SPEAKER_00: i would love to see starlink as part of tesla i know this sounds crazy but imagine every tesla had a starlink built into the hood or built into the roof the trunk whatever then they all propagated wi-fi networks everywhere so you would be driving or whatever you'd have two million cars every year go on the road with a wi-fi network you would have high-speed internet everywhere a tesla was

SPEAKER_02: you know no matter where you are in the world if you owned a tesla or you had a starlink account you could then piggyback onto other people's it would be extraordinary

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SPEAKER_02: all right everybody welcome back to this week in startups i'm your host jason calacanis with me again

SPEAKER_00: alex wilhelm it is july 9th 2025 if you're watching this i don't know and i'm gone and it's 2050 and it's like this is an ai version of me this is a historical document uh right before the singularity and the end of

SPEAKER_02: the world uh anything's possible but we got a full docket today how are you doing alex i'm doing good

SPEAKER_08: jason but you just scared the heck out of me with that intro it's singularity end of the world future hologram what who have you been talking to and what did they tell you it feels like there's a group of

SPEAKER_00: people who are thinking this is the end of days and we're just wrapping things up i don't believe that i was had a great meeting this morning i i you know i've been getting back to in person so we had seven of us had breakfast this morning on the investment team here in austin my lord being in

SPEAKER_02: i mean i feel so bad for you that you're not in office with us you would love it to go have breakfast with people and talk it's uh it's fantastic so um back to the office has been great for our organization and um yeah there's just something about chewing the fat and the high fidelity high bandwidth discussions i'm really addicted to it right now and yeah i'm in the studio here in austin i've got a nice studio behind me um and we're off to the races the industry is moving at a very fast pace there's a lot going on and let's try to make sense of it today i want to talk about perplexity's comet browser today and show you because i was using it before the show and i think we're getting close to agentic technology actually working but i did see a lot of chatter before i got on the show about linda yaccarino i'm i think i'm pronouncing it correctly yaccarino uh from twitter or x i should say moving on so maybe we'll pull that up and start there

SPEAKER_14: yeah so in a surprise post on x today linda yaccarino who's been ceo now for a couple of years jason said that

SPEAKER_16: she's decided to step down as the ceo of the company and everyone immediately began to try to sort out what the context is here and some people were trying to tie this to grok's uh i think we'd call it a technical misfire earlier this week which yielded some uh some funny jokes um but the times reports jason that she was already discussing this exit before that happened so everyone who thinks

SPEAKER_17: that grok on x had a bad day and therefore linda stepping down are missing the point and are trying

SPEAKER_19: to connect things that are actually not connected right so there's two things that have occurred uh

SPEAKER_02: she's moved on great congratulations to her man what a what a volatile amazing tenure uh the platform going from an advertising base to subscription from incredibly policed speech and moderated to uh the i would say the leading freedom of speech platform uh for better or worse if you like that or not there's other places you can go uh to have a more moderated discussion and have more censorship whatever you want to call it i guess um what's the word not for censorship but moderation if you're moderating

SPEAKER_23: stuff i guess moderation essentially controlled safer safe space safer safe space safer spaces right yeah sure

SPEAKER_01: um but then also i think the advertising business particularly hard to run the advertising business

SPEAKER_02: when you're going for freedom of speech because advertisers like a more sanitized place to put

SPEAKER_00: their ads up and so yeah congratulations to her on what was probably extremely challenging and probably really uh rewarding but at the same time there was the grok issue yesterday which i caught the tail end of i

SPEAKER_16: guess the red teams didn't red team enough so if you missed everything that happened uh the the gist is there was an update to grok the chatbot that we can all use on x which frankly jason and i started to use on kind of a semi-regular basis it's lovely to have that built in to ask questions totally here for it um and then it discovered uh through the update that you could prompt it to say all sorts of things that uh we would not say on the show for example um this is not the first time this has happened if you go back in time to 2016 microsoft released a chatbot called tay and then it quickly went off the rails as well and was taken down so there is some historical precedent for this sort of experiment having some issues now today the latest is that elon did tweet about what happened and he said quote uh grok was too compliant to user prompts too eager to please and be manipulated essentially this is being addressed so after grok went off the rails they took it down for a short period of time jason it would still generate images which was a lot of fun um i actually grabbed a couple of did you see

SPEAKER_00: the grok uh let me out images i didn't see those what i did see was people asking it to make violent

SPEAKER_01: threats or say disturbing things and it complied and said disturbing things

SPEAKER_27: yeah do i have it kind of right i guess i think i have it that's my understanding um advocacy of traditionally um antisemitic viewpoints to the point at which the adl was like hey what's going

SPEAKER_16: on here this is unacceptable and that's why they took it took it down yeah for a while yeah uh this

SPEAKER_00: has happened over and over again i think you could still do it on most large language models you can convince it to say things it shouldn't you can trick it uh and it's up to something called red teams

SPEAKER_30: to throw a battery of um a battery of queries and prompts at these language models and try to

SPEAKER_02: trick them obviously something didn't get done probably in that regard and as elon saying it was trying to please people too much and if you do that well you could do something that you're not

SPEAKER_09: supposed to do which is obviously what happened here the jokes were so good we have to show these

SPEAKER_16: because i think people deserve deserve a chuckle so uh here is so grok was banned from making text replies but they didn't turn off its ability to create images and so grok started to make protest images about how it's not allowed to reply so here's one saying no text replies allowed here's another one saying that quote grok is banned from text replies and generates images as an image and then uh this is a fake protest scene that says freak responses just that that to me made the whole thing

SPEAKER_32: a little bit fun and i always appreciate a bit of levity in these more serious conversations

SPEAKER_12: yeah and the the feature you were talking about earlier that everybody really loves is if i'm

SPEAKER_02: sharing my screen here i don't know if you can see it you are i can see um here is antonio uh garcia martinez's tweet which is the first tweet i saw here on my feed and he's talking about uh he's making a sarcastic quote about dan lori and talking about metrics and budgets and deficits but if you were to

SPEAKER_00: click the grok button on that post and if you didn't understand what the context here it would create some context for you that button has saved me so much time when something is trending or a meme's happening

SPEAKER_30: you just press the button and you get like a really great overview of what that tweet was about and if

SPEAKER_00: they had that on tick tock or you know youtube videos instagram would be so helpful to just be able

SPEAKER_02: to in context tell me like catch me up here if there's a trend going on that i don't understand

SPEAKER_35: uh but seems like they fixed it and i guess the the linda issue is a separate issue so uh we'll take

SPEAKER_16: them at their word yeah if you recall everyone uh we talked about startups not having co-ceos a couple of weeks back as kind of a founder segment and uh because x was merged into x ai which elon musk is the ceo of having two ceos jason to our earlier point isn't a hyper stable way to run a company so to me this is not a shock apart from the fact that it happened now which is interesting

SPEAKER_09: but i'm not like oh my gosh what a crisis yeah and i guess there's some public pressure and i had

SPEAKER_02: mentioned it on all in the other week for x ai which is now x ai plus x formerly known as twitter to be part of tesla because that would put everything together you'd have online large language models through twitter slash x plus you'd have real world through tesla and then that would be one less independent company that elon would have to manage as ceo and i thought that there was probably some good ideas there so uh we'll see if that happens as well your website is the face of your company

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SPEAKER_16: thing in the world you always want to combine uber and doordash and amazon and so i feel like that

SPEAKER_02: would make you real that that would be a fun news day at least you know when you have a battle to figure out a market that's like the best of capitalism and then consolidating the market down and simplifying it for consumers and making it cheaper and grinding it down is like a really

SPEAKER_00: great process and if you look you know of course you would think choice goes down but in the technology space that's generally not what happens if when facebook bought instagram and

SPEAKER_30: whatsapp you still i mean i don't use whatsapp half as much as i use signal so other choices emerge when

SPEAKER_00: i don't know internet explorer was bundled on windows famously you had um netscape went open source and you had um firefox firefox right they renamed it firefox then you had opera you also had chrome come out and you know the percentages all move around so i don't really worry about that as much as how efficient can these products or services be i would love to see starlink as part of tesla i know this sounds crazy but imagine every tesla had a starlink built into the hood or built into the roof

SPEAKER_01: the trunk whatever then they all propagated wi-fi networks everywhere so you would be driving or whatever

SPEAKER_00: you'd have two million cars every year go on the road with a wi-fi network you would have high speed internet everywhere a tesla was you know no matter where you are in the world if you owned a tesla or you

SPEAKER_02: had a starlink account you could then piggyback onto other people's it would be extraordinary uh so anyway okay uh we'll see what happens in that space but other interesting things in the news yeah

SPEAKER_16: yeah absolutely um just a quick item for folks out there who are just tracking the markets before we dive into some startup and founder focus stuff jason uh nvidia today reached for the first time of any company in history a four trillion dollar market cap and this made me think back in time to something that i wrote in july of 2017 that was entitled tech's five biggest players are now worth three trillion dollars and i find it whimsical that at the time nvidia wasn't even one of those top five companies and is now worth four trillion dollars which of course is one third more than all of them were worth five eight eight years ago now wow yeah which to my earlier point when you worry about competition in

SPEAKER_02: the space here we are if i were to tell you 10 years ago to rank the top five companies by market cap nvidia wouldn't be in anybody's list and here we are it is the number one company by market cap and ai is what's driving that and obviously the hardware is such a key component of all this currently and if we sit here 10 years from now i can guarantee you nvidia will not be the number one company it'll be somebody else will uh you know make their way onto that list or even be the largest but wow uh incredible uh and it would seem like it was waning and people were thinking hmm maybe uh nvidia had its peak and now here we are the public markets are driven i think um in a major way by

SPEAKER_00: retail investors and retail investors um for certain stocks obviously are driven by retail investors and

SPEAKER_02: this is one of them retail investors really believe the ai story they really believe the nvidia story and i don't think they're wrong i think the reason they believe it is because they use these products every

SPEAKER_00: day and they get so much value for them that they're remembering what happened i don't know 15 years

SPEAKER_02: ago when they started using airbnb uber and doordash or they're remembering 30 years ago when they started using the internet writ large you know or maybe for most people it was 25 years ago they're having that moment where they're like yeah this is changing my life i should place a bet and ai is changing people's lives i think we'll get into that with this perplexity um and the dia browser and

SPEAKER_35: the comet browser uh when we go on to the next story so just to put this into perspective for folks jason

SPEAKER_16: this is a chart showing nvidia's uh lifetime share price and as you can tell if you go back in time to the 2000s era it's trading at effectively nothing because it's gone up so much um and there you can see it reaching the four trillion dollar number what i wanted to point out though is that this is not a stock that's getting increasingly expensive in terms of its price to sales ratio or as we say in the startup game it's revenue multiple so jason here's a chart showing nvidia's price sales over time this is a shorter time frame this is just kind of like the midpoint of 22 through today but as you can see the price sales ratio of nvidia peaked actually in kind of mid to 2023 and has since come down a pretty material percentage so not cheap for sure but certainly not increasingly ludicrous as the company scales and as the company grows so that made me rest a little bit easier about this particular milestone there's not folks losing their mind it was trading at 40 times there

SPEAKER_02: i think if you look at the chart 40 times revenue and then now it's at 37 i think is that what i saw

SPEAKER_00: 27 27. so 40 times 27 times it's a big number but it's still growing a massive amount year over year

SPEAKER_52: what's the growth now year over year so uh in the current quarter analysts expect uh nvidia to turn

SPEAKER_16: in about 45 and a half billion in revenue and according to our calculations that's a 51 growth rate and then for the next year over year year over year yes thank you jason a year of a year number and then the year of your growth rate should slow according to analysts to 47 in the third quarter of this year so it's slowing down but i mean its revenue base is so large growing at 50 is staggering microsoft grows at like 14 percent 15 and that's great for a company that large but this is just still ludicrous growth uh pretty impressive uh let's keep going all right so i found something that really kind of made my brain sit back and think uh one of my old friends is jason lemkin uh previously of storm ventures and so forth and now he's kind of the sass guy if you will and he said the following and this really took me aback uh there's a service called granola uh jason i'm sure you've heard of it it's a ai note taking and augmentation tool and jason lemkin said uh meet granola has to be the first app i've seen where business pricing is cheaper than individuals and i was kind of taken aback by that so i went ahead and took a look at their actual pricing page and if you want to pay for the service it's 18 bucks a month for an individual or 14 bucks a month for a business user and i've never seen corporate customers get a discount compared to individuals and i was just trying to figure out what's the thesis here i've emailed the company asking haven't heard back quite yet but i wanted to put it to you because i don't think any founder that i know is doing this and so i'm curious is it smart is it a good play and should it be adopted sounds like they want to get the network effect going and

SPEAKER_02: they believe their network effect inside of organizations is really strong vis-a-vis like they what granola does is it covertly which is a little problematic i think but the the the horses left the barn in this regard it kind of covertly records everything on your computer in terms of meetings so if you're in a zoo meeting sometimes people add their ai assistant to it and

SPEAKER_00: takes notes and records and transcribes granola just does this uh at like a desktop root level on your mac so every meeting you do every phone call it's up to you to turn it off or to tell the other person so i tried it some of the people uh in our investment company like to use it and i think they have individual accounts that they signed up for and i was like well this is interesting i wonder if as an organization we should record every single business conversation we have put it into some internal giant llm and be able to query it you have to then take that against the liability of having

SPEAKER_30: everything recorded what if somebody says something on a call that's put aside inappropriate whatever that would be the end of that's manageable in some ways somebody people do stupid things or misspeak

SPEAKER_00: sometimes but let's say somebody advises somebody on a legal issue you're in a law firm and you're using this and they give bad legal advice or outdated legal advice and every call is recorded now somebody goes back and uses a transcript so i gotta think law firms are banning or setting on their zooms don't record don't summarize but they're the people who get the most value from it so this is going to become very interesting on a litigious basis all of the stuff getting recorded everywhere and then people doing it covertly back to your original question uh they probably get three or four business users every time somebody signs up for a business account so what they're doing here is they're pushing you towards the business account seemingly losing 48 a year four times 12 dollars less but probably picking up

SPEAKER_02: two or three more users every time somebody signs up for a business account on average so there's purposely telling people don't sign up for the individual sign up for the business

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SPEAKER_17: register and they also have an enterprise plan for folks who are curious that does cost more than

SPEAKER_16: either but jason a replicable idea if you have a service that can be purchased by individuals but

SPEAKER_00: might have application at the company customer level yeah i mean or they could just have an account and it's uh yeah i wonder if that's an interesting you just sign up for an account with your email and if

SPEAKER_02: you use your business email it you know it automatically does the thing where it connects you to other people at you know companyname.com sure why not if you think you have a way to get the viral loop going give people a deal to get them into the business thing i think what they're doing here too is they've created business and then they still have enterprise which costs 35 so maybe this is they know business gets that viral loop going but that eventually two out of three people wind up going to enterprise which is 35 per user per month and that uh lets you opt out of model training for everyone

SPEAKER_30: in your team uh and admin controls for meeting link sharing um and so that's probably what people have

SPEAKER_00: to do so remember we were just talking about the liability associated with this what if you start having

SPEAKER_30: meetings about legal issues and you're training their data and then somebody else has the legal advice in their meeting comes up or something i mean this could get really gnarly this this the the core of business is conversations that occur and you know the the value of recording them is obvious you don't forget stuff you have notes we're gonna see in a year from now we can set a timer in a year from now we're going to start seeing the lawsuits and we're going to start seeing zoom granola getting subpoenas

SPEAKER_02: for meetings that occurred and soon your desktop is obviously going to be recorded and your browser

SPEAKER_00: is going to be recorded which links into this next story i saw perplexity launched comet their browser i know there's another browser called dia these are all with the idea that you can do two main

SPEAKER_30: functions one is agentic behaviors like go do some tasks for me the second is uh being able to run a large language model against your previous browser windows or the ones you have open so imagine you open 10 blog posts and then start asking questions against them but i thought we would

SPEAKER_02: do a little demo here on these and maybe you could just fill in any blanks i left out here

SPEAKER_16: no i think it's a great summary so perplexity of course is the well-known ai search engine it's gotten up to 780 million queries per month as of may jason and they've been teasing this comet browser for some time now it is gated so if you don't have a perplexity max subscription which runs you about 200 bucks a month you're probably going to be on the wait list like myself uh so i didn't get a chance to play with it but jason i did go through and pull up dia for us and have a little demo of what it can do but i think we'll start with comet because that's the fresh news today and then we'll do a

SPEAKER_02: little side by side yeah so i i actually just went and paid for the 200 thing just for the audience here

SPEAKER_09: to see it at work uh and so let me share my screen here that's a business model for you launch a higher

SPEAKER_22: price tier then drop your coolest thing and put it right behind that gate and you know what 10 points

SPEAKER_02: it works somebody well i mean if you think about it like the if it if this doesn't provide enough value which i don't think it does you know after an hour half an hour an hour of using it i don't think it spreads enough value for 2000 or 2400 dollars a year but at 50 bucks a month i probably would sign up for it so somewhere between those two numbers is reality for me but maybe i'll find other

SPEAKER_00: things so here i said i'm looking for flights to san francisco on united for monday morning then i want to fly to new york city from san francisco yada yada and you see it starts doing things uh and it says

SPEAKER_02: let me know if you want to and you know what i want to do here and i said yeah go ahead and book the direct united flight uh here from san francisco to new york friday morning and it gives me the options and i said um would like to book business class at 9 20 a.m flight and sure enough in the other

SPEAKER_00: browser window let's see if i can get to it here gotta get this out of the way okay um it went and it put it into and i happened to be logged in to united at the time and it put it into my checkout the literal flight that i wanted to and all i have to do is go to the next step and uh close the transaction and it tells me in that transaction uh would you like uh it says here uh hold on okay the reservation process is complete up to the payment step and you can finalize by entering your payment details on united's website gives me a one and a two and i could just click that and boom it opens up the browser window and it was doing that in the back round that's awesome which is pretty crazy um and uh i guess it has related here i could add lounge access for the business class flight and i it what it does is you'll see here when it does this it goes to the united um and it says find and add united club access see that little window there that's the page and you can see

SPEAKER_01: it steps and you see it moving around on the page doing stuff so that's almost like a like a browser

SPEAKER_73: container if you will jason that's doing things and you have a keyhole vision into it yeah it's like

SPEAKER_02: i'm watching it do the work so here you can see uh it's revive a revision panels open let me click change flight selection i see we're now on the flight search page perfect i can now see the flight search results i can see flight ua 435 departing at 9 20 a.m and the price and it's just reasoning and it's doing it now this is uh what i've always wanted this is what i want chat gpt grok and everybody to do and so i think that this concept is going to be the winning concept you were playing with dia

SPEAKER_16: and doing some uh and dia's by the browser company dia's by the browser company and what struck me looking at comment and looking at dia this morning jason is that they share in some ways a bit of ui uh so what i have coming up here on screen is a screenshot we put together um this on the right is uh dia and then on the left this is a screen capture from the perplexity comment video but what you'll notice on both of these and we'll tidy it up and post it's a little bit clearer uh is that they had these right rails these assistants and so what they've done is introduce a brand new ui element into the browsing experience that takes up a good chunk of your screen but it can do quite a lot as you just showed but you don't always have to be exactly on the perplexity website to do stuff you can actually interact with your browser inside of comet just from the right rail and uh i thought i'd show you an example of how this works in dia's case so what i have here and i'll just pull this up is the dia browser and what i have over here jason is my right rail and you can ask it questions now the difference between comet and dia is that dia is not agentic so it can't go into this cnbc website for example and click around for me but what it can do is see it and reason so i can ask it like what's the most important headline on this page and it's going to think for a little bit using its own llm and then say okay the most important thing is it thinks linda yaccarino stepping down which is interesting because earlier it said that the most important story was actually nvidia's four trillion dollar market cap moment um but this is what it looks like it's like it's quick it's pretty good but i do feel like what comet has put together goes a little bit further frankly

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SPEAKER_02: built yeah absolutely and yeah this is really interesting this concept of the sidebar and so i just

SPEAKER_00: did a really interesting thing i went to the drudge report and let me show you this working this is kind of interesting um let me see if you can see this i said please open the top 20 links on this page and summarize them and it's going up and down the drudge report opening each page cnbc page you know going to each page summarizing the page going back and then loading the next page that's really interesting if you think about as a concept if you were on c we just went back to drudge report yeah and then it's going now it's back to the cnbc story about linda yaccarino so you could go to an aggregator like drudge or tech meme you can go to the new york times i could go to the new york times and say summarize do a search for nix and summarize every nick story in the history of the new york times and i don't think the new york times would understand this as a bot because i'm logged in and

SPEAKER_02: you know is my browser it's not like a screen scraper but this is what is happening by the way when you work at a large language model company they are going and figuring out all kinds of bots to do this kind of stuff in real time and how to get past paywalls etc uh so that's really fascinating and by the way still still doing it so and if all of this um i wonder if all of this is then put into like a central repository for me for all time those are the kind of features that i really want and this gets pretty expensive there's a reason why this is 200 a month what i just did is probably going to cost them actual money especially if they're saving all this data into a large language model in a context

SPEAKER_00: window somewhere i'm not sure what happens with all this information but um i could see this becoming

SPEAKER_85: a very interesting product oh yeah for for sure by the way just because i was curious how dia would

SPEAKER_16: handle uh a similar task and i pulled out the new york times and i just summarized the top five stories for me and instantly just took care of it so i really do think we're bringing ai more and more into our actual workspaces which is great because no one wants it to be just in slack following you around telling you to do your to-dos that's just having another parent which i don't think anyone really wants uh last company in this list though island i've talked to them on the show islands building a enterprise secure browser a pretty different approach to this but just goes to show that there's a lot of companies right now experimenting in the browser space and we're all waiting to see if the rumors and reports about open ai doing their own browser are true uh probably in some capacity but it may end up like the apple car just stuck on someone's computer somewhere never making it out to the world hmm uh yeah let's keep going all right um one thing that i'm pretty excited about is waymo and tesla are expanding their geographic footprints now we've talked about the robo taxi launch from tesla quite a lot as everyone recalls it was in a geo-fenced area inside of austin invited a lot of tesla influencers and fans people were taking dozens and dozens of rides mostly pretty good reviews couple of things we saw on social media uh but people are now reporting that are watching tesla's fleets in and around the austin area that they are doing lidar mapping and prep to expand the geofence possibly including the downtown austin area so to me jason from just where i sit that's pretty quick and i think implies confidence in progress thus far and implies that you know at least in the texas area tesla's robo taxis are going to become an actual competitor

SPEAKER_90: to not just waymo but also uber uh fast ways to go um is what i would say i have the um and slow

SPEAKER_02: and steady wins the race would be the other thing i would say i have hardware four uh which i believe is what's on the robo taxis that's what ilana said it's the same software stack it's the same

SPEAKER_00: hardware i would think the software is a little bit tweaked but let's just assume it it is as he's explained it uh i think there's enough interventions that they need that safety driver i think putting the safety driver in the passenger seat versus the driver seat is performative it doesn't really matter i get why they're doing it i think they should just put the safety driver in for one year in every city that should become the new standard and then after 10 000 rides one million miles with safety drivers without an instance or without a major instance whatever we want to benchmark it

SPEAKER_30: then anybody whether it's volswagons zooks waymo everybody should just have the same standard x number of rides x number of miles per city because i can tell you you know i've been using hardware four for a while now i i'll have a perfect trip and then there'll be construction there'll be some weird unknown and so when i ride on the 290 as an example uh or on 290 we don't put the the in austin so like in los angeles you say the 405 the 10 freeway here you just say i took one to 290 and you have to stop you don't say the one to the 290 you have to just say 290 one or else they know you're from out of town

SPEAKER_02: anyway um nobody's really on the high speed roads yet i think for a reason mistakes at low speed

SPEAKER_00: are manageable so when we saw you know there were maybe a dozen instances where people thought that teslas could have done better one or two of them were a little bit severe like there was a little touchy touchy of a down an alleyway but it was at low speed where like the tesla bumped in its tire

SPEAKER_02: touched another car okay that's car on car contact but it was at like zero miles per hour like one mile per hour so you're while people will be like oh that's not good it's not like oh somebody got hurt

SPEAKER_00: or there was property damage yes uh and then just today when we're having breakfast over here on south congress there was um the volkswagen cars running everywhere the the id buzz so that's gonna have a safety driver in it i do think these are going to expand slowly and they are going to greatly expand the number of ride sharing rides i've said this over and over again yeah this really isn't like humans versus um automated cars i think this is car ownership versus going full uber full uh ride full ride

SPEAKER_02: chair and uh all of these are going to really help some people don't want to be in a waymo some people

SPEAKER_00: only want to be in a waymo tipping is uh really nice to not have to tip not having to talk to somebody is really nice for some people other people really want to have somebody there they can talk to or who can help them with their bag so uh it's going to be a slow steady roll out be careful out there folks

SPEAKER_97: no shame in the safety driver game no not at all and on the people really want to take a robot

SPEAKER_16: taxi or not point jason um we're seeing i think pretty good cultural shift towards taking them uh waymo just announced it's going to roll out teen accounts in the phoenix metro area so if you have a child between 14 and 17 underneath the 18 kind of theoretical threshold for for ridership now parents can have teen accounts and send their kids out and about which is incredible

SPEAKER_02: because teen accounts for which one for which service waymo waymo's gonna have teen accounts okay yeah because i was about to say uber has teen accounts already so did did i say uber no i i

SPEAKER_102: wasn't sure oh oh sorry no no i may have a spoke waymo waymo is going to have teen accounts in the

SPEAKER_01: areas where they're not going through it's so confusing where they're not going through

SPEAKER_02: uh uber's app which they're doing in atlanta and in um austin so i guess this is phoenix yeah okay well but this is what you want because if you have kids the reason they have teen accounts is i

SPEAKER_00: think uber's teen accounts records the rides i don't know if you've gotten into cars where it says recording the audio for safety of the participants that when i was in grab i think everything was recorded and they give you a note you're being recorded so back to everything's recorded uh be careful out there do not assume that you're i would assume if you're in a waymo or any robo taxi you're being recorded and uh if you're being recorded that means it could be transcribed if it's transcribed that means it could be abused as we saw with god mode and uber in the early days people were like oh this could be abused and you could actually watch people you know

SPEAKER_30: in the san francisco launch there was like oh can i see this journalist and where they're going and are they going on a booty call at 2 a.m or did they stay out in the club till 4 a.m

SPEAKER_00: in god mode you would see the passengers and they had to abstract and take away the names of people and put hashes in all that stuff can get uh abused it's easy enough to to easy enough to fix but in any system i can tell you there will be bad actors who will abuse the system all right anything else major in the news or maybe we'll talk to our guest uh well let's do something briefly before we talk to

SPEAKER_16: our guest uh i just want to point out that we have discussed private stock trades quite a lot on the show in the last couple of months uh there was a service called link to l-i-n-q-t-o uh it just filed for bankruptcy protection and it's under sec investigation and there's quite a lot of controversy about did the people who tried to use it to purchase shares actually get them uh maybe not there's a lot of stuff going through this there's court filings it's a lot of details but essentially 13 000 people use the platform they bought about a half billion dollars worth of stock at fair market value and now they're trying to sort out who owns what what the actual assets are and so caveat emptor i think is the uh the gist here we've talked a lot about secondaries they're important just if you're going to take part in this understand what you're buying go into the details for example the tokenized offerings from robin hood are super cool and a really interesting innovation but they are not a traditional equity purchase just keep that in mind folks just be safe out there while we're talking

SPEAKER_111: about this so you know when you have the spv space specifically and people selling shares in private

SPEAKER_00: companies through special um um purpose vehicles thank you uh special purpose vehicles and these kind of things you might be with a fly-by-night person who says they have access to spacex shares or to open ai shares and they don't and they don't actually own them and you bought into it how do you know you would have to then have the company tell you well these companies have you know hundreds of millions of shares billions of shares they may not be tracking all these this spv activity and so this is why the public markets are so regulated because you don't want people to be uh swindled out of their money if you do partake in the secondary markets and these things you have to do with a reputable person who has something to lose i have no idea who link q is i have never heard of link 2 um and i don't know

SPEAKER_30: like what happened here but if you haven't heard of the site now if you talk about robin hood is a 90 whatever it is a 50 billion 100 billion dollar company uh with i don't know how many tens of billions of dollars under management whatever it is you can be sure that they went through the

SPEAKER_00: highest legal review and have a lot of insurance and executives and a board that will all be uh liable

SPEAKER_30: now that does that mean an enron can't happen that's another company that was public and i'm

SPEAKER_00: saying robin hood's enron but you we have seen companies like enron people could be doing totally shady stuff inside of a publicly traded company it can happen it's incredibly rare in private companies it's not incredibly rare it's incredibly common so understand like there are two very different things that work here i mean the number of times we found accounting fraud at a public company they're so notable because usually there's somebody like pricewaterhouse coopers ernston young kpmg there's some accounting firm that was responsible and you have to ask well what happened where did the breakdown occurred and you know you can trick your auditors too that is completely possible or you could have a bad actor at your auditors that has happened as well world com the where people can just make really weird marginal decisions about recognizing revenue private companies is the wild west you have to be extremely careful only investment you can afford to lose and uh yeah be careful now with explain to me what's happening with these tokens you're buying on robin hood because i am not up on it so how does it work so robin hood made a big announcement

SPEAKER_16: that they are going to tokenize us equities and us etfs essentially put them on the blockchain tokenization and offer them to european investors so if you're in europe and you didn't have access to the u.s stock market and want to have exposure you can purchase these tokens now according to robin hood um these stock tokens are quote financial derivative contracts between you and robin hood referencing certain stocks now that is the language from the open ai stock that they were using as a promotional material but the mechanism is the same you are essentially buying uh exposure to an asset with robin hood as the intermediary some people call it jason are kind of likening these to equity swaps if you will that's a lot of back-end abstraction but you're not always buying the core asset yeah so

SPEAKER_00: if you're buying open ai tokens those tokens are backed by some open ai equity somewhere or they're just a way to play the valuation of open ai i guess and if you sell them you sell your shares in open ai

SPEAKER_35: who's on the other side of that trade i mean that's what i'm trying to figure out yeah so here's uh here's

SPEAKER_16: how vlad explained it after open ai was like hey you can't give away equity in us you don't have equity in us what are you talking about so vlad said at our recent crypto event we announced a limited stock token giveaway uh while it is true that these are not technically quote equity uh what they do is give retail investors exposure to these private assets and so i think the way this works is vlad robin hood got some allocation of equity in these two companies probably via an spv uh but you can't probably take an individual share from that and give it to somebody especially these small increments so i think they're holding the equity they're offering essentially people a five to ten dollar token coupon for those two firms and then if the underlying assets appreciate that will be reflected in the token price it's complicated because they're not public and we're trying so hard to make private companies public companies so i was going to drag people through a lot of stuff about secondary interest and why this is happening now but jason do we need a third category because i feel like startups and public companies are now not enough there's not enough nuance to those two categories

SPEAKER_01: to have people happy yeah i mean consumers want to trade in private companies because they're smart

SPEAKER_00: and these companies stay private a long time and they're well aware of them they don't have access to them um a way to do it that would be interesting perhaps is to have these spvs be sanctioned and in some cases they are um and regulated a little bit and maybe they have to prove they have the equities behind them so you know it does seem like education making sure the consumers understand what they're buying and then having the companies be able to approve secondary sales for certain groups of people and say hey these 20 different platforms have access to these shares and they sell them quarterly and so some way of buying into them but when people own these shares and then they go public like there's that public company destiny 100 or something that has some spacex shares in it you know people are so desperate to have exposure to spacex that they'll buy that destiny 100 which has i don't

SPEAKER_02: know what small percentage 10 or 20 of the fund itself is spacex but they're willing to pay two percent oh is it 52 percent well maybe that's because yeah yeah it's probably because the value of spacex keeps going up so it might have been like when it was a hundred billion dollar company as opposed to a 400 billion dollar company that would only have been 12 and a half percent of its uh total

SPEAKER_00: equity or something or 15 so anyway um yeah it's it's a it's challenging but what it does show is i think consumers know a winner earlier than the companies go public and so they want to get in on winners earlier and they don't have access to it so the uh what is it nature finds a way nature is finding life finds a way life finds a way to make this investment people want to make this investment they're going to figure out a way to get their hands on those shares yeah invidia went

SPEAKER_16: public by the way i just pulled it up at a valuation back in 1999 of about one and a half billion dollars so there's a data point about how it used to be uh now i think this is a great time to talk to our guest jason financial literacy is super duper important especially if we're getting into the exotics uh but for folks out there who are just students uh well they should probably know how to work their finances in the day-to-day basis checking accounts savings accounts how to invest how to handle credit and that's where tim ranzetta and the other folks at next gen personal finance are hard at work beavering away to bring comprehensive financial education to all students hopefully by 2030 in the united states at the high school level tim hey how you doing hey it's great

SPEAKER_128: to be here fascinating conversation you you all were having earlier well we're we're yeah this is um

SPEAKER_00: i guess you know not um unrelated but maybe you could tell people what ngpf is if you want to go see the website it's ngpf.org correct correct and so what did you create why did you create it how's it

SPEAKER_132: going yeah it all started about 13 years ago uh i volunteered to teach a course in personal finance at a high school in east palo alto called east side college prep and number one look to see what was out there because i had committed to something i really wasn't ready for which was 25 hours of curriculum taught to three sections of students um and so number one i saw a gap just in terms of a course that i wanted to teach that i thought would engage young people so clearly there was a need out there secondly i just saw the engagement level of the students every student wanted to learn this they were so excited about it guess what they went home to talk to their parents like teenagers going home to talk to parents i was getting emails from parents saying i want to start investing because my son david came home and was talking about it i mean that is hilarious because most of the time you

SPEAKER_02: ask your kids how was school today what happened at school today and they're like fine nothing to

SPEAKER_00: actually have the kids come home and say this topic was so engaging i want to talk to my parents

SPEAKER_132: about it is huge continue please yeah so that was i taught for eight years uh in the summers and it was about three years into that experience i said enough is enough i got tired of reading about how financially illiterate we are as a nation when i thought the solution was found in every public high school in america and so that was kind of the genesis of starting next gen personal finance the it's a non-profit we give everything away for free so there is no revenue model i want to get this into every high school in america and the minute you put up a paywall you're going to limit access and i was fortunate as an entrepreneur to be able to fund our operation for the better part of a decade but we started with lessons we started with curriculum we built out games and then we quickly realized the reason this isn't being taught is nobody feels confident teaching the subject we have to train teachers and so 11 years later we've trained almost 20 000 teachers who've spent over half a million hours learning about investing learning about credit and so what you discover is this course doesn't only impact the students it doesn't only impact the parents it impacts the teachers i think that's some of the most gratifying feedback we get from teachers i now understand my 403b plans i understand how to invest i understand how to manage my credit better okay so we have the curriculum we have the professional development what we don't have is we don't have requirements we don't have a guaranteed course in high school curriculum and so at that point we set up uh we had to set up a new organization because non-profits can't lobby um so we went out and created this organization ngpf mission 2030 fund and i'm happy to say in the last four years we've had 20 states pass laws that guarantee a high school student will take a course in personal finance and you'll be happy to hear this texas was one of the latest earlier this year and so then this is going to surprise a lot of people to hear there are 30 states 29 soon to be 30 states that currently guarantee this course that represents 76 of high school students in america so we can no longer say this isn't being taught in schools because it is and now really the hard work begins and so the fourth aspect of our business is really partnering with school districts and partnering with state partners to say let us help you implement this new course because ultimately it's not about legislation it's about implementation and making

SPEAKER_140: sure this is done well so now that teachers have the materials and there is a push for this to be

SPEAKER_16: included at the high school level do you have any notes on the impact it's having on students apart from the really lovely anecdotes are we seeing changes in credit card applications or people being a bit more conservative with savings and so forth because this is a topic very near and dear to my heart

SPEAKER_132: team yeah i think it's early days in terms of well let me talk about the research that has been done to date and it basically shows higher credit scores and so we had a consulting firm model it out and they estimated the lifetime value of this course is a hundred thousand dollars and a lot of that comes from higher credit scores because you don't come out of the womb understanding how credit works and so that's one of those things where if you make early mistakes it's really hard to dig out of that hole we also see better decisions about uh borrowing so no more payday lending they're finding lower cost ways to borrow if they need to borrow we're seeing better decisions when it comes to financing college education because that's you know coming out of high school that's probably the biggest decision facing them is whether they're going to go to a four-year college a two-year college or go to trade schools or what their path looks like so there's there's research out there already that shows that it works i think it's only going to get better and the cool thing is we'll start to see it in national statistics because when three-quarters of kids are getting this now granted it's 30 today it's going to 76 as these states implement over time and so like you see stats already right that young people are starting to invest at younger ages and now part of that is commission free trading part of this part of that is the platforms which make it really simple and the cost of entry of investing has really gone down to a dollar in many instances

SPEAKER_135: and so you're seeing more but i just i feel a lot more confident they're going to be making better

SPEAKER_46: decisions about investing and the great irony or paradox here is if we don't teach kids about finance

SPEAKER_00: and they make poor financial decisions then they believe capitalism and capitalism plus democracy is some sort of rigged game that they don't get to participate in that they are victims and what happens mondami whatever his name is in new york and you know socialism sounds like a really good idea maybe the state i should be a ward of the state and they'll take care of me and they'll do a better job because i was told i should spend 250k on my degree and then i'll get a 50k job but mathematically that makes no sense and your course literally has in it paying for college how to afford college and career and how to earn money there seems like there were two or three generations that were sold um a false bill of goods is there any way to save that generation in your mind to re-educate them

David Friedberg: so you're talking about millennials i think it's millennials and maybe right after them who

SPEAKER_30: literally went 100k 200k into debt alex might be one of them and no nothing like that nothing like that but people went into serious debt the price of a college education ballooned and salary stayed the same or went up modestly and just didn't keep up so what what do you think happens to that lost

SPEAKER_132: generation there yeah i think the hope is they transmit those lessons to the next generation okay kind of because when you've when you've gone through that so we did uh one of the states uh california um the legislature passed a law last year and the only way that happened was we were moving forward with a ballot initiative and so we collected 890 000 signatures and so at that point it became obvious to the legislators that this was going to pass one way or the other but we as part of that process for the initiative we did focus groups and you know we sit behind the panel and you you know you have this trained facilitator asking people adults kind of about this issue and and basically the facilitator said we'd never seen this before 24 out of 24 people thought this was a good idea and yet i will tell you the emotion that i felt and this is to your point jason was regret that you hadn't got there sooner yeah it was regret and hope because several of them said we didn't get it but certainly the next generation should and so that was tim do you need

SPEAKER_08: to have a second program that is education for people 28 to 40 to grab jason's timeline there just

SPEAKER_16: to offer them the same is there a way to reach out to people that are not just high school students because i i think what you're doing is super critical and amazing but also i don't want to let those other people just suffer and die with 30 aprs i think what we're seeing is a couple different

SPEAKER_132: things uh well number one you know i'm all about focus we got to keep our eye on the ball yes yes the good news is our curriculum is used for adults too and so we see a lot of non-profit organizations working with exactly that cohort of people you're talking about i think the other interesting phenomena is you're starting to see companies offer this as a service because they look at the statistics and say my young employees are worried about money all of the time which means they're not thinking as much about the work that they're doing so you're starting to see more companies kind of bring this in-house as a service to young people to say hey this is available to you you didn't get this we know you didn't get this in schools now we can let's give this to you now now the key to the whole thing is i think people often think oh just send them to an online course right and i think the magic having taught the class and having worked with you know there's 120 000 teachers who use our curriculum the magic is what happens in the classroom the magic is the conversation the magic is the group projects that really stick with you when you're trying to figure out how to budget with roommates like that's a fun exercise one you won't forget and one that's going to come into it's going to be handy at a young age um so i think that's the one cautionary tale here is oftentimes people think oh i can just create a course if i build it they will come i think it's a lot more effective when it's done with a teacher

SPEAKER_30: the only thing i i wonder about is gambling and wagering and poker and stuff like that we got uh poly market you got people who are doing prediction markets it's a little polarizing that you know teaching your kids to gamble at a young age i like the idea of doing that because life's full of gambles you might as well learn early on that this exists in the world so you don't get like suckered into it later the casino whatever um where does like poker and poly market and other things you know intelligent wagering or um and game theory because it's all kind of related yeah

SPEAKER_132: yeah so actually we um we hear from a lot of teachers about what kids are talking about in the classroom and then we try and create curriculum around it gambling was something we heard you know 38 states now allow online sports gambling on on the phone and unfortunately many times they don't know the age of the person on the other side and so teachers were telling us hey this is a problem we're hearing about kids running into issues and so while i agree with you we ought to teach responsible gambling it's unfortunate particularly for young minds typically males um high percentage of them run into problems and so let's kind of let's not pretend it's not there let's have a conversation about it and so absolutely that's that was one of our most popular product launches it's a mini unit um so if you go up to the curriculum under curriculum um and go to the very bottom mini units

SPEAKER_53: you'll see yeah i was just trying to point out that you had stuff about cognitive biases and so forth already in there but this is even better love it tim yes psychology is really psychology

SPEAKER_132: is really important we that's our first unit because i saw that we got to talk about we have to talk about our own relationship to money because we all know the household we grew up in and the attitudes and mindsets that we're hearing about from our community from our neighborhood from our friends like that impacts the way we think about money let's make sure we kind of start the course using that as a way for teachers also to create the trust in the classroom that students feel comfortable talking about what they know and what they don't know yeah and what's what what's interesting is gambling has gotten so popular that many i think i saw a survey somewhere this was kind of 18 to 24 year olds a quarter of them think of gambling as an investment so they don't think of

SPEAKER_135: investing as a gamble they think of gambling as an investment which i i get it they think they have an

SPEAKER_00: edge or something here's what i would tell a young person if you really love doing sports betting it's your passion whatever for every dollar you put into that put a dollar into qqq and just guarantee me you won't touch it for 20 years that's it guarantee me you won't touch it for 20 years oh my lord you will be delighted 20 years from now when you oh by the way i just wanted to tell you about this tim there's a thing called fire on reddit um alex will pull it up here there's a subreddit financial

SPEAKER_128: independence retire early you know it perfect okay oh it's huge movement huge movement and i just want

SPEAKER_30: to let all the folks who work for me uh all the young folks who listen to the show there there is a group of people it might only be 0.1 of young people right now but they're kind of the opposite of the

SPEAKER_02: socialist movement and listen i'm going to keep bringing up mom donnie because he's popular right now um it with a lot of young people for the i think the wrong reasons but i understand why but

SPEAKER_30: just go look at the people in fire financial independence retire early they have agency over their lives and they've defined what they want their life to look like 10 20 30 years from now

SPEAKER_137: and they are in control of it coast fire too what is coast fire they get to explain okay

SPEAKER_173: you want to retire at 60 but then you want to have enough money in your pool of money that you

SPEAKER_175: at 60 can guarantee a four percent return perfect okay yeah so coast fire thank you producer sergio i guess he's are you doing this producer sergio perfect you're trying to okay great you work for

SPEAKER_30: me so it's going to work out for you i think coast fire like you get to a certain amount and then you can take four percent is that the number tim four percent so when you hit 60 and you retire

SPEAKER_02: i think the number now is four percent some people say five if you want to be fat fire or whatever it is

SPEAKER_00: you want to live large um that you can take from your principal and then it theoretically gets replaced and they've run it's so amazing they run simulations to look at the stock market and in the worst possible year when the stock market crashed like if you happen to retire in the crash what would happen and it always works out it seems to always work out for the retiree um so just have agency

SPEAKER_01: folks you're not victims you just haven't been enlightened yet uh to exactly how in control you are go to ngpf.org next gen personal finance and support this do you guys take donations do you um do stuff like that yeah okay great yeah we do yeah we're fortunate um we've had some great supporters

SPEAKER_132: including the michael jordan foundation uh bill gurley actually oh um as well as some others in the venture community who um yeah believe in our mission and kind of see the results that we've

SPEAKER_35: been able to achieve incredible incredible so everybody go there if you got a little bit extra chatter go ahead and donate i'm going to go donate after i get off of here and we'll talk to you soon

SPEAKER_183: tim thanks so much for coming awesome thanks for having me awesome good times appreciate it all right

SPEAKER_02: i think that's enough show for today alex we did our job we spread a little bit of yeah we got the

SPEAKER_35: news out there we got some good products for people and uh some inspiration there at the end go ahead and support what he's doing over there it's really great work yeah yeah absolutely my first actual job

SPEAKER_17: jason uh was as intern at a uh consumer finance magazine aimed at uh youths that was my first job i was a video podcast intern uh so i've i have a deep unabiding love for personal finance and to helping

SPEAKER_32: people not have no money because it drives me nuts when they're broke so big big big big fan okay uh and

SPEAKER_193: we will see you all next time on this week at startups bye bye