SPEAKER_00: Whenever finance gets super complicated, it's probably there are some things that are complicated, of course, but whenever it gets super complicated, it's probably because somebody's running a grift or a scam. When people started to explain to me, oh, you can get 15%, 20% by loaning out your Bitcoin.

SPEAKER_02: I was like, okay, what's explained to me the scam? What's the grift? And like, not a grift. I'm like, okay, who's paying the 15% interest?

SPEAKER_05: And then what's the no, what's the risk that I'm not seeing? Exactly. This Week in Startups is brought to you by Coda.

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SPEAKER_08: All right, everybody. I've quit This Week in Startups and all-in, and I'm now working for Downtown Josh Brown. I'm Jason Calacanis. Welcome aboard, Jason.

SPEAKER_12: Thanks for hiring me. No, explain what we're doing here, Josh. Just an experiment. We're doing an experiment.

SPEAKER_16: We are simulcasting. Is that the right way to say it? We're dualcasting, I guess. Dualcasting. Dualcasting.

SPEAKER_19: All right. So, all right. So, here's what's going on.

SPEAKER_21: We are live on your channel.

SPEAKER_22: Okay, this week in Startups, yep.

SPEAKER_21: Yes. And we're live on the Compound, which is our channel. And I think there are live chats going in both-

SPEAKER_24: Places, yeah. I think they're separate, though. I don't think my people are mingling with your people. I'm not 100% sure about that.

SPEAKER_27: They're separated, so there's no back and forth. But we can, on Restream, see both coming in. Yes, that's pretty cool. That's pretty cool.

SPEAKER_29: I don't know if the comments are coming from our folks or yours.

SPEAKER_30: That's a good question. I think we're purple. They're gray, I believe.

SPEAKER_31: Oh, maybe that's what it is. Yeah, look at that. Anyway, yeah, yeah. If you're in the Restream interface, we can see both of them.

SPEAKER_32: No, thanks, Jason. I see a lot of our friends. Yeah, let's go purple.

SPEAKER_27: Yeah, exactly. Well, I'm just tweeting, you guys have been having incredible, I don't know how long you've

SPEAKER_35: been doing your live streams, Josh and Michael, but when I tune in, you've got 500 people, 1,000 people. We get 300, 400 pretty regularly now, but this new streaming live-

SPEAKER_36: We're better looking than you.

SPEAKER_00: There is that. There is that. I mean, Josh and I, I feel like we have pretty close hair. We're both, whatever, 67%. We're trying to- I don't know what's going on today. Get a little bit of a dip here. Michael, I don't know what's going on with your hairstyle.

SPEAKER_40: I'm at zero. I've been at zero for a while now.

SPEAKER_00: Well, I was watching, you guys had a show where you were talking about there's a pill coming, so Josh and I can get back the two inches we lost here.

SPEAKER_43: Yes. That's going to be pretty active. And Michael can OD on the rest of the bottle.

SPEAKER_44: I don't think it's going to work for you, Michael. I think you're too far gone. No, I'm done. I'm done. You're done.

SPEAKER_21: We think that our audience is primarily individual investors and then probably like, let's say 10% to 20% are professional investors and or financial advisors.

SPEAKER_48: We have a lot of Fed officials. Fed officials tune in.

SPEAKER_21: A lot of Fed officials. We know when we look at Google Analytics that this skews a lot younger than anything else that we do, and for those who are older than me, for the young of heart, age doesn't have to be biological. Who do you think is the core audience for this week in startups?

SPEAKER_52: Yeah, it's very clearly people running startups, capital allocators in the private market, and then fans of tech, you know, writ large. So if you just were fans of apps and, you know, technology, we talk about general tech as well.

SPEAKER_35: So I think there's some crossover here, but it's probably 25% or something to that. And I think it's just a good way to introduce people to both channels.

SPEAKER_52: And I'm watching your channel and your experimentation with the YouTube live audience. So this week in startups is over 10 years old. We do six episodes a week. And it is, you know, a bit of an institution. We sell out all the ads. It makes millions of dollars a year. I just have Molly Wood as my co-host now. I got her from Marketplace.

SPEAKER_00: And so we got nine people working on it full-time. But we started this live on YouTube because I got obsessed with a YouTube live channel called

SPEAKER_57: Knicks Fan TV. I'm a diehard Knicks fan. Yeah. Me too early.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah. Sorry. We should talk about that. I know. I don't know what's going on this offseason, but at least we got some. We're going to get him.

SPEAKER_15: We're going to get him tomorrow. That's good.

SPEAKER_00: 20 million, but I don't think for 25 million. Jason, we don't know. We don't know. He's a good player.

SPEAKER_65: He's a good player on a good team. And we're a team. So we don't, you know.

SPEAKER_52: I mean, there's no way we can go down, right? But I just love RJ Barrett. I'm really watching his development.

SPEAKER_00: I think this is going to be the breakout year. I love a lot of our bench, you know, Quickly, Grimes, Obie, Sims. I don't know if you're watching Jericho Sims development. I think that kid's got potential.

SPEAKER_67: Big fan. He's a monster. He's a monster. He's a kid.

SPEAKER_68: He's a child, but he's a monster.

SPEAKER_63: He doesn't know how to play basketball yet. He's like a few years away.

SPEAKER_00: He knows how to put the, to dunk the basket and to block the shot. And he's so high in the air. And I think Obie Toppen's the other one. And if we just do player development, I think this team's, you know, got great potential. It seems like a lot of the teams that have made it, did it through drafting, right? Like savvy drafting.

SPEAKER_70: I'm hearing, Jason, I'm hearing way too much optimism. You've been a Knicks fan for a long time. What is this?

SPEAKER_00: That's the problem. I had, I was in the last row of section 324 during the Ewing era.

SPEAKER_52: I used to, I was there for the Larry Johnson four-point play. I was there for Sprewell, the Spurs loss. I watched the Spurs celebrate.

David Sacks: So how are you still glass half full? I don't even understand.

SPEAKER_75: Well, you want to know.

SPEAKER_77: Playoff series in, in 22 years. I'll tell you why. I'll tell you why. Hope Springs eternal.

SPEAKER_42: I'll, I'll tell you my plan. I have done okay, uh, investing in private market companies, uh, that sometimes go public.

SPEAKER_00: You're an optimist. Uh, and I made a 10 year plan.

SPEAKER_35: I looked at all my angel investing. This year I'll do, you know, put a hundred million to work in private markets with my team of 21 people, right? I am pretty active angel investor in early stage companies. And I, there is an outside chance.

SPEAKER_00: If I hit two more Ubers in my life and a couple of more of those signals and doubles. Do it. That I would have enough money. I could hit trace commas and lead a group to buy the Knicks. This is the last thing. That's not for sale.

SPEAKER_85: They'll never sell it.

SPEAKER_00: But there's always a possibility that, you know, Dolan could tokenize music career, his music career could go really well. And the, the downtown brand, but he's got, I think his band is called downtown something.

SPEAKER_24: His, his, I will stream his music on repeat for hours a day. If that's what it takes.

SPEAKER_90: I would literally listen to his music for an hour a day.

SPEAKER_24: If he would sell me the next, I will book his band for every bar mitzvah on long Island. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_90: To get him out of that building. Straight shot. Just crushing it out there.

SPEAKER_00: JD.

SPEAKER_24: Okay.

SPEAKER_00: So, uh, I, you know, I don't have an exact format for here, but I thought maybe taking questions from the audience and going back and back and just talking about markets. Cause I watch your show to give people a little idea of what the compound is.

SPEAKER_12: How long have you been doing?

SPEAKER_46: It's been, is it under a year now or is it not that it's not that long, but it's more than a year. 2018.

SPEAKER_21: I think we launched in 2018, but we didn't start hiring actual staff. Ah. Until 19. And so we, so there's a lot going on behind the scenes that makes the show look much better than it would be if it was just me and Mike trying to figure out YouTube and podcasts. So we've got, uh, staff and they are incredible editors, uh, videographers, audio engineers. They just, uh, social media people. And we've made a big investment because the feedback that we get from our clients, uh, who are watching our stuff and listening to our stuff is that it's really like become part of their routine. And, you know, when you have people managing money for you and giving you financial advice, it's not realistic that you're going to talk to them every day, but they don't feel the need to, because we're giving everybody so much information about how we think and what we're debating internally. And, um, so it, it's like a really great combination of, uh, building a fan base who will eventually

SPEAKER_24: become clients and talking to existing clients, uh, and friends of the firm all in, in one package. So we're really enjoying doing it.

SPEAKER_100: Contrast it for me, Josh, to your CNBC hits. Cause you're still doing that.

SPEAKER_24: Yeah.

SPEAKER_35: How is this different, this medium, cause I, I was doing CNBC like every other week for a while, uh, and we got to share the stage a couple of times, I think. Um, and so it's very different, obviously podcasting and then podcasting is different

SPEAKER_104: than YouTube live streaming. So I guess it's like three buckets there, but for you, how does your performance change?

SPEAKER_51: So, so you can relate to this. Your show all in is, uh, routinely every week, one of the top business podcasts in the

SPEAKER_21: world and you have a rapport with that crew and it's the same crew pretty much, you know, every time I know every once in a while, people can't make it and you throw some new voices into the mix, but like, there are just people that you can almost like Michael could probably explain it better than I can, but there's like a rapport that enables a much better conversation sometimes than when two people who barely know each other are on a zoom or, you know, two different studios. So, uh, you know, I feel like the podcast, I feel like the podcast, um, formula is the winning formula for pretty much every topic under the sun, whether it's sports, history, pop culture. So for finance, it's a layup. It's people that understand each other's differences and similarities. And they know when one is finishing a sentence, the other one's beginning, it's like, it's

SPEAKER_111: just so much team basketball.

SPEAKER_117: It's like being the warriors or something, you're passing the ball better. And Michael, what do you think about that?

SPEAKER_118: Yeah. I mean, TV is a, TV is a tough format. You've got 20 seconds to make a point. It's all about what's going to happen by the end of the day.

SPEAKER_121: It's just, it's hard to, it's hard to get nuance in there. And, uh, yeah, it's just a tough format. I think.

SPEAKER_21: And that's a lot of what, you know, what we do in financial media because the market is the subject and the market is constantly moving. So that is important.

SPEAKER_112: But then there's like room for later in the day or early the next morning for people who are commuting to work or riding a bike or whatever, going for a walk.

SPEAKER_21: And there's no need for real time. The market's closed and like, let's try to like figure out what's going on together. So that's where I think podcasts fit in and it's not either, or most people in the middle

SPEAKER_112: of the day, aren't consuming a podcast if the market's open because they're paying attention to what the market's doing. So I feel like it's just another day part that live TV in finance doesn't really address.

SPEAKER_21: There's also like CNBC has shark tank on at night. You know what I mean?

SPEAKER_118: There's also something to the audio format. And I learned this from being a lifelong Howard Stern fan, where you feel like, you know, every character on his show.

SPEAKER_127: Absolutely.

SPEAKER_72: You take them where you go and I'll like, if I listen to an old Howard Stern bit, I will remember oftentimes literally where I was in the car when I heard that the first time.

SPEAKER_35: I could tell you the first time I heard Howard Stern when I was 15 years old in Brooklyn and a friend came over and said, you have to listen to this tape. It's Hill Street Jews and it's a bunch of Hasidic guys playing the characters of Hill Street Blues, the old TV show.

SPEAKER_84: And it was like contraband to have tapes of Howard Stern in the 80s to listen to. Like when he was on the, in the afternoon.

SPEAKER_21: So, so just taking this a step further, I heard Daniel Eck give an interview about the power of audio. And he made this point that really resonated with me. If you think about all of the mediums, television, movies, a book, like any way that you get content. So take a newspaper article magazine, take all of those mediums. The most true medium is audio. And the example he gave is there were tape recordings of the Beatles in studio. I forget what album they were recording, but in between takes, they're like legitimately having conversations about nonsense. What's for lunch today? Why was John late? Whatever. But when you listen to that with your eyes closed, it's like you're in the room with them.

SPEAKER_133: Yes. No other medium. So when you watch a movie, the director makes choices. What angle am I shooting this from? Yes.

SPEAKER_134: What, what coloration? You're being manipulated. You're literally being manipulated. It's magical.

SPEAKER_111: If you're a startup, having a disorganized team is going to kill your business.

SPEAKER_141: You need everybody to be on the same page. And as an investor, I see this all the time. You must adopt a right first culture, especially in this remote world and use great structure in a beautiful Coda page. One doc to rule them all works right out of the box. It's totally customizable. In Coda, your text and cables, they live together on the same doc, which means all your valuable data, the objectives, the KPIs, the strategies are all in one place. Nothing gets lost and your team is literally on the same page. Some great ways that we use Coda, product roadmaps, absolutely important. Remote onboarding, super important. And taking meeting notes and Coda has a ton of templates for almost anything you can imagine. In fact, we put our hundred point checklist on Coda. So just go to thisweekinstartups.com slash SC. You can make a copy of this. You can do the checklist yourself with your internal team. You can expand it. You can make it a 200 point checklist. You could make three sub checklists underneath some of the important items. So join the productivity revolution and sign up for Coda. Head to Coda.io slash twist to sign up and get a thousand dollars in startup credits. Huh? How great is that?

SPEAKER_143: Voice is voice.

SPEAKER_21: If you're listening to the three of us right now, you could conceivably be in the room with us and it's all true. There's nothing, you know, there's nothing disguising what's going on. It's the most authentic, you know, of all the mediums.

David Friedberg: And if you think about what's happened in journalism, you know, we look at the New York Times, we look at Fox, MSNBC, everybody seems to have picked a side.

SPEAKER_35: Everybody's got an agenda. You layer on link baiting on top of that. You layer on their desire to get subscribers by picking a side. Like the New York Times, you know, felt like left moderate, but now it feels like it's MSNBC and then other people feel like they're going super far to the right to catch up to Fox. And it's just gross to even click on those links. Like every week here in Silicon Valley, we have another tech company when the New York Times is just dunking on them and trying to destroy them. The away founder of that luggage company, they got destroyed, the woman who ran that company, they just do these kind of hit pieces in the New York Times. And then I had the guy from Kraken, the guy, Jesse, who they did a hit piece on like last week, and he seemed completely reasonable on a podcast. And so I think the audience is starting to figure this out as well. It's like, oh, Joe Rogan interviewing somebody. Yeah, I can make my own decision of what I think of Jordan Peterson or what I think of Sam Harris or whoever. Um, and I don't need a journalist at the New York Times to reframe it for me and do those edits like that Scorsese is doing to, you know, make you feel emotion. I think the New York Times is now making those edits.

SPEAKER_55: They're making the quotes kind of lead you in a direction. They're leading the witness.

SPEAKER_112: I kind of see a push and pull there. Like I heard Ray Dalio talk about the, you know, the Wall Street Journal had been going very in-depth on Bridgewater and not everything they published was flattering.

SPEAKER_21: And Dalio in response started LinkedIn. And he just started saying, rather than, you know, hope that my message gets out through a reporter, I'll just start writing my own LinkedIn column. Um, and it's been successful for him. And, you know, one of the comments he made, not 100% sure I believe this, but the media is the, is part of the problem with America because we have no heroes anymore. The minute somebody accomplishes something, the instinct on the part of the press is how can we rip this person to shreds for clicks? Now, so that's one side of it. The other side of it is we've had incredible journalism that has probably saved investors a lot of money by being skeptical. And the Theranos example- John Kerry Ruhl, Theranos, yeah, John Kerry Ruhl. Yeah, so I mean, so like the, you need, you need the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times to support journalists who are going to be, I don't want to say cynical, but maybe skeptical enough. Yeah. So that if there is bull going on, a lot of money doesn't get lost.

SPEAKER_134: So it's, I don't know where the line is. Of course, it's always moving.

SPEAKER_27: It's kind of like shorts, you know, like shorting is a great thing in terms of intellectual honesty in the markets. Somebody gets to place a bet against it.

SPEAKER_35: But then if they go FUD, like they did on Tesla, you're like, okay, you're sending drones over like a garage to tell us that there's no Model 3s being shipped. But when I drop my kid off from school, it's all Teslas.

SPEAKER_42: Like, what's the narrative here? Like if they're delivering the cars, they're delivering the car. So the FUD stuff gets kind of out of control.

SPEAKER_118: Listen, it's very, it's very simple because it's all driven by incentives. So I was looking at this because there's a saying in our industry, our friend Phil Perman said, the higher the VIX, the higher the clicks.

SPEAKER_121: Okay. And I was breaking this down on my own blog. I'm going to write about it later this week. When the VIX is under 25, which is a pretty like calm market environment, I average around 5,000 page views on my blog.

SPEAKER_156: When the VIX is over 45, it's 15,000. Yeah. So it's, it's very constant for everybody. That's it. That's it. It's very simple. There's a new one. What's that?

SPEAKER_42: Now it's called Knicks for clicks last night, Bill Simmons started his show. And I talked to Bill Simmons about this of like, he's got so many Knicks fans left. I'm constantly, you know, DMing him, Knicks stuff.

SPEAKER_160: And they started the show with Knicks just to go off on us for like our off season. And, you know, like we can't get any superstars here and we got Leon Rose and all these other people. And so what, um, CP, the franchise who does this Knicks fan TV thing, what he calls it is Knicks for clicks.

SPEAKER_35: So anytime the national press wants to get clicks, Stephen A. Smith, whoever it is, Knicks for clicks. Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_163: So the reason why the Knicks can't get any, the Knicks can get people here, the Knicks can get people here, but they, all right.

SPEAKER_21: I, I, I spoke to Ennis Cantor, one of my favorite players in the NBA, uh, I mean, just like one of the most passionate people I've ever met. You mean freedom Cantor, excuse me, freedom Cantor. So I, I spent a day with him a couple of years ago and he was on, he was on the Knicks, but leaving. And one of the things that he said is like a really big impediment, um, to getting, you know, great young players to want to come. It's so weird. It's so strange, but like, I believe him because he's had conversations with people about this.

SPEAKER_112: If you're a young player joining the Knicks, where do you live? Because they practice in Westchester. Yes.

SPEAKER_167: They play on the facility to Manhattan or Brooklyn.

SPEAKER_112: They play on the West side of Manhattan, but they practice in Westchester. So like just like hypothetically, you choose to live in Westchester. Okay, great. You're right near the practice facility, but you could be two hours from MSG on game day by car. It's a disaster. So, so do it reverse, live in midtown Manhattan, not great, but do that. Now what? So you're near the games, but for practice, you can get stuck in rush hour traffic leaving Manhattan. So it's like this weird thing that nobody would ever think about, but he's like, people think about their lifestyle. So if four teams are going to give them $20 million, why would they pick the team that makes them commute like a shoe salesman?

SPEAKER_171: Why isn't the training facility at MSG? Just buy the building next to it. Schmucks.

SPEAKER_89: It's unbelievable. I am going to make it first class all the way. I'm going to build like an entire building. I'm going to give them, I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to on the slide. And also it's the owner.

SPEAKER_174: You saw how, how Dolan treats, uh, Charles Oakley throwing them out of the building. I mean, there's no secret. The words that nobody's coming here.

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SPEAKER_109: Hey, what's it like being what? So tell us about your like role or involvement with the Warriors and what this year felt like.

SPEAKER_24: Like give us some s***.

SPEAKER_181: Well, I, you know, I'm a diehard Knicks fan, but since we're not in the playoffs, I also became friendly. Yeah, don't worry about that.

SPEAKER_35: Yeah, so I'm friendly. I root for the Warriors. I like their style of play. I'm friendly with a couple of the Warriors. Very good friends with Draymond, in fact. And so, and my friend Shamath owns part of the team.

SPEAKER_160: And so I develop relationships with some of the players through Shamath. And then, you know, I go to the games. You know, I went to all the playoffs and finals games. They're incredible to see. We saw you. Uh, yeah, I was, I had courtside for one. Ironically, I had courtside for one, which somebody gave me the ticket. I didn't pay for it. Um, and I sit down and who am I sitting down next to? Sheryl Sandberg. And so everybody's like, oh, Sheryl and J. Kala going to the game. And I've been so critical of Zuckerberg. So that was a very funny moment. Uh, and then I, I took Molly to the second row. I paid for those seats. And then I have a friend who has the tickets right behind the bench of the Warriors. So I go, I sit in those all the time, which is my favorite seats because I can see right there. And I know staff. And so staff will say hi to me or whatever. And everybody kind of freaks out or whatever. Um, but the funny story was when I first started going to the games, I was

SPEAKER_42: sitting in Chamat seat and they're playing the Knicks and I was not friends with any of the team players yet. So they're going up 30 against the Knicks. Uh, and I say to Steve Kerr, you know, like, what are you doing? This is Bush league. Like get the starters out. What if like staff rolls his anchor and Andrea Goddala tells me to shut up. Bogan tells me to shut up. I start telling them, listen, you guys can't even beat the Clippers. You need to shut up. You're up 30 on the Knicks. You're not getting past the Clippers. This is before they had won any games. And so then I became good friends with Bogut, good friends with David Lee.

SPEAKER_35: Uh, and I play, you know, it's a small town here. So we play cards, we hang out or whatever, but I got to go to three out of the

SPEAKER_52: four years they went to Vegas to celebrate. So three out of those three years, I went to them with them to Vegas. So it's just a lot of fun to, you know, hang out with them.

SPEAKER_112: So how important, so, so the Knicks can't attract young players. No.

SPEAKER_21: The Warriors, obviously they're, obviously they're the best team in the league over the last 10 years, but besides that, one, one attribute of that team and where they're based is that there seem to be like venture investing opportunities available to NBA players who show up there. Yep. Just like by being in the scene and meeting people who have front row seats that, but that's like a hidden advantage. It's not hidden. That's like an advantage that your team has to attract talent. Right?

SPEAKER_35: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, Iguodalu has his own fund. KD was involved with a lot of the companies when he was out here. Yeah. Um, uh, Draymond is involved in that stuff. I, Draymond's getting into media stuff now. So I, you know, I'm a media guy, so I've been, you know, talking to him about his plans and brainstorming with him and just even giving him some like on air tips of like, Hey, you know, great job on that. You know, I don't know if you watch his dream on green show on the post, um, after he does, uh, after he plays in the game, he goes home and he records a YouTube video, which is pretty crazy. That's crazy. It's awesome. Um, so it's pretty great. Um, and you know, it's just nice to be watching that style of play. I think Steve Kerr is a genius and got everybody to buy in staff is, you know, if we look back on staff, I mean, what, how is history going to look at him and the LeBron era, you know,

SPEAKER_21: like who's going to have, I think he moved up a lot, uh, in the last month, just in, in the minds of basketball people. It's not, it's not just like a guy with a circus shot anymore. It's a guy that can carry a whole team to a championship.

SPEAKER_35: They changed the game. I mean, like, if you look at LeBron and you look at staff, like LeBron is obviously like this incredible, like basketball player. Like, is there anybody who's ever been an individual, better basketball player? Forget about the championships, just as an individual. Um, but then he didn't change the game. It's not like they had to change the rules or everybody changed the style of the game. You know, Shaq, they had to change rules for him.

SPEAKER_89: They changed rules for, I think Steph, you know, like really did change the game.

SPEAKER_21: Uh, and that's my kids, my, my son plays, uh, AAU, uh, basketball on a travel team. Um, we're a million miles away from the Bay area, but these kids are throwing up threes, like they would not have been doing 15 years ago. There's just no way. Yeah. And they're hitting them because that's all they work on. Um, and that's the glam, you know, the most glamorous thing you could do as a 13 year old is, is hit two or three, three pointers in a game. That would not be how they would have been playing 15 years ago. So I agree with you.

SPEAKER_35: Let's go to markets. I have a question for you guys. Uh, if we, this has been quite a drawdown, obviously, um, for tech stocks, for growth stocks, et cetera. Do you believe we're bouncing along the bottom right now? Because we're looking at some of the valuations. I've started to see these, you know, moments where like large cash position in a company, great revenue base. Maybe the company's a little mismanaged. It's been managed for growth, not for cashflow. But this massive discipline that's come to the market, all of a sudden the cuts, the hiring freezes from some of the big companies, you know, it feels like everybody took the medicine

SPEAKER_00: this time really fast, you know, like people realize we're in a downturn and public companies said, we're stopping hiring. We're making cuts. We're going to focus on free cashflow.

SPEAKER_104: Is this, is this the bottom? Is this bouncing along the bottom? Mike, what do you think?

SPEAKER_211: I think that there's, there's no indication that we've bottomed.

SPEAKER_121: I think you're going to have to unfortunately see inflation come down. I think it's really that simple. So you've seen companies take their medicine, valuations reset very quickly. Austin Reef tweeted today, just to give you an idea of how bad it is, how much would you pay for a company with 170 million monthly web visits, 50 million YouTube followers, a two day event with 60,000 attendees and an eight figure hot sauce brand? That company he was describing is Buzzfeed. Their market cap is $200 million. Jason, I know you're seeing deals in the private space that are multiple times.

SPEAKER_214: He's going to put us on hold and acquire Buzzfeed. Don't do that to him.

SPEAKER_35: The thing is they have three or 400 million in revenue and they only have 50 million in cash left and they're losing money. They got a hundred million.

SPEAKER_198: I was going to say, how much does it cost to produce that, that revenue? I wouldn't know, but.

SPEAKER_118: Well, we spoke, Josh, we spoke about this yesterday. If you look at the number of companies that are trading below their cash value in short-term investments, it's at an all-time high.

SPEAKER_121: Why, as you know, much better than we do, all of these money losing companies have been subsidized by people like you and your peers. And that game is over and it's not coming back tomorrow. And so it stands to reason that if you're bleeding money and it costs a ton of money to keep you

SPEAKER_156: in business, you will trade at a discount to what cash you have on hand.

SPEAKER_08: Or somebody could take this company over. Like we're so with, um, uh, Zendesk is being taken private with 1.3.

SPEAKER_35: What does M&A kick up? It's happening right now. I think that's going to be the trend of the rest of the year because you look at Zendesk, they, they had this like, uh, hostile board members kind of pushing them to take that $17 billion go private.

SPEAKER_00: Now they, they wound up taking a $10 billion go private with over a billion dollars in cash, 1.3 billion in revenue, 30% growth. This seems like a great company.

SPEAKER_112: And, you know, Jason, but it, but it, it, I know it feels like a failure for people maybe like in the venture world, but let's keep in mind Zendesk went public in 2014. It was one of the first handful of unicorns. I don't think fortune magazine did the unicorn cover until 2015, but I could be wrong.

SPEAKER_134: Maybe it was 14, but that was one of the first and it was ridiculed.

SPEAKER_112: People said a billion dollars for a chat bot or whatever. Makes no sense. So, so getting a $10 billion exit eight years later is not a failure. Like I know we wish it could have been more. The stock price is higher, but that's a win.

SPEAKER_00: It's a completely fair point. But what I look at is, um, long-term greed wise, the management team and the board, they, I think, um, these private equity folks, I think just pressured them to give up. Cause they made their lives so miserable, you know, couldn't they have, cause they were going to also buy survey monkey. You would think a company that was in a strong position. This isn't Buzzfeed in a weak position. It's a company in a strong position, 30% growth. That's almost high growth, right?

SPEAKER_35: It's, it's, it's very respectable growth on a big number. Um, why cashing your chips now? Why not keep going? And I think it's because the private equity firm is like, we're going to cut half the staff.

SPEAKER_00: We're going to make this thing print three, four, 500 million in profits a year. And then we'll take it out again or sell it to Salesforce for 20 billion. Uh, and I think that's, we're going to see. So somebody will buy, I think bank off or Vox will wind up buying, uh, you can see a reverse merger. Maybe Vox does some kind of deal with Buzzfeed to go public.

SPEAKER_02: And then they just got the Buzzfeed staff and make it profitable and put it with their collection.

SPEAKER_21: We've seen, so we, we've seen a trend of international billionaires buy us media assets from overseas because it puts them immediately into the conversation in a way that they have influence from day one. The business insider company.

SPEAKER_235: Yeah.

SPEAKER_21: Yeah. Rather than hire PR firms and, and try to get a message at, or show up at Davos every year. Like if you own your own media outlet and it's got a video, it's got print, it's got a subscription. Like you're, you're a player. People have to listen to what you have to say. So, uh, I mentioned fortune before I fortune, I think is the best financial magazine of all time. Um, and that was sold to a billionaire from, uh, somewhere in Asia. Nobody.

SPEAKER_153: Yeah, it was the guy, he was a crypto guy who they were criticizing and then he bought part of it. Yeah. I mean, so I, I wouldn't time. Yes. Bezos. And Bezos bought the post.

SPEAKER_35: Yeah. Uh, and then what's his name? Uh, you'll see. Pyramidiar started information. No, he's Pyramidiar started the intercept. So yeah, it's, I mean, it's a classic move. Media sucks as a business. Let's be honest. Like the journal, journalism. That's right.

SPEAKER_112: Unless you have an agenda, unless you have an alternative, uh, use for those assets beyond just advertising revenue. Well, that's what this is too.

SPEAKER_35: Think about this. Like we do media. We don't need to make money from it. We have other day jobs. So that's kind of like the ultimate sweet spot. That was the big beef at all in that. We have this like little flare up because it became a business all of a sudden. And we're like, you know what? Our businesses are big outside of all in let's just make that a podcast. It's a four way split. We'll just do it once a week. We're not going to do any events. We're not going to do any of that. Even with the great success of the event. We, the first event we did, because we're like, our other businesses are crushing it. Let's just do the pot every week and be the 25th, 35th, you know, biggest episode of the week.

SPEAKER_52: Every week, every week, and that's enough, no advertising, just go from there.

SPEAKER_70: Hey, Jason, getting back to where we are on the market.

SPEAKER_121: I was listening to a playing English show with Derek Thompson. He had Connor sent on talking about like where we are in the cycle in 2008. And during the dotcom bubble, by the time stocks were already, by the time stocks were down 20%, we were already in a recession. Now, the MBER didn't tell us we were, but I think people knew that we were in a recession right now. It's happening so much quicker where the stock market is front running a recession. So you look at home builders, for example, and the stocks are down 40%. They have gross profit margins at an all time record high, pre-tax income at a record high, but stocks don't get credit for what they did. They get credit or penalized for what the investors think the market is going to do. So I would say that if we do not get a recession, stocks are very, very attractive right now. But there is still a lot of price instability for the first time in basically our lifetime. And that matters a lot. The cost of capital matters a lot.

SPEAKER_21: Yeah. Hey, Michael, Michael did this thing on his blog. I don't know if we have the graphic to share, but just the information is really valuable because it's a new environment for most people watching this. Stocks during, so when people say inflation is bad, it's actually not, it's, you need inflation because the alternative is worse. Disinflation. It's high inflation that's bad or quickly accelerate. So Michael broke it down into inflation regimes, zero to 2%, 2% to 4%, 4%. And there is a point at which historically the rubber meets the road and stock returns become deeply negative. The other interesting finding there, which Michael can explain is that actually falling inflation, no matter what level it's falling from, is a really good tailwind for stocks. Even if it's falling from 8% to 6%, it's actually beneficial.

SPEAKER_112: Because consumers have more money to spend and engage? Because we're looking forward, because the stock market is looking forward. So falling inflation.

SPEAKER_21: So it's like, so here's the number one thing before Michael go, the number one thing about investing that might be different on Wall Street than Silicon Valley. The number one thing about public market investing and Wall Street, there's no such thing as good or bad. There is only ever better than expected or worse than expected. So get those two words, good and bad. If you're going to be a public market investor, eliminate those two words from your vocabulary. It doesn't exist.

SPEAKER_246: All that matters is, okay, that sounds bad, but the expectations were so much worse. The asset rallies. And vice versa.

SPEAKER_252: The assets are being priced in real time. Dude, so it's the way it's the expectation of it.

SPEAKER_118: Interest rates are the lifeblood of the economy. And interest rates were at zero for a long, long time. And the only thing that mattered was top line growth, subscriber growth, user growth. And we overdid it dramatically, right?

SPEAKER_121: At one point during the pandemic, Peloton had a larger market cap than MetLife.

SPEAKER_253: 30, 40 billion.

SPEAKER_121: Peloton was bigger than MetLife. Zoom was bigger than ExxonMobil. So we clearly overdid it and then said, we don't need to go into all the areas, but we overdid it a lot. And maybe we're overcorrecting on the downside right now. But a lot of these companies, just on traditional metrics, still don't appear to be like bargains. I know the stock price is down a whole lot, but they still have more to do.

SPEAKER_21: Nike is a good example of that. It's like one of the greatest companies in the world. One of the greatest companies in the history of consumer companies.

SPEAKER_112: They had a good earnings report. They actually beat on revenue and earnings. The problem is, it was 23 times earnings when they reported. And this is a market that is 16, probably on its way to 13 or 14.

SPEAKER_141: Hey, Tom Eschbacher is here with us again. He's a senior sales manager at LinkedIn Marketing Solutions. And we're talking about their amazing report today in startup marketing, as well as how to use LinkedIn to grow your startup. What are some tactical things, not big picture strategy.

SPEAKER_258: I'm talking tactics that founders can do today to figure out product market fit.

SPEAKER_259: One of the big tactics we see here is amplifying organic posting with paid advertising. You consider a startup that raises a seed round. They post the news on their LinkedIn page and see a bunch of likes, clicks and follows come in. They follow that then with some updates about product and they see continued traction with, for instance, HR benefit managers at tech companies that have fewer than 500 employees. That's a signal and it becomes important to then get a larger sample. And to increase confidence, we've made it super easy to identify which audiences are engaging with your organic content, your LinkedIn company page, your website, and then extend reach into those segments with our best in class B2B ad targeting. So for early stage startups who amplify organic with paid, we see a 13X lift in unique reach. And those are meaningful insights to help inform product and go-to-market strategies.

SPEAKER_141: Such a great strategy. Head to linkedin.com slash thisweekendstartups and get the report now so you have an edge on your competitors. And as a little pot sweetener, $100 off your first marketing campaign, thanks to Tom and the team at LinkedIn. Go get that report and get the hundy.

SPEAKER_133: We bottomed, by the way, the S&P over the last five years, historically, like during crises,

SPEAKER_21: COVID included, has been bottoming at 14 times. So we're not that far away from crisis multiples.

SPEAKER_35: I feel we're bouncing along the bottom. I feel like we're bouncing along the bottom right now. If you were going to buy a company and hold it for 10 years, like I've been looking at Disney, I've been wanting to get into Disney for a while, but it kind of spiked up and now it's under a hundred again. And I was like, I think I'm going to buy some Disney.

SPEAKER_114: You know what's Disney is more expensive than Netflix right now.

SPEAKER_249: I know, but they own Star Wars, Pixar and- Oh, of course.

SPEAKER_84: You know, Marvel, like, and our kids are going to Disneyland and our kids are not going to Netflix land.

SPEAKER_271: Then I'm going to Ozark World.

SPEAKER_84: Yeah, no, Ozark World kind of dark.

SPEAKER_272: I don't think we want to send them there for, to work with the cartels. To work with Ruth? Orange is the new black world. It's not a great exhibit. No, you don't want to spend time there.

SPEAKER_160: But yeah, I think this is the time if you were going to start building a position, because

SPEAKER_35: I hold things in decades. I take a decade long approach to stuff. I'm not like trading in and out of stuff yearly or, you know, quarterly and God forsake, not like by day.

SPEAKER_52: But I really do like to hold things for a decade. And I feel like that could be like a decade long holding for me.

SPEAKER_21: We ran the numbers and Disney has actually underperformed the S&P 500 for 30, over the last 30 years. So all of the things about Disney that make it a great company, we could all cite those

SPEAKER_233: things, the parks, the kids' connection with the characters. But it's a media company.

SPEAKER_46: But in the end, ESPN and ABC suck.

SPEAKER_21: If you bought the S&P instead of Disney 30 years ago, you did better.

SPEAKER_246: So buy and hold is obviously great, but where you buy is going to have a really big...

SPEAKER_118: Jason, Facebook underperformed the NASDAQ since inception. Yeah. Crazy. It's crazy.

SPEAKER_35: I think the subscription business that Disney is building has such amazing opportunities. I don't understand who's running product there, but, you know, and I said this on CNBC and I almost got laughed at the show. I said, they're going to be bigger than Netflix. Just watch. Like, it's obvious to anybody who looks at content that their content and IP library will result in more subscribers ultimately, especially on a global basis where these

SPEAKER_160: characters transcend.

SPEAKER_283: Wait, why do you say that?

SPEAKER_00: I think anybody who's a parent who gets Disney will never unsubscribe. All of us, yes. So if you're a parent, you're not going to unsubscribe. And these things become timeless. Like, we watch Star Wars. My daughters, who are six years old and 12 years old, they are now into Obi-Wan. They're into Clone Wars. Now we have that shared IP. Marvel, you're having shared IP. We all grew up reading X-Men comic books. And now we're going to have the X-Men movies with the Avengers movies because they just got that license back.

SPEAKER_35: And then Pixar, like our kids, or, you know, we kind of missed that one.

SPEAKER_00: Maybe we saw it, you know, as we're Gen Xers, but Pixar transcends that and the Disney characters transcend that. So this idea that you could have a media company, that subscription, that, that every generation can enjoy together, to me is unprecedented in the world. Whereas Netflix is kind of long tail and pockets of like Chappelle shows over here, Orange is the New Black, Ozark. These appeal to very different groups of people. And I don't understand how incompetent Disney is that when you sign up for Disney Plus, at the end of the show, they don't play a trailer for the Star Wars experience and then have a one-click purchase your tickets.

SPEAKER_55: Or you watched Grogu and you got introduced into Baby Yoda, spoiler alert, it didn't upsell you on buying Grogu for Christmas. Those opportunities are coming in the app, in-app purchases. For sure. In-app typical purchases, or I could subscribe and it would include, like I could give them a thousand dollars a year and get four tickets to the park.

SPEAKER_24: I mean, but why couldn't Netflix sell us opium during Ozark? Absolutely. Yeah. Why can't they upsell you?

SPEAKER_32: I saw a pretty fantastic music today from Netflix. Vox did this piece. Netflix subscribers are more likely to quit in the first month than any other streaming

SPEAKER_118: service. You know why?

SPEAKER_35: Because it sucks. Binging is such a stupid decision. Binging was a great decision at the beginning because it was new and novel, but none of these

SPEAKER_27: shows have the BuzzFeed, you know, water cooler effect. Or Ringer. Or Ringer. You don't have the water cooler effect. Right. Why not spread out Queen's Gambit? Why not spread out Ozark?

SPEAKER_292: So they tried to do that with Stranger Things. They did do that.

SPEAKER_233: With Stranger Things.

SPEAKER_15: They broke over the last two seasons of Ozark, they gave you half and half.

SPEAKER_233: They are doing that now.

SPEAKER_84: They are doing that now. They're going to do it weekly. They need to make it like Sopranos. HBO Max knows what they're doing. HBO Max is so much better than Netflix. So much better. Disney is great. And they just space it out for you.

SPEAKER_21: Aren't there shows, though, that are better to just dump the whole season at once and let

SPEAKER_68: the fans go crazy on the first weekend?

SPEAKER_89: I think it might be better for super fans. I would have loved to gotten Obi-Wan at one drop, but, you know, as a nerd.

SPEAKER_51: Because, honestly, this is embarrassing, but I forget what happened from one week to the next.

SPEAKER_27: No, that's age. That's just age, Josh. It must be age. I'm like, wait, who is this? Are you turning on subtitles? Are you turning on subtitles for Game of Thrones because you can't understand what they're saying anymore?

SPEAKER_304: No. I'm about to. Are you reading Rezogos?

SPEAKER_27: You're the reason they have the recap there. The rest of us hit skip recap. It's for you. You're losing it.

SPEAKER_308: So if one of the interesting-

SPEAKER_143: Let me just put a button on this. Yeah, Disney.

SPEAKER_242: Disney added seven and a half million subs last quarter while Netflix lost 200,000.

SPEAKER_310: Disney will have a billion subs. This is my prediction. Right, because- By when? By when? By when?

SPEAKER_21: I think you'd be right because when Disney goes into a new geography, they don't have to clear their throat and introduce themselves. Nope. These characters are- Timeless. ...universally known and loved the world over. Yep. Yep. And Disney can just basically say, hey, we're here.

SPEAKER_242: We're in your language. Let's go. Here's the price. And it's done. It's done.

SPEAKER_27: You know, I started, here's the problem. I'm married and if I start one of these shows, my wife-

SPEAKER_316: No, you can stop there. That's, that's the problem. You understand.

SPEAKER_27: You know, they fall asleep and then you want to watch and then if you, if I watch the show,

SPEAKER_42: I'm cheating. Yeah. This is the new cheating. You know, if I go one episode ahead, this is the biggest-

SPEAKER_321: My wife's not watching that shit with me. It's not, oh, you know what we're watching together though? She'll watch the old man. She's into it. Really? Yeah. She's into it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_323: My wife doesn't want to watch anything violent and that's like everything I love. I'm like, I start with violence.

SPEAKER_89: Yeah, exactly. I'm like, you want to watch gladiator again? She's like, can't watch that. You know, like anything-

SPEAKER_118: By the way, Jason, all these media companies are going to kill. Paramount's getting destroyed. Yeah. Warner Brothers Discovery.

SPEAKER_00: All of them. It's a tough business. Also advertising in a recession gets walloped.

SPEAKER_52: So, you know, it's, and it starts with, you know, the weakest things outdoor and then TV and the thing that people go to is radio and, um, digital.

SPEAKER_21: We're getting, we're getting a question for you, uh, from our, from purple fans. Um, let's get some questions now. Purple fans want to know what you think about Robin hood at this valuation.

David Friedberg: I am holding my position. I was, uh, an investor before they went public.

SPEAKER_35: I had, man, I wish I could have distributed to my LPs at 30 dollars a share. Um, but I do think the world of the, of the founders and their ability to make great product. I know there were like some issues with like this massive denial of service attack where everybody wanted to short the same stock. Like, this is what happens with successful companies. They become sometimes too successful, but I'm holding. I do think it's a buyout.

SPEAKER_143: What would the stock do if, uh, if Lad stepped down? It was a buyout. I think it would go up 20%.

David Friedberg: Yeah. I mean, he's, I understand why he's not popular right now, but he's also a product genius

SPEAKER_35: and their product genius, genius is over there.

SPEAKER_297: So let me, let me push back a little bit.

SPEAKER_35: It's very rare to be a product genius in the world and that might not be good enough though

SPEAKER_335: in a, in a brokerage industry. Fair enough. Yeah.

SPEAKER_118: Yeah. What's taking so long for IRA accounts to be open? What's taking so long for them to get ACATs on the platform? This seems to be such elemental stuff. Yeah.

SPEAKER_160: I'm, I'm not sure what's going on.

SPEAKER_35: I don't have many insights. I don't talk to management now that it's like a public company all that often. Um, but they should be, you know, releasing product fast. I think there's a lot of cleanup work that probably had to be done and a lot of management distraction, I would say.

SPEAKER_52: So when I was watching the Uber situation with Travis, once management gets distracted with, you know, all these folks, you know, you're, you're basically fighting wars every day, lawsuits, investigations, depositions, whatever it happens to be internal turmoil while you're running a high growth company.

SPEAKER_35: This is incredibly challenging, incredibly challenging. I mean, Elon goes through this from time to time.

SPEAKER_90: It's just the, the distraction level can get crazy with these lawsuits. And, you know, you're trying to.

SPEAKER_121: I will say on the product side, I am a, I use a platform and just from the usability, enter dollar swipe up. There's nothing better. Here's the thing.

SPEAKER_100: That doesn't happen by accident. When you have a flawless app that like just delights customers and you get what's

SPEAKER_35: called market pull in our industry. People are such incredible fans of the product. They tell their friends about it. You don't need to spend money on marketing. You're just acquiring customers because the market loves it so much. It's happened with Uber. It happened with Airbnb. It happened with Google. It happened with Facebook. It happened with Instagram. It happened with Tesla. You know, like Tesla sell themselves. They don't have to do any marketing. You get into Tesla. You're like, I want one, you know, it's that simple.

SPEAKER_30: And the people.

SPEAKER_121: It's a delightful product, but can they survive a bear market? A crypto winter? Like, can they survive that? How much cash do they have? Yeah. I mean, I think they have, they have a lot of cash. So they have a lot of cash. Yeah. I'm sure they will survive. I mean, can they thrive? Those are different questions.

SPEAKER_35: I would, it could be like a year or two of sideways. I mean, I, but I, again, I think in 10 year increments, if you, there's no way I don't see the company having 50 to 100 million active accounts 10 years from now.

SPEAKER_52: There's no way I don't see Disney having two or three times the number of accounts they have two or three years from now. There's no way Airbnb doesn't have twice as many customers and twice as many hosts 10 years from now.

SPEAKER_21: I think what's a reasonable bear case on Robinhood, even at today's valuation though, and where it's different from all of those other examples that you cite. If Disney gets a customer using a lot of their products, it's not really hurting the customer. Like I see a million Disney movies. I have the app. I go to the park once a year. I'm a Disney. Like I love Disney. It's like a good thing. If Robinhood has a customer using its product a lot, that customer is going to go broke. You cannot tell me that the, so Robinhood's incentive is the opposite.

SPEAKER_348: Because day trading is, day trading isn't as good as holding.

SPEAKER_21: Well, what's good for Robinhood is extremely active customers. Lots of them and stock market bubbles. That is simultaneously the worst possible thing that can happen to its users. So they're literally sitting on the other side of the table.

SPEAKER_242: And that's what separates them from a lot of the, the examples that you cite. And I don't know how to, like how does Robinhood do really well while its customers do really well?

SPEAKER_27: Yeah, my, my thesis on this, I've thought about this a lot. I have a thesis on it, which is, you know, you get people who were interested in trading stocks, maybe owning a share of Tesla, owning a share of Apple. They want to participate. They get a little frisky.

SPEAKER_35: You know, it's like somebody at a poker table, they're playing too many hands. Of course, that's negative EV. Um, you want to start with the good cards and maybe, you know, get more money into the best. Hands as opposed to just flipping stuff. So I think what's happening is this next generation, the people who are tuning into us on YouTube, I think that that generation is going to be the most sophisticated financial generation ever because they got their asses walloped in crypto. They, they got involved in meme stocks and other nonsense.

SPEAKER_27: They're starting with an education that is absurdly high. When you hang out with a bunch of millennials or Gen Zs, they understand shorting and they understand puts and calls to a level that, you know, most people in our generation didn't still don't understand. Definitely true.

SPEAKER_355: Definitely true.

SPEAKER_27: And they're doing it. So you learn by doing. If you want to learn poker, you got to play poker. That's it. You want to, you want to be good at gambling. And you have to lose money. And you got to lose money. That's the price. So I always tell people, if you're starting angel investing or poker, make the smallest bets possible, play as much as possible.

SPEAKER_21: So taking your concept though, to its logical end point. Yeah. So somebody learns a lot because they were a Robin Hood user in 20 and 21. They thought they were genius. This year, this year they said, you know what? I have learned a lot. And the worst thing I can do is funnel orders to Robin Hood all day and trade against Citadel.

SPEAKER_89: Robin Hood knows that as well. And they have 401ks, 529s, balanced portfolios and people doing. Is that profitable?

SPEAKER_00: Well, I think there'll be a super app of finance. And I think Robin Hood has a chance of being it. I think they're the likely candidate. So imagine this generation opens up an app. And they're getting their paycheck put in there. They're, they're checking accounts in there. They're 529 for their kids is in there for their 401k is in there, their IRAs in there. And they're just doing tax optimization, tax loss harvesting.

SPEAKER_35: We were also shareholders in Wealthfront, which I think sold too early. Um, but Wealthfront also kind of was educating people on that. And they kind of had a little bit of an older generation, um, you know, using it. But, um, you know, I think that these apps, uh, will, uh, come together and they'll be, um, super apps, just like Uber sort of turning into a super.

SPEAKER_21: You think Robin Hood has a head start on something like a SoFi to be the, because most people are not gonna have five of these.

SPEAKER_363: It'll be a two horse race. It'll be a two or three horse race. Of course.

SPEAKER_21: You think it'll be those two.

SPEAKER_35: Or, and there could be other ones that show up.

SPEAKER_100: You could see something like cash app that Jack's working on, maybe expand, right? Cause I think he, did he add crypto to cash app? I think he did.

SPEAKER_21: Um, do you worry about the seamlessness with which somebody can have their paycheck deposited into a financial super app? And with one swipe, have that be in five different crypto coins? Like, should life be that seamless? Should finance have no roadblocks at all?

SPEAKER_114: No friction?

SPEAKER_35: I am a fan of people being able to do what they want with their money and learning hard lessons early. So I am fine with it, uh, because the alternative is, you know, what I saw when I first started working, you know, in on down on wall street, installing laser printers in the late eighties and early nineties, which was people were taking their paychecks to a money, a cash checking place. And they were paying 4% on their money to just get cash. Yeah. And then we'd go to a bar and we'd lose another 20%. And then we would wonder where our money was going.

SPEAKER_00: So yeah, if it goes into an investment app, yeah, I think it's a much better thing than going to a cash checking place. I think poor people and people who are starting on the economic rung. Yes, they should be getting their money put into an investment app and at least having the option before they, you know, gamble it or spend it on beer or a night out. Yeah, maybe I could put some of it into Apple or Disney. Yeah, that might be a better outcome, actually. Um, and I, I, that's why I love what you guys do, you know, here with the compound is you're educating people and you're demystifying it. We're having a conversation here. It's, you can actually, as a consumer, have a reasonable discussion about Disney. And then you can learn from, from guys like you or guys like me or other places. Yeah, there's some nuance here. What's the price earning? What's the average price earning? That's what we're trying to do on all in.

SPEAKER_35: That's what I try to do on this weekend. Sorry, that's what you're trying to do here. It's not whenever finance gets super complicated.

SPEAKER_00: It's probably there are some things that are complicated, of course. But whenever it gets super complicated, it's probably because somebody's running a grift or a scam. When people started to explain to me, oh, you can get 15%, 20% by loaning out your Bitcoin. I was like, okay, what's explain to me the scam? What's the grift? And like, not a grift.

SPEAKER_02: I'm like, okay, who's paying the 15% interest?

SPEAKER_04: And they're like, what's the, no, what's the risk that I'm not seeing? Exactly. In this case, counter party, of course.

SPEAKER_35: Counter party and people were doing off chain bull. And they were also like giving you tokens as your interest. That'd be like giving you airline miles or something. Like you're throwing in airline miles.

SPEAKER_112: We have a thing that we talk about. And Corey Hofstein, I think, is the person who has done the best job at like coining this phrase and writing about it in depth.

SPEAKER_21: But we stole it. That risk can never be eliminated. It can only be transformed. It's a good one.

SPEAKER_112: So like you can, you can start off by saying, okay, I'm going to invest in such and such asset class, whatever.

SPEAKER_21: But I really don't like this particular risk. Maybe it's the liquidity or maybe it's the risk of volatility or whatever. You can totally transform a volatility risk into a liquidity risk via hedges or whatever. Like there's a million ways that you can transform risk, but you're always taking some kind of risk if there is a potential reward. And I think to your point, like 15, 20 million Robinhood users have learned that about a variety of different markets. I don't know if they really learned it, but they experienced it definitely.

SPEAKER_121: Sometimes risk can be transformed in a positive way where you're not the person over. So for example, illiquid investments, right? Yeah. The, the marks that we all know are fake are sometimes in the, in the investor's best interest. Of course, they can't blow out even if they wanted to, but Cliff Asnes causes volatility laundering.

SPEAKER_112: Yeah. So in other, so, so, so in other words, I am at risk. The risk I have though is not volatility because I can't sell anyway. The risk I have is I just can't get access to my capital, right?

SPEAKER_26: We consider this a feature in private markets.

SPEAKER_35: So, you know, one of the ways people got really rich with Uber was Travis didn't let people sell and he controlled the secondary market of Uber shares with an iron fist. Um, and then some people in the early round, like I was, we had certain rights to our shares where we could sell them. And, you know, there were people who were contemporaries of mine who sold that 234 billion. And I had people banging my door to sell my shares. Listen, it was a lot of money for me at the time. I'm glad I held, you know, uh, there, there were 10 X's to a car, 20 X's to car after that. So, you know, holding is, um, sometimes a feature, not a bug. Um, and that's how venture firms work. Venture firms, you, you got, you put your money in and you find out 10 years how you later, how you did. That's why, you know, endowments like them. It's like, I can just put this money away. I trust this fund manager in 10 years. I'll find out how I'm doing.

SPEAKER_52: That's, that's not a arc that most people want, but it does take out all volatility. We send our LPs a note every year. Here's a very conservative estimate of what this stuff is worth.

SPEAKER_00: But please ignore, feel free to ignore all of these reports, audits, markups, and just look at cash in cash out.

SPEAKER_52: I'm in 20 plus venture funds, some of the most famous ones in the world. And I just look cash in cash out. I put in a hundred thousand. How much they get out? What would I have done in the market? I just set these, I call them wealth bombs. You put a hundred K 250 K into one of these venture firms. I'll find out in 10 years. Did I, did I two X or did I 10 X? And sometimes we two or three X, sometimes you 10 X, sometimes you 20 X. And I kind of like that way of investing, but I'm actually coming around to public markets now that everything's so low. Right.

SPEAKER_00: Because you start looking at some of these valuations, like Peloton at 3 billion with 900 million in quarterly revenue. I know they're running out of cash and it's been mismanaged and it's a show in so many different ways, but the new manager seems pretty good. If they can get some cash. I don't, I don't know why this thing hasn't been bought yet. Why is Peloton sitting out there at 3 billion?

SPEAKER_339: Peloton? Yeah. Why didn't somebody buy it yet?

SPEAKER_387: Because the comps are impossible for the next decade, unless we're going to have a pandemic. Another one.

SPEAKER_21: That's why they'll never have a year as good as, uh, 20 ever. But unless we, unless monkeypox like Willie blows up.

SPEAKER_388: 3, 4 billion in revenue. I mean. Why can't Nike buy them? That makes total sense. Nike can buy them. But what's the, but what's the rush?

SPEAKER_392: Look at the trajectory. So why would you wait? I guess that is the point. Wait. Right? Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_35: We're playing some like game of, um, chicken here.

SPEAKER_395: Like who's going to do this?

SPEAKER_21: Well, mirror got bought, mirror got bought by Lulu. I don't know what they paid, but I already could pretty much mentally guarantee. That's a write off at some point. Like, like, uh, so like, what's the, what's the, what's the, unless you, unless Nike

SPEAKER_112: thinks Adidas is going to buy it, what, why would they be in a rush? I guess.

SPEAKER_08: I guess, but it's got 2 billion. Does it have 2 million subscribers between the two? Like a million and a million and change for the hardware subscribers.

SPEAKER_35: It's such a great product to the people who have it. Love it. I think they would do really well at gyms. Equinox, maybe merge with it.

SPEAKER_21: What about the issue that everybody that could afford one and wants one bought it and there's nobody left? Is that, is that believable?

SPEAKER_72: You could buy the customers and just cross sell them.

SPEAKER_52: Yeah. I think you could, I think the price will go down. I think they have been very greedy on the price. I think that they could really, I mean, I paid like three or four grand for my treadmill and then I pay $44 a month. It's pretty outrageous. I think they could go down market over time and keep expanding that. Um, I would have really liked to seen them buy Tonal. Tonal is a great product too. It's just that Tonal's very expensive to install.

SPEAKER_35: I look at that business. Like you have to like bolt it onto the wall, but it's a very cool product and it keeps getting better. I just think somebody will, you know, consolidate Tonal, Hydro and Peloton and do a roll up. That's the other thing. That'd be great.

SPEAKER_404: One of these PE companies should just buy those three assets, put them together and get the economies of scale.

SPEAKER_242: Um, what are you most excited about that you've invested in recently?

SPEAKER_198: Great question. Public or private. Like, what are you, what are you fired? I forget about like what happens in the next three months. Like what are you just fired up about in general?

SPEAKER_262: So. Hardware is a horrible business.

SPEAKER_35: Like consumer hardware. So I did a, um, a smoke detector at one point in a camera, you know, in the days of drop cam and you know, before nest existed and Google had bought drop cam. And so I got my ass handed to me on a couple of those investments.

SPEAKER_100: And then something hardware as a service emerged. So what's hardware as a service, you know, SAS software as a service, you pay a monthly fee

SPEAKER_35: for software Adobe moved over to this after Salesforce pioneered it. And it turns out to be more profitable when people have to buy package software. We all know, like they steal it and you know, then they're trying to extend the life cycle. Maybe I'll keep my Photoshop for another year. And it's just better for everybody. You pay 20 bucks a month for your Photoshop or you pay 50 bucks a month for whatever Salesforce

SPEAKER_404: or Slack or notion or Zendesk.

SPEAKER_35: Okay, uh, we had a hardware company that presented at one of our events called Density and they were doing people counting, uh, and they would count the number of people coming in and out of Phil's coffee. I was like, there's a reasonable investment. I'll put 350 K and then I own 6% of the company. Um, they go through three iterations of the hardware. Eventually they realize, hey, you know who really actually needs to count people in spaces? People with big campuses. Okay, so let's talk to some universities. Wait a second. There's companies with big campuses like Google and Twitter and Yahoo and all. Oh, Yahoo got bought by AOL. AOL's got campuses. So they built this people counting. It's density.io. And, um, I invested in this company was 5 million. It's worth over a billion now. And lo and behold, the pandemic happens. Now people have this asset of space and they need to optimize it. And they need to know how many people are in a space because of the pandemic. But more importantly, you know, this, you have the legal departments. Like I need more space and we need two more conference rooms. And then the CFO or ops person is like, you have a lot of space now, but I guess you guys get paid a lot. This reminds me of Matterport a little bit.

SPEAKER_410: You probably know RJ. Yep.

SPEAKER_35: And so similar theme. What they can do is they can tell you, hey, the sales department, that 12 seat conference room has an average of 1.1 people in it.

SPEAKER_00: It's being used as a phone booth. You don't need it. They should share it with accounting. Period. Full stop. And, oh, by the way, nobody goes to work in New Brunswick, but everybody's going to work in Long Island City.

SPEAKER_52: You should shut the New Brunswick office down. You've only got six people going there and you're spending this amount per square foot.

SPEAKER_35: And once you do that, it turns out facilities are like the number two after expense. And so they just, they manage that space for you and it's kind of becoming the industry standard. Um, so I was very, very excited about hardware. Is that an exit?

SPEAKER_67: Is that an exit this year or next year? Like, what are they? What do you think?

SPEAKER_52: I think it's like, they're just starting to have their ramp up in terms of, um, you know, sales.

SPEAKER_35: And so I would like to see them stay private for a little bit longer so they could just take a market share nice and quietly. Um, and there'll be plenty of opportunities after that. And, you know, we had this company cafe X, which was, you know, trying to do robotic coffee. And there's two of them at SFO and the company just got walloped. It was in the real world. Uh, airport. So you're running when you, when you run a hardware company like that, you're doing the hardware development and you still have to do the software. Right. But in their case, they also had to do retail. So you had to do three businesses concurrently. Well, now they started saying, you know what, if you're Duncan or you're Starbucks or whoever, do you want our machines to put, you know, if you have a big line now for coffee, how about you put one of these 24 hours a day, you can get all kinds of food. Now they serve food from them. And, uh, I think this company is going to make it, you know, like, and it was like during the pandemic. It was like, oh my God, I don't know if this company is going to make it. And, um, now at airports, they're, they're doing, you know, like significant revenue every week. And they started to beat the coffee shop that was staffed.

SPEAKER_387: It's a storefront or it's a kiosk or how does it work? It's a kiosk. I haven't seen it.

SPEAKER_160: So you can just type in cafe X on YouTube and pull it up. Okay. Or one of my team members could actually play it here for a second.

SPEAKER_72: I was in Starbucks and the line's 40 people long. It doesn't make sense. It doesn't work.

SPEAKER_35: So now imagine there's one between each one and ours can do. It's got a tap in it. So you can do cold brew or kombucha. You can put any food in it because it's using an arm to make the coffee. And so that same unit could also be, there it is. So that could be beer. That could be wine. That could be an egg and cheese sandwich. So eventually all this is going to be automated. Oh, look at that. Yeah. So the robot arms can do anything. So I'm hoping to. Oh, that's cool. That this comp, so what this company is doing now is to say, hey, buy the machine from us for 250 K and, you know, pay us a software fee every month.

SPEAKER_00: And you could put Dunkin Donuts on the front of that. And so, you know, Dunkin has, you know, or coffee bean and tea leaf in LA, whatever it is, they might have five of those in an airport.

SPEAKER_02: Now they could five staff locations. They could put another 10 of these between the other popular places or on a college campus.

SPEAKER_418: And you're helping us with, uh, late labor, uh, labor cost inflation.

SPEAKER_71: How much do you pay a month for that? Is that a, is that a.

SPEAKER_388: I think their software fee will be like 2K or something. Like 2K or something like that. So, you know, you'll buy it for 250. You advertise that over 10 years.

SPEAKER_35: Then, you know, these things can do $10,000 a week, $5,000 a week. You start to do the math on it. You know, these things do a half a million dollars in revenue a year. You know, you start to, and that's not with alcohol. You could start to see these things popping up everywhere. And the, the software and hardware sack is really hard.

SPEAKER_21: Do you worry that it's going to be like the supermarket where it's self checkout? And then there's like two people that work at self checkout, helping people do self checkout.

SPEAKER_423: And then the machines bro. And then the machine breaks.

SPEAKER_111: And I looked, yeah, it's a great question, Josh.

SPEAKER_35: I looked at the burger company, the pizza company, the salad company, the yogurt company. They were robotic. Plus everything. None of them could do the whole process. You, you nailed it. The hamburger company, we get you like halfway there. The salad company would get you 60% of the way there. The yogurt place would get you 65% pizza. We get your 40%. And then a human had to intervene exactly like you're pointing out. It turns out making coffee. Uh, it's something a robot and software can do perfectly today. And they do it more consistently because we know the temperature. We know the phone percentage. The computer does it better. Crazy to think, but the turnover at Dunkin' Donuts is bonkers.

SPEAKER_52: Like the average Dunkin' Donuts worker worked less, less than a year. That person's not going to make you a great coffee. All due respect.

SPEAKER_425: This category should be called ass Americanas as a service. Wow.

SPEAKER_35: I mean, it's just, you know, like you, you look at what happened with Dunk, with, um, um, McDonald's, like in New York, they were trying to give $15 an hour, 10 years ago. And then I remember all of these kiosk companies were like, yum, yum.

SPEAKER_21: You ever walk into a, you ever walk into a subway, uh, and say to yourself, why isn't this a vending machine? Exactly. Yeah.

SPEAKER_430: That would be hard. Yeah. Getting the food. Anytime you got all those ingredients.

SPEAKER_24: It's so modular. It's so modular. Like why, why wouldn't that be an assembly line that you, that's coin operated?

SPEAKER_42: That's probably about 10 years out. Okay.

SPEAKER_35: The reason is because you got to cut all that food and then the food's flying everywhere. Whereas with coffee, you know, it's like two or three ingredients. It's the number, sure number of ingredients and the dexterity needed.

SPEAKER_24: But you know, I think you could do. Last question. Will the, will the robot, um, spell my name wrong on the cup? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

SPEAKER_70: Jason, Jason, I got a question for you. Go ahead.

SPEAKER_121: How long did it take you to transition to Pacific time? Like in your, in your calendar. As a New Yorker? In your calendar invites. As a New Yorker. How long did that take you? Oh God. I mean, don't come at me with PST. I don't like that.

SPEAKER_427: Oh, it's brutal.

SPEAKER_00: It's brutal. I still, you know, I'm getting used to, there's a double-edged sword. There's, it's kind of nice to be at the end of the day. You're kind of wrapping up and you got the Knicks game on at 430. Kind of nice. Very nice. It's kind of nice. And then those late, you know, you guys have those 9 PM starts. I can't stay up for those games.

SPEAKER_437: It's ridiculous. Not fair. It's not fair. We get them at six o'clock.

SPEAKER_436: It's beautiful. They started all the finals at 9 PM Eastern. It's crazy. So beautiful on the west coast. You got kids that want to watch. They can't.

SPEAKER_00: But yeah, I have to tell you, like, you know, getting up for markets and, you know, they're like, oh, hey, come in in person for tech check.

SPEAKER_35: You know? And you're like, at what time? And I got to get up at 530 and then I got to get to the studio and make up at 630 in the morning. I mean, it's brutal. It's brutal to, to be on air at 6 AM. So you guys got the, the market thing is much better for y'all. It's brutal for us.

SPEAKER_27: Jason, how'd we do?

SPEAKER_440: I wake up at 4 AM.

SPEAKER_27: I think this was great. We had, you know, we had three or 400 people on our site. You had 700 people. I think we had a thousand people. That's dope. I think the conversation moved fast.

SPEAKER_421: Shout out to the, uh, shout out to the viewers. Thank you guys. And all the great. How did we do? All the great comments and stuff.

SPEAKER_291: Thank you. Rate the collab. One to 10.

SPEAKER_321: Rate the collab on a one to 10. I thought this was so much fun. We would, we would do, we'll do this with you whenever you want. Just, just hit us up.

SPEAKER_27: I think this is good. And then, you know, we could do a three-way, you know, Josh, we could have a three-way here. My wife said no to that.

SPEAKER_272: She said no to three-ways. Yeah. Yeah. No, we're not going to be doing that. Don't bring it up again, Josh. Okay. That's a road to nowhere. I think that's probably worse than cheating on Netflix.

SPEAKER_370: But look at that. Yeah. A lot of tens, a lot of twelves. Where are people calling in from? That's the other question I had for folks. Where are you calling in from?

SPEAKER_109: What city? What country? Our people are, our people are like US, Canada, UK, but all over the world.

SPEAKER_447: And all over the world.

SPEAKER_109: Yeah.

SPEAKER_182: Yeah. So this is, this, this was, this was awesome. Thank you for having us on our channel. All right. Thanks. Yeah. On your channel. Subscribe to the compound.

SPEAKER_160: We'll have you on our channel next time. Yes. 100%. So you guys host next time. Everybody go just search for the compound and subscribe, rate, and follow.

SPEAKER_21: Congrats on, uh, congrats on all in, by the way. Thank you. Yeah. Great, great show.

SPEAKER_246: You guys are consistent. And, uh, we're, you know, we're, we're fans of yours. You're fans of ours. So we, we really appreciate it.

SPEAKER_452: Yeah. Hey, all right. We'll see y'all next time on the compound and, uh, this weekend starts. Bye bye.

SPEAKER_453: Thank you.

SPEAKER_454: I don't know how to end the show here. I don't, are you supposed to end the show? Do I end the show?

SPEAKER_455: You do a little bow.

SPEAKER_454: We all go out like, uh, we, we hold hands and we bow. Just like it's a Broadway show.