SPEAKER_00: I think it's a little bit soul crushing when you go build features that are what you believe is good for your community. And then you're told that you can't ship them because some company wants to put you in a box so that they can better compete with you. SPEAKER_01: Is he talking about himself or he's talking about Apple? SPEAKER_02: I think I think Mark Pinkett said the same thing about Zuck when they shipped Zynga and Farmville and Zynga Poker. SPEAKER_04: What we should do is we should take that clip again and then scroll down. SPEAKER_05: All the headlines of like Facebook turns off, Facebook kills, Facebook, you know. SPEAKER_06: This Week in Startups is brought to you by Assembly AI. Get maximum value from voice data with Assembly AI. SPEAKER_10: Build powerful products and features for your end users on the industry's leading speech-to-text models. Get 100 free hours to start building at assemblyai.com slash twist. Vanta. Compliance and security shouldn't be a deal breaker for startups to win new business. Vanta makes it easy for companies to get a SOC 2 report fast. Twist listeners can get $1,000 off for a limited time at vanta.com slash twist. And 8sleep, good sleep, is the ultimate game changer. The newest generation of the pod, the Pod 4 Ultra, has arrived. Head to 8sleep.com slash twist and use code twist to get $350 off the Pod 4 Ultra. SPEAKER_12: All right, everybody, welcome back to This Week in Startups. I'm Jason Calacanis, an angel investor, former journalist and publisher, SPEAKER_14: now doing random acts of journalism. With me, my partner in crime, Alex Wilhelm, he writes a sub stack. It's called Cautious Optimism. Am I correct? Nailed it. First try. Cautious optimism. Uh, and it's awesome. Every day, you can get a note from him about what's going on in the market. And then three days a week, uh, is what we're aspiring to, to do news here. Uh, I am on vacation for two weeks, but yeah, it's just too much news for me to be totally out of, uh, pockets. So I'm working half-time as many people who work from home do. What, what's the style of vacation you like, Alex? You prefer the, like, work four hours, take the afternoon off or something like that, and then have two weeks of vacation. Or do you rather have one week of vacation? Totally unplugged. SPEAKER_18: What, where's your, what's your style of vacation? The audience wants to know. SPEAKER_17: Yeah, no, I, I used to do very, very serious log off, be entirely distant, take the time, breathe. SPEAKER_19: And then once you have children going on vacation, isn't actually going on vacation because you give up childcare. So then suddenly you're just exhausted all the time, even more so than you are. And then going back to work actually feels like a vacation. So I have never tried the four hours on, four hours off, but I'm about to pitch you later this week, my paternity leave plan. SPEAKER_20: So get ready for very similar ideas because I'm going to balance the two. SPEAKER_14: I am totally fine with it. You have been such a great collaborator here in your first six weeks on the program. And I always say there's like rules for, uh, you know, work and remote work and contracts and agreements, and then there's rules for high performers. Uh, and we're going to talk a little bit about sales. And, uh, this woman who's trending on Tik Tok and her whole vibes around sales and, uh, taking a lot of time off, but I wanted to start with, um, a little bit of banter here. You know, we haven't talked since Biden dropped out of the race. SPEAKER_23: So the hot swap has occurred, the hot swap has occurred. SPEAKER_19: I, I told you last time we were on the show that, um, in the wake of the assassination attempt, people were rallying around Biden and I said, I'll forgive you the hot swap prognostication, because who could have seen, you know, an assassination attempt coming. And then you ended up being right anyways. Now I'm not here to fluff the old ego, but I will say, uh, I, I expected it to happen. And even though I did, when it did happen, it still felt like a, a real moment. SPEAKER_25: Yeah, it was a real moment, you know, and I, everybody's so, uh, caught up in the outcome of this election. I, I am a moderate and my vote doesn't count, uh, for me living in California earlier this SPEAKER_28: year and now living in Austin, Texas, where I moved to. Uh, so there's your announcement, folks, people were wondering where I was going to move. I'll just tell you right now, Austin, Texas. SPEAKER_14: I moved and actually have been in Austin for a couple of months. As many of you noticed when, uh, on all in or other times, I said, I was in Austin, breaking my teeth, eating beef ribs at Salt Lake. But yeah, our family decided to be homesteaders and we bought a ranch. Uh, now I will still be, I will still be, uh, doing, uh, a bunch of time in the major cities where our startups are, whether that's New York, San Francisco, LA, um, or Miami, which a lot of our startups are in. And so it's a very little change in terms of my actual business life, but a big change for our family to live on horse ranch. SPEAKER_19: Yeah. Also, it's a really big change for my life because I now have a free and open house in the Bay area that I can borrow whenever I want. Absolutely. SPEAKER_33: Absolutely. Free properties for sale. SPEAKER_34: I know. If anybody wants a modern masterpiece in the Bay area, a ski house in Tahoe or a loft in SPEAKER_23: the city, all properties are now for sale. Buy two, get 10% off. SPEAKER_19: I'm joking there if you, that, that would be a lot of cash to care about the 10% discount. But, uh, on the show today, everybody, we have the end of the whiz Google deal Meta's incredible new AI model that's open source Spotify's sparkling earnings. And if we have time, what happens if you just take money and give it to people every single month? But Jason, the biggest story is whiz and Google are not going to get married. No 23 billion dollar deal, no happy VCs. SPEAKER_14: Yeah. Well, I mean, this could be a case of going, uh, for long-term greed over short-term greed. So the deal for 23 billion to Google does have a risk of interference from, uh, different government agencies, potentially, right? All of these deals do, whereas an IPO has zero risk. SPEAKER_23: And after seeing what happened with, um, Figma and Adobe, if I was a VC, uh, in this incredible company that has gotten to this, you know, call it $20 billion market cap, at least the offer SPEAKER_40: was 23 billion and their last private round, I think was 10 or 12 billion, something in that range. SPEAKER_42: Um, you know, the optimal thing to do would be go to go with what's the safest bet plus or minus 20% of the valuation, right? Cause this is going to be an extraordinary outcome either way. So if I'll, I'll kick it back to you, what has a better likelihood of hitting 20, 20% less than 23 billion is minus 4 billion. So let's call it 18 billion. Would you rather go for the 23 billion in a sale and get all of your money at once? Would you rather say, take 18 billion in a public stock and be able to sell some shares SPEAKER_44: after the lockup or hold some shares and have that optionality? If you were a large shareholder here, Alex. SPEAKER_19: Oh, option B day, night, weekends and pick a Sunday. Absolutely. For a bunch of reasons. But the first one is I don't really want to go work for Google, right? SPEAKER_50: I mean, if I'm building a company called ways, if I'm the CEO, us off a wrap up work, by the way, do you know what a person who works at whiz is called? They call themselves wizards. Yeah. SPEAKER_52: I mean, I was going to get there. I was literally put it. I was wizards. Anyways, SPEAKER_19: I thought that was adorable. Congrats to the wizards. Yeah. But, but here's the thing to be an independent company means you could set your own culture, set your own style of business, build products. No, one's telling you in some different feet from the company, what you can and can't do, how to communicate, how to lead, how to hire. And Google is one of those companies that has its own vision and a long time to grow into it. And it has its own way of doing things. And I guarantee you it's not the way whiz does things because whiz is small and Google is enormous. So for me, I think that I would take the bet that you offered. My question is, what's this thing going to be worth? Because the crazy thing is Google was offering 23 billion for a 350 million ARR company, which is a pretty rich multiple for the current time. Now it's growing very quickly. Huzzah. Fantastic. Very happy for it. Let's say that it does do what the CEO wants, which is reach a billion in ARR and go public. First of all, love those goals. That's fantastic. We're going to do a billion and go public. Love it. But today, how hard is it to get a 23 X ARR multiple on the public markets? SPEAKER_50: So the question is impossible. SPEAKER_14: Yeah, it's, I would, I would dare, I say impossible in the public markets right now, you might have some excitement, weird things can happen. So never say never, but you know, uh, maybe they'll get 12 to 15 times forward-looking SPEAKER_42: revenue, this billion dollar goal, you know, a hundred times range of 50 million is 35 billion. So I guess that offer of 23 billion is pretty rich, right? SPEAKER_19: Um, that's where I ended up getting, so you said 18 in the future of public or 23. Now I'll take the 18. I just hope that it's not worth 12 when it goes public. Cause then the math begins to hurt a little bit more, but let's flip it around. SPEAKER_50: Jason, same question to you. You're the CEO of whiz Google shows up 23 billion, taking the check, leaving the check. Chamath Palihapitiya: So, I mean, in the current administration, I think I'm going public, but I'm telling all my investors that we're doing a secondary at 18 billion right now. SPEAKER_14: And every employee and every founder gets to sell 20% of their shares. So we need a $4 billion, you know, or whatever it is, a three and a half billion dollar investment to go long and, or let's say 10%. So we need $1.8 billion in secondary, go get me, you know, uh, Josh Kushner at drive. Is that his company where they just spent whatever amount on, uh, you know, buying shares SPEAKER_40: of opening. I find me someone like that who loves to, you know, buy at the top of the market, shout David Friedberg: out Josh Kushner, soft bank, you know, somebody who really likes, has the guts to do these kind of deal. SPEAKER_40: That has a dig, you know, if you have the guts to make these kinds of a deal, like Josh Kushner did with open AI, you know, or Masayoshi signed it with countless companies, it can SPEAKER_23: pay off in a major way. It just gives a little bit of risk, but those people are out there. So if I mean one of those and let's just clear 10% of our position, the coat, there's four co-founders. SPEAKER_29: I believe they own roughly 40% of the company, you know, so if those four co-founders can take, you know, a hundred million, 200 million off the table right now, that gets you a jet, SPEAKER_42: at least a jet card, get you a nice ski house, pay down some debt. I mean, let's go. So easy, breezy, lemon squeezy. SPEAKER_19: Jack cards only cost like a quarter million a year. They're not, they're not as bad as people think getting an actual jet is expensive. Yes. Jack cards. It's like middle-class venture capital. Um, I think, I think this though, this whole saga does kind of show to me how hard it is to do 2021 style outcomes through an IPO with 2024 revenue multiples, because this is a company that is mind-bendingly good. It's growing so fast. Everyone wants a piece of it. It's got insanely great backers, lots of capital raised, cool culture, moved to New York city. So it's going to be based in the U S to have access to the best capital markets in the history of mankind and we're looking ahead towards a billion dollars in ARR. And we're saying maybe the math won't math out when it goes public. Then like, that just doesn't feel like the place we should be when we're discussing the company that could be, could be the next deck, uh, centricorn, whatever, and really change the game. SPEAKER_81: I I'm confused. What's broken. SPEAKER_14: I think what's broken is if you have a lot of cash, you can make five, six, 7%, uh, safe on your money, or you can put it into corporate credit. Like we're just talking about, uh, no, that didn't work for the beyond meat folks, but there's plenty of stronger companies that have corporate debt that pay 10, 12, 15%. So really capital is going to find, you know, uh, the returns. And if it right now in a high interest rate environment, you know, doesn't think that these companies are going to be, um, valued really well. SPEAKER_86: And that M and a is off the table. Yeah. There's a, there's a major discount. SPEAKER_23: So, oh my Lord, podcasts, audio books, virtual meetings, and Liz videos we're producing and Chamath Palihapitiya: consuming more voice data than we ever have. And if your startup is building a product that uses voice data, you need to check out assembly. AI assembly. AI builds speech to text AI models that can turn your voice data into new product capabilities. All you need is voice data and a few lines of code. For example, vid IO makes video editing tools that generate the captions. You see on our video clips, right? These are really cool. It saves us a ton of time. Well, that would not be possible without assembly. AI crunching all that audio data for vid IO assembly. AI speech to text models are simple, accurate, and fast. And they've got the industry's lowest word error rate, 30% of your hallucinations. And it's so easy to use. So if you want to put your audio data to work and you want to build powerful AI experiences for your customers, head to assembly AI.com slash twist and get a hundred hours for free. And join over 200,000 developers who are building amazing apps with voice data. Go to assembly AI.com slash twist a day. SPEAKER_14: I like the idea of being public like Spotify did. If you're public, the amount of discipline you have. And when I watched the video of Daniel act today, where he did a video, you know, from Sweden on vacation, he just looks in the camera and was like, we're kicking ass. Well, let me explain to you how much ass we're kicking. Like that's what every CEO, uh, aspires towards, which is lots of shareholders, lots of expectations and a lot of pressure on the team. And then you hit those notes and you get rewarded in the public markets where they Chamath Palihapitiya: got, is it over 200 million subscribers and 600 million monthly active users, something SPEAKER_91: in that range. He said, SPEAKER_90: we'll get to the numbers in a second, but I want to play the clip. We haven't pulled up for you. SPEAKER_19: Oh, you do great. We're going to start at 13 seconds, which I believe is when he starts to really spit facts. SPEAKER_92: Okay. SPEAKER_94: Taking this quarter. The bottom line is we had a really great quarter. We are now over 246 million paying subscribers, 626 million monthly active users. And financially we had our biggest free cashflow quarter in the company's history. I really attribute this success to all the innovations that we keep on making to make the product better and better and stickier and stickier. SPEAKER_19: First of all, he's stealing my style, like big glasses, bald head, too close to the, too close to the camera. That's me, Daniel, come on, calm down. But it, it is a flex to just stand there and be like, hello. Do you see the, the Swedish landscape behind me? Great quarter, everybody like, ah, okay. SPEAKER_14: I mean, this is where we're at is just CEOs popping out their phone. I don't know where the comms department is. He's clearly not reading from a teleprompter. I mean, he may have rehearsed it once or twice, but he's just like, Hey, let me tell you how we're doing here now. They went out with a direct listing. Their stock is, I think at an all time. They've got free cashflow. And so, you know, bill Gurley, my, my, my pal, bill Gurley always talks about how, when you go public, you know, this forces a, a level of focus and that's what they wanted for the Ubers and door dashes of the world. And it just, you know, and, and for Stripe, et cetera. And it's so easy to stay private for so long that you have to admire the people who do go public, who take the hits sometimes on valuation. They, they don't take the easy sale. And then they get to this point where now Spotify has a lot of influence and they have, I think, reduced their dependency on the music industry a bit by having this unlimited audio book product, which I haven't tried yet, I now subscribe to three musics as I find myself accidentally. Um, so I'm going to have to consolidate and have Apple music for free as part of my Apple SPEAKER_23: family plan. Cause I went on that Apple family plan that gives you everything. SPEAKER_14: Then, um, I got these high fidelity headphones, as I talked about a bit, shout out to my friends at headphones.com, not a sponsor yet. Uh, and, uh, I bought Cuba's Q U B Z, which is this incredible high fidelity service where you get like the flax, like the original audio files from the studio, real difference when you're using proper equipment. Um, and then of course I have Spotify cause I've loved that in my whole life. And now I find myself like, I use Spotify for playlists. I don't use the Apple music. And then I use co-buzz for when I'm listening to miles Davis or dire straits or some really high fidelity, amazing stuff where I want to hear the nuance. And I want to actually hear the music. So I am enamored by his business. I think the podcast stuff he did was bold and audacious. SPEAKER_29: Now, maybe they had some missteps, but you know, that's part of learning. And now that they have that robust advertising business there and they let, um, you know, bill Simmons's podcasts and Joe Rogan's podcasts in the 2.0 version of this. Now they're available on YouTube and other platforms. And I guess they just take the advertising revenue where if they can get it in super distributed, not exclusive, that's a brilliant idea too. So, you know, I think they could run the table on podcasting if they wanted to. I mean, if they came to me and said, Hey, this week in startups makes this amount of money. Would you like us to take it over and we'll pay you? I don't know. They paid me a 30% premium or something. SPEAKER_103: I might take it. We've been sold out. I might take it and just be like, okay, yeah, you take over the answer. Sorry to my head sales team. We're probably listening to this. SPEAKER_105: I was going to say, Jamie's going to have a viewpoint on that one. Well, anyway, I'm just saying like, if you were a podcaster and they come to you and they SPEAKER_42: look at your revenue and they say, Hey, plus, you know, we'll give you 1.x and x is, you SPEAKER_29: know, a three handle or more. Yes. You have no choice, but to consider it because they would be guaranteeing and taking that risk. And so it's kind of brilliant what they're doing. SPEAKER_44: Um, and I think the sky's the limit for them. Now they, they own audio and I don't know why they're not doing video production more. They should be trying to compete with YouTube. SPEAKER_42: They should be trying to get Mr. Beast next. They should be trying to get these YouTube channels and say, stop publishing on YouTube. Publish to us. SPEAKER_112: Oh, okay. I see what you're saying. You're not saying they should get into video production. You're saying they should get into video hosting. Yes. Okay. SPEAKER_40: They do host video versions of this podcast and all in, and I think they opened it up to everybody. SPEAKER_14: Now we've been in that beta for a couple of years, but why not go to a YouTuber who you think. Is awesome for your existing ad base. Let's say they got an advertising deal with Samsung, uh, you know, and they already sponsor call her daddy and they sponsor bill Simmons and they sponsored Joe Rogan. Like they're, they're, I think those are their top three. Yeah. Okay. So they got the ringer and all those dialed in, but Samsung wants more. SPEAKER_29: So they say, okay, great. We're going to take Marquez it's Marquez, right? Yes. Who does like the YouTube channel. Just go to Marquez and be like, Hey, what are you making on YouTube? We'll, uh, give you a guarantee. SPEAKER_23: You can still post to YouTube. We just want it here first. SPEAKER_22: So give us, you know, 24 hours on Spotify and then everything goes there. How does Marquez not take it? I mean, if they offered him 1.5. SPEAKER_19: Well, Jason right now, Spotify is going through a period of financial strictness. So while I like the theory crafting and because I live in Spotify from the moment I wake up to the moment I go to sleep, totally on board, but they've been working on cost control and margin expansion. So, um, Mr. Beast, I can't imagine being cheap. Didn't he also do a deal with, um, Amazon prime or something like that? Yeah. That was for a different show though. SPEAKER_84: So, you know, anyway, I think these opportunities are out there. SPEAKER_14: They would obviously have to be disciplined in doing them. Probably the first round of deals they did. Maybe they were less disciplined and learning, but now that they understand the model, you know, if they lose, you know, tens, low tens of millions of dollars across a couple of these deals, but they lock in, you know, advertising and it grows audience and they get more members, they've got two ways to win advertising and then subscribers. SPEAKER_29: So now let's say this week in startups and all in became part of Spotify, I'm not having any discussions about that. SPEAKER_22: So I'm just speaking completely hypothetically here, but if they did make an offer for both of these, one of which I own a hundred percent, one of which are on 25% and have one of four SPEAKER_14: votes on, you know, I'd be like, Hmm, at one point again, three, four, five acts are existing SPEAKER_42: revenue, I would have to take a look at it. And, um, they would then have to make point three X. Extra on the subscribers. So if you get some number of net new subscribers, okay. SPEAKER_29: So, you know, they could make the same amount in advertising and then actually convert some number of subscribers. SPEAKER_49: And there's historical precedent for that working. So did you ever watch top gear, the old BBC show? SPEAKER_22: Yeah, yeah, that was like the number one show the BBC ever produced. Right. I believe Dr. Who and that. SPEAKER_19: Yeah. And so the, the three guys ended up leaving and went over to Amazon prime and you had to sign up for prime to watch their new show grand tour. And you know what people did? They signed up because that show was, that show had just a rabid audience. So there, there is precedent for this. It'll be curious to see where Daniel takes the company now, because he's kind of done what he set out to do, which was cut costs, uh, in the last quarter, operating expenses were off 16% year over year. That's one at every $6. That's a lot. And, um, their operating income went from negative 247 million Euro to positive 266 million Euro. The free cashflow went from 9 million to 490 million Euro. Um, and, and the real, the real thing is their paid subs rose 12%, their revenue grew 20% because they raised prices at the same time they were cutting staff. So their profitability has just gone bonkers because they've managed to grow the top line and shrink the cost basis. I mean, it's kind of a beautiful moment for them. So I, I wonder when they're going to have the straight up, like, like belief in themselves to take a risk again. Cause I feel like they spent a lot of money on podcasts, maybe a little bit too much. And then they had to talk to wall street and say, Hey, we're going to get customer control. We're going to bring this back. Don't worry. They did that. But now do they stay where they are with the happy wall street and stock back in record highs, or do they take another risk and say, we're going to double down on video, audio SPEAKER_128: books, whatever it is to break this. SPEAKER_129: Yeah, we, we have this as one of our themes, uh, that we've been working on you and I, SPEAKER_14: um, for 2025, which is the static team size. And that is something I brought up with the CEO of Etsy. We just, we just had, uh, the CEO of Etsy on the pod. It hasn't come out yet. Great guests, by the way, and great notes. Um, but the static team size is, I think one of these themes that I've been talking about now for two years, and it is clearly infected every company. What is static team size? It means you keep the same number of headcount. SPEAKER_23: You empower those individuals to be 20, 30% more efficient each year with tools like AI. Um, and then you fire the weakest performers and replace those with higher performers. And instead of trying to grow headcount because you can, uh, and because everybody has done SPEAKER_42: that since Google started this trend and Facebook matched them in this war for talent, you don't compete in the war for talent. SPEAKER_29: You take your existing static team size, the same thousand people, or 2000 people in the case of Etsy, or how many people it is here. And you just say, we're demanding excellence. We're giving you tools. We're going to give you more stock options. We're going to keep the team size the same if we're more, if we're 30% more productive each, which is, I think you and I become 30 more percent more productive every year. SPEAKER_42: Right. I feel that way. Um, if you're 30%, 20, 30% more productive each year, um, I would rather get raises than SPEAKER_29: increase the number of people, the company that I have to manage or that need to be managed and that we need to hire. Hiring is brutal and time consuming, managing people, brutal and time consuming, just find great people you trust, empower them and be done with it. SPEAKER_19: So you, you raised, so one, generally speaking, I, I agree. I do think our productivity is rising, especially if you live at the forefront of new tooling. Like, I, I don't know, since I've joined, uh, the twist family, I've learned how to use both notion and coda, you know, they've been fantastic. I now can do a lot with them that I didn't do before. I used to live in Google docs. I still kind of do. Um, yeah, I do think we improve over time that the reason why I think it doesn't quite work out the way people want it to, is that when a company can grow revenue and keep head count flat, they don't tend to change their salary increase chart. And so people tend to get a bit more work without the kind of more than a two or 3% raise. And this is why I think we see so much job hopping and so forth. So if a company said we're going to keep head count very low and we're going to grow and we're going to take a big chunk of that new profit and we're going to pay ourselves with it versus bonuses. Yeah. Yeah. SPEAKER_14: That is actually, that would be actually a really good, you know, for the, for the employment side to be saying, Hey, we kept, we did our part. We did more with less and then we achieve 30%. Hey, let's, you know, we have a 2% standard raise 3% standard cost of living raise. Hey, maybe we should talk about 4%, maybe we should talk about 5%, maybe we should talk a little bonus here, maybe some equity. And I think actually that is a really healthy dynamic. Um, and so, yeah, you do hear about the complaining, like, you know, oh, you know, we, we got, we laid everybody off and now I have to do more work. You know, the, the people who are valuable today are the ones who learn the tools and SPEAKER_23: just, you know, when we do show notes and research, I'm taking podcasts or, and cutting and pasting the transcript. I do this myself. I take the transcript, I put it into Claude and I say, give me the 10 most important bullet points here with citations, yada, yada. SPEAKER_14: And so I take the transcript of somebody who's going to be on the show. Like here's the Etsy founder, you know, here's their video from four years ago. And I'll watch that video. And sometimes you guys give me the summaries and I just say, Hey, what are the major SPEAKER_86: bullet points and give me the timestamps, boom, that that's, uh, you know, a half day for a producer, it's five hours of producer time to listen to that bond and write me, you know, those notes. Yeah. SPEAKER_14: So, you know, I, I do think it's a, there's a great dynamic here for both sides of the table to, you know, uh, get a little extra comp and a little SPEAKER_23: extra efficiency in these companies. And then, you know, what can happen with all the other talented people, they can get you beyond how's that transition. SPEAKER_134: I use, you stole it. SPEAKER_95: I, I, I scrolled back up to the, the Facebook area. Cause we're gonna talk about some AI models, but I was like, you know what? I think this isn't trending in a, the worker money direction. Let's just say, let's go. SPEAKER_125: Listen, a strong sales team can make all the difference for a B2B startup, but if you're going to hire sharks, you need to let them hunt and you can't slow them down with compliance hurdles. Like sock two, what is sock two? Well, any company that stores customer data in the cloud needs to be sock two compliant. If you don't have your sock too tight, your sales team can't close major deals. It's that simple, but thankfully Vanta makes it really easy to get and renew your sock two compliance. On average, Vanta customers are compliant in just two to four weeks. Without Vanta, it takes three to five months. Vanta can save you hundreds of hours of work and up to 85% on compliance costs. And Vanta does more than just sock two. They also automate up to 90% compliance for GDPR, HIPAA, and more. So here's your call to action. Stop slowing your sales team down and use Vanta. Get $1,000 off at vanta.com slash twist. SPEAKER_31: That's vanta.com slash twist for $1,000 off your sock two. SPEAKER_19: I want to stay on that last point though. So if you had a company that was growing, let's say 30% per year, growing headcount, 5% per year, because you're going to, you're going to add another person in the mail room, whatever, you know, and then the company keeps doing better and better and better. Everyone's happy. If you offered people something like a pension or something, like an old school style pension, SPEAKER_81: I wonder if you would have like akin to a hundred percent employee retention. Cause that would be something that no one else offers. SPEAKER_23: Nobody has pensions anymore because we all, the biggest, you know, the biggest problem with pensions right now, why it would be insane to offer a pension is because with the gains in AI, we actually don't know how long people are going to live. SPEAKER_04: So. SPEAKER_95: Oh, you're talking about the long tail of like life, life extension. Chamath Palihapitiya: Life expectancy could be 110 you, you are for a pension now, like the New York times. I mean, this is an incredibly weird topic to bring up, but you know, we, we know the SPEAKER_23: tail end of the pension people at the New York times, like probably John Markoff or, you know, I'm trying to think of the old school tech journalists, Saul Ansel came before us, SPEAKER_22: you know, the people, Walt Mossberg, people who are 70 now to my 53 and you're 35. Congratulations. SPEAKER_40: Happy birthday. You are very old. Um, just as I told everybody, man, to get those 18 years. SPEAKER_42: I give you every penny, um, they got pensions, they got pensions at the New York times. Real ones, like actual pensions. And it was like, you're going to get 50% of your salary indefinitely. SPEAKER_23: You're, and it's probably your last three years. So like you hit right comp of 150 a year at the New York times or 125 a year. SPEAKER_29: They took those last three years. They averaged them out or something probably. And then you're going to make 60,000 a year, which is what the cub reporter is getting on the way in. So it's almost like John Markoff or Saul Hansel. If they did hit those pensions, I'm assuming they did Steve Lohr. Some of those folks, they're probably getting $60,000. Pensions right now. SPEAKER_155: So, and they count this headcount. I mean, it could bury a company if they live to 110. SPEAKER_19: So morally though, do you think that pensions are a, a good, or do you think that they are something that is morally neutral? SPEAKER_160: And therefore the fact that we've moved away from them, isn't a loss. SPEAKER_14: They're not aligned properly. And they will bankrupt any company or system that employs them or, you know, or that strategy. SPEAKER_29: Because people used to live to 65 and the average lifespan was 71 for a man. So you'd work to 65, you get your gold thing. And you had six years of pension. SPEAKER_23: If your wife happened to live, you know, uh, you know, an extra eight years, I think probably life expectancy in these cases were like 72, 78, something in that range. So they looked at it like, Hey, you put in your 30 years and we paid you another six and we paid a quarter to your spouse. Cause there were some sort of triggers where like your spouse could get a portion of it. SPEAKER_29: You know, what really has to happen is we need to do what they do in Australia, which is the super annotation funds where you're forced to put 12% of your salary every year. SPEAKER_14: 9% of your salary into essentially what's a 401k because of freedom in the United States. And, you know, a lot of weird things, uh, like democracy and, uh, it being bought and sold by either side of the aisle. Every four to eight years, we don't have a thoughtful approach to retirement. The really thoughtful approach you need only look at Australia. Everybody in Australia is happy. They have no stress because they had a gun put to their head and they said, you have to put 9% into this super annotation fund. You can't touch it. And everybody complained. And then they watched the stock market rip and they're like, Hey, you know what? I'm going to retire at 60 and I'm going to give my job to a younger person. So they actually have a high functioning society there where people, in order for people, you know, in a, in a static team size, how do you get the slot? Somebody has to retire. Somebody has to retire. Right. You have to give up the seat. So somebody gives up the seat. You and I retire to new hosts of this week in startups. Boom. And the cycle goes anew. And that's what super annotation would do. SPEAKER_19: No, I I'm here for it, but we do have some data out on a new UBI study. Uh, it's universal basic income, giving people money for free. I know if you are an American, that's blowing your mind, but they did it. And the experiment was for three years involving 1,000 lower income people selected from Illinois and Texas. They got a thousand dollars a month. There was also a control group that got $50 a month just to show it kind of like two different data sets. And this is all done through Altman's Sam Altman's nonprofit open research. And unlike with open AI, they actually did drop a lot of data and information about this. We have parsed through it. Um, they broke it down into individual buckets of findings, including entrepreneurship, health, home, uh, and a couple of other things. Uh, I have a bunch of information from the study itself here, Jason, but I don't know exactly where you would like me to start. We can talk about results. We can talk about, um, expectations. Where do you want to dig on? SPEAKER_14: Well, I, I, I'll first want to start with, you know, Sam Altman does interesting things with his money. Um, so he put $14 million. I understand of his own money into this. And I think it was while he was a Y Combinator, uh, when I was president of Y Combinator and some other group of people put in the rest of the 60 million. And I think this is a, a worthy test because I have deep concerns about free money, um, because, you know, I worry about motivation. However, I'm smart enough to know that all experiments are worth trying to get more data. Yeah, and so I am thrilled that this occurred and I'm very interested. SPEAKER_42: I, I, I understand some of the points here, but I'm just interested to get into it because what people seem to think about UBI, uh, and, and talk about prescient, you know, we're now really talking about UBI, uh, at this moment because of what we expect from AI. SPEAKER_99: I, so UBI three little letters, AI in the words of Trump, two little letters. Okay. Very important. A I two letters. Okay. SPEAKER_171: You can't just drop a random Trump, but I'm trying to say, no, sorry, sorry, nasty, nasty lady running secret service. SPEAKER_99: Okay. I mean, slope group. Okay. Uh, I don't know if she's qualified or not. SPEAKER_19: Speaking about higher and fire fast. Uh, she didn't make it through that congressional hearing. I think that was the most panned performance by any elected official I've ever seen in front of Congress. No partisanship, just pure anger. And just. SPEAKER_29: I mean, it was infuriating to me because when I, when I saw the clips I saw of her, because, you know, I, I like to think that as Americans, there's like a civic duty pride, especially in the, the pinnacles of leadership. SPEAKER_42: You know, when you're the CEO, when you're the director, when you're the president, whatever it is on the board and all I saw there with her, um, obfuscation, obfuscation. SPEAKER_22: Thank you, obfuscation, I was, she's got a pension back to pensions. SPEAKER_14: She's got a retirement. And it was so obvious to me because anytime you want to understand the world, just understand the incentives. If she resigns, she probably gets less than if she's relieved of duty, like any other person, there are triggers. So if they said to her, we want you to resign. And she says, okay, that's interesting. Um, they're like, so you resigned? Nope. Cause if I resign, my pension is this. If you relieve me of duty, I get this acceleration and I get my pension. I guarantee you when we double click on this, her whole farce of not answering questions is going to be based on her personal economics in filibustering. Chamath Palihapitiya: So she went on to that, you know, that whole rigmarole was done just so she could get some amount of, somebody should have just come in and just said, listen, we'll give you everything. SPEAKER_14: You're relieved of duty. You can call it resignation, call it whatever you want. And I learned this when I was young in entrepreneurship, I got mentored and, uh, a human resources person, uh, said, here's what I want you to do. SPEAKER_42: Cause we were firing somebody and we were firing somebody paradoxically for harassment. SPEAKER_23: And, uh, a woman harassing another woman in a company. And I, it was like, I'm 27 years old, running my first magazine and one 23 or 24 year old woman told another woman about her anatomy and her body. Like, I was just like, what was going on? Like, why am I in the middle of this? And that person complained and wanted to sue. It was nuts. So the person says, here's how you handle it. You, um, take a check for one month of salary. SPEAKER_14: And then you have a letter here of the person being terminated. SPEAKER_28: And then in this one, you have the resignation letter for them to sign the separation agreement. SPEAKER_14: Walk into the room, say, sorry, it didn't work out. I know it's a, it's a complicated situation. There is one month severance. If you sign this piece of paper, here's your termination. If you don't and no month severance, and your desk is being cleaned out right now through in the common room, your desk is being cleaned out right now. All your accounts are turned off. So you're no longer working here. SPEAKER_22: And I just, do you hold the two envelopes and the person goes, thank you for my severance. And they signed the piece of paper and we're done. Is that how it went? Of course. SPEAKER_14: Of course. Yeah. Nobody, I mean, and, and I said, we will never speak of this again. Cause you resigned. It was your choice. Right. You made some decision to leave as opposed to we fired you for cause. SPEAKER_50: Here's the letter. Yes. And, but there's one last clause you didn't, you didn't add, which is, and don't call us for a reference because it's not gonna, it's not gonna go in your favor after we've gone through this and we've, we've let you go. SPEAKER_40: And I wonder, I think if you make a threat like that about references, maybe that could be double actionable. SPEAKER_14: I think what you do is just, we will not, I think that, yeah, the last time I had to deal with that humorous thing is we just don't give references. Cause it's too much liability. So a lot of companies today have a rule. We do not give references good, bad, or otherwise because of liability reason. That's what we'll tell you when the person started and when they left, those are the two pieces of data you can have. SPEAKER_23: Sure. SPEAKER_103: So anyway, let's get into this UBI because I do think this is super interesting. Chamath Palihapitiya: 8 sleep has released the pod for ultra besides heating and cooling, you know, all about that now it elevates automatically, which is so nice for reading. SPEAKER_184: Or if you want to do a little Netflix and chill, it is the best way to prevent snoring, which your spouse is going to be thrilled with. So pod for ultra can cool you down on each side of the bed to 20 degrees Fahrenheit, below room temperature. So you and your partner stay cool. So even in a heat wave, when you have the pod for ultra, man, it is like being just absolutely cool, calm, and collective. You're going to get a great night's sleep. Also, the pod for has an adjustable base that fits between your mattress and your bed frame. So you've got reading and sleeping positions to help you unwind after a hectic day. Not only that, 8 sleep has amazing sensors and those sensors are going to help you track your sleep time, the sleep phases, HRV, and your heart rate. So it's basically a wearable and it's going to give you that great sleep score. So you understand how you're sleeping. You know, for me, it's all about getting that extra hour of sleep every night, because if you've got to make decisions the next day, you want to be sharp. If you're going to be on camera, you're going to be a leader of a company or a podcaster. You need great sleep. So here is an awesome offer for our audience. 8sleep.com slash twist. Use the code twist to get 350 bucks off the pod for ultra. What a generous discount there at 8sleep.com slash twist. Currently, they're shipping United States, Canada, UK, Europe, and Australia. So you can get it down under now. Okay. Well done to my friends at 8sleep. Tell me what you found interesting here. SPEAKER_19: NPR did a little bit of digging. I'm going to quote them because they have good verbiage. So overall, people who got the cash payments worked a bit less. 1.3 hours less per week on average, but that does include some people who were logging 50 to 60 hours a week. So some people were working marginally less, but they were already working time and a half. And keep in mind that these residents had an income of below 28,000. So $12,000 a year is like, you know, like 50% raise. SPEAKER_50: It's huge. There's also some data. SPEAKER_29: By the way, this was tax-free because it was a gift in some way, or it fell under the gift clause, I believe. So they were not paying tax on this $12,000. Okay. SPEAKER_19: And then also the study found that it did drive it more interest in entrepreneurship, but it wasn't until the third year of payments that some folks really kind of got that bug. And I was trying to figure out why there was a lag between cash showing up and more entrepreneurial spirit. And I think I figured it out. If you're just getting by, barely, and you get some more money, you're going to fix the big things first. Your kid's shoes are falling apart. Your car is broken. You're going to really get everything patched up. SPEAKER_192: Broken dishwasher, whatever it is. SPEAKER_19: Maybe your AC doesn't work. Maybe you're behind on the light bill. Whatever it is. You're going to work through all of that. Build a little base. Save a little money. And then you're going to start thinking, I should do something with that money. Then you're going to work on your company, your idea. They did notice that there was a greater impact on entrepreneurship and kind of like the desire to start a business and ideas for a new business amongst women and minorities. And so that was kind of cool to see. Bigger impact there in terms of driving entrepreneurship interest. And then something that I really, really found fascinating was, and this is a quote from the study itself, recipients reported decreased problematic alcohol use and some types of illicit drug abuse. We also find notable improvements in stress, mental distress, and food security during the first year of study, comma, but the effects fade by the second year. SPEAKER_42: So people get used to free money is what you take from that. SPEAKER_29: And so this is a perfect example of a mixed bag, right? And so if you were to tell me what I expected, it would be a mixed bag because not everybody's the same. I'm sure some people get the money and, uh, they take it for granted and they spend it on booze and I'm sure some people get the money and they say, you know what? I've always wanted to be an entrepreneur. SPEAKER_42: And once I get, you know, my credit cards paid off, I'm going to think about starting a business. So it's a mixed bag and probably what needs to happen now is you do a second study where you build on this one and try four different modalities. SPEAKER_29: And I think, you know, if I were going to build another study on top of this, instead of offering a thousand dollars in free money. SPEAKER_14: A month and doing just strictly UBI, I would tie it to, Hey, you can get these UBI payments if you take an entrepreneur course, right? So something's tied to it. Right. Um, and that could be, I think, you know, the combination of UBI plus something else, you know, paired with it, I think could be interesting. And the reason I think that's interesting is because having watched what I saw happen in the middle East, where I met a lot of young people, you know, your age or younger. Who had the King Abdullah scholarship or this scholarship, they had told their citizens go anywhere in the world. Um, not only will we pay your tuition, you don't have to apply for a scholarship, but just pay your tuition, we'll pay for your apartment, not only we'll pay for your apartment and your living expenses, we're going to give you a stipend. In other words, UBI, what happened a whole generation of people in Saudi, Abu Dhabi, Doha, you know, the entire region locked to the West, got degrees and graduate degrees. And then came home with massive knowledge to build their economies. SPEAKER_86: And so I love the idea of tying it to education and then seeing what the outcome there would be. Right. I mean, what do you, what do you think? What would be, you, you have an idea of how to level up the study and what you would do next? SPEAKER_160: Well, I would change the ge, the geographics. I would change the dollar amounts. I would change the frequency. I would also set up one program with triggers. SPEAKER_19: So for example, you know, we're going to give you a thousand bucks a month, but if you get a job that pays 20% more, we're going to jack it up to 1500 a month, just tag on some incentives and just see how fast people react to them. Because we talk a lot in economics about price elasticity and you kind of demand elasticity. I don't think we have enough data points here to actually see how people's behaviors are willing to change or able to change under these circumstances. So I want to go back to what you said. I love an experiment. I love seeing this. I love the fact that it also had some really cool impact on people's lives. So going from the macro to the micro, um, one of the study participants said that when he learned about the cash transfers, he went to his boss and said that he wanted to cut his hours so that he could spend as much time as possible with his four-year-old son. And that's the one thing that I think that these conversations often miss is that it's impossible to measure the GDP of joy. And if people get a little bit more time to be alive and themselves and just off the grind for a little bit, just a little reduction in the noise and pressure of life. I mean, I struggled to not view that as incredibly valuable to my fellow humans. I don't know how to measure it, but I would like to focus on both helping people work, found companies and thrive in the economy and boost joy. If we can. SPEAKER_14: I mean, you have to ask yourself how big are the entitlement programs we already have, uh, in the U S and, um, you know, we have welfare, we have food stamps. We have unemployment is a long list of things that are done already. So people get a little triggered by UBI, like, oh my God, we're giving free money. It's a wealth transfer, all the stuff. It's like, uh, it's already happening folks. SPEAKER_23: It's just got a lot of different names and programs on it that are incredibly expensive to run and are credibly easy to game. So one test I would love to see a state run is to say, what are the collective value? Okay. We got 10 million people live in this state. SPEAKER_42: We are spending this amount, a billion dollars a year on these entitlement programs that 1 million people take advantage of. So we got a million people and they're collectively getting $10,000 a year. Let's take, you know, a hundred thousand of them and just give them the money and a thousand dollars a month. And they, they can either opt to get the money or be in the entitlement program. SPEAKER_41: Oh, see what I'm saying? Like, because I do feel like welfare food stamps, you know, all of these things create a game with a lot of overhead. SPEAKER_42: Um, with a lot of constituents who are now, you know, um, have incentives to grow those programs. SPEAKER_23: So you got somebody who's working at, like we have in San Francisco, the homeless industrial complex. Well, they're going to ask for more money each year. They're going to spend the money they have each year and it wants to grow. SPEAKER_206: Um, as opposed to, if you said to, you know, a group of homeless people, uh, or people without shelter, whatever, whatever the way to say, unsheltered people, or as we called people in the seventies, junkies, uh, in this case, you know, here's the pile of money that you were going to get anyway. SPEAKER_66: You're like, here's the thing. I didn't get it quite right. Is it supposed to be this? Nevermind. We're going back to the seventies. SPEAKER_210: We're going back to the seventies. Just straight up. I mean, if you, if you shoot heroin, you're a junkie, that's, that's, that's super valid. SPEAKER_211: I'm not, I just, the, the word, the junk. Chamath Palihapitiya: And if you enjoy junk, you were junkies. Anyway, why don't we try something like that? And you know, every time you take a scientific, thoughtful approach to this, everybody gets SPEAKER_14: triggered, the right, the left, the people who are benefit from it. And I think of all the money we spend, I wonder how much actually gets to the person in need. SPEAKER_40: And it's probably less than 50 cents on the dollar actually ever makes it to the person. SPEAKER_160: There's an amazing comedian who I'm not able to find the clip for this, this segment, because I didn't know where I was going to get here, but he says, um, that he was giving money to SPEAKER_216: a homeless person and someone said, oh, you know, don't, don't give him the money. You know, he's just going to use it on drink and drugs. And the comedian said, well, what did you think I was going to spend it on? SPEAKER_219: And then, and then the person said, no, no, give us the money and then we'll make sure they'll get it. SPEAKER_14: We have like a gorgeous, you know, $90 square foot office space in Soma. And we have 17 executives here, you know, who are wearing somehow Chanel and Prada, and SPEAKER_40: they get $150,000 a year to work at a homeless organization. SPEAKER_19: I'm like, ah, mistake, error. But what you're describing is block grants, but not in the federal money to state block grant, but in state to individual block grants, essentially an option to grab, uh, not to grab that sounds slightly rude, but just to, to accept the same level of care, if you will, but in a cash form versus a service form. SPEAKER_14: Just like school vouchers. Right. And so what these kinds of concepts do is allow the individual to have sovereignty as SPEAKER_23: opposed to be part of the nanny state. SPEAKER_42: So do you want to have to get in line to get your welfare check, to get your unemployment, to get your food stamps, to get whatever it is. And I'm not saying, I don't think those programs should exist. I think it's great that we have a society with a safety net. SPEAKER_29: What I'm saying is collectively is that money efficiently deployed to the person who needs it. And so I think your idea of tying it to outcomes around your employment or your savings, et cetera, like why not give the thousand dollars and say, we're putting 200 of it into your retirement account, 200 of it into, you know, uh, the QQQ or whatever index fund, and then you're getting 600. Now you can't take that 200 out for your retirement until you're 55. And then you can only take out X percent per year, 5% a year for whatever. And then the other 200, you know, you can take it out 10% at a time when, but you can't go below SPEAKER_23: 5,000 in your account right now that can get really interesting. So they're forced to watch 500, 500,000, $5,000 in their, you know, wealth front account, SPEAKER_14: a trade account, wherever it's custodian. And now you have to watch that grow every year. And now you're part of equity. So that can just be so much more powerful in terms of educating people. And that's really what, you know, I think is the missing component here is people who are at the bottom don't understand economics and, and, uh, JD Vance talked about this in hillbilly, uh, elegy, a whole bunch, which was social capital. What's social capital. It means the people around you and the circumstance you're in that socialization, um, educates you and provides opportunities. If you are growing up and your parents are attorneys, like the chances of you knowing how to become a lawyer are a hundred percent, if you grew up in Appalachia or in deep in Brooklyn and you never met a lawyer in your life and your parents, you've got a single parent and they're, you know, on welfare or whatever, you don't even know how an attorney gets a degree. And JD Vance said that in his book, which is he didn't actually know that lawyers needed to go to law school. He didn't understand what law school was before he, you know, got to yell in other places and, and, you know, whatever you can think of what you want about the person. It's a good book to read to kind of get some insight into, you know, the, some of the SPEAKER_86: challenges poor people have. SPEAKER_230: You've, have you read it by the way? Oh, I own a copy. I have, I have not read it. SPEAKER_19: I know, I, you know, I, I read so much nonfiction during the day that at night I am a 100% fiction guy and I really need to get off of that. But there's so many good books to read. SPEAKER_234: It's a quick read. It's a quick read. It's easy breezy. SPEAKER_22: It's like, and it's, and it's a great lesson, by the way. It's got a great narrator on audible. Shout out to my friends in. SPEAKER_105: Dude. So anyway, great job on this, all my money. SPEAKER_22: I love, you know, what I do is I get the platinum every year, 200 bucks. I've had it for over 10 years. So I've spent probably 3000 on audio books. SPEAKER_42: You know what, one good idea in your life, one change in your life pays for the whole thing. What is, what is platinum? There's a platinum program. SPEAKER_41: I don't know if they promote it anymore, but they give you 20 credits for $200 or 25 credits. For $200 and winds up being $8 a book. SPEAKER_22: But you know, sometimes the books on audible are 35 or 25 or 15. It's like, it's variable. SPEAKER_29: They just abstract that away. You have 20 credits. It nets out to 10 bucks a piece. When I, and I've had years where I get through the 20 audio books by, you know, the summer. And I just read up it earlier. And it, it, they actually give you the option by five more credits, 10 more credits. So I just have always 20 credits sitting in there. I don't even think for a second, if I'm going to read the book, I just think this book I might read at some point, I'm going to buy it, put it in my library, download it and have it there for my next flight. Boom. Yep. All right. That's my strategy. SPEAKER_05: Agree with that anymore. I do a slightly differently, but the same result, but we are, you have a board meeting. SPEAKER_19: So we're going to move on to Meta's new AI model, because this is probably the Google whiz thing. This is the biggest news of the day. So everybody, uh, Meta has a new AI model. It is called Lama 3.1, 405 B for 405 billion, um, parameters of my brain. It just forgot that word mid sentence. Um, it was trained on 15 trillion tokens and 16,000 Nvidia H 100 GPUs. So an enormous cluster, an enormous data set and, uh, Meta says that this is the first openly available model that rivals the top AI models when it comes to state of the art capabilities in general knowledge, steerability, math, tool use, and multilingual translation. The thing that I think matters the most here, Jason is Meta is challenging the top dogs using an open source approach. So before open source was lagging open AI's and Anthropics here, we have Meta going right to the top of the charts with an open source model, which I think actually very much changes SPEAKER_85: the game and makes some of the closed source AI companies look a little bit expensive. SPEAKER_14: Yeah. And if you are working in a large corporation in America, um, and we were sitting here 30 years ago, open source was like this weird thing that you didn't trust. You bought IBM, you bought Microsoft, you, you know, you took the safe route. Then, uh, open source became the safe route because you weren't tied to a vendor. You weren't tied to their price gouging or their release schedule. You could actually get in the code if you needed to and alter it. SPEAKER_23: So once it became stable to use open source and people felt comfortable doing it for their SPEAKER_14: web servers, for, you know, uh, their databases, it was like one step after the next that corporate America, and that's what this is really about. If you are a corporation, whether it's a startup. SPEAKER_42: Or it's, you know, G you trust open source today more than you trust investing in a big company's solution. SPEAKER_23: Um, now that doesn't mean people don't still use Oracle databases. Of course they do at scale. The SLA is incredible. Doesn't mean people stop using office for an open source version of Microsoft office. SPEAKER_42: That's a completely fine product, majority of corporations use it, but it is an alternative that, um, puts a little pressure on the proprietary solutions. And that's what you're seeing in the market today. You know, inside.com I'm working with Z who is our new CEO over there. And we're building a new app and the app is related to news and community and we're using a little AI in it. And we're constantly having this discussion. Do we want to use, you know, the API from closed AI, I'm sorry, open AI. Do we want to use perplexities API? You know, you test everything, but then you're like, at the end of the day, you want to have one of those companies rug pull us. Now, Facebook's been the ultimate rug puller. I remember Zynga and some of these other companies, they rug pulled everybody. Yup. So, you know, they do not allow access to their API anymore. They don't allow you to have access to the graph anymore, but they're behind. SPEAKER_29: So when you're behind you, open source, when you're ahead, you go proprietary. None of these people are honest about that. It is an absolute lie that they are pro open source or they're pro closed source. They are pro whatever, wherever they have an event. SPEAKER_14: And the, you know, if you look at Google, Google site, Android open source, everything's incredibly like, oh, can you open source your API for the algorithm and search? Or like, oh no, no, that's a black box. We can't do that. SPEAKER_259: We couldn't even if we wanted to, it's impossible. It's impossible. SPEAKER_23: It's impossible for us to do that. SPEAKER_14: And it's like, okay, but DuckDuckGo and brave has this new awesome search engine that has, by the way, shout out to brave. I love that browser. It's my default browser. Highly recommend brave their VPN. And then, you know, saving yourself from all advertising and tracking unbelievable product. They're not currently a sponsor. They were on the past. I've used brave on all my devices since day one. I am absolutely militant about protecting my privacy, um, in that regard. SPEAKER_23: Maybe two, but, uh, they have a new search engine with an API, so it is possible to have a search API, by the way. And so, yeah, I think this is super significant. SPEAKER_14: And what's most significant about it is that Zuck is engaged. Very, you know, he's on vacation. He just got off the beach. You can tell his hair. He's got either. He's using the sea spray salt spray for his hair. Um, it's a new innovation since you lost your hair and I'm, I'm barely got whatever I got left here, but I've used the salt spray. SPEAKER_40: It gives you like a right off the beach look, but I have the feeling that's his beach house. I was looking at the wood paneling. I think that's a, I think he's in Kauai right now. SPEAKER_05: I don't think you have to use salt spray. If you, um, own half the world. SPEAKER_40: I'm pretty sure you just go to your, if you own half a Kauai and you built a fence up and built a bunker, a hundred feet below ground. SPEAKER_42: Yeah. I don't, I'm guessing he, he got off the beach and surfing wave surfing, whatever he's doing to put on his gold chain and to do this podcast that tells you everything you need to know. But the dude realizes he blew 40, 50 billion on VR headsets and AR that nobody wants. I mean, all that people want are the Ray bands to take pictures of their kids. That's the beginning and end of it. So that product DOA, maybe in a decade, it won't be, I think in a decade of the Ray bands actually work. SPEAKER_29: Sure. Why not? Sure. Um, but they don't work as currently thing. And now he's just so engaged. You see it in his eyes. He's looking at this going, oh, I'm actually, I'm doing something that could grow my company. And that is worth the investment. Now, 16,000, I think you said it was 16,000 H 100s or something, but those go 20, 40,000 a pop, maybe put it at 30, that's a half billion dollars in hardware. Um, and he's not done buying that hardware. So, you know, David Friedberg: compared to VR though, AI is cheap, you know, it's a, it's a bargain. SPEAKER_14: If you're a meta bargain and he still owns the H 100s, by the way, it's not like you use them once and throw them away. No, he still got them. So, you know, that's 16,000 cluster will be 160,000 will be 1.6 million and continue on from there. So absolutely fantastic for everybody that this is occurring. Most of all, starting. SPEAKER_271: I want to bring your point and my point together. So your point about Zuck being locked in, engaged, ready to rock, super dialed in. SPEAKER_19: And my point about the importance of this being open. We have a clip from Zuck talking about his, was from the podcast you're referring to, and he's talking about his response to Apple and how that led to him thinking about open source and building in a more free setting. SPEAKER_37: So John, can we run that clip? SPEAKER_273: I was a little shocked by how directly you called out Apple and their closed approach. Can you kind of expand on that and where Apple has been a blocker for meta? SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think it's a little bit soul crushing when you go build features that are what you believe is good for your community. And then you're told that you can't ship them because some company wants to put you in a box so that they can better compete with you. SPEAKER_01: Is he talking about himself or he's talking about Apple? SPEAKER_02: I think Mark Pincus said the same thing about Zuck when they shipped Zynga and Farmville and Zynga Poker. SPEAKER_05: What we should do is we should take that clip again and then scroll down all the headlines of like Facebook turns off, Facebook kills, Facebook, you know. SPEAKER_19: Yeah, but I mean, there we have Mark Zuckerberg 30 or 40 minutes of one of the five or six tech CEOs who matters time is a non trivial thing to get your hands on. Yeah, and that is an impressive amount of communication and candor. So I think that Zuck to your point about investing money in something that is working for his business. I bet you right now he's walking a couple inches taller because everyone's been raving about this before 3.145B came out. People were talking about it. They had amazing stats. People wanted to see it in practice. And we have a chart here from Meta just showing the overall score so people can see why this one matters. Basically, and I'm going to gist this down for everybody, each column here is a different model and each row is a different test. You want to have higher scores. And as you can see, Llama 3.145B competes well with what we're seeing from OpenAI and from Anthropic, et cetera. So I think he's, uh, I think after getting beat up for years over his AR VR bets, no one really wants the metaverse. SPEAKER_277: I bet you Zuck feels reinvigorated by this. And that's why he has that broccoli hairdo. He thinks he's a zoomer. SPEAKER_254: Well, and you know, losing sucks and everybody mocking you for changing the name of your company, um, and blowing 40 billion. SPEAKER_29: Like, you know, he's a human. Um, you want to be loved. You want to be respected. Um, and you know, he, he's never been, he was always kind of like, no matter how much money he made, no matter how big Facebook got, everybody always thought he, he's just a mimic machine. Is that the right word? SPEAKER_280: Memmic, um, yeah, I know, I know you're referring to, I don't know. SPEAKER_29: Memmic theory, you know, the thing that teal was always in of like copying and then caring about everybody around you thought he just copied my space friendster and did it better. Never had an original idea, bought Oculus, bought Instagram, bought WhatsApp, you know, there's very few things that actually Zuckerberg didn't steal in the history of Facebook. SPEAKER_14: It's all either acquired or stolen. There was no original idea there, right? Like poke, like there was no original idea, even the newsfeed, like he didn't pioneer a friend feed, did they bought it. Yeah. So people don't remember the history of this, but I think, you know, he told his team, I don't want your ideas. I want you to just copy it. And he took, and that's why the Instagram founders left. Cause they were like, we have our own ideas weren't pretty when they were just like, just do stories, kill Snapchat. Snapchat, right? And there was this joke in the valley that Evan Spiegel was the hardest working person at Facebook because he was their pre product manager. SPEAKER_283: Exactly. He was like the product manager. SPEAKER_14: He was working two jobs because all they did was they stole, um, ephemeral messaging. They sold stories. They just kept stealing everything that he did, uh, streaks, et cetera. You know, I think Zuck feels like he's not an innovative person. He's just an executor. And I think he, you know, now wants to actually put a stamp on something and, you know, maybe he will. SPEAKER_28: So good for him. You know, I hope it works out. SPEAKER_19: There is one last element of this that I think is important to bring up. We have talked about AI safety, regulatory capture, AI regulation, and then the closed versus open source AI debate. Zuck makes a very interesting point. And I read his lengthy essay announcing these models and his own philosophy, and he says this, I'm going to just quote this. There is an ongoing debate about the safety of open source AI models. And my view is that open source AI will be safer than the alternatives. I think governments will conclude it's in their best interest to support open source because it will make the world more prosperous and safer. So doesn't like Apple's closed model thinks open AI, if you will, is the way to move forward with development, I, I gotta say, I, I wonder what this does, the value of your anthropics and your open AIs, because they're not better and they're more expensive. SPEAKER_42: I mean, until they launch, um, a hosted API version of, you know, their models and a consumer $20 version and enterprise 20 version. SPEAKER_23: And that's really what Zuck needs to do, or somebody needs to take that model and do it. There was a note that you couldn't use his stuff. If you had over a hundred million, or maybe it was 250 million users. So this open source model, you're not allowed to just take it and put it in a, in an at scale company. SPEAKER_42: But really what has to happen is if they're going to defeat open AI, they need to have a, an app that does and matches the open AI app, which, you know, I think tens of millions of people are paying for open AI, um, enterprise. SPEAKER_14: Like we do at launch and, uh, you know, S some number of consumers pay for it as well. So I don't know why that doesn't exist yet, but that would be the next card. SPEAKER_23: I think probably by the first quarter of next year, uh, there'll be a meta AI app, a standalone app, and you'll be able to access inside the apps, right? SPEAKER_42: Which already has that little search bar, but look for a, you know, a chat GPT app competitor. And that's really where. I don't know why these other models don't have the focus on the fit and finish of an app, because I have been using that every day, multiple times a day. SPEAKER_40: I will take out my phone and ask it questions using the voice, like the her mode, uh, Scarlett Johansson mode. Uh, I'll call it from now on. SPEAKER_29: So I'll use Scarlett Johansson more trouble, just to get even more trouble, just a bigger settlement. I'm trying to get scar Joe, a bigger settlement. SPEAKER_291: Shout out to my, yeah, shout out to my pal. SPEAKER_29: Um, but you know, the scar Joe mode and, um, also just research mode, you know, where you and I do the show. I have chat GPT open and I was, when we were doing our discussion of UBI, I just said entitlement programs. SPEAKER_41: Tell me what the biggest are just to refresh my memory. And I always just say, do citations. It gives me the citations. SPEAKER_29: I feel relatively good now reading those statistics in 4.0, but you know, you can't do that with this model. SPEAKER_44: You don't have that, you know, Brock doesn't have that fit and finish yet. So Claude, I don't even know if Claude has an app yet, but it needs to be in the app format. That is the interface. So I think look for it. SPEAKER_29: That's my, uh, Nostracanis prediction is we'll have a competitive meta app and it will be 10 bucks a month, 99 bucks a year or ad supported in some way. And that's going to be a complete. And then we'll see who's well, no, just going to see who's better at apps, Sam Altman. And open AI or Zuckerberg and Meta. And I think we already know the answer to that question of who can get more users for their app. Zuckerberg releases a competitor to open AI app. I think open AI loses 50% of their value as a company. I think they're literally get cut in half. So that's my other prediction is open AI is valuation gets cut in half by a competitive app. Zuckerberg will copy that app pixel by pixel, and then add a couple of features and he'll make it free. SPEAKER_50: Did you say, no, there's your Nostracanis. Nostracanis. Cause I thought, I thought you mispronounced it at first. I'm like, Oh, you got that one wrong. SPEAKER_14: After I got the, uh, after I got the hot swap. Correct. Now my friends are calling me Nostracanis. Oh yeah. SPEAKER_04: But in fairness, I told them they had to call me Nostracanis. SPEAKER_95: I was, I was not, I was not going to bring up the question of aster turfing in regards to that comment. Um, I can't improve on that. So we, we have to go, uh, a couple of reminders for, for our friends. Um, episode 2000 is coming up. If you are subscribed to the twist newsletters, don't forget. SPEAKER_19: We are collecting everyone's favorite episodes, moments, and themes from episode 1000 to 2000. SPEAKER_81: Um, we are also Jason, you told me to ask you, we have a twist 500 party coming up. SPEAKER_84: Oh yeah. So, you know, you guys are doing such a great job on the twist 500, go to twist 500.com. SPEAKER_14: A shout out to our friends at Coda who make a great product. SPEAKER_28: They're not the official sponsors of this. Um, we just love that our product and they have sponsored the show before. SPEAKER_23: And I just think the world of their product, but if you go there, you'll start to see, you know, it's getting a little more advanced. You'll see that we now have it by stage. We have it by topic and, you know, we're going to just keep growing this, um, and figuring out different views. And I love to throw events. And so, you know, the show, the advertising on this week in startups, once again, sold out. So we sold out the year, Alex, once again, um, and you know, it's only July or whatever. So this, this happens to us. SPEAKER_29: We run out of inventory. So my poor sales team is like, can you come up with a new product? And so I was thinking, and I'm just brainstorming here, but I'm thinking of doing a twist 500 party, maybe do it in three cities. You know, we do like a New York, a Bay area and an Austin, Texas. SPEAKER_86: And we tell, and we do it three times a year. Anybody who's, uh, works at the, in a, at a twist 500 company will get, you know, two tickets to the event. So, you know, if for the management team, let's say top 10 employees, founders, whatever. SPEAKER_23: So then I was thinking, well, what else could you do there? And I was thinking about making it a one day, just party. SPEAKER_14: Then I was thinking, you know, in the early days when I did tech crunch 50, which was the idea. I came up with, with Mike Arrington, your old boss, or I don't know if you ever worked for him. SPEAKER_124: I've never, I've actually spoken to Mike Arrington for a total of, I think, 30 seconds, my entire life. Congratulations. That's more than enough. SPEAKER_310: He was nice to me in those 30 seconds. SPEAKER_312: If you gave it another 90 seconds, you might've had a different outcome. SPEAKER_03: It's a joke, folks. It's a joke, folks. He's a pretty promulgely guy. Um, anyway, putting it aside, um, what I did in that event was it was a gift back to the community. SPEAKER_14: And I said, let's give everybody a free table, um, in a trade show area. SPEAKER_23: And, you know, we'll just have a hundred tables and we'll have 50 people on stage and everybody will launch a new product. We wound up renting the tables, I think for a thousand dollars for two days, just to cover the costs, which was more than that. But, you know, there's a little cost to the trade show area. So I'm thinking of two ideas. Um, some sort of a party. Like a lawn party, food trucks, no agenda, just for the twist 500, which is the top private technology companies in the world defined as, cause people have been asking me our definition. We're defining these as the companies we think will have the biggest return on investment. So just so we're clear, we believe these will have the biggest outcomes. In other words, if you own shares in them as an employee, as a founder, as an investor, consultant, or if you were to buy them in the secondary market, we're, we're going to say, we believe Alex and I, that these are the ones that will get the biggest return. Now we're not going to be right on that. You have to make your own financial decisions, but we're just going to take a stab at that, right? Of the 50,000 companies, these are the top 1%. Therefore, with our editorial judgment, we think it, we have the biggest outcome. So that's what I'm thinking about. I'm open to people's ideas. And, um, I was also thinking about maybe renting, uh, something like the San Mateo fairgrounds. SPEAKER_29: And just having three or four stages. And then all 500 companies can get a booth or like a tabletop where they show what they're working on. Now, you know, and roll or stripe may not care, uh, to have a little booth there, but the other 200, you know, who are up in commerce series and below might really appreciate that. Yeah. And then we invite, um, you know, the top 100 companies or a hundred companies. We think are interesting to give a 20 minute talk with a 10 minute Q and a. And so you got three stages, two days and make it just like a big festival. Right. So that's my thinking right now is some sort of event to celebrate these companies and let them come together. And, um, yeah, SPEAKER_160: as, as long as there's a big focus on letting the people just mingle and, and connect and cross pollinate. SPEAKER_19: I'm so in also, I love the food in all those places. So I'm in, I will be the first person there. I'm totally into it, but we have to go everybody. Don't forget like, and subscribe on the YouTubes. We did not get to audience cues. That's because we ran out of time. I have a list from the team. I'm going to try to respond after the show. We appreciate you all. Goodbye.