SPEAKER_00: All right, everybody. Welcome back to This Week in Startups. He's Alex. I'm Jason, at Alex at Jason on x.com, previously known as Twitter, full docket. Subscribe to our YouTube channel and just type in This Week in Startups and you will get a notification if you hit the bell when we go live. We're going to go live three days a week. We'll figure out if it's Monday,

SPEAKER_01: Wednesday, Friday, Monday, Tuesday, Thursday. It'll be what it is as we get through the summer and get our legs under us. But let's get started. It's a full, full docket.

SPEAKER_03: Yeah, so today we have up top what Jason is calling woke Google Maps, which I'm sure is going to be a great conversation for everybody. It's going to be fun. Then we're going to talk

SPEAKER_05: a little bit about a fintech company called Built and how they've managed to take Wells Fargo for about $120 million a year. It's my favorite story in tech today, this week, maybe this month. Then AI progress in China and Japan and who is building the fastest in and around the world. What's OpenAI really worth based off of yesterday's all in? And then new calls for social media regulation that could impact the next generation of startups, a.k.a. Jason's favorite issue today.

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SPEAKER_11: First, woke Google Maps. You found this one. You brought it to the show. I have thoughts here, but why don't you start with what caught your eye?

SPEAKER_13: Yeah. So very simply, I, you know, I saw that somebody who worked at Google, uh, was tweeting and

SPEAKER_01: then subsequently deleted the tweets. So, you know, X is a pretty full contact platform. I've been spending a little time on threads. I'm getting destroyed on threads. It's like the anti Twitter anti, you know, it's, it's journalists and people on the left, right? Basically, and Instagram folks. So

SPEAKER_00: it's kind of sad to me because we used to all be on one platform arguing. Now it's like two sets.

SPEAKER_16: But anytime I post over there, everybody's like, I hate you. And the sax is terrible. And this person's terrible. Your friends are terrible. Like, okay, whatever. But on X, you know, you get this

SPEAKER_00: Overton windows wide open. And what I thought was interesting about this was a Google was talking

SPEAKER_13: about, as you can see there from the tweet, if you're watching the video, why doesn't Google have a feature of the most scenic route? Because, you know, like, let's say you're walking through San Francisco or New York or Brooklyn, you might want to take the scenic route, that's something they could do. And so somebody who worked as I think a product manager or something at Google was talking about how you know, actually, that came up a bunch. And so this person Casey pay Limes, if they are in fact, from Google, it's a very tantalizing idea. I did a lot of work and research on pedestrian navigation. This was among the top feature requests I heard from study participants. So it obviously is a great feature. So you're like, Okay, great, tell me more. And here comes the bomb. The next tweet was, yeah, we didn't do it because of equity, right. And so because of its global scale, this is Casey again, who we will take in good faith is a Googler, or was a Googler because of its global scale, even a

SPEAKER_20: small shift in maps routing from a seemingly innocuous, and frankly, very useful feature could create a reinforcing feedback loop with spatial inequity, inequality, spatial inequality. Now, you obviously

SPEAKER_13: it's very easy to mock spatial inequality in this whole like tone of everything has to do with gender, race, identity politics, income, but he goes on and says inadvertently diverting foot traffic from low income streets to high income streets takes revenue and potentially tax dollars from already struggling communities and funnels it instead to richer communities. Always remember, we live and build

SPEAKER_20: tools in complex systems for context. This idea was usually discussed with regard to walking navigation

SPEAKER_25: specifically. Okay, so what what is your take? Because this is obviously anytime we bring up DEI, merit, identity politics, everyone gets along great, and no one gets upset.

SPEAKER_31: And everybody listens fully to each other's perspectives and takes them to heart. So yeah, and that's actually quite why I wanted to put this on because as a twist of fate, I've actually seen a bit of what happens when routing is changed in a city and the economic impacts of it

SPEAKER_03: right here in Providence. So in Providence, we only have so many bridges. We're not a very big state, but there's a very critical bridge that goes out of Providence into East Providence and towards Massachusetts. Everyone goes across as you commutes and half of it broke. So quite literally,

SPEAKER_31: the number of lanes we have going across this river out of Providence went from two bridges to one that has to be shared. Traffic snarl, traffic jams, local investigations, a couple hundred million dollars to fix. This happened in the last couple of months. It's been a hot mess. Like all across the state traffic is now just crap. And there's been a lot of economic damage that's come as a part of this. So for example, a restaurant near where I live, Noodles 102 says, look, our traffic has been decimated. We got to shut down. They're done. Other restaurants are closing and so forth. And so when I saw this, my first thought was it seems a little bit silly, but then when I was just thinking about the economic impact, I can kind of see the point. And here's my argument and tell me if this is too, too woke or not. But if you said everyone who walks wants to take scenic route, or I think they also said the nicest route was the initial like point of the tweet. So nicest scenic people are going to go to where there's the most expensive, best kept parts of town and not go through parts of town that can probably use the foot traffic. And so my question is, who does Google really serve? Or do they have a customer that is the world aka everyone out there? Or is it just the person who's using the

SPEAKER_36: app that just wants to see the most trees? Exactly. And so this is a this is the ultimate

SPEAKER_13: Rorschach test. You can tell somebody's politics by how they would approach the story. This is why I wanted to put it on the docket to kind of just think from first principles. If you and you caught me off of

SPEAKER_37: the past, I was going to tell you about a town, there is a town in north of San Francisco at the

SPEAKER_13: name of it. But I was driving through it. And the highway used to go through the town. So you've ever been on one of those highways and it slows down. And then you're on Main Street, and you hit three lights. And then it says after the 25 miles for 35 miles an hour. Now you're back on a highway. Now you can go 65 or whatever your choices. It's like this in upstate New York as well.

SPEAKER_00: Um, and I'm sure Providence I've seen this in Austin, where they have the 290 and the 290 slows down to go through certain towns and their stoplights. Okay, so they build a highway. And they stopped going through the town. This town has a lot of through traffic going, you know, out of wine country up to Portland and whatever town decimated. Nobody stops. They put billboards on it. Hey, get off here. See our beautiful town, you know, good. But the place is a is hollowed out compared to what it used to be. So there is actually impact to how you route and Google Maps is going to have an impact. So certainly a reasonable person of good faith would say, Hey, let's think about the impact here. On the other side, to your point. Hey, I want to see more trees. I'm in Australia. I'm in Sydney. I would like to take this walk. But is there a way for me to walk along the harbor? I don't know, right. And when I try to do those walks, it's always like, here's the fastest route. And I would

SPEAKER_13: love for it to be able to pick the most scenic, or perhaps the most populous, maybe it's safer if it's the most populous, or I want more energy, right. And so and and conversely, you might want the least populace, maybe you're riding on a bike, you don't want to have like a bunch of foot traffic or something. So there's all kinds of reasons, giving the consumer the power here is great. And having a thoughtful discussion about it is great. Not everything is bad intent is, I guess,

SPEAKER_41: that's the thing. So when I read these, you know, he says things this case, he person, this got talked

SPEAKER_31: about a lot. And he says, Well, I would love this feature, and we can do it. Here's why I didn't think it was the right choice. So to me, this is describing a, a product team that is being as thoughtful as they can about how to build the best stuff. They mentioned studies, they're talking to users, and they want this to work out. I think we can easily say, we don't agree with the decision that they came to, but I don't think the intent here is bad. And that's why like, with a lot of love. I do feel like we use the word woke a little bit too broadly. And I think much like liberal and conservative in this country, it is, it gets used so much that it kind of loses its definitional value. And so they're not saying you can't walk over there because you then would only go to the rich part of town. They're saying, we're trying to find the right balance and drawing that middle line, I think is, is there's not one answer, Jason, because back to your point about even a Rorschach test. What I think is not probably all the time what you think. And so we're going to end up different places. I do think that a system inside of Google maps that is purely safety oriented

SPEAKER_03: for pedestrians, especially at night would make a lot of sense. Like just an anti-crime heat map,

SPEAKER_46: you know? Yeah. One thing that drives me crazy is when I want to buy something on a website, but there's too much friction. When I go to check out, I want a smooth and easy payment experience. And of course it's got to be safe and secure. And sometimes I like to have other ways to pay, like through my digital wallet, or even buy now, pay later, which by the way is super popular these days with a lot of people. If you're a merchant, you got to be able to offer alternative payment methods. They're called APMs in the industry. And you know who's the best at this? That's right. Squarespace. Squarespace payments makes it easy for customers to make purchases, which equates to more revenue for your business. It's super easy to set up and will keep your MRR going up and to the right, which is what we're all looking for. So check out squarespace.com slash twist for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, go to squarespace.com slash twist to get 10% off your first website or

SPEAKER_00: domain purchase. Once again, squarespace.com slash TWIST. There was that app that got very popular

SPEAKER_48: that kind of went the vigilante route. I think Sequoia had made a bet on it. I forgot what it was

SPEAKER_50: called. You're not thinking about Waze, are you? Not Waze. Waze is just like, hey, get there faster.

SPEAKER_52: And if you got to cut through somebody's backyard and run over there to, you know, tulips. But we're doing it. We'll get you there quicker. I mean, I was talking to an Uber driver. I'm here in

SPEAKER_53: Southern California, taking the kids to Disney and Universal and doing that little tour. You know, the driver's like, listen, I lived here my whole life. You're going to get killed in Waze here. Like it takes you on some crazy routes. People are speeding, you know, whatever. Like I know the routes. It's not worth it to save two minutes. And I was like, all right, interesting. There was another one. It was an app. And one of the producers is probably searching for it, but there was a crime app that was specifically citizen. Hmm. Yeah. If you remember and citizen was awesome.

SPEAKER_13: But if you turned on, unless you turned on notifications and lived in San Francisco,

SPEAKER_60: because literally you'd be like, there was a stabbing point, six miles from you. Like there is a stabbing point, six miles from you three times a day in San Francisco.

SPEAKER_03: Tragically point, six miles though in a, in a dense city is a lot like points. It's 12 blocks. Yeah. Where I grew up is halfway up my driveway. Yes. San Francisco in Manhattan in Shanghai, et cetera. Yeah. That's 10 blocks can be a lot. I agree with you though.

SPEAKER_31: It is a little bit unnerving to be constantly told about the crime in your area, but I can just see like, for example, if I was a woman, if I was smaller, I can definitely see having personal safety be higher on my hierarchy. And then you could also just have people turn it off. But I, I just don't want to say that the intent was bad here because it's clear they tried to find

SPEAKER_05: a solution that worked for people and also the world because Google is so big, Jason. I think it should keep in mind it's responsibility to the people because we all use it.

SPEAKER_00: And Waze had to do this as well because Waze did start creating problems for neighborhoods where like, now listen, they're public streets. So we understand the argument. Everybody has a right

SPEAKER_01: to them, but it also kind of sucks if, you know, like, Hey, the four or five is packed and they're like, Hey, by the way, here's a great idea. The street where all the kids used to play through a local neighborhood, we're going to just send people through. And that's why sometimes they put like no through traffic on the street or they put up a blocker and say, listen, there's kids at play

SPEAKER_00: here and we're going to, you know, during rush hour, close the street to through traffic. Right. And so there, you know, you have to, it's a, it's a negotiation. And I think it's an interesting one. Not everything is a race issue. I think the word woke is also, I was listening to Sam Harris and,

SPEAKER_53: um, Bill Maher. Yeah. Good friend of mine, Sam Harris, Bill Maher. I didn't know, you know, Sam, I loved his work on, um, moral philosophy. Yeah. I convinced him to do a podcast. He had come to my studio, see what I was doing with this three good startups. We have the same book agent. And, um, he's like, tell me about podcasting. What do I need to do this? And I was like, a microphone and a guest should tell me more. And I told them the specific microphones were at a dinner and then couples then I was like, get this microphone, get this, get this. And I just went through it all with him. And, um, yeah, no, so I I'm to blame, I think, partially to blame for his podcasting, uh, which means he's not writing any books, but they were having a good conversation about the word woke actually. And like the word woke, I think, you know, in the sixties and seventies, the origin of it is, Hey, if you're an African American in America, stay vigilant, eyes wide open. Like you might get pulled over by cops, you know, in the south or somewhere like stay woke, be aware, be pre you know, present of potential threats to your safety. That's what it meant. Now woke has become like, okay, Karen's and white women fighting for whatever. Uh, and you know, a way to deride people here. I just would put Google's behavior is in being thoughtful and I'll take them on face value and

SPEAKER_75: good faith that they're being thoughtful. You can make fun of them for the Gemini stuff. Yeah.

SPEAKER_78: So the gym. Oh God. Yes. I, I guess that's my point because if we call out every, when I was growing

SPEAKER_03: up in the nineties, in the conservative Christian church, everything was politically correct. That was the, the, the, the stamp put on everything, anything that wasn't aggressively racist or sexist

SPEAKER_31: was stamped politically correct. And to me, it ended up being a phrase that I viewed as a compliment, but I think woke is always used as a pejorative. So there's no like positive case to be made today for its use. So it's spread a little bit. Anyways, we're a bit off topic. Great. Let's keep going.

SPEAKER_05: Glad you're working on this. Um, maybe next time they'll better PR strategy. So that way one engineer

SPEAKER_84: does not end up engendering the entire, uh, class. So leading all their tweets and be like, Oh my God, what have I done? Yeah. Well, you, you've had those tweets, you tweet out something

SPEAKER_03: innocuous and then suddenly bam, bam, bam, the whole world's on your door. You're like, whoa, I was just trying to talk about poodles and Mexican food. That's it. Or whatever the hell.

SPEAKER_86: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. It is the human spirit and psyche is not designed to have thousands of people,

SPEAKER_01: if not millions, see your worst moment and then mock you for it for eternity.

SPEAKER_03: So eternity is a long time, but the cool thing about most social media is that you will become character of the day. And then it, within a week, you've become possible life is pretty short.

SPEAKER_01: It's pretty dramatic. Like, uh, the woman who, um, the woman who had an incident on an airplane and she's like, that guy is not real. Whatever that woman's name is. Like she, I think has made like a

SPEAKER_97: whole persona of it. And I think she scored, she secured the bag. So congratulations to her. As long

SPEAKER_03: as she gets the bag, because otherwise I think you will have a hard time shaking about something at that level of national attention. Yeah. Um, also just don't have a meltdown on a plane because everyone, there's a phone. Everyone's bored. What are you doing? The problem. Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_102: Shout out to Vinnie Gomez. Here we are talking about her still, right? So yeah, I mean, I hope she's well.

SPEAKER_03: Okay. So now the best story in technology today is I think built and Wells Fargo built. If you're

SPEAKER_31: not familiar with it, it's B I L T Jason. It is a FinTech service that allows people to pay their rent with a credit card to generate miles. This was my dream when I lived in San Francisco. Sure. I paid so much rent and I got nothing for it. However, it turns out that people working to try to figure out how this works have finally figured out the answer, but to work everyone into this, we're going to pull up a clip from CNBC with the founder anchor Jane, trying to explain how this works and see if you

SPEAKER_111: can parse out Jason, the, the gesture. It increases. I mean, I'm going to go to count on this. Cause I, and I apologize, but okay. You decided this company is worth $3 billion. Right. Based on some kind of mathematical formula. Right. About how much they're earning and what the future of this. Okay. Expl I'm gonna ask you to explain it because I, I unfortunately still don't understand it with what, so is it, I'm, I know let's just pretend I'm related. Okay. You come to me and you say, Hey, uh, we, we want to process for you. Yep. Okay. And I say to you, okay, I'd be very happy for you to process for me.

SPEAKER_112: How much are you charging? Related pays for payment processing today. Right. ACH fees.

SPEAKER_113: They pay check cashing fees. Right. They pay card fees when you pay your rent. Instead of that being our core business that we're trying to generate a huge margin on that. Right. You can turn that into rewards for the customer that they can then use for airline miles. Somebody has to pay for those. That, that pay, that is already happening. That right. Everybody else's business is just to keep that. So related is already paying for payment processing before build using legacy. Right.

SPEAKER_119: Yeah. But the key thing here at the end of the day is the, the building. Yeah. Right. Everyone converts to the bill payments platform and they're paying a service fee for that. So the same way they used to pay

SPEAKER_113: for their legacy platform that gave none of that back to the renter. Right. They now pay those.

SPEAKER_121: No, but if somebody wrote me a check, a personal check, there'd be no fee on that.

SPEAKER_113: Correct. So then you get less rewards on that check payment. Right. Exactly. So when you pay

SPEAKER_111: electronically where there is a fee. Okay. So it sounds like there's two businesses here. Help me. There's the platform fee. So the software fee that I'm going to pay you to use. Right. Payment processing payment process, a fee per transaction. I'm not paying you some kind of other fee on top of that as a building. Correct. Okay. What am I paying you as a building? I'm a, I'm a landlord. We have a lot of landlords who are watching the show. They may want to work with you or not.

SPEAKER_124: How much are they, are you charging them? It would be the same that they currently

SPEAKER_113: pay for any other payment processing platform they use. And that's different. Just like every

SPEAKER_112: enterprise deal has slightly different. But most of them don't usually allow you to pay

SPEAKER_60: cards and all the online. Yep. So this is a, yeah. What's your take here? I'm confused. And you and I are both in the industry covering this for a combined 50 years. Not only that, we also know

SPEAKER_31: how credit cards work, how the financials work, how much swiping a card costs. And what I do to 3%,

SPEAKER_81: right? Depends on the card a little bit and actually higher, which is why some businesses don't take them, better rewards, blah, blah, blah, blah, corporate cards, person, person. And your safety,

SPEAKER_01: um, you know, if you check people's driver's licenses, you know, like what, what background you do, if you wait to have it clear, all this stuff goes into your fees, right? Absolutely.

SPEAKER_05: Structure. Yeah. And the reason why people don't get, I think, credit card, uh, points for paying for rent is that often it's done via ACH. It's often done via cash or whatever, or just a check.

SPEAKER_31: And so there's not a lot of margin there. So people are trying to figure out CNBC in this case, how does built manage to offer rewards on a thing that doesn't generate margin? And the entire clip is these two poor CNBC hosts chasing this founder around in a circle, trying to figure out what it is you're selling, who's paying for it and how it works out economically. And we have since found out Jason that it turns out that the answer is Wells Fargo.

SPEAKER_05: Ah, yeah. Sugar daddy. Well, accidental sugar daddy. Oh, okay. Explain. So the wall street journal writes that essentially Wells Fargo wanted to get more deeply into credit cards, struck a deal with built. It was super popular over a million people signed up in the first 18 months. Wow. And then the economics did not work out as they expected. People are not holding a balance. They are paying it off immediately. They are not being up sold to new things. They arrived because there was a perk. They are taking that perk and then they are effing off somewhere else.

SPEAKER_31: And so it turns out that built, which is now worth $3 billion, $3.1, I think is losing Wells Fargo

SPEAKER_11: around $10 million a month, which is even for a bank, serious, serious money.

SPEAKER_86: Yeah. So, you know, unit economics is a discussion that we had a lot.

SPEAKER_37: Um, maybe three times in my history in the industry. First, we had it with web van, which was bill Gurley's investment in grocery delivery. Uh, we had it at that same time

SPEAKER_00: around Amazon and could you deliver books? You know, was there a way for this to make sense to like actually ship a book and to give remember Amazon prime free shipping, how is free shipping ever going to work? Right. And so it, and the answer in both those questions is it didn't work. And web van went out of business and eventually Amazon raised prices to, I think right now, most people are paying for Amazon prime $150 a year. So it is not as cheap as people thought it was the introductory price of Amazon prime was between, I think 40 and 50 bucks. So, you know,

SPEAKER_53: if you look at both of those, it didn't work, destroyed one company and the other company had to raise their prices eventually. Okay. Now let's fast forward Uber and Lyft and DoorDash negative unit economics on the lower price, um, services like, uh, Uber pool was losing money.

SPEAKER_37: Uber X was losing money, driver incentives when they were in the war over drivers and trying to build out, you know, their infrastructure. And, you know, that took what five years for Uber and Lyft to

SPEAKER_13: turn a corner, stop trying to grow at all costs. And what made them do that? Wall Street. Wall

SPEAKER_53: Street makes you do that because as I think Warren Buffett or Charlie Munger said, you know, it's eventually, you know, it's the stock market starts as a voting mechanism, and then it becomes a weighing mechanism. It's a scam. And that's what you're seeing here. A startup was like growth at all costs.

SPEAKER_13: It's a Zerp startup. Obviously it was a zero interest rate phenomenon startup. And they came up with a way to sell a hundred dollar bills for $80. If you sell, if I went out onto the middle of mainstream and I said, here's a stack of a hundred bucks, anybody wanted for $80, the smart person would say, how many are you selling? I'll take them all. And just give me the difference. And that's what we have here. And so, you know, it's, um, if you're a founder, you have to understand your unit economics, you have to understand when you are trying to acquire customers and losing money

SPEAKER_20: in doing so. And if you would have the ability to flip it. And I think the problem here is if the average rent was 3000, right? Just back to the envelope, man. And let's say you had about $40,000

SPEAKER_13: in rent a year and you're getting all these miles and you're getting whatever, two or 3% back.

SPEAKER_152: I don't think based on what you've said, there's a way to make that money back. Okay. So that's the thing that I'm absolutely stuck on is how was this ever supposed to actually

SPEAKER_03: work out. The only way it could function is if Wells Fargo's new customers were spending so much money and then letting those balances rest. But I mean, I think those people, the less financially savvy, probably aren't also the same people who are out there looking for new fintech products

SPEAKER_31: to put their money into, to take advantage of. You know, who does that? The points people. I'm not a points person. I respect people who have-

SPEAKER_155: We all got a points person in our life though.

SPEAKER_03: I, you have to have one. I tend to invite them over only for very short lunches so that I can't talk to me about why Chase Sapphire Reserve Platinum Gold Green is the way to go.

SPEAKER_159: I don't know. Um, I just don't. It's a lot of lift. It's a lot.

SPEAKER_160: It's a lot of, it's a, there's a, that's a lot of squeeze for very little juice. Yeah. They're like, it's 0.5% better. And I'm like, boy, I'll buy you two coffees and then you

SPEAKER_03: don't have to do the works. I've, I've cleared the difference for you. But if it's a hobby,

SPEAKER_31: I get it. But the point is those people are not going to leave a fat balance on their built card from Wells Fargo to generate the margin to pay for the rent rewards.

SPEAKER_50: And the second you take this away, that million will go down to half a million,

SPEAKER_167: like literally people will just start canceling and churning out of it immediately. Yes.

SPEAKER_01: There's a name for these people in the sweepstakes business. They're called like sweepstake, you know, some offensive word. And, uh, they're basically like sweep holes or something.

SPEAKER_00: Like there's an industry term for it because there was at some point people going around doing like group sweepstakes, like sign up for 10 newsletters and then win a MacBook. And then all of a sudden you would do this for your email newsletter. And you know what would happen? You would get thousands of emails signing up and none of them and your open rate would go from

SPEAKER_01: 50, 60% down to 40% and then out to 30%. You're like, what happened? Those were dead emails. These

SPEAKER_00: people were creating thousands of emails to just join sweepstakes. They were doing it programmatically. So same thing here. Unit economics at some point become the truth and the truth shall make you free. This startup needs to just accept the truth that they did a hack and the hack is not sustainable.

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SPEAKER_31: because they're giving you a hundy. So in a normal world, everything you said, bang on. They have a deal with Wells Fargo through 2029, which they're currently renegotiating. And if I was built, I would not renegotiate all of my business away. I might cut Wells Fargo a little break just so they don't go apoplectic. But I don't think Wells Fargo is going to be able to walk out of this as easily as we might think. This is not a month to month rental contract, as far as I understand it. So I, honestly, normally I would be like built, you know, okay, it doesn't gonna work out. But given Wells Fargo's history of, of, um, large settlements with the government over alleged criminal behavior, I don't mind someone else making money at their expense. It kind of brings me joy. So built shout out for me. Hope that the next model works out better than the first one, because this one's not

SPEAKER_179: just go back and look at the history of Amazon prime. It's 15 bucks a month now, folks,

SPEAKER_00: 15 bucks a month, $180 a year. So if we, you know, those UPS packages were costing 10 bucks,

SPEAKER_37: you know, they've got at least 18 deliveries, you know, one and a half deliveries a month to your house that they've got covered. And then they have to make the rest back on the margin of, you know, selling products, which is why the prices have gone up over time on Amazon. And it's not the

SPEAKER_05: cheapest place to buy stuff. It's not even close. Actually, what it is, is the place where my credit card is always stored. And if I need a thing, they will have the thing. It's not my preferred place though, just because. Oh, really? Say more. Well, the interface is trash and it's hard to

SPEAKER_31: figure out anything. And what I would like to do is have them curate slightly more. So that way I

SPEAKER_05: don't have to go through 19 Reddit threads to figure out which thing I need. And also they're trying to generate lots of money from advertising. If you don't know, Amazon, like every major tech platform makes hella bank off of that advertising. I think they're up to 40 billion, by the way.

SPEAKER_03: Yeah. And I think they've pulled out 400 billion of customer surplus because using their service is now just wading through SEO like descriptions and all the pictures are fake or they're AI generated.

SPEAKER_05: It's tough. But if I need a book by Wednesday, they will always have it. And so they still have me. And honestly, Jason, I didn't even know what prime cost. We might actually have two prime accounts now that I think about it. We should probably not do that. But to me, it's like a Netflix. It's part of like electricity. It's a thing that you just have and it costs a number and you pay it.

SPEAKER_12: It's interesting that you call it a utility like that. The reason you call it a utility is because

SPEAKER_00: it's so goddamn reliable. And it gets more and more reliable. I'm I'm here. And like I said, I'm in SoCal. And like if I forget something, it's just super easy for me to just go on Amazon,

SPEAKER_37: zip, zip, zip. But if I just did like a search for podcast microphone, just as like a joke. And like, literally, the first row three of the four are ads, they're sponsored. And then above it is roadie. And that's obviously sponsored. So of the top five, four are ads. And then in the

SPEAKER_00: next row, you know, you get like, the best sellers, the overall pick a popular brand pick, all this other nonsense. And then you go to the next row, it's another row of paid. It's a carousel paid. I would pay somebody I'm not and I am not kidding here. If somebody builds me, I'll pay 500 bucks for a toolbar. I literally pay 500 bucks for the toolbar. That takes ads out of Amazon results. Just does it exist? Does it exist? Anybody? I mean, literally, I'll pay four times as much as I'm paying on prime to just stop the ad so I can just get a decision made quicker.

SPEAKER_197: Yes. Also same thing for Google, just Google search, not Google the company. Just, just,

SPEAKER_03: I want to be able to search for something and be able to scroll all the way past the fold before, before I get to content. I want to get rid of that experience. I want it to be inverted. Yes.

SPEAKER_31: That way it's good first, add second or to the right, not to the right ads. And then a result down there. Also that Google thing of people also ask, good. I'm glad you know that. Leave me alone. I don't need nine different ways to rephrase. How do I cook a tortilla? Because if I wanted a different search

SPEAKER_202: for it, I do it because I'm not. Yes. How do you cook a perfect tortilla? Yeah. Got it.

SPEAKER_05: I mean, I would actually love to learn that. That'd be fun. Yeah, sure. Someone pointed out in the comments as we're recording this, that the Amazon prime credit card offers 5% cash back, which is apparently paid for by chase. And the reason why those economics I think can work out is the average Amazon customer is not your average points guy. And so they are probably carrying a balance and therefore the economics are a little bit different and it

SPEAKER_03: can work out differently. Anyways, Bilt, shout out to you Wells Fargo. Well,

SPEAKER_210: enjoy your next $3 billion fine. All right. Let's talk about AI around the world, because you had a couple of things here that you're excited about. The first one

SPEAKER_05: is about a Chinese investment group called High Flyer Capital Management, which was actually new to me. Apparently they've 8 billion AUM. Had you heard of them? Yeah. Nope.

SPEAKER_12: Like a Chinese hedge fund. Apparently they, they are using technology and AI to make better trades,

SPEAKER_212: but something happened along the way. Yeah. So they got into a lot of AI to crunch all the data

SPEAKER_03: to help them run this quant fund as they call it. Yeah. And so they ended up spending some of that technology out and now they have a model called deep seek V2, which is apparently a quite

SPEAKER_31: good LLM. And then the prices have come down so much that we're now actually seeing a price war inside of the Chinese AI market. So deep seek costs to you on for every million output tokens. And then after that launched in May, ByteDance cut its prices dramatically. Alibaba cut prices

SPEAKER_05: dramatically and made some of its models free. So it seems that we're seeing an investment company accidentally subsidize an AI product that caused a price collapse in the value of AI technologies in China. But to me, Jason, the thing that sticks out the most is the pace here. This is moving fast and people talk about China being behind an AI now. It doesn't feel that way when I read this story.

SPEAKER_01: Yeah. Um, what's interesting about this is I think, you know, building language models in other

SPEAKER_00: cultures and other languages is going to be slightly different. Um, I think, and you know, the pricing and the competitiveness here, I think is moving all of these language models down to zero or close to zero. It reminds me of storage storage was such a blocker in our industry for so long. Google photos.

SPEAKER_01: And you know, that's why the product launch of Gmail was so special for those of you who are under the age of 40 when Gmail came out as the second product out of Google, you were fighting people

SPEAKER_00: were selling on eBay and Craigslist invites. It was the first service to really do like an invite system because they were trying to manage the storage. And the idea that you could have unlimited email

SPEAKER_20: storage broke people's brains. How is that possible? And it started with like five gig,

SPEAKER_00: 10 gig, you know, and just you guys have whatever it was, maybe it was 50 megs or something. You guys know how that story went. Once we crack that open, then YouTube, Netflix, just photos as another example, like the idea that you would save high res photos. Before you put photos into your backup storage, the first thing you did was downgrade them. Yes, you would use a piece of software to make them smaller. And then you back them up. Now it's like, do you want raw files? Go for it. And now that I'm in my AV phase, I'm in my audio file phase. Yeah, J file. I am super into this audio stuff. I'm using flax. Uh, these things are 20, 30, 40 times as big and I'm storing them through a service called cobuzz, Q O B U Z, which has, it's basically like Spotify for nerds from France. And they take every album and they make a high res flat version of it. So when you're using these special headphones, like the vocals I use, whatever, you know, you, in order to hear the sound, you, you don't want

SPEAKER_37: compressed audio files again, threes or whatever. And so it's just extraordinary. Again, enabled by storage. So I think the trend here is going to be as the number, the cost per token go down. And I think two, one is like, um, I think it's still seven, eight, one to the dollar, uh, you know, basically. About seven. Yeah. Seven ish. They basically control it. So it's been seven for 20 years. I think, uh, the Chinese are like, huh? Seven. So what's what you're trading at today?

SPEAKER_68: So two Yuan is worth about 14 cents. I believe. Okay. Oh, no, sorry. 28 cents. I'm a big liar. There were 28 cents. Yeah. So it's like it's a quarter. Yeah. Uh, and they

SPEAKER_00: will just, you know, and if energy is going to become the constraint, well, you know, in China, there's a lot of nuclear power plants and hydro plants, and you could just put all the data centers there and pay somebody off to like the Bitcoin miners did. So, um, it's going to be really interesting to see how different countries approach these language models for self-defense, you know, security reaching super intelligence. You know, that's like one existential part of this. And then the other part is a very practical part. Like how are we going to compete in efficiency when I don't know the producers of this podcast can use all these AI tools to make show notes faster or people who are transcribing and transcripts are faster or the average analyst at McKinsey can,

SPEAKER_230: you know, research stuff faster and faster. These other countries and other languages, if they are going to be like still doing things manually, that would be like, they're still, you

SPEAKER_00: know, I don't know, using like rocks. Yeah. They're doing steam engines and everybody moved to electricity. It's like, really, you're burning coal to run your factory. Like there's electricity. You could use that. And so this is existential on an efficiency basis and the efficiency of your populace and businesses. And then there is super intelligence, obviously. And that's where I dovetail this one with what's happening in Japan. Yes. So, so there's a company called,

SPEAKER_03: and Jason, I might butcher this Sakana, Sakana, Sakana AI. It's a Tokyo based LLM developer. It is built by some deep mind alumni. So some Google heads have gone over to work on this. And according to the information, they're raising about a hundred million dollars at a $1 billion valuation. I know we're all a little inured to large dollar AI investments, but here's another nine figure round into a brand new unicorn essentially. So worth keeping in mind. And the things that they do that matter are, are twofold. One is yes, they are building Japanese language, large language models. So in Japanese language, most of the internet is, is English. I think about half. So that's very important, but also they put out a paper talking about how to make LLMs or train them, I suppose, for less. So back to your efficiency point, the actual model creation, according to Sakana AI, is going to become cheaper. So localized language and less expensive. That means we can do more

SPEAKER_05: models in more language at a higher quality point. And I think that means every single language is going to have their own best of breed LLMs within the next 12 months, 18 months.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah, absolutely. And you, you have the Falcon project out of the UAE. You know, I think the sovereign wealth funds and countries are starting to realize, wait a second, America's running away with this. We need to be in the game. And do we want to be in the game with Sam Altman, uh, and Microsoft? Do we want to be in the game with, you know, Facebook or Google? Well, that means then we have an even bigger dependency on our country's sovereignty on another American company. And they already are looking at it like, whoa, how much of the EU's economy is tied to Google and they've and Facebook, and they're trying to figure out how to manage that, right? And, and the impact those things have on elections,

SPEAKER_239: those things have on the economy, right? Okay. So I know we're, we're thinking broadly here,

SPEAKER_03: but when we consider what we now call the decline of globalization, right? Economies being a little bit more insular. Every country wants to make their own food, energy, semiconductors, and AI models. I wonder if some of the decoupling that we're seeing actually is because of what you just said about the EU in that some American companies have gotten so big, so powerful and so global that other nations are like, Hey, this is not like the old days when there were 50 companies competing to ship us tuna, you know, or whatever. That was fine. One company powering this much of our economy is incredibly risky. So we need to be a little bit more local. So I wonder if essentially Microsoft and all of our big tech friends became so powerful that they broke globalization.

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SPEAKER_00: In a way, you know, COVID, when people, COVID exposed all of the, um, kind of lack of redundancy in the system. So when you saw COVID in like, wait a second, people can't get their Prozac or their Adderall, people can't get toilet paper, where are batteries coming from? What about chips? Oh, I can't buy a new car because the supply chain is defined by the weakest link in the supply chain. And if the weakest link is like a chip, there was, I don't know if people remember this,

SPEAKER_01: there was like a moment in time for two years when they were selling cars and like, you can buy this car, but it doesn't have these three features that we launched seven years ago. And I was like, what? They're like, yeah, we can't get that chip. I'm like, you put that chip back in

SPEAKER_245: my car and just get, um, just, no, it's just no for you. No chip. Yeah. No adaptive cruise control

SPEAKER_00: for you. Keep going. And I was like, I literally was going to buy a Land Rover Defender at one point when I was in my, um, my J pow, my, my, my skiing phase, my J powder phase. And I was like, uh, wait, I can get the car and it's angled. So yeah, the more important thing is elections, I think. And then and culture. And so, you know, when you think about governments,

SPEAKER_86: they're looking at it going like, wait a second, who has the most influence over France's elections

SPEAKER_249: or, you know, London, the UK's or Germany's like, YouTube, tick tock, you know, Google and India is

SPEAKER_00: a great example of people who are like a government that's like, you know what, we're the most populous country. Now we're on the ascent. Um, no, you can't have these apps in our country. We want to have our sovereignty. And so they take a, and it's a democracy. It's not the most perfect democracy. If you look at, uh, the statistics of like, you know, living in a free country and you know, there's work to do, but it's pretty much a democracy and they're very smart about it. They're like, you know what, we're not giving you the benefit of the doubt, tick tock. Whereas the United States, we've got like, people are like, oh, I got a donation from, you know, Jeff Yass or whoever's like the big tick tock holder. Okay. Yeah. I think we're cool with it. You know, like they're

SPEAKER_37: making actual smart decisions in India. They're like, yeah, no bueno. You don't have this much influence. We're taking that out of contention. Even with that very, very clear eye perspective.

SPEAKER_03: And their context here is that they did ban tick tock a couple of years ago, much to the chagrin

SPEAKER_05: of a bunch of people in India. Uh, it's still hard to keep certain countries, sorry, certain companies out of the country. So, uh, you're familiar with UPI, which is the unified payment

SPEAKER_03: interface in India, kind of that, that payments backbone the government built. Well, the two biggest users of that are Google wallet. And if I recall correctly, Flipkart, which is mostly owned by Walmart. And they're trying to cap the max percentage of payments on UPI that can come from those two at like 65% or something, but they've had to push it back because there's no real next option. So even if you're smart, it can be hard to get away from the hegemony of American companies,

SPEAKER_68: which are astride the globe. And if you thought what happened with the ad networks and social was

SPEAKER_00: a big impact, it is going to be like a drop in the bucket, a flea on the, on the butt of an elephant when compared to what AI could do. AI could just totally change, you know, how some of these countries are operating and then they would be beholden to this Franken corporate structure of open AI, which kind of is like saying you're owned by Microsoft, or maybe they're going to have a public company. Like, do you really want the sovereignty of your country to be dependent on open AI or Google Gemini? Of course you don't. And so this is existential. What this also means is I think this will move the race towards AGI general intelligence, I think is going to happen faster than people anticipate because there's going to be so much

SPEAKER_03: competition for it. Yeah, no. So I, I agree with that wholeheartedly. I just, I'm curious what your definition of AGI is because I've heard, I mean, this is the thing that you buy into. Yeah. Um, I, I have a personal hunch that may not be particularly learned, but I'll, I'll give it to you anyway, since we're live, why not? I'm sure as flops, we'll just cut it out. Uh, no, we won't. Um, the thing that I struggle with with current LLMs is that they are very good at taking a corpus of information and doing things with it. What they cannot do is something that is kind of self-reinforcing or they can't expand past that as far as I understand it. So to me, an advanced generalized intelligence, if you will, um, would have to be able to look back at itself and then edit what's underneath its decision-making process. And then it could become something that I would consider quasi sentient and therefore generally intelligent. And that may have sounded stupid, but I tried publicly. So there you go.

SPEAKER_00: Uh, yeah. And so that is one of the definitions. There are many swings at bat for this. People have, you know, some people have said something like very simple, like the Turing test. You can't tell it's not human, right? And it can fool most people. Um, I, you know, I look at it, um, from not just

SPEAKER_37: intelligence because verticalized intelligence, we've already adapted to, we know we're not going to beat, you know, um, a verticalized chest AI. We don't anticipate we would beat them, right? We

SPEAKER_00: don't anticipate we would beat a perfect factory robot in making perfect lattes from the cafe X machine, right? Like we, okay, no barista is going to beat the cafe X machine in the sheer number of perfect lattes. It's just, it has all that data. It's going to be perfect. I look at it as artificial super

SPEAKER_37: intelligence, which means it is smarter than any human who has ever existed in the history of humanity. So I came up with that one myself. Um, cause I've heard other people say it's like smarter than everybody or smarter than the average is a lot of things. I just say, you know what? Fuck it. Who's the smartest human that ever lived is an Einstein, whoever is smarter than that person

SPEAKER_00: in which would mean it makes discoveries. It doesn't just do tasks, right? It can make novel discoveries in the world. And we're starting to see that with biotech companies. We're starting to see

SPEAKER_37: that with mathematics. People are starting to see the AI make discoveries that humans haven't gotten to

SPEAKER_01: yet. I don't know that there's been a super profound one that's changed everything. But you

SPEAKER_00: know, Freeberg always talks about the protein folding kind of stuff. So it's augmenting human intelligence, like getting us to these solutions. I think it's going to be like, at some point,

SPEAKER_01: it's like, Hey, by the way, you want to know, uh, what's wrong with the big bang theory? And we're like, yeah, tell us super intelligence and be like, it's wrong here. I've proven the big

SPEAKER_60: bang is wrong. Here's what actually, here's how the universe started, by the way, you're living in a simulation. Like it might actually figure something out that will just be like, what? It's like, yeah,

SPEAKER_01: by the way, there is extraterrestrial life. It's here, here and here. Like, like, like, might literally look at the decorpus of all of what's in space. And then be like, yeah, hey, dumbasses, bing, bing, bing. These are the three closest things. And by the way, here's how you know, it's there. And by the way, these two, these civilizations have flamed out three times already. They're on their fourth gen. You guys are

SPEAKER_00: right behind them. Like it might actually be able to figure stuff out that a human mind is just not capable of. And certainly, we're about to move into the phase of this stuff becoming consistent, which was the other

SPEAKER_53: story I sent you that I wanted to get your perspective on, which is, you know, and I don't know if it made today's docket. But there was a story I read about AI and McDonald's, I guess they were trying to figure out how to take orders with AI. And they're using IBM's Watson, which is hilarious

SPEAKER_13: to think how early IBM was to all this, they were talking about Watson 10 years ago and in Silicon Valley,

SPEAKER_267: and it didn't go that well, but now they're back with Watson X, I think, which is Gen X or Gen AI based.

SPEAKER_03: Here's the story. And you're right. I was actually going to conserve this for tomorrow's show. So here's a preview. But the gist here is that they put all these automated ordering systems into McDonald's locations and now they're taking them out because they weren't doing that good of a job. And when you make a mistake with a new technology, everyone talks about it. Self-driving cars, same thing from last week. So, you know, viral mistakes make it hard to maintain brand equity or brand strength. So actually, ironically, I think social media is to blame here because if no one could have tweeted or tick tocked their McDonald's mistake, it was probably good enough to keep, I would just guess. Yeah. You don't want to get rocked all the time, you know?

SPEAKER_00: The idea that a human being is behind that little box in the drive-through makes no sense. Like, how is that a human's job? It makes no sense. Like, there should be an AI that's just like, you just say randomly what you want. It shows you on the screen. Please confirm, please confirm,

SPEAKER_37: please confirm. We're done. And, you know, I am super excited about humanity not having

SPEAKER_53: arduous, painful jobs that do not fulfill people. Um, you know, like, and I think there's probably some

SPEAKER_00: people who were charming cashiers who used it as a platform for their like own personal standup or being kind to people. It was like a vehicle for that. But, you know, like, I don't know. Maybe

SPEAKER_53: some people also like digging ditches and, you know, picking corn in a field before we had it all

SPEAKER_84: automated away. So, um, I worry a little bit about the job, like ladder. Like, okay, so I went to McDonald's the other day because I like to get an ice cream cone from there when I'm sad. And

SPEAKER_37: the ice cream cones make me happy. Yeah, they're pretty. Actually, I'm with you on that. I'm with you on the McDonald's ice cream. I started hitting the McDonald's on the way to Tahoe when I change out

SPEAKER_00: my snow tires. They're like, it's like on this back road of in Sacramento. And the only place to eat is

SPEAKER_37: McDonald's and it takes me an hour to swap the tires. I like to do it myself. I'm trying to like keep my blue collar thing going, you know, and just be a man of the people. Um, I got like, you know,

SPEAKER_87: the only guy with the family office who does his own tires, but it's fine. It's fine. I kind of like

SPEAKER_00: it. I just told my assistant, like, tell me, find me a place between here and here. And they found it and I go, I know the guy, he swaps it up and it's good for the girls to see me changing the tires with the guy and, you know, doing these kind of like tasks and there's McDonald's there. And I don't go to McDonald's. My parents wouldn't let us go to fast food. That was a day, man. When you go to a

SPEAKER_20: McDonald's and you order from that kiosk and they bring you, my kids eat those chicken nuggets. I get that Filet-O-Fish and the ice cream and their coffee's pretty good too. Coffee's actually remarkably okay.

SPEAKER_01: I'm like, wait a second. This coffee's as good as like most Pakistani delis where I would get them in New York. Like, you know, put the same amount of sugar as my Pakistani guys do. They're like,

SPEAKER_301: you want sugar? One, two, three heaping teaspoons. I'm like, wow, it's different in Pakistan.

SPEAKER_302: Um, well, maybe, maybe that's like the old school Red Bull. It's just coffee with a ton of sugar.

SPEAKER_245: Basically. Yeah. I have a whole different, a whole different metric scale. So, okay,

SPEAKER_135: you go to McDonald's, you get your ice cream, get you out of your funk.

SPEAKER_03: Yeah. And then I feel better. And now I've completely lost where we started this conversation because now I'm thinking about Turkish coffee. The ordering system, the ordering system. Oh, right. Anyways, I go there and thank you. That's perfect. The people who work there are fantastic. It's always kids. They're probably 18, 19. They look like they are in high school or just out

SPEAKER_31: of it and they do a great job straight up. They are lovely to interact with. They're quick and efficient. They're great. And it is back to your point about a platform, a first job. You get in

SPEAKER_03: there, you make some money, you get your first couple of W2 checks. You pay some tax, you put

SPEAKER_31: some money in social security. You learn a lot. Your friend gets fired. You learn how not to be an idiot. You, you become a manager. You learn how much that's terrible. And you get a lot of these

SPEAKER_03: kind of like building block skills. And that's why a lot of people in the United States have their first job at McDonald's or similar. You get rid of that. Society is going to be okay. But if we apply the same idea to a lot of entry level jobs from both the most blue collar, all the way to the most white collar, I worry that we are just kind of sawing the bottom off of all the ladders. Yes. And it's

SPEAKER_210: going to be harder to like even get senior talent later because we didn't have the junior talent that

SPEAKER_31: was doing the grunt work. Digging ditches sucks. I've done it. Pass. Get me a machine. But I just don't

SPEAKER_05: want to be so quick to rip out all the jobs because I think some inefficiencies at the earlier career point are good for the economy net down. Yes. You know what? This is such an important discussion.

SPEAKER_141: That's why I love having you as a co-host because we're kind of off on this little tangent here, but we're figuring some things out here in real time. What's very interesting about this conversation is

SPEAKER_37: having, you know, uh, a 14 year old and, you know, she's got cousins who are all in the same age group.

SPEAKER_00: And I've been hanging out with that group and, um, they are very interested in work. And so like us, when we were kids, like how much am I gonna get paid per hour? It's like, my daughter's doing a

SPEAKER_01: little babysitting here. Yeah. I'll have her do a creative project with the eight year olds. And I'll, I did a fun thing last night. I was like, okay, I'll give you 10 bucks to do this creative

SPEAKER_37: project for an hour with your, uh, two siblings who are eight years old, the twins. Um, and then they're

SPEAKER_01: going to give you a review, like a Yelp review. And if it's a good review, you get a $5, they can give you a $5 tip or not. And she got the $5 tip. They really liked it. Right? So it's just trying

SPEAKER_53: to teach them about tipping and gratuities and, and, you know, good service and all this stuff.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah. Um, and then, um, one of my friends, who's a venture capitalist, his son is trading crypto sons, 12, 13, maybe. Yeah. And he's trading stocks. And I told them about kids investment club. So I started this, uh, I mentioned on all in, I was gonna start a kids investment club and

SPEAKER_37: just get my daughter and her cousins, like a hundred bucks a month. And then we get together twice a month. And we were once a month, they pick what stock they want to do. We have to talk about that, write a deal memo, boom, they bought the stock. So I bought the domain and kids

SPEAKER_311: investment club.com. And I'm wondering like the time between like full adulthood and digging a ditch, but we might actually be doing when you were explaining this, like the rungs, maybe we're compressing it a little bit and we just get them through it faster. So like, okay,

SPEAKER_13: when, you know, three months of digging a ditch, do some manual labor, like understand how hard this is. Yeah. And then, Hey, you can go down being a plumber, by the way, millennials are suddenly not millennials. Yeah. Millennials. I might, I've just read an article. There's a counter trend. Now,

SPEAKER_313: some of them are going to this trad wife, trad, you know, about that traditional wife.

SPEAKER_78: Oh yeah. I saw this more as like, they were just more interested in the trades,

SPEAKER_60: right? So there's trad wives and then there's tradesmen, uh, which is obviously, this is like a very gender or if you're triggered by gender discussions, disclaimer here, if these are

SPEAKER_01: not my terms, it's just the terms they're adopting. They're kind of going back to like, you know what? This whole system's F anyway, if I go work at Google, I'm going to spend three or four years there. They're going to weigh me off. Yeah. Screw it. I want to be a trad wife. I want to be a trades person and vice versa. And I'm going to be a plumber and I'm going to make $150,000 a year as a plumber and run my own business. And then I had two more plumbers and make a half million dollars a year and I'm good. So I wonder if we're going to just compress the time that they get to adulthood and financial literacy, which is what I love about the gambling sites. Everybody's down on gambling. You know what? I can't wait for this. All right. Hit me. I take it. I take the total opposite. I hope these kids lose all their money in high school. A hundred percent of it. Yeah. They all get burned playing poker, crypto, whatever nonsense, let them blow their $500 a month working at McDonald's and let them learn the hard lessons then and get their brains to understand. Like

SPEAKER_00: you're in a casino where you cannot win. There's no, you have no edge. The system is rigged against you and let's get that out of your system. Boom. Let's get onto the next thing. So this is like,

SPEAKER_05: if you catch your kid smoking in the old days, you lock them in the closet with a pack of cigarettes, make them smoke them all before they come out. And then they never smoke again. Right. Or it's like,

SPEAKER_03: it was like you drank tequila in college and now you can't drink tequila anymore. Yeah. Jason's face,

SPEAKER_28: I believe. It happened with gin. Somebody started pouring shots of gin when I was 15 years old and

SPEAKER_326: I got the dry heaves for the first time. Shots of gin? You know that Tanqueray green bottle? Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_329: That by looking at you, you're like, oh yeah, I know that bottle. Quite familiar actually. I didn't

SPEAKER_317: get to rehab on merit. Sorry. Are you a G&T guy? Oh, I was a, well, I was an everything guy, but

SPEAKER_245: geez. Okay. I G'd and T'd. Oh yes. I mean, I know some G&T people and man, they, they like it a little too much. It's so good. I did like four or five shots of G&T over, like they shaked it in ice and I drank,

SPEAKER_332: it went down so smooth. Had like an interesting flavor. Boom. I lost the next three hours dry

SPEAKER_31: heaving. Yep. At 14 or 15. And you turned out fine. So this goes back. Yeah. All children should be given draft kings at 15 and fourth. Sure. To, no, I mean, I, I joke, but on your kids, um,

SPEAKER_03: investment club idea, when I was in elementary school, I joined the, uh, nascent stock market club, and that changed my life. So straight up that, that I think was one of the first sparks of interest to me in business. And then it was biographies of buffet reading the journal. Then I found a book on startups and then I ended up where I am now, but like, I think it was that first touch that early touch of the adult world of money. Ah, it's a sub stack. Nice. I mean, I bought the domain name

David Friedberg: kids investment club and, uh, I just, you know, this is when I have an idea. Uh, this is what's good when

SPEAKER_00: you have like a, a really qualified staff and a team. You, you, now you're part of the team. You, now you understand how I get so much stuff done. Yes. How do you get so much stuff? Now you're at the team. Yeah. Like there's 20 people behind Jason doing all the work. So I just texted Heidi. I'm like,

SPEAKER_01: get me kids investment club. Cause I just talked about it on all in.com and have fresh set up a

SPEAKER_00: landing page. Over a thousand people signed up. This is the second time I'm talking about it. I tweeted it once I'm doing it now. And so I'm going to make, I may make this into a product. Cause I was talking to my friend who had this kid who, um, his son, that's who the kid is, was doing the crypto trading

SPEAKER_42: and stocks. And he's like, yeah, it's a pain in the neck because you can't have a kid's Robinhood account.

SPEAKER_01: So I was like, ah, I was like, I, this is a business opportunity for startup. Here's a request for

SPEAKER_00: startup. You go to kids investment club, you download the app. They can put in their trades.

SPEAKER_308: The parent then sees the trade and either approves it and does it themselves. Ah, so you end up doing it for them. Got it. You approve every trade or you're doing, technically you're doing the trade, right? But the kids, and you could have four kids in the app, each of the four kids, you know, let's say you have four kids, uh, or you did it with your cousins. You have six kids in this app. Each of them, you put in 50 bucks a month, automatically a hundred bucks a month, whatever your jam is. And then you let them take out, you set rules. So my idea was to set the rule of, at the end of the year, um, or at any time, maybe every six months, they can rebalance their portfolio and they can take out half the profits.

SPEAKER_37: I love that. So they have a motivation half stays in half comes out, they can spend it on whatever they want. The other, and if they're, if they're stuck, they can't take anything out until they catch up.

SPEAKER_245: So they got to learn like hedge fund managers. They gotta do the, they gotta do the make good.

SPEAKER_37: And this would be like an incredible product. So if there is somebody out here who's a fintech founder, I will, uh, partner with them and incubate this company. Kids investment club.com. Go ahead and sign up. I haven't done anything yet, but I'm going to do it this summer. I'm going to do the first one where I, maybe you'll come on with me. We'll do it, uh, as a live show. And we'll just like teach kids because your kids will be doing it in eight years or something.

SPEAKER_24: But to your point, how inspired did you get? What was the first thing you said?

SPEAKER_99: Was it a startup book or was something else?

SPEAKER_03: Uh, so for me, it was, uh, investing in stocks, getting interested in business, started reading books about it. I was the only kid in middle school reading the journal in print because I was so cool. I was the coolest kid in middle school, as you can tell. Um, and then I found a book called F to startups at the Corvallis public library.

SPEAKER_05: Oh, my friend Phil Kaplan's book.

SPEAKER_352: Exactly. So I saw Phil this weekend at my friend Nick Turecki's wedding. He's one of my best friends. I Kaplan. I'll have him on the show.

SPEAKER_212: Uh, he ran, can we say his old website on the show? Foxcompany.com. Foxcompany.com. Classic. Yes.

SPEAKER_03: And I read his book and I was blown away by the idea that you could do business, but silly business. And I was like, perfect. This is business, but without all the old fudgy rules. Like I was reading like, you know, bank earnings. And then all of a sudden you read F companies about the 2000.com. Boom. You're like,

SPEAKER_05: that's where I want to be. And so I was going to go into economics and go to wall street and do banking for tech companies, but I ended up with a philosophy degree and now I'm here. So yes, this, this is, um, back to Jason's point about not being politically correct. I think some of the language hasn't aged perfectly, but it is a wild and good read. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

SPEAKER_361: Yeah. Um, and by the way, uh, breaking, um, breaking news story here on the zoom. Um,

SPEAKER_00: I just, somebody just sent me a picture of you in, uh, when you got the, the book,

SPEAKER_177: here you are, Michael P Keaton, Alex P Keaton. There you are. You remember family jobs?

SPEAKER_160: There you are in full head of hair, great hair back then. Yeah, no, it used to be fun. I used to be curly and lovely. And then, and then, uh, I don't know. My genetics reared their head. Literally sheared my head, I guess.

SPEAKER_37: Uh, it's a good look. Anyway, uh, I think it explains a lot. You, you, you have found your

SPEAKER_00: tribe here on this week and startups. Hey, tomorrow we're going to do another live show. We'll have the twist 500. Yes. Uh, today I would like to nominate, um, both the Japanese and Chinese companies to go into the twist 500 under LLMs. Any objections? Oh, zero, zero objections. Okay. So we're adding those two

SPEAKER_37: today. So producers, please add them. Uh, and we talked about, do we talk about any other startups today that we should consider? I don't think we talked about other startups to consider today.

SPEAKER_03: We do have a number of other entries, but we also have two others that I'm going to keep under wraps. Okay. Coming in tomorrow that we're going to add and talk about, uh, we could add built, but I don't think either one of us are, I, I would, I declined to choose them.

SPEAKER_374: Um, I, I, they have to be nominated because this is a $3 billion free IPO company. So the twist 500,

SPEAKER_361: you know, they're just, they're very significant. They're going on then they're going on. Yeah.

SPEAKER_269: And if they go out in flames, you have to give $5 to the local cat and dog shelter.

SPEAKER_01: The idea is like, they're worth monitoring, right? These are companies that it's worth my, this is a story worth monitoring. Like you would put, we work in the twist 500 before they went public too, even though it might've been a train wreck, you probably would have put, uh, we definitely would have put Theranos in, right? To monitor that. Well, I mean, for sure. So much at stake,

SPEAKER_31: right? I guess that's true. We're not endorsing them as here are the 500 startups that we think have the highest chance of delivering the best IRR to their backers. It's because some of those

SPEAKER_03: companies are very quiet and less conversation driving. So this is, um, visibility and importance, if you will, in the conversation and the market. So, okay. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: Worth tracking, right? Like notable, notable might be the word like, yeah.

SPEAKER_37: Doesn't mean we agree with, we're endorsing everything they do, but we're going to monitor them. Uh, and you, I think we'll have the twist 500.com domain up shortly. You can go to,

SPEAKER_245: what is the, um, domain name now for signing up for the newsletter ticker.com. Yep.

SPEAKER_03: Links to the database of the twist 500 in every issue that goes out. So if you get that newsletter and if you don't do it, it's free. Um, you can get to it very easily and we'll have a better URL for all of that, uh, very soon, hopefully this week. All right. Let's take one question from the

SPEAKER_141: audience. As we wrap here, any other news stories I think we can just put into tomorrow's show.

SPEAKER_37: What do you see as the biggest challenges around the EU's AI act? Will the uncertainty kneecap startups, will this be a repeat of GDPR's impact on privacy laws from Christopher Wiseman, who's watching the show live on LinkedIn. So we are, we are coming to you live on LinkedIn. Salute. What, what do you think about the, the, I, I, we haven't taken apart that regulation here on the show, but knowing what I

SPEAKER_141: know about it, this regulation and pre-regulation of the industry is concerning to me. I think we are way too early for regulation. I might be in the minority of this, but, um, what are your thoughts

SPEAKER_391: generally? No, no, I don't think, I don't think you're wrong at all. The, what I find encouraging,

SPEAKER_03: because I do want there to be a third AI tentpole somewhere thinking about China and India being smudged up together, being one, the US is another. I think it'd be great if there was a couple of European champions in the conversation. The thing that has me heartened about the EU AI regulation is that the Mistral team, if I recall correctly, was involved in the crafting of the final set of regulations that got put together. So they're listening to industry and not just industry, but the current AI champion of Europe, if you will. And so that's very encouraging. And I contrast that with what we're seeing in California, when they're trying to set essentially a speed limit on, on model, uh, size, which I don't think is the right way to approach this at all. I don't know what Scott. Well, to your point earlier in the show,

SPEAKER_00: didn't you say earlier on the show, like everybody's making smaller models that are more efficient and you

SPEAKER_01: can string together a hundred models of like a small size, and then you would have routed around this

SPEAKER_03: rule. Well, that's one way to go about it for sure, but it's, it's an unnecessary inefficiency, right? Like, I mean, it's, it's kind of like deciding that cars are brand new, can't go over seven miles an hour because the horses are in danger. Well, the horses are going away. So that to me, that's a really good analogy, right? Yeah. Thank you. Look at us on the show. Um, the EU has me less worried than California, which is a hilarious statement about where we are today. I, I just think that AI engenders more Doomerism than is reasonable and climate change does not engender enough. And so I think we're freaking out about the wrong thing and we should build awesome models, advanced technology quickly,

SPEAKER_31: because we all might need to live in the cloud one day because there won't be any land left.

SPEAKER_345: Uh, we definitely, uh, you know, I had this discussion with Freeberg on the show, you know,

SPEAKER_37: to try to just get from him, like I'm all in, like just putting politics aside. Cause I know it's like supercharged our ocean temperatures going up in recorded history. Yeah. Big time.

SPEAKER_01: Are severe weather events happening at a more frequent basis in recorded history? Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00: Okay. Is the amount of carbon in the environment in recorded history, forget about even doing the previous carbon dating just in modern, is that going up? And it's like, yeah, it's well, we're starting to even it out. We're actually kind of getting to less increasing. Great. So, you know, just put it all together. I remember 20 years ago, I was talking to Elon about this issue and he just said, you know, Jason, this is a stupid experiment to run because we have one planet. So why would you, if it's a 1% chance, if it's a 0.1% chance, you would never run that type of experiment. So I just, just keep that in mind. You know, this is a first principle thinker extraordinaire,

SPEAKER_53: uh, you know, and he kind of, you know, did a good job with the EVs and backing up the biosphere,

SPEAKER_407: Tim Moore. So. Oh, he does, he does my two favorite things. Yeah. He makes,

SPEAKER_05: he's getting us closer to self-driving. Yeah. And he makes big rockets as a science fiction nerd. That's my jam. I will, uh, I'll take you to Starbase for a launch. Uh, I went to the first

SPEAKER_37: Starbase launch and I sat next to him in the control room. And when I say that thing,

SPEAKER_01: shaped, I mean, we were miles away from it. It shook the, it shook you through your core. Your, you could feel the vibration in your body. It was nuts. And I've been inside the starship. Like

SPEAKER_311: the, it is cavernous. You could fit 300 people inside of it. You could literally, it's like taking a giant airplane to the other side of the planet. It's so exciting. Uh, interestingly enough, uh,

SPEAKER_249: I am going to go to space, uh, at some point with my friend. So, and a couple other friends. So I,

SPEAKER_13: I'm waiting for it to be super safe. I have to get buy-in from my three daughters and, uh, I talked to my friend about it. And at some point, I think we're going to go up and we're going to do a guy's

SPEAKER_267: trip. I'll lose enough weight to fit in your backpack. Exactly. I don't think you get to

SPEAKER_78: bring a backpack. Because my, my spouse thinks I'm nuts for wanting to go to space. But to me, it's like, absolutely the next thing. Let's go get, get, get. I mean, come on, please. It's it,

SPEAKER_37: to not want to leave the planet earth. If you had the opportunity to is crazy. And I think in our lifetime, I can see in 30, 40, 50 years, it being accessible to people in the modern, you know, uh, world to develop people with a above average salary will be able to afford to do this as a

SPEAKER_14: bucket list item. Yes. If you do take me to the star base, um, just keep a little bit of duct tape

SPEAKER_37: in your vice. If politics ever come up, just slap it over me. Uh, listen, with regard to politics, we can talk about it here. You and I are actually perfectly aligned on this because we're both first principle thinkers who are common sense thinkers. And like, I can't wait for this election to be over.

SPEAKER_53: This is like, I don't know if you saw, I was checking out drudge report and they linked to an axio story that had pew data on it. So I guess this is, I'll give pew data, the, the credit for

SPEAKER_00: this. Sure. The number of people, the percentage of people who hate both candidates is now above 25%.

SPEAKER_426: I saw your tweet about double haters. They call them. I love it. It's like the Chappelle show,

SPEAKER_299: the haters ball. I am totally on the haters ball. That that's good. Nasty. You are the nastiest

SPEAKER_317: pimp I ever saw. Dave Chappelle is such a, Dave Chappelle show remains to this day underrated, which is hard, given how much phrase it was given. It's so great. Well, let's call it

SPEAKER_86: there and we'll be back. We went crazy. We went crazy long show. Uh, everybody, um, do us a favor.

SPEAKER_00: If you like the show, just email like a friend or two, like maybe just one, just email one friend and say,

SPEAKER_01: check out Alex and Jason breaking down the news. Like this really will catch you up and get you thinking about the future. That's all I ask. Just send it to one friend. That's it. Send the link

SPEAKER_13: to one friend. Say, check it out three days a week. You're going to start getting your news. So this is the place. Get your subscription tight. Keep it right. Alex, you're awesome. X.com slash Alex

SPEAKER_313: cautious optimism.substack.com dot news. Oh, cautious optimism. News. Yes. I have a fancy my,

SPEAKER_434: I have my own URL to Jason. It's not just the kids investment club. I like that. There you go. We'll see you all next time. Bye bye.