SPEAKER_00: Hey, everybody, welcome to Monday This Week in Startups. We had to record this episode twice. So there might be a little bit of consistency problems in the second half, but we re-recorded because right after we got off air, Elon Musk's deal with Twitter was approved at $54.20 a share. We covered some other things in the episode, Molly.

SPEAKER_02: Yeah, we're gonna have a good time talking about that and what we think could happen,

Jason Calacanis: a little pros and cons, but we still, I think, agree that ideally pros. There's also a whole Elon Musk lightning round and then we end the show with a startup. We live in the future and that future is sick pneumatic tube package delivery. It's gonna be a great show. Stick with us.

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SPEAKER_09: Okay, Molly, in the top news story of the day, Elon Musk has officially acquired Twitter for $54.20, or as we like to say in the business, $5,420.

Jason Calacanis: $5,420. I mean, yeah, I mean, listen, like, this appears to be a papered deal. There is a press release.

SPEAKER_13: Prorog Agrawal, the CEO of Twitter, has tweeted about how this appears to be the case.

Jason Calacanis: Twitter has evidently canceled its corresponding earnings call, which we'll get to in a minute. But yes, here are the facts as we know them. At this point, the transaction was unanimously approved by the board just a week after that same board approved a poison pill to try to

SPEAKER_14: stop this purchase.

SPEAKER_17: Slow down, slow down. Probably more accurately, but yes. Maybe slow down. Yeah, exactly. Maybe like, make sure it was real.

SPEAKER_01: And make sure that turned out to be.

SPEAKER_21: Yeah, make sure it's real. And yeah, just shake the tree. See if another buyer wants to beat $54.20.

SPEAKER_24: Yeah, exactly. And not surprisingly, no one did. Elon secured $25.5 billion of fully committed

Jason Calacanis: debt and margin loan financing and is providing an approximately $21 billion equity commitment. Okay. After the deal is completed, Twitter will receive, will become a private company just like that.

SPEAKER_25: The purchase price represents a 38% premium to Twitter's closing stock price on April 1st,

SPEAKER_21: 2022. Well, who could have seen this coming?

SPEAKER_09: Well, I mean, it's, uh, as I said, uh, on all in podcast, a couple episodes ago, I was fairly certain, um, that unless there was another buyer, uh, that Elon would be able to close this deal without any inside information. Um, he tends to get stuff done, uh, sometimes the timetable is variable. You know, things take longer, uh, than Elon expects. Sometimes self-driving comes to mind. Other times things happen quicker. Here's an example of something happening quicker, uh, or hitting a million cars a year. You know, uh, I think Elon's been ahead of schedule on how many cars he can deliver now. So absolutely fantastic. Uh, I think it's going to be be great for Twitter, the product. I think it'll be great for Twitter, the employees. I think their stock options will be worth more ultimately, because I think the company will, if it does in fact go private, which I think is going to be a big part of this, uh, they can make very long-term decisions. And then who knows, it could become a public company again. I mean, uh, that does happen sometimes in these situations that something goes private, you clean everything up very quietly without tipping your cards, without explaining to the public markets, about having the stock go up and down and make, uh, employees stock options go underwater, above water and, and, and causing that chaos. Now they can just, um, you know, very, um, quietly and deftly do, uh, for this company, what Elon did at Tesla, which is run it super professionally. Um, and you know, we had Michael Dell on the program. He talked about how hard it is, uh, to pivot and to iterate on a company when it's public, uh, because analysts are smart and dogged and they will watch every move and criticize it. And that's why he took Dell

SPEAKER_29: private for some period of time before it went public again.

Jason Calacanis: Yeah. And that is why, uh, Elon himself evidently tried pretty hard. And, you know, we'll talk about this a little bit later in another little flash roundup of Elon news, tried pretty hard to take Tesla private, presumably for similar reasons that it is in fact, kind of exhausting to deal with the, the kind of short term shareholder situation. Now we would be remiss if we didn't say that there was also a bit of a lot, a good amount of gnashing of teeth and freak out about this development, right? Like one, is there a part of American society that a billionaire, a tech billionaire doesn't own at this point, but two people worrying, you know, that one of two things will happen that one there's, there's your optimistic view. Sure. Grounded in, we should reiterate grounded in the things that Elon Musk himself has said, which is that he's going to clean up the bot problem and make the algorithms transparent. Yep. There's also the less optimistic view that like all of the moderation guardrails might come off, which are grounded in his comments about free speech, which are vague and, you know, not a hundred percent understood. Um, and that now there's a whole, you know, there are people tweeting like, okay, where are you going to go next? What's going to be your platform of choice? Discord is trending as a result of this, right? Like, there are definitely a lot of people who are like, I'm afraid this is going to turn into 8chan

SPEAKER_00: and I need to get out. Well, I would argue like the, the, the system can only get better from here. I mean the, the amount of bots and brigading and madness on the platform is already acute and it has been

SPEAKER_01: for a decade. The technology you're saying can only get better. Yes. The situation can only get better

SPEAKER_00: because they're not successfully policing the platform today. And I don't think any amount of policing, um, is going to work. I think you have to have, you know, um, I think you have to attack this on

SPEAKER_09: a technology, uh, basis. You have to not let people create tons of accounts and you have to have a path

SPEAKER_00: towards people to use real names and be verified. You don't see a fraction of what we see on, uh, on Twitter, on platforms like LinkedIn or Facebook or other real name platforms. Yeah. And so if there is a path for people to get, uh, like Twitter blue to pay and you want to talk about this publicly to become verified, or if there was two levels of verification, the classic blue, and let's say a light blue, you could just put your credit card in, you pay 50 bucks a year for Twitter. Now you're verified. Now, if you, uh, like yourself, Molly would like to have a cleaner experience, you can say, I only want to, um, have replies posted to my tweets from, uh, verified users. Just like now you can do it with only people who follow you, even though people don't really use that. So I think you'll see the crypto scams and all this other spam go away very quickly. I don't think it's a terribly hard technical problem. I think the reason it hasn't gone away is because it would kill Twitter's numbers. So Twitter management has always lived in constant fear of the stock collapsing because they stopped the bots. And if the bots make up five to 20% or the anonymous accounts equal 10 to 30%, if you were

SPEAKER_35: to deprecate them or make it harder for those accounts to be created, what would happen?

SPEAKER_09: The stock price would plummet. Wall Street would say you're not growing anymore. So this has been like a crack pipe that Twitter has been on for a long time, which is, you know, just trying to, you know, get the product to grow. The pernicious nature of that crack pipe is the more you allow those bots to run amok, what happens? You drive good people off the platform. You do. And you end

SPEAKER_02: up with just this kind of reinforcing negativity. Like, remember how it used to be fun to fight on Twitter? I like an argument. Sure. Why not? A debate is great, but not there. Right. It's just like, it's not fun to have. Imagine if you're trying to have a dinner party and you were having

Jason Calacanis: a philosophical conversation with your friends and you're arguing about this or that, and you're like, I'm taking this side of this position. And then a thousand people ran in through your front door and started throwing like poop on your table, like a bunch of monkeys. Then all of a sudden your dinner party, isn't that fun? And you're like, you know what? I'm just going to keep this to the, like all my, all my spicy takes. Now I have in group chat, like, correct. And so, you know, be fun again.

SPEAKER_01: And the algorithm is comes to mind here. So, uh, Elon has been very clear. And again, I just

SPEAKER_00: encourage people to look at what he's tweeting. He tweets, he's tweeted more in the last month than the last three CEOs combined in the history of Twitter. Yeah, I'm not kidding. If you took all of Jack's tweets when he was CEO, Parag's, Avs and Dick Koselos, you put all those tweets together. I think Elon has engaged more people and tweeted more in the last 30 days than all of those CEOs together,

SPEAKER_09: all four of them. And he knows the platform better than they do in many ways, because as a power user, he's used it to great effect, uh, to get attention for hiring people for his projects or selling cars and generally getting attention for his vision of the future. So the algorithm though, he's been very

SPEAKER_00: clear. This should be transparent and all, um, shadow banning, all, uh, moderation should be clear.

SPEAKER_09: And so that is, uh, a no brainer. And again, I would just listen to what he's saying, what he's

SPEAKER_00: saying. What he said about Tesla wound up being true about Tesla. What he said about, you know, the rocket ship company came true. Starlink came true. People are using Starlink and what he's saying

SPEAKER_09: about Twitter will of course become true. He's got a great sense of humor. Uh, and we're friends,

SPEAKER_00: obviously. So I say that, you know, um, just as a friend, he's got a great sense of humor. And as an

SPEAKER_57: executive, he does what he says he's going to do. So he does what he says he's going to do. And now,

SPEAKER_58: if he's going to do the, if he's going to make the algorithm transparent, if he's going to make

SPEAKER_59: uh, all of the actions about censoring or turning off or suspending people more clear,

SPEAKER_43: he's going to do that. And that would be great for everybody. If you're a startup, you know,

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SPEAKER_64: Yeah, it should be more clear. I mean, nobody doesn't want more control over the algorithm,

Jason Calacanis: right? Listen, I'm pro. I am pro all of these. In true dinner party fashion, we should acknowledge the weirdness of billionaires continuing to buy every part of billion of American life. Like that is weird. Two. I mean, it's kind of always been that way, Molly. Like if you look at the... There's great sense of humor. And then there's like troll and poster and pedo bear. Like there is no question that Elon is also a troll and poster and it distorts people's impression. Well, you know him. So you have this sort of the other side of the coin, whereas a lot of people don't. So in that sort of like, I don't know anything. I only know what people think about things. People think a lot of things about him. And I'm just super curious to see how this is all going to

SPEAKER_00: unfold as a product. And I mean, I get personality. You know, I get people's concern about billionaires buying things. By the way, it's always been that way. Uh, you know, we, we had Hearst and everybody else owning media channels, you know, for hundreds of years. So let's not pretend like people of means can't buy, you know, big things. Let's also not pretend that one individual can change the world with

SPEAKER_09: one essay, one video, one interview, one protest, et cetera. These things are also true. Yeah. And so there is a counterbalance and I, I don't know, let's look at the last time this happened. Washington post, uh, the Atlantic have these products become better under Lorraine Powell jobs and, you know, Jeff Bezos or not, I would argue those products are much better of late. So I don't know what you,

SPEAKER_82: what are you, what are you, Molly? Is Washington post a better product and the Atlantic a better product? Atlantic is fantastic. And the Washington post is revived and journalists are getting paid and he

Jason Calacanis: seems to have stayed out of their business. I'm not like, I'm not again, I'm just pointing out the last time that happened, it was the gilded age that proceeded like a great depression. You know, I mean, when they're that stratification happens and privatization, it's just a, it's like a, it's a spectrum. And, and this is sort of like a new high on that spectrum. I definitely think that he is getting more heat than other billionaires who buy a lot of stuff. I mean, here's, and it's

SPEAKER_73: probably because he is so visible and I'll take the counter to poster and a troll. Here's what

SPEAKER_00: happens when you're highly influential and you've got money and you buy something like this. You really have to be thoughtful about it because there's going to be a ton of scrutiny. So when

SPEAKER_09: David Bradley bought, um, the Atlantic and then he sold it, uh, to Lorraine Powell jobs, or I think most of it, you know, he, as a high profile person, David Bradley, uh, who I know, he was incredibly

SPEAKER_00: thoughtful. Lorraine Powell jobs is being incredibly tough. Jeff Bezos is being incredibly thoughtful. You have to be incredibly thoughtful about this or else it can blow up in your lap. And even controversial folks like the intercept, which was funded by Pierre Omidyar. I mean, that was a really, you know, edgy publication, right? Like, yeah. And, uh, I think most people would say the world is better because it exists. So in the examples I gave of the last four ownerships that

SPEAKER_09: I can think of, it's gone in the right direction, which one hasn't gone in the right direction. Facebook, right? That's the one where I think we're all like, uh, that's kind of a bummer. So

SPEAKER_12: is the Washington post public? Like, is this the right, is this the right corollary? Like they

SPEAKER_25: didn't, like, Aaron Powell jobs took a majority stake, but she didn't like buy it wholesale and

SPEAKER_94: take it private. No, the Atlantic was already private, but she controls it now. So she controls

SPEAKER_09: it. And David Bradley, who was, I don't know if he's a billionaire, but certainly a centimillionaire, um, worth hundreds of millions. He bought it for a hundred million back in the day. I remember that number and he did a great job stewarding it up until this point. So generally,

SPEAKER_99: speaking, the post is public. I think, uh, Washington post is public. I'm not sure about that. I don't think so. Washington post. Unlike Amazon. No, the post became a subsidiary. It did

SPEAKER_25: go private. Okay. Yeah. So, so similar. Yeah. Listen, I'm not, and the New York times is

SPEAKER_09: controlled by a family and most people argue they are thoughtful and do a good job. I mean, you can critique it, I guess on the margins, but, um, yeah, that's why I think the fears are overblown.

SPEAKER_12: The thing about the thing about Elon is that he's very polarizing. I think we should take

Jason Calacanis: these arguments at face value on some level and take them apart. It doesn't necessarily mean I'm not sitting here saying it's going to be a net negative, but I think that it's reasonable to be like, huh? Yeah. Someone just came along and was like, I like this better than you do. I can be a better steward. I'm going to buy it. And now now a lot of people are consternated for a better way to put it.

SPEAKER_106: I think the, the folks who are hand-wringing, um, are just virtual, I think it's virtual

SPEAKER_31: Twitter. I think it's virtual signaling on Twitter. Um, the, the product has been a disaster for a decade.

SPEAKER_00: We all use it in this disastrous, broken format already. Yeah. I think it's only gonna get better. So, you know, it, it, it's, it's one of these platforms that's full contact. It's one that uses

SPEAKER_09: words, not images and videos. And so, uh, you know, I think it's going to be absolutely fantastic. I think, you know, he's gonna bring a level of transparency. And we talked about before on this show, you know, the really hard decisions that the owner of these services have to make. And I can only think of two sensor. We, we, you and I talked about this previously,

SPEAKER_01: because we had to retape today's show, but I think we should revisit the discussion we had on the specific instances of what, what, what people are calling bands and censorship.

SPEAKER_09: Bands and censorship. You have Trump being banned. The second one was Hunter Biden's laptop and the New York post being banned. And the third one was the discussion over the lab leak theory. And it was that, um, suspension for zero hedge, which people claim is a Putin mouthpiece. I'm not certain. Um, but anyway, uh, if you look at all three of those, man, these were hard decisions, weren't they,

SPEAKER_113: Molly? Yeah. I mean, these were unprecedentedly difficult decisions in the case of Trump insurrection. Yeah. And to overturn a free and fair election, like you make that call. I dare you. Right. Hard call to make and people's lives were at risk. People's lives are at risk.

SPEAKER_00: And that was, I mean, that was made universally. I wouldn't have made it a lifetime ban. I would have made it a, I don't know, two year ban or something, and then doubled it each time he did something stupid like that. That's just my personal feeling. But that was a hard decision to make.

SPEAKER_117: I mean, then the New York post was a hard one. Yes. And the New York post one, you know,

Jason Calacanis: maybe you could refresh people's memory. What Twitter said at the time. So this New York post story came out that was like, Oh, we have the contents of Hunter Biden's laptop, which had been this big sort of, um, Republican bugaboo. Like this is going to prove that he's totally corrupt. And this is going to end the Biden candidacy. And effectively us intelligence agencies got in touch with Twitter and said, this is a, a hack and leak operation. This is, this is, you know, Russian interference in our election in the form of a hack and leak, much like the Podesta emails and the Clinton emails back in the day were. And so then Twitter was like, okay, we don't want to, and they said, if you link to this, you are linking to stolen information. So Twitter was like, we don't want that smoke. Yeah. They block links to that story.

SPEAKER_01: And remember this was during, uh, to, to set the table for that decision. We had proven that the

SPEAKER_122: Russians tried to interfere in 2016. We knew that Trump had asked the Russians to hack Hillary Clinton and the Clintons and the DNC. And we knew at that time, shortly before it, that Trump himself had asked the Ukraine to hack, uh, or censor Biden and release information and that he was withholding, uh, aid to them for which he was impeached. Uh, so, you know, when you look at that collectively

SPEAKER_00: and put aside your partisanship for a second, because it does turn out that Hunter Biden is a wild cat who was so absolutely grifting off of his dad's name and he's under investigation by the DOJ.

SPEAKER_09: Everybody knows that. So maybe, you know, it'll turn out that like, oh my God, this guy is the most corrupt guy on the planet and he'll go to jail. Uh, let's put that aside for a second partisanship,

SPEAKER_00: because both things could be true. Yeah. How do you make that decision as a platform? It's a very hard decision to make. You've got the DOJ or somebody from the FBI calling you saying that's stolen. Don't link to it. We're in the middle of an election and we know that the last election was interfered with do not participate in this. And then in addition to that, it included revenge born in, you know, uh, selfies and naked photos, which is also against linking to that is against the terms of service of all these social networks for good reason, obviously, you know, you don't want to

SPEAKER_09: encourage people to use them for that. So you put all that together. What a hard, hard, hard decision

SPEAKER_128: to make content moderation is a nightmare. Like it is a nightmare. And so I think it is fair to be

Jason Calacanis: Elon Musk is very thoughtful and his companies tackle incredibly complex problems. Yeah. This is an

SPEAKER_94: incredibly complex problem. You know, at times and other times it's very simple. If you dock somebody, um, if you're a bot account and you're spamming super easy. Yeah. So I think there'll be a series of things that are exceptionally easy to fix. Um, and I think if they, you know, move from an advertising

SPEAKER_09: model or keep the advertising model, but if people can pay 50 or a hundred bucks a year, or if you're someone like me with 500,000 followers, or you've got a couple of hundred thousand, you know, would I pay,

SPEAKER_00: I don't know, a thousand dollars a year, $5,000 a year to get, you know, a much better package of customer service of, uh, you know, well, no, it could be optional metrics, et cetera. Uh, and to have a blue check mark. Yeah, of course I would. And if you're a company, you know, they already spend

SPEAKER_09: money on third party tools to the tune of hundreds of thousands a year. So Twitter should sell, you know, analytics tools and give incredible customer support and insights to, um, companies and companies and high profile people would absolutely pay for it. So there's so many wins here. And, uh, yeah. So

SPEAKER_35: what, what's the other reaction? We'll get some live reactions here. Let's talk about the fun

SPEAKER_82: conspiracy theories too. Can we? I'm sorry. Conspiracy theories. Not even the conspiracy

Jason Calacanis: theories, but well, first of all, this isn't even a conspiracy theory. This is just the other interesting wrinkle to this, which is zero hedge tweeting and reporting. And I think Parag can confirming that Twitter will not hold its earnings call now. Interesting. That right. So on the one hand, you can be like, well, yeah, it's being bought and taken private. So why have an earnings call? Hmm. But it also Nick raised the point, uh, producer Nick that maybe the earnings call, the earnings were indeed so that the board got an early look at him was like, let's sell.

SPEAKER_09: Yeah. Who knows? I don't know. Like, but I, um, I, yeah, maybe, uh, I think,

SPEAKER_00: do they, will they ever do another one is the question. I wonder it's time for another

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SPEAKER_00: again, that's our crowd.com slash twist to sign up for free. The poll in our YouTube among the

Jason Calacanis: notice currently sits at should Twitter expand its paid product 77%. Yes, 23%. No, like people are

SPEAKER_59: definitely willing to pay. People are right when it does nothing. I mean, I literally get nothing out of blue except maybe being able to change my buttons at the bottom. Imagine if it gave me like metrics and insights and customer support. Like imagine you paid $100 a year and you could actually have

SPEAKER_00: somebody email you back from Twitter support would be pretty amazing, right? Or if you paid $5,000 a year for a business account like mine, and I was able to collect more email addresses or know my users or sort my users or maybe I could DM all my users how great would it be if you had a paid account because I use a third party tool called social metrics or something like that back in the day to email

SPEAKER_09: everybody who was following me. Hey, I'm having a book signing in New York and I emailed every person

SPEAKER_00: in New York. I'm having this book signing. Here's a link if you want to sign up and hundreds of people showed up. What if that was a paid feature? What if I could say I could DM if I paid but a penny per follower, which would be $5,000 a year at 500,000. If I paid $5,000 a year, but I could DM, you know, up to 1000 of my followers up to 10% of my followers anytime I wanted. Wow, that'd be incredible. Yeah,

SPEAKER_02: my Lord, that's the killer idea right there. It is because then you don't have to collect email,

SPEAKER_24: right? Like everybody's in the business. If you want to be building a community, you're in essentially the business of collecting emails. So you can have a powerful email list and cause and

SPEAKER_152: action. And if you could just created the killer feature, I yeah, if only I knew somebody, you need to, I was gonna say, if I knew somebody who worked at Twitter, I could, I could send

SPEAKER_155: him this idea. Do you want to just give him a little? Yeah, exactly. But seriously, like link

Jason Calacanis: Twitter could have killed LinkedIn years ago. And imagine to and imagine like stopping, imagine stopping the perverse incentives of like, Oh, we hired this person because they have half a million or a million Twitter followers when we know nothing about whether those followers

SPEAKER_25: actually translate into engagement. How many I mean, I used to get offers I had like, I don't know, a million followers on Google Plus. Remember when Google Plus existed for like five

Jason Calacanis: minutes? Yes. They were like, Oh, yeah, you should. None of those were real. Like people were like, Oh, we noticed you have a million. Do you want to do this job? And I'm like, sure,

SPEAKER_94: about eight of them are real. So if you're you think how the realness because you would share something and nobody would click on it. Right? So it was all like weird semi English

Jason Calacanis: marriage proposals were all of my Google Plus interaction interaction. So the idea that they could be high be making decisions based on actual metrics on Twitter instead of what is bots and

SPEAKER_168: what is fake activity like? Can we do a round of dunking? May we do a round of

SPEAKER_94: dunking? Yes, yes, yes, yes. Okay, here we go. All right. So on all in episode 76, I wrapped the show by asking my besties to predict what would happen. Sachs said, no deal because it was rigged against Elon. The fix is in the Democrats conspiracy theory.

SPEAKER_122: Biden would put his thumb on the scale. I was like, wow, you've lost it. Sachs. Freeberg said no deal because Twitter's board would run a drawn out process and find a better offer. Chamath said no deal because Twitter will reject the deal against their own best interests were resulting years of lawsuits. What did Jake Hal say? Well, let's play the 27 second clip.

SPEAKER_172: My prediction is the board tries to fight it. Stock collapses. Nobody thinks it's going to get done.

SPEAKER_173: Elon lowers his offer and he wins it by the end of the year and gives him a lower offer. You didn't

David Sacks: like Jake Hal always with the optimism. Now we're going 49. That's very Michael Corleone.

SPEAKER_176: Now the offer is 49 and it goes down $2 every quarter until you guys acquiesce. The end. It's

SPEAKER_180: trading at 30. I lower my offer. I just love when you get all mafia. You're like, oh yeah,

SPEAKER_184: it goes down $2 every day until you finally like you will not curate this. Yeah. I try to tamp down the Brooklyn inside of me, but that would have been my shirt. And he didn't even have to, he did not have to lower the price. It got done. No, I would never, I would never, um, I would never dunk on a

SPEAKER_09: fellow podcaster. Uh, but everybody's favorite, uh, pundit, uh, which, you know, I think this is like, um, who was the guy who was the, uh, SNL guy, Andy Kaufman. I, I think Prof G is like Andy Kaufman. I

SPEAKER_94: think it's like a giant performance art to get every prediction wrong just to get ratings. Right.

SPEAKER_09: So it's kind of like he's trolling everybody, but Prof G, um, said, uh, that this would never happen. This deal could never happen. And the market said it would never happen. Here's 33 seconds

SPEAKER_194: from of ice cold, uh, ice from Prof G. I don't think this is a serious offer and the market doesn't think it's a serious offer. I think this is the first time I've ever seen. I don't know if you've ever

SPEAKER_196: seen an offer to take a company private at a 20% premium. And on that day, the market actually takes the stock down because the market looks at this and says, okay, let's look at the words. My best and final offer deals never get done on the first offer, meaning he isn't serious. If I'm going to have to reconsider my share position, this sounds to me like the market has interpreted this. And I think correctly as I'm about to sell my shares. And as a result,

SPEAKER_202: the market has gone. All right. There you have it folks from the professor himself.

SPEAKER_205: How many did you do that just now? It's just so many ice cold takes in one clip. It's just,

SPEAKER_204: man, he got it so wrong. Um, and to his credit Prof G, um, and RIP, your third TV show that failed in a row. Um, wrong again, he writes on his Twitter. So one thing you could say about Prof G is that he always

SPEAKER_09: owns, he owns it. He owns his terrible takes and the deal did get done at the price. It did get

SPEAKER_02: done on the first try and he was completely wrong. I honestly, I'm going to give him this one though,

Jason Calacanis: to be fair, like who it's like, it's a little unfair because he's up against you, you know, all the cards on the table, right? I don't, I'm trying to think what my, I think there's as good a chance as any of that. I would have been like, I don't think this is a serious bit. I'm not really sure because who knows? I mean, um, I think your point, your point is actually probably the one to hold on to, which is that he does what he says he's going to do like that. I think, and there have like funding secured that, you know, as has now been revealed and we'll talk about this a little

SPEAKER_02: later in the show. He meant that when he said that he meant he actually, yes, we'll get to that in a

SPEAKER_173: second because those texts have been leaked, but I just want to say it's really valuable to just start

Jason Calacanis: being like, what if you take you on literally and seriously, literally just take him seriously

SPEAKER_57: and literally he's, he's not making jokes. He's just, you know, sometimes he's wrong. Like, uh,

SPEAKER_09: you know, some things take longer than he thinks, but he sets aspirational targets. Sometimes he

SPEAKER_00: hits them. Sometimes he's late. Uh, it is what it is. Yeah. Uh, but you know, um, just so you know, thank you to, uh, CNN plus for allowing us to use that 33 second clip. Rest in peace. CNN plus,

SPEAKER_220: uh, lasted, uh, shorter than Elon Musk's bid on the first try. Okay. And then I just want to say

SPEAKER_176: that take aged, just like milk on a hot summer's day. Just another classic. Prof G. Can you say

SPEAKER_122: that? Just please. Prof G. Uh, just say there is no way inside will become a top 100 site in the world.

SPEAKER_224: Just say that. If you could just say that he's like, you just say that I could get there. It's

Jason Calacanis: so much easier. We should though. I mean, I, I want to be respectful of all those CNN plus producers who've been laid off and also we should probably hire some let's get them.

SPEAKER_204: Whoever was prof G's producer, uh, on CNN plus hit me up. I want to hear the inside stories

SPEAKER_205: and I have a job for you. We got work for you. Come see me. I'm at the Plaza hotel. You asked for

SPEAKER_02: Frank White. Um, so a little more fun happened on Twitter about Twitter. Uh, your bestie David

Jason Calacanis: Sachs and Kara Swisher having a rare moment of agreement. David Sachs tweets, crazy thought.

SPEAKER_24: What if Jack masterminded this whole thing? Incentives do seem to be aligned here. Maybe take it private decentralized. Kara Swisher responds for once me and David

SPEAKER_02: Sachs agree on one intriguing conspiracy theory. This is like knives out internet moguls version.

SPEAKER_09: Well, that's true because Kara and David don't like each other. Um, they, they couldn't be on further sides of the aisle and I'm friends with both. So there you have it. Um, yeah, I don't know if I, uh, you know, David's been getting into these conspiracy theories a whole bunch now. So I don't think Jack mastermind the whole thing. No. Um, I'm sure, you know, Jack is supportive of Elon. Um, and I'm wouldn't be surprised if Jack was involved in the future. Why wouldn't he be?

SPEAKER_82: So, yeah, I think mastermind is probably strong. Did he encourage it to do there's incentive. Might

SPEAKER_24: he come back? Absolutely. But I don't know about masterminded. Yeah. When you're growing your company,

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SPEAKER_09: segment before the news broke of Elon successfully buying Twitter. And again, that's going to take, you know, I would think months to close. So it's not a done deal yet, but it seems like it's done. We're on its way to being done. Anything could happen, I suppose. But here's our discussion of Elon's back and forth with the Saudis about taking Tesla private. Turns out he had the receipts. And we'll talk a little bit about the back and forth with Bill Gates shorting Tesla. Ouch. That's going to be hard one to cover. Enjoy the rest of the show, everybody. So we just do like a little lightning

SPEAKER_240: round of I mean, Elon is the news that never keeps giving. So there's a couple other Elon related news

SPEAKER_241: things. Please don't re aggregate the stuff. I mean, I don't want to talk about my friend too much,

SPEAKER_244: but no, I will just give my I'll give my quick take on each of them. Okay, this one I think is

Jason Calacanis: actually this is a redemption tale in some ways. And and Elon Musk actually talked about this at that TED talk when they got done with talking about whether he was in a by Twitter and completely mangling concepts or free speech. They they talked about this thing where he got in trouble with the SEC because he had tweeted funding secured and funding was not secured to take Tesla private. Now, as a result of this shareholder lawsuit, a lot of these texts are coming out. some of which appear to validate what Elon said and that Ted talk and what he has apparently always maintained, which is like, I really thought funding had been secured. And in this case,

SPEAKER_24: it's evidently because of a conversation that he had had with the managing director of Saudi Arabia's public investment investment fund, Yasir al-Rumayan. In which effectively, he was like, whoa, whoa, whoa,

Jason Calacanis: we had a conversation. I'm just gonna I'm gonna go ahead and paraphrase Elon was like, dude, we talked and you told me you were 100% in to give me the money to take Tesla private. And then al-Rumayan wrote back and was like, you don't get off the bus without a transfer, buddy. And Elon was like, you are throwing me under the bus here, man, because they issued this sort of weak sauce statement saying like, well, I don't know, we might be interested, but yeah, funding is not secured. Let's not get ahead of ourselves here.

SPEAKER_21: Uh, so they had, yeah, I mean, this was obvious, like they had told him, you know, that they were in,

SPEAKER_172: they said this in front of the CFO of Tesla. And so maybe it wasn't papered, but they had given him the agreement. And, um, I think this is why he's got this really deep grudge with the SEC. And so, uh, you know, yeah. Yeah. I mean, really, like, I mean, why would you tweet

SPEAKER_252: that you have the funding secured if you don't? And he did, you know, but man, you gotta have the

SPEAKER_253: paper, maybe paper, you don't get off the bus without a transfer. Well, you know, I think, uh,

David Friedberg: you know, some people are, um, you know, the handshake deal is a handshake deal. So,

SPEAKER_17: yeah. Oh yeah. I mean, listen, that sucks. That's, that's, you know, shady business dealings by the Saudis shocker, but, um, um, well, there it is. So, okay. And then I guess, uh,

SPEAKER_172: there was confirmation of what I said last week about Bill Gates, a short position. Yeah. So anyway, obviously, uh, there was a lot of discussion about this going on amongst, uh, friends of mine and yeah. So, uh, it was obviously leaked. It was not leaked by me, but somebody leaked tweets, uh, or our tax exchange with Gates. The question is, when did Gates buy

SPEAKER_00: these shares? When did he short the stock? And if to cover this now that they've had such extraordinary results, this might cost Gates like billions of dollars to cover this position. So I wonder, yeah, he had a half a billion 500 and then the stock tripled, he would owe a billion

SPEAKER_241: dollars. If it 10 X, he would owe a lot more. So, you know, 4.5 billion or something like covering it is, uh, really hard. Yeah. Uh, so I mean, that's why I think that's why I call it. I believe it really

Jason Calacanis: is now onto a very interesting story coming out of the EU, which is so, um, and then paradoxically,

SPEAKER_245: Elon confirmed all this on Twitter, which is in the process of buying apparently. So,

SPEAKER_13: and all of this was leaked on Twitter and when it's his own personal, okay. When it's his own personal,

SPEAKER_00: uh, news service. We'll know why, you know, it's gonna, I think what you'll see is all the bots and the brigading is going to be really hard to do in the future. I would say we're sitting here a

SPEAKER_59: year from now and Elon's been working on it for a year. I think the number of bots will go down by 80 or 90%. And the issues around brigading of fake bots, because every time I get into a conversation with sacks and I do, I basically take screenshots of one or two, just to prove my point of people who created their accounts in the last six months who have zero followers or 15 followers and the 15 followers are all bots. And these, these right wing lunatics and also people on the left, of course, basically the lunatic fringe, they are just exceptional at creating legions of bots. Twitter allows them to create legions of bots because it makes the numbers look good, increases

SPEAKER_270: the number of tweets, increases the number of new accounts. So, you know, somebody who's on the

SPEAKER_122: right or the left, they create 50 bots. They have them all set up on their computers somehow,

SPEAKER_76: and they just flip between the accounts. And then they will reply to my reply with six different versions of the same thing. Now it looks like I'm losing the argument. And then Sacks is liking all the bots. And I'm like, Sacks, you're liking bots. Like, it makes it look like, I mean, I don't think Sacks has bots, obviously, but his stands are creating 50 bots. And then they're like, oh, J Cal is a libtard, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And he's fat. And I'm like, okay,

SPEAKER_268: it was fat, not fat anymore. I love how you always give the credit. Like, I love how you always both sides this and say that it also happens on the left, because like,

SPEAKER_225: well, I do have it. I did. I do have it happen in San Francisco politics, but I would say it's probably 80. It's probably 70, right? 30. I mean, there have been lots and lots of studies on this,

Jason Calacanis: to be clear, like the disinformation that is being there. This is a verified phenomenon that is not both

SPEAKER_225: sides. Well, also like Sacks is like, there's no Russian interference. I'm like, are you deranged?

SPEAKER_288: Like, how can he's like, tell me the top three Russian bots. I'm like, do I work at the CIA? Like,

SPEAKER_224: they're shutting them down in real time. Like, yeah, obviously, if you want to know which bots are currently spreading misinformation, you might want to talk to the CIA, FBI, et cetera, who are responsible for breaking the bot rings along with Twitter.

SPEAKER_12: Sisa, they got a lot to say about it. They got a lot to say. They know, they know who it is. Speaking of all this, I read that the EU is now and the EU is a finer filter on, you know, tech

SPEAKER_00: companies, they, they created like GDPR. And, you know, they're kind of like the apple of privacy. And they just hold the line a little bit tighter than say US regulators. Tell us about this new digital services act because I think that this is going to dovetail with Elon's plans for and Jack's plans for roll your own algorithm. And then I think this could be quite interesting.

Jason Calacanis: This is a huge deal. And it's so woulda shoulda coulda because it's the kind of regulation that had

SPEAKER_13: it occurred here in the United States. Five years ago, six years ago, two years, 10 years ago,

Jason Calacanis: when everybody was calling for it, it actually would have addressed many of the things that made Twitter so effective in terms of and Facebook made them so effective in terms of platforms for misinformation and disinformation and might have even, you know, left Twitter's board in a better position than they're in now. The upshot of it is that it's called the digital services act and will

SPEAKER_24: cover how companies should police content on their platform. It will include obligations to remove illegal content and goods more quickly. And that gets to, for example, like Google and all those

Jason Calacanis: pharmaceutical ads. Also explain to users and how and researchers how their algorithms work, actual algorithm transparency, and then taking stricter action on the spread of misinformation

SPEAKER_24: and potentially disinformation. It only applies to EU citizens, but it much like the GDPR will probably lead multinationals to implement just kind of a one policy that, you know, conforms to the European standards, and then applies here as well. And it seems like a net good. Yeah, and I think the hard part

SPEAKER_122: is going to be like, many of the actions taken inside these algorithms are very complicated. And I'm not sure that these companies are going to have an easy time explaining what they're doing. And the explanations of these algorithm tweaks could be quite embarrassing and or a cookie jar moment. In other words, Zuckerberg or somebody at Twitter or somebody at YouTube might have said, we need to hit our numbers. How do we get more increased, you know, minutes per user? And they said, Well, you know, there's these like clusters of like minded

SPEAKER_76: people. So, you know, we dial that up. Now, the downside might be you might send people to misinformation or Alex Jones, or, you know, conspiracy theories. And they're like, Okay, well, people can decide for themselves. So it's a conspiracy theory, we want more minutes, as opposed to making the decision of, well, we don't want to send people to low source to anonymous or lower quality sources just to increase our minutes, like nobody's making that decision inside a company who's got stock options, you know, it has to hit a

SPEAKER_59: target. So this might result in, let's just say people leaking how these algorithms were made. And

SPEAKER_304: there probably is a bunch of cleanup going on right now, Molly. Oh, I'm sure. And some of these

SPEAKER_288: organizations, they're like, what's the, do we have a log of all the discussions about tweaking the algorithm? Can we purge that log? And nobody talk about how we tweak the algorithm except in this,

SPEAKER_205: like skiff, you know, those skiff rooms, like there's going to be a skiff room at Google and

SPEAKER_288: Twitter. Like, yeah, six people can go in and no devices. And we're going to talk about how we make these changes. And then the changes occur. And then whatever tweets happen there that like wipe out

SPEAKER_59: what we told the algorithm to do. This is going to get gnarly because I think somebody was like, you know, what's really interesting? It turns out people who listen to, you know, this conspiracy theorist or people who get outrage, if we put something that's outrageous. Yeah, those people come back to Twitter the next day. But it could be that somebody was like, you know what, if you want to get people to come back tomorrow, show them something they hate today. And they'll come in and

SPEAKER_00: check in on tomorrow, get them to respond to, you know, this craziness, and they'll come back tomorrow

SPEAKER_24: because they're outraged. So show them more outrage. The ironic part about that is that all of that has already come out about Facebook. Like, all of that. That was all what Francis

Jason Calacanis: Haugen's leaks were about, where they for years now, people have been saying to Mark Zuckerberg, hey, we keep showing people, you know, we keep radicalizing grandmas, we keep like pushing people to anti-vax groups, we keep pushing people to more and more extreme positions. And if we stop doing that,

SPEAKER_24: it will slow down growth. And every time Mark Zuckerberg is literally in these leaked documents

Jason Calacanis: being like, prioritize growth. So I can't imagine. And what I'm really curious to see actually will be the advertising algorithms. And I hope that I have not dug all the way into the Digital Services Act. But what I really want to see is that as well. So not just the content that we see, but the ads, because I don't know if you remember this, but back in, I looked it up real quick 2018, because I'm obsessed with this story. In Europe, Jeremy Corbyn, who is like the labor, the lead of the labor party, right, in the UK, members of his own party, tricked him into thinking

SPEAKER_24: that they were pushing a platform that he wanted them to push, but they didn't, they thought it was a loser. So literally, his own party by buying micro targeted ads on Facebook, so that when he went

Jason Calacanis: on Facebook, he lived in an alternate reality where he was like, Oh, laborers, we're doing a great job of pushing these messages. But they weren't. They were literally just pushing them to

SPEAKER_11: him. So sick. It's so sick. I mean, literally, that one to one targeting is incredible. I had

SPEAKER_76: somebody who tried to do that with me on like Google, where my search results would be like their startup or something. So there was like this micro targeting you could do. And this is called lookalike audiences for people who are not familiar, you can take like an email list. So let's say you had a 1000 people who were on the this week in startups list. Then you say, Hey, tell me people like these

SPEAKER_122: people then you what Facebook's algorithm would do is look at the friends and say, Okay, who works at startups, or just show anybody in this network of people related to this 1000 emails, show them this week in startups ads. And if they click on them, then examine what the relationship between that person and the original person on the list was and find more of those people in that person's list.

SPEAKER_76: And then it would go spider out. Yeah, this is one of the great innovations of advertising of all

SPEAKER_122: time. And this is why people think their phones are listening to them. It's not that their phones are listening to them. It's that the social graph is being worked. So if you care about, I don't know,

SPEAKER_59: the Corvette, the new Stingray. Okay, great. Jason brought up the Corvette Stingray, you know, at his

SPEAKER_122: poker game. And then Jason did searches for the Corvette Stingray clicked on the ads. So then the

SPEAKER_76: advertisers then said, Tell me more people like Jason and it picked up the poker group friends and showed them Corvette ads. Now they think Oh my god, our phones are listening. No, it's, they're looking at

Jason Calacanis: your location correlated with your interest correlated with your searches and everything you've bought in the online. So I'd love to see, I mean, go a step further, right? I want to see the data gathering algorithms, like all of that should be transparent. It will good for society. It is good for society. And I will just say that researchers have been screaming for this for a decade on these social platforms. If the US had done regulation like this, back in the day, so much about our discourse, I mean, it's just a miserable path dependency to think about that we were just like, Oh, it'll be well. And

SPEAKER_59: you know what this also shows is that there are paths to unravel some of the negative effects of social media. And the amount of time you spend online is driven, I think, by these algorithms. And so maybe if you choose to not have your content selected for you by the algorithm, and you select your own

SPEAKER_122: algorithm, and when you turn it on, just like when you turn on a browser, it says, you know, would you like us to be the default? Or in some cases, I think Google did the power move of like, what would you like as your default search engine, they know that the best so it's 90% of people are going to do it. But you

SPEAKER_172: could pick DuckDuckGo as your, you know, you know, search engine if you were so inclined, which is pretty good

SPEAKER_76: from what I understand, or being isn't it for years. So you know, there you have it, like, there could be a when you

SPEAKER_122: sign up, it says, Hey, do you want the default YouTube algorithm? Or here are some popular algorithms made by other users. And this is a Disney algorithm. The people at Disney, imagine

SPEAKER_11: that like, as an opportunity, the same thing, though, like, it's just gonna end up in the same

SPEAKER_122: place made by the EFF, it could be one made by common sense media. So I don't know if you use common sense media. Yeah. And this is a tip for everybody just type in the name of the movie common sense media. And actually, it's kind of like Google auto completed for you. So I went to see

SPEAKER_76: the what's the new Jared Leto Morbius. And, you know, I went, I took another kid who's a friend of my daughter's, and they're both 12 ish. And I was like, Morbius, common sense media. And the parent was like, Oh, my God, is this like, really scary? Like, it looks really scaly from the trailer. And I was like, well, common sense media says it's 12 years old and above. And so God bless the people

SPEAKER_100: at common sense media. I mean, I really actually need to join this and donate. I'm gonna make a note to do

SPEAKER_224: that. But anyway, they are gonna say I don't know this is a two star movie. I thought it was great. I although I can't wait to see this. I loved it. Because I thought it was like a very unique character in the MCU, the cinematic universe. And I also thought like, wow, Adam Newman has a future as a, you know, anti hero. I kept, you know, like I kept getting, I kept hearing

SPEAKER_339: say, Rivka, Rivka, no, I'm not going to drink your blood. You drink the blood, you like it.

SPEAKER_341: Bye, bye, bye, bye, bye, bye, bye, bye. Bye, bye, bye. Okay, I want to like not only do I want to

SPEAKER_13: invest in whatever Adam Newman does in the future, I want to like, I'm all in on the Jared Leto

SPEAKER_344: catalog. Like I just want to watch. I love Jared Leto. Oh, we drink, we drink, we drink,

SPEAKER_346: we drink blood. We also drink tequila. Oh, yeah, it's the tequila. You're going to love it, Rivka.

SPEAKER_348: I drink it. I drink your tequila. You take a shot of tequila, I drink your tequila blood.

Jason Calacanis: I'm getting myself a bottle of that Don Julio 1942 for my birthday, because I'm a big tequila fan. I'm writing that down. Hold on a second. Are we still going to, are we still going to Top Gun?

SPEAKER_224: Are we going to do that? We will do the Top Gun, yes. The Mollywood Top Gun is being a screening. But I want Don Julio. You drink the good stuff now. Send Lon Harris

SPEAKER_350: a Don Julio. Send Molly a Don Julio and send me a Don Julio by Wednesday. So we on Thursday show we can Don Julio. You are so smart. We're going to Don Julio the season finale.

SPEAKER_351: I love you. I love this job. I love you, Nick. You're so bad. I got my I got my Cafe Dumont by the way. You did. Oh, you got a cold brew. Fantastic. I know I'm making my

SPEAKER_102: cold brew this afternoon for tomorrow. Cheers. I'm having iced coffee now because

SPEAKER_350: I forgot to make no more bottles of iced coffee. Only make your own in batches. No

SPEAKER_122: more bottles. Anybody? Hey, Molly, I found a really groovy. We live in the future. Our future TV show. Streamers contact me Jason at Calacanis.com. This is going to be this

Chamath Palihapitiya: is all trademark. This is our new show that we're doing a pilot for. Okay, whoever produced,

SPEAKER_122: uh, what's the best magazine style show ever made Anthony Bourdain, I guess.

SPEAKER_360: Anything better than that? I mean, 60 minutes, honestly, like, all right. Great idea. 60 minutes.

SPEAKER_304: If you're a 60 minutes producer or you worked on Anthony Bourdain show and you know what you're

SPEAKER_122: doing, email me, I'll hire you to produce. We live in the future as a streamer show and we'll

SPEAKER_304: do the first pilot episode. This would be a perfect, perfect company. The company I saw online and the founder had actually reached out to me. So I missed this investment like an idiot because I get too

SPEAKER_122: much inbound. Oh, but that's okay. There's always time for a make good. They just raised 1.6 million dollars. I believe. And it's called pipe dream labs. I'm calling this hyperloop for delivery of

SPEAKER_24: packages. Okay. Molly, walk us through this. Okay. So pipe dream labs is making a subterranean package delivery system like the boring company, but for packages. And if you, none of you are old enough

Jason Calacanis: to remember this, but a long, long time ago, banks had drive throughs and you would go to the drive through and you would put your like check or your money or whatever in a little tube in a little container and then you'd shove it in this pneumatic tube and it would go and just get like sucked up back to the teller and it was the coolest, greatest thing ever. And now these people have made that are trying to evidently make this for package delivery. This is yes. Oh, amazing. And bonkers. Cause where are they going to, where's it going to all go? Okay. So it's a tiny little electric powered system, transports packages at 60 miles an hour in 12 inch PVC pipes. So packages can be up

SPEAKER_24: to 10 inches in diameter and 16 inches long, AKA almost all the crap you get from Amazon. They're starting out with these neighborhood portals. So it won't necessarily be a tube

SPEAKER_375: right to your house immediately, but eventually it will be like a freaking mycelium network. Like

SPEAKER_122: the mushrooms do. Yes. Yes. This is so genius because it's amazing. You know, putting a 12 inch pipe underground, that's not that hard to do. Now these things have electric motors and they have wheels on the top and the bottom. So they kind of just zip zoom. They don't even need to go 60 miles an hour. Let's be honest, this would be on a short 10 mile track. Yeah. But let's imagine you did this in Manhattan. Or let's imagine you did this in your suburb. So now you are building a planned community.

SPEAKER_00: And you have an Amazon warehouse or a Target or a Walmart and Walmart says, you know what,

SPEAKER_59: uh, I will pay to, uh, subsidize this, uh, for the community for the rights to have us connected first. And we'll put a wall. Well, we have a Walmart warehouse here, whatever's closest would absolutely do this. Now Walmart has all of this stuff in a robotic facility themselves, or Target,

SPEAKER_277: or, you know, whoever or Cloud Kitchens. Now, Cloud Kitchens makes a burrito. Boom, they drop it into

SPEAKER_59: the tube. It's in your house within 10 minutes, you need milk, you need three lemons because you forgot lemons. You could be doing very small package runs for free or for a dollar and pay for this.

SPEAKER_111: This is not cars and trucks on the road. This is literally just no traffic. It doesn't add to climate

SPEAKER_09: emissions. Now imagine in Manhattan, you have unlimited numbers of doorman buildings. That's a

SPEAKER_94: non-gender version door person buildings. Concierges. There you go. You got the concierge downstairs.

SPEAKER_122: Boom. You put one of these into the lobby and you don't need to have it go up to every apartment. You got two, three, 400 apartments in this building. You just build a straight shot to the Amazon warehouse, straight shot to whatever, and boom. Now the apartment next to it wants to get on because

SPEAKER_00: everybody in this apartment gets as an amenity. Now you only have to build a little tube from one to the other. So it spreads like a little network like the internet. The first building to get it. Yeah, it has to do but look at this map. If you're watching youtube.com such this weekend. Look at this brilliant map. What they did here is they built a grid system. And so let's say you lived in a neighborhood that didn't have door persons or concierges. In other words, lower income,

SPEAKER_59: middle income, normal people, not a fancy dancy Manhattan with door people. Uh, okay. I get a package. I walk three blocks. And there is a kiosk. The kiosk hands me my thing. That's not a bad

SPEAKER_25: option either. Not really. No. Is it we click on the link that says, is this using new infrastructure? There we go under the frequently asked questions. I mean, obviously it's some new infrastructure. Yeah, I think you would have to build. I'm thinking about our I'm thinking about our investment here and how expensive the infrastructure is going to be.

SPEAKER_24: Well, I mean, yeah, 100% in on this. Like this should happen. This should 100% Yeah. Oh, here we go. How will you pay for the infrastructure installation? The pipe dream infrastructure is designed to be usable by other utility companies electric telecom gas water sewer if needed. That means that the majority of the physical infrastructure will be financeable using conventional bank loans, most likely originating locally wherever the system is installed. This will

Jason Calacanis: also ensure that infrastructure is not wasted and costs are recouped if pipe dream migrates to an

SPEAKER_25: alternative delivery method or goes out of business. Huh? Okay, they would lay some underground

SPEAKER_273: piping and then you could use that for electrical. I guess what they're saying is they go out of

SPEAKER_76: business, somebody else could use it. So you don't have to worry about it because it's a 12 inch

SPEAKER_122: pipe underground. Sure. Yeah. And these things could also do not need to be underground necessarily. I mean, I know it would be an eyesore. But it is possible, I guess, that if you had an elevated highway

SPEAKER_270: or something, this could run along the elevated highway underneath it. I mean, who knows? So I was

Jason Calacanis: starting to think of it as a fifth element thing. Yeah, you could just have a blade runner aspect. But you know what this tells me to is that drone delivery not happening. Clearly not happening. If we need pipe dream drones are not working. Well, I mean, this was Elon's argument with the

SPEAKER_00: Hyperloop, which raised money last week. The Hyperloop is not and these pipes are not going to have a problem with weather. So if you have flooding, if you have tornadoes, if you have snow, easy peasy, lemon squeezy. So congrats to the pipe dream. I know it's a pipe dream right now. But it's a dream worth pursuing. Chances of success are low. But a glorious future if it is achieved. And this is what we need

SPEAKER_270: more of, you know, founders doing really crazy. And let's see if it happens. But this is the kind

SPEAKER_406: of crazy that I'm here for. I love it. Digging is better than flying. Let's go. Well, let's think

SPEAKER_59: that through. I think there would be in some cases where the drones could do better. Yeah.

SPEAKER_270: And that would be suburban areas or the you know, back country in the country. Because a drone flying 10 miles with your package over a bunch of farmland. You can't build the pipe system there, right? It'd be just too hard to dig up the earth. It's kind of like fiber, right? Fiber works in a city, starting to work in the suburbs, never going to work in the country. Yeah. So,

SPEAKER_24: you know, I mean, it's just like climate, right? You need every solution, you need multiple solutions.

SPEAKER_82: And that means there can be lots of winners. And we're here for all of them. Yeah,

SPEAKER_304: we're here for them. And you know, and they're, I think food could be the really interesting thing

SPEAKER_122: here. Man, you imagine McDonald's or whoever is on this tip, and you just throw, you know, five in and out burgers into one of these little robots, and it zips five in and out burgers to you,

SPEAKER_352: it's still hot. Oh, my Lord. I mean, it's bonkers what this could mean. I want they were able to do

SPEAKER_285: this. The flying burritos. I mean, if you I love the idea of a plan community to where this is the

Jason Calacanis: package delivery system, like all those what's the one, uh, cul-de-sac that's trying to do the really eco-friendly plan community, like build these in and then have them terminate in the homes. Yeah,

SPEAKER_122: what I like about this too, is because of the smaller footprint of it, you have to balance like, you're obviously not going to be sending a dishwasher through one of these things that is still be done by regular delivery, or a painting or something. But what this will also do is make people think about packaging. Because if you're putting things in, you know, giant boxes of cereal are not going to fit in this thing. But a bag of cereal without the cardboard box around it will easily fit. And so and these things I think will be able to create little chains. So let's say somebody

SPEAKER_13: has six or seven of these. Boom, you know, um, love it. Yeah, we will live in this future. Yeah.

SPEAKER_09: We hope we get there. All right, everybody. Great show everybody. Uh, the syndicate.com slash climate, uh, launched its first deal. And, uh, we can't say the name of the deal. We don't want to tip the cards of the company. But I think, uh, the reaction based on my email box was extraordinary. A lot of,

SPEAKER_378: I'm very excited about this. Yeah. SAS climate company, uh, that, uh, shout out to Kelly and Molly and the team for getting that teed up. And the founder emailed me, texted me this weekend was

SPEAKER_241: very excited. So I'm super excited. How do you feel Molly making a first big bet? It's amazing.

Jason Calacanis: I feel amazing. I mean, I cannot, but this will be the end of month four. Yeah. And we're just doing it. We're doing all of the things that are two deals and one in the pipeline. Like it's all, it's actually, I know you guys think all I do is sit here and spar with Jason, but in fact, his promise to me when he, uh, pitched this job was we podcast in the morning and we invest in the afternoon. And that is exactly what we do. And it's, that's it.

SPEAKER_43: The core in my case, podcast in the morning and ski in the afternoon, right? Depends on the day. And I'm, I'm, I'm in semi retirement, right? No, I'm not. Oh my God. Yeah. Right. I am going to take up the summer. Uh, I'm going to take up kiteboarding. I think, I think that'll be my afternoon delight now for the summer is try to get some kiteboarding. And do you have to take lessons? Have you ever done that? Take lessons. You know, I did it twice. You got like a trainer. I was on Necker Island twice. And a friend of mine had rented it for his birthday and I was lucky enough to go. It's quite nice. And I did kiteboarding both times. And the same thing happened both times.

SPEAKER_59: First day I get out there. I learned how to use the kite. You have to be on the, the first day you're on the sand, just learning how to use the kite because kiteboarding is like two things. You got a board. So you got to kind of learn how to surf basically. And then you have to learn how to hold a kite. And when I say kite, I mean parachute. And the kite and when it's windy, will literally pull you into the air 100 feet if you screw up. So it's incredibly dangerous. And the way the kite works is if you pull down on that bar, the kite gets more taut and catches the wind and you go flying. If you let go, then it loosens the tautness of the strings and that the kite just falls to the ground and you don't go flying. Everything in your system tells you to do the reverse.

SPEAKER_308: Right. It's like climb jump if you're scared. And now you're 20 feet in the air. That's why they have like the instructor attaches themselves to you and they have their hands on the bar or whatever.

SPEAKER_122: Then day two, you learn to drag yourself in the water. And then maybe someday afternoon, day two or three, you put the board on and you try to get up on the board. Both days, the wind died that both times I did it. The wind died on the second day. I couldn't get to, you know, the promised land, except for one time I got out on the water and I got up on the board. And for six or seven seconds, it was the most magical experience like in sports I might have ever had where it's just all of a sudden you're you're flying and you've got the board. You got the parachute perfectly angled and then the board lifts and you're just skimming across it. I mean, you're and you're going fast. I mean, it might only be 20 miles an hour, but it feels like you're

SPEAKER_350: going a hundred. That's so fast. And it was pretty great. And so there are places here in the Bay Area,

SPEAKER_172: like literally right in the bay between Oakland SFO airport. And then there's one in the east. If you go towards Sacramento. So I had an instructor from Florida reach out and said, Listen, I'm a big fan

SPEAKER_09: of the show. I'm I'm a kiteboard instructor. You tell me where I'll be there. Free of charge. I'll be your personal instructor. And I was like, Wow, that's pretty great to be Jake. How it's great to be

SPEAKER_241: Jake. It's pretty great to be Jake. So shout out to my new kiteboarding instructor. But yeah, I think I

SPEAKER_430: can take that up. You know, I want to stay active and you know, that kind of stuff and be healthy.

SPEAKER_59: So also, I find it's good for my brain. I feel like the performance on the pod and my clarity,

SPEAKER_09: if I'm doing a little bit of like just an hour and a half to three hours a day of some Zen thing,

SPEAKER_172: man, I'm more dialed in. And I'm going to go to the Warriors game this Wednesday. So I'm pretty excited. I would have liked to see them sweep, but you can look for me behind the Warriors bench,

SPEAKER_11: getting thrown out of the game somewhere around the third quarter, get thrown out of the playoffs. I will not get thrown out. All right, let's go. Let's go to the news. Let's go. Congratulations.

SPEAKER_76: Again, if you are an accredited investor, you want to join the syndicate, read Molly and I's deal memos, we write them together with the team. The syndicate.com slash climate. I think

SPEAKER_172: you can sign up as well, even if you're not accredited. And at some point, if the laws change, we will email you and let you know. So we are taking reservations for non accredited investors. And read my book, angel, angel.university. If you want to learn how to angel invest, only invest the money you can afford to lose.

SPEAKER_440: Hey, everyone, producer Nick here. I want to tell you about the SaaS syndicate. If you're a founder of a SaaS company with a product and market, our investment team wants to talk to you. Head over to the syndicate.com slash SaaS, S-A-A-S to apply to raise from the SaaS syndicate. And you can join Jason's syndicate of over 9,000 accredited investors at the syndicate.com.

SPEAKER_441: Producer Justin here. Know a cool startup? Check out openscouting.com where anyone can refer a startup to our investment team here at launch. Even if you don't know the founder, if you're the first to flag a company for us and we decide to invest, you'll get 5k in cash or 10% of our carry.

SPEAKER_445: Hey everybody, producer Rachel here. Are you an early stage startup that has product and market, some traction, and are looking to raise at least $500,000? Apply today to remote demo day for your chance to pitch to over 9,000 investors in Jason's syndicate. Submit your application at remotedemoday.com. Our next event is on April 27th. And if you want to learn how to invest in

SPEAKER_440: startups from the world's greatest angel investor, and no, we're not talking about Chris Saka, then head to angel.university to apply. The four hour workshop costs $300 and all proceeds are donated to charity. To date, we've donated over $175,000 to various charities, and you can see the full list at angel.university.com slash charity.