SPEAKER_00: Hey, everybody, welcome back. It's Tuesday. We have another great show for you today. There's way too much news, but we're going to start off talking about that New York Times puff piece on SPF and FTX.

SPEAKER_03: Mm-hmm. And how it is not helping. It didn't help before and it's not helping now. Then

Jason Calacanis: we're going to have a feisty conversation about a TechCrunch story about how Chinese companies who are wanting to expand globally, specifically to America, want to rebrand and how that's offered. Even included some VCs in China offering passport services to their founders.

SPEAKER_09: Yeah, China is dropping the ball on entrepreneurship and I am here for it. We'll take those entrepreneurs,

David Friedberg: get them some US passports. And then we're going to wrap up with a little We Live in the

SPEAKER_00: Future with a really interesting robot in supermarkets. Anyway, it's going to be a great

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SPEAKER_15: Well, hey, Molly, it is. Tuesday.

SPEAKER_05: That brief pause caused a complete brownout in my brain. I was like, I, I don't know. Is

SPEAKER_19: this a test? I'm not sure what the answer is. I have no idea.

SPEAKER_20: It feels like we're, we're, it feels like based on the news flow and the level of effort and

SPEAKER_21: work we're putting in and the amount of psychological, emotional, our emotional labor as hosts of a news program. You know, remember I was making fun of emotional labor. Yeah. I, I get it now. I get

SPEAKER_25: it. Emotional labor is real. The emotional labor it takes to keep up with the news cycle has reached

SPEAKER_21: a level that is even breaking this. I know. But you know, chop busting Brooklyn kid. I, like, this is too much information. Like we're freaking pros. We are, we are literally lifelong

SPEAKER_29: news junkies, lifelong producers, journalists, all of it. And I like, cannot remember. And also, I would just like to point out that as we went, as we hit record today. No, so I don't even know what's going to be happening by the time. Don't tell me. You're seeing this, but as we hit record

SPEAKER_31: today. Let me guess, did they pick up SBF at an airport somewhere? No, but, oh, I was just reading the New York Times softball piece about, oh, my Lord. The New York Times did this interview with SBF

SPEAKER_33: that's basically just, let's start there. Let's start there. What, let's do it. What I was going to say actually is that Russia just fired two missiles into Poland. What, what, what, what? Accidentally,

SPEAKER_35: accidentally two people were killed in Poland. There are no accidents. Okay. Freud. There's no

SPEAKER_37: accidents. There are no accidents. So like, I'm just timestamping that now as if we all die today.

SPEAKER_41: I don't mean to laugh at global thermonuclear war, but I was just looking at my portfolio before I got on air and everything was up and to the right. And I was like, oh, J trading is back to par.

SPEAKER_47: It's feeling great. And now the market's going to crash after three days of up market. Oh, come on.

SPEAKER_03: There's probably going to be a big sale at the stock store right before the impending doom. Jesus. You know, like literally I just pulled up Yahoo Finance. Stocks pair some gains after cool

David Friedberg: inflation data amid geopolitical angst. Come on. Stop with this. There was some geopolitical angst

SPEAKER_52: yesterday, but now there's more. Now there's more. It's all going to work. So anyway, that's

SPEAKER_29: happening. I just wanted you all to know that we saw it. Um, and then I will drop this. I'm springing this on our, I just want to say it's new guy. Brian's first day producing the show for us. Oh, great. Congrats. Producing and directing doing a great job. So I just want to say I'm springing this on him. I did not send this article to anyone in advance. I was literally just alerted to it. So I'm looking through it in real time, but because there's been this like Sam Bigman free, you know, SPF is a big

SPEAKER_56: democratic donor and that's why he's never going to get investigated and dah, dah, dah, and all this like BS, which is, I'm sorry, patently BS. Maybe. Wait a second. I just took a red pill. What happened? Molly, are you

SPEAKER_28: purpleing it? Then I read this New York Times interview with the guy. And no mention of the donations. And

SPEAKER_29: they're just, no, it's just like. That's what I said. Why are you so great? Yeah. I think no mention of the donations whatsoever, but like, let him get away with sort of not really explaining anything. It's

SPEAKER_66: like a little bit friendly. The, you know, New York Post is like. The piece was softball piece. It was a

SPEAKER_70: softball piece. In the middle of what could be a Madoff level, greater than Theranos, certainly. Mm-hmm. Level, somewhere, this is between a Theranos and a Madoff. Yeah. And it feels like it's trending closer to a Madoff in terms of the sheer scale of it. Yes. And of the fraud. Extreme shadiness, you know, like

SPEAKER_29: extreme. So then there's this, so there's this, and, and I mean, look, this is where like, you could find yourself on Twitter being like, you know, his partner donated almost the exact same amount to Republicans. And really, if you look at like, who has been the biggest proponent and who stopped this one person from becoming a regulator, because they said they were going to regulate crypto, it was Republicans. However, when you see this kind of softball crap in the New York Times, you're like, I think maybe they did just like him because he donated a lot to Democrats. Like, I'm not going

SPEAKER_56: to lie. There might be something to that. And it's very irritating to find myself in a position of

SPEAKER_28: having to say that get your together times. Uh, well, I mean, here's the thing. You have to be

SPEAKER_70: self-aware of what people believe your biases are. And the New York Times is very much aware of this. Yeah. So if they're aware of it, then there should be a thoughtful decision. Hey, people expect us to give somebody who's left leaning a bit of a free pass. We should be, um, cognizant of that. Now, that doesn't mean we have to be extra harsh either, but you and I have been in on these discussions. If somebody at, I don't know, public radio, um, committed a fraud, public radio would be sure. I'm certain to double down on the reporting as a show of even handedness. This is a classic reporting technique. Hey, if somebody in our circle, Jason Blair at the New York Times, you know, was doing just making up stories, they did a whole investigation. They covered their mistake, not covered up, covered it in detail. Yeah. And they said, Hey, here's our Mia Coppa. Here's our, can I pronounce that correct? And here's our taking ownership of it. So you just, I don't know who wrote the piece, but you know, here we are like, they'll destroy the away founder over, you

SPEAKER_29: know, we've talked about many times, right over some, some, you know, push some chippy, your get some chippy. Yeah. I was like trying to lay in on, you know, I was gonna say pushy, but what I really mean is tweets, pushing people to work our slack messages, pushing people to work harder. Yeah.

Jason Calacanis: Like a tough exterior work ethic. And then they'll suggest to this guy, this is what the Times, the post wrote about it, or quoted somebody as saying, it reads as if the Times had conducted an interview

SPEAKER_29: with Bernie Madoff after his Ponzi scheme collapsed and ultimately suggested he just made them bad investments. Yeah. Like it's weirdly and, and having come on the heels of like, you know, the Sequoia kind

Jason Calacanis: of in-house journalism effort where they wrote that 45,000 word piece about him. That was just like, so smoochy and he's going to be a future trillionaire. He's amazing. And then they

SPEAKER_29: kind of like just disappeared it. Like you've got this sort of who is even in charge here. Who's even asking skeptical questions, question floating in the air. And then you discover like, well, it's not the New York Times. They're not asking. And it's, it just is a little bit, you know what? Like it's not looking good for anybody right here.

SPEAKER_00: This is the challenge with being a journalist in today's environment, being objective and fair

SPEAKER_20: just requires a lot of self-awareness, thoughtfulness. And I understand that you also want to give color in a, in a, in a longer piece. So when you're writing a longer piece, which I believe this falls into, I'm not sure how many words it was long. It's a long, long read. You might want to describe like the New Yorker does, you know, the clothes, the person is wearing set the scene. Hey, here's the penthouse. Here's the vibe. Here's, you know, they're in front of whatever is unique about it to bring the reader into it. Now, when you do those things, it does create the air of, um, you know, it's a, a profile, uh, which was a magazine device. A profile is sometimes softer, uh, in terms of like setting

SPEAKER_70: the stage or whatever, but then hopefully it has some substance in it. And so that is the dichotomy and the writing style. For those of you wondering, okay, yeah, they're going to talk about the shoes. The person walked in with there were, you know, the beat up shoes, the leather's falling off. They're cracked. They're not tied properly, but the person's a billionaire. Oh, the juxtaposition here. Okay. We set the stage. Michael Lewis, uh, you know, pick a great business writer, Walter Isaacson. They might set the stage this way and that's okay. Yeah, but it must be on a foundation of very strong objective journalism. This piece wasn't, you know,

SPEAKER_66: I think it's like, that's okay when it is the, you know, like the, the outlet that I will let off

Jason Calacanis: the hook a little bit is fortune who has come under fire all week long for running that cover story where they call them the next Warren Buffett. And, you know, fortune of course put Elizabeth Holmes on the cover. And so people are like, you don't know what you're doing now. I think that is totally silly because no matter what, how these stories turned out, these are noteworthy, right? Newsworthy figures. If the whole world is talking about SBF, you put them on the cover of your magazine. That's not an uncommon thing. If the guy appears to be on the run, there are likely multiple lawsuits

SPEAKER_29: and multiple legal investigations. Like we've confirmed, I think that the SEC and the DOJ were investigating him even before the collapse of FTX. So you have like actual legal questions swirling

Jason Calacanis: about the, the behavior that is not the time to do a smoochie let's get inside his head piece where

SPEAKER_29: it's just like, well, maybe he just like, um, got distracted as opposed to reportedly built up back door into his own system. So he could move around billions of dollars of customer money.

SPEAKER_36: And then you have anybody working for him even noticing.

SPEAKER_70: Yeah. There, there's like, this is actual apparent fraud, right? Layered with substance abuse, layered with stolen funds, you know, and, you know, hacks and political donations. I mean, there's so many layers of insanity here that, you know, yeah, I guess it just shows you, you can frame people,

SPEAKER_96: you know, however you want as a writer.

SPEAKER_98: Let me like, this is amazing. FTX and Alameda were closely linked. I'm reading for the New York times. Alameda traded heavily on the FTX platform, meaning it sometimes benefited when FTX's other

Jason Calacanis: customers lost money, a dynamic that critics called a conflict of interest.

SPEAKER_100: Critics call it a conflict of interest or it is a conflict of interest. I don't think you need a

SPEAKER_101: critic to come in there. I think you could just say that is a conflict of interest, according to any standard objective measure.

SPEAKER_102: And also using your customer's deposits to prop up your other company is in fact, under

SPEAKER_104: some legal definitions, fraud, that critics say to do it. Like, it's just like, what?

SPEAKER_47: Speechless. Yeah, speechless. All right. Well, there it is, folks. Uh, see what the New York Times does to follow up. One fact about startups, finding engineers is

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SPEAKER_96: slash twist and mention twist to get that 20% off. You know, I've been watching this bird corporation,

SPEAKER_115: which a lot of my friends were investors in, collapse, and it's really sad to watch.

SPEAKER_49: I just really, I'm so sorry. Not the one that you might be thinking of, people. I just, because

SPEAKER_36: bird. He means the scooters. Oh, yeah, no, that other company's doing great. I know.

SPEAKER_118: Bird Global is the scooter company. Yes, we're not talking about the company with the bird logo.

SPEAKER_70: No. Bird shares are down, Molly. 97%. Um, market cap is 73.6 million. Oh, dear God. That's an

SPEAKER_00: actual flatline. Yeah. I mean, this is, this is.com era, like, you know, game over.

SPEAKER_33: I shouldn't laugh, but it's just so startling. I'm sorry. The chart came up and it just is.

SPEAKER_96: Yeah. A flatline. You know, this bird went public via SPAC and they had raised, I think, billions of dollars. And now they're worth 70 million. Um, I think the issue here is the cost of these scooters and the maintenance of them and the utilization of them. The unit economics just never worked. And so we suspended disbelief in unit economics and we thought everything was an Uber. I remember when this came out, the people who were investors in it were kind of coming at me a bit saying bird was going to disrupt Uber. And they were giving me all kinds of statistics. Like the average

SPEAKER_00: Uber ride is under a mile. You know, lift ride is under a mile. You can do that for four bucks on a bird, you know, Uber and lift are charging 12. Why wouldn't people take this? This is going to steal. The micro mobility market was going to kill Uber and lift. And I thought about it and I was like,

SPEAKER_96: I, I don't want to ride a scooter though. Like I'm an adult and I don't want to touch the dirty handlebars or die. I don't want to break my elbow. I'm not, if I was 26 and I was riding my Vespa around New York shore, but not now as a father of three kids, I don't want to wind up in the hospital.

SPEAKER_118: I'm not going to wear a helmet look like a dork and wear a dirty helmet. I'm not going to carry

SPEAKER_127: a helmet. I just do just with too many frictions. And, you know, I kind of held to my belief that

SPEAKER_20: this was not going to be like some breakout business, but, uh, you know, a lot of people who are very smart thought this was going to make it. And, um, I think the reason I heard was they were going to make their own hardware that would resolve the issues and future versions of the

SPEAKER_129: hardware would be so strong that they didn't have the maintenance issues. And, um, yeah,

Jason Calacanis: but it's interesting. Yeah. So there, this is precipitated this conversation by a piece in, uh, Bloomberg today, noting that the electric scooter apocalypse may indeed be honest, be on us, upon us, um, or replaced its chief executive and chief financial officer in September. And then Monday actually warned, uh, that it might not make it, that it needed to restate its financial accounts for the past two and a half years due to improperly recognized revenue. Uh, oh, yeah. So that's an issue. And then there's this kind of ongoing question, you know, lime, its main competitor raised more than $500 million last November, but has also, uh, seen a massive drop in value. And like, it's really interesting. Cause on some, in some ways, this is a growth at all costs story, right? Uber did not have good unit economics for a really long time, but it had really strong growth. And so I could totally imagine that argument, like, well, if we get a critical mass of people use it, right, this has been the playbook, this totally works and people will want to do this. And all of those things are true about last mile mobility. And everything you just said is also true. It's like, every time I remember feeling this way about the Segway, the same smart people got so excited about the Segway, but modality matters. And there are modalities that people are used to and comfortable with and that are very common. And those modalities include bikes, walking and cars. Yup. And this was none of that. And it was like, you have to be

SPEAKER_29: buses and subways I'll throw in there. Right. Buses and subways. Occasional ferry. Some public transportation, the occasional ferry, something like that.

SPEAKER_05: This is like, you have to be like, willing to ride this, embrace your inner nine year old. I'm not saying it wasn't fun sometimes. Sure. It'd be a lot of fun.

Jason Calacanis: But as a way to get to work. Not for everybody. Not for everybody. It's almost like asking people to put glasses on their face. Like you are asking them to do something that's totally outside what they

SPEAKER_29: do. And PS you pissed off every city and every cyclist and every pedestrian in the interim.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah. It does feel like, you know, the warning signs were there. I like the idea of people

SPEAKER_20: giving it a shot. And I do think this would be perfect. I always thought the campus version of this. So you've got, you know, whatever, a college campus, a medical campus, you know, whatever, having some of these laying around that anybody can pick up, take from point A to point B, but they don't work when you leave the campus. So you can't steal them. Google threw a bunch of Google bikes everywhere on the campus. You could just pick them up, drop them off. Didn't matter. Um, and I think city bikes has been a huge success in New York. Um, people are out absolutely over the moon with that. I just think these things, you know, the execution really matters. And then are they a scalable business like Uber or door dash? Okay. That is a big question. And once you start segmenting and saying, okay, well, it's only for cities where it's between 50 and 90 degrees. Most of the time, it's only for cities where it doesn't rain. Yeah. It's only for cities that have sidewalks. It's only for cities where you have X, you know, type of density. Like it obviously doesn't work in the suburbs. You're not taking this, you know, down to aunt May's farm seven miles down the road, but you know, you may

SPEAKER_142: take it seven blocks or 17 blocks. Sure. So I know people in LA and Santa Monica who love this. It's like, it's a Santa Monica product, but it may not be like, you know, a, uh, Manhattan product, you know,

SPEAKER_33: it's also only for cities that allow it. I think Paris is talking about banning it. There were some,

SPEAKER_70: didn't Austin ban them. I think they were just like, a lot of them were in the bottom of the lake because we just light them on fire. We're just going to throw these in a dumpster. And then,

SPEAKER_00: yeah. So anyway, uh, I applaud everybody who tried, um, I think you should give it a shot. There's going to be tons of lessons here for founders. I think the number one lesson is you can't look at other businesses and say, just cause they're figuring it out and growing. I'm going to figure it out and grow. You have to think from first principles. These scooters cost whatever they cost $500. They, they break, you know, the maintenance is going to be 500 a year. You make $4 per ride. You're doing 20 rides a day for 80 or 15 rides a day. You just have to do the math. You have to think from first principles and, and you know, it seems like people

SPEAKER_151: suspended belief just a wee bit too much here. Yes, totally. And I apologize for interrupting.

SPEAKER_150: Do people want to do this is the other question, right? It's like, yeah, it's another first principles, which is the first people want to ride a scooter,

SPEAKER_155: like where you started just fundamentally, but you can change consumer behavior. Like

SPEAKER_20: taking an Uber X. If you lived in the boroughs, you know, you didn't take cabs because there were no cabs in Brooklyn or Queens. I forgot about South Island. You took what we call back in the day, gypsy cab. I don't know if it's politically correct to say that anymore, but you took an illegal cab, right? Dollar cabs. As Jay-Z would say dollar cab, gypsy cabs, it's like the famous lyric. That's what people took a dollar cab was you paid a dollar to go a couple of blocks, but they might pick some other people up on the route, right? And you just, you

SPEAKER_91: have a dollar or two. These things were like cash-based little, the no insurance kind of situation, but they did change the behavior of getting people to use an app to call a car.

SPEAKER_56: They didn't have to convince people to take cars. Exactly. It's not a fundamental change. It's just a, like a slightly different way to do the same thing you really did, which was being a car. It was evolutionary. It's evolutionary.

SPEAKER_137: How you ordered it. You still used your phone. You just didn't talk. And I think there's something on the phone, especially calling.

Jason Calacanis: Exactly. I think there's still something very strong and powerful about micromobility. No question, especially as a climate concern and a traffic density, but it's, but I, I would predict

SPEAKER_37: that the areas where it's going to work are e-bikes. E-bikes win. I own three e-bikes.

SPEAKER_163: This is a freaking modality that people already use. Awesome.

SPEAKER_00: They ride bikes. And an e-bike. And there's infrastructure for it. Yes. And here's the thing. The e-bike isn't a change in behavior, but it makes the experience 10 times better because you don't have to exhaust yourself to go to dinner. You eat a big meal and you got a bunch of gnocchi in your belly. I'm not saying that I'm pounding the gnocchi, but yeah,

SPEAKER_96: I'm like, oh my God, I got gnocchi belly here. I'm in chicken parm. I'm an animal. I'm savaging

SPEAKER_70: this like Italian meal. And you're like, and I got to ride my bike. Oh my God. I'm going to be sweating and exhausted. I'm going to just pull over to the side of road and heave. You're on an

SPEAKER_00: electrical bike. It's like all of a sudden your bike that you got a little exercise on the way there turns into a Vespa. Maybe you use 20% of your energy, 80% of the battery, whatever your mix is, you can just pound these uphills, you know, and you don't have to worry about like breaking a sweat.

SPEAKER_70: So anyway, I think electric bikes win the day. It's my grief. All right. Hard agree.

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Jason Calacanis: Interesting TechCrunch article from earlier this week that I just wanted to highlight because I thought, I think rightly that you would have some thoughts about this. Okay. This piece was about the increasing number of Chinese startups asking journalists to call them American, basically. That there is this kind of ongoing tension now with Chinese startups wanting to go global, but fearing that, uh, being seen as, or referred to as Chinese startups will have a chilling effect

SPEAKER_113: on their ability to raise money. Yeah. As it should. So sorry that you want to be called

SPEAKER_29: That you were born where you were born and you live there and you want to start a new company and you

SPEAKER_96: want to like incorporate it in the United States. I mean, I would love to be considered a Japanese podcast or pop star, but I'm not because you're not Japanese. I'm saying if you started a company in

SPEAKER_86: China and then you were like, I am trying to expand to the U S maybe I even want to incorporate

Jason Calacanis: in the U S maybe I am a Chinese immigrant, but my company first started in China, then isn't it fair for because of the reaction you just had, wouldn't it be fair for them to be like, we're an American

SPEAKER_29: company? Well, okay. Let's figure out why they want. Okay. Look again, back to first principle. Why

SPEAKER_20: don't they want to be called a Chinese company? Because it's keeping them from getting funding.

SPEAKER_00: Why is it keeping them getting funding? Because the Chinese communist party, the CCP decided that they would take DD off of the public exchange here and then move it to Hong Kong. And then they would take them out of the app store. And if they didn't give them all their data, I think is the

SPEAKER_20: story and let them do data audits, AKA the CCP gets all your data and gets to track everybody.

SPEAKER_00: So the reason investors don't want to invest in Chinese companies and Chinese companies subsequently don't want to be called Chinese companies is because your outcome. The IPO is

SPEAKER_20: at risk. Your exit as that risk. In fact, the fundamental business is risk. I said this years ago when people were like, are you buying Alibaba sock? And I said on CNBC, I would never buy any company in China. I would never risk my capital that way. When I have options to invest in American companies, where we have the rule of law, we have accounting firms. Hey, is it perfect? Does an Enron happen? Does an, you know, FTX happen? Of course, all these things happen made off the Bahamas. But when those, you know, that's true, actually, there's a red flag. But when these things do happen, Molly, yeah, they're outrageous, you know, aberrations that lead to huge investigations and

SPEAKER_70: people going to jail in China. They just said no education startups. So every VC who invested in education startup lost all their money instantly. Like, yeah, imagine you took my three biggest winners in my career. And then, I don't know, Trump or Obama or Biden just waved a wand and was like, you

SPEAKER_20: know what, those can't be winners anymore. You're, you know, 1000 or 2000 X, your 200 X are now 10 X's. I'd be like, Okay, I quit. I don't want to be a VC anymore. If you're going to take my big wins. Like I win some huge hand at poker. I took a huge risk on that hand. And then as I'm sweeping the chip, somebody comes in and goes, Oh yeah, you know what set of aces is now the worst, you know, hand. It's the least value. Give your chips to the dealer. The dealer gets the chips. The casino gets the chips or what? Why am

SPEAKER_70: I playing in a rig game? That's what's happening here. People don't want to play in a rig game. Well, so the end.

Jason Calacanis: Is there ever a scenario that we're like, I think what these companies, some of them are like, for example, Binance started in China. Yep. Now has no headquarters, officially speaking. Now that Binance might not be a great example. Let's think about, let's use, they actually in the piece use the example of what did we decide? We call it Shein, the clothing startup. Yeah. S H E I N Shein. Yeah. Um, which was used to bill itself as being founded in LA. When in reality, it started out in Nanjing and Guangzhou as a typical Chinese e-commerce exporter, leveraging the country's robust supply chains. But now it has, it's planning to open warehouses in North America. It's moved most of its assets to Singapore and is trying to effectively have its cake and eat it too, with respect to branding. But it's not a company that's going to go public in China. It's not a company that's like using Chinese infrastructure. So, but it sounds like what you're saying is exactly the reason why any company would be asking TechCrunch to please not say that they ever had any Chinese origins at all. Cause it sounds like you're saying if they ever had any Chinese origins at all, that company's dead to you.

SPEAKER_00: Um, I suppose if they had no Chinese ownership, no Chinese headquarters, the CCP didn't have the ability to shut them down and they had sold the assets into a Delaware C corporation with a board of directors in America. And the company could not be repossessed or taken control over by the CCP or the government there. I, I guess I'd take a look at it. Sure. I don't know if they can get there. I guess that's the question is like, if this person is a Chinese citizen, can a Chinese citizen take that asset, buy out all the, they have, I'm assuming they have Chinese investors, have Chinese employees, you know, have file Chinese taxes, whatever those are incorporation documents. If they could sell the

SPEAKER_20: asset and then build a shell here. Sure. Which is what I think by dance is only possibility of survival is mm-hmm and be, it's like to basically do all have the Chinese divest. So if there was a full divestiture or like it was owned under 10% by Chinese, you know, uh, funds and the board was a hundred percent non-Chinese and it was a hundred percent accounting revenue, everything went through America, AWS,

Jason Calacanis: everything. Sure. I could look at it. Sky Xu, the founder and CEO of Xi'an is reportedly seeking Singaporean citizenship. Several entrepreneurs, uh, told TechCrunch that the top VC firms in China now

SPEAKER_33: provide passport shopping as part of their post investment service for founders targeting overseas

SPEAKER_20: markets. Right. We can help you with, uh, your, uh, content marketing. We have a recruiting arm and we have passport washing services. Not something we have to do. Tell you what, that's not part of

SPEAKER_199: BC Sunday school. I mean, the second you're trying to get a passport, that's a bit of a red flag. No, it's not. It's not a red flag. If you're trying to like, I'm sorry, we should, we should

SPEAKER_29: support entrepreneurs no matter where they come from. Okay. And if you are able to start a company and then you want to take that company global and not have it shut down by the CCP, then I am not

SPEAKER_05: going to say to you, sorry, you're dead to me because of where you were born. No, no, no, it's not dead to me, but I'm just saying like, we support entrepreneurs. If your VC firm is providing

SPEAKER_206: passports as a service, that's what you have to do in China. If you want to, if you want to support

SPEAKER_208: an entrepreneur, yes. Fleeing as a service. Fleeing as a service so that an entrepreneur can have a

David Friedberg: business. Like probably, yeah. Just ask them to do a, do a bridge round. I'll give you guys a really sweetheart deal. 10% of the company for $10,000 and seven passports. If I'm a VC and I know that in

SPEAKER_212: China and I know, or I have a China operation and I know that the only way my entrepreneur is ever

Jason Calacanis: going to succeed is to get the hell out of China. That's going to be part of my services because I

David Friedberg: want my money. I'd like to congratulate SPF on his new roommate and his new passport. I think Snowden

SPEAKER_00: and SPF we're going to get along great. You're going to enjoy the pierogies. Russia's Moscow is

David Friedberg: absolutely fantastic. This time of year, negative 20 degrees, cloudy with six hours of kind of sunlight

SPEAKER_03: a day. Enjoy your time. All they ask is your soul. I mean, I just keep. Listen, there's some great

David Friedberg: critics. Critics say cold vodka, some great chess games and we'll meet with you now. I mean, literally I, I would not be surprised if SPF winds up. I mean, I can't believe this guy did not have a plan

Jason Calacanis: given how this was going to get out of Dodge. Oh, well they think he's already out. Remember they were tracking his jet. That jet tracker service was like, it took off and went to Argentina.

SPEAKER_227: And then he would not tell the times where he was. Where is he? Where in the world is SPF? We

SPEAKER_206: should just do a little bit. The internet thinks he's in Argentina, but yes, I would be very curious.

SPEAKER_91: Argentina is going to give him up immediately. Argentina and the U.S. are, we got tons of stuff

SPEAKER_230: we could trade. He's, he's, they'll, they'll, they'll flip him immediately. Argentina.

SPEAKER_70: You know, hold on, I'm looking. I think, yeah, Argentina would give him up. I think if he really

SPEAKER_20: doesn't want to get given up, it's Hong Kong, which I think is where his partner was at some point. I think Hong Kong's a good location. Russia's the, that's the best

SPEAKER_33: location. His jet is in Argentina. We do have an expedition treaty with, uh, with Argentina,

SPEAKER_145: however. So yeah, we do have one. Yeah, we do. Maybe Argentina is like the layover. I could see Argentina has got like an Indiana Jones kind of quality. You land the plane, you, you put on the,

SPEAKER_20: um, tarmac, you know, like the, the, the luggage handler outfit and you just come out of the back of the private jet carrying the bags, but you look like a baggage handler. Then you drive and then you get in a prop plane. You get the prop plane to Columbia, Columbia, you get on a boat, the boat takes you, you know, to some island. And then, then you take another plane from there and you wind up in

SPEAKER_143: Hong Kong. I mean, and then you just leave your jet. Absolutely. That's a great call. Yeah. Who cares,

SPEAKER_103: man. Romancing the stone situation. How many bitcoins does that guy have memorized in his head?

Jason Calacanis: What did I see that there was a funny, uh, Vinny Lingham from the crypto round table. I think

SPEAKER_29: tweeted, he retweeted himself from 2021 where he was like, I'm just saying that when these exchanges give an accounting of all the Bitcoin, they seem to be holding as collateral, it adds up

Jason Calacanis: to more than 21 million. Just, just throwing that out there. I was like, my God, this whole situation.

SPEAKER_239: And it's just, it never, it never stops. Yeah. It's crazy. Let's see. What would I put the odds that he gets out of Dodge? He's clever. The kid's clever planes in Argentina. I think he sent his

SPEAKER_20: lookalike. I think he's got a lookalike with the wig. He sent a lookalike to Argentina who is now walking around Argentina. And then I think he got on a S you know, like a scorpion, like one of those high

SPEAKER_129: speed boats, like a James Bond kind of little inflatable Naval crap got out to sea and he gave some North Korean shipping lanes. And I think he's, he's with the North Korean shipping lanes right now. Give them a couple of Bitcoin, a hundy. I think probably a hundred Bitcoin gets the job done. 2 million, something like that. Give him a hundred Bitcoin and on a, on a, a desk on a, on a thumb drive kids in Hong Kong right now, eating Peking duck, shaved his head, dyed it, wearing a wig.

SPEAKER_29: Yesterday you were like, help him the parents. Now you, now you get, now you get what I was saying,

Jason Calacanis: which is I'm not falling for this. I think that tweet storm was disturbing. I'm sorry, man. And

SPEAKER_00: the kid then admitted, I guess we found out he admitted he was on speed. Like you start putting this stuff together. I could see the kid killing himself. And I listen, I, no matter what crimes he committed, I do have, I mean, I don't want to, I mean, I understand some people consider like

SPEAKER_96: honorable suicide in some, you know, like seppuku kind of situation. Like he did say

SPEAKER_98: something similar about people's lives. About Do Kwan, because he also had some

Jason Calacanis: disturbing sets of tweets and he apparently has just been maybe goofing off in Singapore and has

SPEAKER_252: now run somewhere else. He's out. I just looked it up because I was like, where's he? You know, the legion of doom. These guys are like the legion of dorks round these guys up and put

SPEAKER_20: them in a maximum security prison. And then I want to watch a reality show as they try to escape from it. And like, just get tased. The legion of dorks. Go Kwan, SPF. Who else is in the legion of dorks?

SPEAKER_255: Elizabeth Holmes. She's totally legion of dorks. Oh my God. She is not.

SPEAKER_256: Three of them in a, she's totally a dork. Did you see that scene with her dancing?

SPEAKER_18: Yeah. I mean, to be fair, that was television, but.

SPEAKER_25: I know, but you know that that's accurate. It's like legion of dorks.

SPEAKER_47: Legion of dorks, the lady queen. She would definitely be like, you know, she's like the storm of that. Queen of the dorks. Yeah.

SPEAKER_252: Legion of dorks. Who else is a legion? Snowden kind of fits into the legion of dorks. He's kind of like, uh, I put him in the legion of dorks. They're all on the limb.

Jason Calacanis: Yeah. Legion of dorks. I mean, an SPF currently doesn't necessarily have to worry about being in or not at this moment in a non extradition country, because he has not formally been accused of anything.

David Friedberg: Yeah. I mean, this is one of those things where like formally accusing him is going to take so much work. So long. Yeah. I mean, it takes so long.

SPEAKER_145: The shell game here seems to be, I mean, listen, allegedly, I'm going to put allegedly in front of everything we've said right now, because half of this stuff is things he said he did.

Jason Calacanis: I mean, honestly, like, honestly, Matt Levine. Also the fact back to the New York times, the fact that Matt Levine did an interview with this guy in which he literally was like, you have just described your own business to me as a Ponzi scheme. Right. And Sam Bankman Freed was like, yeah, that's fair.

SPEAKER_29: And Matt Levine never let up on him once with that as your template. How is it possible for the New York times to have done an interview with this guy where they were like, well, perhaps his most ambitious effort was to try to rewrite crypto regulations. Like, no, I think his ambitious effort, most ambitious effort allegedly was to steal $8 billion.

SPEAKER_269: Like, what the hell? Anyway, I'm sorry. Let's move on. I hate it.

SPEAKER_124: So anyway, that's the Chinese startup story. I have, I do have sympathy for the, for the founders.

SPEAKER_70: And this is China's great misstep. They tried to emulate capitalism. And then they learned the hard lesson that capitalism creates, uh, celebrities and stars and people who have influence and competition because they created things in the world. And then politicians then don't get to lord it over those people. They have to, you know, debate it out and build a society with them. And thus capitalism and democracy is messy. It's messy AF.

SPEAKER_273: Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_275: But it's kind of better than living in a dictatorship. Full stop. It's the worst system I've ever seen, except for all the rest.

SPEAKER_20: Listen, lots of founders are loosey-goosey with their personal phone numbers. And that causes tons of downstream problems. You start putting your personal phone number in company documents, you start using it for sales calls, and that makes things messy. You won't know who's calling. Is it a sales prospect? Or is it someone from your kid's school? You don't want to get random calls. Open phone helps you create a business phone number for you and your team in minutes. It's very simple. You download the smartphone app. You download the desktop app, whichever one's your jam or both. If you're like me, just install the app. You get a number. You're done. No need to carry two phones anymore. And by the way, we use this at our company because we wanted to have customer support phone numbers. We wanted our sales team to have numbers. And open phone is really good at filtering out all the spam and the scams. And you can do all kinds of interesting routing things. If you got an existing phone number, they'll port it over. No problem. It's their pleasure to do that. Open phone, they say it's affordable. I say it's too cheap. Based on the product I'm getting, I would pay triple. But, hey, listen, it's their business. They can charge what they want. They decided to start at $10 a month. Twist listeners, on top of that, since open phone, love startups, are going to get an extra 20% off any plan for the first six months. But you have to sign up at my URL, openphone.com.twist. And if you've got existing numbers again, just port them over and start saving money. O-P-E-N-P-H-O-N-E.com.twisttoday.openphone.com.twisttoday. Great job. It's a killer product. Exactly.

Jason Calacanis: Exactly. They did. They tried to have it both ways and eventually had to kill off the competition to the government itself, right? To the party. And so, yes. But I, again, as you just said. Can we do something that makes me feel better?

SPEAKER_20: Sympathy for the founders. Yeah. I want to do something that makes me feel better. That's world positive. You know, what's world positive? We live in the future. So fun. It's just more fun. It's more joyful. Give me something.

SPEAKER_28: It's like our little chaser. It's like our little chaser. Every day. A little something. Yeah, a little. And what says we live in the future?

SPEAKER_70: They give you sparkling water after you have that dark, rich espresso. You know, like some of those fancy shops. Yeah. And they give you that really nice sparkling water. So you drink that. Espresso leaves a little bit of the grit, but you like it on your teeth, but you have the sparkling water chaser with a little lemon in it. Delicious.

Jason Calacanis: Man, I read about that. I'm not trying to bring us down, but just like prayers up to Istanbul, one of my favorite cities that I've ever been. I just could not believe how at home and happy I felt in Istanbul of all places. Everybody was so warm and like kind of sly, like everybody, like Turkish people are just funny. And that coffee is so good. And the food is so incredible. And I just, I heard about that bombing and I was just devastated. I was just devastated.

SPEAKER_294: Um, but anyway, I got us off the world. Please just, I just wanted to shout out

Jason Calacanis: Istanbul and how much I love it. And I want to have my, I'm still planning to have my 50th birthday party at the Basilica cistern. Can't wait. Oh my God.

SPEAKER_163: Do you know about this Basilica cistern? I don't, I hope I get an invite to the 50th. Oh yeah. You're coming. It was like lost for centuries. It was literally lost. It used to

SPEAKER_56: be the water supply for the whole city and it was lost. And then this like in the seventies,

Jason Calacanis: this like Danish explorer got lost underground and then discovered it. And it's this underground,

SPEAKER_05: like water cavern and they turn it into a, um, an event. It's the coolest place I've ever been. I'll send pictures later. Okay. Back to robots. Let's talk about robots.

SPEAKER_124: We live in the future. We need a stinger for this. Can somebody make us a stinger? Like a little

Jason Calacanis: graphic. Thanks. Yeah. Some like sci-fi sounds. Okay. So like robots in stores is increase, is becoming increasingly common. Like we used to have the store Decathlon, which is a French, like the French Ikea. It's sadly closed. It was an emery, but it was so awesome. Like incredible. It was a big, huge sporting superstar. And they had a, like a robot that would go up and down the, and you could look up skews or whatever. And I had never seen that. I was like, this is amazing. But now the robots are actually getting like pretty real and pretty fricking useful. Like they don't just roll around and look goofy and you kind of want to kick them. There's, uh, this company called Simbae, I think S M S I M B E. Yes. Robotics. Providing retailers a solution for what Forbes calls a trillion dollar problem. That being inventory management. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. So they just announced a new version of their robot, the tally get it. Cause inventory. Look at that.

Chamath Palihapitiya: It looks like a, a standup mop, but good looking. Very awesome. Yeah. Svelte. Looks like Apple made it.

SPEAKER_29: Yeah. And, and this, the tally is like, let's go. And it's got all these cameras on it. You can see it's festooned with cameras and it just rolls up and down the aisle unobtrusively looking super cool. Ooh, look at the heat map there. Yeah. And so it can do its 3d cameras and RFID, and it can analyze and record store inventory. So it can

SPEAKER_66: figure out like shelving. It can figure out if things are misplaced and miss, there it is in

SPEAKER_315: decathlon. Oh my God. There it is. Yeah. That's decathlon. Decathlon. Oh, nice. I miss that store so

SPEAKER_00: much. It was like super cheap sporting goods. Wow. It's really cool. This is really the computer vision is the key piece. If you're not watching this youtube.com slash this weekend, or Spotify has

SPEAKER_317: the video version of this weekend startups. There's also a video version on apple. You just have to type in

SPEAKER_155: this weekend startups video. Yeah, it's really cool. It's like a thin little stick with cameras on the

SPEAKER_20: side. Cameras obviously have gotten incredible because of smartphones. Robotics has gotten better because of batteries, Roomba, self-driving cars, yada, yada. Navigation of space has gotten better because of the self-driving car revolution. Computer visualization has gotten better because of Google do Google search, trying to do image search. All of this stuff, the libraries of understanding, uh, this is like standing on the shoulders of four or five different technology verticals. And yeah, why would you send a human to go up and down shelves to take notes? This thing can just walk around and just tell you what's going on in your facility. Yeah. Um, and it can do three inventory checks per day with 99% accuracy. What's the accuracy of a teenager who just took bang to 10 milligram

SPEAKER_275: indica edible? I don't think it's 99%. So Brian, uh, producer Brian reports 65%. I don't know if that's

Jason Calacanis: from personal experience, but he came up with that number real quick. 65% according to that. I'm just

SPEAKER_33: joking. According to the tally website, the, the accuracy of a human is 65% versus the robots. 99%

SPEAKER_317: 12 cameras on this bad boy, 30,000 products per hour scanned. Um, you can also read the price tags and

SPEAKER_33: everything. I mean, that's amazing. So it can be like, oh, you have the wrong price. So none of that,

SPEAKER_10: like, uh, I'm sorry, it says 99 cents right on the can. That lady in the grocery store. Always.

SPEAKER_70: One robot can handle 80,000 SKUs. That's amazing. Yeah. It's amazing. Makes sense. Um, the, the thing it

SPEAKER_00: doesn't do is reshelf, uh, stuff in the retail location. Right. Um, that would be like the next step of this is that they put an arm on it and we're out of Campbell soup. Uh, we got no more chicken soup here. Go to the back, get five cans and put them on the shelf. So there should be really two robots, one that scans and one that restocks, or, you know, they should have, I had seen this other robot. Um, and I put it in the chat by the way, um, before, uh, so maybe we just get a screenshot of it, uh, a robot. Now, when you're looking at, uh, a glass, you know, a frozen in, you know, um, retail display, you know, we have ice cream or, you know, soda pop, uh, there's a robot that tracks, you know, where the doors open, the glass doors, where you reach in and grab your, your Starbucks, uh, latte glass bottle with 8,000 calories in it. Now imagine those vanilla lattes are running low. This robot

SPEAKER_20: could run to the back, grab, grab, grab three or four and restock the shelf. So if you were to build it custom like that, you could actually have it on a track, which when you can control a robot's movement, you know, uh, in space, the free robots are very challenging. Like the one Tesla's building or Boston dynamics, those freestanding robots, they have a mission of just operating in the world.

SPEAKER_00: Very hard to do these other ones that zip around on a track, very easy to do because you've been trained

SPEAKER_91: like the cafe X robot that we invested in as a firm that you can see at SFO in terminal two. And that is doing a million dollars a year between two of these robots. Yeah. Uh, and they can just, when you can strain the mission, uh, the mission gets completed. And this is an example of like a

SPEAKER_20: very constrained mission. So that's, that's what we're seeing now when general AI comes out, Molly, you're gonna start seeing these general purpose robots. And it's like, okay, we prog them to, to do the skews. Now we're gonna program to replace stuff. Now we're gonna program to carry, to carry groceries to your car. And so that's what you'll see over the next 20 years is when that same robot can carry your groceries to the car. Now it's, we we've kind of crossed over to the,

SPEAKER_91: to the real, the real tipping point is like, Hey robot. And then if it can do a mission that it has

SPEAKER_20: previously not been asked to, Hey robot, we just had car accident outside. Can you go lift the car and get it out of the front of the, you know, crash into the front of the store? Can you just go for robots, go move that out of the way, uh, and help get the two people out of the backseat who are stuck in there, rip the door off. That's when we'll be, that's probably not our lifetime. Yeah.

SPEAKER_328: When it can just, you're talking about the I robot movie. Yeah. All right, everybody,

SPEAKER_137: that's a show for today. We'll see you all tomorrow on this week and start up on Wednesday. Next unicorn day. Oh yeah. Next. Yeah. Wrapping that up. Okay, everybody. We'll see you tomorrow.

SPEAKER_331: Bye. Bye.