo, Neo, Neo clouds, AKA new clouds. Yeah. And so here it is, uh, this is, I think, Runway gen three alpha.

SPEAKER_00: And what you're seeing is it made, you know, these beautiful images, but then, um, you

SPEAKER_72: can actually go in and change the viewing angle. And that's really like a new concept here of, um, being able to actually take what AI is building and actually use it in Hollywood.

SPEAKER_20: Yeah. Cause I'm not impressed with these five second clips. Everyone's like, oh my gosh, this look at this five second, you know, clip that looks like a Marvel movie. I'm like, okay, cool. One, do it again, have some fidelity between shots and actually stitch things together. That's what I've been waiting for. So I hope this is a move into that direction because in theory, I do want to be able to say, you know, make me a Marvel movie, but with myself as captain America, because I'm so handsome and strong.

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SPEAKER_87: That's O-P-E-N-P-H-O-N-E.com slash twist for 20% off for six months. All right.

SPEAKER_14: I want to talk about Nvidia. I'm a public markets nerd, Jason.

SPEAKER_20: You know that Nvidia once again took the absolute top spot and as the most valuable public market company in the world. I have a screenshot of this. They beat Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Aramco and Meta, the other leaders with a market cap of just about $3.4 trillion. Now the context here and the reason why I want to bring this up to our startup audience is that there's some stuff that goes into this. One element is that Nvidia is going to replace Intel on the Dow Jones industrial average, which is kind of like, I don't know, a coming of age moment for a company.

SPEAKER_90: Like when you reach the DGIA, you've really made it. Hmm.

SPEAKER_91: Yeah. It is an honor to be in those indexes. There are, you know, only a certain number of slots.

SPEAKER_18: One person comes in, somebody has to get dropped off the list. I remember when it happened to Uber, it was a big deal. And, you know, there's some programmatic buying that occurs in indexes. Obviously, if you buy an index fund, as we've always talked about, you're a fan of them,

SPEAKER_00: low fee index funds, a really great way to compound wealth. Then you have people programmatically buying your stock. It just builds the base of people. The undercurrent I'm hearing, um, which it was in the financial times today. Uh, and was, and this is something we've talked about on this podcast. Last year. And we talked about on all in as well is the concept of round tripping and conflicted transactions and how in videos balance sheet is shaping up. Yeah. Now it's important to say this is all speculation, but there is a group of people speculating

SPEAKER_01: that this is a house of cards and that there are accounting irregularities at NVIDIA.

SPEAKER_30: Yes, I'm not saying that, but this is a buzzy undertone. So how insane is this, that the world's number one company, there is now this undercurrent of, is this a house of cards and is there something funky going on here?

SPEAKER_01: So maybe you could unpack where this thread is coming from, uh, and why people are starting to, I guess it's kind of like the Tesla movement where they added the queue. I don't think anybody's shorting NVIDIA here. That would be a crazy thing to do, but there was this sort of like anti Tesla movement that occurred

SPEAKER_00: for a while because the stock was pretty high and you know, they, people didn't believe they were going to get, you know, a cheap car on the road.

SPEAKER_11: Of course they have now the best selling car. I think. Is the model Y cheaper than the model three?

SPEAKER_01: I think it's a little bit more. It's like the patent version of it. So the model three is a little bit sporty and has a trunk. The model Y has a hatchback and is like a little bit bigger.

SPEAKER_00: So if you're taller and you want more room and you want more storage, you go model Y. If you want something zippy with a trunk and not a hatchback, I think you go with the model Y.

SPEAKER_03: Okay. That helps a lot because I see threes and Y's a lot. And I, I, the Y is the one that's just stretched like this essentially. Yeah. It's a little bit chubbiner.

SPEAKER_00: It's a little bit beefier. It's a beefier version. Let's go through this because I think it's important when these kinds of allegations start coming up that we, we kind of just understand what the underpinnings here are.

SPEAKER_03: Okay.

SPEAKER_20: So there's a thread that we're talking about here and we're going to have the thread up on the screen. We will also link to it in the video and the show notes. So if you want to follow along, you can. This is from a man named Kashyap Sriram, and he has three ideas about how NVIDIA might be, let's just say buttering up its investors by telling them things they want to hear. So the first thing he brings up is that NVIDIA might be essentially giving out sales rebates, but then booking that separately. So it doesn't actually impact net revenue. And the argument here is that this would show up quote under the balance sheet item, prepaid expenses and other current assets. So Jason, I went through NVIDIA's last earnings reports. I went through their earnings transcripts and I tried to find anything interesting about prepaid expenses and other current assets, basically nothing, not in the CFO commentary, not in the Q and A, not much. The thing that I did notice here is that the amount of prepaid expenses and other current assets at NVIDIA is pretty small compared to its overall scale. And I think most importantly, as you see from this chart has leveled off. So this is not going vertical still it's decelerated. And so to me, I don't think there's enough here to actually be smoke hinting at fire.

SPEAKER_11: Got it.

SPEAKER_30: And so I have seen entrepreneurs do this before. They will tell us they have a certain amount of revenue

SPEAKER_00: and they have a certain cost of goods, COGS, you know, and we kind of net it out. And then we find out that they're discounting their product. And that comes up on another line item where they're, you know, let's say that this product costs 10,000 a year. It's about a thousand a month, whatever, 10,000 a year per customer.

SPEAKER_30: Sure. Some SaaS product, but they're actually giving the salespeople the ability to discount it for 5,000 a year. So they say they have a million dollars in top line revenue and the

SPEAKER_18: revenue is growing. But what we find in the last three months is that they had to discount the product 50%, 60%, 70% in order to hit their numbers. So it looks like the top line is still growing,

SPEAKER_30: but somebody is getting a 50 or 60 or 70% discount. And that's coming in a line item later. So there are such a thing as discounts that can occur. You might imagine that with car sales where, you know, you sell it for a certain amount,

SPEAKER_18: and then there's a discount, a spiff, all kinds of weird things. I don't recommend people do this. Just sell your product, whatever you sell it for. Don't play games with hiding discounts in other places because it creates the appearance of impropriety. And what I learned early in my career is the appearance of impropriety will, like we talked about with this

SPEAKER_00: Minecraft game, Descartes is making, you know, the same way that can go viral here, you could have round-tripping allegations or discounting go viral, which is what's happening right now. The next issue that I think is going to come into play, because there are multiple issues here. One, you have this discounting kind of thing. The second is, what is the lifespan of NH100? And then people are giving loans to companies like CoreWeave, a Neos cloud provider. And so this FT story was talking about

SPEAKER_01: just billions and billions of dollars in loans being given by private equity firms to companies that are going public. And then also Nvidia is investing in those companies while those companies are buying from them. And that is called round-tripping. And then there is this house of cards in some people's mind where maybe we're going to build too much capacity, like we did in the fiber era, like I talked about previously on the show, and that the floor will come out. There'll be too

SPEAKER_40: many H100s, too much supply, too many Neo clouds available. And we'll see the cost for H100, which I

SPEAKER_18: think was at $8. This FT story said it was $8 an hour to use an H100. Now it's down to two. So it's like 75% cheaper, which is what you would expect. Things get cheaper in technology. But you know,

SPEAKER_01: all of these things coming together, I don't know if it's a house of cards, but oversupply, the appearance of round-tripping, this all could add up to, you know, maybe some cataclysmic moment

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SPEAKER_14: Twist. Okay. So round tripping is a thing that comes up. I mean, honestly, every couple of years

SPEAKER_20: in technology and Jason, before this situation, we talked about this a lot in terms of Microsoft's investments into open AI. And the question was, are they giving them investment in the form of cloud credits? And then money goes out, money comes back in. You basically take, you know, cash flow and turn it into revenue. Kind of cool, but it also dicey. I've never actually sorted out precisely when this becomes illegal, if that makes sense, because some round tripping is probably accidental. If you invest in a company and they buy a computer, if Dell invests in Jason Inc and you go buy some Dell laptops, is that round tripping? Probably not. But where do you draw the line on that actually?

SPEAKER_30: I would say the way you would draw the line on it is the scale. Does the scale hit anything material?

SPEAKER_00: And so let's take the open AI example. Let's say Microsoft invest 10 billion in cash in open AI. Okay. Okay. So now they have 10 billion sitting in their bank accounts and then open AI proceeds to buy 5 billion in cloud credits from Microsoft in the next year. And then another 5 billion the year after that. Okay. So now you've got billions of dollars going back and forth between bank accounts. If this was done in a coordinated way, it would be illegal. So if I said to you, like, you have no need for this cloud, but I want you to do it anyway. That's, if it's not needed and necessary,

SPEAKER_01: then it definitely doesn't pass the sniff test. I know this because there was a certain accelerator,

SPEAKER_00: which I won't name because they constantly like to pretend they're being bullied, even though they're

SPEAKER_01: the number one accelerator. There was a strategy inside this accelerator where the founders would

SPEAKER_16: buy each other software to ring their cohorts. So imagine you have two or 300 companies and 20 or 30 of

SPEAKER_18: them agree to buy each other software for the year and do it in a coordinated fashion. You buy my SaaS software, I buy yours. And now do it 10 times and all of a sudden things grow. This is easily found out by investors because we always ask during our diligence, tell us your top five clients, where you source them. We will have them literally, we'll ask a founder to put this in a Google sheet and we train our founders to do it. Hey, tell us about your five largest clients by dollar amount. Tell us by the five largest by engagement. In other words, how many people are using the software every day and put it in a Google sheet. Tell us how you source them, when they started paying and how much they've paid every month and to date. And oh, and also put the contracts that you have with those folks in a, in a drive. This is called due diligence. Startups when they become past the seed and angel stage will

SPEAKER_01: be required to do this and seed investors putting in anything, let's call it above 250 or 500 will

SPEAKER_00: start a diligence process. Why will they start a diligence process? Because they are investing OPM, other people's money. When you invest other people's money, you're what's called the fiduciary and you have to do due diligence. You have a fiduciary responsibility to do that. So don't get upset if like a VC asks you for your diligence folder, they have to make sure that they're not investing in FTX and Theranos. And if you watch those examples, people did not due diligence. They were, they basically just said other people did diligence. I'll skip mine. And then there are some nefarious founders who say, you don't need to do diligence. Somebody else did it. That's the major red flag. Hey, if somebody else did diligence, you don't have to. Not a good approach to life. And so if you were in the same example of OpenAI and Microsoft, Microsoft invest 10 billion, 9 billion of it goes to salaries, marketing, whatever investment, and 1 billion of it, 10% goes back to Microsoft and Microsoft's cloud business is

SPEAKER_30: 50 billion. So it's, but 2% of Microsoft's revenue. It's 10% of the amount invested. You would be like,

SPEAKER_18: okay, pass this as a sniff test. If it was 5% or 10% of Microsoft's, and they did that same technique five times, then you'd start going, huh? And I think the challenge is Nvidia has invested in multiple companies now. And that's where I think they're going to get either investigated if they haven't been already, um, or somebody is going to come in and do diligence and they're, it's just not worth

SPEAKER_40: it. They should, if they really feel they should be investing, they should give money to a venture capital firm that's dedicated to AI, take a former employee of Nvidia and start a venture firm. That's a spin out where you put money in and they make the decisions outside of people buying H-100s. That would be much better hygiene. Cause then you could say, well, Jensen isn't making these deals. So it's not like the sales team is selling it. Uh, and there's a corporate development person investing and it's the same conversation. So the proximity of these conversations is the other piece to your question of when is it illegal? I know this because I worked at AOL and Chamath worked at AOL. Um, we both saw this up close and personal. There were salespeople who were selling people on, um, paying AOL $50 million to be the default music

SPEAKER_01: provider. Ah, and then AOL was also giving them $50 million to invest in their company. And this round tripping scandal, you can type in AOL round tripping scandal and find out all about this

SPEAKER_46: resulted in, I believe people going to jail and a bunch of sanctions. It didn't make its way all the way to the top. And this is where a sales team and incentives matter. If the sales team, you know,

SPEAKER_01: runs amok like this and they start trying to hit sales numbers and they get commissions, they will

SPEAKER_00: rightfully do whatever it takes to, to hit that incentive. And this is where management needs to

David Friedberg: be on top of things and avoid the appearance of impropriet. Okay. So a couple of thoughts about

SPEAKER_20: this in the case of NVIDIA one, we have a chart from the same Twitter thread that we're talking about illustrating the concern here. This is round tripping in a single image. So scale, I think does matter. And I'm glad we got to that because I don't know if the numbers in question here really add up to the potential for impropriety. Now I do agree that core weave and Lambda and the other GPU clouds that are, you know, borrowing up to 11 billion, as the FT said are sending material money to NVIDIA. But NVIDIA is not underwriting the debt in question. So that's actually not a round tripping concern. I do agree. There is a hygienic point to be made about NVIDIA investing in smaller companies and then having those companies purchase its hardware. But I just don't think the sums in question scale to the point of being a concern to make NVIDIA a quote, quote, house of cards. And just to make that point kind of clear, NVIDIA's biggest risk right now to me isn't a lack of financial, not hygiene per se, but just like clarity, but it's the massive dependence it has on a couple of customers. So for example, customers A, B, C, D and E in its SEC filings, these are your alphabets, your Microsoft, your Amazons and so forth. Just the top four customers of the company in its last quarter were 25, 36, 46% of its, um, total revenue.

David Friedberg: So five customers equal 46%, top four customers, four customers equal. Yeah. So

SPEAKER_00: yeah, you have to ask yourself at some point, do they have enough, uh, clusters to do the work they

SPEAKER_20: want to do? Well, XAI put together what it said was the biggest, you know, GPU, super computer, a hundred thousand H one hundreds and NVIDIA was very proud of this. They were like, and they're going to double it. And one more point, I'm going to say this, uh, going back to Microsoft's, uh, earnings call Satya Nadella, a man who was putting a lot of his eggs in the AI basket, um, said that, the good news for us is that we're not waiting for the inference, i.e. demand to show up. If you sort of think about it, this is going to be the fastest growth to 10 billion in any business in our history and it's all inference. So I think there's a case to be made that the demand is higher than they can supply. People are spending a lot to build at this capacity. There may be an overrun. I don't think we're in danger of a fiber collapse again, though.

SPEAKER_00: Okay. There you have it. Uh, I, at some point, you know, there will also be competitors and the

SPEAKER_14: margin will come out of these systems. So. Oh yeah. I don't know if I would put my money into a GPU cloud. I just don't think there's any shenanigans. I mean, here's one last thing,

SPEAKER_20: just for the financial nerds out there, Jason, if I underwrote a loan to you for $5 billion predicated on the fact that you had purchased $5 billion of Nvidia H 100 chips, and then Blackwell comes out, their next generation, and suddenly those are worth half. Yeah. So then to me, it's a, it's a sketchy

SPEAKER_46: way to underwrite. I don't know if I do that. Yeah. So the life, what's the reasonable lifespan

SPEAKER_00: of these chips? You know, if you look at Google servers or Facebook servers, when they built these large clusters, I don't actually know the number of years that those computers would operate, but I would think it would be six, seven, eight, nine, 10 years. I do know that when these computers and clusters would have a bad hard drive or a bad server, I was told by the people who architected them that it wasn't worth going and finding the computer and removing it from the rack. They just remotely turned the power off on those. So, because like literally sending somebody there was like,

SPEAKER_01: okay, it's a thousand dollar, you know, server blade, just turn it off. We've been using it for

SPEAKER_00: seven years, just no more power to it. And we'll just turn it off. And I think that's going to be

SPEAKER_18: the real question is what is the lifespan of these? Will it be six, seven, eight, nine, 10 years, or will it be one, two, three, four years? And then also the, the software is getting more efficient. And so as software gets more efficient and you get more out of each GPU, which I think is a big focus right now is writing software that maximizes the utilization of these GPUs. My understanding is in some cases, Sonny said, you know, you're using 20, 30, 40% of the capacity of a GPU when you're running certain jobs and they could be more efficient, you know, and how they move data and jobs, et cetera. So it's definitely worth keeping an eye on this. And it's definitely worth startups understanding that the impact of any financial irregularities or appearance of irregularities. And what we're probably dealing with here is these, this is probably an appearance issue. I don't think someone like Jensen would take this kind of risk. The company's already worth a trillion dollars. Does he need to optimize on the margin this way? I don't think so. So why would anybody take the

SPEAKER_125: risk? I could see salespeople taking the risk and management turning a blind eye to it at AOL

SPEAKER_28: at the end of the empire. And that's where like maybe a house of cards could exist and

SPEAKER_12: there around tripping issues did exist. Yeah. You know, a data point that I just thought of,

SPEAKER_20: Jason, about this is if you look at how NVIDIA is handling shareholder return, its buyback schedule, how it's handling its cash supply, it all looks very copacetic to me. Yeah. It does. When WeWork went public, it's S1 filing was a litany of obfuscation. When I read NVIDIA's numbers, they're impressive, but they don't, there's no bad smell in them that I can tell at least. So if there's something

SPEAKER_03: hiding in here, bad, but, um, you know, everyone just look at the numbers yourself before you.

SPEAKER_01: And stop doing, and well, and stop doing the round tripping. That's my number one piece of advice.

SPEAKER_00: Take the round tripping out of this, just make a venture arm, commit a hundred million dollars a year, a billion dollars a year, whatever tickles your fancy and have it run separately with an independent group and let them have carry and management fees and, and then take the gains,

SPEAKER_46: but don't let the sales team or the management at NVIDIA make the decisions of who to bet on

SPEAKER_00: while concurrently selling them product. That's the conflict internal right now that is going to make

SPEAKER_46: everybody bring this up over and over and over again.

SPEAKER_14: Yeah. You remember when Jensen, uh, went viral for having like 30 direct reports and how he,

SPEAKER_20: um, he kind of did the founder mode argument before Airbnb did, if you will. You know, I wonder if you could get that past him. Cause I think you and I share a general vibe with Jensen and how he would approach business. Oh, he's hands-on. Yeah. Yeah. Very high bar and he's very hands-on. That is theoretically a strong bulwark against the sales team getting into running around territory. Yeah. Yeah. So, all right. Uh, let's move on. Jason, you wanted to talk about Amazon and how their big deal for nuclear power has, uh, hit a bit of a roadblock with a company called Talon. So I'm curious,

SPEAKER_30: why did this catch your eye? Well, you know, we're discussing not only how many chips you need for AI

SPEAKER_18: to process these jobs and hit super intelligence, uh, and solve the world's problems, but energy seems to be a blocker and consistent energy that doesn't burn out the grid and doesn't burn a hole in the ozone

SPEAKER_72: layer and burning carbon and fossil fuels, you know, in order to make these great, uh, advances

SPEAKER_00: is seems to be, um, critically important and other countries, um, namely China are really big on nuclear and they're moving very quickly and they have top down, um, um, authority to just say, we're doing it here in the United States. You have regulatory bodies, you have citizenry, et cetera, who can have these, you know, major debates around, uh, the re firing or reopening of defunct, uh, nuclear power plants in the building of new ones. So I think the most interesting part of the nuclear story here in America is that I don't hear people saying, I don't want nuclear anymore. I don't see massive protests and I'm actually seeing the opposite, which is people saying, Hey, you know, it'd be great if we didn't have a dependency on foreign oil and we had more consistent power. And you know what? I think we went on a complete diversion with the no nukes concert series and the hippies saying,

SPEAKER_40: this is not clean power and it's unsafe because of Fukushima, Chernobyl and Three Mile Island.

SPEAKER_30: Yeah. Which in total had under a thousand, under a hundred deaths associated directly with

SPEAKER_00: the meltdowns that occurred in those emergencies. However, we would frame them. That to me feels like a sea change, but now there seems to be a blocker here and maybe you could explain the thinking behind the blocker to Microsoft buying basically energy from a nuclear power plant.

SPEAKER_12: Okay. So there's two stories that came out in the last couple of days about this. The first one

SPEAKER_20: was that Meta, uh, they had some plans to build an AI data center that was going to run on nuclear power. And it appears to have been thwarted because there is a very rare type of bee on that land.

SPEAKER_14: A bee, like as an insect, a bee. A rare species of bee. Yes. The insect that goes and flies around and stings you. Now I don't want

SPEAKER_03: to pick the endangered species fight, but I'm going to move us onto the Amazon story. So Amazon bought a,

SPEAKER_00: I wasn't aware of the bee story, but I think we need to be thoughtful about this because this could come back and sting us at any moment. If we don't, you know, stop buzzing around the issue and get to

SPEAKER_01: the heart of it, which is, you know, whatever happens to this specific type of bee, could the bee be moved a hundred feet, you know, a hundred yards past where this is going to be. And could they build a

SPEAKER_30: special sanctuary for bees adjacent to it and spend a billion dollars on saving these bees?

SPEAKER_03: I mean, to be or not to be, that is Meta's question. Uh, but there's other, I didn't, I knew if we went down the bee avenue, we'd end up here for a long time. We were stuck in honey. Amazon

SPEAKER_20: spent $650 million to buy a data center campus. That was going to be next to the, um, Susquehanna nuclear facility in Pennsylvania. Now that's owned by Talon. Talon, um, has a interconnection agreement with PJM. And I know everybody, you don't care about this, but I'm going to explain to you anyways, because I had to learn about it. And there was a proposal to increase the production at Susquehanna nuclear plant from 300 to 480 megawatts. Now this all came, got squirrely because of an interconnection agreement with other people. So there's, there's energy production. There is a grid and there's interconnection and there's agreements and rules, but that fall down there. The FERC, the federal energy regulatory commission just voted down a plan that would have allowed for more energy to be generated from 300 to 480 megawatts. Notably Jason, and this was to my surprise, I thought it would be Democrats being opposed to something like this. It was actually the Republicans who voted against this and one Democrat voted in favor of more capacity. Uh, but it all seems to be a little bit hard to parse out. I, I'm not going to lie. I've now read for the first time, um, these interconnection service agreements or ISAs. I'm not an expert in the law here, but it's a bad sign that this deal didn't work out the way people wanted to, because other groups like Constellation with Microsoft, as you mentioned, want to co-locate data centers by nuclear facilities, ramp up the production and then go to work. It gets weird when you talk about baseload power,

SPEAKER_03: grid capacities, and then, uh, if you're before or behind the meter, but this is still an overall, I think bad note for the nuclear will save AI moment. Yeah. We're going to need to get some

SPEAKER_72: leadership here to explain to the local regulatory bodies that if we don't allow this type of

SPEAKER_00: arrangement where nuclear and data centers come together, uh, we're probably going to fall behind

SPEAKER_72: in the AI race to China and other places where, uh, they will allow this, um, to occur. Now,

SPEAKER_01: I do wonder if we could accomplish what people want to accomplish with nuclear by going into the desert,

SPEAKER_18: putting a lot of solar and a lot of batteries, which would be a lot obviously, uh, and trying to do the same thing with renewables and batteries. I don't know if it's possible, but if anybody could do it,

SPEAKER_03: it would be Elon and we'll see. Well, I'm, I'm very optimistic about that, uh, but with some

SPEAKER_20: variations, cause one, I like solar, I like power walls. Give me a big battery pack. I'll high five you. Uh, a company that we also have in the twist 500 is called Exowatt and they're doing solar lenses versus solar panels. And they're doing heat based storage instead of electricity based storage, which apparently has a lot of industrial applications. So I'll take my solar panels along with my solar lenses and my lithium ion next to my iron batteries next to my, you know, uh, heat batteries. I like all of the above, but that includes nuclear. And so I'm just disappointed that here we are seeing what seems to me to be a very technical conversation about grid load and who pays for interconnection and just some technical things that we should be able to get past to prevent what

SPEAKER_03: would be a co-located data center by a effectively zero carbon power. I mean, guys, this is what we want. We should be fighting to make it happen, not pissing and moaning about interconnection.

SPEAKER_18: Well, I mean, in burning, yeah, burning natural gas and coal seems like a not great solution to this problem. The good news is, you know, one of the things I've found is where in business is when there is a big prize, all of a sudden people get very creative because there's a big prize and a lot of money at stake. And, um, you know, that is what I suspect will happen here is people with very big pockets like Microsoft or open AI or XAI or Apple, Google alphabet meta, because they have so much money, because they have lobbyists, because they have lawyers, they're going to be able to fight this fight on behalf of people like American citizens who could never mobilize to fight this. And this is one of the great things about capitalism is there's such a big prize in solving general AI that depocketed

SPEAKER_72: investors will, you know, race to provide this product slash service, uh, to the big iron holders, whether it's Microsoft or meta. And so I think we're, we're going to figure this out. That's what

SPEAKER_00: my gut tells me if we don't, maybe Mexico and Canada get the business, maybe data centers will be in Mexico and Canada and we'll literally, you know, use hydro and nuclear power plants in those locations. Like, I mean, it sounds crazy, but Mexico is right there and maybe Mexico wants the business and we'll just put five nuclear reactors near the border and they'll get all the data center in a business. And we'll be flying flights from the United States to these regions in Mexico that decide, you know what, we do want to, uh, have this business. And that's one of the great things

SPEAKER_72: about jurisdictions. And, you know, as I get older and I've lived in three different states, I really think one of the great features of the United States, I was talking to somebody from Europe the other day. Yeah. These podcasters from Trigonometry and, um, you know, it's a, we have this really great way that you can compete in the United States, Texas, Florida can compete

SPEAKER_00: with New Jersey and New York and California for the same group of people. You see Seattle, uh, Washington now is, I think they have on their referendum to get rid of state capital gains tax. Again, I saw a headline and I haven't been following it, but they were using

SPEAKER_46: Bezos as an example of somebody who moved from Seattle, Washington, where Amazon is headquartered to

SPEAKER_00: Florida. And then he magically sold a bunch of shares when he was in Florida. And they're like, wait a second, we could have kept him here. If we didn't charge him the capital gains tax.

SPEAKER_12: Maybe he said he moved for family and for find that slimy. Like he, the guy builds his company in

SPEAKER_03: Seattle. And then the moment he wants to make a lot of money. He's like, I'm going to go give,

SPEAKER_72: I just, it, I think it is, you know, I, I think he moved to Seattle and a lot of people did

SPEAKER_01: Microsoft as well because they had that tax treatment originally and they changed it. So, you know, I think what's going to make people competitive in the United States is if you, uh,

SPEAKER_72: if you overcharge or you take away people's rights, well, you know, you have both of these things occurring concurrently in some jurisdictions, people are going to have to, um, people will make

SPEAKER_18: the bet of their attention. And the greatest attention is where you domicile yourself and your businesses based upon how that jurisdiction treats you, whether it's safety and security or it's tax treatment or education systems or some combination of it, or bodily autonomy, as we've seen in Iowa and Texas, right? Some people are literally, I know some technology companies that are having a hard time getting people to come to Texas because there are questions about abortion. Uh, can you get one

SPEAKER_11: if you needed to get one? Well, I, I, I love the competition among states for, um, people's custom,

SPEAKER_20: you know, business or whatever. Um, and I, I, my, my beef with, uh, with someone leaving their state is just that it feels to me a little bit on like disloyal, but then again, capitalism is competitive. So maybe I'm overthinking it. I don't want to get too caught up in the nuance of, of interstate tax policy, but I just want to say, you know, talking about Canada and Mexico, picking up a business that we might not want in the U S for one reason or another, I just want a really big United States.

SPEAKER_14: Why can't we just like take Canada, right? And just tuck it in and get like six more states. And then we'll have the 56 states add Puerto Rico, 57, and then we'll have like big America.

SPEAKER_00: How cool would that be? I would love to see a president propose, uh, making additional cities, um, which I've been a fan of cause we have so much land here. And I think somebody got Trump to say that was a good idea as well. Like make a new city. Like that's what China does. They address like, we need a new city. Let's pop one up. We have the resources to do that.

SPEAKER_01: We have the land to do it. Why not pop up a new city from scratch from first principles and yeah,

SPEAKER_00: why not try to buy some land and create a 51st 52nd 55th, you know, state if people want to be part of the

SPEAKER_72: United States, maybe Puerto Rico wants to be part of the United States officially and be the 51st

SPEAKER_20: state. I'd be here for it. Oh yeah. I'm totally in favor of it. All right, guys, that's the AI power story. It's going to be a recurring event. This is why, for example, why SMRs small modular reactors are in the news and all SMR startups are doing well because everyone's desperate for power, but let's move on and talk about our favorite thing in the world, Jason, which is self-driving cars, because I have some good news for you and me. Uh, can we get this tweet up on the screen guys? Nate, Matt Bullard, um, found this data before I did. So I want to give him credit for this. Here is a chart showing the number of driverless rides that Waymo has done in California per month. And it's gone from 12,000 in August of 2023 to 312,000 in August of 2024. Yeah. Uh, and I, I went, Jason, I did the work and I went through all the filings, downloaded all the documents, found the information that we needed, and we prepared a chart, um, showing you the progress that companies made in the last three months. So can we get that up on the, on the screen, Stuart? Here we go. And the, the headline stats are as follows. Total miles driven by Waymo self-driving cars in California in June was just over 1.1 million, 1.4 million in July, 1.8 million in August. Number of passengers, sorry, uh, miles with passengers, 800,000 to 1.1 to 1.4 million. And this is the stuff that blew my mind. The total passengers that they had in June was 291,000.

SPEAKER_03: By August, it was just under 500,000. So to me, the technology is scaling. People want it.

David Friedberg: And have you heard about a lot of crashes, Jason? I haven't.

SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's pretty clear that at low speed, uh, in a contained environment, Waymo can do it. Now there will be criticisms that they're using mission specialists and how much intervention is

SPEAKER_18: going on, but, uh, the rides are occurring and this is great for humanity. Young people are not going to buy cars is my prediction, uh, at the same rate they did. Uh, and so, you know, everybody wants to

SPEAKER_09: know how I feel about Uber. Oh my God. Well, you know, I don't own the same number of Uber shares.

SPEAKER_00: I've always owned that doesn't mean I don't have confidence in them, but I do think Uber will

SPEAKER_18: participate in this. I do think Tesla, Waymo, obviously Waymo has got a deep partnership with Uber. Now the Austin and Arizona rides are going to go through Uber. Yeah. The number of rides, and we've done this, you know, over and over again, we keep doing the back of the envelope math. This is going to take 10 years to roll out, to hit 10% of rides in the U S is my estimate. Maybe it takes 10 years to hit 15% of rides in the U S which would be an absolutely ginormous Tam and growing. I wonder what the point of owning a car will be if rides are everywhere constantly and the wait times

SPEAKER_40: in the suburbs and the burbs goes down to under 10 minutes. If it was under 10 minutes everywhere to get a ride and it was cheaper ultimately than, um, owning a car. I don't see people wanting to own

SPEAKER_00: cars, um, or maybe a family that would own two or three would own one and then, you know, so that, that could be how this hashes out. You know, I own four cars. I own two collectible cars and three cars in service. So if you take the two collectibles, which I don't ride, I have three cars for a family of five. That makes sense because I need my car and then two sets of kids going in two different directions. So we need three, but do I need my car? No, uh, I could, I don't drive it enough.

SPEAKER_72: I could be, uh, in a, in Uber all the time. You own one car or two in your family.

SPEAKER_12: We're a, we're a one car family. Uh, and I'm, well, we own, I keep almost buying a car,

SPEAKER_20: but then it's so annoying, Jason, to actually go through all the little options and the car you once in like Idaho, and then you have to ship it. And then we only have two spots and we have a nanny

SPEAKER_28: who drives and we have one car. Yes. So basically you've come to the conclusion that getting a second car, the juice ain't worth the squeeze. You could afford to do it.

SPEAKER_00: Oh sure. But the, you know, the, the rigmarole of getting one, ensuring it, maintaining it is

SPEAKER_18: greater. Again, the juice ain't worth the squeeze, um, is what a lot of people will come to the conclusion on. And so I think this is going to be also good. People forget this, but one of the reasons we really liked, um, what did we call it? When people shared the sharing economy, we had a buzzword for

SPEAKER_11: the sharing economy. Uh, well, I thought it was the sharing economy. Yeah. There was another word for

SPEAKER_18: not crowdsourcing, but anyway, the sharing economy was a concept that startups went through like,

SPEAKER_11: Oh, you know, your skis, your, you know, basketball. Collaborative consumption. Peer-to-peer. Yeah. Peer-to-peer. Marketplace.

SPEAKER_18: Uh, yeah. Sharing economy. Sharing economy, I think is probably the best term. The sharing economy was something people thought, um, we would have for anything over a thousand

SPEAKER_01: dollars. So a lawn mower, instead of owning a lawn mower, lawn mower and using it once every two weeks,

SPEAKER_00: the idea would be, you would come to my garage, take mine and we would rent them. It we're so, um, we have so much abundance in the United States, in the Western world writ large. You kind of don't need to do that. Uh, but if it becomes easier and the lawn mower comes to you and you know, it's crazy to say this, but I was driving, uh, through one of the communities here in Austin, Texas, and I saw not one, but two robotic lawn mowers, two different homes with robotic lawn mowers. And I just thought to myself, well, there's no reason that that one lawn mower, which goes out every week and trim somebody's lawn, couldn't do the other 10 lawns. So why are 10 people buying these?

SPEAKER_18: It makes no sense. It's not good for the environment and it's wasteful. Why not just have it hop the fence and go to everybody else's yard? Uh, same thing with internet connections. I've always wondered why people don't share them more often. Um, I guess privacy is one of the reasons, but like, if one person were to buy an internet connection for their apartment,

SPEAKER_11: why don't five people share it and split the bill? Oh, I know why. It's because someone's

SPEAKER_03: going to start torrenting half the internet and then uploading half the internet and then

SPEAKER_20: blowing the connection. I think it's the tragedy of the commons. It's another way of saying that. I, I am a big fan of the sharing economy in theory, other than the fact that I just don't have a lot of time. And so I, the amount of money I could get for renting out my backyard to a dog company or

SPEAKER_03: renting out my, my, my child's cool car that we push her behind because all the kids want to ride on it. I just, it's not enough money for me to care about. And that's, that's the thing.

SPEAKER_00: I do know that Facebook marketplace has become absolutely hit critical mass. So the recycling economy. Yes. Um, that has happened for clothes. I know with my 14 year old daughter, all of her friends are very cognizant of the environmental impact of clothes specifically.

Chamath Palihapitiya: And they like thrifting. It is like a pursuit and they, they don't like it just to save money. They like the act of going to a thrifting store and creating outfits. And they like the idea of going

SPEAKER_00: online and getting things cheaper, um, and, and being able to resell stuff they have. So Facebook marketplace seems to have really taken Craigslist and eBay to another level of recycling of goods. I, I put a bunch of computers when I moved and stuff like that on the Facebook marketplace and

SPEAKER_18: then boom, they were gone. Same day. Yeah. Same day. People come and pick it right up.

SPEAKER_03: People would tell me that the only reason they're still on Facebook is for Facebook marketplace.

SPEAKER_20: It is that good. And there's the, uh, the buy nothing groups that all are all about swapping back and forth. This is why when people are like, oh, no, one's actually worried about climate change. I'm like, I don't know, man. Some people do take it pretty fricking seriously. But what is, what is buying nothing? Um, there, there's these buy nothing groups. I think it's designed to facilitate swapping or just like literally like I have a thing. Do you want it? And it's a way to just reduce overall consumption and therefore reduce waste and so forth. Yeah. I don't take part in this because

SPEAKER_01: I buy so much stuff. Um, I, I have never heard of the buy nothing movement and this is super cool.

SPEAKER_00: There is a buy nothing project.org 11 million neighborhoods, 2.6 million gifts month a month, 245 communities. Wow. This is very cool. Uh, I guess people on buy nothing, which is an app.

SPEAKER_12: There's an app apparently. So yeah, it seems like this is a thing. Um, not good for the economy,

SPEAKER_20: not good for capitalism, but, uh, maybe good for the planet and therefore good for capitalism long term. But just, I want to go back to something you said about not buying a car. I'm actually literally the person you're talking about because I do take Ubers in and around Providence when something's a little further away. And so I, I actually have transitioned entirely to feet and Uber and it's

SPEAKER_00: great. I, you know, I, I think that there is something in this, uh, by nothing and, and reusing,

SPEAKER_72: uh, and the, the sharing economy, that's going to have like a sharing economy 2.0 moment. I think we're on the cusp of a sharing economy 2.0 moment. Okay. I'm going to, I'm going to write that

SPEAKER_03: down for, for later. So we can go back to that as a theme, uh, but Jason, we have to leave it there for today, but we are back on Wednesday. We are back on Friday. Well, Wednesday,

David Friedberg: we're going to know some things. We will, we will partially know some things on Wednesday. Yes. You should know some things about the election. Please don't, if you're hearing my

SPEAKER_30: voice and you're upset by whatever happens on Tuesday, do not burn any buildings down. Do not do it, commit any violence. Do not beat up police officers, file a protest, do a peaceful protest.

SPEAKER_208: That's what the country is all about. If you hear my voice and you're thinking about burning a building down or causing property damage or beating up cops, please don't do that.

SPEAKER_209: No, do what I'm going to do instead, which is put your family to bed, fire up a fresh

SPEAKER_14: game of factorio, drink some tea, and then check every 35 minutes because you can't keep away from

SPEAKER_18: yourself. All right. Well, I am doing a live stream on all in tomorrow night. So if you, if you haven't gotten enough Jake out and you want to hang out with the besties tomorrow night, go to YouTube. You can find the feed right now. There's literally like 30 lunatics

SPEAKER_01: already in the chat of the live stream. You know how some people will hang out in the live stream before. Oh, I know. There's like 30 people arguing and shake house got TDS and oh my God, Trump's some Hitler. So you can, if you, if you really want to get into it, please go to the live stream right now. I, I'm going to decline that as I've declined

SPEAKER_20: invitations locally to participate in election watching ceremonies, because I cannot imagine something worse than that. Like imagine. I love that you're doing it. It's going to be popular. Godspeed. I

SPEAKER_03: will be automating an incredibly large space factory and try not to split. Awesome. All right. We'll talk to the people that we're going to go to the studio. We'll talk to you next time. We'll talk to you next time. Take care. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.