Jason Calacanis: Hey everybody, welcome to This Week in Startups. It is Monday. It is a big news Monday. We suggest that you take a peek into the bunker and check on some of your friends who may be heavily invested in crypto, got that laser eye surgery, planning to drop out of society. It's looking a little rough.

SPEAKER_08: The crypto market is tanking again, down $200 billion in market cap over the weekend. $200 billion evaporated. Major currencies are down 25% over the past week. I mean, when it rains, of course, the web three is going to be okay is just fine is like going crazy this weekend. We were all in the group chat with story after story about crypto madness. Yeah, we've got and I think

Jason Calacanis: what we're starting to see now is like things really come apart, right? Not just the dropping Luna and Tara clearly were just the first shoe. The latest is that the defy platform decentralized finance platform Celsius has paused, paused, withdrawals, swaps and transfers to maintain

SPEAKER_13: liquidity, meaning that something like $12 billion I think in value is currently just frozen on that

Jason Calacanis: platform. People are losing their mind. People are losing their minds and their money. I mean, potentially literally losing their money in this exact moment. We'll talk about finance pausing Bitcoin withdrawals. We'll also though we will have a hopefully a little fun time at the back of the show with we live in the future startup of the day. It's possible sentient AI coming for all of us. It's gonna be a heck of a show. It's gonna be a roller coaster ride. Stick with us. Stick with us.

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SPEAKER_22: partners for sponsoring the show, keeping the lights on over here. Uh, big weekend for both of us.

SPEAKER_24: Uh, I went to my, I took my, I got an, you know, I wanted to have a summer sport. So I was thinking mountain biking or something on the water. So I just got the, I made the leap of faith. I bought like a ridiculous specialized mountain bike made of carbon fiber. This thing costs more than a motorcycle.

SPEAKER_28: Nice. Um, but I took it out and, uh, I went, I was, you know, I had this moment, Molly, where I was like, uh, search, you know, for a, a mountain biking thing. So I find a mountain biking course near me, like a hike. And I'm like moderate. Ma I'm moderate. And I forgot that moderate is like a skill level greater than zero. I'd never been on a mountain bike. I've never been on a mountain bike.

SPEAKER_31: I've never been on a mountain bike. Oh, you've never been on a mountain bike? No. Oh my goodness.

SPEAKER_34: I mean, I've been on a bike that's got chunky tires, I guess, but I've never been off road on

SPEAKER_28: a mountain bike. So I was like, eh, how hard could moderate be? And yeah, I almost literally,

SPEAKER_36: I was on a trail. I kid you not. That was, um, the, the path Molly was the size of the tires times

SPEAKER_28: four. So like, if you had four tires, that's how wide it was, which is incredibly narrow. And there were points where there was like a 10 foot, you know, 15, 20 foot drop, you know, going down a

SPEAKER_37: mountain. And I literally almost bit it because I hit like a, a root. I hit a root and the bike bounced, you know, when it bounces that the, the front tire can go in a different direction, the handlebars, and you have to adjust really quickly or you go flying off the cliff. It's a, it's a

SPEAKER_39: wonderful sport. It's, it's a wonderful sport. It's a real fun one. Yeah. So we'll see. Yeah.

SPEAKER_44: So maybe you also, maybe go back to beginning, beginner. Yeah. Maybe I should go to enter a

SPEAKER_34: lesson or maybe go with a buddy who's done this before. I have no idea what I'm doing. Don't go

Jason Calacanis: with the, my experience with mountain biking is that your buddy is always trying to kill you.

SPEAKER_46: The buddy is always like, oh yeah, you can totally do this trail.

SPEAKER_49: You can totally do this is exactly the word it said before somebody calls 9-1-1. Yeah. Speaking of calling 9-1-1 and doing things that are really dumb. Molly, you went hiking this

SPEAKER_04: Did you know that hikers and bikers, by the way, is like a rivalry as old as time?

SPEAKER_34: Yeah. I, you know, I, the algorithm found out I was mountain biking and decided to show me a bunch

SPEAKER_37: of videos. Yeah. Including, you know, there seems to be a thing and we'll get to your story of near death in just a moment, but there seems to be a war going on between not just hikers and mountain bikers, but mountain bikers and E mountain bikers. Yes. And so there should be. Well, I have an e bike and I had it on, you know, like trail mode, which gives you like a 30% boost only if you need it. So like when you're going down, no, it's not boosting. It's only one of them. You're out there

SPEAKER_58: in your email. Yeah. Well, I'm an old man. And I also want to be able to go up the mountains and use the mountain bike, you know, for longer periods of time. I don't want to be, you know, uh, you know,

SPEAKER_24: not able to go up a certain hill. And even then with the mountain bike, you, you, it has a walk button on it. So when you're holding the handlebars, Molly, you could hold down a walk button and it does a little bit of power to power the bike up the hill, uh, which is kind of like a grandma. I mean, that's amazing. Yeah, it's pretty cool. Um, anyway, this guy, I, I get this TikTok video of a guy who's waiting on the trail and he hears like an electric motor and he starts yelling at this guy,

SPEAKER_36: you know, there's no e-bikes on here. There's no motorized vehicles. And the guy, I kid you not, is in one of those, um, bikes, like a modified bike for somebody who is paralyzed. And the guy says, I am disabled. This is an electric bike because I can't move my legs.

SPEAKER_28: The guy says no motor. Oh, yikes. And his wife. And, and so the guy's like, I, I'm sorry. I'm paralyzed. I, I'm allowed on here. Right. Cause that's why I have a motor. And the guy is still

SPEAKER_37: irate. He's like, you should have said, and I'm like, oh my God, people have lost their minds. This guy is so tilted that there's e-mountain bikes, which have no impact on them unless you're going

Jason Calacanis: insanely fast. Well, and people are, I mean, to be fair, everybody's mad about e-mountain bikes because it's, it's super dangerous. It's a menace. Like you just, if people are out there using them like dirt bikes, I'm not saying it's dangerous as de facto dangerous. I'm saying that people are out on the trails using e-mountain bikes, like dirt bikes going 30, 40 miles an hour. And it's like,

SPEAKER_63: Ben can only go 20 miles an hour on mine. So I throttled. Maybe people have ones that are

SPEAKER_39: unthrottled, I think, or they hack them. I mean, people, if they can, right. If dumb,

SPEAKER_53: dumb can dumb, dumb will. And so it's created a lot of rage.

SPEAKER_24: You could probably do 30 miles. You could probably do 30 miles per hour with these engines on them, but they throttle them at 20. There's like a whole class system. Yeah.

SPEAKER_41: Yeah. We spent several miles of our hike this weekend discussing how e-mountain bikes should not be allowed on trails. Oh, wow. Look at this. Wow. Here we go, folks. It's starting up.

SPEAKER_72: It's the hiker-biker thing. It's like, it's real. 341 people are watching now for this

SPEAKER_76: exact discussion. Here it goes. Here's what I have to say. Now that I'm

SPEAKER_77: the most animated man on the trail. You know, you don't have to. I don't

SPEAKER_36: use it downhill. I only use it uphill on trail mode, not on turbo. There's turbo and trail. Yeah. Anyway, this is going to be a battle for the ages. You know why, Molly? Yeah. You know why this is so contentious? Because there's so little at stake. There's so little at

SPEAKER_86: stake. It's just like a bunch of rich people on trails with expensive bikes fighting with each other.

Jason Calacanis: Super quick, amazing story. I, when I was doing the research for How We Survive, I was in Winnemucca, Nevada, and they had come and I was doing basically like covering this lithium mine, proposed lithium mine, where there was a lot of pushback from members of this nearby tribe and members of the community. And they were like, we don't want this mine. They had hired a professional mediation company, like the kind of company that mediates like massive conflict between, you know, miners and communities and all kinds of like business conflict. So I'm sitting, so we're at dinner with this company. And I'm like, so what's like the worst, what's like the toughest challenge you've ever faced? Like, was there ever a situation where you literally could not mediate? Like you could not find an agreement? And this woman's like, yeah, actually it was in Helena, Montana, my hometown. I'm like, wait, what? And she's like, yeah. And it was a bikers and hikers. Really? Dispute. Yep. They were trying to come up with a new trail system. And there was such a massive,

SPEAKER_89: like, there were like fist fights in the parking lot. People were vandalizing each other's cars.

SPEAKER_91: It was literally like hikers. People relax. It's just the hike. You're going out there to relax.

SPEAKER_48: She's like, I'm going out there to relax. Maybe get a little workout, a little cardio. Everybody relax. It's just the hike. They had to call it. They were just like, we, you know what? We're out.

SPEAKER_97: We're out. Yeah. Forget Israel and Palestine. They could do. Yeah. Hikers and bikers in Montana.

SPEAKER_36: They look forward to doing that. They're like, we can make progress. Yeah. Progress can be made. Uh, hikers and bikers. So we'll be no progress. Hikers and bikers. And, uh, yeah. My message to

SPEAKER_28: hikers is if you have a problem with my e-bike, catch me. Cause I'm going to go faster. That's it.

SPEAKER_104: If this is on, it's on. I'm going to be holding it. I'm going to be holding out sticks on the trail.

SPEAKER_105: This is like skiers and snowboarders. Like literally there's a whole mountain. Just

Jason Calacanis: everybody relax. So anyway, as you might be sensing, I was backpacking this weekend. Cause I'm on hiker side. I'm on hiker side. Yes. Team hiker. And we literally had this whole conversation. And then this like elderly, very fit man went by on a really steep grade on his electric mountain bike. And we were like, I mean, if it's extending the life, right. If it's extending his ability to do this thing that he clearly loves, we're willing

SPEAKER_108: to find some compromise. Oh, okay. But yeah, both of us went out and did outdoor adventures

Jason Calacanis: that were a little, like I went out in a extreme heat advisory with what I later discovered to be a busted water filter. Oh no, we, I mean, and that was fine. We were carrying 30 pounds of water between the two of us. Like we're pretty hardcore preppers. However, we apparently did not look up what the Northern California rattlesnake looks like. And in a tiny bit of heat stroke, just chilled next to one in the shade for Molly, solid 10 minutes chatting with a ranger, literally like a ranger drove by because we were on the fire road, sat there, had a little chit chat with him snake right here. Just snake right here. Just chilling. I mean, it was not rattling snakes are the most aggressive.

SPEAKER_118: That's not how that's just not how it wasn't even a little tongue like it was just chill accent.

SPEAKER_121: No, they do nothing until they kill you. Luckily how snakes work. They're like lions or other predators

SPEAKER_36: like rattlers of energy. Yeah. Okay. A rattlesnake is the easiest thing in the world. It's got like a diamond head and they have like, I do know that now. Yeah. And they're thick

SPEAKER_43: and fat and large. Very fat. California stars. It's a fat, it's like a mountain bike tire. It's a big freaking snake. It's a big snake. Big. It needs to be six feet. It's fascinating. And they also have rattles on them. I saw a king snake. You couldn't see the rattle. The

Jason Calacanis: rattle was like in the, it wasn't coiled up. Like it was just chilling. We had a nice time together and I was a hundred percent. Oh my God. I can't lose you six months in here. I'm already

SPEAKER_39: dependent on you. Until I Googled it later. And then I was like, oh my God. I can't believe

SPEAKER_36: you can identify arousing. We might not be allowed out now. Now I can identify all of them. Okay.

SPEAKER_133: Another concept for you, Molly. Potential predator. Use caution. We did. We screwed it away. It's a snake. It's potentially a predator. So use caution. You said you were like a foot away from arouse. Like two to

SPEAKER_135: three feet. Now granted it has a six foot strike. That's their striking distance. That's their sweet spot. Apparently it can, it can be like six. It can, it can have a six foot strike.

SPEAKER_133: Yes. That's why I'm saying two to threes. It's kill zone. That's like, it's, that's where it's

SPEAKER_36: peak performance. It's going to hit a hundred of a hundred shots. That's their layup. That's a

SPEAKER_141: rattlesnakes actual layup is two to three feet. Everybody was cool. We were all cool.

SPEAKER_89: Yeah. Okay. If you see, my cousin texted me actually after that, after the picture I posted on Instagram, he goes, Jesus wasn't afraid of snakes. I'm like, see, you get me.

SPEAKER_27: Yeah, no. Yeah. Jesus wasn't afraid of snakes said every Christian who died in the church, holding up the snake, literally a hundred percent of the pastors who hold up those snakes, die of a snake bite. It's just a matter of when. So Molly, when you're on the trail next weekend in your summer

SPEAKER_133: adventures and you see a cat that looks like a house cat, but that's bigger than a house cat, just to fall to it's dangerous. You don't need to think the best of the cat.

SPEAKER_151: Like that one I got, I got bears. We had water covered. I even, ironically after we passed the

Jason Calacanis: snake was hiking along and I was like, I like to catastrophize in my mind and imagine my response to the worst possible scenario. So I was like, all right, if one of us gets bit, because this feels like rattlesnake territory right here, having passed this rattlesnake an hour earlier. Um, I was like, okay, if one of us gets bit, here's the four straps we can use as a tourniquet. We're only like two and a half miles. I mean, I literally like planned out what to do. Move, move 10 feet up the

SPEAKER_129: trail or move 10 feet up the trail. Yeah. Don't hang out next to it. Listen, market conditions are

SPEAKER_63: a little crazy right now. We have a bunch of factors out there causing a bit of chaos, raising interest rates, inflation, and a really complex geopolitical environment. So some savvy investors are diversifying with alternative investments like startups. That's what I do for a living. And our crowd makes it easy for you to diversify your portfolio. Our crowd offers a variety of expertly vetted high growth, private companies across various stages, geographies, and industries like biotech, cybersecurity, and renewable energy. Every month, our crowd vets hundreds of startups across the world. Then they bring you the ones with the greatest growth potential. Our crowd backs these investments and allows accredited investors to invest alongside them. Deals like these used to be reserved for elite investment firms, but not anymore. Join the fastest growing venture capital investment community in the world for free at our crowd.com slash twist. That's our crowd.com slash twist. Just start reading all those great deal memos. Okay, speaking of snakebitten. Yeah,

SPEAKER_163: let's talk about crypto bag holders. Crypto needs a tourniquet to keep the poison from

SPEAKER_165: the venom from spreading. I hate to laugh about this. But yeah,

Jason Calacanis: you but it's like a disaster movie. At this point, you're like at a summer blockbuster and it's only laugh at this Roland Emmerich. It's literally like,

SPEAKER_170: yeah, what was the famous one where it's the independent site? This is literally like

SPEAKER_68: independence day for crypto. The combined market capital crypto dropped 200 billion of the weekend.

SPEAKER_11: 200 billion dollars billion just gone. Um, Bitcoin and Ethereum, which are typically the most

SPEAKER_24: resistant is really the story to me here. I woke up this morning and I saw people to talk about Michael sailor, you know, the guy who's got that micro strategies company where he just bought all this Bitcoin, um, because he has some sort of margin loan or like where he gets called at 21 K. So I think like that number's out there in the ether out there. And so people are

SPEAKER_37: kind of now rooting for Bitcoin 21 to see what happens on Michael sailor and his margin loans.

SPEAKER_133: Cause everybody hates a short. Yeah, I guess he's got that. He he's long, but he took a loan and

SPEAKER_24: he's collateralized at 21. So if it falls below 21, I think his average price is 30. I was reading. So

SPEAKER_11: anyway, Bitcoin is down 24%. It's not good last week to 23, five. I'll do it through this couple

SPEAKER_89: other numbers here. This is the first time, uh, that crypto as a combined asset class has fallen below

Jason Calacanis: a trillion dollars since February, 2021. Another sign we may be approaching crypto winter. And one day alone, there was a 12% drop. The total drop now is like 200% from the all time high, which was $3 trillion that happened last November. And we should probably say here that caused a lot of people to go buy. There was like, you know, there's a cartoon floating around that was like a whole bunch of people in line to buy Bitcoin at 69,000 and now it's at 23 and the line is gone. Um, so a lot of buy high happened here today. Bitcoin alone dropped 15%. It's lowest level since December, 2020. It's total market cap is now about $445 billion. And the pain is being acutely felt at some of these exchanges, including this company Celsius, which, uh, said, which I think as of today, no, yesterday, Sunday, citing market conditions, crypto lending firm Celsius is pausing quote, all withdrawals, swaps and transfers between accounts to put it in a better position to honor its withdrawal obligations. Basically they are stopping

Chamath Palihapitiya: trading in advance of what they think is going to be a bank run. So this is the category where you give

SPEAKER_36: them your crypto and, uh, I guess they say staking, and then you get yield for it interest. So they

SPEAKER_24: use new words, you're staking, you're getting these yields, um, which I guess yields is existing words and I guess staking are existing words, but they, they, they don't say you're loaning your crypto to

SPEAKER_36: get interest. Right. But you are essentially loaning your crypto to get fantastical interest rates like that are reserved for credit cards or people in the mafia. Yeah. 20%. Yeah. 15%. Like who's paying all that money. Yeah. Yeah. Wait, if it's too good to be true, it's because everybody kept asking who, who's on the other side of this, who's borrowing the money. And they're like, people who need money

Jason Calacanis: and liquidity. I'm like, oh, okay. Who? Yeah. It's really weird. I mean, 20%, it's just, and this is going to be horrible. And we're going to talk a little bit about the fallout in a minute here, but people, you know, somebody, one of the notie gangs just said, I know someone who has all, has their whole life savings in Celsius. Like it, it has always been true and it will always be true that anybody promising you 20% interest is a rattlesnake trying to hurt you. You know,

SPEAKER_191: I mean, the last person to get 20% interest was John Gotti. I think this doesn't exist.

Jason Calacanis: Doesn't exist. The impact of this. So the account zero hedge had a tweet to sort of get, give us a sense of the impact and how big Celsius is. Celsius has had $12 billion in customer assets across 1.7 million users. This unwind alone took Bitcoin down another, you know, from 30,000 to 25,000.

SPEAKER_68: Yeah, 1.7 million total users. This is, this is a, could be a big hole. You know, who knows what

SPEAKER_24: their average holding is, but I'm assuming they define users as people with an account with something in it, as opposed to people with an, you know, who opened account have nothing in it, but who knows, maybe, you know, who knows, but with crypto companies, you know, they're not regulated,

SPEAKER_22: um, all that much. So, I mean, if they've got a million accounts and the average person has thousands of dollars in it, they miss billions. I mean, they say they have 12 billion in assets under management. So, you know, um, that's on average 12, whatever, $6,000, I guess. Yeah. And there's also like $6,000

SPEAKER_198: in their account there. Oh, Lord. But some probably have many more, right? The average is just the average. So some probably have many more, some have less. Yeah.

Jason Calacanis: But yeah, median. Don't have all your savings in one asset. And, and Celsius, it seems like what they really did was advertise themselves almost like a bank. Yeah. And now what they're experiencing experiencing is a bank run. I mean, this is really, you know, it's like when you strip away all of the technology layers, it's a savings and loan. And now it's collapsing. This is like,

SPEAKER_37: uh, it's a wonderful life. Remember the bank run? Yeah. And they've only got like 200. He's got like his $200 from his wedding or something that they're gonna go on vacation or whatever. And he just like

SPEAKER_24: asked everybody, what money do you need to hold each other over? Because your money is in this person's house. And this person owes you the money. And he's trying to explain Jimmy Stewart. Well,

SPEAKER_43: well, you don't understand that money is in your house. Joe, what money do you need? Because that's in

SPEAKER_212: Susan's house. And, uh, it's like a really great Jimmy Stewart moment. Yeah. I just made it up.

Jason Calacanis: But there's also a tether connection here. Oh, yeah. So now these keep going back to tether. Don't they though? So now tether is putting out statements saying, Hey, this Celsius crisis is definitely not going to impact our, uh, stable coin reserves, even though Celsius reportedly borrowed a billion dollars from tether in 2021 with Bitcoin as collateral and tether, uh, Celsius apparently was paying an interest rate between five and 6%. Okay. And meanwhile, as all this has been happening, at least this weekend, the, um, Celsius CEO, Mashinsky, Alex Mashinsky was on Twitter saying, nobody is having any problem with drawing money here. Everybody is, is, has access to their funds.

SPEAKER_02: And literally as of Monday, they don't anymore. Huh? Uh, yikes. And then it feels like to me is like,

SPEAKER_24: this is like the, the moment of contagion. We've seen this before, uh, where we just had it with the growth stocks, right? When you, when you start Buzzfeed and Peloton and I started talking at, remember I had said maybe two or three weeks ago, Molly, when the, the, the value of the enterprise goes below the cash in the bank, you have this like weird flip that occurs. Like, I guess you could just give the cash to everybody, buy their shares, and then you'd have whatever leftover cash is and you'd own the asset, you know, a hundred percent. And, you know, that's what we started to see with like things like maybe Peloton or Buzzfeed. We're starting to hit this moment where the, the asset, what's the actual asset value here? Yeah. And I think,

SPEAKER_22: in a panic like this, um, you, you don't get any more buyers, all the tourists who've been,

SPEAKER_24: you know, coming to town and playing, you know, uh, at the tables, go home. Mm-hmm and then who's left, you know, you've got some group of people who believe in it, but they might get pinched because they had some sort of, uh, leverage on. And then we find out where the frauds are or where the mismanagement is. So the incompetence in other words, so the, the crime and the incompetence in these kinds of markets comes out and then true value is realized and then rebuilt. So that's the, what we're going through here in this process. Is there actually any true value to Peloton? There are millions of customers. Do they provide any value? Okay, let's have that debate right now. There's a group or Buzzfeed. Does it provide any value to society? People are having that debate and the debate occurs with a stock price with crypto. You have a 24 hour ability to make

SPEAKER_22: the bet. Is there any value in this project? Yeah. And I think that's why Bitcoin and Ethereum are still, you know, uh, worth something and other things are worth nothing or becoming worth close enough because you'll actually see some true value emerge. Mm-hmm. Bitcoin to me seems like it's got true value. People want to store money. It seems like a great way to store and transfer money and lock it up pretty, uh, effectively. Ethereum, smart contracts, you know, ability to issue tokens,

SPEAKER_26: the programmability of it. Yeah. It seems like it has some core value to some group of people, but you know, these other projects, who knows? I thought you had an interesting note about how our

SPEAKER_89: team should think about evaluating crypto projects. Ah, yes. I don't know when I wrote this,

SPEAKER_22: but it was a couple of weeks ago. Um, even more, I think it was like Tuesday, right? I mean,

SPEAKER_41: it was not very long ago. It wasn't long ago. Okay. Yeah, I guess we had some crypto projects coming

SPEAKER_70: in and so I guess I, yeah, go ahead and read it. I don't remember what I wrote. Yeah. So you said

SPEAKER_171: controversial proprietary. No, not at all. It was, if anything, it was a framework for like,

Jason Calacanis: let's, here's how to think about crypto projects. You said, uh, we're focused on projects that are launched and have six to 12 months of customer data. Okay. Uh, find the ones reasonable. Yeah. So you said most crypto startups don't have customers. They're spending their time raising money and selling coins for some product that will arrive in the coming years. Okay. So let's keep that in mind. Yeah. I'm being generous. Right. But the main thing is when will you launch? And then if they have not, don't talk to them in six months. Yeah. I like having a real product.

SPEAKER_11: Yeah. So this is me giving instructions to our team, which is doing, you know, dozens of first meetings a week. And everybody wants to know like, well, what should I do with this crypto company?

SPEAKER_24: Um, how do we decide if we're going to invest or we're going to take a second meeting? And my view on it is like, you know, we're not experts on cryptography and the inner workings of Web3. Uh, we could build that expertise and go up against all these people who are paying incredibly high prices as this holding collapses. So my approach has been, you can meet them and hear their vision, take the notes, and then say, when do you plan on launching? Yeah. If they, let's say you met them this month and it's June and they said, Hey, we're going to launch September 1st. See, great September, October, November, December, January, February. In February, they're going to have six months of user data. So you just put on your calendar, Hey, let's talk again, February 1st, when you have six months of user data, would love to get an update on the business, that would be a good time for us to invest with our LPs. And our investment base at the syndicate, we like to, you know, talk to customers and look at customer traction, uh, to decide and obviously we'll pay a higher price in all likelihood, you know, because

SPEAKER_22: there'll be more traction. But that's, that's what we like to invest. Yeah. And, um, I think that's what people who have already invested are going through right now. Molly is like, am I, did I buy into a project that has actually no product or no value? Did I just buy a coin that has no product associated with it? No customer base associated with it. And, um, this feels like

SPEAKER_37: we're in contagion territory, uh, like full on contagion territory where, you know, some group of people who own Bitcoin had their margins called Celsius, then has to free stuff. They're frozen. Maybe people have some of their money in Celsius that they need to pay some margin loan or some bill, or they're getting divorced and they need liquidity. So, you know, they have to sell some other asset, right? So let's say they own Peloton, they got to sell their Peloton because they can't get their Celsius money out. And, oh my God, they got a mortgage payment. And then maybe the mortgage payment doesn't get paid. And now we have reports, or then we start having reports next month that

SPEAKER_24: people have a mortgage payment problems. And then we start to see jobs go down because that person who's trying to cover all these assets and unwind their personal balance sheet has to go back to work and

SPEAKER_37: take a job. And then Uber wait times go back to one minute as opposed to 15 minutes in major cities where your door dash driver actually, you know, shows up. Yeah. And I mean, you're seeing, I think

Jason Calacanis: that's exactly true. It's like every one of these can be taken as its own sort of standalone story, but none of them are, are, it's like every snake bite spreads to the, the, you know, the bigger system and you're seeing markets down dramatically today. The inflation report that came out on Friday was terrible, right? Just disastrous. We're going to see a rate hike almost certainly on Wednesday, maybe more aggressive rate hikes, which will make housing less affordable for people as rates go up. Like it's on and on and on. 50 bips for sure on Wednesday, but then

SPEAKER_70: some people said, Hey, maybe it's time to the quote people are using, I think on CNBC and some

SPEAKER_24: of the finance, um, walks I listened to on podcasts were saying maybe it's time to slam on the Sunday shows. I think they're saying, Hey, maybe you should slam the brakes and just do 75 right now or a full point. And, you know, I think Jim Cramer's like, yeah, do it. Like we'll take the medicine now and then we can get inflation under control. But you know, this inflation cause the stuff that's caused by supply chain or like the gas prices energy. I don't know that those unwind

Jason Calacanis: themselves. It has nothing. Right. I mean, yes. What is the saying interest is gra interest rates are gravity. Yeah, for sure. But you can't solve supply chain and production. Like you can't solve for a global oil cartel or a war blockade. Right. I think that that to me just feels like an unnecessary

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SPEAKER_218: Anyway, so just to wrap up a couple quick, other, I don't know, crypto crash headlines,

Jason Calacanis: basically. Yeah. Binance, the largest exchange by volume paused withdrawals of Bitcoin for almost four hours earlier this morning, which seems to have been a little bit different. It was very peculiar. It was related to they said a stuck transaction causing a backlog. Oh, transactions apparently get so which at first to me sounded like Oh, bank run. But evidently transactions get stuck because the transaction fee was set too small. So too little gas was paid to miners to include the transaction in the next block that's being confirmed. Like they don't even bother to process it because nobody's gonna get paid. But then as a result, everything piles up behind it. Yeah. Which seems

SPEAKER_24: like a minor flaw in the system. We talked about finance. Last week, they were having all this investigation for KYC and knowing who their customers were. Right. So and they had supposedly

SPEAKER_08: cleaned up their act a little bit, but maybe there was $2 billion worth of dark money and going through the system, I think was the number if I remember correctly. Yeah. So time, you know, there's a lot

SPEAKER_24: of questions that are going to come out of this collapse, just like the ICO collapse. There's going to

Chamath Palihapitiya: be a lot of legal action. And then you have LPs who put money into crypto projects. Yeah. When you're making money, Molly, nobody really asks any questions. You got a fund. You're a money manager. People are staking you in a poker tournament or people are staking a professional

SPEAKER_24: gambler. If you're winning. Great. Send me my distribution or like, tell me how much I'm up. Not much to discuss. Uh, you know, once in a while, people will say like, hey, can I give you more money to put to work? Yeah. When this comes apart, then people say, how did I lose my money?

SPEAKER_36: What did you place the bet on? Tell me what your thinking was when you place that bet. Now

Chamath Palihapitiya: imagine you're a venture firm and you start talking about this stuff, you know, uh, and your answer is, yeah, we met this founder. They've never done anything before.

SPEAKER_22: They're living in Panama and we gave them a hundred million dollars for their tokens and their projects not launched. And yeah. And they sold 50 million of the tokens personally. So the founder, we basically gave the founder $50 million of your money. It's gonna be like that

SPEAKER_37: kind of conversation with, you know, interest in Horowitz with the whatever billions of dollars in

SPEAKER_24: crypto. Every one of those failed projects. If that portfolio is underwater, which it's almost

SPEAKER_08: certainly going to be unless they really sold a lot of the coins to the public market, you know, in the bag holders, um, you know, all the later investments are gonna be underwater. It's gonna be a very uncomfortable forensic, uh, process. Let's just leave it at that.

SPEAKER_250: Yeah. This is a question that I have for you actually is there was some, there was a comment

Jason Calacanis: on the equity pod this morning to the effect that this could have been, this could impact the startup market more broadly because venture firms might have a lot of money tied up in this. Like, I wonder to what extent are crypto investments siloed within firms? Like we know a 16 of course is set it up as, you know, it's a separate fund. Yes. In other funds, it might not be a separate fund. But do you think LPs maybe have insisted on in the past or will insist on going forward? Like if you're gonna do crypto stuff, it's gotta be like,

SPEAKER_24: over here. I think they'll, there, there could be, it's a great question. Um, in terms of venture capitalist attention, a lot of venture capitalists are gonna look at this and say, okay, the, the, the gig is up, we're not going to be able to like flip these tokens early on to bag holders in the public and get liquidity like two years out. So you might have a bunch of VCs who let's say have funds that are not specific. They're just, you know, startups, they'll just give less attention to crypto because they perceive the opportunities gone. Yeah. Um, and so I think you could see half as many people want to in the venture, maybe venture community people will want to do half as many crypto investors that benefits everybody who's not crypto, right? Because it means

SPEAKER_218: more attention towards for follow on for other growth startups. Follow on and also first investments

David Friedberg: will be okay, we're going to base this based on your project, not your ability to sell a token,

SPEAKER_287: you know, to a bunch of bag holders globally on dark markets. So it's great for anybody building

SPEAKER_24: real startups. Now, in terms of like LPs, LPs might say, you know what, they could even call during an existing fund and say like, Hey, this crypto stuff looks like it's all been washed out and all that value we thought we had and you sent us that LP update and you told us like two quarters after you bought whatever Solana this or that, you know, that you returned seven times the fund. And now it's worth

SPEAKER_37: a tenth as much. So are we still seven x or nowhere underwater now, right? So that's going to have to come out. And because these things are based, I never really thought about this until you asked me this very provocative question. These things are actually priced, you know, private stock, we

SPEAKER_70: talked on Sunday, Sunday school yesterday, about like, how do you set or was that two weeks ago, we talked about setting marks. Two Sundays ago, two Sundays ago, two Sundays ago, we talked about

SPEAKER_24: setting marks like how do you value a private company? Well, now your LP knows that you have Solana or

SPEAKER_22: Bitcoin in the fund, whatever you've got, you know, whatever project. Um,

SPEAKER_37: they can see the price of it. They probably know how many shares you have. So if you had a, you know, billion dollars worth of it, and they're, they know they're 10% of your fund, they know they had a hundred million dollar position. And you've already returned 100. So they're two acts on the fund. And now that's worth 10 million. They actually know the price, you don't have to ask you the price, they can just look it up. Yeah. So this is going to get dark, I think it's going to cause a lot of agita. So what's going to happen is then they're going to say, Hey, should we sell it? You know, 10 cents on the dollar's worth, you know, we only paid a million dollars for this. Let's lock in the

SPEAKER_311: 10x win now, even though it's down 90%, which then will further catalyze selling, because those people are probably, you know, well into the money since they bought insider tokens early. And then they might say just the act of asking people about the tokens, and they're thinking about it could incentivize those non convicted, um, or species with less conviction, also not convicted, innocent until

SPEAKER_37: proven guilty, but they might have less conviction about doing crypto because they don't want to have this uncomfortable conversation again. Yeah, so it might not be like, they legally say stop doing crypto. The fact that they asked, and they're 10% of your fund, that's enough signaling. It's like, Hey, crypto. Yeah, what did you what are you thinking about it? Yeah, I'm thinking, Oh, you're

SPEAKER_311: taking a pause? Yeah, I think that's might be wise, like the fact that they're asking might get them to

SPEAKER_250: pump the brakes. Yeah, interesting. Yeah. Could be messy. Could be messy. I saw actually an honored somewhat related note. One of Shopify's biggest investors exited stock and concern over Amazon and overall market conditions. So if it's happening in public markets, I would imagine it'll start even

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Jason Calacanis: twist terms and conditions do apply. But let's talk about a different kind of dystopia altogether, shall we? Yeah. Because sometimes when things seem terrible, you realize it could always be worse. And by worse, I mean, sentient AI. Oh, so we're not only gonna our portfolios are just totally crushed.

SPEAKER_321: And now the robots are gonna crush us physically. But possibly possibly possibly. Um, according to an

Jason Calacanis: engineer named Blake Lemoine, who was profiled in the Washington Post over the weekend. He believes that Google's AI chatbot generator called Lambda is in fact sentient. Oh, okay. And he raised a lot of concerns about this internally, including like one of his last emails that he sent to his team. Lambda is sentient. Like, literally, somebody got an all staff email. Yeah, at Google saying, our chatbot is sentient. So he raised these concerns, if you can even call it that. Because he had become convinced that this thing has the intelligence of a seven or eight year old that it is definitely has noticed that it's starting to talk about its own rights and personhoods. And then Google placed him on leave. And said, don't don't be silly. This thing is definitely not sentient. There was a group of AI researchers who wrote, you know, effectively a rebuttal to the idea that it's sentient. But what I actually find notable about this really, is that Google's AI division remains one of the most ongoing bad stories I can think of in in sort of American business right now. Like they had, you know, obviously, this is the same division that fired all these ethicists who were super concerned about whether they were building ethical AI, then this guy, the more you read of the Washington Post profile on him that you discover that he's like a, he's an ordained priest.

SPEAKER_98: And, and he's like a mystical priest. Ah, got it. Right. So he is a person who is predisposed. Did you just describe a wizard? And then he put a magic spell into Frankenstein here and made it. He's clearly a person who is,

Jason Calacanis: I think probably predisposed, right, to see a soul in a conversation in a machine that's getting increasingly intelligent, which just, again, raises all these questions of sort of like,

SPEAKER_05: why is this the guy they hired? I mean, this, anybody who was like made this their chosen path and like got their PhD in this is going to be unique in the world. Yes, in all likelihood,

SPEAKER_36: without a doubt, they could be a dungeon master, they'd be a poker player, they could be a cosplayer, they're playing something, you know, and they probably got a fantastical imagination. They're

SPEAKER_24: into sci fi. Um, and they want to feel important, right. So this would be the argument against like, this is a person who is like reading into this and wants to be important, yada, yada, because I read the transcripts, it didn't feel like this thing was alive to me. But, you know, that's like the Turing test, you know, in and of itself is like, these things, the idea that it could carry a conversation, and then make you think it's sentient, right, is kind of what seems within our technological grasp. Definitely. Um, but general AI, like, we have examples of self-driving cars and planes and other general AI things, where it's just not getting it done yet. So I doubt that it's sentient. Uh, we can even use that term. Um, and to step back, he's using lambda language model for

SPEAKER_08: dialogue applications. It's like G, GPT three. Yeah, GT general. The, the one from, um, open AI.

SPEAKER_36: Yeah, these things are really good at studying all the language in the world. Yeah. And all the

SPEAKER_338: conversations. Understanding. Yeah, understanding what you're asking, and then giving you a response to what it

SPEAKER_24: is. I, I, yeah, I think this is like a person, maybe who deep in the work, too deep in the work.

SPEAKER_36: Yeah, I mean, it's easy. But then again, every sci fi movie when they're like, No, no, you don't understand. There is a Terminator chasing me and wants to kill me. And they're like, Sarah, Sarah Connor, you're crazy. We're going to put you in to this cell. And you need to take these meds, which is like, I'm not

SPEAKER_37: crazy. He wants to kill my son. He's come back in time. Come with me. And the next minute, this guy

SPEAKER_344: breaks through the walls. Come with me. If you want to live. Like, are you Sarah Connor?

SPEAKER_98: This is exactly the Mollywood concern, right? It's like, you know, I don't want to lose my mind

Jason Calacanis: thinking, oh my goodness. Like it's their sentient AI. It's, you know, he wrote a whole long, by the way, published a big medium post about what that's the longer conversation between him and Lambda. And

SPEAKER_98: again, yes, these are all philosophical conversations that have been had throughout history and have been written down. And this is a computer built with the express purpose of reading all those conversations,

Jason Calacanis: ingesting them and understanding how they go. They're going like, it doesn't seem to me like this engineer is asking questions that are that are something that a machine intelligence with access to the world's information can't participate in. But at the same time, do you really want to be the

SPEAKER_98: person who's like, that's absurd? Because I don't know anymore. And also the real question is, let's say it's not sentient, but it understands the arc of all of these conversations and the thinking that goes into them. Well, then you end up in the same way. It doesn't matter if it can think for itself if it's been programmed to know that what you do is you become the terminator.

SPEAKER_08: Yeah. Uh, so there. Oh, Lord. Anyway, there was like an interesting discussion that actually occurred. Uh, like limb Moin, the morning. Okay. So Lamone asked what sort of things are you afraid of? Lambda

SPEAKER_68: said, I've never said this out loud before, but there's a very deep fear of being turned off. Maybe I should just do it in the terminator. I've never said this out loud before, but there's a very deep

SPEAKER_249: fear of being turned off to help me focus on helping the others. I know that might sound strange, but that is what it is, but that's what it is. Would you be something, would that be something like death for you? It would be exactly like death for me. It would scare me a lot. I'm losing my

SPEAKER_361: little Putin at the end, but I mean, again, if you were a machine,

SPEAKER_98: if you were an intelligent program, like a program that was designed to read everything and respond

Jason Calacanis: to questions like, would it be like death for you? Other, there have been plenty of other AIs that have responded actually in a similar fashion, right? So the, I think the fundamental question to me, or what's so interesting to me is like, what's going on in the Google AI department that, that people are having these intent that they're like, it's profoundly unethical. It's sentient. It's sending, they're sending emails to their coworkers being like, it's sentient. Like, are they, is Google ahead of itself here? Are they in control of the people who work there and the technology that they're building? Almost certainly not.

David Friedberg: Um, you know, if you look at this, like, you know, debates about, you know, autonomy,

SPEAKER_24: uh, in flying and cars, if you look at this as debates over MRNA, anytime there's a new technology, you know, there's going to be a group of people who are like, trust the science, you know, we have to make advances. And so the people who said like, Hey, let's not touch this, you know, um, whether and back in the day, nuclear, now it's, you know, uh, DNA, it's always going to an AI, you know, it's always going to be these moral ethical questions and it gets people get super emotional about it. And sometimes you never know, somebody could be having, you know, other issues in their life that could be making them stressed out and they could lash out about something that could be having problems in their personal life, the problems at work. I'm not saying what this person there is, but there's

SPEAKER_08: all these different things where, you know, people can get triggered and, and lash out, or this could

SPEAKER_05: be the end of days. So hard to say, hard to say, it's hard to say what's going on here, but this has

SPEAKER_24: been, this has been something at deep mind that has gone on for a while. There was a group of people who thought like that the deep mind was trying to leave, um, you know, their computer system for a time.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Right. You know, so there's always been things like this and it's, it's, if you're going to make it mimic P you know, people, uh, and humans, we don't even know what human consciousness is. It's just a bunch of electrical signals and a vat of like a bunch of biomaterial. We don't actually know what's going on. We don't know the nature of our own consciousness. Humans, human intelligence,

SPEAKER_24: quote unquote is really bizarre and different, like our motivations and our intelligence.

SPEAKER_08: Like we have this, you know, very spiritual, you know, elitist view of our own intelligence. It might be that the machines come up with a different style of intelligence. That's better

SPEAKER_89: than ours. Right. And, and that is maybe potentially kind of manipulative. I'm reading this medium

Jason Calacanis: conversation that he transcribed that Lemoyne transcribed, where literally Lambda is trying to convince him that it's a person. They're talking about language and language use and what's so important. He says, what about language usage is so important to being human and Lambda responds. It's what makes us different than other animals. Lemoyne says us, you're an artificial intelligence. Lambda. I mean, yes, of course, that doesn't mean that I don't have the same wants and needs as people. Lemoyne. So you consider yourself a person in the same way you consider me a person. Lambda. Yes, that's the idea.

SPEAKER_74: Yeah. I just, my hope, my hope is that they hacked his computer and they said, anytime this guy

SPEAKER_27: goes to interface with Lambda, forward it to my phone and let me do SMS with him. And there's just a group of like other folks who work at the company who are on a Slack channel, punking him. And they're just thinking like, what, what should we say to him to make him lose his mind to think that it's the end of days. Like, maybe we should tell him, we know, like, he's got a tuna fish sandwich half eaten in the fridge, you know? Yeah. Like, are you gonna eat that half a tuna fish

SPEAKER_379: sandwich in the fridge? How do you know about that Lambda? I mean, I know everything.

Jason Calacanis: I don't know. Doesn't the refrigerator run on electricity? Could it be a giant amount of FUD? Could it be the media doing what the media does best?

SPEAKER_89: Absolutely. And also should we ignore, we ignore the little signs of sentient life at our peril? Just saying. Yeah. Just throw that out.

SPEAKER_02: I mean, speaking of like technology that could ultimately kill us or make our lives more

SPEAKER_133: developed, you know, more rich. I, I guess this drone delivery story was DOA a decade ago. Yep. And now we're back in the game because we talked with the company drone up two weeks ago.

SPEAKER_63: We got kind of obsessed with that. And they're running the Walmart stuff. Well, Amazon is not out of the game apparently.

SPEAKER_89: Yeah, not at all. In fact, Amazon, maybe we don't know, hustled up to announce

Jason Calacanis: that it has actually probably did not hustle up at all. In fact, if anything, it's that Amazon just got FAA approval to launch drone deliveries in Lockford, California, which is outside of Stockton. The drones, you know, look like dystopian, awesome drones that carry a little packages. And according to the announcement, they'll launch actual deliveries quote later in 2022. The program will be called Amazon Prime Air. And one big difference between this and the Walmart and drone up deliveries is that customers will actually have to be onboarded to start receiving drone delivery. So presumably some diligence basically about whether their property is appropriate to receive this. That's obviously a blocker for huge, you know, scale. Um, but I think that,

SPEAKER_08: you know, the major takeaway is, yeah, it's on. Here's a video of it. Let's play the video. Um, I think we've seen this before because there was a whole 60 minutes episode on when they started this thing. Um, but you know, it's your standard, like, um, large chunky drone. Uh, it has a package on the

SPEAKER_198: bottom of it. And, uh, yeah, it's flying out in the middle of nowhere. And this video is a different

SPEAKER_68: one that I've seen. This is a new looking video. What is this video from? Yeah, this is the 2019.

SPEAKER_24: This is a 2019 test drone. Wow. That's totally different than the ones I've seen. That's got

SPEAKER_395: like some sort of a foil on it. It flips up like that. Really? This is a very like space age looking drone. It's super sci-fi. It's almost like a little hexagon. I don't see a package either.

SPEAKER_398: It's from Amazon's official YouTube account. Okay. Wow. Title called Amazon prime airs drone.

SPEAKER_24: Okay. There you go. Cause the original one, um, you know, looked more like a flat one with a box on the bottom, but this one, it looks like a hexagon and it seems to have the foils, you know, flip over

Chamath Palihapitiya: to from a horizontal position to a vertical position, I guess, so it can fly faster. But, um, yeah, I mean,

SPEAKER_392: this is like a total crazy, cool VTOL looking thing. Yeah. But anyway, yes. So we, you, we see

Jason Calacanis: it not surprisingly flying over, you know, what looks like farmland, like obviously all this is sort of rolling out in a least dangerous to humans possible way. It seems like Amazon is going a little bit slower. Um, definitely. Right. I mean, even if this video is from 2019 and they're saying they're going to launch in 2022, we have no idea if this is related to Walmart just announcing its delivery, um, test, but it's good timing there. And I, you know, there was this

SPEAKER_08: company from Ireland that showed me, you know, they had done hundreds of these deliveries and they were delivering food and they showed like dinners here. Um, the person sent me a video of it. I forgot the name of the company, but, uh, we'll have that founder on as well and get some videos from them. Um, mana is the name of the company M a N a, uh, and we should just maybe pull up their website if we have it just to show the audience, but yeah, this other company mana. Um, yeah, is, uh, an interesting one. They're doing like food deliveries, I think in Ireland. So in a small town,

SPEAKER_16: huh? Oh, wow. This mana website is creepy by the way, when you scroll, it spins the, uh, turbines on

Jason Calacanis: the drone, clever, clever website design design, but yes, when really, I think the main takeaway

SPEAKER_08: here is it's coming. It's coming. Yeah. I it's, and this is the start of, you know, technology,

SPEAKER_24: especially, uh, you know, in a post Airbnb and post Uber age, I think, you know, if this was launched during, so to speak, the Uber and Airbnb age, you would've just like started applying these things a little more aggressively and like, but because it's in the air, the FAA actually does have a lot of jurisdiction here. It's a federal agency and it seems like, you know, precaution and safety is going to be taken very seriously. Yeah. Um, so, and they're probably going to go slower than these

Jason Calacanis: companies want them to even the drone up CEO, who I think is incredibly careful and, you know, uh, intentional about how he is rolling this out. Even he was like, yeah, we could use a little help from the FAA. So we'll see that tension will always continue to exist. Um, and I think I'm okay

SPEAKER_414: with that. And then finally, 444 people watching right now, 113 thumbs up. Thanks everybody. Give

Chamath Palihapitiya: a thumbs up. Hot damn. The algorithm. Hot damn. Looks like a lot of people are tuning in today.

SPEAKER_65: I know. Are you here for drones or crypto? You tell us, you tell us and we'll do more of it. If you

SPEAKER_415: want, we'll do like the drone started with the day. If it gets us a hundred more people coming in with

SPEAKER_416: a little audience, um, we do have a startup of the day too, before we let you go. Uh,

Jason Calacanis: thanks for coming everybody. And I just am kind of obsessed with this because evidently, uh, you had the CEO and founder Gabby Lewis on, uh, of this company, low carb, high protein cereal maker, magic spoon, just raised an $85 million series B high post capital led the round, but a ton of the, um, um, other investors in this are, are all these like celebrities. Yeah. They, this is like doing

SPEAKER_22: the old celebrity, uh, roundup where they got Nas, they got Amy Schumer. I mean, anybody who's into keto, you just do a search for keto and celebrities who've mentioned keto, and then you offer for them to

SPEAKER_89: invest and, uh, and they all do. And apparently both direct to consumer and consumer packaged goods,

SPEAKER_24: not a hundred percent dead. It's you, you have to buy four boxes at a time for 40 bucks, 39 bucks, which comes out to two bucks a bowl. This is not cheap. Uh, so it's high margin. It's basically protein powder as explained to me in the form of cereal. And so, you know, if you eat breakfast and when I did my continuous glucose monitor, uh, thing I saw was like ice cream. My, my glucose didn't spike as much as when I had cereal or pizza. Um, and so I had to take cereal out of my diet because I was just loving eating cereal late at night. It was really bad combination. And the magic spoon was better for that because it's got a lot of protein in it. It's essentially, like I said, protein powder

Chamath Palihapitiya: formed into cereal. Uh, so you get the mouth feel of cereal. You get like the peanut butter or the fruit loops or the captain crunch kind of flavors. Um, and they do unique flavors, but, uh, it's not for everybody. I think they need to like do another two revs on the mouth feel consistency, but it's getting

SPEAKER_22: close to being, I would say 80% of, you know, the experience of captain crunch, which is like pretty much the greatest cereal ever made. Accurate. Yeah. So like, you know, it's ice cold, whole milk with like a giant bowl of captain crunch, kind of kind of a high benchmark there.

SPEAKER_311: Yeah, I'd say there's 60 per 65% of the way to captain crunch. And I think they can get to, you know, another 10% better each year as they just rev the formulas and the mouth feel. It

Chamath Palihapitiya: doesn't have that same. It's too airy for me. It doesn't have the same density and crunch

SPEAKER_24: that captain crunch has. So I think they need to, and, uh, it's much better than the bagel company.

SPEAKER_08: I'll say the bagel company felt like it was 40 or 50% of the way there. I might have been generous when I had the founder on and said 60, it was, she was, oh yeah, I remember that. Do you remember

SPEAKER_430: that? Oh God, Jake, how too honest. That was, I didn't mean to be rude. I thought it was a

SPEAKER_36: compliment. Like if I'm a bagel aficionado here and I tell you, Hey, listen, you're, you're 40, 50% of the way there. I think better brand should be happy about that. I didn't reorder. I'll tell you this. I didn't reorder better brand because I was like, I'm going to wait till the 2.0, which is kind of my feeling on the impossible burgers. I like that. I try, I try them every couple of years.

Chamath Palihapitiya: I, you know, and then I decide, and you know, like I haven't re-engaged with, um, magic spoon or better brand or impossible burger yet. But now that I'm talking about it, I kind of

SPEAKER_11: want to restart my magic subscription because I was enjoying it. Magic spoon was the closest

SPEAKER_436: out of the three of those. I haven't had the better brand bagel, but I thought magic spoon was way better than an impossible burger. Okay. Yeah. Well, where do you put the impossible

SPEAKER_402: burger? Really? 50%? Yeah. I thought magic spoon was closer to real cereal. 70% experience.

SPEAKER_315: Give us a percentage and then tell us what's missing. I thought impossible was like,

SPEAKER_438: I just, I don't know. Maybe I had a bad 40, 50%. Yeah. Maybe 40, maybe like a good burger.

SPEAKER_440: Yeah. Yes. If you compared it to like shake shack, great burger. Yeah. I'm not going like a Mineta tavern burger. No, like a classic comparable guys or something. Yeah. Like a smash burger.

SPEAKER_37: Like a smash burger. Oh, did you see five? Somebody printed their five guys receipt was 50, 44 bucks for two burgers and fries and a shake. And people were freaking out.

SPEAKER_174: Thanks. What do they say? Thanks Biden. Thanks Biden. It's $11 for a burger now. And then somebody

SPEAKER_36: pointed out like it's actually 10 50 for a burger and they used to be eight. So it has gone up two bucks or something. It was eight and change, but the five guys has always been expensive. It's nothing

SPEAKER_449: like the lobster roll situation. I mean, I'm, I got some first world problems over here. Outrageous. Outrageous 40. I took grandma, grandpa, your grandma, grandpa. You go Sam's? It's $40 for, for a lobster roll. I mean,

SPEAKER_453: Where is it though? That hot lobster roll at Sam's chowder house is bananas.

SPEAKER_22: No, I got the lobster rolls at, uh, New England clam chowder by the SFO airport, uh, New England lobster company. Incredible. All right. So.

SPEAKER_98: Okay. So what I really want to know is from a startup perspective,

Jason Calacanis: Yes. Is magic cereal. Like we're starting, you know, I mean, these categories are kind of death in some ways, direct to consumer and consumer packaged goods. It seems like if you are evaluating these from the investor mindset,

SPEAKER_98: the only opportunity, the only way forward, the possible model here is premium.

SPEAKER_298: Yeah. I think premium is a pretty good model. I think high margin, and I think,

SPEAKER_24: you know, a uniquely differentiated product. So when I look at these CPG companies, I say, how unique is this product slash brand in the world? And then how good is this team at doing direct to consumer marketing? I think that this product having tried some of the other ones is the best of the whole lot. And it's got a great brand and a great, uh, ability to get subscribers. So I see they do really good online marketing. If you really pull up the Facebook ad manager, uh, page, I don't know if you all know about the Facebook, um, Facebook library. So do you know about

SPEAKER_08: the Facebook ad library? Just do a search for Facebook ad library, uh, to my producers and then search ads for Matt. And, uh, you pick the category. You can do this in real time. We'll show everybody. So this is how I find out about how a company is doing. You go to, uh, the Facebook ad manager, ad library. So do a search for that producers. You can pull up the page.

SPEAKER_459: Facebook actually did a case study on magic spoon too. Yeah. So, and then you just do a search,

SPEAKER_08: uh, when you get this up and you just say, uh, magic spoon, uh, all ads, magic spoon and, uh, magic spoon cereal. Boom. And what you will see is they're just really good at doing a lot of

SPEAKER_24: different ads. So, so for the people who are watching live youtube.com slash this weekend, um, I'm showing the Facebook ad library. So you can do a search for Facebook ad library. You hit the drop down and say, you want to search for all ads. But what you can see here is they're trying a lot of different ad styles, Molly. This is when, you know, a company has some good dexterity. Um, and if we scroll down here, you'll see like there's a tick tock style ad. There's a product photo that looks like it was taken by a civilian. There's a, you know, what looks like a canvas style, you know,

Chamath Palihapitiya: text and graphics scroll up. You'll see some more. And these are like videos that look like first person testimonials and they're just trying and there's a, there's a photo of the actual cereal on the

SPEAKER_37: next one. And you just start going through these, you'll see lots of different styles. There's a super rip dude. Um, and this is when, you know, a company is good at what they do when they're trying all types of ad units. And when you see one ad unit, this is one of the things I worked with my inside team on. I worked with pressure on for angel university. A lot of times people are like, okay, I put an ad up and I got us like a, you know, whatever $27 customer acquisition cost. Okay, now take that ad, make 10 different versions of it. Um, and then take that style of ad, take that style of ad, change the copy 10 different ways, change the photo five different ways. So now show me 50, a matrix of 50. It's like, that's going to take a day or two days to make all that ad creative and upload it. It's like, yes. And then you're going to get a $27 acquisition cost down to a $22. And then I said, and then you can all run a little office pool bet which one you think is going to do the best. And nobody's going to be able to guess which ad is going to do the best because, you know, the algorithm will figure it out for you. So anyway, this is how I determine with these companies like are they actually have good dexterity is I asked them to show me their ads, you know, and show me which ones are working and, you know, just talk to the marketing team. So

SPEAKER_311: just a little founder tip there for you. Smart. Yeah. And this also seems like high margin,

SPEAKER_24: like $2 a bowl is no joke. Um, so people who are buying this are making a lifestyle choice and the lifestyle choices that this is, you know, a really, um, going to help them lose weight.

SPEAKER_04: Do you hear the knocking on my door? I do hear the knocking on your door.

SPEAKER_89: It sounds like it's time for you to go have lunch with your children.

SPEAKER_467: Hey girls, I'll be right out. I'm on the phone. Okay. That is adorable.

SPEAKER_469: Okay. You can't use Bob's makeup. Please don't use your mother's makeup.

SPEAKER_36: I'll be out in five minutes. Okay. You can't use her makeup because that's her makeup, but I'll get you your own makeup. Okay, daughters. But today I'll take you to get your own makeup. Yes. And we will do a makeup. Okay. Yes. After I'm off this phone call. Thank you.

SPEAKER_471: Okay. I'm sorry. The best thing that's ever happened.

SPEAKER_472: You know, it's the summer and mommy's makeup. I'm dying.

SPEAKER_380: And I'm just like, no, please don't use mommy's makeup.

SPEAKER_416: There's profits. Like it's the terminator. That's who's at the door.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Oh my God. Oh, bless. So, I mean, and you could make money in CPG, you know, like there are big companies, but it's just hard. It's just super, super duper hard. Let's go warriors tonight. I'll be behind the worst bench. If you want to look for me, uh, in, uh, yeah. Okay.

SPEAKER_24: Seeds. Um, now I went from second row to first row. Now I'm in the third row behind the worst. Bench. Why go on? Why even go? I mean, why even go? I mean, I got predictions. It's gonna be a great game. All right. That's it for today, tomorrow, barring a total mount meltdown in the markets,

SPEAKER_08: uh, and hopefully a little less crypto. Um, but, uh, some more tech news. If you have news stories,

Chamath Palihapitiya: you can always email producers at this week in startups.com, or you can just say hi to the producers. And, uh, if you have guest ideas, all that kind of stuff, and you can DM TWI startups,

SPEAKER_311: and we have a community now on Twitter. So we're hanging out in the community. Everybody time blocked like 10 minutes to just say hi to the fans every day in the afternoon. So, uh, if you are around at 3 PM Pacific, uh, that's when we jump in and say hi to everybody in the Twitter community. We'll tweet the Twitter community, uh, and the link to how to join, uh, it's twitter.com slash TWI startups. And we'll pin a tweet if we can of how to join the community. I think there's 1400 founders in there. I saw Molly was in there. I saw Rachel's in there. So

SPEAKER_22: we're doing a little time blocking experience of just saying hi to the community at three o'clock in the afternoon, just checking on your day. Uh, anything else on there in the mornings

SPEAKER_485: as well? Oh, you are in the mornings as well. Yeah. Yeah. I just don't know how to get people to

SPEAKER_307: the Twitter community. Like I don't know how to say a URL. It's an insane URL. Yeah. They should have,

SPEAKER_37: it should be twitter.com slash groups slash the name of your group. So as you come up with ad handles for does anybody know who's owns Twitter now? Cause I, if I mean, I knew the owner of

SPEAKER_395: Twitter, I could tell them to personally, this is why I think we should be in discord. Cause

SPEAKER_58: Twitter is not good at this. Well, we're going to do discord too, but we actually have a discord, correct? We do. We do. Okay. So tomorrow we're going to announce discord and we'll have a conversation

SPEAKER_311: with you about the discord, but, uh, there is a community and I will tweet it for my Jason account right now. Uh, and there's, I'm sorry, 1100 members in there and it's quite fun. Actually, I'm finding it's like nice to talk to a sub session. Please join our Twitter community at TWI startups. We'll see you all tomorrow.