SPEAKER_00: key here is for us not to have foreign dependency and to win ai and win super intelligence you cannot

SPEAKER_01: win super intelligence without a ton of power and a lot of chips this is going to be awesome for america independence and reaching super intelligence and the super intelligence is going to train us how to make better decisions about technology to get more efficiency and energy

SPEAKER_02: just this could spiral in a really good way the first thing the super intelligence is going to say

SPEAKER_06: it's going to it's going to print out lena khan was right and you're going to go no why have we made

SPEAKER_09: this this week in startups is brought to you by lemon.io hire pre-vetted remote developers get 15 off your first four weeks of developer time at lemon.io twist coda coda empowers your startup by bringing words tables and teams together strategize plan and track goals effectively with all your valuable data in one place go to coda.io twist to get started for free and get six free months of the team plan and google cloud accelerate your startup journey with the google for startups cloud program get up to 200k in google cloud credits or up to 350k for ai startups plus training and guidance

SPEAKER_12: apply at startups.google.com twist all right everybody welcome back to this week in startup

SPEAKER_15: it's monday september 23rd 2024 and the news doesn't stop we're going to talk about a lot of big picture

SPEAKER_01: stuff here and how it relates to your startup with me again alex wilhelm he is formerly with crunch base tech crunch matter bar bunch of great companies he's been studying the technology industry as a journalist and writer for two decades so welcome back we're in a second decade i should say yeah i

SPEAKER_21: don't want to make you seem too old but in your second decade uh today our housekeeper i was going in to shave my head in anticipation of our recording today and uh she said you're going to shave your hair

SPEAKER_24: what hair and i was like oh getting burned wow getting roasted yeah in my own in your own home i love it fantastic so yeah i'm old is what i'm saying um anyways before we get into the rundown jason i wanted to bring up this this this viral tweet from harry stebbins so i shout out harry stebbins 20

SPEAKER_33: i've met him seems nice this blew my mind so harry says the biggest problem in venture capital right now is that we've made entrepreneurship to safe a career path starting the company should be for the crazy for the obsessed instead today it's for the rational leave a top tier vc aka stanford raise vc own your time work on something cool pay yourself well we need to go back to the ones who only do this because they cannot bear to do not see their creation in the world okay i i have thoughts about

SPEAKER_40: this but let's start with you first impressions of that tweet easy to say as a venture capitalist with

SPEAKER_43: very large salaries huge compensation um if things do work out and very low risk because you're in a mutual fund of startup companies so whenever you're a venture capitalist you do have to be careful to understand that your job is incredibly low risk and diversified whereas founders jobs are incredibly concentrated and if it does go back to what he describes where you you know make a pittance of a salary and it's incredibly hard then you will leave out people who might pursue the path who have i don't know a baby a mortgage uh you know a payment for college so there are a very small number of people who can do what he describes which is live off of ramen and suffer etc so i don't um disagree that in the old days it was harder and it drew more grit but the truth is um it might have been actually too hard back then and a little bit too unreasonable and listen i am a eat rocks chew glass spit blood entrepreneurial guy i had to do what he's describing there if you were a founder it was because you were a misfit who couldn't work at a big company and you had to suffer you know and and essentially live like a monk and put every penny you had into it and it created a certain pain and

SPEAKER_52: suffering um much of that pain and suffering is unnecessary and a distraction and probably doesn't

SPEAKER_43: actually accrete to a better product or service in other words like if you have a studio apartment or a one bedroom or a two bedroom it probably doesn't make a difference to the ultimate success of your startup that being said we did create the luxury version of entrepreneurship which is i could take down a 250k salary and my salary should be similar to the salaries of let's say you know the equivalent of me working as a vice president at verizon aol you know cisco uber you know or apple and so between the two is kind of the truth you don't want people to suffer so much that they don't become entrepreneurs and they have no choice but to take that amazon job uh we'll talk about that in a minute uh and you don't want them to be so i don't know coddled that it's like you know the google hooli send up where you're just picking between which cut of steak you want before you get your massage and play volleyball and do a meditation mindfulness session like you see in a tiktok video in the day of a life of a googler which by the way i think pissed off a lot of people from google like those millennials doing those specific you know soy matcha honey manuka honey latte you know it's like in my day

SPEAKER_05: we had bad coffee and we drank it bad coffee is cheap and easy to make and you can make it in big

SPEAKER_43: vats like yeah i mean you want your matcha latte latte with manuka honey and your tweak that they have soy instead of whatever nut milk you like like that's i think what he's reacting to but you

SPEAKER_01: know having been there when it was pure suffering it was probably a little too much suffering yeah no

SPEAKER_33: actually i think that's very reasonable i mean my first job at a startup i was sleeping on a couch and my desk was a series of cardboard boxes in front of me where i put a laptop and that was fine because i was 20 you know like i mean that i could literally sleep on my also my office chair because it was the same couch that's fine but not for everybody the thing that i think that i it's not brought up enough enough is secondaries became so common in the larger rounds in the 2021 era peak syrup yeah peak syrup but i think a lot of founders got accustomed to the idea that they should be able to uh start a company raise money and then also be a part-time vc on the side and make lots of money and be you know and so i think like the founder universe got much larger and that takes money and i think that's changed things but the nice thing is a little austerity solves successes and i feel like now things are getting a bit back to that middle ground you detailed which is why this harry tweets interesting to me i'm curious if this is not like a 18 months late tweet i have a feeling

SPEAKER_15: you know when you see a vc tweet like this and harry's a nice guy um you know i think it's probably just some frustration with an acute situation that happened that week to a vc we're all

SPEAKER_75: human and you know there probably was some founder who was like yeah i know the company's dying i know we got product market fit problems and when i get back from my silent retreat um and i spend you know this money i spent in secondary at peaks that i sold on my you know new uh you know beach house i'll uh i'll

SPEAKER_43: try to solve that problem it's probably something like that he probably got tweaked in we're all human it happens on both sides of the equation people get frustrated with their vcs they get frustrated with their founder they get frustrated with their cto they get frustrated with the vp of sales

SPEAKER_00: but the truth is you know as the market gets hot exactly as you outline you can let people who just

SPEAKER_75: don't have the metal the proper you know grit to be founders will get anointed as founders and i'll be totally honest people who don't have do not have the stomach to be venture capitalist have become venture capitalists so this is overall in our industry it got too easy now you get an inside look at my life as a venture capitalist when the market comes down there's no dpi lena con's reign of terror on the industry continues unabated for another six months you know we have to figure out hey how do we sell a 50 million dollar company without the 10 buyers who would love to buy it being too scared to buy you know a little acquisition that might make your venture capital might it might be the difference between a seed fund existing next year or not existing might be that little 50 million dollar acquisition because they own 20 of the company and they would have got 10 million dollars to distribute to their lps and their 20 million dollar fund and it gets them to break even right so we we are in a

SPEAKER_43: very difficult time for the industry a lot of like things have been a lot of the excess we've got to

SPEAKER_79: clean up after like a bender you know you have a bender and like the house gets trashed and then everybody

SPEAKER_53: leaves and everybody who's at the bender who broke the windows and the railings broken on the staircase and the mirrors cracked in the bathroom like those are the people who broke it aren't the people who

SPEAKER_06: clean it up no no it's the people gotta live in the house who clean it up the person who puked in the sink is never there with the plunger the next day fixing nope no definitely not thank you for that

SPEAKER_84: graphic reminder of college days yeah college days all right founders are you tired of doing all your

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SPEAKER_37: about major cleanups well there is amazon's big rto move we're going to talk about that and what it

SPEAKER_33: means for stealth layoffs and startups then we do have some notes from lena conch who's on 60 minutes we have clips to bring you all the latest there jason you brought up apple intelligence aka ai on apple devices we have microsoft and some big nuclear deals a couple of new twist 500 companies and a little bit more on open ai to wrap things up so let's start with amazon uh jason the big story here is that amazon's going back to the office of five days a week they are tooled around with coming back three days and now they're going to five just to break this down for everybody ceo of amazon jassy asked two questions one do we have the right org structure to drive the level of ownership and speed we desire and two is the company set up in the way that's going to be the most effective and in both cases he said no so two things are going to happen one they're going to try to reduce the ratio of ic's or individual contributors to managers by at least 15 percent by the end of the first quarter of next year

SPEAKER_97: and then also like i said returning to office five days a week um in order jason first of all a mandate to reduce the number of managers compared to ic's genius top down i can't decide yeah

SPEAKER_00: so you know andy jassy is not a founder but he's going in founder mode the stock has been up and down they obviously got a huge covid bump but if you and independent on when you look at the stock versus the smp and contemporaries what you'll find is you know you take out that huge spike they had in

SPEAKER_01: covid stock hasn't kept up with the performance of contemporaries and if you are a hired gun ceo i you know bezos left in 21 i believe 2021 um you know you have to perform and your performance is exhibited through the stock price and amazon has an incredible business it's growing but i don't think

SPEAKER_43: the stock has done particularly well and i don't think the work from home experiment experiment is working at amazon now if it's not working and you feel people are not as committed and you know you have to reduce workforce what's a good strategy you want to test everybody and so i'll just this isn't necessarily an endorsement from me this isn't necessarily the strategy i would pursue but reading

SPEAKER_75: the tea leaves here stock price not great business growing but maybe you see more innovation and people are talking about microsoft ai's ever at apple intelligence zuck releasing his own llm tesla being on the verge of releasing their you know uh robo taxis and fsd coming out quite nicely waymo doing quite nicely at google google it's got sir uh sergey back in the office and they're making progress and then you

SPEAKER_99: go to amazon and you're like what have they done put more ads in our search results okay precisely also

SPEAKER_01: they put ads in my prime videos jerks i mean it's like okay lord of the rings series that nobody's talking about for a billion dollars it does not feel qualitatively or in the stock price like amazon's a leader if you're not a leader you're falling behind and everybody else is thriving in ai you got to shake things up so how do you rattle everybody's cage you want to scare the entire team and make them feel unsafe now i know this is sounding triggering so i'll put in yet another disclaimer alex i'm not saying that this is what i would do i'm not endorsing this saying it's right

SPEAKER_43: i'm just telling you reality you want to scare the out of every employee there that their jobs aren't safe unless performance changes that's what's happening right now and if you don't get your ass into a seat by january go your resignation is accepted and then whoever's left is going to get compensated they're going to get your rsu's and we're going to get this company back on track full

SPEAKER_109: stop that's what he's trying to do will it work let's talk about it yeah so i want to go back and

SPEAKER_33: just clarify that when you say you want people to feel unsafe we're not trying to say like unsafe in

SPEAKER_24: your person just unsafe in your current existing employment deal with amazon so a very narrow not

SPEAKER_75: that you're going to be beat up he's not going to come with a bat and do an al capone situation from

SPEAKER_113: the untouchables i know i know with the round table right yes exactly yeah baseball is a team sport but

SPEAKER_114: when you're at bad it's for an individual oh boy that's a that's a memory i haven't come back up

SPEAKER_117: within a while no but i agree with you i went and read a bunch of forums about this i read the aws uh

SPEAKER_33: reddit and read a bunch of other different areas just trying to find any developer on one of those groups that thought this was a good idea and would lead to retention of the best talent i couldn't find a single example of that in fact everyone was saying things like oh well i just i just took a job at amazon because it was three days a week in the office and my commute's long and now what am i going to do and a lot of people expressing annoyance that this was being put into uh affect the way it was some even saying that the new rto policy is actually going to be more strict than amazon was pre-covered so this is a tightening down my concern is that from a a c-suite perspective this looks great because you want some people to quit anyways amazon's been doing small layoffs throughout the year why not do this we'll get better return on our office space we've already bought or leased cool cool cool cool cool when i just think you lose a lot of the best people who know stuff and i i i don't know how to put that in eps terms you know but it is going to be institutional knowledge walking out the door and if i was the ceo of a company as complex as amazon uh that would give me pause you

SPEAKER_97: know i i don't mean to throw my hat in here i just it makes me worry about who they're going to lose

SPEAKER_52: that would be uh a calculus that they discussed internally for sure you're highlighting something

SPEAKER_01: that they had a discussion about before they did this they said you know there's these this team over here at twitch there's another team over here they've been like twitch i think has been remote

SPEAKER_43: since before they were bought so twitch got a carve out so there'll be a little carve outs that occur to address what you're saying they just won't talk about those publicly they'll do them very quietly

SPEAKER_01: you know and you know that that has always been the case there could be some incredibly high performer in sales or development and you just they've got a different set of rules and everybody goes why does that guy or that gal get a different set of rules and it's like here's her sales and here's your sales and then everybody you know stf use like there's nothing really to discuss this person's the high

SPEAKER_05: performer they want to work from japan for six weeks they're working from japan for six weeks the end we're done every corporate policy is is a thing the corporation wants it's not something that

SPEAKER_97: they're going to hold themselves to it's designed to limit your behavior not theirs just keep that in mind everybody unless you're in charge then it is your policy so if you wanted to get rid of 20

SPEAKER_00: percent of people not pay six months or a year of severance not have to deal deal with you know

SPEAKER_43: all the legal filings that go through plant shutdown rules these are antiquated rules um that existed so like a a factory couldn't just leave a town and the whole town collapses they got to give some warning right um those warning acts exist so this you know a lot of moving parts there and i think they looked at all options getting people to come in two or three days a week wasn't working people wouldn't do it they would do coffee badging they would you know basically ignore it and you know in the details here devil's in the details one of the details i saw that people were particularly tweaked with was assigned

SPEAKER_00: seating so you have to say there's a well why is that so controversial why would they include in you will be in your seat not a seat so what they're saying is when they say that and again you just gotta like kind of read into your just imagine you're in that management meeting and they say what how do we get people to take this seriously we say yeah they have a desk what they're saying is

SPEAKER_43: you have a desk 15 of people are going and if you're not in that desk we assume you're one of the 15 you're one of six or seven people that will no longer be working here worst case scenario they lose some institutional knowledge they'll survive it's not going to affect my buying stuff on amazon i will probably not notice the loss of those institute that institutional knowledge that burden will be carried by the employees who remain who have to clean up that mess sorry it sucks but so so be it and um worst case their earnings go up and the stock recovers best case maybe the company becomes more competitive and actually releases some products or services that are disruptive in the way that amazon web services were so he's he's trying to any just he's trying to keep his job and he's trying to do a 15 rift and he's trying to make the stock go up there's your explanation folks well if you were

SPEAKER_117: curious about if amazon is now in its balmer era i think the answer is yeah actually the best comment i read online was isn't this some day two we can bleep that out but i i was kind of laughing about

SPEAKER_138: that listen are you spending too much time as a founder all tabbing between your team chat maybe a document editor spreadsheets database as well it's time for you to consolidate all of that knowledge into one platform and that one platform that i use every single day is coda if you don't know coda it's like a new category of software best described as like a collaborative workspace it pulls together all the stuff you got going on in documents spreadsheets maybe a database maybe you built an app and it's super easy to learn it's incredibly powerful in fact we use it and we run founder university on it then we had a new project twist 500.com we wanted to make a database for the listeners of this podcast that essentially profiled the top 500 private companies it was a no-brainer we said oh we should make a website so i got twist 500.com i was like what are we going to do this for everybody in the meeting was like coda coda can do that and that means i don't have to buy new software it means i don't have to hire a dev shop i can just do it myself coda empowers your startup to strategize plan and track all of your goals effectively take advantage of this limited time offer just for startups coda.io twist today to get six months free of their team plan you're going to save at least a couple hours a week per team member and you're going to feel like you're in control that's coda.io twist to get started for free and get six free months of the team plan coda.io twist this fits

SPEAKER_33: neatly into something that we've been talking about on the show which is static team size uh amazon actually a couple weeks or months ago dropped this big note about how uh they saved all this time and money using what's it called uh amazon q i think yeah amazon q their gen ai software assistant you see them like you know hundreds and thousands of hours and hundreds of millions of dollars and so i think amazon's also looking at this stuff they're building internally and going we're going to limit our need for developers so if we lose some in this process and get what we want out of it maybe that's fine so i i wonder if rto is actually somehow being made more possible by advances in gen ai and therefore if developers aren't taking away some of their own perks by building better ai tech thousand percent

SPEAKER_00: static team size ai arriving you know ai job uh loss and then offshoring are all part of what's going on here you will see some of these jobs go to india uh or you know ukraine south america where they don't require rsu's and their cost is 50 or 30 on the dollar not even counting rsu's people in those

SPEAKER_01: jurisdictions are not expecting to get big huge stock grants it doesn't exist culturally as a concept that you would take the risk of working at a startup and get some big uh payday they haven't seen it therefore they don't expect it they don't demand it so you get all of this massive air cover and you know a lot of times management decisions are made based on never waste a crisis cover was a crisis was not

SPEAKER_43: wasted on executives at companies who decided working from home is dope now we've got a reason to let's

SPEAKER_53: hold on to it coming back to office the stock's in crisis or the stock's not as robust as it could be in comparison to competitors and other competitors are doing things that are making amazon look like a laggard it's a bad look to be a laggard if you're a part of the you know fang you want to look like

SPEAKER_01: a leader so this i think dovetails nicely into what's happening uh with m a which has been a part of amazon's and facebook's growth and then also you know looking at apple intelligence as a consumer

SPEAKER_33: company we're going to get into the eminent i think in just a second but i want to grab one more chart this is the number of job postings on indeed that are for software development gigs in the us and i think we actually may have had this on the show before but i pulled it back up for today thinking about this amazon thing what blows my mind is we're essentially back down to the lowest point of covid like that early three four months of coven everyone thought the economy was going to be dead forever that's how low today job uh listings are for software development gigs in the us which is kind of shocking to me it's worse than i thought it was going to be based on what i just saw the finite

SPEAKER_43: resource in our industry was developer talent it is no longer the finite resource and so that shows you exactly what happens during um you know this kind of uh you know economic and boom bus cycle we've seen combined with the efficiency of ai this is a multi-factor experience on here people are people over

SPEAKER_01: hired therefore they reduced ai makes it so you don't need to hire as many people because people are getting 30 or 40 percent more effective a year so you don't have to hire people that's two

SPEAKER_53: really considerable factors there it's almost like you built too many apartments and then we came up

SPEAKER_01: with this new technology that made construction workers 30 percent more efficient at a year every year imagine if that happened in housing we'd be like whoa housing prices are going to plummet and

SPEAKER_53: there's going to be construction people everywhere and we're not going to need as many and we don't have that because there's regulatory capture and there's you know nimbyism and all kinds of other

SPEAKER_01: stuff that are factors there that distort that market but you don't have that distortion here and then add to it globalization multiple factors working in conjunction to reduce the need for developers in

SPEAKER_37: the united states i agree with all of that but there's there's a tension that i that i can't quite

SPEAKER_33: unspool for myself which is how does a company that wants to go rto to get back in the office the most irl they could possibly get five days a week hanging out bumping shoulders and then also do offshoring so are we going to see like companies that that pursue rto be the outliers when it comes to hiring people in

SPEAKER_97: ukraine latin america and so forth or can companies kind of like walk and talk at the same time i suppose

SPEAKER_00: those employees are in offices in india so the bangalore office is in office and there's some manager there and you know it's it's always been my belief that the top 20 of performers over perform

SPEAKER_43: at home by removing their commute increasing their happiness then i think there's another swap probably

SPEAKER_00: equal size who do you know just as good plus or minus a couple of percentage points and then i think

SPEAKER_01: it's the bottom half which when you have an at scale company becomes the real challenge there's no

SPEAKER_43: mentorship there's no discipline they don't have self-discipline they don't have the ability to learn

SPEAKER_01: on their own they need resources they might need people next to them to motivate them you know when you're in part of a sales culture as an example or you're part of a running club as an example if the people who are around you when you run as a young runner coming into the world if you run with people who run an eight or nine minute mile you're gonna trend towards that if you run with people who run

SPEAKER_53: a 12 13 minute mile you're gonna jog and you're gonna you're gonna jog instead of run and everything in between and so that is human nature and i think when you look at finance companies they were the first

SPEAKER_43: to say every you know get back in the office we need that dogged competition that energy we want people to be part of this culture now in information work writers designers sales people maybe in startup land we are slow to get back but i think for you for that bottom half of people that vibrant competition

SPEAKER_00: and learning and collisions equal some culture that does increase performance i know if you put these

SPEAKER_79: companies side by side and in-person culture would be a remote culture with the same people i mean and

SPEAKER_43: i'm sorry to people who that hurts their feelings or it's a bummer me you know what if you weren't you

SPEAKER_75: i wouldn't give you the gig because you're an extremely talented person there's only i would say

SPEAKER_00: maybe 30 of us 40 of us who in tech can draw an audience and have a good conversation on a pockets you're one of 30 you're not one of 30 000 you know and so that's if you want to work from home be one of 30 not one of 30 000 the people who are being forced to come back to offer it are mids yeah yeah

SPEAKER_174: the thing they're not elites we we gotta we gotta move on to lena khan but i'll just say this spoken

SPEAKER_111: like a true extrovert said with nothing but hearts i just like i just want to be like i'm like oh yeah i can see that from you but also i'm like i also want to hide in the corner a little bit and yeah

SPEAKER_138: all right everybody you know being at a startup is a team sport you're not going to get there alone man you got your founders you got the early team members of course investors most importantly that first couple of customers right and you all work together to get your company off the ground and i have great news for you and your team google for startups cloud program is now a partner here at this week in startups and listen you all just want to know the number here's the number two hundred thousand three hundred fifty thousand these are the two numbers what are these two numbers you're going to get two hundred thousand dollars in google cloud credits and if you're an ai startup you can get up to three hundred fifty thousand dollars google is serious google for startups cloud program is here on this week in startups just letting you know they are serious about helping your startup the number is the number okay and there's two great numbers here ninety percent of generative ai unicorns choose google cloud we all know that they do a great job so here's your call to action you need to get these credits you need to start building you're going to find out everything about this amazing program google startup cloud program at startups.google.com twist okay very simple hit the rewind key bookmark this write it down i want you to sign up right now pause the podcast because these are big numbers folks they really want to support you i don't know how long they're going to do this for so startups.google.com twist all right let's get back to this amazing program halloween is coming up

SPEAKER_33: ladies and gentlemen which means that everyone's dressing up as things that scare them most which is why i'm very glad to report that jason is going to go as lena khan for halloween yeah nothing makes

SPEAKER_111: him uh more like it's funny to talk to you i talk to you a lot and yes you're actually uh pleasant

SPEAKER_117: and nice and then lena khan comes up and you're like she is destroying the industry terrible she's godzilla kicking over my tower yes but she was also recently on 60 minutes and we have a couple of

SPEAKER_33: clips we're going to play them for everybody here and then we're going to talk about what she says and what we've learned so um decades of m a and what happened with that court hit it in the technology

SPEAKER_189: markets we went through a couple of decades where we saw over 800 acquisitions by the five big players not a single one of which was blocked and some of those we realized ended up leading to significant harm just to give you a concrete example there were companies that were offering americans greater privacy and they were promising that we're not going to use your data we're not going to sell it we're not going to spy on you everywhere all the time after some of those firms were bought up by one of the big guys all of those data privacy policies changed overnight and so americans lost those privacy

SPEAKER_191: protections you're talking about facebook and whatsapp yes that's one example of that so jason first of all

SPEAKER_111: thoughts about about that argument that a agglomeration of technology companies has led to a deterioration of

SPEAKER_00: consumer privacy uh hogwash i mean we take 800 acquisitions she mentioned 800 acquisitions can you name the three or four that were the most harmful and they came up with one and i would say

SPEAKER_43: the harm of facebook tracking whatsapp users is all within the law if it falls outside of the law they

SPEAKER_00: get very significant penalties and in fact facebook had the largest judgment against any american company in history for privacy violations and they are audited because of that if you remember um that case i

SPEAKER_19: know this was over 10 years ago um and very recently there was the attorney general uh ken paxton uh texas case that cost meta i think it was 1.4 billion dollars so this is still happening so there are laws around

SPEAKER_15: privacy so she's taking a fear tactic and she is very smart and very evil in my mind i think she's sinister

SPEAKER_43: i think she is political i think she is a political tool uh to be anti-capitalist and to be uh and and and you can see in that weak argument um exactly um how blatantly political what she's doing is they don't like facebook they want to go after facebook they're going and taking an acquisition that was not fought at the time um of a messenger app which is a commodity that anybody can build it's not

SPEAKER_53: like it's some incredibly um proprietary technologies technology that exists inside of now twitter has encrypted messaging um signal telegram i mean there there are more messaging apps than you could ever use available to you and they're all free so the concept of consumer harm here that they're going to is privacy consumers don't have to use those apps they can easily use one of the alternatives if they really care about privacy and they don't like the feature set or the deal presented by whatsapp which is a free product that is a free product people can use globally communicate for free and and run it for their businesses and get massive value out of and so i think they're in that quote you can see how insincere this effort is now because it's scary to consumers oh they're collecting our data you opted into that you don't need to opt into it you could use another service if you really cared consumers do not care about getting targeted ads if we've learned anything consumers do not care about that type of privacy they might care about having their phones hacked they do not care about getting targeted ads

SPEAKER_33: it's a total red herring you and i do though i mean we rerun adblock and all sorts of stuff and i i suppose the i guess to me the argument that unsophisticated people are unsophisticated and therefore they shouldn't have protections is yeah i know what you're getting at the thing that i'll

SPEAKER_208: say though is and i just i just say this as a as an enormous please take the counter argument i mean

SPEAKER_209: it's just this is my worldview i mean i would love to hear the counter if you have it yeah which is that

SPEAKER_208: i don't think she's being insincere at all i think she really cares about this okay i i i think that you disagree with her entirely i just don't think that she's as malicious as you make it out to be i think

SPEAKER_33: you guys just have a very deep-seated policy disagreement and she has been i would say effective at changing the conversation from where she sits inside the government and i'll also throw

SPEAKER_213: in that i don't think that many people think that lena khan no matter who wins the upcoming election

SPEAKER_33: is going to have her gig next year so to me this is definitely not kind of like it's almost like a not a victory laugh but like a farewell tour thank you jason it's kind of a farewell to her i was surprised that she was on 60 minutes i'm like why would you do this now it's almost like she's probably been told that someone else is going to get the job if kamala wins and of course if trump wins she's out of her job either way i just don't think she's evil i i think she's just um applying the best take that she can of the regulations that are in the same way that i don't think gary ginsler is the evil mastermind that everyone wants to make about to be in the crypto world

SPEAKER_99: do people have legitimate policy beef with them hell yes so yeah my counter to that is i think gary

SPEAKER_00: againster is a square a nerd who just wants to apply the law and he doesn't want to deal with the chaos of adding new technology because it's a lot more work and it's a lot more headache and it's all downside for him and so that is a fundamental architecture of that organization an enforcement organization they're rewarded for stopping crime they're not rewarded for allowing innovation so you know that just the nature of it's not like a police officer you know or a police precinct gets

SPEAKER_01: like bonus points if everybody in the community is happy and they they're thriving and they go to you know great colleges and their scores go up they only get graded on if there's less crime did less people get murdered did less stores get robbed you did your job and and that's the sec right there's no upside there's no reward for them allowing new types of financial services so that's like a very unique

SPEAKER_53: situation and with her watchdog organization i think she was selected because she had extremist views and there was an anti-technology bent to the current administration which wanted to stop what they

SPEAKER_01: perceived was the power of the social network specifically and information because it felt like

SPEAKER_03: hey man maybe this is competing with politicians and their abilities so i mean i'm starting to sound a little conspiracy there here but they picked a 32 year old with very radical ideas to run this

SPEAKER_53: her ideas are you know break up big tech and to stop future harm through competition what we've learned is there's a very simple way um to deal with monopolies it's to allow technologists to start companies and compete now it might take 20 years to displace somebody might take 30 years but we're seeing it right now between chat gpt and google we saw it between aol and google and facebook and twitter it's just always some renewal that occurs android ios versus you know displacing microsoft in mobile like everybody thought

SPEAKER_224: microsoft would win mobile right they won desktop so how do they not win mobile and they play no role

SPEAKER_53: in it so you know i'm just i'm glad she's going i think what we're seeing here is you know what she did was just basically freeze the market for a couple years hopefully we allow the small acquisitions to occur and we actually look at the behavior of the companies and address the behavior not a theoretical future competition because i would rather not have government officials determining through a crystal ball what's going to happen with future competition i'd rather leave it to the market if i'm being honest i'm not saying the market's perfect you can get monopolistic behaviors but i want to see them give speeding tickets you know and revoke licenses uh you know in this metaphor of unsafe driving for people who actually break the rules i don't think i don't think facebook broke the rules by buying

SPEAKER_85: instagram and whatsapp well i i think if well facebook was a smaller company at the time and that's that's the thing that we should bring into this conversation i am slightly more skeptical of how

SPEAKER_33: to knock off certain incumbents because there doesn't be quite a lot of inertia in the market but it just feels like sometimes people point to lena con's regime and rain as more impactful than it is because i can't recall that many examples of deals that are these tuck in acquisitions that are so important to early stage funds the seed funds from earlier getting blocked to me it's the major they're

SPEAKER_00: just not happening it's the chilling effect so you're correct you're not seeing them get blocked because

SPEAKER_43: people don't even try that's how that's how bad it is would they get blocked i guess is my is my is my question probably would get probably would get a legal letter saying you know and you probably would get vetted and so they've just given up on it and and the paradox of it is then they just build their

SPEAKER_00: own so instead of buying things they say you know what we'll just build and so if you actually wanted

SPEAKER_43: to make apple and facebook and microsoft less powerful having them buy the companies and having those companies be valuable and being able to raise more money would be a better way to do it than

SPEAKER_53: having those companies fail and just have facebook incorporate the idea into their next version of

SPEAKER_21: their product so the argument there is if we allow big tech companies to go into the pool of startups that are competing with them in some ways and pull out a couple of the names it enriches the the the pool so

SPEAKER_33: much that the overall package of startups become stronger i'm very sympathetic to that i mean i am a guy who i mean i i've been interested in startups since i was going to the public library in my hometown because i think they're cool i think it's cool to go up against the big players like that is the key thing that's going to be interesting in this sector for so long um and that's why i i've always thought that some antitrust work has to be pro startup because if we do have some limits on companies that are monopoly trending let's say avoiding some arguments uh then it creates more room for startups to be able to compete and then take them on um so i can see this from both sides i i will say that i thought this interview was interesting and it's framing so court why don't we play one more clip from this uh from lena con to get more of a taste of um of what they put out of all the

SPEAKER_189: thousands of deals that are proposed every year the ftc and doj collectively investigate maybe two or

SPEAKER_237: three percent that might not sound like a lot but startup founders complain that she's spooking

SPEAKER_238: investors so much she's actually stifling innovation others fear that her chasing the tech giants will cause a domino effect earlier this month after it was reported that her counterpart at the justice department subpoenaed the chip maker nvidia nvidia share is getting slammed in the regular session

SPEAKER_240: the stock market plunged do you ever okay court let's pause it there so did you see what just so

SPEAKER_33: back to your point about weak examples i think that is that is the definition of a weak example they just said that when someone who is not lena khan announced an investigation of a different company their share price quote plunged played a clip from cnbc when the share price was off two percent yeah after

SPEAKER_43: going up by like eight thousand percent in the last like i mean this shows you like even 60 minutes is you know as a journalistic enterprise very lauded does incredible work at times you know they also at

SPEAKER_01: times they also are an entertainment program that's uh you know fighting for audience and they can make

SPEAKER_43: things a lot more dramatic than they actually are the doj investigating like you know some activity at nvidia doesn't necessarily has to do with her that is just an example of the government investigating

SPEAKER_01: companies and then sometimes that affects the stock price in a minor way or a major way but in this case a minor way so it's not exactly evidence the the statement before that which is that startup founders are feeling the chilling effect is the actual story um and i think what she's on right now is an apology farewell job interview i'm going to restate that it's just a farewell tour because she's 30 something years old i think she is doing these tours because she's going to be doing one of two careers after that one of three careers she's either going to be working for a

SPEAKER_53: um very large tech company on the other side of the table a venture capital firm on the other side of the table and advising them on how to get deals through etc work for one of the giant law firms i'm not sure if she's an attorney or not i assume she is um somebody should look that up but if she is

David Friedberg: an attorney maybe she goes and works for one of those firms to help deals get through so when figma is

SPEAKER_43: getting bought by adobe maybe adobe hires her um and i think the other possibility is to run for

SPEAKER_00: political office she's well spoken she's highly intelligent and she's anti-corporate which plays

SPEAKER_43: you know in a lot of america so she would be a great senator congresswoman you know who knows

SPEAKER_00: what position she would go for next uh but you know this is a great resume builder that you try to fight against the evils of amazon etc i love the consumer harm framework and i and i i like the idea of looking at specific anti-competitive behaviors i do believe apple giving all of their search results to google in a multi-year tens of billions of dollars a deal i do believe that feels

SPEAKER_01: anti-competitive i do believe not allowing app stores on the iphone or android or i guess android

SPEAKER_00: allows it now but ios previously or ios taking a 30 tax not letting people click to pay directly and

SPEAKER_43: have a direct relationship with their newspaper or their you know uh you know app of choice i believe that's anti-competitive and that's where you could really make really good progress you know if if i want

SPEAKER_01: to use apple news um or i want i'm apples you know i'm the wall street journal app why am i giving money to apple to you know go through the app store i mean if it was if it felt like the three percent you pay to stripe visa that's one thing but thirty percent is ten times that number and so i think you know forcing them to allow other app stores on ios is which i think the eu is doing now they're going to force them to do that and allowing them have links on the web page to say go direct there's a podcasting 2.0 um uh standard that adam curry's working on that has two buttons that apple and

SPEAKER_53: spotify don't put into their apps to the best of my knowledge one of them is the donate button one of them is this podcast is going live that is like now standard in the html code like the rss code the standard for podcast so when we go live we have to tell you like log into youtube subscribe etc but it should be in any podcast player if you have notifications on spotify or apple you get that alert but they don't follow the standard and there should be a button that says donate that goes to our stripe page and let you donate with or whatever we choose to use patreon stripe and we we program that we don't have to go through apple subscriptions through spotify subscriptions through you know youtube subscriptions and let them take 20 30 absurd so i think that would be a better use of whoever comes in next a better path and then we've talked about it here before let's let the small companies go crazy

SPEAKER_43: so that we have more big companies instead of a mag 7 we've got a mag 17 or a mag 170 and that would

SPEAKER_53: happen if you allowed uber and doordash to merge or waymo to spin out and merge with uber you know or tesla to buy uber or doordash you know that's where you start getting really interesting ways of competing against big tech thank you for coming to me no no i'm here for also just going back um

SPEAKER_117: she uh is a has a lot of degree from yale uh unsurprising given that she runs a department

SPEAKER_33: and she is 35 so it turns out according to my research i just did lena khan and i are one month apart in age and uh we are four months older than taylor swift so there you go i mean three of the most

SPEAKER_85: important people in my life yes uh also a nightmare blunt rotation i think that would be the worst way to

SPEAKER_197: hang out um okay let's move on swift doesn't is just bogeys that doobie every time i'm like swift

SPEAKER_24: t swift pass it puff puff pass and she's like absolutely not i have to date a football player

SPEAKER_33: all right um jason so today uh before the show you were all hot and bothered about apple intelligence because you have the new version of ios my iphone is too old sorry i'm my new one um tell me what's up

SPEAKER_15: so it's just interesting to see a lot of the features that were in products like superhuman uh

SPEAKER_01: gmail uh grammarly uh notion around writing all of a sudden appear on the operating system level

SPEAKER_00: of your phone so the first thing i'll show here today is the writing tools i sent a couple screenshots

SPEAKER_01: i'm sure we could find other screenshots online but in the new um ios and anybody can join the beta by the way if you go to your software section you can join the beta there's sonoma and then there's another one right now i can't remember the two names of the betas and they have different things in each

SPEAKER_00: one and some of them you need apple silicon and higher levels but the writing assistant tool very good and so here i was i think in our docket um we write a nice little docket here and when i say we i mean alex and so i could highlight this section here and writing tools comes up as one of your choices so i highlighted the section we did on amazon's riff that you wrote and then it could proofread it rewrite it make it friendly make it professional in other words like you know maybe 20 percent of what grammarly already does right um here's another one this is a very simple feature um that you can use with chat gpt for a claw at all of them but it's built into safari so when you're

SPEAKER_15: in safari you'll see on the top left you have that reader view now it pops up a menu and you can enable

SPEAKER_01: highlights highlights so you have writing tools and now you have highlights highlights safari intelligently displays summaries previews and suggestions from the web nearby locations and more you turn it on and then when you're reading um let me show you that um so when you're and this is just this another feature i found which is to hide sections if you click that hide sections and i don't know if this is part of rappel intelligence or they had this previously you could do something like here i opened up the new york times top story about rfk having a uh a really spicy relationship with a

SPEAKER_43: journalist you could click on something like the carousel and say hide this and then it no longer shows you that when you go to the new york post so you can actually like huge yeah it's kind of cute right and so it's not an ad blocker it just empowers the user to remove clutter um now of course you can click it again another screenshot i sent is when you click on that you can get the reader view so everybody knows reader view if you don't know reader view it takes everything out and just gives

SPEAKER_53: you text i love read review now when you do reader view in safari you have summarize you click summarize

SPEAKER_00: and you'll get essentially a three-sentence summary of the story here robert kennedy is considering suing olivia newsy her name is newsy and she's in the news i think it's not i think it's not easy okay

SPEAKER_53: nuzzy um for allegedly sending him spicy images and videos after tricking him into unblocking her number okay like this i guess summer here um sorry that i picked the salacious story it was the top

SPEAKER_111: story no i just i find it really funny that everyone's like on this we find rfk jr entirely

SPEAKER_171: believable i mean it's kind of hilarious like this guy's like 70 years old and he's a kennedy and like

SPEAKER_75: these are the stories i mean this guy's got some i mean i don't know what it is is it the kennedy last name is it the delivery what is it that sends people into a tizzy i i don't know but people still

SPEAKER_33: have kennedy rose tinted glasses in a way that you know given my age and being born in oregon never

SPEAKER_21: reached me i missed i missed the the mythos of this much like i missed all of princess guy being a big you

SPEAKER_294: know global phenomena um so those are just a couple of the ones that are interesting um another kind of

SPEAKER_00: interesting aspect of this is when you talk to siri it puts a glowing bar around your whole iphone which makes it feel alive you know it's almost like a little bit of a synthesizer where it kind of

SPEAKER_43: glows as you talk and then knowing that you don't always want to talk to it there's a a spot on the bottom of your keyboard if you double click it it will pull up your keyboard glowing with siri and you

SPEAKER_75: can have a text exchange with siri essentially it turns itself into chat gpt so it's going to and it's also kind of um got a very different um it has a very uh efficient way of listening to you so if you said

SPEAKER_01: to it hey blank i'm not going to say because i don't want to turn everybody's on if you have a similar

SPEAKER_75: voice to mine um you know i want to set a timer for six minutes now make it four uh actually make it three and a half it would actually follow that thread and very quickly respond if you ask it how do i set up a calendar uh item on my phone it would do it very quickly so it's got that snappiness that

SPEAKER_43: it needs to actually be utilized and they're doing what apple always does take the simplest simplest features of ai and make them work for everybody you know including laggards including the vanguard and you know the the massive middle of a technology adoption i'm giving them like an absolute a plus not for what's been delivered but for the approach i can see this approach is going to work i think

SPEAKER_01: siri that sucked for a decade is going to become essential in the next decade i think they're going to nail it is is what i'm saying i'm a buyer of apple stock i'm not selling any shares i'm very optimistic

SPEAKER_21: to hear all that because my iphone 11 has finally i think reached the end of its life so i'm about to

SPEAKER_33: go get a uh apple intelligence ready iphone uh very very soon are you a pro max guy or just a pro i'm a

SPEAKER_43: max i like the large screen size you know i'm older i wear glasses so you know when i have this giant one

SPEAKER_03: it's got better battery life and i can read it a little bit easier i put my anchor battery pack on it with my little stand i got my kickstand here and i put it on the side when we're talking i can leave

SPEAKER_158: it open during a show etc when i'm on an airplane i can put the kickstand on and i'm in great shape

SPEAKER_43: so yeah okay this is going to be uh pretty big they've also got recording of phone calls they're

SPEAKER_01: adding and transcribing them in other words huge what's already in zoom so that'll be huge i don't

SPEAKER_53: know if it alerts the person i haven't tried it yet uh i'll try it and let you know on a future episode but i think you can call somebody click the record button i hope it tells them you're

SPEAKER_03: recording or ask them for permission uh you know zoom i think tells people the calls being recorded right like that's a standard procedure um and then obviously there's different states that have different rules around recording uh or two-party consent of recording so you know it wouldn't be so

SPEAKER_01: difficult for it to know what geo you're in and say hey you're in california you need consent hey you're

SPEAKER_53: in new york you don't need consent would you like to request consent yes or no as opposed to just telling people like jason's recording you like whoa would you like to ask alex if you could record this call and make a transcript and send it to both of you so there's going to be a new uh we're going

SPEAKER_224: to have a some new what's the word uh that i talked about manners norm norm's manners um i have a character miss manners that i call on the phone for my daughters i don't i don't know if you know

SPEAKER_309: about miss manners but i don't but i'm gonna need to know because i'll give you her phone number her

SPEAKER_53: phone number is very easy for you to remember so when my daughters were young they said listen that's it i'm calling miss manners no no no no call miss manners i pick up my phone and i go beep beep

SPEAKER_310: that's miss manners phone numbers did you get it it's beep beep boop i got it no no i'll never forget

SPEAKER_311: that that's written in my head and then it goes and then i do my missed outfire oh hello it's miss

SPEAKER_53: manners what's going on it's good to hear from you jason i say oh you know my daughters they're misbehaving somebody just said this pasta is gross oh we don't use the word gross we say i don't care

SPEAKER_314: for it i'm wondering if there's another option if it's not too much trouble for dinner and so i

SPEAKER_53: taught my daughters to stop saying yuck or gross because at another person's house for a restaurant

SPEAKER_00: that's sure sure and now they say when asked if something is not to their liking we'll say um i

SPEAKER_74: don't care for it um thank you very much uh how did you manage to hire the late queen to hide in your

SPEAKER_319: phone to scold your children and what did that cost no no it's a new it's a new startup i'm incubating

SPEAKER_294: it's called the mismanners it's a it's an ai that teaches manners it follows you all around the startup

SPEAKER_208: point is what i what i wanted to get to because you said at the start of this rant that you know some stuff from superhuman is making its way in some stuff from grammarly is making its way in and to me

SPEAKER_33: there's a there's a thing called getting sherlock in which apple takes a product that was built by the community brings it into its os and uh politely kills off another company so i'm curious do you see apple intelligence coming to all of our phones very soon hurting a class of startups out there

SPEAKER_52: no because i think there'll always be a place for luxury power user software if you can't the pace at which apple likes to release stuff is when it is bulletproof for 99.99 of you know people you know

SPEAKER_43: the picture your friend who literally doesn't know how to turn on the flashlight or you know doesn't

SPEAKER_01: know where the bluetooth settings on their phone is like that person they wanted to work for that person if they stumble upon the feature so you're there's they're never going to be part of the vanguard the

SPEAKER_00: avant-garde you know and it would mean you are a very lazy developer making a really terrible product with an untalented team if you can beat apple's you know product velocity so don't worry about that too much um what i what i do think it's going to do is educate a large number of people to trust ai in certain circumstances and i think the person who loses the most here is open ai i think that apple does not need open ai to do any of this they could use llama they could use any of the hugging face models none of this is dependent on chat gpt and i think what will happen is chat gpt is massively that i'm

SPEAKER_43: seeing and by massive i mean six to twelve months some people might argue it's 18 months i don't think anybody in our industry is arguing that chat gpt is like 24 months five years yeah nobody would say that

SPEAKER_20: yeah no i i don't know if you would um i doubt it um yeah it's like it feels like a six months so

SPEAKER_43: this oh one preview is so good i was talking to people in the industry the last couple days about

SPEAKER_00: it and everybody admits oh one is wild in what it does in terms of thinking you and i talked about it i believe last week yep the distance between apple having that grok inside of twitter slash x clawed it being in every facebook i think it's all commoditized i don't think open ai will be able to charge 20 or 50 for this to that class of consumers i don't think that class of consumers is going to need another app i think a lot of that i think a lot of the base functionality like rewrite this or proof it for me is going to be enough for a large group of people so it doesn't mean chat gpt doesn't have a great business but if you were to ask me who loses most i think they lose because apple is intent on making this a system level feature it's not an app it's in the os it is the it is the interface and when i saw what they're doing with apple intelligence and i used it and you have to use it in order to understand it's a key premise i have as a technologist and an investor in technology companies and a commentator is use it so i made everybody in our organization i tried as hard as i can when you open up a new tab have chat gpt4 or claude open up in that new window and when you start doing that or you install the beta of this apple intelligence what you realize is it's going to be the new interface the you're not going to scroll and click apps you're going to talk to siri and siri is studying your behavior in apps there is a bunch of stuff in the terms of service you and i talked about it offline where they're asking you to watch yourself in an app the reason they're doing that is they want siri commands to go two clicks into each app an

SPEAKER_01: example of that would be when you ask siri to play a specific artist in spotify it works so you want to play music you want to play this genre of music and you want to do it in this app so three things

SPEAKER_43: music genre app now it's going to be like i'm looking for a sushi restaurant within this many miles and i want it to be open tonight and i want it to be good for groups and they have to take apple pay right can't be cash only so now you got like five you know variables oh and please

SPEAKER_53: i need them to have peking duck so i want to go to a chinese place with peking duck that takes apple pay and

SPEAKER_43: is good for groups now it gives you the three dim sum restaurants and it's like that one's not open

SPEAKER_53: on monday nights and it's a monday night so here are the two those queries will be done through siri not by opening up yelp and clicking a bunch of buttons if that makes sense no it absolutely does

SPEAKER_71: but i mean it does limit the number of companies that have that have that opportunity in front of

SPEAKER_33: them because it comes down to microsoft uh windows google android apple ios which are three of the mag seven it disappoints me a little bit that we're kind of trending towards a future by the way that i agree we're going towards i i'm completely on board with you where you see this going it just makes

SPEAKER_43: me worry a little bit sure it's a lot of power it's going to be a lot of power it's a lot of power you know he who owns the interface like really can exert a lot now once you're inside of that app it's

SPEAKER_00: now up to yelp to earn their keep and have a discussion with yelp's data set be more robust than what apple can simply look in apple local or apple maps and give you and so it just means you

SPEAKER_346: have to be that much better you know or or it means that yelp at all simply become data providers

SPEAKER_33: for ai models essentially and they become less and less a consumer facing entity and instead they're mediated through the jason calacanis siri instance that you have across your ios devices i wonder if a lot of companies just won't have a gui in the end and they'll just be essentially api data streams

SPEAKER_99: that are fed into either real-time answers or model creation and training i mean

SPEAKER_43: i mean there are probably many companies already that exist that would fit that model you know um there are databases of airline flights and hotels and you know kayak queries them to give their

SPEAKER_00: results and then gives them a they pay a license for data so it is possible yelp's future is not in having a front-end interface for the majority of users but allowing chat gpt uh gemini from google and apple's new whatever to um pay them per query and maybe it's a better business model for them maybe they just perfect the data set and and it's a better business model and it's better for consumers

SPEAKER_01: to have that interface the right now they're already being mitigated through a desktop or an app that has to go through the store so it it's it is troubling in some ways and it is an opportunity in other ways and again as a technologist you must look at the trajectory of what they're doing they

SPEAKER_00: want to control the conversation you're going to have to have a better tool a better mousetrap that

SPEAKER_117: provides more value than they can yeah absolutely and i bet the argument you made earlier about apple's app store being a bit too controlling of other companies trying to reach consumers we're going to have a complete reprise of that with siri and other similar services at the os level i think with other people wanting in um looking forward to that when it happens now jason give me a direction here

SPEAKER_352: we can talk about microsoft and the renaissance in nuclear power or we can tie this right into open ai

SPEAKER_03: what do you want to do well i think the more important story is obviously yeah the most important story is obviously what's going on with uh nuclear power and microsoft and three mile island so why

SPEAKER_158: don't we just do a quick hit on that and take one question from our linkedin twitter x audience awesome

SPEAKER_117: so this is one of the coolest stories that has hit the world technology in a long time um everyone knows three mile island here in the us the site of the worst uh nuclear accident in our history it was a

SPEAKER_33: partial meltdown that was back in the 70s things have changed and now microsoft is working with constellation to turn back on one of the producing units at three mile island so that it can essentially buy all the power for its data centers low carbon jason we love to see a clean energy source but you know microsoft is now essentially in the leasing its own power plant business because of the demands that it

SPEAKER_99: has for power and so forth and i this strikes me as an absolute story of the times i mean we were

SPEAKER_197: sitting here a couple of years ago and if you brought up nuclear power people would reference

SPEAKER_00: fukushima and they were scared to death and don't put it in my backyard and then you know now we have ai demanding more power we have utilities uh and many people in the country putting generators on their homes because they keep losing power so and then you know we have global warming which some people don't believe in but statistically it's clearly happening and um we have energy prices out of control so i i

SPEAKER_43: have found this very strange phenomenon where what people tell you they care about is very specifically

SPEAKER_01: impacted on what they have to pay for that product or services or its availability so when electricity is not available and it's really expensive people are like can i get another solution and nuclear is obviously the cleanest along with solar and so solar takes a while to deploy some of these nuclear power plants apparently i didn't know this but most uh nuclear power plants have multiple reactors okay i didn't know that fukushima had a couple three mile and a couple but three mile island was still operating in 2019 and they shut it down for financial reasons um we need to restart nuclear here in the united states we need to have the will to put up new these new gen 3 gen 4s um and turn on the old ones if you look at what happened with germany uh not to make this a political show but germany germany turning off all their nuclear power because you've got some green um group of individuals who are

SPEAKER_43: obviously misguided and don't understand that like they're now burning coal and oil instead of having nuclear like we really need to educate people uh and three mile island fukushima and chernobyl

SPEAKER_01: really warped people's minds into how dangerous this technology is it is the safest technologies ever we have more people dying from coal from breathing it in and getting lung cancer and we were talking about tens of millions of people or millions of years of lifespan and i would say probably billions of years of years of lifespan have been shortened by coal but we remember like three dozen people who died

SPEAKER_43: acutely in fires at nuclear power plants like come on let's try to have some thoughtfulness about this

SPEAKER_01: and if ai is the reason that we'll have the willpower to do it it's the huge win for society yeah absolutely

SPEAKER_33: absolutely also keep in mind that three mile island was back in 1979 that's before metallica had released their first album that's how long ago that was i mean it's it's back in the day technology has improved and what had to happen for there to be a crisis at fukushima well there was massive earthquake and tsunami so you know we are never going to have zero risk energy but nuclear is so safe that i would live on top of a nuclear reactor today let alone nearby to it bring it on bring it on is such an obvious thing it generates very little waste you can just throw in the hole in the ground huzzah it's it's fantastic so microsoft 100 points for this i absolutely love it we also found some stuff that's been bouncing around the internet including that amazon is hiring a principal nuclear engineer data engineering power generation solutions so we are moving towards a world in which data centers not only are getting larger and more power intensive but the power that goes into them will also be owned and operated by the company that runs the data center so that means that microsoft is going to be eventually a nuclear power operator a data center provider a laptop maker a failed phone company and i mean it's like these these tech companies are getting kind of weird business productivity yeah i mean

SPEAKER_00: fantastic if you know sometimes you know uh some need will drive uh changing people's opinions on these

SPEAKER_01: items and here we are we we we don't get our power situation straightened down in this country

SPEAKER_00: you know there's other countries that maybe uh you have top down uh control and they can just ordain uh a company or force through eminent domain that you know one of these uh nuclear reactors gets thrown up every x number of miles and then they never have to drill for oil again or be dependent on another country so the key here is for us not to have foreign dependency and to win ai and win super intelligence you cannot win super intelligence without a ton of power and a lot of chips interestingly

SPEAKER_01: most nuclear power plants in the united states are on the east coast and you might ask yourself why is that and it's pretty simple that's where industry form formed in our country a lot of it was on the east coast that's where water is and that's where population density was an industrial uh the people in

SPEAKER_43: industry who needed power were all in the the east coast not the west coast you know so we do have

SPEAKER_01: a lot of people who moved west since the 50s 60s and 70s i think 60s and 70s early 70s is when this ended so during that time period they all cluster on the east coast we need to actually bring them to the west coast as well and you know more power um is a good thing for our country which is now a next and a net exporter of fossil fuel so we're going to be this is going to be awesome for america independence and reaching super intelligence and the super intelligence is going to train us how to make

SPEAKER_03: better decisions about technology to get more efficiency and energy so we've got this like

SPEAKER_02: this could spiral in a really good way the first thing the super intelligence is going to say

SPEAKER_06: it's going to it's going to print out lena khan was right and you're going to go no why have we made

SPEAKER_53: this she's totally right about like the speeding ticket she's given i give her a lot of credit for uh you know investigating people for app stores it's just the m a piece that it really gets under

SPEAKER_207: my skin and i cannot wait for her to join andreessen horowitz that's what i thought you would use that

SPEAKER_137: vc from i'm like it's gonna be andreessen horowitz i mean i sure why not yeah yeah okay uh i know we

SPEAKER_33: gotta go but before we leave a couple of notes about companies that are building next gen nuclear reactors actually a few are public which blew my mind so new scale power nano nuclear and oclo are all public and they have a combined market cap of uh 4.2 billion dollars so not the biggest companies um well i'm i'm not going to tell you which one's my favorites i don't know yet but i will add that there's two startups that i'm going to put onto the twist 500 last energy and x energy last energy last raised a 40 million dollar series b and x energy's last round was a 235 million dollar series c but these are companies that are working on more modular easy to install nuclear power that you can place where you need it and i think that's freaking great because we need it everywhere because data centers aren't always located near power generation so i'm stoked at the money flowing into this the need for it how it's going to change our society i love nuclear power and uh now we get to watch chernobyl again because that's a great miniseries you know i didn't get to it i wanted to watch it with

SPEAKER_17: the wife people seem to be over the moon of it i will just say if you haven't tuned into industry

SPEAKER_00: uh it's the hbo uh show about uh young people doing trading in london it is awesome oh it's like okay it's kind of like secession or sopranos but taking place at like a goldman sachs trading firm with a bunch of young people doing crazy things that young finance people do but you know like a lot of hbo shows they kind of innovate in storytelling and the innovation here is you don't know any of the actors

SPEAKER_01: but they're all really good and it moves fast it's kind of like that movie uh that adam sadler was in uncut gems um if you remember did you see uncut gems by chance i did not say i know it's adam sandler's latest masterpiece it's incredible i mean it's basically about a degenerate gambler doing degenerate gambler stuff but this has that vibe of like these people are taking risks it moves too fast the screen moves quickly they're talking fast they're doing crazy things and it's got like a pace to it that's

SPEAKER_20: so frenetic that each episode is like a starter's pistol goes off and it's a sprint oh and then it's

SPEAKER_43: it's really compelling in i haven't seen this in storytelling except in like very manic portions of movies like in goodfellas when they do that scene where like the helicopter's flying and it's

SPEAKER_53: like an intense 10 minutes of like oh man that's yeah it's kind of like that for the entire series it never lets up it's just chaos and the lack of sleep and stimulants and coffee and trades and anger and double crossing highly recommend the tv show industry it's on its third season it's gotten

SPEAKER_33: better every single season all right well jason i'm going to watch that this weekend with the spouse once i get all the children into bed but a couple of comments and questions from our dear friends who are with us live and uh so from andrew storm why is it with the obsession in technology to return to

SPEAKER_00: office i think he's asking kind of as compared to other industries um i think competition is driving it and um that's the beginning and end of it i think there's some obscure situations where

SPEAKER_01: people feel like they want to do a riff so it's a gentleman's riff we've talked about that before but i think the obsession is really can you compete against an in-person team and do they have a

SPEAKER_00: distinct advantage if everybody was working from home and you didn't have competition i think people

SPEAKER_01: would be like okay yeah but people believe that in startups there's more intensity creativity when everybody's in an office as but one example i heard three well first three team members for our company in austin will be in office in october and i'm going back to the office so of our team we'll have four

SPEAKER_88: of 21 or 22 will be in office but i'll grandfather everybody who's not in office if if they are ultra

SPEAKER_43: high performers so you have to be in a u h p to be remote in my mind does it mean like tomorrow everybody's gotta i'm not taking this like in you know hardcore everybody comes back to office on this date it's be an ultra high performer who i don't have to manage or if you choose to be creative and come to an office and that's fine i think there's room for both and that's my personal philosophy but when you were in a large organization it's just easier to tell everybody to get their asses back

SPEAKER_03: and see it so there's a little bit of lazy management there's a little bit of control and there's a lot

SPEAKER_399: of competition worries yeah no i think that's true i also think there's no good way to build an

SPEAKER_117: incredibly large company i don't think any corporation has managed to build an internal structure at like a hundred thousand person scale that that works i think they're always trying to make it kind of fit

SPEAKER_33: and so i think amazon got so much bigger during the pandemic and now they're trying to make that work uh okay let's just do one one more uh giacomo bali says uh why is it not okay to make rules for your own proprietary hardware anymore essentially arguing against your app store comment so you know when

SPEAKER_00: you have a large percentage of market share and you try to extract um more value than you're giving i think that's when people get a little bit tweaked if you are giving a tip to a creator

SPEAKER_01: um you know let's imagine you were walking by somebody in the street they play a song they took a

SPEAKER_00: request and you wanted to give them 10 bucks it was very special for you if somebody dipped in there and took three dollars and walked away you'd be like but i gave him 10. now if you did it with venmo and

SPEAKER_01: you gave the 10 bucks and they got nine dollars and 25 cents or 9.50 you'd be like okay fine i got to use venma so it just doesn't feel fair it's the percentage if if the app stores were five to ten percent i don't perceive anybody would bring this up it's because they're over 20 percent even if it was 15 i don't think people would bring it up but 20 30 is a big ring it's a big rank there's not a lot of poker chips left if the dealer is taking 30 of all the chips every hour every transaction it's just

SPEAKER_33: too much that would kill the poker game in fact that might be a good way to think about this if your cut is so high that if it was a rake it would kill a poker game you're you're you're taking too much

SPEAKER_117: you're taking too much the thing that i would just throw in there is that you know right now i don't

SPEAKER_21: think apple's breaking the law but we have regulations to shape the market because not everything fits exactly in an act of commerce but anyways everyone who's live you're the best

SPEAKER_108: otherwise we'll see you all on the podcast things and we are back on wednesday with more live news we'll see you then