SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the show, everybody. It's going to be a great episode of This Week in Startups. We have a little bit of an accidental VC school from Jason, his evolving pitch strategy, how to take a meeting, basically. Then we're going to talk a little bit about the creator economy, monetization

SPEAKER_01: for creators on TikTok, why lots of people are moving over to YouTube, and what platforms owe creators. More importantly, how you as a creator, you're basically a startup founder. So how do you turn your talent and your brand into a business? We're going to talk about that. We also dish the tea on Bolt's founder accusing Stripe and Y Combinator of being Silicon Valley mob bosses. Nobody had that on their Twitter bingo card yesterday. Let me just put it that way. We also have a startup of the day,

SPEAKER_00: cul-de-sac building a walkable and sustainable community in Arizona. And finally, we cover Anduril's $1 billion Department of Defense contract for counter drone tech. Stick with us. It's going to be an amazing episode.

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SPEAKER_01: four weeks. I do have to tell you that what I have realized doing this job so far is that the hardest part for me is that I'm a little embarrassed to say this, but like, I've kind of been talent for a long

SPEAKER_09: time. And things I discovered early on is I didn't I don't I didn't even know how to make a zoom meeting.

SPEAKER_11: No, it is hard to be talented snowflake and I don't know how to make my own meeting.

SPEAKER_15: Well, I tell you, I had this too, because as talent slash CEO, I had the benefit of both. And I was like, get me on a flight. And then yeah, get that. And then I realized like, wait a second, I haven't

Chamath Palihapitiya: booked the flight in like 10 fucking years. I have all these apps on my phone. And the apps went from being absolutely horrific. Five years ago. Yeah, absolutely flawless. Now I don't know if you

SPEAKER_20: noticed that no excuse, there's no excuse not to book your own damn flight.

Chamath Palihapitiya: So I'm trying to book a flight on United or JetBlue. And then I'm like, wait a second, I go in the app. And it's like, book, click done. And like getting a JetBlue flight now. United not so much, but they're

SPEAKER_15: working on it. But JetBlue, Bonvoy and United, which is kind of my thing. They're kind of like as easy as Uber Eats, DoorDash and Uber now. Not quite. 80% 85% of the way there.

SPEAKER_01: That one luckily, I feel like I never went full time. There are things that I'm bad at being talent about. For example, I'm always trying to produce everything that I'm doing, which annoys producers. I never got so far. I still like book my own. I'm a very, I'm kind of a control freak. So I prefer to book my own sh**. Like the meetings and stuff like that.

SPEAKER_26: I did not know. And I keep waiting for everybody else to book the meeting. Like I'm like, yeah, you book it. You put the time on my calendar.

SPEAKER_32: Right. That's what you actually, in this case, you should do that. That's what the producers are good at. Because that also gives them an excuse to talk to the subject, maybe do a pre interview or, you know, check their tech. So that's actually a 100% when it's related to the

SPEAKER_01: show. But now when it's like a fellow investor who's going to teach me some stuff that I need to know, I'm like, oh, yeah, no, I need to book that. Yeah. What is tell me, what do you think it's your etiquette for? Because the Calendly thing is amazing where I can be like, let's not have 19 emails about when you're free. Here's the calendar link. Yeah. But it does feel a bit

SPEAKER_42: like a power play to be like, here's my calendar. But no, I think it's the opposite. I think

SPEAKER_44: that's being like, I think that's like total submission. It's like, right? It's totally

SPEAKER_34: like your call. Here's everything open. It's you make the decision. I I'm available to you.

SPEAKER_45: Here it is. So I think it's like the ultimate, like, you know, submissive, like, yeah, just I'm at your beck and call when you need me. Schedule me. I'll be there. I'll be there. Just you put it on my calendar for when works best for you. I think that it's pretty great.

SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's an incredible innovation. Like, I think I'm just gonna put it in my signature

SPEAKER_50: and be like, go crazy people. Be careful with that. Because once your calendar gets

SPEAKER_52: out there, you will what you'll find as an investor is all of a sudden, the calendar

SPEAKER_42: just gets too filled. Like what just happened? But today I was two minutes late to our recording

SPEAKER_00: two minutes, two minutes, because all of a sudden I noticed I had meetings from nine to

Chamath Palihapitiya: 11. I was like, oh, whoops. And then you start getting board meetings on this and you're taping pods, it gets a little busy, but you have good stamina to talk. And that's what it's really about. And one of the nice things about when you do taking presentations and pitches is you're, you're like, kind of like a sniper, right? You don't have to carry the conversation. You're like, sure. So would you like to show me your deck or do a product demo? And they're like, show you the deck. And now seven minutes, 10 minutes, you just put yourself

SPEAKER_32: on mute, you take notes, and you think, I love that. To me, that's like a great respite.

Chamath Palihapitiya: It's super energizing. Yeah, just sit there. Just let, let it tell me everything. Let it wash over me for 10 minutes. I get to think about it, contemplate it. And I get to vibe the person. I used to interrupt people a lot. What about this? What about this? Now I just save all my questions. I write them down in a notepad or a notion. Boom. And then I'm like, I have five questions. You know, I might have written down eight. But like, I just prioritize. These are my four questions. I'm going to tell you all four. I put the four questions into the zoom chat. Oh,

SPEAKER_65: boom, smart. So they can just and they have them. Good tip. Right? Yeah. So I

Chamath Palihapitiya: see school right here. It makes me a little more considered. If I slow down, I write all my questions. And then I pick which ones I want to ask because I don't have to get

SPEAKER_68: all of them answered at that moment. Yeah, true. And what you're doing in that first founder investor meeting, you're kind of getting a feel for the person. Like

SPEAKER_69: this person intelligent? Are they crisp? Are they sloppy? Are they a creative genius? Are they savant? Are they sales? Are they a pitch person? Are they a product person? Are they developer? Are they weird? You know,

SPEAKER_52: you want to get a read on? Yeah, right. And it's just letting them talk. I always tell people let the Mustangs run. Like you want to figure out this

SPEAKER_74: horse is fast and you can ride it. Let it go. Just, you know, let the

SPEAKER_76: Mustangs run. I let them talk. Give them the rope. Yeah. Sometimes they talk and

SPEAKER_78: they don't have anything to say. Yeah. Like, Oh, I just gave you the

SPEAKER_81: floor. Okay. All right. There it is. There's your Sunday VC school. We got a lot of news. We got to get you. Let's do it. Let's go. All right. So we are

SPEAKER_01: gonna start diving a little more, a little more often into the creator economy. We've already started some of this with the OK Boomer segment, of course, with Rachel Braun interviewing, you know, the youngs. But also, this is a huge economic force. And every one of these creators is essentially a founder doing a little baby startup, a small business, and figuring out the best way to make money. And it turns out that over the last couple of days,

SPEAKER_85: it's become increasingly clear that one of the ways to not make any money is to be on tick tock.

SPEAKER_89: Wait a second. Is that shocking? That's a big discovery because I thought tick tock was huge.

SPEAKER_01: Tick tock is huge. Okay, sure. Right. It's a massive market force. People are doing a ton of work to be on tick tock and get famous on tick tock. And also, you can rack up hundreds of millions and even billions of views and basically make pennies. And it's what's really interesting is that creators all of a sudden in the past few days, because you know, look, when you're a creator, it's you have this weird power dynamic dynamic because the platform is in charge, in some ways of your life. Yeah. And so it's taken some pretty big creators, Mr. Beast and Hank Green, who is like, oh, gee, creator gets, you know, tons and tons and tons of views, big YouTuber, did a video on YouTube basically being like, Hmm, we got to be honest about this. The economics of tick tock are terrible. So

SPEAKER_94: Forbes reported. Let's get into the I want to know the numbers because I have my own theory here, that people are equating a YouTube view, which

SPEAKER_52: might be longer form with a tick tock view, which is a quickie swipey and

SPEAKER_96: very short. So maybe there's some metric issues here. Let's get into the numbers.

SPEAKER_01: Yeah, no, that makes a bunch of sense. Okay, so that the data is hard to come by. However, Mr. Beast posted a fund dashboard based on tick tock and said it 200 million likes in 2021, 1 billion views on tick tock, but only made $15,000.

SPEAKER_103: Okay, 1 billion views equals $15,000. $15,000. Yes.

SPEAKER_01: So Charlie D'Amelio has 133 million followers, she makes she earned 17 and a half million dollars last year. That was tick tock's top earner. But like many creators look, lots of creators have discovered they need to diversify away from just streams and likes. And so a lot of them have merch. That's how Charlie D'Amelio is making all of her money, her clothing line, and promoting products in tick tock videos and other ads. That's also the case with Instagram. Instagram doesn't have a fund to pay creators directly, or at least didn't. I think for a long time, they mostly make money through these influencer and merchandise deals. But if Charlie D'Amelio, who uploaded 322 videos in 2021 and racked up 2 billion likes and 10 billion views, if she's earning money at the same rate as Mr. Beast, she would have earned $150,000.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Makes sense. So there we need to do some back of the envelope math like we are prone to do here.

SPEAKER_33: We need a sting for that, by the way, like don't we have a little like a sound effect for that?

Chamath Palihapitiya: Like a calculator, like or or one of those old, tiny registers. Remember the

SPEAKER_94: ones we go? And then you hit the enter. So we need that kind of thing for back of the envelope.

SPEAKER_115: Yeah, a little speciality. It's 2022. And it's a great time for you to start your own online business or a

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SPEAKER_119: going to be beautiful and perfect every time. And they've got built in SEO. So you don't have to hire some consultant who disappears on you and charges your arm and leg. They just built it in. Plus, free and secure hosting. You don't have to go find a hosting provider that's built into Squarespace. And they have 24 by 7 award winning customer support. If you need help, you get help. If you don't need help. Well, great, but you always have it there when you need it. And trust me, there's gonna be at some point, maybe not this year or next year, but maybe two or three years from now, you need some help. You want somebody to pick up the phone, don't you? Or to respond to your email where they're going to do that 24 seven. So go to squarespace.com slash twist for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, just use the offer code twist to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. And congratulations to the team that went public in 2021. An amazing journey for a hardworking, incredibly great group of builders. You have my respect and we love the product. And

SPEAKER_121: thanks so much for supporting this week in startups. We really do appreciate it.

SPEAKER_122: So when I was on YouTube, I was part of their creators program. I

SPEAKER_125: wrote a famous piece like I don't want to work on YouTube's farm no more like Maggie's farm for Bob Dylan. And I was just like, you know,

Chamath Palihapitiya: this they take 55% or they give us 55%. They take 45%. It's just going to be really hard to make this into a sustainable business. And that's become true. But you still make millions if you're a top creator or hundreds of 1000s or 10s of 1000s. Yeah, so people have figured out how to make it work. But the CPMs, the cost per 1000 views that you can charge an advertiser for, it tended to be somewhere between two and $7 net to the creator. So if you got 1000 views, you made two bucks. 10,000 views 20 100,000 views 200 and a million views $2,000. So a

SPEAKER_52: million view video on YouTube could make two to $7,000 in advertising from YouTube and YouTube. It was very low at the beginning was sub $1. And then it slowly went up as they got more advertisers and they increase the number of ads. So what's the big complaint on YouTube?

SPEAKER_01: ads, too many ads, too many ads. And you have to make these really long, boring videos because 10 minutes now is the standard for a YouTube video so that you can get like two ad breaks in

SPEAKER_26: there.

SPEAKER_128: Ah, so yeah, because now they're putting break ads into the middle

SPEAKER_130: of the videos, which is super annoying, which is why I pay for the YouTube Pro account, which is the greatest deal in all of

Chamath Palihapitiya: media, I believe. So if you were to look, talking about CPM, I think we're talking about a one to two cent CPM. Okay, if we were to do the back of the envelope math here, I think that math is correct. Somebody can check me on it. We'll make a Google sheet later.

SPEAKER_01: But if you went from let's back up to the numbers here, 2 billion 10 billion views, and you earn $150,000, right? Something one to

SPEAKER_26: one and a half cent.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Yeah. So what's what's happening here, I think we have to look at Molly is how are these views different? Well, the view is, when you see this account as a view on Tick Tock, one second, five seconds, at what point do you actually consider it a view in their metrics, they're incented at Tick Tock to give you more views, because it makes you feel better, right? Yeah. So they would be incentive when you hit maybe I would guess two or three seconds of a video, they count that you got a view. So if I swiped by and I swiped immediately, in under three seconds, maybe I don't get the view over three seconds, I do I don't know how they do it on Tick Tock. So that is making people

SPEAKER_52: inflate what is a quality view that is in YouTube terms, a monetizable view. Yeah. So I think there's a lot of I would guess half the views on Tick Tock are not monetizable. So you cut the number in half, you obviously double the CPM. And then Tick Tock might not be showing that many ads early because they're trying to get people addicted to the service. Once people are addicted, they hit scale, then they'll do what YouTube did, which was, hey, we know you have no choice but to

SPEAKER_74: use YouTube, we're going to give you a ton of ads, get used to getting five, four, three, two, one, skip ad.

SPEAKER_01: There's also fundamentally not a consistent way for creators to get paid. So you have two things going on. One is that and you and look, it is probably easier to rack up a lot of views on Tick Tock on a 32nd to two minute knobs, you know, on a super short clip, versus Peter Noterbaum. Thank you, Nota gang for saying that the, the minimum, the required length for mid role is now eight minutes on YouTube down from 10. So you can have an eight minute video and still get a mid role. But here's the difference in how creators actually get paid. Tick Tock has a fund, right, a big fixed pool of money that it uses to pay all the creators and Tick Tock essentially takes 95% of the revenue. So only 5% of the revenue that they earn from these creators is paid back to them. Whereas YouTube, which we used to think was crazy, pays creators 55% of their ad revenue. So they're incentivized to get more views, which frankly, does not seem to be the case on Tick Tock, right, you're sort of incentivized to get views, but you just really are incentivized to get external merch deals, or influencer deals. So you have this sort of difference. And here we should actually here's a mash up, basically of two clips, a minute and 25 seconds of Hank

Jason Calacanis: Green, who is such a good explainer explaining how the math

SPEAKER_154: works. See you on the other side, I used to make 5 cents per

David Friedberg: view on Tick Tock. What happened? What changed? The pool of money is the same size. Why am I making less per view? Because there are more views on the platform. It's grown. There are more creators, there are more users, Tick Tock is earning more money. The pool is the same size. So there are more views with the same number of dollars. So you make fewer dollars per view. Literally, when Tick Tock becomes more successful, Tick Tockers become less successful. What? If Tick Tock had the same partnership with creators that YouTube has, Tick Tockers would be making at minimum 16 cents per thousand views. That is six times, six times what they are making now. Every creator in the creator fund who thinks to themselves, wow, $1,000 a month, that's $12,000 a year. That person could be a full-time creator. They could be thinking about expanding, about hiring, about creating a business in their community for their audience. This is the economic engine that drove YouTube forward. And Tick Tock is just letting it leak out of the tub into their bottom line. This change would not increase the number of full-time Tick Tockers by six times. It would increase it by a thousand times. Because just from the structure of the platform, the number of creators making $6,000 a month is a thousand times more than the number of creators making $1,000 a month.

SPEAKER_161: It's not wrong. Um, and, uh, yeah, it's just, I think we have to look at is maybe

SPEAKER_115: I would do a 20 to one ratio of views from Tick Tock to YouTube to normalize. So if you're 20 to one it, if he's saying 5 cents, you know, 20 times 5 cents, a dollar. So if you do 25 to one, maybe you

Chamath Palihapitiya: start understanding the qualitative nature of monetizable views on

SPEAKER_115: YouTube versus Tick Tock. Because when, how often do you see an ad on Tick Tock? Maybe every 10 swipes up?

SPEAKER_166: I feel like never. Yeah. I don't know. I just keep rolling. I mean, I guess I eventually do.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Yeah. I think it's every 10 maybe, maybe it's every 15. So I think they're lightly monetizing it. Number one, I think the ads are less effective because people don't know how to use the platform yet. Like, I don't know what ad format actually works when people are

SPEAKER_15: moving at that violent of a pace. Like, are you if you're in that Tick Tock hypnotic zone? Because they, I mean, that is like the fentanyl of social media. I have to say. It definitely is. Yeah. Like, man, holy cow, that gets you like in the zone. So like an hour can go by and you're like, I don't remember anything I watch. Right. But I watched a bunch of stuff that I couldn't stop watching. It's really weird. It's like some dystopian. Like remember in Clockwork Orange, they pinned his eyes open. Totally. It's just like that. It's like, that's how I feel when I put on Tick Tock. I'm like, this is horrible. This person is dancing. And I don't know their age. And they're talking about things that I don't think at their

SPEAKER_55: age, they should be talking. It's like watching Euphoria.

SPEAKER_01: I don't know what's happening in your algorithm, but mine is literally all like Huskies, because I'm obsessed with how they

SPEAKER_173: howl and other cute animals, like interactions, like all in and

Chamath Palihapitiya: this week in startups, Lizzo, a couple of impersonators, and then people dancing. And like, I'm watching these people dance. And

SPEAKER_15: I'm like, I really don't know, like what the algorithm is showing me here. But do you watch this show Euphoria?

SPEAKER_176: I haven't seen it. But I know it. I know of it.

SPEAKER_15: Euphoria is like watching, like you ever see Requiem for a Dream? Mm hmm. Like Bennett? Yeah, I'm out. I'm out. Like, I'm not watching. Horrible. Yeah. Euphoria is Requiem for a Dream plus High School Musical. Like, it's like a bunch of Disney kids doing stuff that Disney kids should not be doing drugs, sex, whatever. And I feel like that's where like, tick tock eventually just like, is just

SPEAKER_80: horrible. Um, I really wish the service did not exist. And when I see kids on it, I'm just like, oy.

SPEAKER_182: What if they're just watching the Huskies?

SPEAKER_14: I don't think, I don't know if you saw that Wall Street Journal, they're not watching the Huskies. It's true. I mean,

SPEAKER_183: they're basically political. It's really interesting.

Chamath Palihapitiya: The I think it is psyops from the Chinese against America. I

SPEAKER_45: know it sounds crazy, but I think they want to polarize America. And that's why it just kind of goes to our worst. All

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SPEAKER_190: twist.

SPEAKER_91: Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. You think Tick Tock wants to polarize

SPEAKER_01: America more than Facebook already successfully has and more than YouTube, which like, I think it's all I ever watch on the internet because I don't spend a lot of time on this. All I ever watch is like cute animals and, and yoga. I do yoga with Adrian on YouTube. And I can be on YouTube for a grand total of six minutes before it's like, would you like to watch this video about red pilling? They every freaking time I am on YouTube, it is recommending some video to me that's like, hey, do you want to hear about how women are the worst? Or do you want to hear about like, Jordan Peterson, vaccines, right? Vaccines were invented by Tick Tock Huskies. Like, I don't think anybody's got a monopoly on attempting to

Chamath Palihapitiya: polarize Americans. I just think that they're better at it. I think the Chinese are better at it because they instead of you know, like your feed on YouTube is supposed to be for Molly mine supposed to be for me, it's supposed to be based on our watch times on various things. So

SPEAKER_45: maybe you watched a little Joe Rogan and it gave you some Sam Harris or vice versa, and then it got you to Ben Shapiro or whatever. But I think Tick Tock is just like I said, ever does

SPEAKER_183: that Tick Tock only ever gives me cute animals exclusively. It is never not given me cute. Anyway, we're gonna kick this Tick Tock

SPEAKER_44: needs to be kicked out.

SPEAKER_91: We do want to know, okay, well, so then you don't care. This is all working for you because YouTube is winning the creator monetization wars. I think it's very interesting because it's like, this has been a

SPEAKER_00: tale as old as time right in user generated content, which you and I

SPEAKER_01: grew up on, which is what is the responsibility of the platform to compensate the people who make the platform exist by creating content YouTube has been somewhat good at this. They have also been the only game in town. Now they have a Tick Tock competitor called shorts and they created $100 million fund to start paying people for making, you know, effectively Tick Tocks. They are expanding the way creators can make money, including these technologies, such as NFTs, and they're letting people make and sell digital goods. And so this is an opportunity. This is frankly, this is a competitive opportunity, like Tick Tock might end up just not being popular enough for creators or popular with creators who are actually looking to make money because they can't.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Yeah, I mean, on all these platforms, I would look at them as like, they're taking advantage of you, you need to take advantage of them. So how does one as a creator take advantage of them? Well, if you own emails, phone numbers, RSS subscribers, and a brand, those are things you actually own. Like your RSS feed is yours. And when people try to get rid of your RSS feed, they get rid of email addresses to get rid of phone numbers. That's when you actually lose followers and subscribers on these services are not yours. As Facebook showed, they took away your follower account, you couldn't reach them, you had to pay to reach them. YouTube, you used to reach all your followers and subscribers all the time, then they decide, you know, how many of your subscribers you show up on their main feed, right. And so I look at all these and just say, how do we build the This Week in Star Wars brand, the all in brand, whatever? How do we collect more emails? How do we get in touch with our true fans? And how do we build that deep, meaningful relationship with them, which Mr. Beast and other people are realizing and learning, which is, you know, can I get 10% of my subscriber counts email? And that's how I would look at it. What percentage of your follower count on tick tock? Do you have their email addresses? Right? Do you have the ability to directly contact them when you have a new product or service? Because at some point, they will delete your account or possibly,

SPEAKER_130: right? So just be independent of the platforms,

SPEAKER_00: they'll demonetize you, you know, for everything I just said about YouTube

SPEAKER_01: finding more ways to compensate creators, just as many creators have been demonetized. For various reasons, they change the algorithm, or now you have to have an eight minute video or this or that, right? Like, they don't love you back these platforms, you feed them. And then your job is to do the best you can to figure out alternate revenue streams. And the smart creators all know this. That's why they have merch. That's why they have deals. That's why in some cases, they have middlemen, they've got managers and agents, because that's the only way to really make money that you own.

SPEAKER_69: If you want to be a proper publisher, you need to have a relationship with the talent, you need to have a relationship with your customers, a direct relationship with your customers and a direct relationship with advertisers, what these platforms do is they abstract those things away from you. So you're the talent, so you have control over that. But you don't have a direct relationship with your customers, your listeners, your viewers, and you don't have a direct relationship with the advertising. So they make it easier for you by taking away two thirds of the work of

SPEAKER_96: being a publisher. So what you need to do as a publisher is take ownership of those three pillars of the stool. And so people have come to

Chamath Palihapitiya: me over and over again, hey, we'll produce this week in startups, make it part of our network, we'll produce all in I'm like, Nope, I would rather control the content. Thank you. Then they're like, Oh, we'll sell your ads. You might Nope, I have two in house ad sales executives, we have direct relationship with the advertisers, we talk to them, we understand what their goals are,

SPEAKER_96: etc. Not you. And then Oh, what about the customers? Well, we have a direct line to them, we have them following us across 20 platforms, we have their emails, etc. And I think that's really the

SPEAKER_225: best thing you can do as a publisher. And everybody who hits any level of scale realizes this, and then starts acting in their own interest, which is developing direct relationships

SPEAKER_96: with sponsors.

SPEAKER_227: Yeah. That's how you turn, that's how you turn your creator gig into a business. Boom, Professor J. Cal.

SPEAKER_229: That's it. It's a three legged stool. And you just have to ask

Chamath Palihapitiya: yourself, are you are you balancing on one leg of the stool, your talent? That's what a lot of these people are doing. And then Mr. Beast, who I know, he has direct relationships with partners, he has direct relationships with his customers, right? Therefore, his stool is nice and steady,

SPEAKER_69: right? That three legged stool much stronger. And brand becomes like the fourth leg of the stool. So I would say, you know, he probably has three of those four nice and stable.

SPEAKER_01: Well, and I do think that's actually what's interesting, not to belabor this, but that's what I actually do think is interesting about this specific economy, the creator economy, is that because brand is now a leg of the stool in the way that it didn't used to be creators can potentially afford to give away some of the control, they don't necessarily it's sort of like cloud computing, right? They don't necessarily have to build the infrastructure to become a publisher, they could outsource that infrastructure to take talk or YouTube, but they still have to construct the other legs around it, the you know, owning the relationship with your users, or your, I mean, I think this is

Chamath Palihapitiya: where having patreon or subscribers works, right? So you see a lot of folks saying, you know what, instead of having a direct relationship and monetize to the advertisers, like, they could negatively impact the content. Therefore, I'm going to rely on this other leg of the three or four legged stool, heading on how you build it. And they say, you know what, this stool will be

SPEAKER_52: stronger. If I'm getting the money from the from my patreon, right,

SPEAKER_36: like Red Scare does or other folks, or Tom, Tom Merritt. Yeah, it's a we do a show called it's a thing that's patreon, it's

Chamath Palihapitiya: a thing that's patreon, right. And so if it makes a couple of thousand a month or whatever, it's going to not need advertisers. And then his daily tech roundup show, I think makes like 1520 K a month. So he was working for Leo, they had a dispute, I believe, over his pay. He left to do his own daily tech news show. And he probably he arguably makes the same but

SPEAKER_34: has control, right?

SPEAKER_41: And he's able to do that because of that, that one, which is

SPEAKER_240: brand, right? Yeah, daily tech news show.

SPEAKER_137: His brand, right. And my friend Sam Harris, when I got him into

Chamath Palihapitiya: podcasting, and I helped him set that up and talk to him about that. He went with Patreon because he talks about terrorism, he

SPEAKER_45: talks about atheism, like it's just not good for advertisers, like Casper does not want to be in the middle of that discussion of Islamic terrorism, slash, you know, atheism, whatever. Go

Chamath Palihapitiya: figure. But he was on Patreon, then he realized, wait a second, Patreon can cancel me because Patreon started canceling people who said things that people didn't like. And he was just like, what, I can set up a stripe and do it on my website. So he literally left Patreon and he was making he was one out he didn't disclose but I know the number, you know, well into the, you know, to comment territory a year from his fan base. And he was like, I don't want to have Patreon, then be able to do this into media. I mean, I'll just go direct with stripe. And then there's like this edge case, where the cancel culture, or

SPEAKER_45: could you do something so controversial that stripe doesn't

SPEAKER_235: want to, you know, like OnlyFans, right. And some of those places had a hard time getting credit card companies to do stuff. When

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SPEAKER_01: Speaking of this question of who controls, who owns who controls super dishy posts, people are just speaking the truth or their truth, right? There's this sort of interesting thing where it's like, I'm going to take to the public. And in the case of these creators, it was about Tick Tock. In this case, it is a founder, Bolt founder and CEO Ryan Breslow, who appeared on episode 1313 of This Week in Startups, posted a thread on Twitter yesterday as accusing Stripe and Y Combinator of being not just being but sort of colluding as the mob bosses of Silicon

SPEAKER_200: Valley. Spicy. Yeah, it was packing. It was super dishy. So

SPEAKER_01: here's some basics.

SPEAKER_251: Yeah, let's go through what he said specifically. Yes. And let's

SPEAKER_01: start with sort of like, some context. Bolt is one click checkout software, right? Sort of competes with stripes payment API is not perfectly direct, but close enough. And his first tweet was Stripe and Y Combinator, the mob bosses of Silicon Valley, a threat. Spicy. Dun, dun, dun. At this point, I paused the show, made some popcorn, poured some bourbon, and came on back to my chair. Essentially, Breslow is claiming that Stripe bullies fintech competitors with Y Combinator's help, because the two evidently, according to Breslow, work closely together. This is true. Stripe is a Y Combinator darling. Stripe competes indirectly with Bolt. Bolt interviewed for YC with with, according to Breslow, strong traction, a good team, and was declined. Then Breslow claims Stripe raised money from many of the top VCs in order to actively block other payments companies from raising from those same VCs. Breslow also claims Stripe and YC control Silicon Valley media via hacker news. So they have a whole ecosystem of control here. He explained how a Bolt product release went to number one on Hacker News, and then shortly after that, were displaced by a Stripe post, which was basically about the same topic. Breslow also claimed that Stripe funded a prelaunch one click checkout competitor called Fast. That CEO, Dom Holland was on episode 1103. You can skip that episode. Breslow said, oh, okay, so back to Hacker News. Breslow said that because Hacker News is owned by Y Combinator, it rigs the rankings to pump Stripe product releases to number one. And that's why Bolt's post about payments got bumped down all of a sudden. And that all of a sudden, Stripe basically stood up a checkout competitor at the same valuation and with more capital just to fight off Bolt.

SPEAKER_64: Interesting. Yes. All right. This caused some Twitter. Yes, as you might imagine.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Yeah, and that she'll, I think, put out a good post, which is like,

SPEAKER_137: listen, it's pretty amazing. The list of investors in Stripe, interest in Harvard, Sequoia Founders Fund, General Catalyst, Coastal,

SPEAKER_44: Clona Perkins, Redpoint Thrive, Google, GV, Capital G, Tiger, DST, SV Angels, 500 Startups, YC, Mamex Visa. What Stripe did here is a classic playbook.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Um, and if you get a bunch of different Silicon Valley people to invest, they only invest in one company in a category, considered distasteful, with the exception of accelerators and platforms like the syndicate or AngelList, to double down and invest in multiple people in a category. It does happen from time to time that people will pivot their business. So you get a conflict. But if you invested in Uber, you were probably not supposed to live, invest in Lyft, because they were direct, direct competitors. And so what Uber did was it got a lot of investors, and it was pretty clear. I think everybody knew if you invested in Lyft, you were basically choosing them over Uber. If you invested in Stripe, you're picking them over other competitors. This is a pretty pragmatic, non, non controversial, non controversial strategy, but it does, in fact, act like a blocker. And it reminded me of marriage story where, you know, if somebody met with a divorce attorney, but didn't even hire them, but they had paid them the deposit, they now had a conflict. So you couldn't hire that divorce attorney. So there's this concept in Hollywood, where like the high profile divorces, I think it was Heidi Klum, or somebody like that went and met with the top 10 divorce attorneys, put them all on retainer, told them like what their fears were about their divorce. Now those firms can't represent her spouse, because they're conflicted out because she gave them the $5,000 retainer. So if you really are divorcing in some multi billion dollar

SPEAKER_45: thing, you can conflict out the other side's potential counsel. That's kind of

SPEAKER_266: what you're doing here. Right? Right. I think that's like a high level. Truth. Even

SPEAKER_00: if it's not a collusion situation, the truth is that if all of these huge names have already invested in Stripe, then if you come along in your bolt, you are kind of out of luck.

SPEAKER_235: You are and then the person let's say it's red point or founders fund on this

Chamath Palihapitiya: list. They want to own more shares of Stripe. They got to buy a tiny taste in the series B. Now they want to put more in the C and D with their late stage fund. They don't want to piss off the brothers. Therefore, they don't do that. Now why Combinator? Actually, it's kind of false why Combinator wanted to accept in the second time why Combinator bets on all kinds of conflicting people. In fact, that's created a little bit of controversy. So if you're Airbnb or Stripe, and 20 different people come in who want to compete with Airbnb, Stripe that why Combinator is going to accept you. And if you create the why the companies in outside the US that compete with Airbnb and Stripe, they'll bet on you as well. And that has been a point of contention. But the fact is, like, these are very early stage companies where they start is never where they finish, they always pivot. So when you're Y Combinator, any accelerator, tech stars are accelerated, you really can't offer exclusivity, because it's just too many companies, and they change their business models three times in the first year, or they're, you know, their target customers often, you never know where they're gonna wind up. We've had people, you know, start in a place and they're like, you know what, we should be doing what, you know, Robin Hood is doing or calm or Uber, and they pivot into those and, you know, puts me in a position where when I go talk to the founders of those companies that I'm invested in, I'm like, they pivot into that. But the good news is, if you want to buy them at some point, you can use us as a bridge. So we could help. So there's an expression that I heard early on no conflict, no interest in private markets, right. So no conflict, no interest. This whole thing is a mess and conflicted. People will throw the same criticism at me. Oh, Jake, how's gonna

SPEAKER_235: have, you know, whoever on this podcast, because he's an investor. Well, of course I am. Am I going to have their competitors on the pod? Yes, I've had lift on the pod. Would I have so fi or, you know, headspace on the pod? Sure, you

SPEAKER_130: know, like, am I racing out to do that? Maybe not. But, you know, so you're going to be conflicted all over the place.

SPEAKER_01: As a another venture capitalist friend said, when you have a company that's a large competitor space, like, yes, they will crush you when it comes to fundraising. Yes, they will talk you to every VC. There is some, it seems that there is clearly some truth to the sharp elbows here. There is probably a replicatable strategy of taking a little bit of money from every big name in the valley so that you can, like you said, box out, you know, future competitors. The question is, is it? Is it somehow coordinated? Is it a colluding thing? Is, you know, somebody in the Noti gang says YC does act as a gatekeeper to protect monopolies created by them?

SPEAKER_137: No, they invest in their competitors. So the truth is that they invest in

Chamath Palihapitiya: competitors of people they've already invested in. They do it on the regular. So the evidence is different. Now, if you look at Hacker News, if you consider Hacker News, the YC alumni social news site, it's like a subreddit of YC founders. That's what it is. It's 70, 80, 90% YC founders, they all know each other. It doesn't say Y Combinator on the site, really, except for the URL. But you can be sure the mods, it's run by YC, it's controlled by YC. So yes, anything with Stripe. Now, is it coordinated? Probably not. What it is, is Stripe has the inside line, they come speak at YC, they offer them probably special deals. And YC partners encourage them because they own 6% of the companies where the 100 billion, it's a $6 billion position for Y Combinator. It's probably one of their biggest, if not the biggest most meaningful position along with Airbnb. Therefore,

SPEAKER_235: everything in that world is going to lean towards it. Just like you might hear me say, like, if somebody's like, Oh, I gotta get a lift. I'm like, you mean Uber? You know, it's like, I love DoorDash. I'm like, you should try Uber. It's like, it's more like that kind of a thing where you're enthusiastic, but not a coordinated attack. But I understand why it feels like a coordinated attack.

SPEAKER_01: Totally. And I can I really like the way that you're putting it makes perfect sense. Because of course, there isn't going to be some look, it's not journalism, right? It's not like, church, like there's there is bias, there is bias built into the system. And that bias is equity.

SPEAKER_15: Yes, equity equals vote. Like, you show somebody's your you show

Chamath Palihapitiya: me somebody's equity holdings, I will show you their opinion. Totally, basically, right? Because in and that's not just that the equity informs the opinion. It was that the opinion resulted in you buying the equity. Totally.

SPEAKER_283: So there's a consistency to this, right? Like, I believed in

Chamath Palihapitiya: Travis, I voted with my dollars to put money into Uber. Therefore, my opinion is Uber is a great company. But it's not that I was just randomly gifted Uber over lift shares, I actually picked that company. And therefore, I'm it's confirmation bias, I bet on that company. Therefore, I will continue to be enthusiastic and promote that company, just like people who bought Bitcoin over Ethereum or vice versa, or Solana, you know, you can tell how much crypto somebody owns in the first five minutes of meeting them, because they will tell you to buy that crypto, right?

SPEAKER_01: Totally. But that's such a great point that I just want to reiterate, it's not that like, if you're promoting a company, if you YC, Stripe, Jason, Sequoia, me, like, if we're promoting something, promoting a company, having a portfolio company on the podcast, it's not because like, they tricked us or paid us off or gave us free stuff. It's because we picked them.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Right. So there's cause and correlation. So what's happening here is he this person feels they're being attacked on all sides. Yeah, which would be how you would feel if your competitor was supported by everybody in the industry. And this new site that you're conflating with the New York Times was spiking your story and promoting other ones. It's it's not in the New York Times that's doing this. It's Y Combinator alumni social network

SPEAKER_137: that's doing it aka Hacker News. They had news. Y Combinator.com for a reason. It's not hacker news.com. It's news. Y

SPEAKER_229: Combinator. The people at alumni at Y Combinator are talking about the news.

SPEAKER_01: Yeah, this is where producer Nick reads my mind and says, remember what Frank Slootman said, business is war, kill your enemies or they will kill you.

SPEAKER_235: There's no doubt about that. I mean, you you do have to be

Chamath Palihapitiya: aggressive in this regard. And I think actually, this tweet stream is an attempt to get attention. You always fight up. So I give the founder here credit for seeing an opportunity to get in the headlines. Okay, if I can't get on Hacker News, and that channels burned. Okay, where can I get on? Oh, I can trend on Twitter by attacking Y Combinator, which has a built up animosity towards it. There's so much animosity towards Y Combinator from two groups of people, founders who didn't get in. So you left them at the altar, you didn't accept them, they weren't, you know, they weren't led into the club. So you got all that built up an animosity. And then you have the animosity of everybody who's in the venture community who's jealous of them getting 7% of a company for 100 grand. Yeah. And people who don't get in at a $2 million valuation, like they do a $1.8 million valuation. So you have that animosity. So whenever you bring up somebody who's got that good of a deal, my Lord, it's gonna be like, that's where you're gonna get all these people

SPEAKER_32: who are gonna retweet this and be like, Oh, yeah, F those guys,

Chamath Palihapitiya: you know, they saw. And the reason is, they're successful, you

SPEAKER_45: know, and they have a disproportionate amount of power and good for them, you know, they built a great platform.

Jason Calacanis: It's just not a, it's not a fair, it's not an industry built on

SPEAKER_01: fairness, but you fight every way you can. And so in some ways, kudos to Bolt CEO for getting all this attention and, you know,

SPEAKER_50: potentially some new investors savvy. I mean, this is high

SPEAKER_216: level jujitsu. Yeah, this is high level media jujitsu kung fu. I always tell people like if you want to get into a fight with

Chamath Palihapitiya: people, just be careful, like and with Y Combinator, with them doing like this $375,000 blind bet, like we had done that previously, I think we influenced them. And now I'm looking at it going wait a second. Okay, now they're making that guaranteed. I didn't make it guaranteed. So people don't know this. But I went to the current accelerator class, I said to the seven companies, hey, for five of the companies did not have an open note, I said to all five $8 million 500k. Would you like this term sheet will syndicate you for 500k for 8 million right now at the start of the accelerator? All five said yes. So since all five said yes, now I will come out in the coming months, and I'll announce, we have a better deal than Y Combinator. So to Frank Slotman's thing, your competitors do something and we're marginally competitors. I mean, there's, it's not like we can't invest in YC companies, or they can't invest in our companies. Of course you can. And they do. But yeah, I think you do have to take a warlike stance in this regard. Conflict equals drama.

SPEAKER_00: Alright, let's do one more quick story. The drama. Let's do the startup of the day.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Oh, great. Yeah, this one cul de sac is a startup building a car free neighborhood brilliant in Tempe, Arizona, they claim 52% of Americans want to live in a walkable neighborhood, but only 8% do I agree. My neighborhood is a fancy dancing neighborhood with no sidewalks. When I lived in Brentwood in LA, it was a fancy dancing neighborhood and these maniacs in these two neighborhoods I've lived in in my life. Do not want sidewalks because they don't want people walking outside their homes. It's infuriating because if you want to go for a run or ride your bike or take your kids on a bike ride, you have to risk their goddamn lives. And it's annoying as heck. So stupid rich people. Oh, stupid rich people. It's like it's such a stupid Bel Air does the same thing. No sidewalks in Bel Air. Everybody's on an acre a lot, but they can't have like 10 seconds of 10 feet of sidewalk is ridiculous. So quote from their fundraising announcement of $30 million. With record increases in congestion, loneliness, traffic fatalities and global warming, building a new option for the way we live has never been more important. Never been more important. 30 million was led by coastal with participation for founders fund initialized and

SPEAKER_137: others valuation wasn't disclosed. I'll say it was for 20% of the company, which puts out $150 million post money valuation is my guess. Yeah, informed guests, you know, those kind of folks would want to own about 20% of the company. So that would equal a 120

SPEAKER_271: pre 150 post on probably within 10 20% of that number. First

SPEAKER_96: neighborhood will officially open sometime later in 2022. Here's a 3d rendering of what the community will look like so interesting

SPEAKER_01: about this is it really is a planned development. And they're starting to do more of this in a couple of European cities, it's become a little bit of an experiment. And the truth is, like, they're right in saying that 52% of people want to live like this, you got people on their bikes, and they're walking around, and there's cafes where you can sort of just like, sit outside, it's perfect for COVID time, because there's lots of outdoor spaces. It's also in Arizona. So they have potentially a benefit. The Noda gang is saying damn, this metaverse is nice, which is totally true. But look, we know from just real estate stats, right? Like my real estate agent calls it the what is it the $100,000 coffee is what he calls it. He's like, people will pay $100,000 over what they otherwise would have paid because they think they can walk the coffee and they want to do that. I mean, it is 100% something that people value and want to do not to mention a map. I mean, I would have this is like, this is a deal that had I been in this job a few years ago, because I've been hearing about cul-de-sac for a while, like I would have thrown money at this because it

SPEAKER_137: is a game changer. 100% Yeah. And if you look at it, you know,

Chamath Palihapitiya: you're gonna have less CO2 emissions. So that's good for the planet, you have more convenience. If you have kids and dogs, you can go downstairs, not worry about them getting run over and hit by cars. The only thing I ever wonder about with these is, you know, when I and this is stupid and pragmatic. But if an ambulance comes to your house, can they get to your house? If you're on one of these things, and I think the way they do this is these streets are wide enough for an ambulance. Or let's say you had a piano delivered for them to come get you, you just have to lower like a gate somewhere or like, you know, those pylons they put in with a lock on them, those the fire department or police can press a button and have them automatically come down. And it looks like you could reach any

SPEAKER_329: of these apartments with a fire truck, or an ambulance. I think they think that through when they build these interesting

SPEAKER_330: idea. I'm not sure if there's a lot of paranoia there. A lot of

SPEAKER_130: paranoia. I wonder like you do have this in other neighborhoods, like in Venice, they have the walk streets. And you're always

SPEAKER_45: like, it's a walk street. How do I get my groceries? Or like, right, if you've got a lot of groceries, you're this location

SPEAKER_01: wagons, they have wagons, right? So cul de sac says this location in Tempe is the first car free community built from scratch in the United States. 55% of it is open space. It's got a grocery store, coffee shop, restaurant, bike shop, co working space, designated e bike garages over 1000 bike racks because the truth is, who was it that tweeted this the other day, somebody I really like and respect and I'm just gonna steal his tweet, because I can't remember his name right now but said, you know, Americans think that buying an EV is there like one and done climate, like no, you better thing. It's all about riding your bike. It really is. Well, all residents get $3,000 a year in mobility benefits through partnerships, 10 bucks a day, envoy, $10 a day. Yeah, I mean, it is super interesting. I think you raise a really good question. Because the company raised over $200 million in real estate capital locations, they did not mention how this plays into the series A, which is only $30 million. So you raise a really good question. So I know the answer. Yeah, because I'm on the board of

SPEAKER_271: blockable, which is building housing in factories. And so blockable is doing something similar in this regard. I'll leave it up to them to when they disclose that or how they

SPEAKER_235: disclose it. But if you're building a real estate project like this, there are real estate investors who have a desire to

Chamath Palihapitiya: make a certain profile, and they have certain tax treatment they want. You can find those real estate investors up and down Wall Street, Main Street, family offices. So they will invest on a project by project basis with a certain tax and investment horizon. Whereas venture folks want to invest in the core technology. So what they do here is each community, I'm certain, they will find real estate investors offered to the venture investors if they want to, but the venture investors

SPEAKER_137: want to own the operating company with the technology, the marketplaces and whatever else IP there is here. And then they would get I bet you they're going to raise this 200 million to build this community. And then they own 10% of the community, or 20% of the community for building the technology and the infrastructure and the SaaS software. That makes sense. So then after they every five communities they build, maybe let's say they own 20% of it for building it and the real estate people who under wrote it on 80%. Every fifth community, this company called the sack, basically owns an entire community. So in the same way, like Airbnb doesn't own the inventory on their platform. But they do take 10 20% of the value out of the ecosystem, it's going to be something similar here.

SPEAKER_85: Now I don't mean to be naive, but how do you make money owning a community? Like from the businesses that come in from like a

SPEAKER_122: kind of range managing it, they would get a management fee for managing this whole thing. So who knows if they're selling these

SPEAKER_96: units are renting them if they're renting them, they could be like the management company that manages these locations. And you

SPEAKER_137: could imagine the software, you could imagine collecting the rent, or the storefronts and all that. All that's being managed by a management company that has revenue thrown off, right. And it's 100% technology enabled. And just think about all the

SPEAKER_225: ancillary services. So when they build this pop up community, they could have one fiber line come in for $5,000 a month. And if it does 300 units, they could be charging $100 per unit, making $30,000 costing them five, and you would have better T ones. Yeah. So you start thinking about, you know, all those kind of incremental concepts, right?

SPEAKER_166: It's an interesting challenge. It really is. I mean, community building is no joke. It is super I mean, but this is also this is a

SPEAKER_01: thing that like, cities don't have the will to, you know, finance some new construction of a completely new type of neighborhood and bring in all the businesses. And so it's like, if we're gonna do this, I guess this is one of the models that's gonna make it happen. Because it's sort of how we have to.

SPEAKER_74: All right, exactly. All right, maybe we'll just rip through

SPEAKER_329: this one really quick. And Andrew Palmer Lockie's company. He doesn't like me, unfortunately, because I said something about him in the Oculus days when he left Facebook. So he won't come on the show. But I'm enamored with what he's doing. Would love to have him on the podcast. I think he's an interesting cat. Just want

Chamath Palihapitiya: a billion dollar contract with the US Department of Defense for its counter drone technology. I love Palmer. Lucky as like a maniac entrepreneur does crazy stuff in the world, like Oculus

SPEAKER_69: and this. So I find him a fascinating person contract will

SPEAKER_161: be paid out over the next 10 years. By us so calm special operations band. Super cool. Palmer. Lucky tweeted the exact number of the contract. Boom. It's a five year old company.

SPEAKER_01: You know, honestly, if I were a five mil if I a five year old company that landed a billion dollar contract, I also would tweet out the exact amount. I would have included the pennies.

SPEAKER_364: I love you know, here. Yeah, totally. I love what he's

Chamath Palihapitiya: doing. I think all this like advanced military tech that doesn't require soldiers and to get into like the middle of the fray are cool. And I think we have to compete with the Chinese who are probably building really advanced drone technology to do things like take over Taiwan eventually. This guy. I mean, listen, I'm not just saying this. Like, I think it's actually a cool thing for an American to do is to build advanced technology. I want to go all Tony Stark here. But like Google not being willing to build this technology or Apple not being willing to build this technology. Somebody has to

SPEAKER_15: build military technology in case China jumps the fence on the line. And decide say Hong Kong is not enough. I mean, there's nobody cares technology. You're absolutely right. And I think

SPEAKER_01: like the fact that a lot of companies have shied away from this, you can and should ask a lot of questions about autonomous drones. Exactly. Even if they are meant to attack and kill other autonomous drones, any device that is weapons hot, yeah, capable of making its own decisions. That is a lot of hard questions about but as a purely business matter, if Microsoft and Google have vacated Microsoft is still doing government contracts, but if Google has vacated, and you can land a billion dollar government contract like that's smart, that's smart business.

SPEAKER_290: And I don't see how we have a choice to build autonomous AI

SPEAKER_137: weapon systems if China or Russia are going to build them or Iran.

Chamath Palihapitiya: So this may not be something we have a choice over. Again, this is a big discussion. But it is let's watch this 90 second video. So

SPEAKER_01: here we go. Yeah, we're gonna narrate this too. And it looks

SPEAKER_375: like Star Wars to me. To be clear, defense workers from

SPEAKER_01: anywhere in the world can use Anduril's operating system, which is called Lattice OS. It sets up the business is to set up these sentry towers to monitor large areas for enemy drones using radar and infrared to launch counter drones that can

Jason Calacanis: autonomously attack and destroy enemy drones. I mean, look, I am a giant action movie fan like this. I love this. Like, I have a

Chamath Palihapitiya: little look. I mean, the other thing is like Palmer's making stuff that looks rad. So like, this thing is like, looks like

SPEAKER_161: a little like R2 T2 droid and flares up a bunch of sensors. And then a drone comes in and the murder drones coming to blow some shit up. And somebody is like at their laptop. And they're like,

Chamath Palihapitiya: Nope. Here's a bunch of tiny little Tony Stark missiles.

SPEAKER_91: Sorry, can we talk about the porno shot of like opening the case

SPEAKER_382: with all the bullets inside? Those are like little, tiny,

SPEAKER_383: beautiful. It's really like Boba Fett style rockets, you know, Boba Fett has a little rocket pack or like on his wrist. Like man, just like pew pew. Yeah, exactly. There's a few rockets. I like a pew pew pew rocket, like a nice tiny one that zips in and just gets the job done.

SPEAKER_01: I'm like, I just all of the parts of my personality are warring with each other right now. Because if you could see this drone, knock

SPEAKER_386: this other drone out of the sky, you would be like, USA, USA.

SPEAKER_91: Yeah. And you know what is awesome and terrifying is so

SPEAKER_122: terrifying. Well, here's the thing. It's only I mean, the

SPEAKER_98: next 911, God forbid, it's gonna be an autonomous drone. It's

Chamath Palihapitiya: gonna be an autonomous drone. So at some point, Al Qaeda will figure this out. Or, you know, Hamas, Hezbollah, whoever, China, and they're gonna start sending these things and killing innocents. And they're gonna start blowing up buildings like they did on 911. This is the new frontier. We got to be ready for it. So let's shoot them out of the sky before they kill our citizens. Great job. I'm a lucky come on the pod sometime. Come on the pod. I like Palmer. And the best part about this is the government realizes insane, crazy, vibrant entrepreneurs are better at building advanced tech that looks really cool and is effective. So give Elon the money, give Palmer lucky the money, give whoever it is the money to build spaceships, satellites, and let our private

SPEAKER_52: sector companies run. And let's win because it's existential. We have to beat the communists and the dictators in the world. Period.

SPEAKER_137: End of story. That's my feeling. I'm sticking to it. I don't know how you feel.

SPEAKER_01: I love it. I feel as clearly. Look, I'm a Gemini. There's two fully formed humans in here and they're in deep conflict right now. Because on the one hand, crazy entrepreneurs don't always care if you die in the process. And when you're starting to talk about rocket ships and moving vehicles that weigh three tons and autonomous drones, like you really hope that there's a lot of

Jason Calacanis: diligence on the government side. And let's be real, there's not. And on the other hand, everything you said.

SPEAKER_292: Exactly. All right. We'll see you next time. Bye bye. Bye.