SPEAKER_00: the robots have you know the same kind of sensors you have on self-driving cars like lidar and and cameras and more so they're actually quite smart by themselves the video you just showed by the way i should say that is that was my brand new car being used as a test subject so i have a lot of

SPEAKER_01: confidence in this this week in startups is brought to you by beehive power your newsletters with ai tools referral programs and ad network features all in one platform get 30 days free and 20 off your first three months at beehive.com twist vanta compliance and security shouldn't be a deal breaker for startups to win new business vanta makes it easy for companies to get a sock to report fast twist listeners can get a thousand dollars off for a limited time at vanta.com twist and cloud devs building the best remote team is tough but you don't have to do it alone visit cloud devs.com twist for an unbeatable offer on hiring elite latam talent today all right everybody

SPEAKER_04: welcome back to this week in startups i'm jason calacanis and with me my co-host alex wilhelm how are you alex did you have a good restful weekend how are we doing in babyland tell me i hosted my

SPEAKER_08: lovely parents for the weekend jason so while i did many family oriented things uh rest was not one of them but good news my uh my soccer team won yesterday so i'm wearing my new york new jersey gotham

SPEAKER_07: shirt because go team is is it uh male or female soccer this is female soccer so it's the national

SPEAKER_08: women's soccer league my spouse and i are big fans and uh i had i don't get to watch a lot of sports now because of the kids so it was fun to watch it but same question to you how was your weekend

SPEAKER_11: my weekend uh wow let me think that through um i had a nice dinner friday night with my friend

SPEAKER_13: kimbo musk at his amazing new restaurant in austin i'll give him a plug here it's called the kitchen and i i think they open in two weeks but i got to dine with him twice this week uh because we were working on the menu uh i cook with kimball sometimes when we hang out and we always cook this tomahawk steak together when we hang and so we put the tomahawk on the menu so i highly recommend the tomahawk if you go to the kitchen austin or the pork chop or the duck if you're into meat those three

SPEAKER_14: dishes are just outstanding if you're a vegan go for the cauliflower they have like a cauliflower that they i found myself addicted to they make it like a smash burger in that it's crispy in all the little nooks and crannies if i and i don't know how they do it if they use like a air fryer or something but it's so crispy amazing so yeah the kitchen this food scene here in austin has been unbelievable uh everything from like fast you know tacos you were asking about tacos like there's a quick serve restaurant here called torchies tacos it's a little polarizing but i like it it's like you know as far as like an in-and-out burger kind of experience it's kind of like that of of tacos really great for tacos but then there's like a bunch of taco trucks and everything so i am uh and i did a bunch of i've been doing rucksacking you know about this rocking have you heard of rocking well my my brother's in the army

SPEAKER_06: so yes i have and i'm also a huge fan of this i have a weighted vest i take it out on pretty much every stroller walk jason so i the question is how heavy is your vest or or past i i started by using

SPEAKER_14: my wife's uh pack and i think it was like 10 or 15 pounds or like sandbags or whatever and that was like you know i felt it a little bit but then i went up to this 35 pound wolf tactical like manly military grade rocking vest and it has weights that come in and out of it and i have to say

SPEAKER_13: you know i'm focused on three things right now personally sleep exercise and diet so i got eight sleep dialed in um i uh you know lost the weight and did the mondrano but i'm just trying to

SPEAKER_11: eat generally you know more clean food if that makes sense less processed food more clean food and then uh yeah working out and it turns out rocking is just so great so a lot of times when you are text you and i are texting in the morning going over the docket and man what a docket we have

SPEAKER_14: today i and i'm really excited to talk about it especially uh immigration which i threw in the dock at the last minute but we got a lot of stuff related to this new trump administration uh but the rucking is a great thing i think for old guys over 50 crowd over 40 crowd for dads because when you put on a 25 35 pound vest i realized i lost 43 pounds so the amount of weight i lost is even greater than the rocking vest and now when i use the the vest i am exhausted and i realized now i know when i was overweight and you can go back and look at old episodes and see me go from this style face

SPEAKER_22: to ernie and then back to bert from 14 years ago to now it's just me going yo yo yo yeah yeah but now

SPEAKER_24: i'm on the other side because i really like this rocking i think it's really great i just walk around my ranch i do the perimeter walk which is like a ranch walk i don't have a ranch water after that's a different thing but um yeah it's uh i think it's gonna get me in great shape knock on wood for ski season to be you know just having your your body under this load of weight but then being able to take

SPEAKER_27: it off so anyway i highly recommend looking into that uh shout out to i don't know if peter atia and kevin rose and all that crowd are into it but i i'm not sure where i learned about it i think from my

SPEAKER_24: wife but i think she may have gotten it from peter atia so anyway uh really feel great i'm really feeling like great energy i feel like i'm adding muscle keeping well getting good sleep scores shout

SPEAKER_33: out to eight sleep everything's going in the right direction well i i love to hear that i'm a big fan

SPEAKER_06: of a weighted vest and also farmers carriers and just kind of weights in general but i do have to say you did go from i'm cooking with kimball musk i love my tomahawk steak also try the pork chop too 10 seconds later i'm working on my diet so help me i love i think protein's great for the diet okay

SPEAKER_13: i think the only issue i had and everybody's different was i was get i would get the snack attack i constantly had hunger yeah voices in my head you know cheeseburger fries chicken parm

SPEAKER_11: hamburgers you know ice cream whatever cookies just what they call food noise when you go on a glp

SPEAKER_13: uh the food noise goes away and so i now when i'm off the glps i i don't have as much food noise so

SPEAKER_27: something's changed where i don't know if it's just getting all that fat off my body but yeah i think

SPEAKER_06: it's well either way i'm stoked for you and uh i'm gonna eventually end up in austin the next six months to see my brother so i will uh i will demand that we do a ruck walk together when we do so

SPEAKER_24: well rock war we'll do the ruck walk and then we'll uh we'll do uh salt lick and terry black's

SPEAKER_41: barbecue two great ones i can't wait to have you out here done all right let's get to the docket there's a lot to do here i know we also have a great guest so yes get to work so quickly for

SPEAKER_08: everyone listening we're going to talk to the ceo and co-founder of serve robotics all about food delivery and automation then we have a couple notes on the trump trade latest there what's going on in the world of fintech also notes on immigration policy and how they will impact startup founders and with as much time as we have left notes on ai's rapid advances viz open ai and what that might mean for startup and software development but jason let's welcome first our guest to the show i have ali kashani here dialing in from palo alto he is the ceo and co-founder at serve robotics which people might recall was originally the robotics division at postmates which was then purchased by uber and then the company was later spun out and is now a public company ali hey how are you thanks for

SPEAKER_13: having me guys excited to be here so maybe we can start by just telling us you know what you are

SPEAKER_04: working on and how close you are to it sort of hitting the mainstream which is where all these conversations wind up going and i'm assuming we have some great collateral of your robots at work

SPEAKER_00: absolutely so we are making this shopping size card uh robots and their job is to bring you your whatever you need your food uh packages it's the last mile delivery robot if you go to los angeles you actually see them all over the place we've been growing about 20 percent months over months for like almost three years uh in our delivery volume and we are the largest uh partner on the uber eats side and in in autonomy so the robots are you know level four autonomous they're moving around in hollywood and many other neighborhoods in in l.a as we speak define level four for the audience yeah so level four means that the robot is not going to make all decisions by itself but when it's in its uh operating area it's you know um when it's basically within an environment is familiar with it can do things by itself but whenever it doesn't know what to do it can call home and someone would remotely step in level five is the highest level that's basically sci-fi and level two is your tesla you hold the steering you're in the loop all the time level four is where you actually hand over responsibility

SPEAKER_03: completely to the machine for extended periods of time and these machines are monitored and for people

SPEAKER_13: who are just listening right now it looks like r2d2 it looks like r2d2 if it had four chunky

SPEAKER_24: uh tires like you might have on a stroller i don't know if you you have kids ali but um do you have kids i have two teenage daughters oh okay i'm i have three uh daughters one teenager and two minded but

SPEAKER_13: uh yeah godspeed teenage daughters good luck um and these have the chunky tires that alex you probably have with your two young children when you want to go rolling on your stroller so for people who don't understand what it looks like chunky stroller tile tires with shreds and it looks like a little r2d2 unit it opens up you could fit i think maybe two bags of groceries and i understand the larger one

SPEAKER_00: can fit a pizza in it is that true yeah they can fit like four uh large pizzas uh two big shopping bags

SPEAKER_54: they're pretty spacious so i'm really curious about those acquisitions we switched to beehive and it has

SPEAKER_56: been huge for this week in startups we have this twist 500 newsletter i've been working on this entire platform where we're trying to find the 500 most important private companies so twist500.com and we've been using beehive for this email newsletter beehive b-e-e-h-i-i-v it's a service that's built for growth and when you're doing an email list or a podcast you want growth and they've baked it into it beehive was co-founded by one of the minds behind morning brew you know that incredible newsletter well you can get access to the tools that helped build morning brew to millions of readers and if you're interested in making a little money with your newsletter beehive can do that too because beehive has an ad network so it's a no-brainer for folks who want to drive revenue and want to grow there's a million platforms there's a million tools out there but a tool that solves those two problems growth and revenue that's the winning tool in my mind that's why we moved over to it they have an ai post builder they got a referral program the list goes on and on it's super affordable at 39 per

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SPEAKER_08: we really love the product so the company i know just announced the purchase of another firm called veeboo and when i think of serve robotics ali i think entirely of the robots we just discussed the little cute robots that are out on the sidewalks delivering food but you guys just purchased veeboo which is making something called the autocado and we have some uh some b-roll of that here but it's a robot that takes all the avocados in a chipotle and then does a lot of the manual work so you can then turn them into guac how does that fit into what you're working on and how much did you pay for

SPEAKER_00: the company uh yeah great question so we've been more big picture we've been trying to bring robots to real life applications uh in the case of our delivery robots they're literally operating on sidewalks and public spaces as we speak uh but what one thing you learn when you're working with restaurants is that you need to meet them where they are and they're not just sitting there thinking about oh what am i going to do for my delivery and then what am i going to do for my kitchen they're sitting there thinking i need to bring automation and efficiency to my entire kind of set of problems that i have so we had this opportunity to acquire veeboo i've known the founder of veeboo for some time he was one of our first investors joined our board so we've had a very close relationship and had an opportunity to bring them on board so that we can offer this holistic solution to restaurants so that we can be the partner that they work with when they're trying to solve these problems because they do have limited time and bandwidth to do this work so avocado is great because it actually helps restaurants like chipotle they're doing a pilot together process avocados about you know twice as fast yeah but there are other things in the vivos umbrella that we are we are

SPEAKER_68: also going to be working on so how fast can you scale these robots because i know that the daily

SPEAKER_08: active robots for serve for the on the ground sidewalk robots are growing i think it was 21 in the last quarter compared to the preceding quarter will the autocados have a similar growth

SPEAKER_00: trajectory to them i i definitely think that would be the case um now they're in a pilot phase right now with chipotle but if they pass through the pilot process which is a very well-defined stage stage gate process chipotle has thousands of stores in the country so it's just a matter of manufacturing and scaling it up our delivery robots we have a contract with uber to deploy 2000 of them which we are doing next year so we could be the largest autonomous fleet in the country next year

SPEAKER_13: because of that contract alone and these operate on sidewalks at a limited speed i think slower than humans are about the same speed as humans five miles per hour am i correct yeah it's like a fast walk if

SPEAKER_00: you want to kind of stay with it you have to put a little bit of effort got it so five miles an hour

SPEAKER_13: ish six miles an hour and there are remote operators lest people think that this thing is going to smash into i don't know even if it's smashed into a toddler who was happened to like walk in front of it it has the ability to stop and it wouldn't do much damage if it did i mean my bulldog would certainly do more i can guarantee you that so but talk a little bit about the human in the loop currently how many

SPEAKER_53: interventions do you see and then what are the nature of the interventions is it people still kicking the robot and messing with it right or is it they've just got to avoid you know a garbage can

SPEAKER_00: that's falling over on the street yeah you touched on a couple of really important things so first these robots have about 3 000 times less kinetic energy than a car i mean a really uh simple way of thinking about it is every time you get in your car to go buy a carton of milk you are really accepting the risk that car could come in contact with other people and and that obviously could be a really bad outcome versus these robots when we replace that car we are already making roads safer because we have so much uh you know less kinetic energy uh compared force equals mass time acceleration

SPEAKER_53: this is a formula that of physics that nobody can get away with these things don't weigh a lot and they don't go very fast exactly eliminate death death is not a possibility here that's exactly these robots a bruise you could potentially get a bruise perhaps that's right exactly right so that to me is

SPEAKER_00: the biggest safety safety kind of benefits but we still don't want to bruise people so the robots have you know the same kind of sensors you have on self-driving cars like lidar and cameras and more so they're actually quite smart by themselves the video you just showed by the way i should say that is that was my brand new car being used as a test subject so i have a lot of confidence in this and human's job is less about safety because they're not there in real time to see everything that the robot does their job is to solve that long tail of problems so when a robot doesn't know what to do that's when they ask for a remote operator to step in and help okay and they use the remote control right yeah they they basically have a joystick they can command the robot to do stuff

SPEAKER_08: yeah okay so but ali so i'm very impressed with the safety features that we've discussed and i know you guys are scaling at manufacturing so my question is why aren't we seeing more serve robots out there than we are today you guys are talking about getting to 250 in la in the first quarter of next year

SPEAKER_00: why isn't it 2500 or 25 000 you know to get the entire operation and make it you know commercially viable make the cost work the unit economics out it takes some time it's most this kind of tech cycles and i actually saw your episode with skydio it's that kind of 10 years it takes from the idea that's super exciting to when you actually have all the pieces working and we're in like year seven year eight right now so it's basically that ramp up moment that's happening finally and and now it's been a lot of question about can we get access to capital to go ahead and and ramp up we this year we raised about 80 million most of it after we've been public so that has now given us the ammunition to start the

SPEAKER_84: scaling up okay so now that you have the capital technology works out the next two years are going

SPEAKER_08: to be a rapid growth in number of robots how much work is it to add a municipality like i know you guys are looking at texas as an expansion route is there local regulations all uh what uber had to go through earlier on to deal with or is it a bit more green field for you guys to expand into actually it is uh

SPEAKER_00: there are no laws by default that make these robots illegal and it has to do with the fact that you know they don't carry the kind of kinetic energy they don't move at the kind of speed that cars do however we are we've learned from scooters and other folks where we actually try to engage ahead of time so we reach out to the municipalities like when we came to la and said hey guys we're going to be coming here we don't think there's anything against uh you know what we are we are doing but we do want to be uh collaborating with you and in every time we've actually tried uh to outreach uh try to reach out to to to cities they have actually told us that we can go ahead and operate we have we have a hundred percent batting record basically so in the case of la they gave us initially a letter that said yep totally fine you can come operate here over time we worked with them and put a permit program in place so there's no legal limits it's actually much easier to do

SPEAKER_41: compared to the other other options you flipped the standard operating procedure which is beg for forgiveness as opposed to ask for permission yeah and i think this is like very notable in the startup

SPEAKER_13: space when you are coming into a space you have to kind of read the room alex and the room in this case

SPEAKER_53: is airbnb lyft uber and waymo have all and tesla and everybody's already come into these municipalities and started talking to them crews about autonomy about ride sharing and they kind of it's a different

SPEAKER_13: moment in time in 20 in the 2020s now than it was in the what do we call them the teens yeah i guess

SPEAKER_10: the teens the teens teens and now we're in the 20s i don't know in the roaring 20s but it was the aughts

SPEAKER_13: then the teens now the 20s so in the roaring 20s people kind of expect this stuff how many

SPEAKER_94: interventions per hour do you have to do in los angeles in this current test that's a good question

SPEAKER_00: we don't measure it that way we actually look at the output in terms of how fast are we getting deliveries done are we on time and then is it safe and then we let the operators decide what they want to do rather than try to track metrics where we would then try to enforce them to not intervene that's not a good outcome so instead we actually look at the output but there are certain things like crossing intersections i always want people involved i want them to be watching the robot it's really the only unsafe kind of moment for robots not because the robots aren't safe it's because the cars are unsafe so we want people to be involved in that moment founders do you want to sell to bigger

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SPEAKER_56: your sock two compliance on average vanta customers are compliant in just two to four weeks can take months without vanta and they automate compliance for gdpr hipaa and more so you can sell to bigger customers in whatever markup your startup is going after vanta is going to save you hundreds of hours of work and up to 85 percent on compliance costs stop slowing your sales team down and use vanta get a thousand dollars off at vanta.com twist that's vanta.com twist for one thousand dollars off

SPEAKER_11: your sock two so when you talk about um you know sort of growing the company is the plan for you to own

SPEAKER_14: and operate fleets or to provide fleets to i don't know cloud kitchens to provide them to grab or you know pick the other provider because it does seem like you're an arms dealer here and i guess the question is as an arms dealer do you want to create a nation state and go up against doordash and uber eats

SPEAKER_74: or do you want to provide them to those players and let them brand them themselves how do you how

SPEAKER_00: do you see this shaking out i really don't want to make things other people have made and you know trying to build the the channels that uh doordash and ubers and other folks have built doesn't make any sense to me that's not really where we add value uh what i do want to create are robots that can exist in human environments and food delivery to us is just the first step uh so right now we plug into existing business models uber our first partner they pay per delivery to their uh drivers so we charge them per delivery and this fleet that we have for uber is actually shared so 7-eleven can tap in and use it they're also one of our partners there are other folks like we've talked about like shake shack so they can all use the same feet now there's some folks who may want an exclusive fleet let's say you're working with walmart we had a pilot with them a couple years ago in that case the robot is in their facility and it would be dedicated to them so now they are paying per hour for those robots and then the ultimate uh kind of vision for us is that we would then open the platform for other people to build their own robots on top magna if do you know magna i don't but that's a brilliant concept here tell us yeah magna is a tier one automaker the largest in north america and they have actually licensed our tech stack to build their own robots this is very exciting they're also assembling our robots so we have a separate partnership where they make our robots for us but they are going to use our technology now to build robots for their own application and to me that's the ultimate vision for us food and food delivery to us is the first killer app we are building the killer app end to end make it work proving it that this works so that other people can come in and use our stack to build other kind of applications that's fascinating i want to go back

SPEAKER_08: there i'll lead to the the uber point about how you get paid a per delivery fee compared to the drivers that get paid a fee how much cheaper is it for uber to send a delivery through your robots

SPEAKER_00: versus a human it's uh we don't disclose the price obviously but what i would tell you is it is cheaper today and we are basically splitting the saving with them so they they uh you know get uh cost benefits from using robots and of course um you know that uh also gives us sufficient uh you know revenue um and then i think over time as we put more robots out more folks are going to use the robots so in a way uber is helping us bootstrap the platform so that there are lots of robots out there and then other folks can step in and also uh use the same robots and uber is still a a large shareholder in the company if i recall correctly they are yeah uber and nvidia are two are two largest shareholders um

SPEAKER_72: uh they have i think somewhere in the 20 25 ownership together all right i want to talk about

SPEAKER_68: one other thing you guys have announced recently which was a partnership with a drone company to

SPEAKER_08: use your robots to bring deliveries to a drone and i think we have a video of this i i asked this in politeness not to be rude but is this um eye candy and a gimmick or is this something that people are actually going to be using in the nearest future uh to actually get stuff brought to their homes well look

SPEAKER_00: we are starting with a pilot so of course we got to prove this but this has actually been a pet project of mine i've been trying to make this happen reached out to the folks at wing um which is alphabet subsidiary and uh worked with adam and his team and we've put this pilot together which should start actually operating in dallas in the coming weeks um but there's actually a bigger picture here which is when again when you go to a restaurant and say i want to automate your last mile deliveries they're not thinking about okay i work with you for the half of the uh you know deliveries that are short distance by the way half of all deliveries in the us are less than two two and a half miles so those are the robot deliveries uh but they're thinking about all of their deliveries with drone uh the benefit here is that we can do the short distance with the robots but with the other long distance deliveries the robot picks up the item hands it to the drone to complete the delivery now i should explain why the robot is even needed it's very difficult for drones to get to the restaurant because restaurants are always in uh you know urban environments busy environments there's no dedicated real estate for for a drone or even a you know self-driving car to show up there and get right in front of their door we solve that problem we grab the item because we can go to all the front doors effectively with the robot without any changes to the infrastructure and then we can take the food to a nearby loading area like the video you just showed so essentially jason could get barbecue delivered to

SPEAKER_06: his house outside of austin from an austin-based restaurant through this partnership in time exactly

SPEAKER_24: exactly so tell us about um bicycles and uh motorcycles that can drive themselves and i'll ask

SPEAKER_13: the producers to i'm calling an audible here see if they can find this one there was a really interesting one i forgot the name of it but if you just google for your youtube self-driving bicycle self-driving motorcycle there's probably 10 people working on them it would seem to me that one of the limitations you have is sidewalks sidewalks make it safe but not everywhere has sidewalks and so have you started looking into i'm sure you have this new technology for bicycles electric bicycles and motorcycles slash vespas you know scooters to be able to ride themselves and how

SPEAKER_52: close is that technology yeah i mean the the broader question of what is the right form factor is is is is an important one i haven't seen a ton of traction right now with bicycles and two wheel

SPEAKER_00: kind of modalities right now because what happens if they fall i guess that's that's the it's a big problem um our robots right now complete more deliveries than even human couriers in terms of percentages so when we take on an order 99.9 or 99.8 percent of the time we actually successfully complete that delivery humans are about like 98 so we are one nine better but that's because the robot cannot fall down it doesn't get stuck in fact the drivetrain is designed for the sidewalk the big wheels you mentioned that are an important part of it it can navigate all the you know difficulties of a sidewalk uh but in future when you want to go upstairs for example i think you're going to see new form factor maybe legged and wheeled robots like that uh i'm not as convinced that it would be two wheels because two wheels has its own limitations but it's probably not going to be our

SPEAKER_06: confidence form factor so it's going to evolve okay i want to sit on so i was thinking about what if we put a chair on the serve robot versus having a bicycle act like a server robot but is there a future in which there's like a version of what you guys have that i can just take in a bike lane and just sit and go slowly throughout my city because i would love that you've just reinvented the scooter

SPEAKER_113: i don't know but it's it's the lazy it's i want a mobile you want to grow is it yes you want to put

David Friedberg: a backrest on his robot so that you actually get on top of your there's one of these self-driving there you go yeah it's fascinating technology but you know the it's not the obvious solution here is

SPEAKER_13: there are trikes three-wheeled motorcycles and four-wheel ones there's all kinds of weird ones you can

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SPEAKER_13: congratulations on the massive progress i think one of the interesting things to me alex is about this

SPEAKER_123: space yeah is there's just so much innovation occurring that there's a lot of oh seeming seemingly conflicts but it's coopetition and it's such an amazingly dynamic space and one that's worth studying for entrepreneurs when you have a coopetition type market you'll have a company like this

SPEAKER_13: building robots with somebody who builds a another version of their own robot just like android provides

SPEAKER_14: their operating system to samsung and they also make the pixel then you'll have somebody like cloud kitchens um having i don't know a certain famous burger joint in them but that burger joint might also have a direct relationship with doordash uber eats uh and swerve right see you what you see is like a lot of overlap i notice a lot of restaurants are now driving people to their website so they can use the white labeled version of doordash or uh the white labeled version uh uber eats and they eliminate the the service fees so it's a very interesting space huh where everything's a bit conflicted

SPEAKER_00: no conflict no interest yes uh you would you would say i i 100 agree uh our thesis from the beginning was i don't want to do or make the stuff other people are making we should find the gaps and try to play in that space because then everybody becomes a partner so for example we don't make a consumer app so we're not competing with uber they're the perfect uh mechanism for customers to go order food why would we make that ourselves and i've seen people in the robotic space that have actually decided to to to make their own apps for the restaurants and for the customers we stayed clear from that because we want to play nice with everybody there's a lot of problems to solve and we could just focus on on the

SPEAKER_27: white space what's the average um delivery time or the delivery distance right now ballpark yeah the

SPEAKER_52: robots go about over a mile right now when when they completed anyway and i think from the time we pick up an order to the time we drop it off takes about 18 minutes on average see i think that this is

SPEAKER_24: the perfect app alex for mcdonald's and starbucks i believe mcdonald's and starbucks are so ubiquitous

SPEAKER_13: that uh they could become the place that houses these because you have to house them somewhere and recharge yeah so if you did like a meta deal with cloud kitchens starbucks and or mcdonald's you would basically have the country blanketed uh and a place where if you could co uh habitat with them a place for the robots

SPEAKER_14: to get cleaned and to get charged yeah that's like a piece of this cleaning and charging and

SPEAKER_00: maintaining robots exactly at night when the robots come home someone has to clean them make sure they're in good shape for tomorrow's uh you know uh work and tell them how good they did right a little pat

SPEAKER_68: on the head i didn't think that robot shepherd was going to be a job category in 2025 but here we are

SPEAKER_08: but just to build off jason's point though you know we're talking a lot about commercial real estate and the decline of malls and what to do with some of these big buildings that we don't quite fit into our current economy i mean jason why not just turn those into drone depots and then link them to

SPEAKER_13: you know stories that are nearby a store you know there's a storefront or two available on every block in almost every major city that can't get rented so you just you take one of those you got it you put a bunch of these robots in it it's no it's a no brand when do you think this when do you think in your estimation um the majority of americans and the majority of two questions majority of americans

Chamath Palihapitiya: and the majority of uh deliveries will be done autonomously either through your service drones

SPEAKER_00: cyber cabs cruise etc yeah it's a it's a it's a fair question and we are usually wrong about these timelines because we don't get the exponential part really well but uh i think by the end of this decade you're gonna see uh people be deeply familiar with this technology everybody has kind of experienced it one way or another uh uber obviously is really leading the charge they have eight av partners now way more obviously is on the right side doing a lot of um incredible work beyond the delivery side the largest uh on the platform so i think in the by the end of this decade you're gonna have this

SPEAKER_41: fairly ubiquitous so five years will it be the majority in five years they need line because we

SPEAKER_00: could bet this right now we could bet yeah yeah that's it's a it's fair i would say there would be majority in areas like the urban areas we operate they could absolutely be majority but new york san

SPEAKER_13: francisco santa monica you believe the majority will be under five years so before 2030 they'll be

SPEAKER_22: on the majority i just want to say we are a public company so this is right speculation i've got you

David Friedberg: gambling you set the over under i tell you what you set 2030 as the over under so january 1st 2030 alex

SPEAKER_13: you and i will bet it okay barbecue lunch here done okay limit upper limit a hundred dollars per person okay ladies are invited uh tell me could be sushi whatever you want uh you're taking the over the

David Friedberg: under oh i'm taking the it happens faster which i believe is the under the under right okay so before

SPEAKER_14: january 1st let's do it 2030 you believe i'll take the over that the majority of deliveries we're just gonna go with deliveries on you know uh food deliveries will be automated hey listen this is amazing uh great work and you're gonna free up people to spend more time with their families and do other things and increase safety so that we don't have cars i mean a lot of the uh deaths and

SPEAKER_11: accidents that have been going on is because you know i don't god forbid like an amazon truck driver is going too fast because they're or ups driver they're under too much pressure and they're driving a giant tank and and you know they make some tiny tiny tiny minuscule error and you know god you know it's terrible loss of life or somebody gets really hurt so i think what you're doing is just so awesome for safety and i appreciate you telling everybody about it uh any anything uh we can do to help you

SPEAKER_14: you you're hiring for any sticky positions there ali always robotics software engineering hardware

SPEAKER_00: engineering operations everywhere we are going really fast so folks please visit our website

SPEAKER_150: there's a lot of jobs there all right there you have it folks and we'll see you soon ali well done

SPEAKER_152: good guest alex good guest was that one of your pickups i do not recall the original point of that

SPEAKER_68: but i'll take the points nicely done okay i want to go back to coopetition because i think that's the exact word i've been looking for when i think about waymo and uber because seeing seeing them work

SPEAKER_08: together to me on one hand makes so much sense but on the other hand i'm like uber are you letting the wolf into the sheep's pen you know are they going to take your lunch because they do have their own business but at the same time they work together you know it's a great point and what you have to

SPEAKER_123: do is look at the game on the field so uh they'll say like uh politics makes strange bedfellows and we'll be talking about a bunch about politics in a moment it can make very strange bedfellows you could have democrats suddenly become republicans you can have republicans cheney suddenly become democrats it can cause like very strange partnerships because people want to win is one of the great things about capitalism and you know if tesla decides hey or cruz decides we're going on and on our

SPEAKER_13: own we're not going to work with uber lyft or dash well then the other partners are going to say okay well then it's an advantage for us to work with them because we get to not have to worry about

SPEAKER_14: signing up restaurants or getting people to download an app man we could just get all these cars on the road real fast and start making money and i think there's enough money in this that if you know it's much better for uber to not make the self-driving technology and for self-driving folks to not try to replicate what doordash and uber have already built and just sell into it but uh it does make everybody on their toes and i think you would not see uh people maybe uh signing up to work with each other

SPEAKER_155: if it wasn't so competitive and that's like a great dynamic to have for consumers yes exactly it's

SPEAKER_06: gonna be great for you and i no matter what even if uber and waymo get into a spat later on i don't care i get more self-driving cars faster in an app that i use cheaper what is your what's your wait time

SPEAKER_08: typically where you are oh gosh um three to five minutes it's really great actually there's a lot of ubers in town they're super easy to get to and i live in a relatively accessible part of town jason so there's not a lot of delay so uber is honestly great here i sent my mom to the airport in uber this

SPEAKER_11: morning you know i am uh where i live out in the hill country and in texas outside of austin you have seven to twenty minutes to get uber oh if i do an airport and it's it's been a major

SPEAKER_53: adjustment i didn't realize how entitled i was i have been living under this belief that you should be on your way to your destination within three minutes of making that decision i never you know well like you right like i i should be able to be inside of an uber maximum five minutes yeah this idea

SPEAKER_13: that you would sit there and look at the screen and wait for 15 minutes for the person to get there is like what so i live in the burbs i live on a ranch i'm 30 minutes outside of austin you know downtown austin so it's a little bit different uh and this is where i think self-driving could be really interesting because you could deploy robo taxis ramos into the you know sticks into ranch country

SPEAKER_53: and just have them hanging out because you don't have to have a human there waiting for an hour for a

SPEAKER_13: ride and so that's going to be part of the magic here is a whole different group of people who have

SPEAKER_14: not experienced uber eats doordash and lyft and uber as a default are going to suddenly have that as a

SPEAKER_11: potential default and that's really you know that bell curve we'll have the team pull up the bell curve of technology adoption it starts with uh the vanguard you know early adopters and then you get

SPEAKER_14: the early majority the later majority and you get the laggards and so if you've never seen this uh

SPEAKER_11: bell curve we're now on the back end of that bell curve we're on the laggards like who doesn't have broadband who doesn't have a smartphone it's like 10 of people uh and so there you have it folks uh the classic uh innovators early adopters early majority late majority and laggards and then you have market

SPEAKER_14: penetration there on the chart makes a nice bell curve and different technologies go up and down

SPEAKER_151: the slope at different speeds i think chat gbt has probably gone really fast on this because students and you know parents have found out about it very quickly in in a city uber and doordash man they

SPEAKER_08: were almost instant self-driving will take a little bit of time but yeah you know it's interesting you talking about parking a self-driving car in a certain market or a certain location where there might not be a ton of like regular demand so you wouldn't have a human there that does open up really interesting variations on what the car could be because if i was out in hill country i'd probably want something that's four-wheel drive maybe has a truck bed or whatever sure and if i was going in print yeah sure but you could also have like a special like your own like uber luxe version of waymo that only had

SPEAKER_07: i don't know bentleys or whatever that were self-driving you could only have those in certain areas like yeah you could yes atherton park i mean atherton just hit your belly yourself driving rolls royce that's right i mean i would love to go to sfo and have you know the suicide doors open

SPEAKER_06: it'd be great but it does make for a lot of cool opportunities i i hope people build more than just

SPEAKER_08: one fleet of honda accords you know you asked me to prepare some stuff on this so sure the two news items that are i think big on the personnel side uh last week jason said that one way we're going to track what the trump administration will do is through the lens of personnel appointments who's in the cabinet essentially yeah and the two that uh i saw one breaking news this is not uh fully reported out and confirmed yet but yes stephen miller from trump administration one will be back in trump administration two i heard that he's going to be the uh deputy chief of policy i believe so i will fact check that but he's coming back an immigration hawk if you will and then also tim homan is going to be the new border czar he was also in trump administration one and according to an npr article that i was reading just before we went on air he has warned undocumented immigrants to quote start packing so i think jason looking at those two the lens towards um i would say uh immigration both legal and illegal is relatively uh negative or you might say conservative yeah i think the laws will

SPEAKER_41: be enforced is what uh we will see happen immediately so i think the southern border will be closed

SPEAKER_24: uh as opposed to the last four years where it was open uh it's kind of not debatable at this point

SPEAKER_13: and we can argue over the statistics if it was 5 million or 15 million it's it's some many millions of people uh crossed into the country illegally so then the next step is okay well what do you do about that step one is going to close the border i think we all agree trump's going to do that

SPEAKER_123: and 80 percent of americans are in favor of that they want people to come through

SPEAKER_13: legally it's unfair and i have a lot of friends who are immigrants they fear it's profoundly they feel it's profoundly unfair for people to sneak in versus actually going in um you know legally so

SPEAKER_173: okay i get that the next piece then becomes criminals okay if you're a criminal and you came

SPEAKER_123: to the united states or you're high skilled which would be like the two ends of the spectrum you got

SPEAKER_13: somebody incredibly high skilled and or a financier who wants to invest in the united states so somebody wants to build hospitals in the united states or work in a hospital as a doctor or nurse and we need those high skilled immigrants i think we all agree like we should go recruit those people

SPEAKER_14: and then on the other side if you're a criminal and you beat up some cops like they had on uh tv or there's venezuelan gangs you know in santa monica that have been caught doing home invasions

SPEAKER_11: nobody's disagreement that those people got to go immediately arrest them deport them no problem

SPEAKER_27: then you got this piece in the middle and this is what i think is going to be

SPEAKER_14: all consuming in the new year so i'm predicting that we're going to have the 72 million people who voted for kamala and the 75 million americans who voted for trump going to war for 2025 this is an early

SPEAKER_11: prediction over this issue i hope we do not see people being dragged from their homes families being deported uh and then you know people taking videos of it and just the brutality of that you

SPEAKER_151: know somebody's hard-working dishwasher at a restaurant i remember my dad and his restaurant

SPEAKER_11: no americans would take the job and this was the 80s and 90s to to wash dishes it was all mexicans

SPEAKER_13: who were here illegally um and uh you know people's nannies or housekeepers just people

SPEAKER_123: who are in those frontline jobs if we deport them in some very large way i could see this being quite chaotic so i am hope you know my big hope is to not have chaos yeah i saw your chaos and i i've just

SPEAKER_13: you know i'm basically putting it out there for anyone who will listen let's do what we can agree on close the border let in high skilled and get rid of criminals that's a lot of work those three things and then for the rest of the folks who yeah they did break the law coming in here we need uh but maybe they're they're good citizens and they have the great potential to be great

SPEAKER_11: citizens we can maybe have some grace or thoughtfulness about how we adjudicate their cases just because this could get a little chaotic and i know that for some americans they feel like they're taking their jobs and for other folks you know they feel like a lot of immigrants feel like hey i waited

SPEAKER_14: and you didn't so i i get all that and none of that is wrong i mean in fact all of that is right i i i

SPEAKER_11: don't there's no there's nothing that's not factually correct there uh or logical but i'm thinking

SPEAKER_27: emotionally i'm thinking emotionally i'm thinking compassionately and empathetically uh and also for

SPEAKER_11: the good of coming together as a country if we if we are dragging a million people out every couple of months you know families kids i don't know if that's going to work i did hear one interesting idea

SPEAKER_14: from a friend um which i'll put as the uh tony shea idea which is if you're here illegally you have x number of days to report in uh be processed have your application you know processed if you're

SPEAKER_11: coming here for compassionate reasons whatever and then we will pay you 5 000 or 10 000 to go back to your country and get back in line so you get a little pocket change the public change of giving

SPEAKER_14: 10 000 or 5 000 that might seem infuriating to people until they understand that the price tag is somewhere between 50 and 150 000 per person to deport them yeah so it might actually be a 95 savings to

SPEAKER_11: just give them a token spending cash i know it sounds like a big number five grand to you know an illegal immigrant they got paid five grand they got rewarded for coming across the border a way to look at that is what my friend tony shea rest in peace from zappos did when you finished your uh training he would

SPEAKER_14: say okay you did your whatever six week training here's two thousand dollars if you want to we'll give you two thousand dollars in cash right now to not come in on monday for work if you if it's not for you and like one out of ten people took the 2k yeah so he pre-sorted people who weren't committed by giving them an incentive to leave early i'm gonna get off my soapbox here uh i'm praying for the best

SPEAKER_185: for everybody no which i know infuriates people but i have a big heart and i care about people i think i

SPEAKER_186: think what you're outlining and i don't mean this sarcastically kind of harkens back to the george

SPEAKER_08: w bush compassionate conservatism concept and i don't think there's bad only bad parallels i think there's some good stuff to be said i also i agree with most of that but the thing that i'm a little bit concerned about jason is going to make the high skill integration point you and i were both reading an article earlier today from the last day of october so what is that just about two weeks ago yeah that was discussing how trump's closest advisors were working on ways to limit also high skill or legal immigration and one of the things that was called out uh by wall street general reporting was the potential um to decrease the number of green cards that are given out for technology workers and so i'm going to be very curious to see which side of the the trump um i don't know 1.0 or 2.0 i think

SPEAKER_13: it's a way we could frame it i like that 1.02 1.0 crowd which would be steve bannon and uh what's the other guy's name steve miller steve miller yeah he's the one who said america is for americans and

SPEAKER_11: americans only and i just thought you're like within spitting distance of the statue of liberty and

SPEAKER_24: you're in new york city in the capital of immigration in the united states uh you know historically i mean maybe the border is more people come across the border now but

SPEAKER_11: historically you're right by ellis island where my both of my well yeah all of my ancestors came through and my my grandfather god rest his soul um uh james john calacanis was uh brought a lot he was a chief engineer and a merchant marine he went through ellis island 30 times his hit the hit the what he was carrying in those ships at the turn of the century uh when he came here and they misspelled our name wrong at ellis island it's with k's not c's was uh humans so he came from venezuela ireland italy spain bringing in you're tired you're poor yeah but the thing if we do limit high school immigration

SPEAKER_08: though jason my read is that it's going to be harder for founders to get green cards to come to launcher y combinator build here and this is going to be just great news for canada mexico so it's

SPEAKER_14: interesting you bring that up canada would be the waypoint it has been and i you know of the last 10 years anytime i go to canada i've had multiple people say hey please send us people who can't get into the us like i there's literally somebody from the government in vancouver said to me jake out big fan thanks for coming i was there for a visit uh i had a nice lunch with the the the politicians there who were trying to drum up business for vancouver versus toronto and quebec etc and um they were telling me that if i emailed them i could cc the person who was trying to get a visa and that they would zip zip zip uh try to make it happen and i was like wow i've never heard that in america but okay

SPEAKER_11: they said they're shutting the border in canada i think uh trudeau is it trudeau yeah yeah yeah he said they're going to shut the border for a couple of years i guess the populist movement is there as

SPEAKER_14: well so it's interesting i you know we do have we do have um whatever the united states losses in

SPEAKER_11: bringing founders over here will be uh abu dhabi dubai doha and saudi and london and berlin

SPEAKER_06: gain you know i just saw a very interesting story speaking of saudi arabia jason i didn't actually throw this in the show notes but i'm just going to bring it up because i think it fits into your

SPEAKER_08: thesis about the middle east um cnbc reported this morning that silicon valley's general catalyst just made their first investment into a saudi arabian startup and that to me felt a little bit seminal actually it wasn't just gc it was also bain capital's first investment into saudi arabia the company is called lean technologies and i think it raised a series b worth 67.5 million but i think that just goes to show the global competition for talent for startup capital for funding for building and i just hope that as we change our immigration policy we keep the door very open for everyone who wants to come here and start a company start a business and not to bring it up again but i i like the green card idea and i would not mind seeing that staple it to your business plan

SPEAKER_24: if you they should literally not just put it on your degree the green card yeah if you get a term sheet for over a million dollars staple it to that as well so clip this and send it to trump and

Chamath Palihapitiya: to my friends who are helping trump um would be a great idea you know i think some of the jason are i

SPEAKER_197: i know on all in some of the folks there are going to be doing a little bit of work for the trump

SPEAKER_08: administration and i think we're sorting out what capacity that will be um does that stretch to you as well or are you not in that order okay no i'm not working on anything with the trump campaign nor

SPEAKER_11: have i been asked nor would i um i i am rooting for trump to do a great job i am hopeful uh that he has

SPEAKER_27: evolved since his first term and i am genuinely rooting for my friends to be a great influence and to

SPEAKER_13: see as much of trump 2.0 and as little as trump 1.0 as possible and the way i define trump 1.0 is just chaotic and divisive whether you believe the media made him divisive or he's just naturally that way or people don't get his jokes whatever it is i just don't want to see the chaos during his first term replicated in the second term because that was bad for everybody the country did not make progress

SPEAKER_53: i don't want to see the country and people wasting time on issues that we essentially agree on but

SPEAKER_13: we're like arguing and fighting over you know the the little details of the margin so i am rooting for

Chamath Palihapitiya: him i don't think the other guys i think they were pretty clear that they don't have plans to join the

SPEAKER_07: administration it does seem like you know maybe asking for advice that's that's kind of what i meant an advisory role because i was going to ask if you were going to have input on pushing our favorite green card policy forward because if you did i wouldn't mind you know what i'll do is i'll write it up

SPEAKER_14: based on what i said today i'll write a blog post and then i'll send it to my email list i have a

SPEAKER_11: substack calacanis dot uh substack.com and then i have another or you just go to calacanis.com and then i have one that's like i was going to use for just my thoughts after each episode of all in so i have like a jason's all in newsletter so maybe i'll put it on that one as opposed to my jason on startups but i

SPEAKER_203: have two or three mailing lists over at substack i don't know how i separated them we'll be in the

SPEAKER_08: show notes i'm just hoping that uh voices of reason can advocate for high school immigration and more of it i i'm a little bit worried by the news reports that we've seen but it does seem like

SPEAKER_11: these would be the spiciest people right who would be going for the most extreme interpretation of you know uh we're deporting everybody and you know this is one of the big challenges with trump as a leader um is you know he says things in such a bombastic way and then we see you know if peter thiel's

SPEAKER_14: correct do we take him literally or seriously in this case i don't actually know if it's literal or serious yeah nobody's i can't seem to get that piece of information are they literally going to take 15 million people out of there or should we take it serious that they're going to shut the border and do what i described let in high skilled kick out people who are criminals and then be compassionate thoughtful with everybody in between because i really do not want to spend the next year or two with the entire world um watching the united states at war with itself over people's nannies

SPEAKER_11: housekeepers dishwashers busboys carpenters you know uh you know construction workers being dragged off work sites during their shift that's going to be crazy um like seriously crazy highly inflationary too

SPEAKER_06: if labor prices go up super dramatically inside of this nation if we lose 10 million of our you know workforce that's going to be tough i mean that's an interesting point every single industry every

SPEAKER_151: single though i have two thoughts on this and i don't think anybody can tell us what's exactly going to happen but it's great that you brought this up because i was i was like literally thinking

SPEAKER_14: about this on my hike if a bunch of white collar americans are going to lose their jobs because of ai and you know you're not going to lose your job to ai you're going to lose it to somebody using ai so some video editor can edit you know 10 times as much you know or take some one tenth of the time to edit it you don't need as many video editors what are those extra surplus video editors journalists writers researchers whatever going to do with their time they might actually be incented to go work at uh you know a chip fab or a tesla factory to make cars or to take plumbing jobs electrician jobs and actually get a trade job that pays twice as much and has a pension there could be a lot of interesting

SPEAKER_13: uh you know maneuvering from the white collar to the generation tool belt as we talked about yeah so that would argue for maybe it's perfect timing to close the border not let as many people in and give americans first shot at those jobs what i'll call frontline jobs that doesn't mean they're entry level frontline means you know in the kindest interpretation like uh blue collar jobs i get

Chamath Palihapitiya: but frontline jobs you're out there doing stuff in the real world yeah it's going to be i don't know

SPEAKER_13: what do you what do you think of that theory that that could be what people are thinking white collar

Chamath Palihapitiya: jobs are going to be going away we want to save the plumber construction worker job dishwasher job waiter job chef job short order chef job for americans and would americans take those jobs and then

SPEAKER_13: you would have to have businesses raise those wages in order to get americans to do it because you don't pay you know it's not like you can pay somebody 12 bucks 15 bucks cash for those positions or 20 bucks in cash you're going to need to make it a 35 45 dollar an hour job to be a dishwasher in loss

SPEAKER_94: in i remember a restaurant tour telling me in san francisco they were paying 40 an hour four zero

SPEAKER_13: for a dishwasher and the last two hours were in the overtime bonus which were 60 an hour one and a

SPEAKER_11: half times pay because i think in san francisco if you go past 10 hours in like you know typical 12 hour shift at a restaurant or you know if it goes from eight to ten and whatever it is the last two

SPEAKER_07: are going to have to be time and a half or something so i think it's very interesting to think about

SPEAKER_08: how we'll have different labor demands in the future but i think it would be very hard to get industries to accept paying double or 3x but they're paying for labor today if we had a shift in the workforce that you're describing and so i wonder if going back to our interview and the autocado machine if we're going to see at once you know automation reduce the need for a uh for white collar jobs and automation reduce the need for blue collar jobs because then yes having fewer laborers does ameliorate the impacts jason to your point but i don't think it solves the core issue of just needing fewer humans

SPEAKER_41: to do the work right because you're getting hey right now the guacamole half the guacamole work or more two-thirds of it like the guy was just spicing the the guac yeah he didn't need to

SPEAKER_53: peel it cut it get that you know whack and get the seed out and and scoop it out man that thing did a

SPEAKER_13: lot of the work um so you're right and then if you don't need delivery people zipping around on bikes in manhattan they're going to start using little r2d2s yeah maybe that's what happened is you know happens as well as we just think less manual labor and then every country becomes a bit xenophobic circle the wagons shut the borders nationalism and you know i don't know that that makes the world worse japan did it new zealand and sydney have done new zealand and australia largely do it um those countries would prefer to keep their culture uh and to assimilate a very small number of people it's just here in the united states that we have this very open-minded expansive view of it i've learned over time that there are other countries finland i think is falling into this now i think sweden has

SPEAKER_14: now fallen into this of like you know we have a culture here and if you want to learn the language and assimilate yeah we'd love to have you but you got to learn the language you know kind of forced

SPEAKER_13: assimilation you gotta you gotta prove it to us you want to be here yeah i'm not going to give you the

SPEAKER_97: test in spanish or french or german you're going to have to take it in you know whatever japanese or

SPEAKER_40: japanese yeah this is actually a an important point for people who are american to keep in mind because

SPEAKER_06: i was you know i'm born here lived here raised here and i've always had a very american view on what it means to be an american which is if you're here you're an american congratulations huzzah that is just not how a lot of other countries think and yeah uh reagan actually said this reagan said

SPEAKER_08: you know if i went to turkey or other countries for 20 years i wouldn't even count then as someone from turkey well you can come to the us and be an american and i i just thought that everyone thought that way naively you know unthinkingly uncritically and then you travel some you read some news and you rest that's not the case but it will be a bummer i think jason if the nation that was the most open and welcoming became overly not welcoming i think that would be to our detriment even given the labor

SPEAKER_14: stuff that we're describing we think on that let's keep let's keep the best of america being the place that accepts people and growing we could have a billion people in this country we got the space for

SPEAKER_11: it and i think if we really wanted to have a goal as an as america it should be to get to 500 million

SPEAKER_14: americans as quick as possible let's go but do it as quick as possible with high-skilled people like imagine we said you know we got 340 50 million people right now we're going to try to get to 500 in the next i don't know call it uh 30 years 5 million a year so we want to actually have 5 million people immigrate here we're going to build new cities we're going to build 10 new cities of 10 million each and that's where these people are americans will get first shot at it but we're going

SPEAKER_13: to build 10 cities you know or revitalize 10 cities detroit etc like revitalize 10 cities put something there you know really be thoughtful about building housing in those places high-speed rail whatever it is and just start from scratch to build some really great infrastructure here and set a really uh audacious

David Friedberg: goal that would be american dynamism that would be american dynamism so i'm going to write two blog posts i need you to hold me accountable because you're okay you're my writing partner on these i'm going

SPEAKER_07: to write that down so we don't forget i do want to get to one more thing before we we take a couple on the stock market's gone crazy right the stock market's gone absolutely crazy and crypto's gone crazy as we predicted as we predicted uh so just for everyone knows some level setting here jason and

SPEAKER_08: then we'll talk about what we think about it but 52 week highs for the nasdaq the dow jones the s p um we're seeing um equities just rally very steeply in the wake of the trump election we have a chart that i pulled from white charts showing off um a couple of markets and also i threw tesla in there because they've seen really rapid appreciation in the last couple of days and then we also have a chart going over fintech stocks the the public companies that are in the fintech space your coin bases and as you can see if you're watching the video here uh dramatically up into the right and bitcoin yeah there's

SPEAKER_11: robin hood i you know i've never sold a share of my robin hood and i've been i was down at low single digits when i put a j trade in and bought more and now it's back above 30 and i've always

SPEAKER_14: just thought like vlad and the team over there are just so good and they released a desktop version and everything they just never stop releasing great product coinbase never i mean even with all the regulatory distractions they've had and culture wars inside their own company right it's just always been a really good product guy and keeps adding product um paypal i'm not so sure about affirm is back

SPEAKER_150: that's interesting this why your financial why are financial things coming back alex what's the

SPEAKER_08: thesis here ah the expectation of lower regulation but let's be specific if you think about what the biden administration has done when it comes to consumer finance they've wanted to do things like capping interest rates eliminating what they call junk fees those are all things that you could consider as incredibly consumer friendly things that i would have really appreciated when i was broke frankly uh but those are not great for business if they were making money off of those fees those income streams and so forth so the expectation is a firm can probably charge higher rates be a little bit more aggressive robin hood can do things like the prediction markets they got into at the end without getting into potential regulatory issues so it's kind of katie bar the door and everyone's very optimistic and just because you mentioned it crypto everybody bitcoin's up 24 in the last week and ethereum's up 35 percent uh and jason i heard that you actually still own some bitcoin so i'm curious what you're going to do with your uh it's funny people are yeah you know i i've made some

SPEAKER_24: spicy tweets about bitcoin and we had bitcoin on this very podcast in 2011 and i wrote a uh i wrote a blog

SPEAKER_13: post uh the world's most dangerous open source project bitcoin this blog post and uh but i also said to people when crypto was crashing uh and there was like a china had banned it a couple of countries i

SPEAKER_123: said you know i i think bitcoin zero is the likely case i don't see governments being willing to hand over their currency to an anonymous project where 50 of the coins are unaccounted for like this sounds

SPEAKER_14: crazy uh based on what i know about governments they accumulate power through a currency and weapons and nukes you know like that's basically and population and geography and natural resources you know down the line but currency and weapons and army those are the two things that make a nation state i don't believe a nation state would actually sanction or allow one of these currencies to replace their dollar and sure enough the united states has allowed people to buy bitcoin ethereum and any number

SPEAKER_13: of tokens and gary gensler and is obviously you know going to be replaced at some point soon and i don't know how his term works exactly but i think we have a situation happening while we're here

SPEAKER_14: that uh bitcoin my bitcoin zero being the majority case which i believed in you know through 2015 through 2018 i just thought there is no way china the united states or european governments allow this and i put it at 60 70 bitcoin zero now i put bitcoin zero at like under 10 percent like maybe even under five percent because i think it's too big to fail um now and governments have embraced it i never thought they would i can't believe it and it's going to be so disruptive for the united states government if they keep printing money the way they are and i don't think trump's gonna i hope he does but i just based on what i've seen my entire life with the exception of bill clinton i i don't think they're going to be able to stop the runaway spending i hope doge works and they do doge the department of

SPEAKER_150: government efficiency but i don't think it's gonna be that dramatic if it does happen at all um you know

SPEAKER_68: it's really interesting that you're talking about the the government position because this really was

SPEAKER_08: for lack of a better term the crypto election and i know we're talking a lot about you know trump versus harris and tariffs and all that but underneath all this was a lot of advocacy done by the crypto industry yeah uh you know lots of money and lots and lots of well there's one thing that you know crypto vcs have it's they have capital and they put it to work you know yeah points to that but people like the new senator um i'm going to try to pronounce your name here lumbus i believe uh wants to build a national bitcoin reserve trump went to a bitcoin event and said we'll never sell our nation's bitcoins and so i i can't tell back to your trump one trump two kind of thing trump one was very anti-crypto trump two theoretically in favor of it i'm curious to see how far that goes because if we do actually at the federal level embrace this particular cryptocurrency i mean that could be big for every startup in the sector every vc who's invested in the sector i mean really spread out

SPEAKER_13: i think if you're in the government and you want to maintain control of your country i think it's fine to own some bitcoin i think doing your own um you know national crypto project which trump has been

SPEAKER_230: alluding to not his personal ones scott that are like a personal grift and whatever trump coins

SPEAKER_08: he's doing or sneakers or watch trump cards that he was like doing like like that you mean that's

SPEAKER_113: what's going to happen to usd uh eusd sure well no they don't want to do that they don't want to do a

SPEAKER_08: a oh my gosh i'm going to butcher this acronym a central bank crypto token there's like yeah bbc or something i think the idea is keep that third party in the hands of circle and other companies that are regulated but then not directly the federal government and then they just buy u.s government debt with their uh reserves which is pretty cool but that's pretty far from bitcoin which is non-backed

SPEAKER_11: non-regulated and you know pretty distinct a a a possibility of where this could wind up is if governments truly feel threatened by it is you just put a 10 tariff since we're getting into

SPEAKER_14: tariff territory a 10 tax on crypto when you buy it you pay 10 when you sell it you pay 10 then it's at a 20 disadvantage to the dollar so it's you get all these advantages it's not a dollar but it's kind of angled a bit right it's kind of throttled and you already pay a certain percentage right now to transact on it but a federal tax in addition to capital gains or maybe remove cryptocurrencies capital gains and you make it ordinary income there's all kinds of different ways for the government i'm not saying i'm advocating any of this i'm just saying well less people clip this again and make a clip of me uh you know uh that faith but that that is how it could be countered but for now if you donated yeah 20 of your bitcoin to get trump elected last year you're up 30 40 now so that was probably a good trade uh and i think that's the big money in politics we're gonna see uh happen over and over again which is people made some pretty good trades here if you were jeff bezos or elon or any number of people who are the people who supported trump directly jeff yoss with tick tock these were really in the money trades uh to support him and i think that the democrats have to look at their anti-capitalism anti-crypto anti-innovation stance and realize that's part of why they lost

SPEAKER_06: you know the the anti-crypto stance i think is kind of dead i don't know if that really persists because think about it four years from now let's say trump uh doesn't try to go for a third term like we're all worried about and let's say jd vance loses in 28 just bear with me here does the incoming

SPEAKER_08: democratic president go back and try to undo four years of pro-conto policy no so i think that that conversation is now effectively the horse is out of the barn the horse is left the bar the horse and and

SPEAKER_13: the bitcoin horse left the barn because they said it's not a security and ethereum is not a security ripple they're still saying is a security because it's centralized and people who are directing it

SPEAKER_10: as opposed to like you know the whole howey test nonsense so that's really important though because

SPEAKER_08: andreessen horowitz wrote a long post their crypto team and they said i'm gonna quote here that entrepreneurs should now all feel empowered to explore all of the groundbreaking products and services that blockchains enable including tokens and that's i'm i'm here for it i i said from the beginning i

SPEAKER_13: thought dow's were really interesting and i very much wanted to start i wanted to tokenize our funds for venture capital okay so launch fund four which is a 45 million dollar early stage vehicle that goes into found university and accelerator companies and you know companies of people in my network and friends who you know start companies and i have special access to if we could tokenize it and any american

SPEAKER_14: could buy it i could raise a hundred million dollar fund and never go on the road pitching lps because i could have literally you know a million people give a hundred dollars or a hundred thousand people give a thousand dollars and i would love to have a hundred thousand people give me a thousand dollars per fund and let them trade those tokens as they wish if they think we have a home run in there you know knock on wood we hit another robin hood calm uber thumbtack athena whatever and you know they want to trade every day the tokens available to trade and you could speculate on it you could build a position in our

SPEAKER_08: fund you could clear a position in our fund that would be awesome it'd be great well if you take the crypto positivity of the trump campaign and then cross it with something that we talked about i think it was a week or two ago the tim scott bill in the senate that was going to make it uh easier for people to invest in private companies you could actually not have the accredited investor test have a tokenized fund and it would essentially be completely open access to anybody with a phone that's a very

SPEAKER_13: different world yeah i would very much like to explore this if there's somebody because i got pitched on this five six seven years ago where people were pitching me on tokenizing funds and i was like

SPEAKER_123: but the tokenization doesn't help me it just creates more overhead more expense but i would very much like to have a j coin where people could buy the j coin the coins could buy equity and startups

SPEAKER_13: and then people could trade them and you know i would just publicly share everything we've invested in and you could just go to this yeah i wouldn't give decision making over but i would really you know

SPEAKER_123: the problem was this was going to add a million dollars in expense uh to the starting of a fund and

SPEAKER_13: then probably a quarter million a year so you would be at like four million dollars in expense you know and then customer support and everything maybe five million expense over 10 or 15 years to manage

SPEAKER_94: this it'd be like a half million dollars a year on average to manage the project which i guess if you

SPEAKER_11: have a hundred million or 200 million dollar fund is okay but it was just prohibitively expensive you

SPEAKER_08: know it's it's funny that you bring up the j coin idea because um going back to i think it's 2014. yes so just over 10 years ago i wrote this for tech crunch i think we can pull this up um i jokingly introduced crunch coin and it was going to be the native currency for tech crunch employees and you'd have to get paid in crunch coin and that was the only way to buy tickets to our events and it's funny that's a good idea this is still like it was an april fool's joke 10 years ago and i maybe it's not going to be an april fool's joke in five more years the world's crazy man i love

David Friedberg: it this um i i you know this will be something great that comes out of the trump administration

Chamath Palihapitiya: and his term if they can make crypto uh safe for retail investors by forcing them the people who launched the products to have their names on them to have insurance to have a board of directors but allow anybody who wants to buy let's say under a thousand dollars personally of any token

SPEAKER_13: let every person be able to spend 10 of their yearly income on any securities they want and yolo because then the most an american could lose would be 10 of what they made that year so if you're a i don't know plumber who makes a hundred thousand a year 150 000 a year and you want to you know yolo 10 15 grand into dogecoin or bitcoin or ethereum or my coin j coin and well if you lose it guess what no vacation for you this year you're doing a staycation yeah and then next year you get a vacation because you chose to to make a bet for you and your family right and maybe it pays off and then you can buy a second and third home so i i like treating people like adults and i i think there

SPEAKER_14: is an adult path here that trump can set up with the accreditation test and limits on the amount you

SPEAKER_08: can invest per individual problem solved yes now jason we do have some good audience questions that i want to get to in a second but i want to wrap with a kind of spicy take on the stock market if i can just squeeze this in so enthusiasm we discussed stocks are up people are very excited about you know less regulation and maybe less red tape in general in the economy and all that but there's an interesting counter bet that people are talking about and it comes from warren buffett so right now berkshire hathaway which is the anti-startup if you will it is a holding company of cash generating assets as opposed to a high growth cash consuming business but warren buffett's a well-known investor for a lot of reasons and right now he's sitting on a record amount of cash and the reason 300 billion 400 billion 350 billion something something crazy like that that's a big number and the reason why people think that omaha's oracle is doing this is because the buffett indicator is incredibly stretched and i have a chart uh here for everybody the buffett indicator if you're not familiar is just the market capitalization of us-based companies divided by gdp uh or if you want it's the wilshire 5000 divided by you know current gdp and jason we're at essentially 200 plus um of this ratio which is incredibly stretched compared to historical norms so just to be a contrarian just to be a debbie downer here on the show i wonder if people are properly understanding that stocks were already a little bit expensive on a broad basis going into the trump administration and that could limit upside and then that could mean that a lot of the enthusiasm the hope for deal making and ipos might be dashed because if stocks end up going down just because of fundamentals we won't get all the candy that

SPEAKER_10: people expect to rain down from the skies that's he he likes your take is correct um buffett likes to

SPEAKER_13: buy things on sale he doesn't believe apple is on sale anymore he thinks it's fully valued he has concerns about people i think this story has a lot to do with apple and him falling out of love with apple okay and so i think he cleared that a lot of that position maybe even all of it and that had done incredible for him and i think he's probably looking and saying if i have a bunch of cash and meta goes back down to 100 bucks a share or you know uh apple loses half its value i can buy it again and so or there might be other companies he could buy a significant piece of when they're at a discount

SPEAKER_14: so that's probably what's going on there i think you know the the spending of the government has been so dramatic and there's so much money in the system that the money always makes its way to equities because you know putting it into a 10-year you're going to make 4.x putting it into your cash in your bank account is close to five i guess if in just having cash so until the rates come down

SPEAKER_11: people are going to just keep putting money in equities um and in cash and you know i i i don't see a world um in which meta apple tesla etc take a nosedive i i i could see them correcting 20 or 30 and maybe

SPEAKER_07: that's enough for warren buffett to make his move so oh man if stocks go down by 30 i'm going to stop eating just like and buy more that would be that would be the logical thing to do yeah that's what

SPEAKER_151: i said oh yeah yeah i mean me too i did the exact same thing i was like these companies are on sale i

SPEAKER_14: bought meta at 91 dollars etc and all of it did amazing i basically 2x in two years it was bonkers in terms of return all right it's been a great episode uh we do it live monday wednesday friday but this week will be monday wednesday thursday correct that's correct where we move the all-in tape and for people who know all in tapes on thursday so if you want to know my personal schedule it's typically monday wednesday friday twist and thursday is all in but one of the other besties had to switch so i think we're taping on friday so i moved the twist taping to thursday you'll see us all here back on wednesday about 12 ish my time in texas texas time 1 p.m east coast 10 a.m ish uh on the

SPEAKER_11: left coast he's alex i'm jason cautious optimism dot news if you're into cautious optimism dot news no

SPEAKER_14: not if you're into it if you get to this point in the pod you're into it go sign up right now if you got a couple of shackles throw a hundy into the pot and motivate alex to keep writing every day and we will see you next time bye bye