SPEAKER_00: out of these SPACs, there will be a FedEx, an Amazon. There'll be some great company that comes

SPEAKER_01: out of this. You just have to assume an 80% failure rate. Now, when I say 80% failure rate, I mean a zero. Yeah. Lose all your money. Right. Space tourism. When I saw that one come up,

David Friedberg: I was like, that's a Hail Mary. If you're betting on that, you should expect it to be one in 250. Yeah. Now, if you're betting on Joby, I would take it from one in 250 down to one in 50.

SPEAKER_04: And that's just what I do for a living is to make these assessments. It's taken me a lot of pain

SPEAKER_08: and suffering to get that skill. Right. Yeah. Man, there are so many companies. A lot of lessons

SPEAKER_13: learned along the way. There are so many companies, Lon, that I thought were going to do so much

SPEAKER_00: better that went to zero. And there are so many that beat my estimations unbelievably that I would have put behind those other companies, man. There's so much randomness in this. And the randomness is

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SPEAKER_18: Hey, everybody. Welcome back to This Week in Startups. I'm your host, Jason Calacanis. With me

SPEAKER_01: again, Alex Trebek, calling in from Jeopardy. No, it's Alex Wilhelm. He's x.com slash Alex. He's in Providence, Rhode Island. We're here in the great state of Texas in Austin with Lon Harris in our studio. Hey, hey. Shout out to my friends at Capital Factory for hosting us here.

SPEAKER_22: Yeah. Shout out. Let's get to the program. What's in the news here, Lon, Alex? I do want to start us off by talking about this Blue Origin rocket launch. They sent six women

SPEAKER_24: into space. Oh, it's all six women. The entire crew is women. This is the first all-female crew to go to space since 1963. The Soviets sent a cosmonaut up, Valentina Perishkova. In 1963, she went into orbit.

SPEAKER_01: This is a great move by, I tell you, this is a power move by Bezos because there are very few female astronauts. And there's always been this controversy, like who goes on. And so basically,

SPEAKER_00: what you're telling me is all these female NASA astronauts who haven't been able to go up have

SPEAKER_24: gotten up. Oh, these were not NASA astronauts. These were, it was Lauren Sanchez, Jeff Bezos' lovely bride. Fiance. Fiance. It was like a wedding present. Oh, I see. I see. Okay. So she went up with five astronauts. She went up and she had five of her lady friends. Aisha Bowe, who is a scientist. Amanda Nguyen, who is also a Nobel Peace Prize nominee and a scientist. This is great. Journalist and Oprah friend,

SPEAKER_32: Gayle King. Okay. Film producer, Carrie Ann Flynn, and pop star, Katy Perry. Okay. Katy Perry. Yeah. All right. This image went viral of Gayle King just before this is when they were walking on to the spacecraft and Gayle King, she's got a little trepidation. People thought maybe she had agreed when this was an abstract, like, Hey, you want to go to space? She looks terrified. Yeah. And then when they were walking onto the space shuttle,

SPEAKER_24: she's having second thoughts. And then the moment they got back. Is that Katy Perry vomiting?

SPEAKER_32: No, the moment they got back, this is right when the spacecraft landed, Katy Perry kissed the

SPEAKER_39: ground. Yes. Okay. Once again, Katy Perry making herself the center of attention. Of course. Oh,

SPEAKER_24: even more. Gayle let us know that as they were attempting re-entry, Katy Perry treated them all to

SPEAKER_42: a little song. The best part was to when we got back in our seats after zero G's, Katy saying,

SPEAKER_44: what a wonderful world. She did. That nice. Oh my God. Oh, yes, yes, yes. Oh,

SPEAKER_48: you're in a spacecraft. You can't get away. It's a command performance. You can't escape. Wow. I can't think of anything worse. Just let us enjoy the moment. Get out of space. We're looking

SPEAKER_24: at earth, the majesty of the cosmos all around you. And Katy Perry's got to be like, hang on. I need to make this moment better. I mean, wow. I just want to shout out Orlando Bloom. Now we all

SPEAKER_26: know what this poor man has to go through. I mean, she just breaks out in song and ruins

SPEAKER_24: the flight. I don't know if it ruined, but I feel like I would have wanted to just appreciate

SPEAKER_40: the majesty, the grandeur of being in space. All right. I'm going to defend Katy Perry here.

SPEAKER_59: She's a singer. What did you think she was going to do on the way down? Juggle? I'm just literally trolling. I mean, you could have just, yeah. Let everybody enjoy. It's such a lot. It's not just to Katy Perry specifically. Anybody. This has ruined it for me now. I don't want to go to space.

SPEAKER_00: Okay. I will take your seat. A friend of mine and I are going to go up at some point when he's ready to go up. We have a group of four of us that are going to do something similar to this,

SPEAKER_63: I think. Yeah. I feel like that's spitting in the face of our Lord. We're clear. There's no oxygen

SPEAKER_21: up there. Like that's not, it's an inhospitable place for. All right. Well, here's the thing with the blue origin approach. And listen, amazing job to Bezos of getting this stuff going.

SPEAKER_32: I mean, yeah, they're doing it. They got to space. They came back. Everybody's safe and alive at work. Number one, there's something about his rocket.

SPEAKER_62: A little, what a great moment for feminism this was.

SPEAKER_67: There's a lot going on here. I'll just leave it at that because that rocket kind of feel like

SPEAKER_63: the design of the rocket is a little bit trolling. Oh, it couldn't look more wang-like. There's nothing you could do to make it look more like a wang. No, it is literally designed to evoke a

SPEAKER_26: certain, yes. A pallic image. Yes. I mean, rockets inherently look like penises. And then this one is

SPEAKER_01: designed to just look like a circumcised penis. Yeah. If people are curious, this is a new shepherd

SPEAKER_72: rocket. I think this is the 11th crewed flight from blue origins. They've been doing this quite a lot. Yeah. This is not, by the way, the new Glenn, which is their big take, you know, cargo to space rocket. This is their like space tourism rocket. So just data points. I'll just give some credit

SPEAKER_77: where credit is due. Absolutely fantastic that we now have a second, you know, really super viable,

David Friedberg: it seems. I mean, they're a decade behind, but it's viable. It's nowhere near what SpaceX is doing,

SPEAKER_22: obviously, but maybe they're 10% of the way there. It's just kind of interesting too,

SPEAKER_24: that it's sort of a different framing marketing approach. Like SpaceX is so focused on transport. We're going to deliver satellites. We're making deliveries to the international space stations, Argo. Cost per kilo is what they're going for. Right. And blue origin, they're leaning much more into the space tourism. Like we're taking celebrities up and we're having these incredible experiences. And I feel like they're kind of branding themselves differently.

SPEAKER_84: Yeah. It was like the Virgin, Virgin space, which doesn't seem to have made it.

SPEAKER_87: It's right. Galactic. Virgin galactic. It doesn't seem to have made it, but you know, this is entrepreneurship. This is capitalism. Some companies work, some don't. This is great because we've been talking on this program for 14 years about things like VTOLs, flying cars, right? Sure. We've been talking about space tourism. We've been talking about self-driving cars, Waymo, FSD, the DARPA project. We talk about a lot of these things and that they're coming,

SPEAKER_01: drone delivery of food and breads. It feels like in the last couple of months, a lot of the stuff that was supposedly coming in the next 10 years is actually starting to land.

SPEAKER_94: Yeah. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_95: Gil King is not getting on a rocket. She's a pragmatist. Yeah. I feel like-

SPEAKER_29: There's no way she's going up first. No, I feel like she feels like me where it's like, we're really like, why am I testing the odds here?

SPEAKER_98: You're the laggards laggard on this.

SPEAKER_32: I, yeah, I really don't have the desire to go to space. I mean, I'm sure it'd be great once you're up there.

David Friedberg: Pull up the early adopter curve. There's a curve, uh, that, you know, people in the audience should know if they're founders and it basically goes, you know, you have the laggards on one side, you have the early adopters on the other. This is a Clayton Christensen, like, you know, classic way of looking at the adoption curve of new technologies. You have early adopters, you have the Vanguard all the way out there, standard deviation. And so when you look at this, you got the innovators,

SPEAKER_01: right? It's 2.5% of people. Now these are astronauts are innovators, right? They're the ones who will come up. They have early adopters. Early adopters will be, you know, right after them, you know, these crazy people who will pay $50 million to go on one of these things. Sure.

David Friedberg: And then you have the early majority, the late majority and the laggards. What we're seeing here is the early majority is doing space flight now. These are not early adopters. This early majority kind of behavior.

SPEAKER_104: Mainstream kinds of people.

David Friedberg: Yes. And so the equivalent here would be when you looked at the Tesla rollout, innovators were the ones who bought the Roadster. Early adopters bought the Model S. The early majority bought the Model X. The late majority bought the Model 3 and Y and the laggards still haven't bought electric cars. Or maybe they're buying other brands of electric cars or hybrids, right? Like a Prius or whatever. Plug-in hybrid might be.

SPEAKER_109: They're the Rivian folks. Yeah.

SPEAKER_77: The Rivian folks would be, actually, that's correct. Yes. They would be like the late majority.

David Friedberg: Right. I would say. And it's really important to look at that group. Now, when we look at this and we talk about self-driving Waymo's, right now Waymo's is in the early adopters phase. We're not even to the early majority. We only have probably low hundreds of thousands of people who've ever used a Waymo.

SPEAKER_63: Right. And my mom was in town this weekend. Uber offered to send her a Waymo to bring her to Ucci the other night. She said, no, no, no. No Bueno. Oh. Not ready.

SPEAKER_113: Not for mom. She picked Rafael the Uber driver instead.

SPEAKER_26: Right. And she's the late majority. Yeah. She might be a laggard. I mean, she will get there.

SPEAKER_63: So then she's a laggard. Yeah. On her second or third trip to Austin, I guarantee we'll get her in a Waymo.

SPEAKER_87: So this is this standard innovation adoption life cycle. If you look at that drone delivery,

SPEAKER_16: we're really in the innovators and early adopters. Right. We're just going into the early adopters phase.

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SPEAKER_84: Registered Agent dot com slash twist today. There's all kinds of different challenges along that curve.

SPEAKER_00: You don't have to convince Robert Scoble's name was invoked on the last episode. Yes, it was. Robert Scoble literally would jump on the hood of a Tesla as an early innovator. Oh, sure. Literally, if I was driving my Roadster, he literally would jump on and grab the fender

SPEAKER_126: to be part of that. He's literally like, if you had a pill that could increase your IQ. And I was like, yeah, we haven't tested it yet. He's the guy who would just take two and be like, all right,

SPEAKER_66: it's tested now. He's that like Jack Black of, he's the Jack Black of the tech industry in a way where he'll just, but in the most flattering way, I mean, in the most flattering way, I'm not describing his body type or anything, just a lesser mega visual. I want to start with a couple of quick

SPEAKER_130: things. First of all, hugging face, everyone's favorite online repository for AI models and compute has bought a robotics company, which immediately struck me as kind of confusing because why would a startup buy that does, you know, AI model hosting by robotics company, but the company in question is called pollen robotics. It's a French robotics company, and they're working on open source robotic technology using AI. So I think the gesture Jason is that hugging face wants to go from just being the AI, you know, hub and source for the digital world and also become the same thing in the physical world. And I think that's fricking genius. It's a great idea. This company is doing

SPEAKER_01: real world robotics. Do you know what format are they? So this is Ricci 2. And for folks

SPEAKER_72: on the audio version, it's a very basic robot with two effector effectuators, which are the little hands. And the gist here is open source research, robotics and AI. This is not trying to replace a human right now in a manufacturing facility, Jason. But it is a humanoid robot. It doesn't

SPEAKER_18: have legs yet. It's got arms. You know, what's great about this is, if the models can have human

David Friedberg: behavior open source into them, the entire industry is not going to be owned by one person and it's going to move faster. And what AI needs is open source. When a company is in the lead, they are closed. So chat GPT and open AI closed everything. They realized they had a fantastic lead. That's as cynical as it gets. You're committed to being open AI, and then you close everything down because you can make money. That is the most cynical thing you can do. It's basically like

SPEAKER_01: completely dishonest to make that flip. And the actual point of open AI was AI is so important that everybody should own it. I actually agree with that. It levels the playing field. So every person has access to it. Now, when you open the playing field and everybody has access to a technology, that means the business opportunity and the global opportunity is spread equally. If you want to make a competitor to WordPress, you can get wordpress.com, my friend, Matt Mullenweg, and you can pay them to host your WordPress blog. You can pay WP engine. And then there was this other one that I've read the ad for.

SPEAKER_87: All of those put pressure on wordpress.com. They've had a big back and forth with WP engine, but anybody can use WordPress. It's awesome. Then you look at what's happening in the AI space. Zuckerberg was so far behind. He said, Alex, hey, the great thing to do is let's open source everything we do. That's called Llama. Hugging Face is a collection of

SPEAKER_01: all those open source projects put into one place, a repository, and you can then pop things up. But

David Friedberg: what's missing is a company like Tesla that's very far ahead. A company that Waymo is very far ahead, self-driving. Are they open or closed? Close. Close. Of course, because they're ahead. Yeah. This is what you need to know as an entrepreneur. If you're ahead, do not open anything up because all you're going to do is lose fast.

SPEAKER_06: Right. If you're behind, open up somebody else's clothes. That's what Hugging Face is doing. Yeah.

David Friedberg: By the way, NVIDIA, Alex, you covered an announcement from NVIDIA. NVIDIA announced Jensen at his last keynote that he was going to do an open source and build into the models directly, self-driving technology. So now for every action, there is an equal reaction. You have proprietary language models. That's open AI. And I believe Claude and Brock are all closed. Right. And they're the top three and Gemini is closed. Those are your top four. And now we have on the other side, Llama and Deepsea, open source. Then we look at self-driving. You have Waymo closed. You have Tesla closed, as they should. I'm not making any judgment here.

SPEAKER_01: Right. I'm a pragmatist and an investor. I'm a capitalist. Then on the other side, now you have self-driving by NVIDIA. And you have this real world robot for figure AI. To every action,

David Friedberg: there's a counter reaction. And that is how the game is played. I advised, as did Bill Gurley, Uber to, and I'm advising them again. This is a message to Dara. Whatever you do, the number one focus of Uber right now should be to be support, open source, self-driving. Why? Why do I, as the shareholder in Uber still to this day, why am I such a proponent of NVIDIA open sourcing, what they're doing and this open source movement with Hubbing Face? And why do I think Uber should back all open source?

SPEAKER_01: Why would I do that?

SPEAKER_147: Because they're behind.

SPEAKER_01: They don't have any bets. They are putting anybody into Uber's network. So they have Waymo. Right. They have WeRide. They've got a bunch of folks. But if open source technology was used for self-driving, think about how many lives would be saved. I mean, you will pull this technology forward quicker because then anybody who wants to start an open source company, just like WP Engine and other people wanted to use WordPress and just start a competitor. What that does is it makes everybody lower prices and move faster because it's competition. Self-driving, open source project would absolutely

SPEAKER_87: crush.

SPEAKER_32: Well, it makes the most sense. Like self-driving is one of those projects that makes so much sense for open source because it's so much about the data that you're collecting from all these

SPEAKER_149: cars on the road. Like if all these companies were sharing everything they're learning every time they go on these rides, we're going to get where we want to go much more quickly.

SPEAKER_01: More of this is what I'll say for, uh, I think on Friday, we covered those little robots that drive

SPEAKER_21: around delivering burritos. Power move from one of those companies, open source it. Yeah. Coco and Samo, I think they're called.

SPEAKER_153: Coco and, um, serve, uh, service robotics, Jason. Oh my gosh. Serve robotics. There we go.

SPEAKER_63: Right. But Samo is the name of the little guy.

David Friedberg: Oh, robotics is ahead. Somebody should make a version of that where all the parts are hardware, open source. Actually, this is what DoorDash and Uberate should do. They should make a hardware project that's open source for those where you just publish all the specs and let anybody make them. And then you open source the software layer and you open source the data layer. So when you run those robots around Los Angeles, you just publish the data, just open source, publish world data. There's a project called open map. I think, um, that's the open source mapping project that was created by Gowalla, Foursquare, and a bunch of other people. Open street map. Open street map. Because people were fearing the dependency on Google maps and then

SPEAKER_01: Apple maps came out. So they have two competitors and then open street map.org is where you can see

David Friedberg: an open source project. The next thing that should happen is open street map, plus these little

SPEAKER_87: delivery robots, plus Nvidia self-driving nation all get together and map out the world with lidar and make it free for humanity. Now that could be a bummer for Waymo and a bummer for Tesla, but only on the margins because they have other things that make them defensible, the hardware stack, et cetera. And all it will do is move everybody up the stack to work on harder problems as opposed to keeping all your data for yourself. Exactly.

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SPEAKER_32: squarespace.com slash twist. The one other thing I would say about Hugging Face that makes this a

SPEAKER_24: really interesting thing for me is when I was working on, like when I was first trying out stable diffusion, like during that first wave when everybody was really excited about generative AI and I wanted to try it out, Hugging Face is so essential because that would be where all the little things you want to add, it's like a GitHub for working on those kinds of models where anytime you wanted to add like a Studio Ghibli filter or any other, like make me look like a Barbie doll, any of those, you had to download a new model or a new tweak, a Laura, they call it from Hugging Face. Yeah. So it's very integrated into the process. So I think that's what they want to do. If you were working on a robotics project, it would be the same thing, like all the little things, all the little coded details that you wanted to add to your project, you would integrate Hugging Face

SPEAKER_172: into your workflow. One thing I want to bring up before we get too far into the show today is a bit of controversy over the weekend. I don't know where you kind of stand on this one,

SPEAKER_130: but Jack, Jack Dorsey, formerly of Twitter, formerly of Square, now Block and X. He had a tweet that says he thinks we should delete all IP law. And I'm not exaggerating here. His tweet just reads, delete all IP law. And some people came out vociferously against this. Some people were very much in favor. Hot topic. Uh, my dad has a couple of patents and I don't know, we've talked a lot here about the importance of copyright. Is Jack having a moment or is this something that's a bit more of a normal view in technology than I was thinking? I saw the tweet. I haven't had a chance

SPEAKER_18: to respond because I was literally dealing with the fallout from the all in episode on Thursday, which was the record all in of all time. It hit number four in the rankings. We had Larry Summers on Ezra Klein on. Saks came back to do a full episode and it was wild. Before you go on, I want

SPEAKER_130: to say, uh, Reddit gives me one of the all in subreddits. Just, it shows it to me and you got shout outs for your moderation skills during that episode in particular. I just wanted you to know

SPEAKER_30: that. Oh, I appreciate that. I have gotten more feedback on my moderation of that episode than

SPEAKER_01: the top five moderation jobs I've ever did. No, Saks was like, why am I not allowed to speak? And I wasn't interrupting him. Larry Summers interrupted him multiple times and wouldn't let him speak,

SPEAKER_126: which is new for Saks to experience because usually people complain, Saks is the one who's interrupting folks. And so I was trying to defer to the guests. Larry Summers is a big guest.

SPEAKER_24: This felt in particular, like, I feel like this is actual history. Like in 30 years, when people are talking about this moment, the tariff moment, the tariff moment and the reaction to it, because you had this very notable economics expert going head to head against a member of the White House team that is actually doing it, including this policy where it's, it's a rare

SPEAKER_22: thing to see. It doesn't exist in the world. It's a very rare thing. I think this was my, it was like a Frost Nixon moment, wasn't it? Well, there, there is that moment where

SPEAKER_24: Ezra sort of directly challenges Saks and is saying, what is the actual goal in real metrics that are measurable that we can all look at? And Saks wouldn't give it to him. It hedges a bit. And then Chamath kind of says, step in and save it. And that to me, it's like, well, that's very notable. Like that's a, it's a memorable. And the notable thing about that is I had

SPEAKER_87: said multiple times on the episode, Hey, listen, we all know we have to bring back chips. We have to bring back, you know, ships and weapons. We talked to Alex, you and I talked about that

SPEAKER_01: on a previous episode, how many ships are. And so, you know, what Chamath described is exactly what the Democrats tried to do in the last. Yeah. It was mostly the, the Biden policy.

SPEAKER_87: No, it is the Biden policy. So you got to give credit there. What Chamath described is what we all agree on and what Biden tried to do with the chips act and on shoring, I think chips, rare earths, um, you know, and, and, you know, some of those, uh, and, and pharmaceuticals putting that aside at the end, I felt like we had some, I tried to bring it back to have a little consensus. You know, there are two other metrics we could look at that I added, which is GDP and the number of jobs that work in high tech. So Alex did a little homework assignment for Wednesday. I'd like you to share with the audience, how many open jobs there are for high tech factory work and how many unemployed people there are who are capable of taking that. And just a general exploration of

David Friedberg: how many people in America are qualified to do high tech chip manufacturing and what degree and or skills do you need to do that? Cause my understanding is to work in a high tech factory. We have so few people who know how to do that in America today that Nvidia, I'm sorry, TSMC, when they've built their fab here, they had to bring people from Taiwan because there weren't any people here. Really? I want to try to put some numbers on this and some understanding. What is the

SPEAKER_01: reality? Yeah. If you want to have a hundred thousand people working in chip fobs here and doing high tech chip manufacturing or putting phones together here or routers, what degree do they need

SPEAKER_84: to have? What level of precision do they need to have? My understanding is there's like two pieces

SPEAKER_149: here. There's like physical dexterity to build some of this. Because it's so small. You're working

SPEAKER_84: on something. Yeah. Yeah. So there's a physical dexterity, but also there is some knowledge that you need to have as well. So it's a very hard one for me to understand. Yeah. Well, and it seems

SPEAKER_24: like it's probably, there's, there's gotta be different tiers too. I mean, it's a huge team in a big factory. I'm sure some of the jobs are more specialized than others. Okay. So back to the IP

SPEAKER_84: recap, I didn't get to do the IP recap, Alex, because I was literally had so many people

David Friedberg: complaining and congratulating me over the weekend. So back to IP. Jack's a friend. He's awesome. I

SPEAKER_01: don't know what part of IP he was talking about here is the challenge. So let's break it down. Did

SPEAKER_24: he say anything in the follow-up tweets? In follow-ups, it looked like it was about AI, like we, the only way we are going to compete with the Chinese is if we get over this obsession

SPEAKER_212: with copyright and IP. Yeah. Okay. That's what I thought. That seems to be where he was coming

SPEAKER_215: from to me. It is when you are a billionaire and you've made all your money

SPEAKER_87: in software and building a software and you're in the technology industry, you have, you, you very quickly lose any respect for, if you had any to start with. Right. Yeah. For artists in Silicon

David Friedberg: Valley, people think artists are to be used because artists are so dumb that they've built all these platforms. The platforms aggregate all the value and YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok laugh at how stupid artists are for letting them build trillion dollar, hundred billion dollar, 10 billion dollar franchises off the backs of content creators. Content creators are dumb. And content creators need to show these platforms exactly that they're not dumb. And what they should do is get together. Mr. Beast, I don't know, Charlie XCX. I don't know who the biggest-

SPEAKER_21: Colin and Samiri. Well, they're not huge. I'm saying the ones who actually drive-

SPEAKER_01: All the TikTok influencers. The top 25 TikTok influencers and Mr. Beast and 25 other people should leave those platforms. Now that content is, now that software is so easy to build with AI, they should stick it to them, leave those platforms and premiere their stuff on their

SPEAKER_87: own platform. That gives a hundred percent of revenue or 95% of revenue.

SPEAKER_149: It's tough though. I mean, there, there have been, there have been groups that have tried to do this.

SPEAKER_24: Number one. The Try Guys was a sort of an infamous example. They built up a huge audience on YouTube. You know, the Try Guys, they were on Buzzfeed originally. It was just, they'll go out and

SPEAKER_32: try any crazy thing. Okay. It can't work with one person. It has to be a consortium of the top 10. Yeah. Dropout. The College Humor guys went and built their own subscription platform. Okay, sure. The Dropout does okay. Okay.

SPEAKER_226: Yeah. I think you need to mix in a record label too, because that way you can get all the music off

SPEAKER_130: of YouTube. So I feel like right now the reporting circle between music comes out, YouTube ranks of views and revenue kind of goes back in the music industry is a hard thing to break, but I think that

SPEAKER_72: would be clutch. So creators, some artists, a record label or two, you could do it.

David Friedberg: There's a very simple way to do it, which is, Hey, we're going to put 50% of our content on the platform we own. We'll keep 50% on the existing platform. And every time we'll say, watch the followup or the behind the scenes at this new place. And if, you know, there was a consortium that did that, you could actually teach a lesson to the technology. I'm not singling out Jack here. This is like pervasive. Zuckerberg would be the bigger version of this, but Jack himself owns title and he's friends with Jay-Z and, and, and Kendrick Lamar. Go ask Kendrick Lamar and Jay-Z if they think that somebody should be able to take their music and put it for free on the internet. Right. And then what that would do to the culture if those people couldn't make money. Right. And then, you know, I saw Elon retweeted it and Elon in fairness has exposed all of the IP, all the patents for self, not self-driving for a lot of Tesla's patents. But as we just said in

SPEAKER_01: the earlier segment, I don't think the self-driving stuff is open source. Right. So people again are speaking out of both sides of their mouth. Jack owns title, right? It's still owned by where I believe. Block. Yeah. By block. Okay. If he feels that way, then go to Jay-Z and go to Kendrick Lamar

SPEAKER_87: and ask them if they're cool with all their IP being free. Right.

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SPEAKER_102: slash twist. That's the nature of IP. Artists need to be protected. If China doesn't protect IP,

David Friedberg: I don't like what Sam Altman and Jack and other people are doing here. I think it's dirty. I think it's a really dirty move to say because the Chinese are thieves that we're not going to be able to

SPEAKER_01: compete. And we as Americans should hold a higher standard. Right. And I believe this in IP. I believe it in due process. I believe it in many different spaces. You don't get to take the low standard China

David Friedberg: has for IP or the low standard that El Salvador has for human rights and due process and then apply it to

SPEAKER_87: America and say, and point to those bad actors and say, that's what we should do. Josh Wolfe from

SPEAKER_72: Lux Capital, uh, says Jack may be smart. This is his stupidest take ever. And I just want to say that other VCs, Jason are on, are on your side here. But like I said, I don't understand his intent here

SPEAKER_87: exactly. Right. And so I have to talk to him first before I actually understand. Sometimes people make

David Friedberg: tweets and they're, you know, they do have a point like, right? He has a choice here. If he truly believes this, Jack has enough money to go buy Jay-Z's catalog. Right. Go buy Jay-Z's catalog and

SPEAKER_249: open source and give it as a gift for free to the world and let anybody sample it and use it however

SPEAKER_248: they want. Yeah. He doesn't want to do that. Okay. Let's move on to the next story. All right. Uh,

SPEAKER_130: one thing we've been talking about on the show a lot is lack of exits. Jason, in the first quarter of this year, we saw some IPOs. We saw some MNA activity. It was going great. Yeah, it's going great. Uh, things have changed a little bit in the last couple of weeks. All right. So there's a group called Setter. Uh, they're a secondary trading platform Jason, and they released their Q1 report showing the most in demand secondary companies. And I wanted to show this to everybody. Cause there's a bunch of twist 500 companies on here, but also I think it's an interesting look at what VCs are trying to scoop from the secondary markets, which is a key place for liquidity these days. Now, at the top of this list, there's some names you kind of expected space X and roll and thropic, but then there are some surprises X AI ranked higher than I expected it was going to, given its youth figure AI, the humanoid robotics company, Jason walk with a Q is on there opening

SPEAKER_253: AI ranks under Stripe with sixth and seventh place. I thought this was a fascinating list.

David Friedberg: Anthropic is at 61 billion. Is that the share price or is that the market cap? Let's see.

SPEAKER_254: Space X market cap last public round. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

SPEAKER_242: Private round that we know of the valuation publicly. Got it. Okay. Uh, EV expected value last round,

SPEAKER_18: expected value, I think is what there should be by EV there. Yes. So, um, there are tons of these secondary markets there. It's kind of like a little bit of gray. There's some weird stuff going on here. And so if we were to look at this, uh, Andrew at 28 billion space X at three 50 and a figure at 39 billion figure at 39 billion does not make a lot of sense to me. That's a pre revenue company, right? Yep. So that's the one that stands out. I mean, X AI does have some revenue and it owns Twitter. So it has billions of revenue there.

SPEAKER_01: So that makes sense. Defense tech, they have billions in revenue. Andrew. Um, I mean, base X has billions. Stripe has billions. Open AI has 10 billion rock is crushing it. So when I look at

David Friedberg: these, the only out of the top 10 that stands out to me here, as maybe you would debate is figure AI, just so you know how these are driven. Secondary markets here are driven not by venture capitalists, but by high net worth individuals. Right. And so if you're a high net worth individual,

SPEAKER_01: uh, I can go on these and they get pitched on them all the time. And I can buy these,

SPEAKER_00: pay massive fees, like typically maybe five to 10% to buy them. And then a 20% carry or 10% carry,

SPEAKER_262: or you may just buy them without carry. And when I go buy a million dollars worth of Andrel, uh, you know, and I own about 7 million worth of Andrel right now, I'm joking.

SPEAKER_01: Yeah. That's my guy, Bob, more lucky. If you were to go buy a million dollars worth of Andrel on this, you're going to pay like 150,000 or $100,000 in fees to get in there. So it's a bit of a racket.

David Friedberg: A lot of founders don't like this and they don't like that these markets are doing this

SPEAKER_63: because it just creates a bit of chaos for them. How much of this do you think, because you, like you said, these are not, this is not VC driven. This is just individuals who have the money

SPEAKER_24: to throw around. How much of these do you think is driven rather than based on the fundamentals of the companies by their notoriety and prominence in the culture? Because I can't help but notice a lot of the companies near the top of the list. They're brands that are recognizable in the world. Your, your Stripes, your open AIs, your bike dances, your neural links, they're all famous companies.

David Friedberg: I would say the panache, the patina, the branding is but 20% of this. It is playing a factor, but a lot of this is cause and correlation. So the reason some of these are famous, like SpaceX and Stripe is because they've been private for so long. Both of those have been private for well over 10 years now. Those two companies have been private for a long time, which means they have a large number of shareholders. They've got a large number of shareholders because they have so many employees. Employees vast over four years, typically. If a company like Stripe is 12 years old, you might have an employee who has had three different grants, a four-year grant, a four-year grant. Maybe they've had, if it's a really high-performing employee, maybe they have four

SPEAKER_01: grants where they overlap. Somebody told me when Nvidia was private, that like Jensen would just drop extra shares on people. He had like a pool of shares that he had like God power on. He didn't have to go to the board or anything. He would just be like, you did a great job. Boom, I'm doubling your shares. And he wouldn't even do it. He'd have somebody go do it for him. So he was just like dropping these kinds of things on people. But there's many, many sellers in these companies because they've been private for so long. A company like Figure AI, they raised this round. And I think Rulof did a tweet about how SPVs were ruining the industry because there were no lead investors. I think this

SPEAKER_87: is kind of a sub tweet. I haven't spoken to Rulof about it. I'm obviously friends with Rulof. Rulof, when he said this, at the same time, I was getting pitched on Figure AI at 30, 40 billion.

SPEAKER_130: And here's the tweet. We remain destined to repeat the mistakes of the past. SPVs are making a comeback where the lead investor speaks for less than 10% of the capital, yet eagerly lines up the latest set of tourist chumps who think the story will end differently this time. It's only been three years, head exploding emoji. I think he's talking about Figure AI here. At the same time he

SPEAKER_01: made this tweet, people I understand were trying to lead Figure AI's round at a reasonable valuation, say 10 billion. And listen, this is no shade at the founder and the team over at Figure AI. They should go for the greatest valuation they can get. This is their right. That's a marketplace.

David Friedberg: However, it is a pre-revenue company. When pre-revenue companies that have serious competitors are raising at a very high valuation, that is going to get the knives out. And it's going to get more than the knives, actually. You will get a little haters on the margins. The microscopes come out. And the microscopes today are not the microscopes of yesteryear. It's not a spyglass. This is one

SPEAKER_17: of those scientific microscopes at Stanford that really get in there. And then you're going to

David Friedberg: start getting the real colonoscopy going on here. They're going to really examine this company and say, if this company's run 39 billion, it's pre-revenue, what are the details of this? And they're going to start getting very granular into justifying that. And the VCs could be a little upset

SPEAKER_01: that some person they consider a knucklehead offers them 40 billion when, you know, let's say Sequoia or Jason Horowitz had offered to fund this thing at 20 billion. And they really were going to give them credit. Like, okay, you have zero revenue. In my understanding, somebody fact check me,

SPEAKER_87: please, that I heard they were pre-revenue. Maybe the BM, I think they had a BMW deal.

SPEAKER_172: I have context on that, Jason. Let me share that really quick.

SPEAKER_281: Yeah, please fill me in so I make sure I get my notes correct.

SPEAKER_172: So this is from a story about the $40 billion valuation round that you're referring to and how it's coming together. There's mentioned this piece about SPV, people getting in for as little

SPEAKER_130: as a hundred K and essentially what appears to be from what I can tell a hunt for capital at that price. But the thing that I want to highlight is details are a little bit vague and the company likes to talk. So quoting this wall street journal post and in March 31 post where he shared a video of these slender humanoids working on assembly tasks for BMW, the CEO wrote, this isn't a test. This is what

SPEAKER_72: autonomous robots in production operations looked like. Later, a BMW spokesman said that the automaker had three of the robots at its facility for a technical evaluation. So to me, there does seem to be a little bit of a disconnect between promise and reality. He's getting a little ahead of his skis. And that makes this entire thing to me a little sketchy. Although I will say it is a twist 500 company. So I don't want to be. Listen, there's no doubt it's a great company. It's no doubt that they

SPEAKER_01: are one of the top 10 robotics companies, I think probably pursuing the space and they've cashed up. Here's the challenge. We've talked about this countless times. If you oversell something while selling shares, shout out to Nicola, people can consider that to be securities fraud. Now, the distance

David Friedberg: between the two statements you just read us, I will give my judgment. This will be an official judgment. I need to hear the first statement again from the CEO. And I will tell you if this is securities fraud

SPEAKER_130: or not. Uh, the CEO Adcock wrote quote, this isn't a test. This is what autonomous robots in production operations look like. Turn the music up exclamation point. Okay. This isn't a test.

SPEAKER_253: And BMW said BMW spokesman said on April one, the automaker had three of the robots at its facility for

SPEAKER_130: technical evaluation. Quote, only one is used at a time, but the robot has practiced picking up and grasping parts during non-production hours in our body shop. The spokesman said the following week, the BMW spokesman said that he had received an update from colleagues at the plant and that there were now more than three robots on site. He said they were being used in non-production and live

SPEAKER_294: production situations. Pretty close. It's a, this is a, this is a bubble case for sure.

SPEAKER_296: This is definitely a bubble case. Yeah. Because he said, this is not a test. Then the BMW spokesman

SPEAKER_63: explains exactly a test. Yeah. They came back and said, we're using it on both live production and non-production. And then the last one he got saved. Yeah. That's what, that's the distinction

SPEAKER_26: that really matters. The final, the final words. Yeah. Save him as not guilty. Give me the final words again. The final part of that statement from BMW, the, the cleanup. Right. That, it feels like that was afterwards that they were like, oh, we gotta throw him a bone here. Well, no, I'll tell you they

SPEAKER_01: had, no, no, not even throw him a bone. When they saw that BMW quote, the, the lawyers that figure, or the lawyers at BMW or somewhere in between, some council probably said, wait a second. Yeah. Our understanding is this is not a test. You just said it's a test. We're raising money at a $39 billion valuation saying you're our key customer. Yeah. Can you please make sure that what you say

SPEAKER_275: is accurate in the press? The final sentence. The following week. The following week, the BMW spokesman said that he had received an update from colleagues at the plant and that there were now more

SPEAKER_130: than three robots on site. He said they were being used in non-production and live production situations.

SPEAKER_215: Right. Okay. Now they're in live production situations, which means not a test. So

SPEAKER_01: not guilty. This is not securities fraud. The reason I am harping on this, and I don't want to

SPEAKER_310: create another powerlucky situation. No, man.

SPEAKER_220: A CEO is really upset. Brett Adcock watching this right now, like, no.

SPEAKER_154: No, the point I'm just trying to make here is a partner can say something out of school.

David Friedberg: Like BMW is their number one customer. Right. This raise is happening because of that BMW relationship. When you look at those SPVs, the people investing in the SPVs, are investing because they're seeing those tweets from the founder.

SPEAKER_315: Mm-hmm .

David Friedberg: If the founder tweets, you know, this is not a test and the BMW says it isn't, it is a test. Then the person who bought the shares at 39 billion can get a lawyer and then say, Hey, I want my money back because you said it wasn't a test. BMW said it is. That is the ultimate, ultimate way you can buy shares in a company with an option to get your money back. Right?

SPEAKER_316: Mm-hmm .

David Friedberg: Now, when the BMW person says, no, no, it's in production. Now you have no recourse. Right. The CEO said it's not a test. The person from BMW said, we're not testing it. It's in production. Then you have no case. Right.

SPEAKER_249: This is, and you have to understand there are bad actors out there as well. As a founder,

SPEAKER_01: there are bad actors who will take every single thing you say on Twitter. And there are lawyers who will be more than happy to have a big targeted company with a big valuation and a billion or $10

David Friedberg: billion in cash, and they will go dunk on them. And if you're taking money from civilians through these SPVs, which is Ruloff's point to tie both points together, Alex, Ruloff is explaining those

SPEAKER_87: people are not making economic decisions the way VCs do, which is to get returns for LPs like Harvard or Ford Foundation or CalPERS and retirement funds. They're not, and sovereign wealth funds. They're

David Friedberg: not making economically sound decisions at all times. They're making decisions based on emotions, based on how, as you said, how high profile is the company. So if a founder is out there increasing the profile of the company, which is the job, and you take money from Sequoia or Andreessen Horowitz, they're not going to sue you. They're professionals. They know, they've done the math, they've penciled it out. They've made hopefully a thoughtful decision. Civilians are like, YOLO, 100K. Then you get 100 YOLOs, and you raise 10 million, and then there's five other SPVs in that same thing. Man, this really does complicating. We run

SPEAKER_01: SPVs at thesyndicate.com all the time at a very small scale. The average one is $700,000. We're putting money into seed stage companies, not late stage companies, which is where the average tech size

David Friedberg: is an orange is 7K. And you are YOLOing. And we say that. Only invest money you can afford to lose. These are typically companies that are either pre-revenue or have a small amount of revenue,

SPEAKER_17: hundreds of thousands of years, low millions. I'm actually in the SPV business as well as the fund business, but primarily the fund business. So yeah, interesting. This is a very interesting situation. Be careful out there, folks. Yeah.

SPEAKER_226: Be careful out there. And also I think SPACs and SPVs are things that people should use if they're

SPEAKER_327: incredibly sophisticated in very rare circumstances when they make sense. Not if you're a dentist.

SPEAKER_00: You know, there'll be out of these SPACs, there will be a FedEx, an Amazon. There'll be some great

SPEAKER_01: company that comes out of this, uh, these SPACs. You just have to assume an 80% failure rate. Now, when I say 80% failure rate, I mean a zero. Yeah. Lose all your money. Right. Space tourism. When I saw that one come up, I was like, that's a Hail Mary. If you're betting on that, you should expect it to be

David Friedberg: one in two 50. Yeah. Now, if you're betting on Joby, I would take it from one in two 50 down to one in

SPEAKER_04: 50. And that's just what I do for a living is to make these assessments. It's taken me a lot of pain

SPEAKER_08: and suffering to, to, to get that skill. Right. Yeah. Man, there are so many, a lot of lessons

SPEAKER_11: learned along the way. There are so many companies, Lon, that I thought were going to do so much better

SPEAKER_13: that went to zero. And there are so many that beat my estimations unbelievably that I would have put

SPEAKER_00: behind those other companies, man. There's so much randomness in this and the randomness is really the

SPEAKER_29: founding team. I found, uh, some, some fun videos on social media that directly relate to found up

SPEAKER_24: starters. We call these startup insights. Uh, I found a really good one this morning from David Heinemeier Hansen, friend of the show. Oh, DHH. Our old, our old friend, DHH. Yeah. This is from his,

SPEAKER_32: uh, a recent episode of his rework podcast. He talks about the inherent contradictions in being

SPEAKER_335: a founder. The inherent contradictions in being a founder. Go. Let's go in assuming it's going to

SPEAKER_337: work. If we go in assuming it might not work, you know what? You're not going to put your all in to it. And if there's anything you need these days, it sure as hell is you're all in. Everyone else is putting in, they're all in their best thoughts, their best competence, all this stuff into it. You can't show up half-assed and then expect that there's going to be a prize for you. That just doesn't work. And you actually need that conviction because you're going to have sort of a dip in motivation of like, oh, I think it's not going to work. Oh, this is a great idea. Oh, this is a stupid idea. Like it's going to fluctuate, right? So you need to go in with that conviction, like whether it fluctuates, whether it goes up and go down, I believe this is going to work. And then also, again, knowing it probably won't. It probably won't. And when it doesn't, or it does, you're going to be happy either way. Because you did it in a way where you did it with integrity, regardless of what that means to you. You're not doing it in a slimy way. You're not doing it in a quick, scammy, make a buck kind of way. You're doing it in a way where you go like, you know what? I could put my name on this. If there was a little box, a little plaque, I'd proudly write, made by David on it so people knew who made it. I'm going to be hiding behind something. I'm going to make something I'm proud of because that's just going to make me feel good about it. I also think it works in the market when you're authentically excited, enthusiastic and integral about what you're building. And then I'm going to build it in a way that if it does not work, I'm going to be better now than I was when I started.

SPEAKER_32: So I thought this was a really interesting sort of insight. And it reminded me a little bit of that Rick Rubin book, the creative act that we like to talk about, where it's making something that you feel proud of regardless. That's how he recommends getting out of this sort of contradiction is as long as you are happy with the work that you did, and it's something you're proud of, and you're happy to put your name on it. It doesn't matter at the end so much whether it works or not. And I like that approach.

SPEAKER_133: Yeah. You know, David's been through the ringer and he makes a couple of really solid points here

SPEAKER_01: that you have to keep in mind. If you're not fired up with enthusiasm, you're going to be fired with enthusiasm, right? It typically refers to employees, but in general, you know, you shouldn't do a project unless you really have that all in. And you notice he mentioned all in many times, like the reason I named the podcast all in, you know, is for a reason. You do need to be dedicated

David Friedberg: and you need to be all in when you're going for a startup. Why? Because he points out it's a roller coaster. And you do need to recognize I'm going all in with the understanding that there's an 80 or 90% chance of failure. But no matter what happens, I put my name on the back of it. And Naval was on

SPEAKER_87: all in a couple of weeks ago. He sat in the sack seat and he talked about the social network he created for himself. I forgot the name of it. I had it on my phone. They sold it, spent a lot of time

SPEAKER_154: on it. And basically it was going to be an audio version of Twitter where you have conversations on there and it would be more thoughtful air chat, air chat. Thank you, Alex. And air chat was pretty

David Friedberg: cool. And he said, you know, he tried, he wanted to do something important in the world. He wanted to

SPEAKER_18: feel like he was doing something of substance. You know, he sees Elon, he said, and he feels like pathetic sometimes that he's not making something and he's got to go do something that he really feels.

David Friedberg: And he put his name on air chat. He was on it constantly. I had conversations with him on it. And you know what? Social networks are like the lightning in a bottle of all lightning in a

SPEAKER_18: bottles. Like you literally put a thousand bottles out, lightning hits one of them and the other 999 shatter. And his was one of the 999 that chatter, but he said he felt really good about it. And I think

SPEAKER_154: that's one of the things to keep in mind. It's a great quote from David Hammer, Hanson friend.

SPEAKER_72: I just want to say, I really want him to follow me around and kind of keep me in line. I feel like

SPEAKER_226: if I ever slacked off, he'd be like, you're not Elon! All right. Sorry, DHH.

SPEAKER_63: In honor of Jeff Bezos and Blue Origin's big day, we got one more clip here. This is from last year's

SPEAKER_24: New York Times deal book summit. And here is Jeff on overestimating risk versus underestimating opportunity.

SPEAKER_352: I think it's generally human nature to overestimate risk and underestimate opportunity. And so I think entrepreneurs in general would be well advised to try and bias against that piece of human nature. The risks are probably not as big as you perceive, and the opportunities may be bigger than you perceive. The second thing I would point out is that thinking small is a

SPEAKER_252: self-fulfilling prophecy. Yeah, this is something I actually had a conversation with Elon about on his

SPEAKER_01: plane 15 years ago. We were, he was working on Tesla and was trying to get a CEO. And he was just saying people always overestimate the downside risk was the way he phrased it. Got always stuck with me.

David Friedberg: It is true. If you fail spectacularly, nobody remembers. You remember, you think it's a big deal. You will think about it constantly. It's the equivalent of somebody going to a party and literally trips and

SPEAKER_154: falls. And, uh, then they ruminate about that rumination, right? And, uh, rumination is a real blocker for success in life. Obsessing and ruminating over ruminating just means thinking over and over again about something. And when you ruminate over your perceived failings of yourself, uh, you will

SPEAKER_01: then start to feel worse about yourself and you'll over index on it. And what I have learned is that it's much better to celebrate all of the victories, even the little ones. So we've been sitting here as

David Friedberg: we build out the studio and I've been celebrating the little victories. Oh, we've got the lighting better. Oh, we got the flags up. Oh, we now have this OLED. Oh, we got a better shot over here. Oh, Alex is wearing a college shirt, not a t-shirt under this place. You know, it's just all the little tiny

SPEAKER_24: thing. Your perception is that everybody's staring at you constantly and obsessing over you, but actually no one is ever thinking about you. They're thinking about themselves. Scott Lyce syndrome. Yeah, exactly. And so that, that is a helpful thing to remember because I do sort of, you know, I feel like insecure social anxiety and you just got to get over that because

SPEAKER_72: nobody's actually looking at you. Let's, let's turn this around. So Jason, what you just described is

SPEAKER_130: something that I actually personally struggle with. Like I'm a big ruminator by, oh yeah. I'm an insecure introvert. I just pretend. Um, I'm curious about you though. Like, do you, how do you avoid rumination?

David Friedberg: Like personally? Oh yeah. So it was very simple. I am super self-aware and I've always said like,

SPEAKER_18: I'm a kid from Brooklyn who somehow figured out at a very early age how to start his own magazine and

David Friedberg: be an entrepreneur because I was unmanageable and nobody taught me anything about entrepreneurship except watching my dad run a bar, which was chaotic. And I built a mythology for myself. And my mythology was, man, the kid from Brooklyn did okay. I was going to be a cop. The expectations were incredibly low and my Lord, you know, out of the gate, I started to exceed them. And now I still

SPEAKER_18: champion that mythology for myself, which is, can you imagine a kid from Brooklyn became a millionaire, has everything you always wanted, has a beautiful family, has great friends and can do whatever he

David Friedberg: wants in life has two of the top podcasts in the world. And, uh, you know, it gets to ski in Japan.

SPEAKER_01: And I take the time to just appreciate how much further I am from the expectation people had for me. And I went into my, my college counselor, my high school counselor at Severian high school in Brooklyn. This is why I don't donate money to Severian high school, specifically because of this instance and others. And they asked me every year and in the like famous alumni glass thing they have, they have Chris Mullin. And then somebody told me they had me and a story about me where they, you know, just talk about famous people at my high school. You're a notable alumni. I'm a no, I'm like the number two notable alumni. If you look at the people who went there, Chris Mullin, Olympian, incredible NBA player,

SPEAKER_17: Jay Cal. Okay. Very flattering. I'm still not buying you. They pitched me on building the computer science wing with Jason Calacanis. They asked me for 10 million bucks or something. Oh, wow. I've given them zero dollars for, you know.

SPEAKER_367: Oh, you could have like the Calacanis Memorial Library.

SPEAKER_126: Basically. Yes. And I'm just like, yeah, no, I'm like, 10 million dollars. Whatever. They wanted me. For a high school, that feels like a lot.

SPEAKER_87: It literally takes me on doing all this. And, you know, listen, when I went to the,

SPEAKER_01: uh, the person who was the college counselor, I said, they said, well, what are you thinking? And you were required to go twice. That was the requirement. Yeah. No, my school had a similar. So I went to there, this is when I'm a sophomore or junior. And I said, you know, well, I, I read about, I read about Brown. Good school.

David Friedberg: And in Brown, you can make your own degree. And I'm really interested in computers. And I'm really interested in psychology. I was wondering if there's anything where you can have, like the psychology associated with technology.

SPEAKER_220: What a forward thinking major that would have been.

SPEAKER_01: This is the age of 15 years old, 16 years old. Do you want to know what the guy did? He laughed in my face. Really?

SPEAKER_26: Yeah. He laughed at me. What? And he went, Why was Brown super outside of your, like, what was your GPA? Two point something. Yeah. It was terrible.

SPEAKER_377: Yeah. That's a little low.

SPEAKER_26: Three, whatever. Anyway, he laughed at my face.

David Friedberg: He says, there is no way you would ever get in there. Have you taken the police officer's test?

SPEAKER_379: Oh, that's not great.

David Friedberg: Or the firefighter test.

SPEAKER_56: You should encourage somebody. Chips on shoulders. Put chips in pockets. This mother did not even for a second.

SPEAKER_381: He could have just said for, but 60 seconds.

SPEAKER_249: It's really interesting. What did you hear about Brown? How did you hear about it? Have you looked into the requirements to get to Brown? Is there a second place you could go? Right. That maybe you could do a year or two and then get into Brown?

SPEAKER_22: That's the approach. Yes. What other schools have interesting programs aligned with what you want to study that you could get into and then transfer to Brown?

SPEAKER_385: So he gives me this, you know, this nag. And I just thought to myself, and this is when it became J Cal versus the world. You know, or it was, Did you a favor?

SPEAKER_87: Well, yeah, in a certain way. And I had started to take martial arts and run marathons. And I started to get my chutzpah up. And I was like, you know what, if everybody thinks I'm not going to make it, I'm going to just prove it to them. I got a little, started to get a little chip on my shoulder. And so I went on my own and I figured out, oh, I could go to Fordham university. I knew some friends who were at Fordham in Jesuit school.

SPEAKER_01: And so I started going up and I, my friend was at Fordham and he was teaching the Taekwondo program there, the Taekwondo club. And I was in the Taekwondo club at Severian high school. So I started going up there every couple of weeks and I met with this guy. The counselor there was Edward MJ Boland. I got to find out where he is now. Somebody can find him if they can. I want to send him a gift basket or something, or just say hi to him.

David Friedberg: And I started going to his office because I had applied for admission to Fordham. And Edward Boland was the guy there.

SPEAKER_01: And they sent me a letter and said, you didn't get in, but I had set up a tour with him. And I said to him, Hey, um, I, I had set up a tour, but you rejected him. He goes, oh, well, the tours have nothing to do with the acceptance. You didn't get accepted because we, you know, we have people with higher SATs and higher GPAs. I said, oh, so I can't take the tour even. He goes, no, come up and take the tour. So he met me. He took the tour. I took the tour. I said to him, you know, any chance I can get in, you know? And he said, well, you know, traditionally, we don't take a student like you. And I said, well, what about non-traditional? And he looked at me and he's like, that's a good question. I don't know. And, uh, he said, well, where, where have you been accepted? I said, Brooklyn college. He said, I'll tell you what courses take at Brooklyn. If you get straight A's and you do really well, then we'll consider your first sophomore. Sure. I said, I hammered this guy. I brought him three letters of recommendation three months in a row. And I dropped them off in his office. I literally went to his office unannounced. Hey, Mr. Bolin, it's Jason Calacanis. And he looked at me and he didn't recognize me. I said, I came last month. Remember I had that you guys rejected me and told me. Yeah. Yeah. I said, I did really well. Here's my report card for my senior year. And here's a letter of recommendation from a place where I had a job.

David Friedberg: I said, oh, that's great. What are you doing here? He's like, I'm like, I take one dough thing. He's like, oh, you with your friend from the, the psychologist. Well, I said, yeah. He said, oh, that's great. Nice seeing you next month. Mr. Bolin. He's like, you're back. I'm like, yes. He's like another recommendation letter. I said, yeah, I gave it to him.

SPEAKER_01: Hey, um, how's it gone? And I give him a third letter. He said, I never told the story on the air. He said, uh, Jason, I wanted to let you know, I'm leaving Fordham university. Oh no. I said.

SPEAKER_209: He put in all that leg work. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: Put in all that leg work. I lost my, my rabbi. He's gone. I said, oh, I'm sorry. What happened? He said, oh, I, I got a job at Yale. He said, you got a job at Yale? I said, that's a better school than Fordham.

SPEAKER_87: I said, congratulations. He said, yeah. And I had, um, I had one request for Fordham when I was leaving. I said, oh, what's that? He said, I wanted the most promising non-traditional student to get in. Oh, I said, who did you pick? I swear to God, that's what I said. He said, you dummy. I said, what? You? He said, yeah, you're, you're, you're in Fordham. I said, I'm in Fordham. Yeah. I said, I already signed up for Brooklyn College. He goes, well, you, you can get in if you want. Yeah. I said, okay. What do I do? He goes, go to the Bursa. Do you want to go to Rose Hill? There's no housing available. Or do you want to go to Lincoln Center? I said, well, I can't afford the housing anyway. Where's Lincoln Center? He said, where's Lincoln Center? You're in New York, right?

SPEAKER_396: Yeah. Lincoln Center.

SPEAKER_87: He says, it's the Lincoln Center, 60th Street. I'm like, oh, Columbus Circle. He said, yeah, it's a block off Columbus Circle. It's like, oh, the B train goes there. I have to, he's like, okay. I was like, okay, I'll go to Lincoln Center. I said, what do I do? He goes, go to the Bursa. They got your name there. I said, okay. He said, goodbye.

SPEAKER_01: I said, mom, I got into Lincoln Center, whatever. She goes, I can't pay for that. I said, I don't know. Figure it out. Yeah. I went, I went to Fordham.

David Friedberg: And that's when I learned that there is a whole system, Alex, out there. And you can either be a victim to the system, or you can believe in the system or like Neo in the matrix, you can bend reality. And I decided I would see how far I could bend reality. It was literally that moment in time. Those two events led me to believe that I could bend reality to what I want it to be. And it was, it made me so dangerous because then I was like, well, I could just start my own magazine. You just start my own company. I could have Sequoia as an investor. I could do whatever I want.

SPEAKER_01: And it just started to snowball. And so once I started to have that mindset that there was a reality available, then like this whole rumination or feeling bad about myself when I did something stupid or I mispronounced somebody's name, I was like, well, who cares?

David Friedberg: And I just started to view myself as a samurai or a Jedi Knight operating in the world as a Ronin. That's where I have my lack of rumination from is that they laughed in my face and told me I couldn't do it. And then I bent the spoons. And then I just literally in my mind, just thought I was a Jedi Knight. It is normal for people to think like, okay, what did I do wrong? Why, why did he laugh in my face? All this stuff. And I realized the reason he laughed in my face is because he's part of the system. And the system is often wrong. It's just a system. Like, yeah, the system's wrong and it's, it's just a system. It's an abstraction. The whole thing, all of society is just some crazy abstraction. If you want to go to Japan and ski, you can get on a plane with a one-way ticket, go to Japan and start skiing. And I met this guy, John, who owns the Iwani Resort. He did that. And then he bought the resort.

SPEAKER_01: You can just go do things. Yeah. He bought Iwani. It took three or four years, four or five years to convince the village to let him buy this shutdown ski resort. Now he runs my favorite place in the world, Iwani. All right, everybody.

SPEAKER_84: This has been another exciting episode of this weekend. Guys, stop ruminating. You can just do f***ing things. Let's just do things. Okay. That's the deal. That's it. We'll see you all next time. Bye-bye. Bye. Bye.